Recent surveys highlighting the prevalence of mental health problems among young people leave me very concerned, not only about the findings but also about the counterproductive perceptions of younger generations.
TO Common Sense Media Survey found that 53% of the country's 12- to 17-year-olds see mental health issues as a major problem in their schools. and a Gallup-Walton Family Foundation Study reported a significant decline in the proportion of Gen Z youth who rate their mental health as excellent since 2013. These findings echo a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention One survey indicated that 42% of high school students had experienced such persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness over the past year that they were unable to participate in regular activities, up from 28% in 2011.
I have already heard adults label today's youth as the Hopeless Generation, the Anxious Generation, the Depressed Generation, the COVID Generation, and the Troubled Generation. The latest polls threaten to reinforce these stereotypes.
Don't get me wrong: given my years of working in youth mental health, I understand that it is imperative to address this challenge. But while we do that, we can't forget that many young people are not struggling.
While only 20% of Gallup-Walton respondents reported their mental health as “excellent,” for example, 44% said it was “good,” 26% said it was “fair,” and 10% said it was “fair.” bad”. We need to address these mental health challenges without labeling an entire generation as problematic.
I have spent the last nine years listening to what teens think and feel in focus groups, two nationally representative studies of children ages 9 to 19, in-depth interviews with youth from these studies, and a study of school behavior. One of the questions I asked is what they want American adults to know about people their age.
38 percent responded “don't stereotype us” or “don't label us,” an overwhelming number for an open-ended question. They highlighted that not all young people share the same challenges.
In his words: “Not all of us fall under the umbrella of being problem drug addicts”; “Not all children are troublemakers or irresponsible”; and “We are not obsessed with social media, we are not extremely involved in ourselves, our phones do not define us, and the Internet will not be the end of us.”
These answers show that we adults have to try harder to keep two ideas in mind while parenting, teaching, and raising the next generation. We need to address the real challenges that some young people face without subjecting them all to unhelpful generalizations.
Yes, adults have always been too willing to put negative labels on teenagers. This has been true since the dawn of the study of adolescent development in the early 20th century. It was then considered a time of “storm and stress,” as it is today.
In one of my studies, we asked parents of children ages 9 to 19 to describe the typical teenage brain in one word. Fifty-nine percent used negative words, while 27% used neutral words and only 14% used positive words. But when I asked parents to select from a list of positive and negative words to describe their children's age, as well as to describe their own child, they were much more likely to be negative about other people's children than their own. own.
We also found that parents who used negative words to describe the adolescent brain were more likely to have children who reported more negative feelings, such as anger, sadness, loneliness, and worry.
What comes first, the negative feelings of young people or the negative opinions of parents? We couldn't fully answer that question, but we were able to control for factors that might affect how adults view teens, such as demographics, level of parent-child conflict, and negative words parents use to describe teens. their children. Our finding of a correlation between views and feelings held.
The relationship also persisted when we surveyed the same parents and teens again nine months later, during the pandemic. To put it another way, parents who had more positive views of teenagers in general had children who did better during a very difficult period in our nation's history.
Parents in my studies told me over and over again that children live by the opinions we have of them. Therefore, viewing this generation as a problematic or anxious generation could lead adults to act in ways that exacerbate the mental health challenges faced by some, but not all, adolescents.
So what can we do? We, as a society, certainly need a mental health system that provides access to affordable, consistent, high-quality care more reliably than now. We need to make the education provided by our schools more engaging, relevant and meaningful. And we need to mitigate the risks of social media for young people.
However, beyond these monumental undertakings, we can all help in smaller, everyday ways. We can work to improve young people's relationships with the people in their lives, especially older people, a point that the surgeon general report 2021 on the mental health of young people emphasizes. Our own study found that when teens reported being treated with respect, made to feel like they belonged, and helped them grow and learn, they did well during the pandemic. They got better grades, had a more hopeful view of their future, and were less stressed.
It is equally important that we refrain from the age-old pastime of mocking and belittling teenagers. Let us remember that although adolescence can be a time of great vulnerability, It can also be one of great possibility.
Ellen Galinsky is the president of the Families and Work Institute and author of the following article “The Revolutionary Years: A New Scientific Framework for Raising Thriving Adolescents.”
