Why are teen girls so depressed these days. Jonathan Haidt thinks the answer is smartphones and social media, and I expressed some doubts about that a few weeks ago. Haidt is back today and, among other things, shows us this chart:
You can see one of the reasons for my skepticism here: the starting point for the rise in "self-derogation" is around 2009, not 2012, the year that Haidt has always focused on. This may seem trivial, but it's not. If a trend started in 2009, it's all but impossible for the cause to be something that didn't start until 2012.¹
So what do we make of this? Haidt suggests that a big part of the problem is an increasing feeling of not being in control of your life. In psychology-ese, this is referred to as having an external locus of control:
After trying a few different graphing strategies, and after seeing if there was a good statistical justification for dropping any items, we reached the tentative conclusion that the big story about locus of control is not about liberal girls, it’s about Gen Z as a whole. Everyone—boys and girls, left and right—developed a more external locus of control gradually, beginning in the 1990s. I’ll come back to this finding in future posts as I explore the second strand of the After Babel Substack: the loss of “play-based childhood” which happened in the 1990s when American parents (and British, and Canadian) stopped letting their children out to play and explore, unsupervised.
Haidt thinks this began in the 1990s and then accelerated after 2012 when smartphones became widespread. I'm inclined to believe this, mainly because I've long been astonished at the suffocating amount of control that parents apparently have over their kids these days. And the worst part of this, in my view, isn't even the control per se. It's the motivation for the control: fear. Modern parents seem to be extraordinarily sensitive to even the tiniest potential danger to their children, and it's hard to believe that this constant fear doesn't get picked up by the kids. It's probably not even conscious.
But either way, it can't be healthy. If you live in a bubble of fear and control, what happens when you start to move outside of that bubble in your teenage years? My guess is that the answer is increased stress and depression, which is exactly what we see. Smartphones and social media might give this an extra push, but I'll bet they aren't the primary source.
¹I say "all but" because there could, by coincidence, be something else that happened during 2008-12 and then smartphones picked up the ball in 2012. Unlikely, but not impossible.
The whole phenomenon of terrified parents not letting their children do anything on their own is real and terrible, but I suspect it is largely limited to the middle and upper classes.
My guess as the this increase is depression is related in another way to parents' excessive fear for and concern for their children: over diagnosis of ordinary problems. Obviously some people are depressed and have genuine mental health problems. But today's kids (middle class mostly) are watched so closely for any sign of any sort of distress and are taken to medical professionals and prescribed medication for what used to be considered just the normal pangs of growing up. (I learned recently that a young relative was told by a mental health professional that she had "borderline personality disorder" or some such nonsense because she was worried that her bf might break up with her.)
It's as if any emotion expressed by a kid other than absolutely confidence and satisfaction with every aspect of their life is seen as a medical problem, when sometimes feeling sad or lonely or worried or like nothing matters and everything is stupid is just a normal way for a kid to be.
Personally I'm very glad I was never diagnosed with any sort of mental health issue as a kid so I didn't have to carry that around with me for my whole life. And I'm sure I could have been because, lets face it, being a teenager sucks!
it is not confined to any class, and may actually be more pronounced the lower your income is, because poor people can’t afford nannies or tutors. we’ve reached the point where leaving a minor alone for any length of time before they turn about 15/16 is a crime. you HAVE to have them in sports/clubs/church/scouts/something at all times, and otherwise have them in school or tutoring. your life before age 21 is all preparation for employment, and your parents are responsible for it. this is the world neoliberalism has given us.
. . . neoliberalism . . .
Drink!
The impression I get is that helicopter parenting is very much a higher-income thing, because lower-income parents quite literally cannot afford it. Their time is eaten up just keeping the family afloat and they cannot supervise their kids, or ensure that another adult is supervising them, on a 24/7 basis.
I've been surprised by how many other parents seem intent on telling me that my kids have some sort of serious mental health problem, when they seem pretty normal to me. Toddler doesn't want to put on a coat? They must have Sensory Processing Disorder. Kid nervous about going to a new school? They must have clinical anxiety. It's like every emotion or personal preference now has to be turned into a diagnosis.
There is a strong sense that you should never push a kid to do anything they don't want to, even if the thing is pretty simple and normal (like drawing a picture of trees in art class). One other parent told me I would be risking PTSD for my child if I let him get an MRI (he just found it kind of long and boring).
It's as if parents want to totally destroy any sense of self-sufficiency or resilience a kid might have.
One area where cell phones play in with the youngest is at school. I was surprised by how many kids text the slightest issue at recess to their parents, who then angrily call the school. That's more of a working-class to middle-class phenomenon, since the richer parents often refuse to give their kids phones until after elementary school (those kids are always with adults, so they don't "need" a phone the way poorer kids do).
No kid “needs” a cellphone. I understand schools now are seen as potential slaughterhouses. But for most kids at most schools for most 12-13 year stretches of time, there is no reason they will “need” a cellphone. If they have to contact a parent during the day, they can go to the office & use a landline like they did in the pre cellphone age.
And for the (still, thank god) rare occasion that the school becomes a war zone? After Uvalde, it’s sadly unclear that even having cellphones will help the children at all. The problems are (1) the sheer number of guns lying around waiting to be used and (2) the ineffectiveness of police for whatever reason to deal with violence except cleaning up after it occurs. Just make sure every classroom and hallway has emergency-only landlines like college campuses have, and pray your school doesn’t “win” the future massacre lottery. Giving your child a cellphone is simply giving them a lucky amulet, one which comes with lots of unintended side effects like “distraction during class time” and “enabling helicopter parenting.”
Totally agree. No elementary school student should ever be allowed to bring a phone to school. The odds they'll need to call for help in a shooting are miniscule, the odds their education will be disrupted by constant distraction are 100%. I feel so much for all the poor teachers and school administrators who have to deal with neurotic parents who catastrophize everything.
(I will note, though, that most parents are probably not this ridiculous. The neurotics are just more visible because they are always complaining.)
Its all great when you can make a living doing what many of us do for free on blog comments, is it not?
I will be first contrarian. Although I could not believe the loss in unsupervised play in only one generation, from me (1960s) to my kids (born circa 1996 and 1998), I don't know that you can say that an increase in depression has any causal connection.
Outside unsupervised play was replaced with on line gaming first, and now on line social media.
But, the total number of friendships/acquaintanships seemed about the same, but what do I know, I have a sample size of like three or four.
I get where the author and his co-author are going with this: expanding the ven diagram of what is offensive means that more of the world is an awful place - sure, you might be partially successful in having better behavior, but the cost is more anxiety.
If, prior to whatever time period this is supposed to begin asking an Asian kid "aren't you guys good at math?" is some sort of stereotyping, and after its a "microagression" they argue that this is (counter intuitively -- it has to be since that is what makes bacon in academia) making our hypothetical Asian kid fees worse, not better.
Its all made up though.
Maybe "free range parenting" will be back now that the pandemic has subsided.
/s on sooo many levels....
There is a first-mover problem here. Back in the old days when every healthy kid was allowed to roam, the kids were effectively supervised *by each other* and if someone got hurt or if there was a crime attempt, they could fetch the adults. A parent letting their kid out now, in a neighborhood where no one else lets their kid out, is exposing them to more danger than would have been the case when there was safety in numbers.
According to Common Sense Media's tracking (2019 report - https://bityl.co/Hh2m, 2021 report - https://bityl.co/Hh2p):
Social media use by 13-18 years old, % and avg time per day / Total screen media (all types of devices incl TVs, computers, tablets, phones for multiple types of uses):
2015 = 58%, 2:04 / 6:40
2019 = 61%, 1:56 / 7:22
2021 = 67%, 2:10 / 8:39
Technology has lured kids away from playing outside and interacting with each other in person?
Facebook is the culprit. It started I think in 2004, by 2009 it was ubiquitous. Now there are other very popular social media sites. I would like to see this broken down by family income rather than "conservative" vs. "liberal".
Yes, and around that same time there was everyone getting a device in their pocket that they could pull out and use in every down moment. That's not a coincidence either. It takes both, and I think this is what Haidt is saying.
Kevin is more or less raising the Chewbacca defense here. His own charts contradict him.
1. As a parent of a child born in 1994, I was a pretty bad father - overbearing, and I regret it (documented in my latest https://www.losingmyreligions.net/ along with other mistakes)
2. I honestly believe a lot of the recent rise in liberal kids is being told they are doomed https://www.mattball.org/2023/01/climate-activists-are-to-blame-for-some.html
Take care, all.
Re: doomed. It would be interesting to do a comparison of kids' depression levels in the 1950s, when Death by Nuclear War was just around the corner ... and there was absolutely nothing they could do about it.
(Although I heard that it convinced a lot of girls to go to bed, so male satisfaction levels were probably pretty high.)
I remember duck and cover drills in the early 60s. We were less than a mile from the main gate of Kaneohe Marine Corp (Air) Base. Even at age 12 I knew hiding under my desk was not likely to help. Didn't bother me.
This is only my observation, but just look at you local elementary school. How many kids walk to school by themselves? Or in a group of other children? At my neighborhood school, none. All driven, or walked with their parent. With sometimes the parent carrying the backpack.
There are a couple of busy streets, but still. And of course most of the traffic at that time in the morning is people driving their kids to school!
I grew up walking to school by myself (most of the time) from the earliest grades that I can remember. And I do not currently have kids, but I am acquainted with other families who apparently need to warp and twist their daily schedule around the dropping off and the picking up of kids to and from school. Because, apparently, no kid is allowed to just go to school (or come home) on their own anymore.
I've never researched this phenomenon, but I certainly do wonder where on Earth it comes from. Are the schools demanding that parents behave this way? Or is it originating from the parents themselves? Are the schools afraid of lawsuits? Are the parents afraid of a visit from Child Protective Services if their kid walks alone, trips, and scrapes a knee? I do have relatives who once brought their son to an emergency room after an injury and were immediately confronted with Child Protective Services (the CPS apparently had a permanent presence in the emergency area of that hospital). Is that the kind of incident freaking parents out?
Or is it the nihilistic perspective of our mainstream news coverage convincing everyone that we live in a hell-scape of historical proportions (despite the fact that we live in what is - relatively - one of the most peaceful and prosperous societies in the history of the world)?
Is there any actual legislation forcing parents to constantly hover over their kids? Or is it all (or mostly) cultural influence?
I'm very curious about these questions, and I haven't encountered good answers anywhere (although I haven't really looked around much). If anyone has any good tips, let me know!
Teachers, in California at least, are mandatory reporters of suspect neglect/abuse.
https://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/ss/ap/childabusereportingguide.asp
I think most states have something similar.
Well, yes - as they should be. The question is "is 'kid walks a mile home from school'" abuse or neglect...? Back in the day it never was, and was laughable. But it seems like now it is.
It certainly isn’t in poorer school districts, where you still see kids (even in elementary school!) walking to school without adults. I’m guessing this is because poorer school districts would have to charge virtually all their parents with neglect if they enforced a “kids must always come to school with an adult” rule as many/most of the parents don’t have lenient employers willing to let them adjust their work schedules.
Those mandatory reporting laws need to be less vague about what, exactly, constitutes abuse. Too many BS reports are being generated by people who err on the side of reporting just to avoid running afoul of the mandatory reporting rules.
My 8 yr old rides the bus. But I'm not sure I'd let her walk even if it were practical.
There's an enormous amount of pressure on parents these days. What you do for your kid and the resources you spend to do it signals how good of a parent -- and person and citizen -- you are.
Doesn't help that for so long we've indulged a cultural narrative that kids today are "out of control".
Teenagers cannot have unsupervised parties, period. I know people with teenagers and it does not happen. Once local prosecutors started throwing parents in jail for teenage drinking it was Game Over. The best strategy to see your friends outside school hours is by joining 50 after-school activities. Which your parents can drive you to, of course.
@NikosRedux:
Your post is interesting in that it seems to point to both cultural as well as legal aspects to the situation.
Cultural: "There's an enormous amount of pressure on parents these days."
Legal/political: "Once local prosecutors started throwing parents in jail for teenage drinking it was Game Over."
But how does that cultural pressure actually express itself? Do parents shun us if we don't pick our kids up from school in person? Is our job at risk if our employer(s) find out? Will someone threaten to call up a social services agency on us? Here's what I'm getting at: how easy or hard is it to resist pressure that may not actually have much legal leverage behind it?
And how extensive or oppressive are the actual legal threats you mention? Are we talking about state laws or federal legislation? Is this a situation with a few random prosecutors who have gone rogue or a widespread trend that tries to toss parents in jail for not sufficiently hovering over their children? My main focus: how concerned do parents actually need to be about legal threats to parenting styles that were completely normal until maybe 30 years ago?
The fear of legal action can have a powerful effect on behavior even if legal action rarely happens in practice.
The iPhone came out in 2007. Adoption was fast and steady and saturation was about 2012. This is also the time where you could say more or less for social media.
I'm not sure how this contradicts anything Haidt is saying. In fact, it seems like that exactly fits your own chart.
Glad someone else noticed this discrepancy. Not sure why Drum consigns smartphone and social media to 2012-. Tumblr (which was horrible for teen mental health) launched in 2007. Facebook opened up to teens in 2006. Youtube was bought out by Google in 2006 and went big.
For girls, perhaps. But for boys, were we to draw a Drum Trendline, we'd see that locus of control seems to have been going up and to the right from the start of the chart circa 1980.
That’s about when society stopped letting “boys just be boys” and started expecting them to adhere to some of the same rules that girls always had to follow. Equality feels like oppression to those who used to be privileged. Look back at movies from the 1980s and before about all the near- and actual criminal activity grade school boys (and only boys) were nod-and-wink allowed to engage in. Smoking, cursing, drinking, joining motorcycle gangs, bullying other kids, beating up other kids after school, relentlessly pressuring girls to go out with them, having and proudly enjoying sex (unlike their partners who often ended up being portrayed as sluts and abandoned if/when pregnant), graffiting walls, skateboarding over every possible surface, terrorizing shoppers in malls… I love teen comedies from the 1980s in particular, but even I’m shocked by what everyone thought was ok back then for “adolescent male behavior.” And maybe not letting “boys just be boys” started shifting the locus of control. (This is a good thing in my opinion, as letting boys commit crimes as part of growing up was terrible.)
Sixteen Candles just came on, and it reminded me of yet another “boys will be boys” behavior that starting in the 1990s was strongly frowned upon for future generations of boys: getting girls blackout drunk to coerce them into sex. As we saw in the Kavanaugh hearings, apparently that was a common tactic of past teenage boys that has been (rightfully) condemned for current teenage boys to use.
Talk about losing your locus on control… nothing says “I’m not the master of my own life” than not being able to view girls as “non-player characters” who exist to be date raped with impunity… and be lauded for it the next day by all your friends and the victim herself. (Watch the scene where the hungover prom queen wakes up in the geek’s arms again. Very cringey in 2023.)
No wonder teenage boys are all depressed now that they can’t freely do what their fathers did to get laid. /s
On the other hand, today's boys have *much* easier access to porn than their fathers did in the 1980s.
Re: "I've long been astonished at the suffocating amount of control that parents apparently have over their kids these days."
It has been going on for a long time. I was surprised when my wife introduced me to her parents 26 years ago. The fearful look really surprised me. She was 50 years old at the time. She was afraid they would not approve of me. She told me they were constantly in control. Not like me as I grew up as a free range kid.
How do you explain the difference between liberal and conservative children?
Liberal families live in denser areas constantly portrayed as hellholes in the nightly news and online media. Places where predators lurk around every corner, and absolutely nobody will help your child or even call 911 if they witness your child being kidnapped, raped or murdered.
Conservative families still mostly live in rural and small town America, which is almost always portrayed like Hallmark movies does: idyllic, where everyone is a white Christian (or vouched for by a white Christian) and knows your entire family by name. Thus, nothing bad will ever happen… and if by some chance it does the whole community will come together to fix it.
The question not answered or discussed here is whether or not there has been a corresponding increase in physical safety. Has all of this control resulted in less childhood deaths/injuries from the stuff parents are trying to keep their kids from?
Also, I think the whole “parental control” thing started with the children of baby boomers. I remember discussing with co-workers in the 80’s how “free range” we were and how kids no longer had that. Helicopter parents became a discussed “thing” in the 80’s and early 90’s. I think our kids just built on that so their kids are even more controlled. I see that with my grandkids.
According to my baby-boomer mom, adults used to brush off minor injuries, falls, etc. in children with the words "kids bounce". And there is some truth to this: kids' bodies are lighter and don't fall as hard, and their tissues are also more resilient and heal more rapidly than adults'.
I agree that parents are insufferable. I'm more inclined to blame single parents than over protective ones.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/stories/single-parent-day.html
Almost a quarter of U.S. children under the age of 18 live with one parent and no other adults (23%), more than three times the share of children around the world who do so (7%).
https://www.aecf.org/blog/child-well-being-in-single-parent-families
As this article points out, American youth have been in a perpetual state of crisis since at least the early 1900's. Does anyone remember the existential crisis Boomers and Gen X grew up with, threatened with nuclear annihilation?
Choosing to focus on "External Locus of Control" feels like a researcher just KNOWING that there is a crisis and then looking everywhere for a chart going up-and-to-the-right to justify his preconceived notion. Just look at how hard he has to try to find a causation for his cherry-picked correlation.
https://www.yesmagazine.org/health-happiness/2023/03/02/social-media-teens-depressed
I came across a paper from 2000 "The Age of Anxiety? Birth Cohort Change in Anxiety and Neuroticism, 1952-1993" that claims that anxiety of children and college students had been rising since 1953. From the abstract:
"The average American child in the 1980s reported more anxiety than child psychiatric patients in the 1950s. Correlations with social indices (e.g., divorce rates, crime rates) suggest that decreases in social connectedness and increases in environmental dangers may be responsible for the rise in anxiety."
You'd think kids of my generation would have been nervous wrecks hiding under their desks and worrying about the flash of a detonating nuclear weapon. Instead, we shrugged off the daily air raid warning sirens. Only a supervillain would plot a surprise attack at noon, and that's what James Bond was for.
Were kids growing more anxious in the 1930s with the Great Depression and the deteriorating European situation? How about during World War I? My guess, based on contemporary children's literature is that adults were better able to shelter children from anxiety. The quid pro quo was that children were expected to bend to their parent's authority. If you read the Anne of Green Gables books, they are almost timeless. The outside world is the world outside, at least until the last book, Rilla of Ingleside which is set during World War I.
This is exactly it. Everything else on this subject is hand waving, bulls**t, and commentary. And it started in the ’80’s, not ’90’s. I worked with adolescents as a therapist for over ten years, did deep dives on attachment, development, the developmental requirement for risk behaviors, resilience factors, etc etc. All key to seeing how Americans in particular, and Anglo societies in general (with their tabloid media), have centered narcissistic parental fear, ego, anxiety, status, etc. over kids’ well being, with kids seen almost exclusively as reflections, or representations, of parents’ needs and abilities, but most importantly as testaments of parental and societal goodness.
It’s not just a microcosmic nuclear family issue. Many widely noted societal mores emerge from, feed into, engender, reinforce these crippling trends, but as far as I’m concerned it’s a form of subtle, collective child abuse. In short, this s**t is really, really f****d up. Generations of kids are being crushed by it, and it constitutes in ways of being that are unquestioned as inherently ‘good’ in our society - my favorite is how 24/7/365 AC irreparably changes kids habits to where going outside on your own volition (with all this implies and entails) becomes effectively eliminated. Like I said, this s**t is really, really f****d up.
How do Americans get everything that really matters - EVERYTHING - so horribly wrong? Because we do. Everything, including the socio-psycho-emotional kneecapping of generations of children? One thing is certain - there are tens of millions of young and maturing Americans who are, and have every right to be, deeply, volcanically angry, consciously or unconsciously. The second, of course, should be concerning to everyone. When this level and scope of shame based rage foments in darkness, that’s something of a problem. Just ask Alice Miller.
Don't discount the aftereffects of 9/11. The HS seniors in 2009 would have experienced 8 years of parental fear and overly supervised and greatly restricted activities. I taught during those years, and my colleagues and I noticed the difference between pre-and post 9/11 kids in terms of their curiosity, confidence, and playfulness. The kids are looking for something real and the virtual world can't supplying it.
Also, I don't think it's a class issue. I live in a very poor small town. There are children here, but they are not outside playing and exploring. They are inside with their screens.