Recently, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube legally liable for harming a young woman who began using Instagram at age 9. TikTok and Snap settled before trial. The plaintiff, now 20, described developing anxiety, depression, and body dysmorphia and feeling unable to stop using platforms she had started on as a child. It was the first social media addiction verdict of its kind, and it sent a clear signal that the legal landscape around these companies has permanently shifted. Closer to home, LAUSD, the second-largest school district in the country, voted 6-0 to establish developmentally based limits on classroom screen use. That unanimous vote is not a symbolic gesture. It is a reckoning.

And it is now policy, not just precedent, for every school district in California. Governor Gavin Newsom signed the Phone-Free School Act, which requires every school district and charter school in the state to develop and implement a policy limiting smartphone use during school hours, with a compliance deadline of July 2026. BHUSD was already moving in this direction: the board approved a resolution in March establishing intentional technology use and screen time guidelines and has since been working through additional policy drafts on how those guidelines apply across district programs and activities. The state law means that work now has a legal deadline, and our district’s decisions in the coming months will shape the daily experience of every student on every BHUSD campus. Early evidence from districts that have already implemented phone restrictions is encouraging. Researchers are finding declines in bullying and cyberbullying, and gains in academic achievement and classroom engagement. These are serious institutions moving carefully and deliberately, and they are all saying the same thing: we have a problem, and we are going to do something about it.

This is not a panic. It is a pattern. And as a licensed psychologist who has worked with teenagers and families for decades, and who recently testified before state legislators in Sacramento about the mental health implications of social media use, I want to share what I know—and what I think every parent and grandparent in this community deserves to understand.

The Scale of the Problem

Up to 95% of teenagers are now using social media, with nearly half reporting they are online almost constantly, according to Pew Research Center data. A new statewide survey found that about 94% of California’s young people report experiencing regular mental health challenges— and in Los Angeles, where kids have also faced wildfire trauma and community instability, those numbers are the highest in the state. Nearly a third of California young people say social media is harmful to their mental health. About one in three reports being cyberbullied. About seven in ten say social media has contributed to a negative body image.

Teens who spend more than three hours per day on social media face significantly elevated risk of anxiety and depression; a finding that has appeared consistently across national youth mental health data, and that was central to the Surgeon General’s advisory on the topic. CDC data documents rising rates of sadness and suicidal ideation among adolescents, trends that closely track increased social media use. The former U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, was unambiguous: “It is time to require a surgeon general’s warning label on social media platforms.” We do not yet have sufficient evidence to conclude that social media is safe for children and adolescents.

These are not fringe statistics. They describe a generation. They may describe your child.

Why This Is So Hard to Stop

The first thing I want parents to understand is that this is not a willpower problem. These platforms are not neutral spaces. They are intentionally engineered to maximize the time users spend on them. The mechanisms are worth understanding, because none of it is accidental.

There is no natural stopping point in an infinite scroll. That’s a deliberate design choice: removing stopping cues keeps users engaged longer. Likes and comments arrive unpredictably, and behavioral science tells us that unpredictable rewards are far more compulsive than consistent ones. This is the same principle that makes slot machines so difficult to walk away from. Algorithms surface content calibrated to provoke emotional responses, because emotionally activating content keeps people engaged. Notifications are timed to pull users back the moment they’ve stepped away. And the entire social architecture of these platforms—follower counts, likes, view metrics—ties a teenager’s sense of worth to numbers that fluctuate constantly.

Adolescence is already a critical window for brain development, particularly in the areas governing impulse control, emotional regulation, and identity formation. The adolescent brain, with its still-developing prefrontal cortex and highly active reward circuitry, is exquisitely sensitive to exactly this kind of stimulation. These platforms are designed by engineers who understand adolescent neurobiology very well. The result is what I hear regularly from teenagers: “I don’t even want to be on it, but I can’t stop.” These are not weak kids. They are kids whose developing brains are being deliberately targeted.

Expecting a teenager to simply put the phone down is like expecting her to moderate her eating at a buffet designed by food scientists whose only goal is that she never stops. The problem is environmental, not personal. That framing matters because it takes shame off the table and points toward what actually works.

What Parents Often Miss

Most parents I speak with are worried about screen time. That’s reasonable, but it’s incomplete. The more pressing concern is exposure: to cyberbullying, to social comparison at a scale no previous generation has experienced, to age-inappropriate content that algorithms surface without warning, and to predatory behavior that has become disturbingly common on platforms teens use every day. Most of this happens in spaces parents rarely see, on devices that go everywhere a child goes, including into their bedrooms at night.

I know how it can feel in a community like ours. Beverly Hills has well-resourced schools, attentive families, and a general sense that the worst of this happens somewhere else. It doesn’t. The children here are on the same platforms, targeted by the same algorithms, and shaped by the same design features as every other child in Los Angeles County. No setting is insulated from what a phone does at 1 a.m. when everyone else in the house is asleep.

If your teenager seems moodier, more withdrawn, harder to reach, sleeping badly, or oddly fragile; you are not imagining it, and you are not alone.

What Families Can Actually Do

The most important shift is practical: change the environment, not just the conversation. These platforms are designed to override self-regulation.  Individual willpower in children (or adults) will never be sufficient on its own.

Here are the steps that the evidence supports:

Remove devices from bedrooms overnight. This is the single most impactful change most families can make. Sleep disruption is one of the most consistent and damaging effects of late-night device use, and poor sleep compounds every other mental health vulnerability. A simple charging station outside the bedroom changes the pattern.

Create stopping cues that platforms deliberately omit. Set screen time limits. Establish device-free zones i.e., the dinner table, the car, family time. The goal is to reintroduce natural transitions and pauses that infinite scroll is specifically designed to eliminate.

Talk differently about what’s happening. Not “Get off your phone,” but “How does this make you feel, and do you notice how hard it is to stop?” Helping a teenager understand that these platforms are engineered to be habit-forming. Struggling to stop is not a personal failing and acknowledging this tends to open far more honest conversation than shame or lectures ever do.

Look honestly at your own habits. Children are paying close attention to how the adults in their lives relate to their devices, whether we think they are or not.

Stay engaged with what’s happening at school. The conversations happening right now at BHUSD about technology policy matter, and parent voices are part of what moves them. The Phone-Free School Act gives every California district a deadline, and our community has an opportunity to shape what that looks like locally. If you have not yet been part of that conversation, this is an invitation.

You’re Not Too Late

I have watched too many good parents get blindsided by this and then blame themselves. You didn’t fail. This is genuinely new territory, and the companies that built these platforms have invested heavily in keeping it confusing.

What we know now from juries, from school boards, from the Surgeon General, from a growing body of clinical and research evidence; is that this is a solvable problem. Not through shame or alarm, but through understanding how these platforms work, changing the environment at home, and staying connected to the community conversations that shape the environment at school.

In the weeks ahead, we’re going to talk about how we got here, what these platforms do to the developing brain, what’s happening in your teenager’s phone that you probably don’t know about, and what you can concretely do right now. The better we understand this, the better equipped we are to protect the kids in our community. 

You’re not too late.

Resources are available, and you don’t have to figure this out alone.

Resources

Organization for Social Media Safety: www.ofsms.org;

The Maple Counseling Center: www.maple4counseling.org;

Common Sense Media: www.commonsensemedia.org;

Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741 988;

Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988;

BHUSD Student Counseling: bhusd.org | 310-551-5100

Erica Felsenthal, Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist (PSY 21357) in Beverly Hills. She has testified in Sacramento about the impact of social media on youth mental health and serves on the board of the Organization for Social Media Safety. Reach her at www.drericafels.com or 310-995-9432. This column is for informational purposes only and does not constitute psychotherapy or clinical mental health services.

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