Are Phones and Social Media Really Driving Teen Suicide?

Many parents today are scared.

Everywhere you look, there are headlines saying phones, social media, AI, and screen time are driving teen suicide. It can feel overwhelming. And when parents feel afraid, they often start parenting from panic.

In this episode, I want to slow things down and zoom out.

We talk about what the data actually shows about teen suicide. We look at why some of the statistics being shared are true—but also misleading. And we talk about why blaming phones and social media misses the bigger picture.

I also share a personal story from my time as a high school principal and why learning to understand the data helped me move from fear to confidence.

This episode isn’t about ignoring real struggles. Teen suicide is serious. But fear-based parenting is not the answer.

You’ll learn:

• Why most teens use phones and social media without being suicidal
• How fear and panic change the way parents show up
• What research says really protects teens
• Why connection matters more than control
• How to parent from confidence instead of fear

If you’ve felt anxious, worried, or pressured by scary headlines, this episode will help you breathe, think clearly, and trust yourself as a parent again.

Are You Caught in the Parent Trap?

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Take this quick (and eye-opening) quiz to uncover which common parenting trap you’re falling into with your teen.
Get a personalized roadmap to help you parent with more clarity, confidence, and connection—starting today.

https://benpughcoaching.com/parenttrapquiz

Transcript

Ben: 0:00

I'm Ben Pugh and you're listening to IMPACT! Parenting with Perspective. This podcast is all about helping parents manage the mental and emotional drama that comes with parenting teens so they can focus on what's most important. Building rock solid relationships and having a powerful impact on their teen's life. Join me each week as I dive into real tools to help you and your teen turn struggles into strengths.

ben_1_01-28-2026_103013: 0:35

Hello and welcome back to the podcast. I wanna thank you for being here. If this is your first time listening to this podcast, thank you for checking me out. If you've been here for a while, thank you for coming back. Today We will be talking about parenting out of fear and how news and media are kind of driving even more fear in parenting by tying everything to teen suicide from cell phones, video games. AI screen time, and I want to, I want to zoom out. I want to help you have a better perspective, and I want to help you realize that fear is not a parenting strategy, and whether we're talking about screens or we're talking about suicide, the data is not actually as scary. Everyone makes it sound, and honestly, there are a lot of people trying to get you to start parenting from panic. Now, I'll be honest, I like to go against the grain. I like to think for myself, and I wouldn't probably do this podcast on this topic, but several of my close. Friends and associates who are either parenting coaches or teen coaches, they are jumping on the bandwagon. If any of you guys are listening to this and you actually want to come talk to me on my podcast, reach out to me'cause I would love to hear your thoughts. But a lot of this fear is driven by news. A lot of states and a lot of schools are banning cell phones. They're citing data that isn't necessarily accurate, and now that this has become kind of a buzz phrase or topic, a lot of coaches are using it to get your attention, and that's fine. I understand it. Like part of the reason I'm talking about this is to get your attention, but I also don't want you to fall into the trap of parenting. From fear and panic because of all the scary numbers that are being tossed around. So, if you are a fellow life coach and you feel targeted by this, I'm not targeting you. Just reach out to me. I would love to have another perspective on the podcast, but for now, I want to help all these other parents not have to parent from fear. The goal of today's podcast is to help you gain a larger perspective of what's going on when it comes to social media, cell phones, screen time, ai, so that you don't have to be as scared. In addition to seeing this all over the internet and social media and news. I've also had several parents reach out to me, and we've had a few free consultations where parents are legitimately concerned about their child's safety because of some of the scary things that they've heard when it comes to suicide and social media. So like I said, this is a heavier topic. I don't know for sure where I'm going with all this. If. This triggers you. You might want to go to one of my older podcasts or just take this week off and come back next week. But if you are the type of parent who cares deeply about your child and you can see yourself getting into fear and panic, and you know that's not. How you best show up as a parent. Stick around. I promise this will help. Now I do want to bring up a quick little story. Most of you guys know that I was a high school principal for five years on the Ute Indian Reservation. Still my all time favorite job. I loved working for the tribe in my first year as principal, I. Unfortunately, and this is like one of the saddest, biggest regrets of my life, but I lost a student to suicide. I almost quit being a high school principal. And at that point I decided I, I need to learn way more about suicide. I need to be empowered to better support my students. I was a foster parent at the time to better support my foster kids, and I was a parent, still am a parent, but I wanted to better support my children, so I started going to. Conferences about preventing suicide amongst students, amongst teenagers. And man, there was this one conference that we went to and it was honestly the scariest thing I'd ever been to. And very similar to what we're hearing today on the news and media. A lot of the talk was about suicide and cell phones and social media and video games. And this was before ai, so they didn't include ai. There is this real palpable fear that if our teens have access to these things, something terrible will happen. And in our news, like there's one case that I heard a lot about where a teen was exploring suicide via AI, and I believe ended up. Taking his life, which is tragic. But then the narrative beca began to be like, Hey, teens with ai, they're way more likely to commit suicide. And a lot of this is meant to drive fear because we know that human beings are more likely to take action if they're scared, then if they're feeling any other emotion. So before I get too deep into this story, I'm gonna share with you about this. Suicide awareness conference I went to. I do wanna say teen suicide is real. It is tragic. It is something that we need to be taking seriously because our teenagers matter. I don't wanna lose any of them, but I also have to be honest, and I have to let you know that fear-based parenting. Built on bad data that is meant to scare the crap outta you, doesn't help you as a parent and it does not help your teen. So back to this story. Years ago when I was principal, I attended this suicide prevention training and they showed us slide after slide of these horrifying statistics that linked screen time, video game use, and social media. To suicide, and it was a real downer. They're like, oh yeah, teens that have access to social media, they're way more likely to commit suicide. And there's just scare sharing, scary statistics. Now, a lot of those statistics while being true, they were deeply misleading. And I had the fortune of going to a breakout session where the person. Doing the breakout session was actually a statistician, and he said some things that changed my life. They helped me go from fear to confidence, and it was super powerful. And the thing that he shared, he's like, Hey, a lot of those statistics are technically true. But they're very misleading. And he talked to us about how a lot of the numbers and the data that they were showing us, they were taken from the small group of numbers of children who had attempted suicide or died by suicide. And he explained that, Hey. If you only look at the teens who attempt suicide, like yeah, many of them have misused screens. They've misused social media or video games. But here's the problem. And he shared with us like 90 some odd per like 99% of teens, almost all of our teens are able to use screens, social media. Cell phones, video games, all without struggling with suicide. So the data might give us important information about the children who are struggling with suicide, but it doesn't give us the big picture. It doesn't give us data on the 95% of teenagers who use smartphones and social media regularly, and they're fine. The percentage of teens who die by suicide? It is really low. I think it's under 1%. I can't remember. I pulled up some numbers. I think it's even less than half a percentage a year. And that doesn't mean that we need to ignore teen suicide. And it doesn't mean that if your teen is struggling with suicidal ideation that Oh man. You. This isn't even a real problem. It's not big enough to even consider. No, I am not saying any of that. But what I am saying is that we need to stop acting like every teen is on the brink of suicide, and we need to stop blaming cell phones and social media and video games and AI as if it's the direct cause to teen suicide. If that was the case, the numbers would be astronomically higher. The truth is, if you look at the big picture, suicide, though it's tragic and I have experienced it as a principal with one of my all time favorite students. Even though it's tragic and it's really hard, it is not something that should scare you to death as a parent. And radically change how you parent. Now, if your teen is struggling with suicide, by all means, please go get help. And one of the things that I would recommend really have open conversations about what you can be doing to help them. Some of the teens that I've talked with, they're like, man, I wasn't depressed, I wasn't suicidal. But then when my parents took away all my video games, they restricted. My TV time down to like half an hour a day, they wouldn't let me have a cell phone. Like these knee jerk reactions where we're parenting out fear that is causing more harm than it's actually doing good. And if you've left some for a long time. You know that even though I was a high school principal for five years and in education for a total of 15 years, I'm not the biggest fan of education right now. And I think there is something bigger at play. There is something more about control than just protecting our students from suicide because the reality is most students can handle having screen time. They can handle using the internet, they can handle using ai. Yet we're acting like it's the most deadly thing out there, which by the way, one of the interesting statistics, and this is probably five years old, and I don't know the exact numbers, but this guy who was a statistician, he is like, let's look at the real numbers. While suicide has increased. He's like, overall deaths of teenagers has decreased. By far, by far, by far, by far the leading cause of death in teenagers is automobile accidents. But we don't hear anyone talking about, oh, teens shouldn't be able to drive. They shouldn't be allowed to do this. And he talked about how even though there are scary numbers out there, we don't want to be, he was talking to school leaders. We don't wanna be acting outta fear because that. Changes how we show up. So I wanna be really clear. There's scary data out there. Go research it yourself. I spent a little bit of time before recording this podcast, researching some of the data, understanding why, though it's true, it isn't necessarily a good fit for all teenagers. So here are some of the things that research shows. This is important. There are teens who are already struggling with depression, with anxiety, with loneliness, with trauma, and oftentimes with those teens, the way that they use cell phones, the way that they use social media is different. They change the way that they use. They maybe scroll more, they have more comparison. They stay up later at night scrolling and. W reading stuff on their screens and they do more withdrawing from family and friends and social settings and re retreating into screens. So when these studies say, Hey, teens who attempt suicide had way higher screen time, the real question is, did the screens cause the pain? Or did their pain change how they were using screens? And most of the high quality research out there says that it's more the second one. These teens were already struggling, and then the way that they used cell phones, screen time, video games, social media, whatever, changed because they were struggling. So. It is important to keep in mind a lot of the scary data that we hear about teens and suicide and their social media use is driven by a small data set. So let's talk about the parenting panic that is going on. A lot of parents, they've been panicking about video games from the time that I was in school. Like I remember. People blaming video games for school shootings and violence, and there's a kid who got beat up in a football locker room and everyone's like, oh, those the kids who beat'em up, they play video games. It's gotta be the video games. The parenting panic right now is all about social media, cell phones and ai, and it's tragic because there are bad things that happen with. These tools or these resources that our teens have access to, but it's not large scale population level data that's like, oh man, every teen that uses AI is way more likely to you fill in the blank. That's not accurate. What we do know is this teens who are already struggling, they might explore heavy topics like suicide with. People with friends with search engines in their journal, and nowadays they might do it with ai, but blaming the tool instead of understanding and addressing the underlying struggle, the underlying distress isn't responsible. It's not going to help. It's going to further the problem and it's emotionally understandable. Why we would want to blame the tool. I, when I lost the student, I wanted to blame the girlfriend. I wanted to blame access to guns. I wanted to blame the friends. I wanted everyone. But blaming instead of understanding sets us back further. And it is statistically irresponsible to use numbers manipulatively in a way that causes fear and panic. Here is the hidden danger when it comes to parental fear, and I might say some things here that might make you feel uncomfortable. I want you to know that is not my goal, but if you do feel uncomfortable, it probably means that this is a little closer to home and you need to start exploring and start listening to yourself. The thing is. When parents live in constant fear of suicide, when suicide becomes the lens through which you see your teenager, you will change as a and your parenting will change. And if you're like most parents, when you start parenting through that lens, you will become. More restrictive, you will try to control even more. You'll start hovering and monitoring, and that doesn't create safety, that creates pressure and disconnection from your teenager and secrecy. And just so you know that I know what I'm talking about, like there was a time we had a foster child that lost the privilege of having doors in their room and. Closet rods and could only be in the bathroom for so long before we'd unlock it to check on this foster child. But the thing is, you can't start parenting out of fear and trying to control something outside of your control, because what that does is it creates teens who don't feel trusted. If you are scared, your teen will start to be scared. One of the things that I teach is that calm is contagious, unfortunately. So is fear and panic. If you are afraid, if you are panicked, the chances of your teen becoming afraid and panicked are. Greatly, greatly increased, and ironically, one of the strongest predictors when it comes to teen withdrawal is teens not feeling trusted, feeling like they're overly restricted and being controlled. We want to find ways to empower our teens without the knee-jerk reaction when it comes to fear. So let's talk about some of the things that matter most, the research. And you can go do this research super easy. They're like, go check out like the CDC and surgeon general summaries on youth mental health and protective factors and things like that. The thing is, the research is pretty consistent in this area. The protective factors. That work the best and matter way more than screen limits are whether or not your teen feels connected to at least one adult. And it doesn't have to be mom and dad, it can be a football coach, it can be a favorite teacher at school. It can be a church leader, it can be an older sibling, it can be an aunt or an uncle. Bonus points if it's. One of the parents, but it doesn't have to be another of the protective factors that is more powerful than screen limits. Is your teen getting enough sleep? Now, I'll be honest with you, in my home, sometimes we use screen limits to help our teens get more sleep. We might make a rule as to how late you can have your phone, but we don't do it. From the mentality of, Hey, we wanna restrict you. We do it from the mentality of, Hey, sleep is important in our home. It's sleep time from this time to this time. And when it's sleep time, we're not on our phones. Another one of the protective factors that is super powerful. If your teen has a sense of competence and autonomy, they will feel more empowered. They will feel more safe. One of the things, I was recently working with a teenager, straight A's in school does sports. She's like the poster child, like, we all want our kids to be like this. And her mom and dad just came and took away her phone and, oh, we're gonna get you Gab phone and we're going to do this. And the reason why was that they were afraid that she would become suicidal. This is a young woman who has never. Struggled with suicide and it completely demolished her sense of competence and autonomy because her parents are parenting out of fear. She had straight A's, she had she was doing great in sports. She was engaged in her church and fortunately I was able to talk with her and her parents. But that was one of the things that they didn't realize. They were just parenting out of fear. Another, and this is one of the biggest things. If your teen knows that they can talk with you about tough conversations without you overreacting, that is a powerful protective factor. So I want to just be clear. Phones don't remove these protective factors. Fear-based parenting typically does, like if you are parenting outta fear and you feel panicked, we need to talk, we need to put things into perspective. Like I said, you can go get the data on, like go look at like just Google, CDC and surgeon general summaries on youth mental health, and you can Google like protective factors I'm sorry. I get fired up about this As someone who has lost a student to suicide, people that are close to me to suicide, and as someone who is an advocate for teenagers and who strongly, strongly believes that the answer isn't taking away power from our teen is finding ways to better empower them. I think it's time that we start asking better questions. Instead of asking questions like, how do I control my teen's access to everything that's dangerous in life, we need to try asking, how do I empower my teen to be able to manage these dangerous tools safely? I'll be honest with you, one of the scariest tools that I let my teens use every day, I'm more scared about them using the car than I am about them being on their cell phone. We have talks. I lost a brother in a car accident. I know how deadly vehicles can be. I don't want to restrict my kids from being allowed to use vehicles. What I want to do is I wanna ask, how can I be the dad that helps them be a safe driver? How can we have conversations about the importance of putting yourself on a way while you're driving? Here's one of the answers that comes to me. I can do better at not checking my phone while I'm driving. I could do better at not just glancing, just to quickly see, well, who was it that texted me? I can see their name real quick. That's not the parent that I wanna be. I wanna start asking better questions. How can I empower my teen to use these tools and resources, even though at times they can be dangerous? The truth is just like automobiles and trucks and cars and all that, they're not going away. Neither are cell phones. We can start asking ourselves questions. How can I have a discussion here and be more calm? How can I be more curious? How can I be more confident in my parenting? How can I be better connected to my teen? Because teens don't need parents who eliminate all the risk and take over. Hey, get in the passenger seat. I've got this. I don't trust you to do it. Right. That's not the type of parents that we want to be, and that's not the type of parent that your teen needs you to believe. Your teen needs a parent who believes in their capacity to navigate life, even though it can be hard, even though it can be dangerous. A few things I want to share with you. These are important. I share a video on a lot of my coaching calls. You can Google it. It's by Rourke Denver, and it's called Calm is Contagious. Here's the truth, fear is also contagious and there are systems in place and there are people in our world who benefit from fear. There are life coaches and therapists and tech companies and schools, and there are people who benefit from fear, and I want you to be able to see through that. It's okay to be afraid, but don't run. Don't run away from fear because then the thing you're afraid of is gonna chase you. Be able to turn and face your fear and be confident. Trust. Your ability as a parent to handle anything that comes up and trust your teen's ability as a teenager, as a human being to be able to handle tough situations. You don't need to follow every scary headline. You don't need to parent out a panic. I promise you, your teen is not as fragile as the world would have you think they are. And we keep on building a world that reinforces this. Fragility mindset. Oh no, don't do that. Or you'll be broken. Trust yourself as a parent. Trust your teen and know that the most impactful thing you can do in your teen's life is first, be the best parent that you can be. And second, find ways to connect with your teen where they are as they are. If you got a B plus student, connect with your B plus student instead of trying to turn them into the A plus student that you've been trying to connect to. Connect with them where they are as they are, and trust that your teen, just like most teens, statistically and developmentally, is far more resilient than the internet would have. You believe your teen, they, they've got this. Trust them. So that was a long rant. I apologize. There's just a lot of fear and a lot of divisive rhetoric in our media, in our news, in our schools, and I want to help you be able to parent from a place of confidence rather than from a place of panic. And fear. Now, if this has been helpful to you, and if you know someone who needs to hear this, please feel free to share my podcast with them. If you guys have been listening to me for a while, you know that I don't really do much advertising. I don't really do a lot of posting on social media. I rely heavily on word of mouth. If this has been helpful to you, I promise you, you know, someone that it will be helpful to. I do have a few one-on-one coaching spots that are now available now that we're here in the new year. If you or your teen would like support or if you would like help parenting from a place of confidence and trusting your teen, rather than getting into parenting fear and panic, reach out to me. I would be happy to give you a free coaching call where you can explore if this is the right move for you. You can book that free coaching call, at benpughcoaching.com/mini. Alright, thanks for coming. I'll talk to you again next week.