19/09/2024
The parents aren’t okay, Surgeon General Murthy declares in a new advisory that makes his 2022 advisory on teens and social media look silly
Murthy flatly contradicts social-media blamers like Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge who claim parents are healthy and fine -- but still evades harsh realities.
Two sentences (mine, not his) sum up Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s new advisory: American parents are more stressed and mentally troubled than their teenagers. Messed-up parents and grownups create messed-up kids – but it’s better politics to pretend it’s the other way around.
Look for his new advisory to be ignored or truncated by fellow social-media blamers. It contradicts their crafted image of older-generation superiority.
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt pronounces parents today, raised in the idyllic Eden before smartphones and social media rewired and destroyed childhood, cannot possibly suffer depression, anxiety, loneliness, or poor mental health. His colleague, psychologist Jean Twenge, ferrets selective surveys featuring parents and middle-agers saying, we’re perfectly fine! No problems!
Except for that tripling in overdose deaths and hospital drug/alcohol-related emergencies soaring to 5 million per year among ages 25-64 from 2010 to 2022 – exactly the period teens became more depressed. Except that a man Haidt’s age is 4 times more likely to commit su***de and 16 times more likely to die from an overdose than a 16-year-old is, CDC 2022 numbers show.
Murthy’s advisory pronounces the parents anything but fine:
“41% of parents say that most days they are so stressed they cannot function, and 48% say that most days their stress is completely overwhelming compared to other adults (20% and 26%, respectively) … In a 2021 survey, approximately 65% of parents and guardians, and 77% of single parents in particular, experienced loneliness, compared to 55% of non-parents. Furthermore, 42% of parents who experienced loneliness always felt left out compared to 24% of non-parents who experienced loneliness.”
“The mental health of parents and caregivers can have profound impacts on the well-being of children, families, and society,” Murthy declares.
So, what is the worst cause of modern parents’ poor mental health?
You guessed it: those damn kids and their social media. Murthy’s incessant fear-mongering hyping conjectural threats social-media “could lead to” but haven’t happened while ignoring far more serious real-life threats that are happening plays a big role in fanning the anxieties he elsewhere deplores:
“Nearly 70% of parents say parenting is now more difficult than it was 20 years ago, with children’s use of technology and social media as the top two cited reasons. A majority of parents of adolescents say they are somewhat, very, or extremely worried that their child’s use of social media could lead to problems with anxiety or depression (53%), lower self-esteem (54%), being harassed or bullied by others (54%), feeling pressured to act a certain way (59%), and exposure to explicit content (71%).”
Twenty years ago, teens had crime rates 6 times higher, serious violence more than double, 4 times more babies before age 15, much more school dropout, etc., compared to today. Go back further, to massive gang troubles, murders, school failure, etc., and back further into eras of deadly and crippling disease, heavy casualties in industries, farms, and battlefields with little medical help, and vastly higher early-death rates (U.S. life expectancy in 1900: 46). Never mind those problems; parents and teens of the past had it easy – they didn’t suffer smartphones and TikTok.
Again and again, Murthy shrinks from confronting the difficult, distressing, grownup-caused realities children and teens suffering depression and risk face in their homes.
The CDC’s 2021 survey of 7,000 teens showed the same social problems that depress parents – food insecurity, homelessness, parental job loss, etc. – also depress teens and greatly elevate su***de attempts. Table 1 shows more variables (among others) from the CDC survey of teens that one would expect the Surgeon General to address forcefully: food insecurity (hunger), parents’ job loss, parents/adults’ bullying and violent abuses.
These are not small issues. The CDC survey shows 24% of teens suffer hunger, 55% of teens are bullied by adults, 12% of teens are violently abused by adults, and 31% of teens experience chronic unemployment or job loss by parents.
Yet, Murthy, who rightly highlighted social conditions to help explain parents’ anxiety and depression, remains fixated on social media to explain teenage unhappiness. His most widely-quoted advisory pretends parental abuse doesn’t exist; teens just abuse each other online.
Even worse, while Murthy blamed teens’ social media use as the major cause of parents’ anxiety, he still dismisses in scattered, anonymous half-sentences grownup-inflicted domestic violence as causes of victimized teens’ poor mental health.
That 13% of teenagers reported to the 2022 Centers for Disease Control survey being hit, kicked, slapped, and violently abused and 55% reported being cursed at and emotionally abused by parents and/or household adults is too rough a stuff for the nation’s chief health officer. Parents’ and nearby adults’ soaring, widespread drug and alcohol overdose casualties likewise are taboo topics.
Murthy cites another example of a factor driving parents’ anxieties. “Firearm-related injury has become the leading cause of death among U.S. children and adolescents ages 1-19 years old.” He never mentions the biggest single solution: parents and other adults, stop shooting them. Two-thirds of gun homicide victims under age 15 were shot by grownups age 25 and older; just 13% were shot by youths under age 18, the FBI’s latest tabulation shows.
For another crucial connection Murthy and other commentators refuse to talk about: teens abused at home by adults are many times more likely also to be cyberbullied online and bullied at school, the CDC survey shows.
For still another: Murthy’s only mention of child abuse in his latest report is to note that having been abused as children is another factor in parents’ poor mental health. That is, of course, true – except that when it comes to today’s teens, Murthy (who endlessly deplores the “teenage mental health crisis”) never mentions his own CDC’s survey showing parental and household-grownup abuses are by far the single biggest predictor of teens’ poor mental health.
Murthy could issue far more effective, analytical reports detailing the social and domestic causes driving teenagers’ depression, su***de, and risk, teens’ connection to adult risks and behaviors, and the useful reforms he proposes to help parents. Instead, he, along with the nation’s top health authorities, mental health professionals, and political leaders choose to evade disturbing issues in order to obsess over Instagram, TikTok, and smartphones."
![“Psychologist Jonathan Haidt...[Jean]Twenge, and colleagues committed themselves years ago to blaming social media witho...](https://img3.findhealthclinics.com/624/994/1092128106249940.jpg)
