Over the past year I've gotten interested in the steady decline of children's mental health. I haven't looked into it in any depth, though, so I was interested in a survey of the topic by Judith Warner in the Washington Post Magazine yesterday. First off, she takes on the possibility that the crisis is an outgrowth of the COVID-19 pandemic:
That’s an explanation that feels right, particularly if you’re one of the millions of parents trying to balance back-to-normal work expectations with the continued chaos of your school-age children’s lives. It feels especially right if you’re someone whose child, pre-pandemic, seemed basically fine (or fine enough) and then just … wasn’t.
But — as the shrinks say — feelings aren’t facts.
Bottom line: It's not COVID. The pandemic might have made things worse, but this problem has been growing for at least a decade. So how about smartphones and social media?
Theories as to why children’s mental health was so bad pre-covid abound. A prominent subset — popularized most notably by San Diego State psychologist Jean Twenge’s 2017 Atlantic story, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” — blames technology. That theory — regretfully, I’m tempted to add, because it’s one of those ideas that, no matter how wrong, still feel perfectly right — has been extensively refuted.
So it's not down to tech. Here's another guess:
Then there’s the view that part of what we’re seeing is a greater awareness and openness about children’s mental health on the part of a new generation of parents, the first to grow up at a time when it was common for kids to be diagnosed with issues like attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and to come of age in a world where celebrities talked publicly about their struggles with depression or addiction. But most experts feel that this hypothesis doesn’t tell the whole story. Beyond the research evidence, their gut-level take tells them that young people truly have become more anxious and despairing.
So there's more. But what? Warner stops there to tell the rest of her story, which is about politicizing mental health and other topics. In other words, we don't really have a good idea yet of why kids today seem to have much worse mental health problems than previous generations.
FWIW, one of the first things I do when I come across something like this is to see if it's worldwide or mainly an American phenomenon. This is hard to suss out, but a brief survey suggests that it's a problem in Europe too, though possibly not quite as severe. So whatever's causing it, it's something at least moderately universal in rich Western countries.
But what?
Thinking back to my childhood, I can think of kids who, in retrospect, probably suffered from some sort of classifiable emotional problem, but it was always blamed on bad kid behavior. While lack of diagnoses (or lack of interest in diagnoses) may not explain the increase, I'll bet that's a big piece of it. Parents and teachers no longer satisfied with blaming the victims.
That's certainly a big part of it - mental health issues were often ignored or undiagnosed in the past. Surely autism, for example, has always existed, but until the mid-20th century it was just called hysteria or idiocy.
Likewise, when I was in elementary school, there was a kid of the same age who I now know in retrospect would have been diagnosed with a learning disability (possibly dyslexia) had he been born a decade or two later. At the time, though, his days were nothing but struggle. In the fourth grade, my teacher asked my to try to help him with his reading (since I was almost always ahead of the rest of the class), but I felt pretty helpless.
I’m going to struggle with saying this the right way, but … I’m 57. I have two boys in their 20s. So I’ve spent a lot of time observing them and their peers. I put the responsibility on my generation and how we went about parenting our children. Every body gets a trophy, we protect them from failure, and we protect them from the big, bad world because we’re afraid they will get hurt. Or worse. And then as they get older, that world starts to intrude and they don’t have the tools to appropriately address and respond to the slights and dangers out there. We spent so much time protecting our children we failed to let them learn to fail and fix things on their own.
Who is this "we" of which you speak? Are you using the inclusive pronoun because you believe you share the blame in how you raised your boys?
You can leave me out. My wife and I raised a healthy, well-adjusted daughter who is independent and confident.
Good for you. I made a generalization that doesn’t apply to every parent of my generation.
You used the inclusive pronoun "we." So it applies to you?
Yes. As most rational mature people do, I can recognize that I could have done a better job when I look back at how I managed raising my kids. Apparently, you were perfect.
I think this is more complicated than "everybody gets a trophy". First of all that is an overused expression and not really true in most contexts. Yes, at an early age things like youth sports, in an effort to engage everyone and not just the athletic kids, tend to give younger kids a participation trophy. I'm a decade older than you and I was an athletic kid and played sports very competitively through high school. Kids who weren't so inclined just stopped participating in those days. But perversely, despite the efforts now to make sports more democratic so that more kids have fun and get exercise - a good goal in my opinion - the hyper competitive model of interscholastic sports has been pushed down toyounger and younger kids so that you have things like AAU teams and travel teams for 8 and 10 year olds. In short, I think the everyone gets a trophy meme is misleading.
That said, I think there is something going on at a broader level which is our culture is extending adolescence into the 20's. In part this is because we now expect many more people to go to college or extend the years they are learning and preparing nd they enter the work force at a later age. Does this have anything to do with mental health issues being on the rise for younger people ? Maybe. Very hard to say.
I agree that it is more complicated than “every body gets a trophy.” I meant that as a shorthand reference one aspect of the dynamic and also referred to several other examples of the dynamic.
Most of my peers that I discuss this with agree that our generation (in general- there are always exceptions) didn’t do a great job at raising the next generation.
And I agree, we also are allowing adolescence to last much longer than when I was that age.
There is also an issue with the schools. Critical thinking and rational analysis seems in short supply in the younger generation. And their writing skills? Pfffft. Too much time teaching to the test and not enough time on skills development. Which is also a factor in the larger point of Kevin’s point. At some point, kids have to have those skills and when they hit the “real world” and don’t have them …
But, if the issue was kids not developing skills that prepare them for the "real world," you'd be seeing an increase in mental health problems in younger adults, not children.
It’s happening at both ages.
Maybe, but your proposed mechanism wouldn't explain why it's happening with children. Which is the question Kevin raised.
There you go again with the "we."
As for your other generalizations, I edit grant proposals and manuscripts for my colleagues. In some cases, their writing skills leave much to be desired. But there are plenty of colleagues who publish and get funded without my help. I'm able to resist the impulse to say "we don't know how to write."
I can't decide whether your comments reflect solipsism or narcissism. Or both. They certainly suffer from a lack of objective, quantifiable evidence.
My comments represent almost 30 years of observing my peers and how we raised our kids. And the fact that you are alone in challenging the concept that our generation made a lot of mistakes in how we raised our kids.
Funny thing is that I’m not challenging you and your success as a parent. Yet you appear to believe your experience must mean I’m just blowing smoke. Maybe you’re the narcissist.
agree with you on the "participation trophy" bit. i coached t-ball and coach-pitch with kids 4, 5, 6. year olds. some were fairly advanced for their age, some not at all. in coach-pitch it was my rule that no one struck out no matter how many swings it took for them to make contact. for a lot of these kids, it was their first real exposer to the sport and it's no fun if all you do is fail. let them have a taste of success first and let them learn how to play the game. once they do that, then it's three strikes and you're out.
Otoh, we know physically mental brain development continues throughout the early 20s. 18 year olds are not great at analysis yet we give them guns anyway.
I can confirm that what you describe is a unique US issue. I raised my children in the US and avoided this craziness that created a generation of selfish and entitled adults.
How did that happen? The cult of personal success.
No such thing in Europe among my family and friends at least.
Yes. As others have suggested, us ‘Muricans seem most unique in how we define personal success and the ambitions to achieve it.
I'm only a couple of years younger than you. When I played baseball and soccer I always got a trophy and let me assure you that I sucked and so did the teams I played on.
Not when I played.
This idea was expanded on in this famous Atlantic article, which later turned into a very popular book. I'm surprised it was not on Kevin's radar when he made this post.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/
Excellent.
Spit-balling here: I see two anxiety-inducing trends. One is academic pressure, which while not entirely new seems to me more ingrained in the middle class than it was when I was a kid. The other is culturally-induced agoraphobia--not literally, but not too far from it. This is the whole idea that it is unspeakably dangerous for a kid to walk down the street without an adult present. I think this is adults cosplaying the 1970s, when we were kids. Of course we roamed freely all over the place, but in retrospect it seems incredible that any of us survived. This is tied with the phenomenon of people who flat out disbelieve that violent crime is vastly rarer today than it was fifty years ago. The result is that parents teach their kids to be anxious, even in objectively benign settings.
“Of course we roamed freely all over the place, but in retrospect it seems incredible that any of us survived.”
Why does it appear, in retrospect, incredible that any kids from an earlier generation survived? This is, to me, one of the truly great mysteries of our time. Why did one generation of parents apparently get up one day and, in contrast with (majorities within) all previous generations of parents, suddenly decide, “oh my god, my kids must never, ever go anywhere or do anything alone”?
What this indicates to me is that it’s not just the kids who suddenly suddenly started suffering from increased mental illness: it’s the parents as well. In fact, it likely began with the parents and was passed down to the kids. But what started this trend?
One fairly obvious culprit, in my view, is cable news. Cable news involves not just negative reporting, which has been around forever. Rather, cable news involves NON STOP and round the clock negative reporting, and I think that may be the crucial difference. Cable news is a social pathology assaulting the population with a daily dose of vicious, addictive nihilism. And that has simply got to have a cumulative impact.
Does it explain everything? I doubt it. But I do believe it’s an important factor. And there are certain aspects to this theory which check out. CNN launched in 1980. By the time it’s daily and nonstop assault began to have an effect on everyone’s feelings of security, that’s approximately when we begin to see parents taking all freedom away from kids. And, eventually, this phenomenon went global, spreading the social pathology around the world (which matches Kevin’s statement that the same problem is in Europe).
There will always be complicating factors, but 24-hour cable news, and its relentless, nihilistic, dystopian view of the world, must be an aspect of the situation.
Interesting idea. I have a family member who is mentally ill and who watches a lot of cable news. I notice that it cranks up his anxiety level to 11 and he lacks the ability to regulate his response. I don't think his illness was caused by cable news but it clearly exacerbates some of the symptoms. I wonder if it wouldn't do the same for people not so severely afflicted to start with, especially children who also have less ability to regulate their responses such that a somewhat shy or careful child becomes noticeably more anxious to the extent of a more disabling neuroses.
I like. From my youth way back- my Mom and the family left all the doors unlocked as a kid. We had 5 kids so a lot of in and out, as we got older, in and out at all hours. We got the local paper Newsday, an afternoon paper then and the morning paper was the NYT. Then out of the blue the NY Daily news showed up in the morning along with the NYT. Free samples for a month. By the end of the month the doors were locked and Mom suddenly knew about crime. So I do subscribe to your cable news theory.
This is a part of what I tried to cover in my comments. Far too many children spending far too much time in adult-managed activities and too little time unsupervised in child-led activities where they can fail and pick themselves up all on their own.
Is it in parallel with their parents' and the country's mental health? My own personal feeling is it is the continual ramping up of consumerism that is driving everyone to want more and seek the means of getting more with the inevitability of failure because there is always more, more, more. Every aspect of our lives from cradle to grave is tracked, measured, stored, and then used by every company from your health provider to your car repairer so they can vacuum as much as possible from your wallet. Kids, just like their parents and everyone else, are constantly trying to keep up with desires and expectations all around them, and nobody can ever get there.
So many of my kids’ peers came out of college expecting to immediately get the perfect job, a house with a picket fence and two cars in the driveway, and annual vacations to Europe. It just doesn’t happen that way. But they’ve been led to believe in that fantasy.
Social media has a lot to do with creating this desired fiction.
IDK, talking to late teens I think global warming combined with the inability of the ruling gerontocracy to address…well anything probably does not lead to much hope for the future (combined with intense pressure to get one of the few (and shrinking) spots that lead to material security.
In the 1980s we teens often had a “maybe it will all blow up” attitude, but that is very different from hearing about seemingly monthly reports from scientists saying “it indeed is all going to hell in a hand basket”.
Also school shootings. School shooting training is standard and unlike the vague blow it all up era, we get pretty regular occurrences of it. That is something that was barely a thought 25 years ago.
Kevin, despite your continual trumpeting of the world getting better and better, remember: in my lifetime, the population has increased from 3 billion to 8 billion and is on its way to 10 billion. And we aren't figuring out how to increase the carrying capacity as fast as we are growing the population. There really are more things to be anxious about these days.
It's not just Covid throwing kids out of school. It's living through an actual worldwide pandemic, which my generation didn't have to do until now. Plus, here, biblical wildfires.
While the population has doubled from 1973, extreme poverty (in constant spending power) has dropped from 65% to under 10%, while relative affluence has inccreased from 12% to 65%, Relative poverty has doubled, while maintaining the sams percentage- because many those who used to live in extreme poverty moved up to relative poverty, while those in relative poverty moved up to relative affluence.
+1
Yep. And every indication is that the crash in population growth the planet has happily experienced will continue unabated until the human population begins to actually shrink, later this century.
If anybody wants something to obsessively worry about, I'd suggest starting with the scary thought that we somehow haven't yet gotten around to banning nuclear weapons. We really ought to: it's unlikely we'll be able to refrain from using them (again) indefinitely.
What is odd is that, if kids have more mental health problems these days, they are also much better behaved than my generation was (1960-70s). Kevin commented on this a couple of years ago:
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/06/the-kids-today-are-very-nice-people/
Better behavior doesn't necessarily correlate with increased personal happiness. Maybe?
"extensively refuted"? as the kids on wikipedia say, citation needed.
I have 21 & 19 year old kids. Among other circumstances, their entire lives have been lived against the background of multiple wars, a great recession, that former guy, skyrocketing tuition, skyrocketing housing prices, a violently polarized electorate, and the climate crisis. Frankly, it would be a miracle of sorts if they weren't a mess. At least we had punk when I was their age.
I don’t think it’s really that simple. It would be easy to argue that earlier generations had it infinitely worse, and it’s really not hard at all to come up with examples. WW1 and WW2 killed tens of millions of people around the world, upended hundreds of millions of lives, and inflicted who knows how many trillions of dollars in damages. That was immediately followed by multiple generations that grew up under a constant threat of immediate annihilation from nuclear war. And that’s not even to mention the fact that women, gays, blacks, Jews, Asians, and no doubt other groups as well were essentially blocked from any sort of meaningful and free engagement with life. There were also plenty of Climate doomsayers announcing that acid rain and/or the hole in the ozone would soon destroy us all.
Recent generations, by contrast, have grown up in decades free of major wars at a time when violent crimes have been at their lowest levels in decades. It’s possible that “the kids these days” have lived through the most peaceful and egalitarian years that humanity has ever known. So, why on Earth would their mental health be worse?
Well, of course, it’s all relative. There will always be problems. So, my own two cents is that the main thing which must have changed is how we view our problems. A deterioration in mental health indicates, to me, a change in us (and how we view the world) more than it indicates a change in a world which, arguably, has provided kids with ever safer environments.
But how and why did our outlooks suddenly change for the negative? As I write elsewhere in this discussion, I suspect that the advent of 24-hour cable news (in 1980) must be one important factor.
I don’t think it’s really that simple. It would be easy to argue that earlier generations had it infinitely worse, and it’s really not hard at all to come up with examples. WW1 and WW2 killed tens of millions of people
You're absolutely right. Homo sapiens in my observation is absolutely imprisoned by recency basis.
I think this is getting at it. America's culture from its very founding has been one of optimism, opportunity and the notion that each generation will pass off something better to the next. These days, there's just not a ton to be optimistic about any longer. The past twenty years have, frankly, sucked, from 9/11 to the Great Recession to Trump and now the brink of WWIII. Then there's climate change...and on and on. And the institutions -- political, religious, educational -- that once held out hope of creating opportunity and change among young people are captured by a small segment of either the most privilged or the most insane. To quote Yeats, the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity.
How can you grow up in a world like this and not suffer from some kind of depression?
The past twenty years have, frankly, sucked, from 9/11 to the Great Recession to Trump and now the brink of WWIII.
Seems wrong. Someone born in the late 1920s would've witnessed an economic collapse far worse than anything current youngins have dealt with, quickly accompanied by the rise of fascism and culminating with Auschwitz and Hiroshima.
Someone born in the late 1940s would've witnessed the Red Scare, duck and cover, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK, the Tet Offensive, the Mai Lai Massacre and the burning of American cities.
Someone born in the late 1960s would've witnessed Watergate, gasoline shortages, the Hostage Crisis, Son of Sam, Jonestown, double-digit inflation, a 22% misery index, the Challenger disaster, the Crack epidemic and AIDS/HIV.
And so on...
Recency bias, people!
And these people are all fucking pathological. Someone born in 1929s people got in charge of gov. in 1980 (60) and it's been since then that our politics has been totally in the shitter.
"But — as the shrinks say — feelings aren’t facts."
"But most experts feel that this hypothesis doesn’t tell the whole story. Beyond the research evidence, their gut-level take tells them that young people truly have become more anxious and despairing"
"Beyond the research evidence, their gut-level take tells them that young people truly have become more anxious and despairing"
"Gut level take" = opinion. Opinions are like nose hairs. Everybody's got 'em. If your opinion isn't backed by objective evidence. why should I be interested in inspecting nose hairs?
My guess would be a mix of factors, much in agreement with the tenor of this thread:
1. Overprotection: I walked alone one kilometer to school every day as a first grader, and almost as far 2 years before to Kindergarten. Today's parents seem to be too risk averse to allow that.
2. Overambition: The pressure on our kids to succeed academically--plus in extracurriculars--must be unbearable to all but the most talented.
3. Overdiagnosis: Knowing who I am and my behavior when I was in primary school I have no doubt that I would be diagnosed with Asperger syndrome if I were in primary school now. I am extremely grateful everybody thought of me as a somewhat weird but gifted child rather than as a patient, i.e. someone who needs to be fixed.
The problem may be worse in the US because of the hyper-competitive and hierarchy obsessed* nature of our culture.
On the surface Americans appear to be very egalitarian to outsiders, what with everybody being on first name terms with everybody. But the attention paid to the question which college is better and which is worse and the amount of effort wasted on getting into a "better" one says the opposite.
Just an idea to add to the above: Does the abundance of diagnoses by themselves reinforce the development? Being diagnosed with something "mental" must be stressful on its own and might make things worse rather than better.
Why is it wasted? If you get into a really good school you AREN'T ALLOWED TO FAIL. I don't mean grades, though there is some of that, I mean the elites will make sure fuck ups like Hunter Biden or W always land on their feet. Even if you aren't born elite and get in your kid WILL be and then they are set.
There are probably multiple factors contributing to this but one I haven't seen mentioned is environmental factors. I'm surprised Kevin, with his very forceful argument for the influence of lead, didn't put it out there. There are many many chemicals and other non natural substances floating around that could affect children as early as in utero. In the Post piece one example was of a 5 year old with bipolar disorder. This is one of many more severe mental problems that are far more likely to be mostly biological in origin than a result of some large scale sociological phenomenon.
I was similarly surprised.
Regardless of whether you agree with the notion that today's kids have more mental health problems or not, it would be impossible to really verify it because in the past children were simply not assessed for it. Even if in the past there were problems present, except for the most extreme/visible cases, people would just shrug it off because there was no name nor proper understanding for what was going on mentally with the kid.
It's the same for physical conditions that we know exist today and can diagnose, but which in the past would pass undetected. It's not that the condition is worse today, we are just a lot better at detecting it.
Having said that, my vote for a cause goes to too much information. In the past not just kids, but people in general were largely unaware of anything that wasn't happening in their immediate surrounding except for the truly big things (major wars, catastrophes, etc) that made the news. Even then, people had to be much more proactive to get access to it, so it was a lot easier to live on without too much concern in the world.
Today it is virtually impossible to do that. Unless you live off the grid, you get constantly bombarded with "news"(usually bad ones) about everything both big and small that happens both within in your community as well as communities you've never heard off. It's hard even for adults to process everything that is going on without it having an effect on you, but even more so for children who still can't fully comprehend or understand what is going on, or how things could affect them (or not), they just know that a lot of bad stuff is happening all around them.
Yes, whatever the "gut-level takes" of experts, it has not really been proven that there is more anxiety and other mental problems than formerly. Kevin seems to be talking about something that happened in the last few years, but people have been talking about a supposed increase in anxiety in particular for many decades - it's a wonder everybody isn't running around stark mad (or that more than about 30% aren't doing this). What has definitely been increasing for over a hundred years is the number of people who make a living diagnosing and writing about mental disturbances. How many practicing psychiatrists were there in 1880? There are also more drugs available to treat mental problems, so there is a huge amount of money to be made by greater awareness of such problems.
I'm a little surprised that Kevin isn't blaming Fox News for an increase in mental problems. Their mission has been to get people stoked up about various racial and cultural matters, to distract from economic issues. To some extent people on the left have also become more strident in reaction to this. Wouldn't this greater state of agitation tend to cause more mental problems?
How about the destruction of the power and future of the middle class in 1st world democracies, AKA the Reagan/Thatcher project. Throw in global warming denial and amplification of conflict by social media as a bonus. Easy peasy.
Reagan stopped being president 33 years ago. Pointing to Reaganism as a reason for a recent uptick in children's mental health issues is probably ignoring a couple of decades of intervening actors/factors.
As a result of the Reagan/Thatcher trickle up program, accelerated by W, Citizens United, and Trump, the future of the middle class in the USA looks bleak - crushing healthcare costs, student debt, skyrocketing rent, non-responsive government, Federalist Society controlled SCOTUS, global warming, maximal domestic culture wars? What's not to like? It depresses ME!
Surely there is a Children’s Mental Health component to the Health Industrial Complex.
Yes, that would fit in well with azumbrunn's #3: overdiagnosis.
A personal anecdote. An ADHD huckster visited my children's grade school to give a spiel to the teachers, and afterwards, the teachers claimed that my son clearly had it, and needed to get on meds. Attention deficit? Hyperactivity? The kid was known for his patience and ability to build intricate things and work out details. After a heavy rain, he and his sister would race snails along a wetted-down surface!
We didn't bother to get a more professional evaluation, and he did fine on his own. Now he's building electron microscopes.
We were told by a ADHD huckster (who as it turns out was being paid kickbacks by drug companies) that if a kid could focus really well and behaved in school, then that was also a clear cut symptom of ADHD. Basically, his conception of ADHD would have meant that every single kid on earth had ADHD.
For starters, it should be noted that mental illness is a physiological disorder and not a matter of “feelings” there is some disorder in the brain, which causes dysfunction of the organ on many levels. We have limited understanding of it and how to treat it, but the real question is what is causing this disorder? I think there are a growing number of individuals suffering from some level of stress disorder, which can change the brain’s chemical infrastructure and trap people in short term thinking, which is the primary showing of PTSD. Without access to long term thinking (also PTSD showing) people can quickly slide to hopelessness. So what are the stress inducing incidents driving the surge? Probably multifaceted and would take a long time to discover, if ever, so best to mitigate the symptoms as you dig deeper. For some that means medication, while others have seen tremendous benefit from meditation, which can temporarily switch the brain back to normal from flight or flight. Not permanent, but helps in a bind
It's been hinted at, but not said directly: Fox News.
You're welcome.
This is why we don't have cable.
Between my experience as a parent of teens, getting to see them and their friends, and being old enough to be the parent of teens, I'm pretty sure the fundamental answer is "The Internet".
By that, it seems that simply having access to an entire world of information about every single topic in the world without necessarily having the developmental maturity. An evocative example would be porn, which is emotionally intense, especially if you are only just beginning to understand the idea of sexuality. But I think this applies to many, many concepts, and of course the "Social Internet" adds fuel to the fire of social dynamics.
I agree with the social media component. Even as an adult, I've been much happier having left Facebook.
That said there are a few other factors that I see: 1. Frequent moving by adults--this is true of very low-income families, as well as higher-income because of housing vouchers/evictions, etc. 2. Increase in incarceration for parents as well as teens. 3. reduced stability in families and marriages in the last 50 years or so. 4. Fewer non-school based group activities and engagement, especially of the non-competitive type. 5. Less unscheduled, un-directed outdoor play after school. 6. Less autonomy. 7. More parental stress.
Our society has grown more and more competitive in the last decades, at least since the 1980s. Housing has become more unaffordable (in NE generally, and major cities). Middle-class life has become more and more difficult to attain and maintain. Media is more fragmented, culture has become more divisive where it was once a means of bridging gaps, and life in general is more confusing. Politics has gotten very mean, and people feel more determined to give vent to their worst impulses.
Plus gun culture and the spread of mass shootings, especially in schools.
It's not PC, but I do believe that not having at least one parent home when the kids are home from school is a major detriment. My wife and I decided early on we would do without a lot of material wealth, and opted for jobs or lack thereof that allowed us to spend tons of quality time with our kids. We had (and still live in) a small apartment, yet always had a full home of kids and friends after school from grade school through high school. Our front door was always open to any child that needed a warm, safe, and fun place to go or a hot meal, and that sometimes meant kids just showing up we didn't know until we helped them get sorted out a bit. Plus, we lived in a neighborhood with a bunch of families that would take our kids under their wings whenever needed. Lots of kids today are packed off to early childcare all day long, then later put on buses before sunrise only to get home well after dark. Lots arrive home by themselves to an empty house with nobody to talk to about their day.
I'm not convinced there's an epidemic of mental health problems for kids today that didn't happen in the past. It's easy to idealize life when you were growing up. I grew mostly in an unsupervised childhood. The grownups didn't know where my friends and I were between breakfast and dinner, in summers at least. We'd ride bikes around town, go to the ball field or the woods or the beach, take a train into the city, maybe watch a day game at Yankee Stadium. After school was free time too. It was a time before video games, smartphones, social media. If we had any indulgences, it was radio and TV (but not cable). As I remember it, we spent an extraordinary amount of our time outside. We didn't know the term couch potato.
One change between then and now that doesn't get a lot of attention is family life. On average, families were bigger in the past, and it was more likely kids would have siblings around, i.e., someone home even when parents were at work. Sibs can be the source of a lot of stress, but mostly they're a net positive. Often there were aunts and uncles around too. My nieces and nephews have been growing up with almost their all their aunts, uncles, and cousins living out of state.
So life was great back then, right? None of the modern-day anxieties, or loneliness, or worries about climate change.
But maybe not. Suicide rates for ages 15 to 24 doubled between 1965 and 1975. https://www.edweek.org/education/chart-suicide-rates-by-age-group-1960-97/2000/04
Maybe the idea that life was better in the past is more an illusion that fact.
(FWIW The chart ends before 2000, and rates have risen since then, but the data shows that rates peaked several years ago and were coming down before the pandemic.)
A new dominate medium, not technology, is the cause of so many mental health problems, and not with just the children. Smart phones combined with the internet have replicated the human neurological system and severed it from consciousness. The phantom pain created by the 'outering' of the central nervous system, which no longer regulates all the stimulus people in the developed world experience, is causing the trauma of the first half of the 21st century.
But --all three of those explanation end with someone going with their gut.
Maybe they all need pepto-bismol.
Even the experts in the third explanation, who dismiss the going with the guts of parents in the first two, go with their own gut themselves.
Is this a test? Why are the experts so quick to dismiss results of their own expertise, exactly like the parents, whose guts they're so confident to dismiss? Do they actually not notice it ends with the same result, and for the same reasons?
My money, as I will admit is often the case, is on agricultural chemicals in the greater environment. It's yet another example of the subtle effects of the eighty year uncontrolled experiment on the human genome and biochemistry being run by the vampire squids of the chemical industry.
It's almost CERTAIN to be the reason for ADHD, and probably massively contributes to depression because kids don't have as much general motivation as they once did. Testosterone levels -- in both boys and girls -- are in an ever-shrinking abundance, replaced by estrogen-analogues.
Humanity is profiting itself out of existence. What could be a more "just" outcome of our endless greed and narcissism?
It is literally impossible that kids today actually have worse mental health than when I was a kid in the glorious, disgusting 70s.
* Open racism was still very prevalent.
* Open anti-homosexual policies were ubiquitous. To be called "gay" was literally the worst insult imaginable
* Sexism was also rampant
* Every single child suffered from the effects of lead poisoning
* Bullying took the form kids who were thought weak or different actually getting the crap beat out of them
* Nuclear war was a real, daily concern
* And almost no parents would have considered taking their kids in for psychological counseling and certainly would not have had them medicated for the mental woes.
So no. The answer is overdiagnosis. And overdiagnosis has real impacts on a kids mental health. Take a kid who is going through the usual troubles that teenagers face, trouble making friends, trouble with the opposite (or same) sex, struggles with identity, with what you are going to do with your future, with a sneaking feeling that all adults are frauds and life is going to be hard. Take all that and tell the kid, ah you got personality displacic disorder! And the poor kid will then think of himself (or herself) as someone with a mental problem, on top of all that.
Ok end of grumpy old man/kids today rant.
Like +10. How soon we forget.
It's politics and polarization, and the politicization of everything.
Oh, and look up. The world's literally on fire.
As usual, Mr. Drum, you ask the big questions to which there are no easy answers. You're also committing the very sin those who ignore your lead explanation commit - you're ignoring the obvious. Here's where any discussion of this issue has to start - what are the giant, huge, sweeping societal changes that have happened to childhood and parenting since, oh, 19880, that are accepted as "normal," but are an immense, radical break from how children's lives were structured prior to around 1980? It's right under our noses, right in front of us, and these changes have become so engrained in the American parenting DNA that they are unquestioned and beyond criticism. Yet they have had seismic effects on children and childhood, and soaring mental health issues are one dramatic outcome.
There's a paradox which is well-known in psychology circles: Avoiding things that make one anxious does not make one less anxious. It turns out to make them more anxious, not less.
I would guess that this dynamic is defiinitely in play. A parents have put in great effort to protect their children, which is appropriate, they have also cut off many of the ways that people learn to soothe themselves and cope with anxiety. I'm pretty sure I made this exact mistake, in fact.
Dear god, it's true!
https://i.redd.it/1pmko3m6wyo81.png
So having a 4 year old, I have researched this topic a lot. The best single explanation is that the late boomer/early Xer parents failed at teaching us how to successfully deal with anxiety/stress right. Things as simple as a child can't handle not knowing where their parent is at all times.
Devil's advocate here. One important cause could well be the decline in genuine American conservatism. Nothing comforts the young like absolute confidence in the greatness of their family/community/country and the righteousness of their causes, along with unquestioning faith in God to underwrite American exceptionalism. Many young minds are poorly equipped to cope with the chronic uncertainty, ambiguity and self-doubt that arises when they see many adults struggling to cope with everyday life while others are consumed with bitter cynicism and perpetual anger.
Just to be clear, by "true conservatism" I am referring to the values which used to be shared by most white Americans, not the radical reactionary incoherence of the American right. The constant denigration of American society by right-wingers this century has probably done more to create the lack of confidence I mentioned than progressive liberalism.
The increasing divisiveness in American society has been well-documented. It would be interesting to see objective studies of the incidence of mental health issues in America compared to (say) Sweden or China, where on the surface at least there is more social consensus.
I do think you're onto something here, but I think you're letting the Left off too easy. And I say that as someone who is officially a strong Liberal (as least according to the Pew typologies). Perhaps it's because I'm currently in Grad School, but the stuff I encounter from the far Left is eye-popping, and the extent to which some if it has in fact infested previously academic organizations (formerly committed to intellectual freedom) really is startling. For example: https://cccc.ncte.org/cccc/demand-for-black-linguistic-justice
The far Left's fanatical view of the USA as nothing other than an irredeemable cauldron of evil racists is, just as you describe, potentially injurious to the mental health of anyone who falls under the spell of such a nihilistic ideology.
I think it's the utter humorlessness of radical douchebags that's their most self-evident trait, and really should be a dead give away when hiring them for any position where communication is a key priority.
Obama has covid, Clarence Thomas probably has covid, Jen Psaki has covid, Hillary Clinton has covid.
Should we really be throwing the windows open right now?
Clarence Thomas does not have covid, they treated him with antibiotics.
Also throwing open the windows vastly improves ventilation so yes!
Treatment with antibiotics doesn't rule out covid, just says that he was also treated with antibiotics.