It has been widely reported that middle and high-school age students are suffering from much more depression, anxiety, dysphoria, and dysmorphia. Why is this?

Some social media posts suggest that this is related to the school closures due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and temporary social isolation that resulted. But numerous studies have shown that these massively increasing psychological problems among youth began a decade before this. Covid-19 only made these already existing issues more visible.

Studies show that declining student mental health and resilience is linked with the rise in use of social media, and the corrosive way that people use it and are affected by it.

Students who spend more time on social media, instead of interacting in the real world with peers, report more anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia, gender dysphoria, and symptoms related to anorexia.

Students who spend more time with friends and family, and community groups in the real world, report much less of this. Let’s be honest and ask two questions:

How many hours a week do typical students spend on cell phones and social media?

Pay attention closely – many kids underestimate the number of hours.

How many hours a week do typical students engage in healthy fun such as 

playing outdoors at recess; playing outdoors after school and on weekends

Participating in the Boy scouts, Girl scouts, 4 H club, etc.

Helping neighbors at the senior center; spending time with their grandparents

Playing a musical instrument; being in a band or chorus

spending time with friends at church or synagogue youth groups

hanging out with friends at the beach, parks, or mall. Roller skating. Anything fun in a group.

I have many years of experience as a teacher; I’ve spent a lot of time listening to students about such things. Growing up, my friends and I spent well over 20 hours a week, collectively, on these things. To my dismay, in recent years most of my students report spending almost no time doing this. Rather, it’s mostly homework, social media, or social media-via-video gaming online.

As the articles below clearly show, human beings evolved outdoors as social beings. Nothing in our evolution prepared us for sitting still seven hours a day in school without recess, or sitting still for hours each day listening to toxic messages on social media.

This realization is not old people being grumpy, not keeping up with the times. The socially indoctrinated behaviors of today’s young people are demonstrably psychologically unhealthy.

I urge teachers, school counselors, and parents to read these articles –

Declining Student Resilience: A Serious Problem for Colleges

By Peter Gray, Psychology Researcher at Boston College, September 22, 2015

A year ago I received an invitation from the head of Counseling Services at a major university to join faculty and administrators for discussions about how to deal with the decline in resilience among students.

At the first meeting, we learned that emergency calls to Counseling had more than doubled over the past five years. Students are increasingly seeking help for, and apparently having emotional crises over, problems of everyday life.

Recent examples mentioned included a student who felt traumatized because her roommate had called her a [bad name] and two students who had sought counseling because they had seen a mouse in their off-campus apartment. The latter two also called the police, who kindly arrived and set a mousetrap for them.

Faculty at the meetings noted that students’ emotional fragility has become a serious problem when it comes to grading. Some said they had grown afraid to give low grades for poor performance, because of the subsequent emotional crises they would have to deal with in their offices. Many students, they said, now view a C, or sometimes even a B, as failure, and they interpret such “failure” as the end of the world.

Faculty also noted an increased tendency for students to blame them (the faculty) for low grades—they weren’t explicit enough in telling the students just what the test would cover or just what would distinguish a good paper from a bad one. They described an increased tendency to see a poor grade as reason to complain rather than as reason to study more, or more effectively.

Much of the discussions had to do with the amount of handholding faculty should do versus the degree to which the response should be something like, “Buck up, this is college.” Does the first response simply play into and perpetuate students’ neediness and unwillingness to take responsibility? Does the second response create the possibility of serious emotional breakdown, or, who knows, maybe even suicide?

Two weeks ago, that head of Counseling sent us all a follow-up email, announcing a new set of meetings. His email included this sobering paragraph:

“I have done a considerable amount of reading and research in recent months on the topic of resilience in college students. Our students are no different from what is being reported across the country on the state of late adolescence/early adulthood. There has been an increase in diagnosable mental health problems, but there has also been a decrease in the ability of many young people to manage the everyday bumps in the road of life. Whether we want it or not, these students are bringing their struggles to their teachers and others on campus who deal with students on a day-today basis. The lack of resilience is interfering with the academic mission of the University and is thwarting the emotional and personal development of students.”

The full article is available here Psychology Today: Declining student resilience, by Peter Gray

Decline of Play and the Rise of Psychopathology in Children and Adolescents

Over the past half century, in the United States and other developed nations, children’s free play with other children has declined sharply. Over the same period, anxiety, depression, suicide, feelings of helplessness, and narcissism have increased sharply in children, adolescents, and young adults. This article documents these historical changes and contends that the decline in play has contributed to the rise in the psychopathology of young people.

Play functions as the major means by which children (1) develop intrinsic interests and competencies; (2) learn how to make decisions, solve problems, exert self-control, and follow rules; (3) learn to regulate their emotions; (4) make friends and learn to get along with others as equals; and (5) experience joy. Through all of these effects, play promotes mental health. Key words: anxiety; decline of play; depression; feelings of helplessness;
free play; narcissism; psychopathology in children; suicide

The Decline of Play and the Rise of Psychopathology in Children and Adolescents

Helicopter Parenting & College Students’ Increased Neediness

In my last post, I summarized reports from directors of college counseling services concerning college students’ rising levels of depression and anxiety; declining abilities to cope effectively with problems of everyday life; and increasing feelings of entitlement … A common theory is that these changes may be at least partly attributable to a rise in “helicopter parenting”

… The theory makes sense, logically, but is there any empirical evidence? A first step in testing the theory is to look for correlations between the style of parenting and students’ emotional and behavioral well-being. Are students whose parents are highly controlling and intrusive more likely than others to manifest the kinds of problems reported by college counselors? A number of studies have examined this question, and the results of all that I have found indicate that the answer is yes.

Helicopter Parenting & College Students’ Increased Neediness
Researchers link helicopter parenting to emotional fragility in young adults.
Peter Gray, Psychology Today, Oct 23, 2015

The Many Shades of Fear-Based Parenting

I have long been advocating, on this blog and elsewhere, for what I refer to as trustful parenting. Trustful parents allow their children as much freedom as reasonably possible to make their own decisions. They trust their children’s instincts, judgments, and ability to learn from mistakes….

The enemy of trustful parenting is fear, and, unfortunately, fear runs rampant in our society today. It runs rampant not because the world is truly more dangerous than it was in the past, but because we as a society have generated dangerous myths about dangers. We are afraid that strangers will snatch our children away if we don’t guard them constantly and that our children will be homeless, or in some other way life failures, if they don’t get all As in school, do all the proper extracurricular activities, and get into a top-ranked college…

Fear-based parenting comes in various shades, depending partly on the types of fears most prominent in the parents’ minds and partly on the parents’ personalities and economic means. Here is a list.

The Many Shades of Fear-Based Parenting, Peter Gray, Psychology Today, Mar 25, 2019

Doing More Time in School

Those who want more forced schooling ignore students’ opinions.
by Peter Gray

Kids aren’t learning much in school, so let’s make them start school when they are younger; let’s make them stay more hours in school each day and more days each year; and let’s not allow them to leave until they are at least 18 years old. Let’s do all this especially to the poor kids; they are getting the least out of school now, so let’s lengthen their time in school even more than we lengthen the time for others!…

Doing More Time in School

School districts now go so far as to ban ‘tag’

Schools are contributing to mental health problems in children by banning normal, healthy forms of play and social interaction. Many now claim that even tag is too emotionally and physically dangerous to kids.

http://www.freerangekids.com/school-district-bans-tag-for-students-physical-and-emotional-safety/

Children are literally not free to play outside

From the article

As if parents don’t have enough to worry about in the midst of a pandemic, last week, I got a terribly upsetting email from a dad who wrote to say that Child Protective Services, or CPS, had come to investigate him. Not because his kids weren’t social distancing. Not because of any beatings or starvation or deliberate exposure to dangerous germs.

He was being investigated for allowing his kids, ages 6 and 3, to play on their own front lawn.

The email came to me from a dad in Texas. He wrote, “While letting my kids play in my front yard, I got CPS called on me. I wasn’t out there with them but I was going out every 5 to 10 minutes and watching through the window between checks.”  When the caseworker arrived, his son made some popcorn, and the caseworker commented on how self-reliant he was. But self-reliant or not, the caseworker added, Dad had to be by his kids’ side at all times.

That is simply not true.

“Misstatements of law like this happen all around the country,” says longtime Chicago-based child welfare lawyer Diane Redleaf. “Neglect laws are intended to protect children from serious harm. That’s why it is more important than ever to get child protection policy right.”

The idea that kids can’t play on their own lawn, lightly supervised, is nonsensical in the best of times. When there’s a pandemic and kids are cooped up 24/7 for weeks at a time, it is even more important that we all understand: Kids need some play time. Parents need some work time. Even if helicopter parenting was the crazy norm before, it’s impossible now.

From Kids Deserve Playtime Without Their Parents Getting Arrested, Lenore Skenazy, The Sun (newspaper) 4/27/2020

Scientific studies of cell phone usage and mental health

Excessive Smartphone Use Is Associated With Health Problems in Adolescents and Young Adults
Yehuda Wacks and Aviv M. Weinstein*

They report that excessive cell phone usage leads to depression, anxiety, OCD, ADHD, alcohol abuse, cognitive-emotion regulation, impulsivity, impaired cognitive function, addiction to social networking, shyness and low self-esteem, sleep problems, reduced physical fitness, unhealthy eating habits, pain and migraines, reduced cognitive control and changes in the brain’s gray matter volume.

Cell phones, Teens and Mental Health

Two recent studies shed light on the negative psychological consequences of social media use.

There is no doubt that smartphone use has become pervasive in our society. In a 2018 Pew Research Center poll, 95 per cent of teens reported having access to a smart phone. Some 45 per cent of teens reported using the internet “almost constantly” (a number that has doubled compared to the 2014-2015 survey), while another 44 per cent said they go online multiple times per day.

The negative potential for social media was highlighted in two recent studies. In the first, researchers found that in a cohort of 6,595 U.S. adolescents, those who used social media more than three hours per day were at increased risk for developing mental health problems. The risk was principally seen for internalizing problems such feeling lonely, sad, depressed or anxious rather than for externalizing problems like acting out or behaviour difficulties.

The second study was an analysis of more than 12,000 teenagers in England. English teenagers were even more active on social media than their American counterparts. Two in three teens ages 15 to 16 used social media multiple times per day.

The researchers also found that teens who used social media multiple times per day were more likely to report psychological distress, less life satisfaction, less happiness and more anxiety than those who used it only weekly or less often. An interesting aspect of the study was that the negative effects of social media were more prominent in girls than boys. While both boys and girls showed an increase in psychological distress, the magnitude of the increase was higher in girls (18 per cent) than in boys (5 per cent).

Cell phones and mental health of students