Warning: Unlike feel-good columns blaming "social media" for teen problems and praising grownups as healthy rescuers, this column is no fun to read.
Mike Males
The three figures to the right, taken from standard Centers for Disease Control tabulations authorities refuse to talk about, bracket the iceberg-tip of cataclysmic family and community crises today’s teens face.
American adulthood is deteriorating from family to institution as drug and alcohol overdoses and* domestic abuse skyrocket. Authorities, evading the stark realities glaring from their own scientific indexes, surveys, and research, popularize themselves by indulging culture-war scapegoating blaming “social media” and teen themselves.
The adult landscape today’s teens negotiate is increasingly troubled:
• Among the 30-59-year-olds of ages to parent teens, drug and alcohol overdose death rates exploded by 600%, from 9,200 in 2000 to 71,500 in 2022. Parent-aged deaths from suicides, homicides, and accidental overdoses and gunshots surged from 36,000 in 2000 to a staggering 112,000 in 2022 – a rate increase of 183% to a level three times higher than among teens.
• Over the last three years, an appalling 11,000 Americans under age 18 were murdered – a rate 49% higher than a decade ago and 10 times higher than in other Western countries. While media-quotable “experts” blame school shooters, “kids killing kids” with loose guns, and “teen dating violence,” FBI tabulations show two-thirds of the murderers of victims under age 18 are adults 21 and older. Grownups 25 and older murder three times more under-18 victims than do young peers. Eight times more children and youth are shot to death by household grownups than at school.
• Troubled adulthood spawns dangerous, disrupted households. Adults’ violent and psychological abuses victimizing teenagers increased two to four times, respectively, from 2011 to 2021. The Centers for Disease Control reported in 2022 that one in nine teens suffer violent victimization and 55% report emotional abuse by parents and household adults – rising levels greatly exceeding school and online bullying. Standard analysis of the CDC survey shows parents’ and adults’ abuses drive the “teenage mental health crisis” far more than peers or social media.
To derelict authorities and commentators, the reality that more addicted, violent, abusive households could be making teens more depressed and anxious either never occurred to them – or, 2020s grownups are desensitized to normal caring. From top to bottom, MAGA Republican to liberal Democrat, Fox News to National Public Radio to MSNBC, the Atlantic, and New Yorker, elite academic and professional associations like the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Psychological Association, and American School Counselor Association to local News-at-11 “expert,” the herd consensus blares that the problem is just teens with too much freedom and too many gadgets.
American adulthood is disintegrating
Authorities, from the Surgeon General, mental health practitioners, professional associations, educators, and political leaders to hundreds of media columnists, well aware of mountains of research linking domestic abuses to adolescents’ poor mental health and tragic outcomes, ignore this compelling reality while pushing potentially harmful restrictions on teens’ social media use.
The CDC itself omitted abuse entirely from its follow-up 2023 report despite the stark findings of its massive 2022 Adolescent Behaviors and Experiences survey with 7,800 participants and 116 questions, the big one everyone cites miscites on “teenage mental health.”
Standard regression analysis of the survey’s 15 key independent variables that might contribute to teens’ depression and tragic outcomes* shows that one factor stands out in every case as powerfully associated with every teenage mental health and other risks at the highest significance level: abuse by parents and household grownups (hitting, beating, kicking, physical injury, and psychological abuse).
Once domestic abuse is included, hours spent online and electronic bullying become superficial factors. The results for two key measures of mental health, depression and suicide attempt, are typical. For depression, abuse by parents and household adults is by far the biggest contributor, followed by sexual violence victimization and sleep hours (more sleep reduces depression).
For suicide attempt, parental abuse remains the biggest factor, with school and sexual violence victimization (ages of perpetrators unspecified) the next biggest factors. Electronic bullying becomes a minor factor, and screen time disappears altogether.
Depression and suicide attempts rise sharply with the frequency of parent/grownup abuse. Compared to non-abused teenagers, the most abused teens report 3.5 times more sadness, 4.5 times more depression, nine times more suicide contemplation, and 24 times more suicide attempts, along with four times more alcohol and drug use, six times more dating violence and school fights, and a dozen times more weapons-carrying.
Teens abused at home are four times more likely also to be bullied at school or online – a completely overlooked relationship. Girls and LGBQ youth are the most abused at home – and also the most likely to report depression and suicide attempts as well as seeking connections via social media.
Overlooking grownup abuse explains why some researchers mistakenly claim social media drives teenage depression. Imagine studies that assessed a dozen potential causes of lung cancer – but left out the big one: smoking. Some other factors (say, listening to country music) would then become “statistically significant causes” of lung cancer, although with weak explanatory power. Omitting the major abuse factor is the problem with all social-media studies.
In fact, the correlation between teenage mental health problems and time spent online is a reverse one: depression drives more social media use, not the other way around. The CDC survey shows victimized teens use social media more to secure online connections, especially mental health and medical services. This is especially true of the youngest teens.
In this climate of official dereliction, it is dangerous for lawmakers to restrict or ban teenagers’ use of social media with half-baked measures cutting off teens from pathways to vital connections and services.
Are America’s leaders and mental health professionals really this clueless?
Troubling trends among parent-aged adults accompany large increases in adult depression over the period. These trends relate to the stresses of rising opiate addiction and the pandemic. Parents who lost jobs are twice as likely to abuse teens, CDC numbers show.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Americans suffered similar official/academic/professional shirking. Authorities such as Alan Bloom, Tipper Gore, and A Nation at Risk variously blamed rising social crises on allegedly uneducable, unemployable, mentally disturbed kids suffering “tripled” suicide rates (that is, today’s most vocal youth-bashers when they were young) hooked on dangerous rock and rap music and violent video games. It was malarkey then and malarkey now. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Americans, led by parent ages, died from drug and alcohol abuse, poverty-driven violence, and domestic killings every year – all ignored by authorities indulging moral crusading and a destructive prison boom.
Now, in 2023, social crises have erupted to record levels, with hundreds of thousands of Americans dying and millions of families suffering. Yet, once again, leaders and institutions led by the Surgeon General are grandstanding with popularity-grubbing moral panics.
Honest authorities, instead of peddling feel-good commentaries praising themselves and grownups as the saviors of screen-seduced teenagers, would quit scapegoating youth and social media and instead work to forcefully address the addiction and violence crises afflicting families and communities, including helping parents to confront their own troubles and stop hitting and taking out frustrations on kids. Schools would drop silly lawsuits blaming social media for teenage depression and would set later hours that allow teens more sleep time, a major factor deterring depression.
America is suffering mental health issues driven by serious factors involving economics, addiction, pandemic disease, and severe domestic troubles, not by Smartphones and Instagram. America’s institutional breakdown is a wake-up call for major redirection of health priorities at every level, from communities and schools to Washington powers.
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Sources for charts: Centers for Disease Control, Multiple cause of death (2023). Sources: CDC (2023); FBI, Supplemental Homicide Reports, victim crosstabs, 2022. CDC, Adolescent Behaviors and Experiences Survey, 2021; Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence, 2011, 2015.
*Predictor variables included hours spent online, electronic bullying, parent/grownup abuse victimization, sexual violence victimization, rape victimization, dating violence victimization, school violence/bullying victimization, school racism victimization, witnessing community violence, homelessness, hunger, adult monitoring, hours of sleep, regular physical activity, and parents’ unemployment. Outcome variables included overall depression, depression during the pandemic, debilitating sadness, trouble concentrating, suicide contemplation, suicide plan, suicide attempt, and suicide-attempt hospitalization.