- New evidence suggests

that sexting is a driver

of the mental health crisis in teens.

Can you explain that?

- Absolutely.

New evidence shows that most teens

who send inappropriatetext messages or sexts

have anxiety, and manyeven have depression.

Now, the correlation doesn'tnecessarily mean causation.

But let me tell you a story

about how those twothings could be connected.

At Canopy, part of ourjob is to talk to parents

about what their teenagersare experiencing online.

And one dad told us this story.

His daughter sent one nudeimage to her boyfriend

while they were dating.

Later they broke up

and unfortunately, he actuallyshared that text message

with a lot of other people.

Of course, this was reallyhorrible and humiliating

for the girl,

and someone who used to bedescribed as full of life

and really vivacious ended up having

to switch schools

because she no longer wascomfortable going to her class.

So this is why it's so important

for parents to have conversations

and also to use software like Canopy

to keep their kids safer online.

- [Reporter] Absolutely.

- Yeah, very true.

Matt, you say that talkingwith kids about sexting

is a necessary conversation

that parents should not avoid this.

Why is that? Break it down for us.

- What really amazes Ithink a lot of parents

is just how much teenage life has changed

since we were teenagers.

Things have really shifted.

What you have to understand

is that most of a teenager'ssocial life now happens online.

And so if you wanna be an engaged parent,

you have to be engagedwith their digital lives,

and not just with their real lives.

One study showed that 2/3of 12 to 18-year-old girls

had been asked for a nude image online.

2/3.

That's amazing.

And so what parents need to understand

is that their kids, even good kids,

are gonna run into temptations online

that they really need to be trained

and have conversations with their parents

about how to address.

- And really quickly,how can people connect

and find out more about Canopy?

- People can go to canopy.us.

That's canopy.us to learn more

about how to keep their kids safe online,

and really, get a lot ofgreat parenting resources

to have hard but reallyimportant conversations

with their kids.