GUEST PODCAST: EdTechnical Series 3 Episode 3
Authors
This season EdTech funder Libby Hills and AI researcher Owen Henkel continue to speak with leading researchers, practitioners and educators on the EdTechnical podcast series about the cutting edge of AI in education. They will break down complex AI concepts into non-technical insights to better understand what the research says and help educators sift the useful insights from the AI hype.
In this episode of EdTechnical, Libby and Owen speak with Candice Odgers, a psychologist and researcher studying how online experiences influence children’s mental health. They revisit the debate around social media and teen wellbeing, questioning the claims that social media use has caused rising rates of depression and anxiety. Candice calls for a more careful reading of the evidence and cautions against rushing into restrictive policies that may have unintended consequences or divert attention from more effective interventions.
Candice also shares early findings from her recent research into AI in education. She finds surprisingly limited use of AI among young people, and mixed perceptions around what counts as cheating, which shapes how these tools are received. Notably, she found no clear socioeconomic divide in AI engagement, raising questions about how these tools might be designed to support more equitable learning. They discuss the challenge of designing rigorous studies in this space and the need for thoughtful, evidence-informed approaches to both social media and AI.
Owen Henkel’s reflection, June 2026
The headline from Candice is that data linking social media to youth mental health is much messier than the public conversation suggests. That part we expected, which is why we invited her on the podcast. We didn’t expect two adjacent points that have stuck with us since:
- The opportunity cost. Even granting some harm from social media, fixating on it as the driver of poorer mental health risks crowding out attention to factors with much stronger evidence: the parental mental health crisis, and the unequal scaffolding kids get at home and school.
- What researchers should be doing. Studies keep hunting for small negative correlations. Candice argues that it’s more useful to question the mechanisms: which design features, for which kids, and under what conditions, might be causing harm? That makes the science actionable. Instead of relitigating whether social media is bad, you start building an evidence base about what to change.
Links
Adaptlab – Adaptation, Development and Positive Transitions Lab
NYT Article: Panicking About Your Kids’ Phones? New Research Says Don’t
Bio
Candice Odgers is the Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development and Professor of Psychological Science at the University of California Irvine. She also co-directs the Child & Brain Development Program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and the CERES Network funded by the Jacobs Foundation.
Her team has been capturing the daily lives and health of adolescents using mobile phones and sensors over the past decade. More recently, she has been working to leverage digital technologies to better support the needs of children and adolescents as they come of age in an increasingly unequal and digital world.
Authors