Young people’s mental health is deteriorating and we’re still arguing about social media
Wednesday, 18 March 2026
Malindi Maclean is a former chief executive of Outward Bound, and is co-founder of B416 (a group campaigning for a minimum age limit on social media use) and a mother of two.
OPINION: Very few people would dispute that New Zealand has a crisis when it comes to youth mental health, and our struggling health system is buckling under the strain. Parents, educators and clinicians know all too well that rates of anxiety, depression and distress among young people have risen sharply over the past decade, with youth mental health services reporting record demand.
What is far more contested is what we should do about the conditions shaping young people’s lives.
A substantial body of international research now points to links between heavy social media use and sleep disruption, anxiety, body image concerns and social comparison in adolescents. Court proceedings in the United States are also bringing internal company research into the public domain, raising further questions about how these platforms affect young users.
Read more:
Parliamentary inquiry backs under-16 social media ban, and discusses going much further
Why New Zealand shouldn’t blink on a social media ban for under-16s
Government still taking aim at social media - but coalition backing uncertain
Just this month Meta announced it would notify parents when their child encounters self-harm content. My first reaction was simple: why are children on platforms where they can encounter such material in the first place?
Yet when proposals emerge to delay access to social media for children, a loud minority appears determined to shut the conversation down.
Some critics approach this debate primarily through legal abstractions or regulatory theory. But for parents raising children today, the problem is not theoretical. It is a daily struggle with platforms engineered to capture attention and shape behaviour. These are systems that did not exist when many of the loudest commentators were raising their own children.
The objections usually sound technical: the evidence isn’t perfect, the policy won’t be foolproof, young people will find ways around it and privacy questions remain.
These are legitimate issues to examine. But when they become reasons to do nothing, the debate often drifts away from the reality families are dealing with every day.
I have spent five years leading Outward Bound New Zealand, working closely with thousands of young people aged 16 to 18. I have seen firsthand how algorithmically driven these platforms shape their daily lives.
What often surprises adults is that many teenagers themselves express unease about the role social media plays in their world. In fact, in surveys we run with participants at the end of their course, the majority say they wish social media had never been invented.
Parents today are navigating something that simply did not exist a generation ago: digital platforms designed by some of the most sophisticated engineers and behavioural scientists in the world to capture attention and keep users engaged for as long as possible.
Teenagers’ brains are especially sensitive to social reward and novelty. When that stage of development meets systems engineered to deliver endless streams of personalised content, the result is an environment unlike anything previous generations encountered.
Parents see this every day: the hours lost to scrolling, the impact on sleep, the relentless social comparison, the exposure to material that many adults would struggle to process and the constant battle to remove their devices from them.
None of this means social media is the sole cause of rising youth distress. Mental health is shaped by many factors, but ignoring the role these platforms may be playing simply because the evidence is still building makes little sense.
Today New Zealand lacks large-scale long-term independent research assessing the impact of social media on our own young people. Much of the most detailed data about how these platforms shape behaviour sits with the companies themselves and is rarely accessible to independent researchers.
Yet the need for stronger research does not mean the evidence we already have should be dismissed, nor does it mean policymakers must wait decades before introducing sensible safeguards. Brains are brains, and the international studies sounding the alarm overseas apply to Kiwi kids’ lives too.
Governments are currently expending enormous resources responding to rising youth mental health needs. If highly persuasive digital platforms are contributing to the problem, focusing only on treatment begins to look like mopping the floor without turning off the tap.
This is why proposals such as delaying social media access until 16 are gaining traction internationally. They are not about banning technology or pretending young people should grow up fully offline. They are about recognising that early adolescence is a uniquely sensitive developmental period and asking whether unrestricted access to platforms designed to maximise engagement is appropriate during those years.
Waiting for perfect certainty before taking even modest steps would mean allowing another generation of young people to grow up inside systems we are only beginning to understand.
The real risk now is not acting too quickly. It is allowing procedural objections and abstract debates to become a justification for doing nothing while the mental health of young people continues to deteriorate in plain sight.