American teens are having a hard time. High school students reporting chronic feelings of sadness and hopelessness rose from 1 in 5 to 1 in 3 from 2008 to 2019, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). By the pandemic fall of 2021, the feelings were reported by 42% of high school students and almost 60% of girls. The thing is, a lot of parents are in really bad shape too.
BY JENNY ANDERSON
HEALTH
The attention to the kids makes sense. The CDC’s 2021 data showed a quarter of teen girls had made a suicide plan. Social media has been blamed for the rise in mood disorders, as have sleep deprivation, spikes in loneliness, and academic pressure.
One of the key ways we can bolster teens’ mental health and buffer the vulnerable is healthy, attuned relationships with their parents. The trouble is, that can be problematic too.
According to two national surveys completed as the pandemic wound down in December 2022, about 20% of mothers and 15% of fathers reported anxiety, compared with 18% of teens. About 15% of teens reported depression, alongside 16% of mothers and 10% of fathers. In total, about one-third of teens had a parent suffering from reported anxiety or depression.
“Our data suggest that we would be just as right to sound the alarm about the state of parents’ mental health as about teens’ mental health,” writes Richard Weissbourd, director of the Making Caring Common Project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, one of the authors of Caring for the Caregivers: The Critical Link Between Parent and Teen Mental Health.
Depressed and anxious adults who are parents of teens are faced with the double whammy of trying to manage themselves while simultaneously supporting teens. For adolescents, worrying about a parent or caregiver can be destabilizing when life seems rocky enough. Weissbourd’s data show that depressed teens are about five times as likely as non-depressed teens to have a depressed parent, and that anxious teens are about three times as likely as non-anxious teens to have an anxious parent. About 40% of those surveyed were at least “somewhat” worried about a parent’s mental health.
The bottom line: if we want to help teens, we need to help their parents too. Depressed and anxious parents can be excellent caregivers. Their own experience can build empathy and give adults language they can use to help teens navigate similar emotional terrain. But research shows that children of parents with untreated depression have higher rates of behavior problems, difficulty coping with stress and forming healthy relationships, academic problems, and mental illness. If
