The Kids Aren't Alright (Cot'd)

Great Debates
1

This thread is being started to end a hijack of a different, equally interesting thread.

On the subject of whether or not adolescents and young adults are less independent than they are in years past, some have posited reduced rates in young people driving as evidence that something is seriously amiss in our society.

I would agree that something is seriously amiss, but not driving is really not the issue. It’s the increased inability of young people to cope with life, as evidenced by skyrocketing rates of depression, anxiety, suicidal and self-harming behavior. Not driving might be a symptom of their inability to cope with life, but it’s not the strongest indicator, as obviously not everyone needs to drive, or is physically/mentally able to drive.

As I expressed here, while I acknowledge multiple factors at play, I think permissive and enabling parenting is a factor in the mental health crisis, particularly the way that adolescents with serious mental health disorders are “dealt with” by their parents.

In that other thread, I said this:

Full text here:

To be clear, my statement was really within a narrower scope of mental health and how ill-equipped young people are to cope with life, including chronic mental illness. I think whether or not older kids are driving at the population level can maybe be used as a rough proxy for independence, but there will always be outliers, including disabled people and city dwellers.

My husband’s specialization is in children and adolescents with anxiety disorders. So he is seeing the kids who are doing worse in terms of mental health, and he has his own conclusions, many supported by evidence, of why there are so many more severe cases than there used to be. COVID is certainly a factor, as are recent local shootings, but the kid’s environment and the expectations parents have for them is a big factor too. In particular he has observed a relationship between permissive, enabling parenting and poor mental health in adolescents and young adults. Which also includes adolescents of driving age who depend on their parents to drive them everywhere, who have no intention of ever learning to drive or to aspire to anything beyond sitting at home wasting time, and who are suffering greatly as a result of their lifestyle. These kids are the ones who deserve the most attention, and I don’t think that denying that they exist in greater numbers than, say, twenty years ago, is doing them any favors.

OK, sorry this was put together so hastily, I am trying to end a hijack. Have at it!

2

You think young people are depressed? Well, no shit - why shouldn’t they be? The world is on fire, the economy sucks, and the people who screwed things up this badly to begin with are digging their heels in and entranching to ensure that none of us can stir the bus away from the cliff until they are dead and buried.

The problem is that our economy is set up in such a way that for many people who are Millenials or younger the odds of reaching even their parents’ level of economic success are heavily stacked against them.

If young people are depressed, it is because a rational look at our economic and environmental situation is depressing. The future is bleak unless we change our destination, and the people who made it that way are doing everything in their considerable power to stop us from doing so.

3

I don’t think any parent, who isn’t a trained metal health professional, knows how to deal with a kid that has serious mental health issues, and I think many kids have trouble adapting to the real world, regardless of their upbringing, with most figuring out how to cope with the support of their friends and family. Some kids, however, never learn to cope, and turn to drugs, crime, or worse. Is it worse now than it was 20 years ago when I was raising my kid? I doubt it

4

Unfortunately, that Atlantic article is a link to a summary of the article rather than the article itself, which is paywalled.

There’s such a strong tendency to say KIDS THESE DAYS that I’m automatically skeptical of anyone saying KIDS THESE DAYS. Even the thread title here is a play off the Who’s song “The Kids Are All Right,” which was in turn making fun of hand-wringing over “[their] Generation”, almost sixty years ago.

The specifics of the complaints have changed, but I’m unconvinced that the general state of the complaints has changed. In general, middle-aged people look at the troubles and travails of younger people, at the behaviors of younger people, and get really worried; but rather than attribute the trouble, travails, and behaviors to different life stages, attribute them to some fundamental problem with younger people.

The flip side is the unrealistic hope that people put into Youth Of Today. Check out this article about teenagers, declaring that “this generation of teenagers may be one of the most trustworthy and capable we have had in a long time.” It’s talking, of course, about Baby Boomers, who as everyone knows have maintained their reputation as trustworthy and capable throughout their lives.

Yes, the world changes. Yes, us hairless primates develop different responses to the changing world. But we need very strong evidence if we’re going to claim that there’s something uniquely bad going on with today’s children.

The article from the Boys and Girls Club of America does present some data, showing an upward trend in suicidal ideation, and that’s really concerning. I’d want to see more than a trend based on two data points: an article written in 2022 includes a line graph tracking growth in suicidal ideation from 2009 to 2019, which makes me wonder why those years were chosen. Was 2009 exceptionally low? 2019 exceptionally high? I’m not sure.

I also wonder whether the data being collected is as inclusive as it should be. How is mental health changing for queer teens? How is mental health changing for Black teens? How is mental health changing for immigrant teens?

Finally, I want to look far beyond middle-class parenting trends for any causes of mental health crises. Are crises caused by increasing disparities in income? Increasing incarceration of parents? Increasing community use of opioids? Increasing hostility toward immigrants and people of color? Increasing emphasis on high-stakes testing in schools?

5

And the oldest of those Millennials are barely even “young adults” anymore - they’re in their early 40s.

6

You never know, it could be a reference to the Offspring song. :wink:

7

The Who?

8

Picking up where I left off in the last thread, my point of view had been that the current generation of young adults or soon-to-be adults, at least anecdotally in my experience and among others I know of my generation, is that there is a growing tendency for young adults to have less life experience, be more insular, and have an extended period of childhood that lasts well into chronological adulthood.

There was a good amount of pushback to this premise: living at home as a young adult, or not getting one’s driver’s license, isn’t necessarily a sign of protracted immaturity; economic and other conditions of modern life make life as a young adult-to-be extremely daunting these days.

Things which are all true.

Yes, the way ‘kids these days’ are, however that may be, is shaped by current reality, and are none of the kids’ faults.

Spice_Weasel said:

I think changes in parenting have made a difference; not that parents have necessarily done a bad job, but the increase in ‘helicopter parenting’ (which I think would fall under ‘enabling parenting’) while done with the best of intentions, tend to not allow kids to make mistakes and solve problems on their own. My parents would let me run free like a feral animal from morning to dusk, as long as I came home for meals and bedtime. They weren’t bad parents, they were just of their time. Was I exposed to more danger than a child of ‘helicopter’ parents? Sure. Did I learn to be more independent than a child of parents who don’t let their children out of their sight? Definitely. I’m not saying one parenting stye is better or worse; there are no easy answers. Mrs. Solost and I tended more toward the ‘helicopter’ style.

There’s been stories in the news in recent years about parents who let their 9 year old ride the subway alone, or walk home from school alone for a mile or so, to try to teach their kids independence, and were arrested for child neglect. Were they bad parents for doing so? It is a complicated world; in some ways safer-- crime in general has gone down; but in some ways much more dangerous, with school and general mass shootings alarmingly on the rise.

The internet has been a huge change in the way kids socialize; now they are often much more likely to keep in touch virtually than to make a journey out into the real world to hang out in person. There is much more online in general to entertain, influence, titillate and generally hold one’s attention these days than there ever was before.

9

I know, I’m not a subscriber anymore so not even I can read it. I read it a long time ago and it’s a good article specifically about how many teens with anxiety are being permitted by their parents to avoid the thing that they are anxious about, when that is, according to the evidence, the best way to reinforce anxiety and make it worse. And in the case of my husband’s clients, we’re not talking about people who lack access to mental health services, or who can’t help their children because they have no resources to do so.

We have very strong evidence that youth are in a state of mental health crisis.

In the 10 years leading up to the pandemic, feelings of persistent sadness and hopelessness—as well as suicidal thoughts and behaviors—increased by about 40% among young people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System.

“We’re seeing really high rates of suicide and depression, and this has been going on for a while,” said psychologist Kimberly Hoagwood, PhD, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine. “It certainly got worse during the pandemic.”

Particularly we’re seeing a rise in emergency room visits.

From 2011 to 2020, the weighted number of pediatric mental health–related visits increased from 4.8 million (7.7% of all pediatric ED visits) to 7.5 million (13.1% of all ED visits) with an average annual percent change of 8.0% (95% CI, 6.1%-10.1%; P < .001). Significant linearly increasing trends were seen among children, adolescents, and young adults, with the greatest increase among adolescents and across sex and race and ethnicity. While all types of mental health–related visits significantly increased, suicide-related visits demonstrated the greatest increase from 0.9% to 4.2% of all pediatric ED visits (average annual percent change, 23.1% [95% CI, 19.0%-27.5%]; P < .001).

These kids are not just “being depressed”’ they are unable to manage that depression without resorting to self-injury or attempts at self-harm. I am both a Millennial and someone who has struggled in the past with severe, debilitating depression, as in “can barely get out of bed and it’s an over/under whether I’ll be able to shower today” depression. Had to Quit School for a Year depression. One could look at the factors that contributed to that and place the blame there, but that wouldn’t really help me learn to cope with depression. We may live in a very depressing world but that’s a separate issue from whether or not kids are able to mentally cope with that world. I would argue that if they cannot mentally cope with that world, there are things that can be done to help them cope that don’t involve a complete transformation of the social and economic conditions in which they live.

I’d want to see more than a trend based on two data points: an article written in 2022 includes a line graph tracking growth in suicidal ideation from 2009 to 2019, which makes me wonder why those years were chosen. Was 2009 exceptionally low? 2019 exceptionally high? I’m not sure.

That’s when it started to spike, which is why most charts start there. I found this one for depression that starts in 2004. These changes have happened globally, for the record, so it’s unlikely to be something unique to American culture. There are some good charts on Jonathan Haidt’s free Substack here. His particular axe to grind is against social media, but the point is you can see data from 2004 for different countries and see this is not an issue specific to the US.

It’s much worse for them, of course.

Research suggests that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer or questioning (LGBTQ) youth may be particularly vulnerable to negative mental health outcomes during the pandemic. A non-probability survey of LGBTQ youth conducted in Fall 2020 found that large shares of adolescent respondents (ages 13-17) reported symptoms of anxiety (73%) or depressive (67%) disorder in the past two weeks; and 48% seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year. Prior to the pandemic, LGBTQ youth were already at increased risk for depression, suicidal ideation, and substance use. In 2019, 66% of lesbian, gay, and bisexual high schools students reported persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness (compared to 37% of all high school students) and 47% reported serious thoughts of suicide (compared to 19% of all high school students) (Figure 4). Larger than average shares of lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth also reported substance use before the pandemic.

Do you understand the point is not to blame children, here? It’s to unpack what is really at the center of this crisis so we can help more kids. And it is a crisis.

10

@Spice_Weasel, I’m glad you made this thread – I’m interested to see what discussion comes out of it. (Plus which I always think your comments are interesting and valuable, and thought it was very thought-provoking in the other thread.)

I’ve definitely noticed that my kids do a lot less free-ranging than I did as a kid. In the summers I’d go out for hours with my sister and we’d ride our bikes and our parents would have no idea where we were. No cell phones or anything. My sister and I would go to the mall together and just wander around for hours, though we did have a strict time we were expected to be back and we adhered to that. My kids don’t do that kind of thing. I try to kick my 13-year-old out like my parents kicked us out and she will ride her bike on the bike path for 20 minutes but then come back.

I’ve also noticed that my 13-year-old does a lot of socializing over the internet and in small amounts this is great (it helps her keep up with kids in a way that’s less stressful for her spectrum brain than many other mediums) but after a while it starts making her cranky and anxious and unhappy, so I’ve started restricting how much time she can spend on it.

A third thing I’ve noticed is a trend in the parents I know that their kids don’t necessarily have much in the way of chores or responsibilities that aren’t academic. (Not everyone, but it’s more kids than I knew growing up.) My husband had both house chores and a part-time job (delivering newspapers) by the time he was in high school. I didn’t have even chores, and as a result I didn’t learn how to do a lot of things that I wish I had – I learned later, but it was much more of a pain later. As a result, though I’m not sure I’d be able to swing having them do the part-time job, I am really prioritizing making sure my kids have chores and do things like are in charge of cooking meals once a week (even though it means we eat a LOT of fried rice and mac&cheese, our kids’ favorites). I think this is related because I believe strongly that having responsibilities and learning how to do things independently is related to not being quite so anxious – in part because you’ve already had practice failing at cooking the rice, or whatever, but also because you have the knowledge that you can handle the base duties of life independently.

ETA: haha, I didn’t read your last post until after posting this. But yeah I do think social media is part of it, though not all of it.

11

Here’s an argument for unsupervised play:

To be clear, I don’t necessarily hold Jonathan Haidt out as a paragon of expertise, and I’ve discussed my issues with him elsewhere, but he is a data nerd, and he is interested in the issue of rising rates of mental illness among youth. And I happen to really agree with him on this point. I’m frustrated that my particular kid has no danger awareness so that I can’t really let him roam as much as I would if he didn’t have that particular limitation. My youth, which was so bad in so many ways, was also good in some ways, and one of the ways it was good is that I could fuck off for hours without parental supervision, I could ride my bike to the lake, buy candy at the store, then go on a two mile bikeride, or climb a tree, or start a war with friends, or whatever the hell I wanted. And I maintain that was really good for me, and is good for kids in general. Unfortunately our culture has changed so much that many parents face real life consequences, such as having the police called for the involvement of Child Protective Services, if they attempt to recreate their own childhood.

ETA: But I think we can still work within those limitations to put our kids in situations where they have to confront problems and learn to solve them without adult assistance.

12

That was supposed to say “without resorting to suicidal behaviors or attempts at self-harm.”

13

On that note, let’s talk about rumination. Rumination has been identified as a major factor in anxiety and depression. This means the tendency to dwell for extended periods of time on something that distresses you, or that you are unhappy about.

I would argue that the internet and social media in general increases the amount of time that people ruminate on negative subjects. This appears to have been the case with COVID-19. (And it’s not stated in this abstract, but obviously not being able to leave the house would result in a lot of people spending more time on the internet, ruminating about how they can’t leave the house.)

I also want to say that the pandemic seems to have exacerbated mental health problems across every age group. Youth have it worse off, but adults aren’t doing so hot either.

OK, I’ll let someone else talk now.

14

As with the rate of autism spectrum diagnoses, how much of the increase in suicidal ideation and self-harm is an increase in reporting, and an increase in the social acceptability of having these issues, versus an actual increase in actual mental states and actual behaviors?

I do not know, and I’m not trying to claim “it’s all just a fashion”. But that might be a factor.

I have a question about both factual accuracy and intellectual honesty when I hear

The apparent increase in autism isn’t being caused by our physical environment, it’s just now being more accurately diagnosed so it seems like there’s more autism in the world. And there’s no change in the quantity of LGBTQ+ folks; they’re just no longer quite so afraid to be seen as such so it seems like there’s more gender nonconformity in the world.

But suicide and anxiety? Now that’s an actual increase for sure; no reporting bias or social acceptance issues there at all, nosiree.

Color me mildly suspicious of that. Recognizing that I may have just constructed a strawman by accident.

15

Yep. I have a memory from when I was around 7 or 8; I decided to try riding my bike in one direction as far as I dared. It was a pretty large suburban neighborhood, so I was able to go a long way without having to cross busy roads, and I emerged from the neighborhood to a busy intersection. And I was amazed to realize how far I had gone! It was only a couple miles from home, but it was an area that before then, was somewhere I never before would have dreamed of getting to without my parents driving, me being a passive passenger in the backseat. i felt like an intrepid explorer, and it opened up my world in a small but very significant way.

As a parent myself though, I would never, never, never have considered for a second letting my kids ride their bikes alone like that.

16

I understand your point. Well, we could look at suicide rates, which exist whether someone has access to mental health care or not.

Between 2000 and 2018, the suicide rate among youth ages 10 to 24 rose from 6.8 per 100,000 to 10.7 per 100,000, according to death certificate data (Curtin, S. C., National Vital Statistics Report, Vol. 69, No. 11, 2020 [PDF, 477KB]). This rise pushed suicide into the second leading cause of death for people ages 10 to 14 in 2021, according to the CDC (Facts About Suicide, May 2023).

The overall suicide rate declined in 2019 and 2020 before rising nearly back to the 2018 peak again in 2021 (Stone, D. M., et al. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Vol. 72, No. 6, 2023). The most alarming trend in this period was a sharp rise in suicide among Black youth ages 10 to 24. In this group, the suicide rate increased from 8.2 per 100,000 in 2018 to 11.2 per 100,000 in 2021, a rise of 36.6%. “Adolescent Black girls, compared with other demographics, have the highest increase in suicide attempts,” said Meza.

Oh, and then there are the pre-teens.

The number of kids killing themselves may seem like a drop in the bucket per 100,000 but consider that when we widen that scope to include ER emergencies such as suicide attempts and self-injuries, things are looking a lot worse.

Re: autism I suspect that is just as tricky to sus out as the youth mental health crisis. Yes, we are screening way more, but there are likely environmental factors contributing to increased rates of autism. And as my husband recently pointed out, “It used to be those kids would just die.” The rate of survivability for premature infants has increased a lot so maybe some share of increased autism rates can be attributed to more premature infants surviving.

Which fits into the OP because… uh… I’m not claiming any one thing is causing this trend. Issues like these are extraordinarily complex. My OP focuses on parenting because that’s what we were discussing at the time, but I really hoped to talk about ALL of the factors contributing to this problem.

17

Yeah, wow, I just read this article and it’s funny that your post about it came right after my post, as I feel like Haidt and I came to many of the same conclusions independently. (Though I fully admit all my evidence is anecdotal.)

Another thing that the article made me think of is one we were talking about in another thread – that it used to be that people had a lot more in the way of institutions where you could socialize in a group way than people tend to do now. My church had a “church clean-up night” last week and a bunch of families went and did various cleaning tasks while socializing, and the kids were supposed to help but instead self-organized some sort of group hide-and-seek with a stuffed animal someone had found. It was amazing to watch (especially for me, as my spectrum older child is just starting to be able to participate in these kinds of things and every time she does it’s surprising to me), and I thought, if we didn’t go to church, I have no idea where my kids would be able to do this kind of group self-organized play outside of, I guess, recess at school. (We don’t live on a street with many kids, and certainly not the type of street that self-organizes group play like that.) I don’t have the social chops to provide that kind of atmosphere for my kids without a structure already in place.

On autism, I wonder a lot about the self assortative mating hypothesis and whether that’s leading to increased incidence. In our parents’ generation, the nerdy engineering guys would marry someone from church or the neighborhood or high school or something, and the nerdy girls would… usually just not get married. In our generation, the nerdy girls (me) fell in love with nerdy boys (my husband) in grad school, and surprise, our kid was diagnosed with autism.

18

Another thought I had after reading Haidt’s article (which I forgot to put in the previous post) was about the rise of structured activities, something Haidt mentions in the article. There are so many of them now, a lot of them are actually great, and almost all the parents I know have their kids in a bunch of them. I feel like there’s some pressure on parents now because of the idea that their kid should have experience with music, gymnastics, dance, soccer, swimming, science club, math team, etc. I’m not immune to that myself – every so often I find myself worrying that I’m depriving my child of opportunities by not giving him the chance to do e.g. a track and field non-competitive activity (an actual example that came up a couple of weeks ago). I can totally see how always having your life mapped out in a very precise way like that long-term messes with your ability to have autonomy in your life.

Before the pandemic we were out of control as well – Older Child had an activity every day of the week. (Younger child was too young to be on that treadmill yet.) But we found during the pandemic that not being go go go like that all the time was so valuable that I’ve been trying to cut down even now that all of the activities are back.

19

Nerds do tend to result in autistic kids, especially engineering nerds. I’m not an engineer but both my mother and grandfather were. My husband is probably not autistic but boy howdy, does he have some traits.

Of course autism has a higher comorbidity with mental health conditions/disorders including ADHD (which causes emotion dysregulation), OCD and others… so maybe increased rates of autism are indirectly a factor in the youth mental health crisis! (I have no idea. Just kind of playing around.)

We’re trying to avoid that, I mean the kid’s only three, but right now his life is pretty scheduled with therapy. But the only extracurricular he has is swim lessons. We are kicking around getting him a math tutor because he is scary good at math for a three year old, and it’s his favorite thing, so I don’t think it will feel like work for him. In the future I think our rule of thumb is to just pick one thing he wants to do, or maybe two if he feels like he wants to, but I know I’m not going to run a kid to twenty different events per week, and if he wants it that bad he can learn to drive (assuming his disability doesn’t prevent him from being able to learn - I prefer to think optimistically.)

Of course in my days I had extra-curriculars up the wazoo, I was that kid with perfect grades involved in everything. But it was self-driven (as opposed to forced upon me by my parents.) I was also heavily involved with my church, now that you mention it, and that was a major protective factor for me as a troubled kid. I’ve been told that I have a strength for surrounding myself with the right people, and I can see that in my childhood.

I honestly envy you for your church group, because there is nothing like that any more. I have friendships that exist in silos, but no real community.

20

I also feel like… when we were kids, the pendulum was way too far in one direction in terms of not being understanding and accepting of neurodiversity and things like anxiety, and not giving any accommodations whatsoever. And I’m glad that the world isn’t like that anymore.

I do wonder sometimes if now the pendulum is too far in the other direction of wanting to blame everything on one’s spectrum-ness or anxiety or whatever, and expecting constant accommodation, which I kind of feel can set up a kid, or adult, with not being able or willing to confront hard things and therefore setting oneself up for failure. I can even see that in myself – I’m probably a least a bit on the spectrum, and when I start thinking, “Oh, I have trouble doing [whatever] because of my spectrum tendencies,” I notice that I tend to actually get worse at the thing and definitely less willing to do it. I have to append, “…but I’m gonna do it anyway and it’s gonna be fine.”

(Haidt and another guy wrote a book about this too that I thought was really interesting – The Coddling of the American Mind. Again I read this years ago, and I remember not agreeing 100% with everything in the book, but by and large agreeing with many of the main points which jibed with my personal experience.)

I don’t really know what the answer is, as I definitely don’t want to go back to the way we were before where it was all “suck it up, buttercup.” But I’m not sure this way totally works either.