Increase of Adolescent Mental Health Concerns

“What if phones aren’t to blame for teen malaise after all?” was the provocative title of an opinion piece by Kara Bettis Carvalho in last weekend’s Boston Globe.  Carvalho writes of Boston College professor Peter Gray’s work which notes that, despite steady declines in teen mental health measures, there was a blip upwards between 1990 and 2002. What does he credit with this minor improvement?  The arrival of computers.

Gray believes that “the main purpose of childhood is for kids to learn how to become independent from their parents” in order to develop agency. He posits that by 1990 most families had a computer and an internet connection and that “online gaming and chatrooms allowed kids a new sense of freedom and even peer-level community.” This, he believes, explains the improvement between 1990 and 2002. The decline in adolescent mental health began again in 2003; in 2010 there was a sharp spike downwards. Interestingly, he believes that is explained by the near ubiquity of the Common Core curriculum (which Primary Day did not adopt, nor did many independent schools) but which he says made schools more stressful.

Jonathan Haidt, the author of The Anxious Generation, concluded the steep decline in teen mental health “was directly linked to the rise of smartphones and social media.” Gray believes the decline was largely due to the new curriculum demands which in turn increased stress, homework, bullying, peer comparison, and anxiety over school shootings. He believes, “We think we have to do more in schools. Let’s start doing less… – assign less homework, require fewer classes, schedule fewer weeks of school, spend less ‘time glued to the desk,’ and provide more choices for kids.”  He minimizes the impact of the smartphone first introduced in 2007. Haidt’s response?  “Restoring childhood requires both: more independence in the real world and stronger guardrails in the virtual one.”

It is always tempting, but rarely accurate, to reduce a complex trend’s etiology to one cause.  Jennifer Wallace, the author I mentioned at Back to School Night, in her book Never Enough, points to a plethora of causes to explain the current pressures on adolescents. Parental values and emphases – as well as those of society in general and families’ peer and socioeconomic groups – also are undoubtedly formative. Nothing, though, takes the place of human connection and mattering.