Kids don’t necessarily want to spend every waking minute staring at a screen, however strongly they give that impression. Their relationship with phones is complex and maddening, but not a million miles off adults’ own love-hate relationship with social media. Yet lately, longstanding parental unease over children’s screen habits has been hardening into something more like revolt.

In Canada last week, four school boards announced they were suing TikTok, Meta and Snapchat, claiming that compulsively appealing social media products have “ rewired the way children think, behave and learn” and left schools struggling to contain the fallout. And parents are only likely to be more alarmed by the US psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s widely publicised new book The Anxious Generation, which blames surging teenage mental health problems partly on smartphones and social media.

That connection feels instinctively right to many of us who have seen X, Facebook and Instagram bring out the inner bully, conspiracy theorist or narcissist in too many full-grown adults, never mind insecure and immature teenagers. In retrospect, letting these platforms evolve in the carelessly destructive way they did looks like madness. Yet there’s a difference between holding tech giants accountable for avoidable harms and leaping to the simplistic conclusion that social media alone explains children’s unhappiness, or that it has actively “rewired” their neurological pathways.

Reviewing Haidt’s book in the scientific journal Nature, the psychologist Candice Odgers argues that while the decline in teenage mental health did roughly overlap with the arrival of smartphones, evidence for a causal link between the two remains weak and contradictory. So far, the picture is arguably still muddled enough to allow cherrypicking of evidence by both sides—but that’s little help to anxious parents.

For teenagers with existing mental health issues who seek comfort or answers online, social media looks custom-built to amplify whatever dark feelings of inadequacy they’re already struggling with, while for bullied children, smartphones enable persecution around the clock. Those two risks alone should be enough to invoke the precautionary principle, which treats social media like alcohol or tobacco, legal harms that kids must learn to navigate eventually but preferably not before they’re mature enough to cope.

But treating smartphones as the only source of children’s unhappiness is scientifically shaky and politically too convenient, skating as it does over significantly more expensive problems to solve: poverty, parental stress, the shocking under-provision both of children’s mental health services and youth work services offering safe, interesting, alternative ways for kids to spend their time. This isn’t just about phones, but over-anxious parenting and the decline of adventurous, unsupervised play for younger children.

As a society we keep telling kids to get off their phones into the real world, but won’t make room for them here; we put adult convenience first, and are then surprised when children don’t flourish. The tech giants could and should do vastly more to create a healthy environment for children. But in that, they’re very much not alone.

What can be inferred from Paragraph 5 about social media?