The Teen Mental Health Crisis
Is it actually happening? If so, what can we do to fix it?
Author note: I work only with a handful of teenagers, so for this article I relied heavily on the research and two “on-the-ground” experts: my aunt, who has been a high-school English teacher for 21 years, and my colleague Celeste, a school counselor.
Is there a teen mental health crisis, and if so, what’s causing it?
The “teen mental health crisis” refers to the fact that adolescents across the world have become significantly more anxious, depressed, and suicidal since around 2012 (which happens to be the year that Facebook bought Instagram). For a while, the severity and existence of these trends were hotly contested, but now most people agree that kids are in trouble. In 2021, the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and Children’s Hospital Association together declared child and adolescent mental health a “national emergency.”
The conversation has since shifted to the cause of the crisis, and while that debate is ongoing, it seems to have become more of a simmer than a boil, mostly thanks to the persistent work of John Haidt and Jean Twenge, who nominate two culprits. As Haidt says, “the loss of ‘play-based childhood’ and its replacement by ‘phone-based childhood.’”
Basically, the idea is that kids transitioned abruptly from being outside and hanging out with their friends in person to spending large amounts of time inside and online, especially on social media. The time spent on social media, in particular, was bad for a number of reasons, many of which the reader will be familiar with: less in-person interaction, exercise, and sleep, more curated content to compare oneself to, and so on. Both Haidt and Twenge have been thorough and patient in responding to various criticisms. I find their arguments convincing and recommend visiting their Substacks for more.1
In this article, I would like to add to the picture of teen mental health in two ways. First, by coloring in the evidence with some “on the ground” testimony from my two expert witnesses. Second, by exploring some changing social forces that I find relevant to the discussion. To the extent that these forces are causes, they are downstream of the causes that Haidt and Twenge propose, but I still think they will be helpful in thinking through both the problem and solution.
As always, I’ll be sprinkling in that evolutionary layer that readers of Living Fossils have come to know and love.
How Have Kids Changed?
My aunt has been teaching high school English for 21 years. For her, a major change occurred around 2012, the same year Haidt and Twenge highlight in their research. Students began claiming, with much greater frequency, that they didn’t have enough time to complete her assignments. She also noticed that they were more easily overwhelmed and quicker to cite mental health issues as a reason for an extension.
Aunt Bridget says these trends increased gradually from 2012 onward, were supercharged by COVID-19, and have since relaxed, though they remain far beyond what she was accustomed to before 2012. Partly as a result of this, she now gives half of the assignments that she used to. While the quantity of work has diminished, she maintains that the quality hasn’t.
Do kids have less time? Recently, Twenge showed that kids spend less time doing homework than they used to, undoubtedly because the average teen is now spending more than 4 hours per day on social media. In fact, according to both my aunt and Celeste, students openly admit to mismanaging their time.
Honestly, should we expect anything different? In the one corner we have developing adolescent brains, especially attuned to sociality; and in the other, we have the best attention-getting stimuli that social engineering of the last two decades has been able to create. It’s not a fair fight. To make matters worse, the referee is out to lunch. Adults haven’t made enough of an effort to intervene.
Parents continue to give their kids smartphones earlier. The majority of 11-year-olds have one. Being kids, they bring their phones to school, where many school administrators, overwhelmed by everything else they have to deal with, kick the responsibility to teachers, who are also overwhelmed and don’t want to deal with parent backlash. Parents themselves, according to Celeste, don’t want to be the bad guy. The result has too often been that across the country, kids are on their phones even in class.2
Distrust of Authority
The above highlights another issue kids are facing today: a growing distrust of authority.3
When I was going to school—the phrase as old as schools goes—not only did we walk uphill both ways, but when we had a disagreement with a teacher, the teacher won nine times out of 10. Obviously we didn’t like it, but we went along with it. We had to.
Put another way, the power dynamic was pretty clear. Or at least it started as pretty clear. A shift occurred while I was in school (I graduated high school in 2007) in which, according to my aunt, teacher authority was undermined. This happened mostly as a result of parents pushing teachers to indulge every excuse and grant every accommodation to their children. Administrators slowly began siding with parents. Now, of course, teachers are in full retreat.
Celeste agrees that accommodations played a major role in this transition. Part of her role as a school counselor is to oversee individualized education plans (IEPs). The intention of an IEP is to recognize, for example, how difficult it might be for a certain student to finish a test on time, and grant them extra time. Although Celeste believes in the goal of helping kids succeed, she’s noticed that, as with many things, a major issue arises when you start granting allowances: everyone soon wants one.
At times, it has seemed to Celeste that parents somehow transitioned from pushing their kids to be their best, to convincing school administrations that their kids aren’t capable of anything without help.
There is good reason, though, not to blame the undermining of teacher authority on parents of schoolchildren. Questioning authority matches a much more general trend across American culture. I mean, hasn’t our society become more skeptical of most power dynamics? Maybe this is a consequence of what we have seen people and institutions with power do. More likely, it is just one of these generational shifts that defy simple explanations. Regardless, it applies not only to teachers, but coaches, parents, bosses, and doctors, too. Really, anyone in a traditional role of power is under the microscope. Justifications for authority are being questioned, scrutinized, and in some cases circumvented.4
I think we have gone too far. Stepping back for a moment, shouldn’t teachers be right more often than students? More deserving of society’s trust and respect? They are adults, after all. Don’t we want to take their side nine times out of 10? Moreover, my aunt believes, as do I, that kids respond to structure. That, on a deep level, they are relieved when someone is in charge. As Ruby LaRocca writes in her excellent essay, A Constitution for Teenage Happiness:
Like human happiness, teenage happiness does not flourish when everyone has the freedom to live just as they please. Where there is neither order nor necessity in life—no constraints, no inhibitions, no discomfort—life becomes both relaxing and boring, as American philosopher Allan Bloom notes. A soft imprisonment.
There is a simple solution here: put the adults back in the room. Schools and households should have a well-considered and enforced policy with respect to phones and social media especially. Given how addictive this stuff is, the policy can’t be “anything goes.”
We also shouldn’t let mental health experts be the only authorities who can do something about the mental health crisis. Particularly when it comes to phones and social media, therapists and school counselors aren’t any more qualified to create or enforce a policy than teachers and parents. Instead of sending a kid with mental health issues directly to a counselor, perhaps we ought to take a look at their social media usage first. Before staffing a school with dozens of school counselors, let’s try enforcing a policy of no phones in class.
Better Community, Not Less
Another way the world has changed significantly for teenagers is that there is a much greater awareness of mental health. All else being equal, that’s not a bad thing. But when a teenager expresses having anxiety, what do we do? We tell them to take all the time they need, remove as much as we can from their plate, and say: “Let me know when you’re ready.”
What’s the idea here? Is the teenager supposed to wallow? Find themselves? Discover the secret of the universe? Sleep more? Attend therapy religiously? Seriously, what are they supposed to be doing? My guess is that what they actually do is a combination of rumination and doubling down on what got them there, e.g., too much social media usage.
The basic approach to a teenager who is suffering—drop everything and go away until you’re well enough to return—provides almost no avenue for improvement. It all but guarantees that the problem will remain the same or get worse.
To understand why, remember from the Loneliness series that humans have a bunch of adaptations designed to monitor social standing, and if the read-out is poor—You don’t have enough friends—then a stress response follows, one designed to rectify the situation. If the problem isn’t solved, though, the effects can accumulate. And even before the effects accumulate, one feels negative emotions such as loneliness, anxiety, shame, and so on.
Assuming that most teenagers are suffering from social problems—and not, say, medical or workload issues—how are these problems supposed to be rectified by removing teens from their social environment? A teenager in anguish usually needs better connection, not less.
Even the impact of therapy, as the research shows, comes down to the connection between therapist and client. At its best, therapy is just good community. But it’s also removed community. Your therapist isn’t going to speak at your wedding, or set you up in the first place. That’s why we ought to pair therapy with embedded community—with people who are part of the teenager’s life. Which is why removing a student from their daily routine is a bad idea.
What would it look like to change our focus to helping teens fit in better, not less? Well, people tend to fit in by having roles. By being given responsibility. This might be especially true for teenagers, whose stage of life is concerned with who they will be as an adult member of the community. That is why even if the role is mundane, like being a student, or the responsibility is ho-hum, like completing homework, it can still be steadying and orienting. It can still provide purpose, structure, and a sense of accomplishment. (It can also be distracting, which isn’t always a bad thing.)
But as Ruby says: “The taut cable of high expectations has been slackened, and the result is the current mood: listlessness.”
Far from taking things from kids, then, my aunt and Celeste want to give them more. Consistent with this, my hockey teammates in high school always had their best semesters during the season, when ostensibly they had the least amount of time to study. Among other things, they were challenged. And lo and behold, they responded.
My aunt is all for helping students. Probably more than I would be. But she wants them to do something first. She wants them to learn both how to succeed and fail. Similarly, Celeste supports accommodations for many of her students, but she wants them to try to succeed without it first.
“Look,” she tells parents. “I’m happy to create this IEP if Johnny can’t succeed. But let’s try a few different things first. Once he gets this IEP, he’ll never have a reason to work around it.”
In other words, don’t treat teenagers with kid gloves. Challenge them.5
Before moving on, I have a really lame story about being challenged. I was in Latin class—twenty years ago!—and my teacher asked us a hard question. Nobody knew the answer, so we sat there in silence. For an excruciating five minutes. I remember going through multiple phases of—“Let me think—Nope, I don’t know—Someone else will answer it, surely—Well, she’ll bail us out soon enough—Wow, she’s really not going to say anything?—Okay, let me think again.” Eventually, a lightbulb went off and I answered the question. (I know, I’m amazing.)
In the current political climate, though, imagine someone suggesting that we need to challenge students more. If they went too far, in fact, we might suggest they do the same thing as a student with anxiety: go away and do nothing.
Taxing the Identity Throughput
A final challenge for teenagers is having too much choice in the main question they are asking: Who am I?
Given that humans are such a social species, another way of asking the question is relational: “How will I fit into the group? What role will I play?”
These are daunting questions for anyone at any time, but surely these questions are currently harder to answer for two main reasons. First, “the tribe” is much larger. We can potentially come into contact with millions of people spread out all over the world, and not only that, but students spend much of their time reading about the impressive accomplishments of dead people. It was probably much easier over our evolutionary history to distinguish oneself in a band of 50 living members.
Another reason it would be easier to fit into a group of hunters and gatherers is that, well, you’d most likely either be a hunter or gatherer. Maybe you could land a healer/religious leader position, but there wasn’t much else. Many more specialized trades, and therefore roles in the group, emerged as a result of agriculture. For example, my wife does contract law for the entertainment business, and somehow that puts food on our table. (Living Fossils certainly doesn’t 😊)
As with career, so with other aspects of identity—even the list of what constitutes identity. There are more ways than ever to define oneself today. The pressure for kids to choose their politics, sexuality, gender, and form of neurodivergence (as well as options within each of those domains) has increased dramatically over even the last ten years. And while our heightened sensitivity, sophistication, and tolerance for the variety of these concepts has undoubtedly helped people who existed at or beyond the margins, the overall effect might be overwhelm, plain and simple.
Let’s take gender as an example.6 My colleague Ben and I were talking about this the other day because in his practice, he sees a lot of kids wondering whether they were born in the right body. Ben himself, when he was growing up, noticed he had some feminine qualities. Likewise, one of my female cousins admits to having had very masculine qualities. She was a tomboy whose nickname was based on an NFL linebacker.7 Ben’s feminine qualities and my cousin’s masculine qualities just “were.” They didn’t mean anything—or rather, they didn’t mean anything. But if a pointed question had been asked…or if a label, one with consequences, had been attached early on…well, who knows what that would have led to?
My point isn’t to debate this particular issue. (There’s probably enough of that going on without my help.) It’s merely to note that there has been an explosion of “identity boxes” that kids must now check. The question “who am I?” has always been a hard one. Now it seems never-ending.
While we’re on the topic, I also think this emphasis on labels more generally—from political orientation to sexual preference to racial identity—is giving kids the wrong idea of what an identity is in the first place. Kids might be led to believe that identity is just the sum of all these parts. The reality is that people are so complexly different across the board that, really, we could continue to create categories for all our different experiences and dimensions ad nauseum. As we continue in this vein, I worry that we actively reinforce an incorrect model of what makes a person.
A Portrait of the Teenager as a Young Person
Teenagers ask themselves: who am I? How will I fit into the adult world? That question, always difficult, is now more complicated than ever. The menu has gone from a fixed meal to a Manhattan diner. In their confusion, though, our teen might be loath to consult an adult, because what do adults know? Seriously, an adult might not have any idea what our teen is saying. So perhaps our subject turns to friends—not in person, of course, but online. And maybe to a few million other people who happen to be hanging out, all of whom have very strong opinions. With all these major questions and life besides, maybe our teenager gets overwhelmed and admits anxiety. Poor child. What can be done? At the very least, we can take things off their plate. “Just let us know when you’re ready to resume life.” (I’ll answer that one for you now: Never!)
It’s not up to the kids to fix this. It’s up to the adults. The teenage years are already a crisis. Let’s not make them worse.
CODA: Why did parents turn?
It was clear in talking to Celeste and my aunt that the sea-change occurring in schools is more of a “top down” effect than “bottom up.” Parents are driving the change, with kids following. So why have parents changed so drastically in just a generation or so? I can think of three possibilities. First, as Sedaris mentions in Punching Down, parents are having fewer children, which means each is more precious. Second, as Twenge argues in Generations, technology by and large makes us less reliant on others, and therefore more individualistic. For example, I don’t have to ask anyone for directions anymore. (Also, plenty of major technologies, from Facebook to Twitter, have amplified the importance of individuality.) Third, I’ve heard some people claim that Boomers over-reacted to the strict parenting they received, which began a trend of permissive parenting. I’m not sure what to think of this claim, other than that it’s entirely possible, and also offers hope that the pendulum could swing back.
In the end, I’m curious if readers have any insight on this, because I’m really not sure what to think.
John’s is After Babel; Jean’s is Generation Tech.
Florida has recently passed a law banning phones in schools. Good for them.
Research by Pew and others is consistent with the idea that there is a perception among some people that institutions sacrificed truth for political agendas, reducing trust in institutions broadly. Maybe particularly during the covid years.
Fellow Fossil Rob, in reading this post, described his experience in the classroom. He indicated that he varied the demands that he made on undergraduate students in different classes over the years. Reliably, as he increased what he demanded of students, they 1) complained more, 2) worked harder, and 3) reported more satisfaction with the class.
Or should I just go ahead and cancel myself?
Rhymes with Smurlacher.