How Social Media Affects Teen Mental Health: What Pew’s 2025 Survey Tells Educators

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I spend most of my time making the case for AI in education. But the technology conversation in schools has never been limited to AI. Social media got there first, and it still dominates how teens experience digital life. The latest survey from Pew Research Center, released in April 2025, confirms what I’ve been noticing across the broader research: teens are growing more skeptical of these platforms, even as they keep scrolling.

Faverio, Anderson, and Park (2025) surveyed 1,391 U.S. teens (ages 13–17) and their parents between September and October 2024. The results are worth reading carefully if you work in education, because they reveal a widening gap between how teens experience social media and how the adults around them perceive that experience. For anyone building digital literacy programs, designing mental health initiatives, or just trying to understand what students are going through, this data raises questions that go well beyond screen time limits.

Social Media’s Effect on Teens: The Third-Person Perception Gap

The most striking finding is what researchers call the third-person perception gap. Nearly half of teens (48%) say social media has a mostly negative effect on people their age. That number has jumped from 32% in just two years. But only 14% say the effect on them personally is mostly negative. Teens can see the damage when they look at their peers. They have a harder time recognizing it in themselves.

The positive camp has shrunk dramatically. In 2022, 24% of teens described social media’s effect on their age group as mostly positive. That share dropped to 11% by 2024. The neutral percentage stayed flat, which means the entire shift moved from positive to negative. Teens are not becoming ambivalent. They are becoming specifically critical.

I’ve written before about how short-form video already affects teen attention at a neurological level (Yan et al., 2024). The Pew data adds a self-awareness dimension to that picture. Teens know something is off. They can articulate it when they talk about their peers. But they can’t always apply that knowledge to their own behavior.

That gap between recognizing a problem in others and failing to see it in yourself echoes what Shaw and Nave (2026) describe as cognitive surrender, the gradual outsourcing of mental effort to digital systems that feel effortless. The platform keeps working even when the user suspects it probably shouldn’t.

Social Media Affects Teen Mental Health

What Parents and Teachers Get Wrong About Teen Mental Health

Parents are more worried about teen mental health than teens themselves: 55% report being extremely or very concerned, compared with 35% of teens. And parents are far more likely to single out social media as the culprit. When asked what hurts teen mental health the most, 44% of parents name social media. Teens spread the blame more broadly: 22% point to social media, 17% to bullying, 16% to pressures and expectations.

This asymmetry shapes how families talk about technology. A parent who sees social media as the primary threat may focus entirely on screen time limits and platform access. A teen dealing with a more complicated mix of stressors, where bullying and academic pressure weigh just as heavily, may feel that the conversation misses the point entirely.

Faverio et al. also found a significant comfort gap: 80% of parents say they would be comfortable talking to their teen about mental health, but only 52% of teens say the same about talking to a parent. Parents believe the door is wide open. Many teens do not agree.

The teacher finding is even more sobering. Only 12% of teens say they would be extremely or very comfortable discussing mental health with a teacher. 54% say they would not be comfortable at all. Teachers rank last among the five groups Pew tested, behind parents, friends, therapists, and extended family members.

This does not mean teachers are failing. It means the relationship between students and teachers, as teens perceive it, is not structured for that kind of disclosure. I see a similar dynamic in the AI adoption research, where students are already deep into tools that their teachers are still figuring out (see Villar Onrubia et al., 2025).

The mental health data from Pew suggests the same structural gap from a different angle. Students are processing serious questions about their own digital well-being, and teachers are simply not the people they turn to for help. Schools that want to build meaningful mental health support need to reckon with this number. Any initiative that routes primarily through classroom teachers risks missing the students who need it most.

Social Media as a Mental Health Resource for Teens

About a third of teens (34%) say they at least sometimes get mental health information from social media. Among that group, 63% call it an important source. Girls are more likely to seek this content (40% vs. 28% for boys), and Black teens lead among racial groups at 49%.

The paradox is hard to miss. The same platforms that nearly half of teens describe as harmful to their age group are also where a sizable chunk of them go to understand and cope with that harm. For educators building digital literacy curricula, this creates a concrete task that goes beyond warning students about screen time.

Students need to learn how to evaluate health information they encounter on social media, to distinguish evidence-based mental health content from influencer advice, and to recognize when a platform is amplifying their anxiety under the guise of helping them manage it. The critical thinking frameworks many of us are building around AI literacy, learning to question sources, evaluate claims, and spot manipulation, apply just as directly to how teens consume mental health content on TikTok and Instagram.

Why Gender and Race Complicate Social Media Policy in Schools

Faverio et al. report that gender differences run through nearly every survey item. Girls are more likely to say social media hurts their mental health (25% vs. 14%), their confidence (20% vs. 10%), and their sleep (50% vs. 40%). They report more negative social dynamics on the platforms: feeling overwhelmed by drama (45% vs. 34%) and pressured to post popular content (36% vs. 26%).

But the story does not run in one direction. Girls also report more of social media’s positive effects. They are more likely to say these platforms give them a creative outlet (68% vs. 58%) and connect them with supportive people (57% vs. 45%). The gendered experience is amplified in both directions. Any school policy that frames social media’s effects on girls as uniformly negative is working with an incomplete picture.

Racial differences add another layer. Black teens and Black parents express the highest levels of concern about teen mental health (50% and 70%, respectively), and Black teens also report feeling greater support and acceptance from social media than their White or Hispanic peers.

One-quarter of Black teens say these platforms make them feel much more accepted, compared with 10% of White teens and 13% of Hispanic teens. The platforms are doing different work for different communities. Educators designing digital wellness programs need to hold that complexity, or they risk building interventions that serve some students while alienating others.

The Pew data does not tell us that social media is destroying a generation. It tells us something more useful: teens are increasingly aware that these platforms create problems, even as they continue to rely on them for connection and information. The adults around them, parents and teachers, see the situation through a different lens entirely. Closing that perception gap is not a technology problem. It is a communication problem, a trust problem, and ultimately a pedagogy problem. For educators, that should sound like familiar ground.

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