Adam Wittenberg April 29, 2026
(The Lion) — More than 200 school districts are suing social media companies, blaming them for the youth mental health crisis, but one expert says schools themselves may bear more responsibility than smartphones.
Jennifer Huddleston, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, argues “the intense pressure that many young people feel in various aspects of their life offline,” including at school, better correlates with “rising depression and suicide concerns than social media use.”
“Blaming technology may be more of an excuse to avoid looking at the bigger and deeper causes in society about why the kids are not OK,” she wrote in the Los Angeles Daily News on Friday. “Reports of major depression and suicidality for teens jumped 12-18% when compared to when school is not in session, including summer or remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Huddleston said school can be harmful for students for reasons not related to social media or technology.
Increased pressures include a surge in “high-stakes testing,” which has become the norm in most schools since No Child Left Behind, the introduction of Common Core and higher demands on students’ time outside school.
“Beyond the classroom stress, students at schools may face bullying and other social dynamics that negatively impact their mental health,” Huddleston writes.
She explains how schools previously blamed students’ problems on pagers or beepers in the 1980s and violent video games in the 1990s and 2000s, but “evidence of the link never materialized. Indeed, a range of research found that despite the popularity of such games, no link could be established between video game violence and teen aggression.”
Instead of blaming technology, Huddleston advocates teaching young people how to use it wisely through digital and media literacy, empowering students to “have a positive online experience.”
“Social media can be a valuable lifeline to some of the most vulnerable young people, like those in abusive situations or those who often feel isolated offline,” she writes. “Taking away technology would not solve the problems schools face with students’ mental health. It could make such situations worse.”
While blaming social media may be “politically convenient,” Huddleston says the causes of student distress are more complex and deserve further exploration.
“The idea that social media is the problem has become so widely accepted that many are probably unaware of the research on the impact of schools and academic pressure on kids’ and teens’ mental health. We don’t engage with that data in the same way as headlines about smartphones, social media or AI.”
This article was made available to EdNews Virginia via The Lion, a publication of the Herzog Foundation.