Are kids more or less satisfied with themselves now?

I decided this year to give myself an especially high self approval rating. I earned it.

Reason 987675 not to give your child a smartphone for as long as possible (at least until high school).

By Jonathan Haidt, NYU

Dec 25, 2025

And when you give them a smartphone, wait until at least 16 for social media apps, though parental controls are hard to work with and kids find workarounds if they really want to be on social media. This is why communication is so important, as well as kids understanding how social media makes them feel.

For most girls, social media apps are an endless comparison mechanism where they get to feel inferior to the most beautiful women in the world, many of them surgically enhanced and/or retouched. Unlike earlier decades, who had magazines as instruments of beauty standards, social media is:

👉 constant

👉 addictive

👉 boundary-less (compare yourself to the entire world)

👉 the sheer volume of content is endless

👉 girls' own friends become the beauty standard they compare themselves to

Is it any wonder that since 2010, when smartphones and social media had become ubiquitous in the developed world, girls' (and boys') self-esteem started to tank?