There is now a depressing familiarity to the conversations I hear between parents of teenagers. After the obligatory pleasantries, the conversation often turns to mental health. Someone’s daughter is having a hard time, struggling with body image issues. Someone’s son is sullen and lost in video games. The parental concerns of previous generations (sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll) have been replaced by a new triumvirate: anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts.
As a parent of a teenager, I see this world every day. It is the message I hear from my colleagues. So I’ve been following the discussion of growing anxiety in teens with intense interest – particularly the role of social media, secularization And politics in immizing our children. But there is one factor that has not received enough attention in the debate about external factors in teen suffering: what if the call also comes from within? What if parents inadvertently contribute to their own children’s pain?
Just as there is a depressing familiarity in parents’ conversations about their children, there is a similar familiarity in children’s conversations about their parents. I spend a lot of my time traveling to college campuses, both secular and religious, and I hear a similar refrain all the time: “Something happened to my parents.” Sometimes (especially in elite schools) they share stories about parents obsessed with their children’s education. More and more often I hear about parents who are consumed by politics. And at the very end I hear stories about the impact of all kinds of conspiracy theories. Just as parents are angry about their children’s anxiety and depression, children are concerned about their parents’ mental health.
Let’s map out the very bleak landscape first. By 2021, nearly 60 percent of teenage girls reported that they “persistent sadnesswrote Azeen Ghorayshi and Roni Caryn Rabin in The Times. Overall, 44 percent of teens reported “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessnesssaid The Washington Post, up from 26 percent in 2009. These are the known numbers — the terrifying boom that sou-searching has spawned across the length and breadth of this country.
But let’s put them in a stark context. In the same year that 44 percent of teens reported being seriously sad, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 41.5 percent of adults reported “recent symptoms of an anxiety or depressive disorder,” up from an already high baseline of 36.4 percent several months prior.
In addition, while suicide rates have risen in the youngest cohort of Americans, they still are equipment left behind behind their parents’ and grandparents’ suicide rates. Deaths of desperation – the name for deaths from suicide, drug abuse or alcohol poisoning – especially have middle-aged white menand the numbers in general are simply staggering, especially since they started increase sharply in 2000.
Aside from self-reported statistics about depression and anxiety or the grim toll of drug abuse and suicide, there are other indicators that the adults are just not up to par. Partisan hostility, for example just keeps rising. Adult anger and pessimism are ubiquitous: a recent one NBC News poll indicated that a file 58 percent of registered voters surveyed believed America’s best days were over.
And when we think about kids and screens, let’s also consider the relationship between adults and their TVs and smartphones. Watch cable news (where grandparents get their news), and you will see a discourse dominated by fear and anger. If you spend any time on political Twitter (or observe the discourse on political Facebook posts), you’ll soon see a level of vicious, personal attacks little different from the most extreme personal bullying someone can experience in high school. secondary school.
Teens don’t exist on an island. There is a link between the emotional health of parents and the emotional health of their children well established. In addition, the way parents raise their children can, of course, directly affect emotional health. As Derek Thompson pointed out in the Atlantic Oceanmay placing children in “pressure cooker” higher income schools harm student well-being.
Parenting styles have changed. as Peter Grey wrote in Psychology Today last year., the increase in teenage suffering “occurred at a time when young people were given more and more time under the supervision, direction, and protection of adults.” He argues that “the pressure and constant scrutiny and judgment of adults, coupled with the loss of freedom to follow their own interests and solve their own problems, results in anxiety, depression and general dissatisfaction with life.” And if we’re concerned about continuous monitoring, Covid has only exacerbated the problem.
This is not to say that parents are the full story. I’m open to the smartphone thesis (and the secularization and the political thesis) as the main explanation for teen unhappiness, but I’m not convinced that the kids will ever be okay as long as mom and dad suffer from their own deep problems. Helicopter parenting is potentially suffocating on its own terms, but it must be incalculably worse when the floating parent is gripped by fear and anxiety.
So what’s there to do? It is not my intention to make parents even more anxious about their own anxiety, but insofar as our mental health is rooted in factors beyond our direct control – a particularly salient point when considering national politics – it may be worth taking a to ask a simple question. : How much fear and anxiety should we import into our lives and homes? Forget teenagers for now. Are We prove they are better able to cope with the information age?
It’s a question I honestly ask myself. I know my experiences carry over into family life online. I know that my fear can radiate outward to affect my children. Our own addictions—yes, to alcohol or drugs, but also to information and resentment—can wreak havoc on our families. I often think of the poignant words of A British clergyman named Andrew Wilson (indeed, I saw that on Twitter): “One of the things that struck me during my last two visits to the US was how painful the culture wars have become for so many people. Online you see that fighters seem to enjoy the fight (or even make money from it). But on the ground you see the pain, confusion and fatigue.”
Now is the time for us to realize that our pain can become our children’s pain, and if we want to heal our children, that process may very well begin by seeking the help we need to heal ourselves.
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