What worries parents in 2023
I read a new Pew research study last month that made me think a lot.
A heads up, this blog post will be discussing a survey that asked parents about difficult, and sometimes violent topics that their kids might experience, so you may want to skip this blog post if that’s not a topic you want to reflect on today.
Pew research studies are based on responses they get from the American test panel, a group of 10,000 randomly selected Americans that has been maintained since 2014. In this particular study, they had 3,757 US parents who responded between 9/2022 and 10/2/2022 to the survey questions.
As a child psychiatrist, I’ve experienced first hand the dramatic increase in mental health complaints among children over the last three years. But this survey really illustrated how deeply these concerns are being felt by American parents.
Parents were asked to rate how worried they felt about the following concerns, their options for response were “extremely/very worried”, “somewhat worried”, or “not too/not at all worried”.
The parents were asked how much worry they had about their kids experiencing:
-getting shot
-getting kidnapped/abducted
-getting in trouble with police
-getting pregnant or getting someone else pregnant
-having problems with drugs or alcohol
-having depression or anxiety
-getting beaten up or attacked
-being bullied
The results were as follows:
While all of these potential issues with our kids are terrifying to consider, I was interested to see how closely parent’s ranking correlated with actual likelihood of these events.
In order of decreasing likelihood, these events rank as follows:
-struggling with anxiety or depression
-being bullied
-teen pregnancy
-child beaten up or attacked
-having problems with drugs or alcohol
-getting in trouble with the police
-getting kidnapped/abducted (though it’s important to note that 90% of abductions are by a parent and 99% of abducted kids are returned safely home)
-getting shot (including non fatal shootings in teens)
This shows parents are right about their top concerns - depression/anxiety and bullying in their kids, and for good reason. The recent numbers of depressed teens is overwhelming. A study of nearly 8,000 teens from Jan to June 2021 showed that 44.2% experienced persistent feelings of hopelessness in the preceding year, while 19.9% had experienced passive suicidal ideation in the preceding 12 months and 9% reported they had made a suicide attempt in the preceding 12 months. (Jones SE, et all, MMWR April 1, 2022 vol 71 No 3).
My first read of this study was disbelief. How could nearly 1 in 5 teens have contemplated suicide between 2020 and 2021? But then I recalled my work with teens during this time, and the serious negative impact of Covid-19 on teenage socialization. I remembered how flat and isolated and desperate most of the teens I spoke with seemed during their telehealth visits. Upon further reflection, I had to admit I am not that surprised by these numbers. Most of them were white-knuckling it through their days. I can only hope that as we have returned to more “normal” activities, the mental health of our teens has improved as well.
Importantly, this same study noted that students who felt close to someone at school had a significant reduction in their risk of hopelessness or sadness (35.4% vs. 52.9%), having seriously considered suicide (14.0% vs. 25.6%) and having attempted suicide (5.8% vs. 11.9%). The same reduction was observed among youth who reported being virtually connected to others (family, friends, or other groups via computer, phone, or other device). Thus underscoring the deep importance of feeling connected for all of us, but for teens especially. Unfortunately, the study didn’t ask whether teens felt connected and close to anyone in real life, so it’s hard to know how protective that factor would have been, but I think it’s safe to assume that if a virtual connection reduced their risk, a real life connection would have done at least as much to reduce their risk.
If you’re a parent of a teenager, please know that you are important to your child, even if they say or do things that make you feel otherwise. Just your presence and connection is grounding and validating and therapeutic.
This study also outlines the upside in digital connectedness, which definitely exists. One of the most difficult situations I help parents navigate is when they have a teenager struggling with depression who has been victimized or bullied online, or who may be using their phone to connect with people who aren’t aiding their recovery (for example, to obtain drugs or alcohol). In these cases, the teenager typically feels they must keep access to their phones or online connected devices to maintain the support of their friends. In such situations, parents feel they are in a double bind, because to remove the phone or computer is met with resistance by the teenager, who feels that doing so cuts them off from their support system. Restricting access to a phone or computer can also lead the parents to fear for their child’s safety, especially if the child has already expressed feeling suicidal or made suicide attempts in the past.
It can feel like an impossible situation, but parents can facilitate a win-win compromise, in which they are able to foster connectedness between their children and supportive friends without allowing unlimited, unsupervised access to phones or computers that could place their child at risk when their child is most vulnerable. The hardest part is delivering this decision in a way that doesn’t make the teen feel blamed or shamed, and supporting parents as they empathically contain their teen’s reaction to this decision.
