225. Teens and Screens, Part 2: The Case Against Moral Panic with Dr. Will Dobud

225. Teens and Screens, Part 2: The Case Against Moral Panic with Dr. Will Dobud

From You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist by Stephanie Winn

August 3, 2026 · 1h 41m

About this episode

The episode discusses the complexities of youth mental health in relation to screen use, challenging common narratives and exploring the evidence behind them.

This is Part Two of Teens and Screens, and it's the counterweight. Last episode, Dr. Johann D'Souza made the case for keeping toxic screens out of your teenager's hands entirely. Today I'm joined again by Dr. Will Dobud — social worker, researcher, and co-author of Kids These Days — who thinks the story we tell ourselves about phones and youth mental health is far bigger than the evidence behind it. I open by naming my own bias: I work with the families where it went wrong. Porn addiction, gaming addiction, failure to launch, daughters pulled into dark corners of social media. Will names his: he's oppositional by temperament, and he wrote a book making fun of how adults talk about kids. We get into why the meta-analytic effects between screen use and youth mental health are so small they're arguably not worth publishing, what a third variable does to correlational data, and why Australia's social media ban is failing six months in. I push back repeatedly — on whether "do what feels right" is useful advice to parents who don't know what modern pornography even is, on the candy-bin problem of unregulated access, and on whether calling the phone a symptom of family dysfunction…

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