AN IMPORTANT social media UPDATE
Assistant Head of School Becky Roberts recently wrote to Montrose middle school parents in her weekly Middle School Newsletter, sharing news that increases concern about the heavy use of social media in young people.
The following is an excerpt from her message.
3/25/26
At Montrose, we are learning and thinking and talking a lot about AI. And there is much to say; so much, in fact, that it often feels that we cannot say or learn it fast enough to keep up. However, I’m not writing just about AI today. Instead, as I often do, I find myself wanting to write to you about phones and social media and our kids. And this is not to say that these things are not connected: AI is now integrated into social media in very powerful ways. It’s the same universe but a different sort of gravity.
The worries I have long had (and have been writing to you about!) regarding adolescents and social media came back to the forefront for me after two things happened this week:
- I covered Enrichment Reading for another teacher and took that opportunity to read an article that had been on my desk for some time: “Social Media is Harming Young People at a Scale Large Enough to Cause Changes at the Population Level” by Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch.
- While making dinner later that same evening, I listened to an episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour podcast called “Social Media Goes to Court,” which happened to be an interview with Jonathan Haidt about the recent lawsuits being brought against social media companies in California.
Both pieces felt so urgent to me that I wanted to share them with you.
Many of you know that Haidt has been beating the drum about the harms of social media on our children for some time. You’ve probably read The Anxious Generation or some of his other research; perhaps you have heard him on a podcast or seen him in interviews.
For a while following the publication of The Anxious Generation, many critics dismissed him as alarmist. The critics said that there was no causal relationship between social media and the decline in children’s mental health or in the dip in academic achievement or in the change in social skills, attention, or habits. Maybe there is some small correlation, they said, but there were many other factors involved. But Haidt is more convinced than ever that there is a direct causal relationship between social media use and the declines that we are seeing across many different measures of adolescent flourishing, and the research is finally catching up with his earliest assertions.
The essay linked above is a compelling argument written for the World Happiness Report 2026 that pulls together “seven lines of evidence” to show that social media (specifically) is unsafe for individual adolescents.
Haidt and Rausch share data from youth and adult (teachers, clinicians, parents, etc.) surveys, cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, and internal documents and whistleblower reports from the social media companies themselves to build the case, and his arguments are among those that undergird the legal cases moving through the courts in California that aim to hold social media companies liable for the harms caused to children using their platforms – and then to advocate for change. In the podcast Haidt references the essay, and then he speaks to the specific legal claims being made in California against Meta and YouTube, in particular.
On March 25, the California jury found Meta and YouTube negligent, holding that they failed to warn users of the dangers of using their platforms.
Haidt and Rausch have framed the argument primarily through the lens of consumer safety: that this product – social media – that adolescents are consuming at high rates (“The average U.S. teen now spends nearly five hours per day on social media, and a recent survey found that one quarter of U.S. thirteen- to fourteen-year-olds were on for seven or more hours each day.”) causes both direct (eg. cyberbullying, exposure to violent images and graphic pornography) and indirect (eg. causing mental health disorders such as depression, anxiety, and disordered eating) harms to to adolescents – especially girls – in an incredibly sensitive period of their development. The harms, they argue, are "at a scale large enough to be causing change at the population level." The research suggests there is plenty of cause for alarm.
At Montrose, we have always been a phone-free school. But even Haidt would argue that our policy is not strict enough. Yes, phones are off and away all day, but the draw to check the feed or the likes or the Snaps is incredibly powerful and swims about in the girls’ consciousness even as they are learning Algebra and English. And although we can educate girls on responsible use and teach them about the algorithms and the brain rot engineered in the design of infinite scroll, there is an observable, magnetic pull that we see during the fifteen-minute window after school when phone use is permitted, and the girls take out those phones and turn away from one another. The platforms are built this way, and our preteens with their early-developing prefrontal cortex are not built to resist it.
I hope that you will read or listen, and then I hope that we can keep talking about this. We have to do more. Moreover, I hope that you are talking with your girls and with one another – parents can fall down the social media, doomscrolling rabbit hole, too – and we can lean on one another to chart a new course for our kids. And although I also hope that some change is coming on a broader, societal scale, we do not have to wait for the culture to change to make a change for ourselves. It’s too important.
Our kids are too important.