Candice Odgers gave both of her daughters smartphones for their eleventh birthdays and even let her youngest daughter use Snapchat.

You might be shaking your head and wondering why she would be so reckless. Hasn’t she read the work of experts regarding how social media damages children’s mental health? Well, not only has she read those studies, she analyzed them and found the case for restricting minors’ access to social media does not hold up under scrutiny.

In addition to being a mother, Odgers is a professor of developmental psychology who has studied adolescent mental health for 25 years. Not only does she not think social media is the main cause of children’s mental health problems, she believes laws forbidding children below a certain age from accessing social media “are likely to make things worse, not better.”

One reason Odgers opposes forbidding minors from using social media is that they can easily get around the bans. A study published by the British Medical Journal found that over 85% of Australians under 16 are still using social media even though the government banned them from........

© Yuma Sun