外刊阅读20240502｜00后都是问题青年？我们好着呢~

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A Common Sense Media poll found that 53% of the country’s 12- to 17-year-olds see mental health challenges as a major problem in their schools. And a Gallup-Walton Family Foundation study reported a significant decline in the proportion of Gen Z youths who consider their mental health excellent since 2013. These findings echo a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey indicating 42% of high school students had experienced such persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in the past year that they couldn’t participate in regular activities, up from 28% in 2011.

I’ve already heard adults labeling today’s young people the Hopeless Generation, the Anxious Generation, the Depressed Generation, the COVID Generation and the Troubled Generation. The latest surveys threaten to reinforce such stereotypes . Yes, adults have long been too ready to attach negative labels to teenagers. This has been true since the dawn of the study of adolescent development in the early 20th century. We also found that parents who used negative words to describe the teen brain were more likely to have children who reported more negative feelings, including anger, sadness, loneliness and worry.

What comes first, young people’s negative feelings or parents’ negative views? We couldn’t fully answer that question, but we could control for factors that might affect how adults see teenagers, such as demographics, the level of conflict between parents and children, and the negative words parents use to describe their children. Our finding of a correlation between views and feelings held up .

The relationship also persisted when we surveyed the same parents and adolescents again nine months later, during the pandemic. To put it another way, the parents who held more positive views of teenagers in general had kids who were doing better during a very rough period in our nation’s history. So what can we do? We as a society certainly need a mental health system that provides access to affordable, high-quality, consistent care more reliably that it does now. We need the education provided by our schools to be more engaging, relevant and meaningful. And we need to mitigate the risks of social media to young people.