Teach a nation’s white children that they should hate themselves, their parents, their families and their nation and this is the result.
With their culture completely eroded to the point of being seen as a disease among their peers and bingo, you just created an extremely unstable situation. The ones that don’t turn “trans” so they can join the new culture of victimhood kill themselves. Then the ones that do turn trans, kill themselves once they realize they’ve destroyed their future as a human being.
Great job, liberal America, globalists, and other evil fucks across the globe.
I’m not sure there is a racial angle - if anything white kids are doing marginally better. 15% of black female high school students attempted suicide in the year leading up to the CDC’s 2019 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, compared to about 9% of white female students and about 12% of Hispanic female students. Actual suicide death rates for Black American girls ages 13 to 19 increased by 182% from 2001 to 2017, according to a 2019 study published in the Journal of Community Health.
I’ve got a few facts, but I’m sure by now you’ve gotten the gist of things with the release of the Nashville Shooters manifesto. That enough facts? Need more?
What the data seems to show is fairly stable numbers for both genders up until the very early sixties, followed by a breakout and continued upward trend since. Less pronounced in girls but clearly shown, and accelerating for girls. I would argue that the issue isnt a play based vs phone based childhood, but a play/family based vs tech/isolated childhood. The beginning of the 1960's marked the rise of women entering the workforce, 2 income families, latchkey kids phenomenon, and the penetration of televisions into the average household. Its only gotten more isolating since. The smartphone is just another tool to isolate kids further from each other and from their families.
Latch key kids, true. However, they were also house holds where the power dynamic in the family was fundamentally changed. The traditional role of the father to represent the outside world and put demands on the kids was replaced by a non-discussable feminine model where the kid was to be praised only and never to be disappointed or made aware of their shortcomings. Always price and rubber tiles under the play ground.
Excellent data collection, analyses, and presentation. In other words exemplary research. In particular the Suicide Rates by Age Groups and Generations graphs are very interesting and, as far as I know, original and significant contribution to suicide scholarship.
I'm fully convinced of After Babel's theory that smart phone usage is the largest direct cause of the increases in anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide over the past 12ish years. I'm sitting here brainstorming what I, a father of toddlers, can do between now and the beginning of their adolescence to ensure good mental health and strong relationships not just for my children but for their future friends and acquaintances.
I remember when I was about 13 and my older sister and I laughed about owning iPhones. She said, "It's kinda weird, right? We're like guinea pigs, who knows what this thing could do to us." It's not as funny now...
Hey Zach, the fact that suicides are going down for teenagers in the non-Anglosphere is a major challenge to the social media hypothesis. You acknowledge this, but put it to the side by speculating that the data is not broken down by sex and does not have a separate category for 10-14 year olds.
This is easy for me to say since I'm not doing all the painstaking research, but I would have waited to publish this until I had either (a) acquired the data on female 10-14 year olds outside the Anglosphere or (b) developed a more fleshed-out theory for why the rise in teen suicides is specific to the Anglosphere.
I am currently working on other posts that look beyond the anglosphere and nordic nations (for anxiety, depression, and later, on suicide), but as David said, it becomes quite difficult to find reliable trends data.
Let's stay in touch and I'll keep you updated as I continue my research -- it is very possible my working hypothesis on individualism/collectivism may shift, but based on everything I have seen:
Stable in-person communities/families, religiosity, durkheimian moral order, along with a variety of other factors are protective against suicide and poor mental health. Individualism atomizes society and technology amplifies this (as Jean notes in her book, Generations).
Of course, there is much much more research to be done here!
It makes sense to publish the Anglo data first since it needs explanation -- albeit one that may not be the one Haidt promotes (e.g. it could be the influence of Anglo-sphere news and entertainment media as well as the effects of Gen X parenting).
It is actually very difficult to get RELIABLE suicide trends data for most nations. I've done some work on this two years ago and was never convinced that, for example, the WHO database is truly valid for trends. So it is unclear how long it will take Zach to do what I failed to do a while ago: get a truly reliable data for many large non-Anglo nations. This is an issue you will fully appreciate only if you try to collect suicide international trends data on your own (as I did).
I of course do agree with you that non-Anglo suicide presents a major challenge to Haidt and Twenge and I think it would have been best had Zach restricted his article to data analysis rather than end it with promoting the Haidt and Twenge hypothesis.
That said, the core of the paper seems excellent and raises the entirely valid question as to why suicides rates of girls have risen so much in ALL the Anglo nations during the previous decade.
I would be curious to know if the data are skewed in any way by males identifying as females and females identifying as males. Taking into account historic trends, males identifying as females (and being counted as such) would tend to drive the female rates up--particularly because there is a tremendously high suicide rate among MTF trannies. Women identifying as males, conversely could have the effect of making the male suicide rate appear lower.
My sense is the numbers of trans kids is a tiny percentage of the overall population. Anecdotally as someone who works in clinical social work there seems to be a trend of more girls identifying as boys seeking care than males who identify as female.
The number of trans identifying in the US has doubled in the past 5 years. Half the total number of trans (around 2.6 million) in the US are teens and young adults, so around 1.3 million. Currently there are around 5,000 suicides between the ages of 15 and 24 in the US.
You'd have to do enough research to publish a paper to determine how much it would skew the numbers regarding the increase in young female suicide, but it's reasonable to assume it would have statistical significance at the very least.
Agreed it would show up in the stats. (About 25% of that 1.3M identify as non-binary as well.) Suicide rates for transgender youth are profoundly high. What’s fascinating is how split the US & Europe are regarding gender affirming care. Europe sees the US as borderline unethical and the US cites whatever it takes to reduce suicide risk as a debate ending harm reduction strategy.
The stats are almost useless, in a sense, because they're so ideologically biased. You say that 25% of those identifying as trans also identify as non-binary and I don't doubt that you''ve seen that statistic or even that's it's accurate but, for Pete's sake, trans and non-binary are mutually exclusive!
Ouch, “gen x parenting” as contributing to higher rates of suicide. As a Gen x parent, I can say that the Gen x parents I know are the most loving examples of parenting I’ve seen across the generations. Is our crime being TOO caring?
It very well could be. Little hurts build resistance and emotional maturity. There is a certain emotional frailty i see in young people that is mind blowing to me. Kids will always be cruel, and I would love to see if having older siblings reduces suicide risk (older bro or sis providing some healthy bullying).
In some ways I would compare it to the increase in misogyny one sees in men raised by single mothers. It shouldn't happen, but it does.
It’s interesting what you said in increased misogyny from men raised by single moms. That has not been my experience at all with men in my life, so I would be interested to see the research on that. But it does track bin some ways because my sons were raised by a lot of women and they definitely display a lot of misogyny toward us, unfortunately.
Actually Haidt does blame parenting (but also society in general) for over-protection of kids offline and under-protection of kids online, which he thinks leads to MH problems. The under-protection is obviously not due to lack of caring but due to a limited understanding and control of online risks.
My view, however, is more specific to suicide: the suicide and overdose rates of parents have been steadily rising since circa 2000 as Gen X entered parenting -- it is this childhood trauma that might have eventually led to much higher suicide rates among teens.
Not so great tying to phones. I have gen Z (what I refer to as zoomer) kids. My girls got the first iPhone the day it came out.
Why do I mention that? I as a parent was very involved in how my kids were using the phone and the internet and social media. My kids largely used Facebook in their high school years to plan parties on the spur of the moment - ie engage in more face-to-face time. Why is that?
I speculate it’s because the community we lived in focused on being socially involved in high school and as a result how they engaged in college and later in life.
I viewed the phone as another tool for my kids, not some way of making it so they could be entertained without my involvement.
Maybe the tool is not the problem. Maybe it’s how parents thought about the tool. I suspect many parents liked the internet and it extending to phones because they had to spend less time entertaining their kids.
I tend to focus on parents as the reason zoomers are more anxious, depressed, and suicidal. Parents gave the kids internet and a phone without understanding the implications. Why did parents do that? Do they still largely do that today?
You just gave the answer to the problems teenagers are faced with ie; parents absent from the needs of the child, love, empathy, support, guidance, and respect of mankind.
That's a good point and it raises the more general question of what we know about changes in parenting practices. Unfortunately there seems little research on this in relation to adolescent mental health.
This problem can be traced back to the 1970's when Dr. SPOCK published a manual on how to discipline children. Then in the years of 2000 the wonderful discovery of cell phones and internet that gave those young people a new way of communicating. Raised without responsibility and respect for fellow mankind they embarked on a non oral form of communicating. Now they can demean and slander anyone without facing them. This onslaught of verbal abuse has caused anxiety, depression, hatred, and a myriad of personal destruction of minds that are already confused of their place in life.
I'm bought in to there being a link between how children are raised in the world today v in the past. I'm bought in to social media and phones having a part to play in this. But I do think the reasons are nuanced and probably have a lot to do with the place the child grows up. I think this data actually highlights this. Although the principle behind the article is that all the countries show the same trends, on another view of the data I might argue all 5 countries are in fact showing different trends.
Older women in the US had some startling rises in suicide rates until they seem to have dropped off a cliff in 2020 - which rather skews the comparison to younger cohort rates.
In the UK, 15-19 female rates are between 2 and 3 per 100k pretty much all the way until 2017. And the volumes are really small, we're talking yearly deaths around 60 in 2019-21 v 35 in 2007-2009.
You guys don't discuss the clear recent decreasing trend in suicides in Canada for young women. Did Canadians ban smartphones at some point?
Australia's rise seems to be in line with older cohorts - all ages have increasing suicide rates.
New Zealand trends don't seem to fit the general increase you're trying to prove here.
I appreciate the rigour of this, bringing it all together, its great analysis. For me it just prompts more questions (which is good!). I don't think this is as simple as one clear cut cause.
The precis of it is some guy selling sodium nitrate on the internet which can be used to die by suicide. But the wider message I took is the ease with which the means of killing yourself can be distributed today. As well as the online forums encouraging it. How much of the increase in suicides in recent years can be put down to this? Can we tease this out of the data? As I think this is a different reason (though perhaps somewhat linked) to the Smartphone/social media theory.
Wonderful analysis and yet I fear we waste our attention looking for silver bullet causes. Todays young people are growing in poorer soil than recent generations. Adolescence is hard enough and todays kids are struggling to thrive in a world with fewer resources, greater crises (Maine last week anyone?) and more risks (both real and perceived) all while spending less time with friends. What kids need is not a mystery - stability, love and attention. Phone use is the symptom not the cause. Doritos alone do not cause obesity. Kids with vibrant lives and compelling activity choices have low(er) social media use.
Lots of good data on suicides. Thank you. The focus on girls is somewhat expected and pc. The reality is that boys and men are many times more likely to commit suicide and no one really knows why. Your assumption about lethal means is weak. I would love to see the data that makes you think that. So many times people, and even researchers, will look at the number of men who used hanging and/or guns to complete suicide and compare those numbers to the women's numbers and jump quickly to think that lethal means must be the underlying reason for such a huge difference. But they fail to take into account the fact that women suicide far less often and therefore comparing the absolute numbers is very misleading. You would need to multiply the number of female suicides by lethal means by the 3-4 in order to get a comparison. The stats on lethal means are not easy to come by but it seems clear that when you take this into account the lethal means theory is a part of the difference but nowhere near being the main cause for the dramatic difference in male and female rates of completed suicide.
I do appreciate your identifying the increase in girls suicides. However, we are in great need of bright folks who are willing to take a look at just why men and boys suicide so much more often. Perhaps when we get that we will be in better shape to limit the suicides of both males and females. For more information on men and suicide I did a short video looking at this problem that can be seen here: https://menaregood.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-male-suicide
Thanks for your comments. I agree that much more needs to be said about boys. I focused on girls for this post because of the clear and consistent trends we see with depression, anxiety, and self-harm and its connection to smartphones and social media.
We plan to do much more on boys in upcoming posts. The work of Richard Reeves is fabulous on this topic as well: https://ofboysandmen.substack.com/
Hi Zach - thanks for your response. I will look forward to your work on boys and men. There is much to be done. I am betting that the video I linked above might be of some help to you on this. It is part one of a two part series on men and suicide. You might also find helpful the report I wrote when I was the vice-chair of the Maryland Commission for Men's Health on male suicide with recommendations for what Maryland might do about this. Here's a link to that one: https://open.substack.com/pub/menaregood/p/maryland-report-boys-men-and-suicide?r=ybmah&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Tom, I would argue that, instead of logging these events as 'attempted suicide', and suicide' we should log them as 'unsuccessful suicide attempts' and 'successful suicide attempts' which would make abundantly clear that women do NOT attempt suicide more than men. I practically wrote an entire article about it in a thread further up the page so I won't repeat it here, but I'd love to hear your take on it.
Boys have always been expected to "man up" which is not always possible. When women fall down, society is to blame. When men fall down, they are worthless losers who are failures. Perhaps we are starting to see a bit of equality in places we did not want it?
In addition to girls not having as much time with friends, I wonder if the reduction in dating and sexual activity has also played a role. Back in the day a sad girl would draw male attention. Even if the girl had no intentions, she might enjoy the company and make a new group of friends. I have no idea if this played a part or not, but I would be curious to play with some regression analysis, if any good data exists.
Suicides for girls or boys are tragic. However, once again a study puts females front and center over boys. Im not a scientist, the X axis (left side) for girls on your graphs is much smaller than boys. That gives the erroneous impression that girls are more at risk than girls.
I don't think Haidt has argued in any way that girls are more likely to die of suicide. He's simply pointing out that girls, based on their suicide rates, must be facing new problems that lead to suicidality (and his other articles make the argument very well that smart phones are the biggest and more relevant new problem). Nowhere does he say boys' suicide rates are not concerning, just that they seem to be less affected by whatever problem girls are recently facing. One researcher can only address so many things at once, and Haidt is currently trying to solve the puzzle of what is changing girls' suicide (and anxiety and depression) rates.
It's also worth highlighting the gender paradox of suicide that Haidt mentions - girls may in fact be trying to commit suicide more often than boys, albeit with less deadly methods.
A 'cry for help' can NOT be a suicide because it assumes survival. You can't be helped if you're dead. I find it really difficult to believe that so-called experts who say that girls use 'less lethal' methods because they're really seeking attention and help and yet STILL call it an 'attempted suicide'.
Yes, the emphasis Haidt places of adolescent female suicide due to smartphone use seems to be giving him a serious blind spot. What struck me is that the male suicide rate is three times the female rate and that the 45-64 suicide rate is much higher than for adolescents. Also the suicide rates for males prior to the adoption of smartphones doesn’t fit his main smartphone hypothesis and seems to be largely ignored. I’ll venture a guess based merely upon observation, but I think the atomization of community and loneliness is one of the major drivers. It would be fabulous to see these other cohorts addressed in greater depth and with some proposed solutions.
The high rates of suicide for males ages 45-64 is significant. I believe you are correct that loneliness is a major factor. Of divorces filed, 75% were initiated by women. Due to the overwhelming bias against men in family court many men will lose or have limited access to their children. They could end up financially devastated.
Women also tend to be the social hub of the family. So men can end up isolated. Friends they shared with their wives can evaporate. Just look at the % of homeless, drug addicted or incarcerated that are men. This is not to say women don’t have their own issues or suffer from divorce.
I think one solution to these major social changes is to help men adapt to a increasingly matriarchal world. To protect themselves and to build a life and relationship with the kids that is separate from the wife. In a healthy and loving way.
Or perhaps we need to accept that many men are no longer necessary. We are returning to a world where hypergamy is the norm and we may only need a few high-status men. I see a war-filled future as societies rush to use these leftover men while they still have potential value. Russia's war machine may be a hint of future international affairs.
I agree with many of the good points you’ve made. Their appears to be some commonality between genders regarding suicide. Their are also gender specific reasons which Haidt and others have done a good job identifying.
Frankly, it would be disturbing to me if I gave the impression that, in regards to suicide, one gender is more relevant than another. However, in our society today narrative trumps science. More so in the social sciences. It appears that their is a serious empathy gap for boys & men. We see it in academia and the media, but also in governmental organizations like the CDC. This gynocentric narrative is driven by the Obama/Biden admin & liberal Democrats.
No, that narrative is on both sides, but they use different vocabularies. As human beings we like favoring women. No one would draft pregnant women or even have the same expectations of women. We all like to favor women. That used to come at the cost of opportunity. Now the system is essentially rigged in the favor of the winners, and it is in no one's interest to change it. We will simply return to a more natural order where dominant males have many mates and most men have none. Suicide, addiction and prison and the future for most men, and no one will shed a tear. Males are disposable once again, at least until war becomes normal again.
The rapid rise in free-floating anxiety and dissociation in all youth and especially amongst females combines with the snail-like success of the feminist movement (more females than males attending college and professional schools, eg, and slower but real success in corporate and political fields) creates an ever-larger population susceptible to Mattias Desmets’ theory of mass formation resulting in a technocratic totalitarianism. This may be the ultimate societal disaster resulting from our smartphone revolution.
Absolutely. Leftover women can bear the children of the elites who do not have the time, while leftover men can fight wars or or be shipped off to settle Mars.
"Regarding the first fact, the ratio of suicides among teenage boys to teenage girls stands at a staggering 3:1. Understanding this significant disparity is crucial for any discussion about suicide. Suicidologists have found that this gender gap in suicide is partly due to the fact that boys tend to use more lethal means than girls, and have higher suicidal intent. Regarding methods, boys tend to use guns or asphyxiation, while girls are more likely to use more reversible methods, such as overdosing on pills (Note that rates of asphyxiation among girls have been rising in recent years)."
Does anyone besides me see the folly in explaining higher attempted suicide rates among females with 'less lethal means' and 'less suicidal intent'? These researchers are quite literally saying that females are *more* likely to attempt suicide because they have *less* intent and are *less* likely to use a method which will reliably get the job done. Such a glaring logical inconsistency really ought to be easy to spot but it doesn't seem to be.
In my view, these rates ought not to be labeled as 'suicide' and 'attempted suicide', but as 'successful suicide attempts' and 'unsuccessful suicide attempts'. This makes things much clearer and shows that males are *BOTH* more likely to kill themselves *AND* to attempt to kill themselves.
Why is this significant? Because it more clearly shows that suicidality is a 'masculine' trait, on the whole. This leads to another theory which could explain why the suicide rate among younger females is rising (which it definitely appears to be) and that is that they are being masculinized through woke feminist influences in society. They are acting more and more like men and assuming more masculine roles in the socio-economic structure.
Ho do you objectively classify which acts are suicide attempts?
Also, even if you have somehow access to objective info, how do you classify a single round of Russian roulette that is motivated by a PARTIAL desire to die by a 12-year-old child?
I almost laughed out loud when I read "[s]uicide is a 'hard metric'—it is a number carefully counted (not estimated) by national governments." These incidents, once logged as such, may well be "carefully counted" but that in no way makes them a precise measurement of anything because the determination is in no way definitive or even objective.
Here's just one glaring example of how a predominantly male form of suicide--suicide by cop--is always reported as 'homicide'.
"Results: Suicide by cop accounted for 11% (n=46) of all officer-involved shootings and 13% of all officer-involved justifiable homicides. Ages of suicidal individuals ranged from 18 to 54 years; 98% were male. Forty-eight percent of weapons possessed by suicidal individuals were firearms, 17% replica firearms. The median time from arrival of officers at the scene to the time of the shooting was 15 minutes with 70% of shootings occurring within 30 minutes of arrival of officers. Thirty-nine percent of cases involved domestic violence. Fifty-four percent of suicidal individuals sustained fatal gunshot wounds. All deaths were classified by the coroner as homicides, as opposed to suicides."
To make it a little clearer, one often hears the trope that, for females (or at least more females than males), an attempted suicide is a 'cry for help'. A cry for help can NOT be an attempted suicide because it relies on the assumption of survival. No one can help you once you're dead. I would go so far as to opine that there are at least some cases in which 'successful suicide attempts' are actually 'failed cries for help'.
Again, it makes no logical sense to deny the fact that we ignore people who actually killed themselves when calculating the number of people who tried to kill themselves. Suicide isn't suicide without intentionality. You can kill yourself accidentally, of course, but to fit the current definition of 'suicide', there has to be a legitimate, successful attempt. To fit the current definition of 'attempted suicide', it's only necessary to have survived an event in which the intentionality is ambiguous. And if you question that ambiguity, then how would you explain that the researchers rank 'intentionality' on a scale?
You make an interesting point. "Attempted suicide" as a label might be too inclusive, counting up girls who have done things that would not kill themselves and who never actually intended to kill themselves anyway. However, imagine a girl who decides to follow through on a drastic "cry for help", takes enough pills to cause her own death if she's not treated, and then unexpectedly and against her best efforts is unable to get treatment, resulting in her death. What label should that event have?
As I see it, a person whose goal is attention but whose choices are deadly without intervention should indeed be referred to as an attempted suicide. They attempted suicide for attention-based reasons, but it's not as if they attempted something else entirely. Suicide is the thing they attempted, attention is the motivation. Both can be true.
You are missing my point. What I'm saying is that it's silly to say that women attempt to kill themselves more often than men simply because they fail more often. A successful attempt is still an attempt.
As Kate replied (above) "[v]irtually every night I'm on call in paediatrics the ED has several teenage girls who have 'overdosed' ... preferred drugs are paracetamol and ibuprofen. They take 20 or 30 tablets ....and then they tell someone about it ...ie they want to be saved (They have no clue about liver toxicity.)"
How can one explain that this modality is so common if other than that it is widely publicized and that these girls know that hardly anyone receiving timely medical attention for this will not survive, at least in the short term?
It's often joked that girls are just too stupid to know how to get the job done but, in fact, it's usually the opposite. They use methods that they KNOW they will probably survive.
That's not what I'm suggesting at all. I'm just pointing out that the way things are currently labelled leads to the ridiculously false perception that women try to kill themselves more than men do. They actually, by any reasonable accounting, attempt suicide significantly less often than men.
Biologist here. Holy mackerel this "study" is misleading. Especially the title. A classic case of starting with a premise and attempting to make the data bend to fit it. Which scientists are specifically trained to avoid.
You really went as far as the classic "How To Lie With Statistics" trick of putting 2 graphs next to each other that look identical but use different number scales, resulting in the increase among males appearing to be less next to the increase among females. Presumably to support your inaccurate "especially girls" point.
In a period where the suicides per 100,000 rose from 10 to 17 for US Gen Z males and 2 to 5 for US Gen Z females, you really are trying to argue that the numbers for the girls are more concerning.
Really truly.
If you are a scientist and/or statistician, you've been specifically trained to be wary of the percentages-of-small-numbers fallacy. So much for your training!
Please, please stop posting this biased crap. It is not sound science. And it's encouraging people to ignore the growing gap between male and female suicide rates.
Great work, breaking down the statistics and giving form and comparison. I’m traveling right now and your topics made me a little more observant of the children (or lack thereof) in the East Asian country I’m visiting. I noticed that the children I encountered seemed far more interested in the screens in the environment than the people surrounding them. I work with pediatric populations and it was so surreal to see children so focused on screens (even billlboard type digital displays) whilst seeming disconnected from the humans around them. I found this quite jarring and unusual as ordinarily children (in decades past) would usually be observing people.
Another thought occurred to me is that the in-utero development of preborn children includes hearing speech and these days much of our communication is text-based so there is probably less language exposure and the rhythms and patterns of speech may be less frequent than in the past.
Hope is a requirement to visualize and anticipate a positive future. Our children are being assaulted day and night with scenarios that are so overwhelmingly negative. It’s almost impossible to avoid messages of Armageddon-like dystopian futures with catastrophic predictions. Children in the past would have easily avoided these negative narratives as they would need to pick up a paper or tune into a news channel. Now it is ubiquitous and served up around the clock arriving on your social media feed when you only intended to see cute animal videos or photos of friends.
Friends can help guide you through difficult situations and females need to discuss shared experiences to help them cope with the chaotic changes of puberty. Now these children have fewer friends, and thanks to family planning and divorce, they have fewer siblings, fewer cousins, smaller families.
I apologize for the random thoughts but I do see profound changes in the behavior of children and it’s very unusual compared to past generations. I was intrigued by the situation of “missing” family members and the fact that children have to turn to screens to interact with other children rather than living amongst families and neighbors with plenty of other children to spend time with.
We as humans need to be with other people, children need to be with other children. Isolation is hard yet it is part of the shifting culture where hearing and seeing other children through a screen is a desperate attempt to connect with others.
It's hard for me to see any trend toward children getting more negative information in their lives. A quick look at the content of children's literature over the ages makes it very clear that it consists largely of cautionary tales designed to frighten them.
I grew up watching people kill each other on TV shows and seeing real dead people on the news. Nuclear paranoia was all over the media from 'duck and cover' to Godzilla. I watched police sic dogs on civil rights marchers in real time.
I think the difference, today, is that there is rampant nihilism running through the social narratives that dominate in the media and, particularly, the school system. Children are being taught that there is nothing they can do about any of it. They're being systematically drained of hope and deprived of agency.
That’s actually an excellent point. Certainly the suicide statistics are an alarming sign that change is needed for children to feel the hope they need to go forward in life.
Teach a nation’s white children that they should hate themselves, their parents, their families and their nation and this is the result.
With their culture completely eroded to the point of being seen as a disease among their peers and bingo, you just created an extremely unstable situation. The ones that don’t turn “trans” so they can join the new culture of victimhood kill themselves. Then the ones that do turn trans, kill themselves once they realize they’ve destroyed their future as a human being.
Great job, liberal America, globalists, and other evil fucks across the globe.
I’m not sure there is a racial angle - if anything white kids are doing marginally better. 15% of black female high school students attempted suicide in the year leading up to the CDC’s 2019 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, compared to about 9% of white female students and about 12% of Hispanic female students. Actual suicide death rates for Black American girls ages 13 to 19 increased by 182% from 2001 to 2017, according to a 2019 study published in the Journal of Community Health.
Bit ranty....but basically bang on true. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
Information doesn't shame kids, people do
How are those people doing? In teaching our kids this errant information?
What? An interesting opinion - any facts?
I’ve got a few facts, but I’m sure by now you’ve gotten the gist of things with the release of the Nashville Shooters manifesto. That enough facts? Need more?
This.
What the data seems to show is fairly stable numbers for both genders up until the very early sixties, followed by a breakout and continued upward trend since. Less pronounced in girls but clearly shown, and accelerating for girls. I would argue that the issue isnt a play based vs phone based childhood, but a play/family based vs tech/isolated childhood. The beginning of the 1960's marked the rise of women entering the workforce, 2 income families, latchkey kids phenomenon, and the penetration of televisions into the average household. Its only gotten more isolating since. The smartphone is just another tool to isolate kids further from each other and from their families.
Latch key kids, true. However, they were also house holds where the power dynamic in the family was fundamentally changed. The traditional role of the father to represent the outside world and put demands on the kids was replaced by a non-discussable feminine model where the kid was to be praised only and never to be disappointed or made aware of their shortcomings. Always price and rubber tiles under the play ground.
Yeah the dads are all checked out playing video games instead of parenting, so your attempt to blame women fails.
But more generally, it's true that we did not evolve as a species to deal with world supremacy in a healthy way. We evolved simply to survive.
Wrong! Men actually increased their household chores over time since the sixties.
^^^This idiot thinks doing the laundry is parenting!
^^^ The idiot is the person who think women's and men's parenting contributions should be exactly same whilst overlooking biological factors.
Bless your lil' heart. Best to go back to your COD.
Excellent data collection, analyses, and presentation. In other words exemplary research. In particular the Suicide Rates by Age Groups and Generations graphs are very interesting and, as far as I know, original and significant contribution to suicide scholarship.
I'm fully convinced of After Babel's theory that smart phone usage is the largest direct cause of the increases in anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide over the past 12ish years. I'm sitting here brainstorming what I, a father of toddlers, can do between now and the beginning of their adolescence to ensure good mental health and strong relationships not just for my children but for their future friends and acquaintances.
I remember when I was about 13 and my older sister and I laughed about owning iPhones. She said, "It's kinda weird, right? We're like guinea pigs, who knows what this thing could do to us." It's not as funny now...
Hey Zach, the fact that suicides are going down for teenagers in the non-Anglosphere is a major challenge to the social media hypothesis. You acknowledge this, but put it to the side by speculating that the data is not broken down by sex and does not have a separate category for 10-14 year olds.
This is easy for me to say since I'm not doing all the painstaking research, but I would have waited to publish this until I had either (a) acquired the data on female 10-14 year olds outside the Anglosphere or (b) developed a more fleshed-out theory for why the rise in teen suicides is specific to the Anglosphere.
Hi Chris, thanks for this.
I am currently working on other posts that look beyond the anglosphere and nordic nations (for anxiety, depression, and later, on suicide), but as David said, it becomes quite difficult to find reliable trends data.
Let's stay in touch and I'll keep you updated as I continue my research -- it is very possible my working hypothesis on individualism/collectivism may shift, but based on everything I have seen:
Stable in-person communities/families, religiosity, durkheimian moral order, along with a variety of other factors are protective against suicide and poor mental health. Individualism atomizes society and technology amplifies this (as Jean notes in her book, Generations).
Of course, there is much much more research to be done here!
It makes sense to publish the Anglo data first since it needs explanation -- albeit one that may not be the one Haidt promotes (e.g. it could be the influence of Anglo-sphere news and entertainment media as well as the effects of Gen X parenting).
It is actually very difficult to get RELIABLE suicide trends data for most nations. I've done some work on this two years ago and was never convinced that, for example, the WHO database is truly valid for trends. So it is unclear how long it will take Zach to do what I failed to do a while ago: get a truly reliable data for many large non-Anglo nations. This is an issue you will fully appreciate only if you try to collect suicide international trends data on your own (as I did).
I of course do agree with you that non-Anglo suicide presents a major challenge to Haidt and Twenge and I think it would have been best had Zach restricted his article to data analysis rather than end it with promoting the Haidt and Twenge hypothesis.
That said, the core of the paper seems excellent and raises the entirely valid question as to why suicides rates of girls have risen so much in ALL the Anglo nations during the previous decade.
I would be curious to know if the data are skewed in any way by males identifying as females and females identifying as males. Taking into account historic trends, males identifying as females (and being counted as such) would tend to drive the female rates up--particularly because there is a tremendously high suicide rate among MTF trannies. Women identifying as males, conversely could have the effect of making the male suicide rate appear lower.
My sense is the numbers of trans kids is a tiny percentage of the overall population. Anecdotally as someone who works in clinical social work there seems to be a trend of more girls identifying as boys seeking care than males who identify as female.
The number of trans identifying in the US has doubled in the past 5 years. Half the total number of trans (around 2.6 million) in the US are teens and young adults, so around 1.3 million. Currently there are around 5,000 suicides between the ages of 15 and 24 in the US.
You'd have to do enough research to publish a paper to determine how much it would skew the numbers regarding the increase in young female suicide, but it's reasonable to assume it would have statistical significance at the very least.
Agreed it would show up in the stats. (About 25% of that 1.3M identify as non-binary as well.) Suicide rates for transgender youth are profoundly high. What’s fascinating is how split the US & Europe are regarding gender affirming care. Europe sees the US as borderline unethical and the US cites whatever it takes to reduce suicide risk as a debate ending harm reduction strategy.
The stats are almost useless, in a sense, because they're so ideologically biased. You say that 25% of those identifying as trans also identify as non-binary and I don't doubt that you''ve seen that statistic or even that's it's accurate but, for Pete's sake, trans and non-binary are mutually exclusive!
Ouch, “gen x parenting” as contributing to higher rates of suicide. As a Gen x parent, I can say that the Gen x parents I know are the most loving examples of parenting I’ve seen across the generations. Is our crime being TOO caring?
It very well could be. Little hurts build resistance and emotional maturity. There is a certain emotional frailty i see in young people that is mind blowing to me. Kids will always be cruel, and I would love to see if having older siblings reduces suicide risk (older bro or sis providing some healthy bullying).
In some ways I would compare it to the increase in misogyny one sees in men raised by single mothers. It shouldn't happen, but it does.
It’s interesting what you said in increased misogyny from men raised by single moms. That has not been my experience at all with men in my life, so I would be interested to see the research on that. But it does track bin some ways because my sons were raised by a lot of women and they definitely display a lot of misogyny toward us, unfortunately.
Actually Haidt does blame parenting (but also society in general) for over-protection of kids offline and under-protection of kids online, which he thinks leads to MH problems. The under-protection is obviously not due to lack of caring but due to a limited understanding and control of online risks.
My view, however, is more specific to suicide: the suicide and overdose rates of parents have been steadily rising since circa 2000 as Gen X entered parenting -- it is this childhood trauma that might have eventually led to much higher suicide rates among teens.
Great data on suicide rates.
Not so great tying to phones. I have gen Z (what I refer to as zoomer) kids. My girls got the first iPhone the day it came out.
Why do I mention that? I as a parent was very involved in how my kids were using the phone and the internet and social media. My kids largely used Facebook in their high school years to plan parties on the spur of the moment - ie engage in more face-to-face time. Why is that?
I speculate it’s because the community we lived in focused on being socially involved in high school and as a result how they engaged in college and later in life.
I viewed the phone as another tool for my kids, not some way of making it so they could be entertained without my involvement.
Maybe the tool is not the problem. Maybe it’s how parents thought about the tool. I suspect many parents liked the internet and it extending to phones because they had to spend less time entertaining their kids.
I tend to focus on parents as the reason zoomers are more anxious, depressed, and suicidal. Parents gave the kids internet and a phone without understanding the implications. Why did parents do that? Do they still largely do that today?
You just gave the answer to the problems teenagers are faced with ie; parents absent from the needs of the child, love, empathy, support, guidance, and respect of mankind.
That's a good point and it raises the more general question of what we know about changes in parenting practices. Unfortunately there seems little research on this in relation to adolescent mental health.
This problem can be traced back to the 1970's when Dr. SPOCK published a manual on how to discipline children. Then in the years of 2000 the wonderful discovery of cell phones and internet that gave those young people a new way of communicating. Raised without responsibility and respect for fellow mankind they embarked on a non oral form of communicating. Now they can demean and slander anyone without facing them. This onslaught of verbal abuse has caused anxiety, depression, hatred, and a myriad of personal destruction of minds that are already confused of their place in life.
I'm bought in to there being a link between how children are raised in the world today v in the past. I'm bought in to social media and phones having a part to play in this. But I do think the reasons are nuanced and probably have a lot to do with the place the child grows up. I think this data actually highlights this. Although the principle behind the article is that all the countries show the same trends, on another view of the data I might argue all 5 countries are in fact showing different trends.
Older women in the US had some startling rises in suicide rates until they seem to have dropped off a cliff in 2020 - which rather skews the comparison to younger cohort rates.
In the UK, 15-19 female rates are between 2 and 3 per 100k pretty much all the way until 2017. And the volumes are really small, we're talking yearly deaths around 60 in 2019-21 v 35 in 2007-2009.
You guys don't discuss the clear recent decreasing trend in suicides in Canada for young women. Did Canadians ban smartphones at some point?
Australia's rise seems to be in line with older cohorts - all ages have increasing suicide rates.
New Zealand trends don't seem to fit the general increase you're trying to prove here.
I appreciate the rigour of this, bringing it all together, its great analysis. For me it just prompts more questions (which is good!). I don't think this is as simple as one clear cut cause.
Just came across this article - https://torontolife.com/deep-dives/kenneth-law-suicide-kits/
The precis of it is some guy selling sodium nitrate on the internet which can be used to die by suicide. But the wider message I took is the ease with which the means of killing yourself can be distributed today. As well as the online forums encouraging it. How much of the increase in suicides in recent years can be put down to this? Can we tease this out of the data? As I think this is a different reason (though perhaps somewhat linked) to the Smartphone/social media theory.
Wonderful analysis and yet I fear we waste our attention looking for silver bullet causes. Todays young people are growing in poorer soil than recent generations. Adolescence is hard enough and todays kids are struggling to thrive in a world with fewer resources, greater crises (Maine last week anyone?) and more risks (both real and perceived) all while spending less time with friends. What kids need is not a mystery - stability, love and attention. Phone use is the symptom not the cause. Doritos alone do not cause obesity. Kids with vibrant lives and compelling activity choices have low(er) social media use.
Lots of good data on suicides. Thank you. The focus on girls is somewhat expected and pc. The reality is that boys and men are many times more likely to commit suicide and no one really knows why. Your assumption about lethal means is weak. I would love to see the data that makes you think that. So many times people, and even researchers, will look at the number of men who used hanging and/or guns to complete suicide and compare those numbers to the women's numbers and jump quickly to think that lethal means must be the underlying reason for such a huge difference. But they fail to take into account the fact that women suicide far less often and therefore comparing the absolute numbers is very misleading. You would need to multiply the number of female suicides by lethal means by the 3-4 in order to get a comparison. The stats on lethal means are not easy to come by but it seems clear that when you take this into account the lethal means theory is a part of the difference but nowhere near being the main cause for the dramatic difference in male and female rates of completed suicide.
I do appreciate your identifying the increase in girls suicides. However, we are in great need of bright folks who are willing to take a look at just why men and boys suicide so much more often. Perhaps when we get that we will be in better shape to limit the suicides of both males and females. For more information on men and suicide I did a short video looking at this problem that can be seen here: https://menaregood.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-male-suicide
Hi Tom,
Thanks for your comments. I agree that much more needs to be said about boys. I focused on girls for this post because of the clear and consistent trends we see with depression, anxiety, and self-harm and its connection to smartphones and social media.
We plan to do much more on boys in upcoming posts. The work of Richard Reeves is fabulous on this topic as well: https://ofboysandmen.substack.com/
Hi Zach - thanks for your response. I will look forward to your work on boys and men. There is much to be done. I am betting that the video I linked above might be of some help to you on this. It is part one of a two part series on men and suicide. You might also find helpful the report I wrote when I was the vice-chair of the Maryland Commission for Men's Health on male suicide with recommendations for what Maryland might do about this. Here's a link to that one: https://open.substack.com/pub/menaregood/p/maryland-report-boys-men-and-suicide?r=ybmah&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Well said Tom! I also thought the video was informative.
Thanks Half Newfie!
Tom, I would argue that, instead of logging these events as 'attempted suicide', and suicide' we should log them as 'unsuccessful suicide attempts' and 'successful suicide attempts' which would make abundantly clear that women do NOT attempt suicide more than men. I practically wrote an entire article about it in a thread further up the page so I won't repeat it here, but I'd love to hear your take on it.
I like that idea. maybe even FAILED suicides. lol
As I like to say, many 'successful suicides' could more accurately be called 'failed cries for help'.
Boys have always been expected to "man up" which is not always possible. When women fall down, society is to blame. When men fall down, they are worthless losers who are failures. Perhaps we are starting to see a bit of equality in places we did not want it?
In addition to girls not having as much time with friends, I wonder if the reduction in dating and sexual activity has also played a role. Back in the day a sad girl would draw male attention. Even if the girl had no intentions, she might enjoy the company and make a new group of friends. I have no idea if this played a part or not, but I would be curious to play with some regression analysis, if any good data exists.
Suicides for girls or boys are tragic. However, once again a study puts females front and center over boys. Im not a scientist, the X axis (left side) for girls on your graphs is much smaller than boys. That gives the erroneous impression that girls are more at risk than girls.
I don't think Haidt has argued in any way that girls are more likely to die of suicide. He's simply pointing out that girls, based on their suicide rates, must be facing new problems that lead to suicidality (and his other articles make the argument very well that smart phones are the biggest and more relevant new problem). Nowhere does he say boys' suicide rates are not concerning, just that they seem to be less affected by whatever problem girls are recently facing. One researcher can only address so many things at once, and Haidt is currently trying to solve the puzzle of what is changing girls' suicide (and anxiety and depression) rates.
It's also worth highlighting the gender paradox of suicide that Haidt mentions - girls may in fact be trying to commit suicide more often than boys, albeit with less deadly methods.
A 'cry for help' can NOT be a suicide because it assumes survival. You can't be helped if you're dead. I find it really difficult to believe that so-called experts who say that girls use 'less lethal' methods because they're really seeking attention and help and yet STILL call it an 'attempted suicide'.
Yes, the emphasis Haidt places of adolescent female suicide due to smartphone use seems to be giving him a serious blind spot. What struck me is that the male suicide rate is three times the female rate and that the 45-64 suicide rate is much higher than for adolescents. Also the suicide rates for males prior to the adoption of smartphones doesn’t fit his main smartphone hypothesis and seems to be largely ignored. I’ll venture a guess based merely upon observation, but I think the atomization of community and loneliness is one of the major drivers. It would be fabulous to see these other cohorts addressed in greater depth and with some proposed solutions.
The high rates of suicide for males ages 45-64 is significant. I believe you are correct that loneliness is a major factor. Of divorces filed, 75% were initiated by women. Due to the overwhelming bias against men in family court many men will lose or have limited access to their children. They could end up financially devastated.
Women also tend to be the social hub of the family. So men can end up isolated. Friends they shared with their wives can evaporate. Just look at the % of homeless, drug addicted or incarcerated that are men. This is not to say women don’t have their own issues or suffer from divorce.
I think one solution to these major social changes is to help men adapt to a increasingly matriarchal world. To protect themselves and to build a life and relationship with the kids that is separate from the wife. In a healthy and loving way.
Or perhaps we need to accept that many men are no longer necessary. We are returning to a world where hypergamy is the norm and we may only need a few high-status men. I see a war-filled future as societies rush to use these leftover men while they still have potential value. Russia's war machine may be a hint of future international affairs.
I agree with many of the good points you’ve made. Their appears to be some commonality between genders regarding suicide. Their are also gender specific reasons which Haidt and others have done a good job identifying.
Frankly, it would be disturbing to me if I gave the impression that, in regards to suicide, one gender is more relevant than another. However, in our society today narrative trumps science. More so in the social sciences. It appears that their is a serious empathy gap for boys & men. We see it in academia and the media, but also in governmental organizations like the CDC. This gynocentric narrative is driven by the Obama/Biden admin & liberal Democrats.
No, that narrative is on both sides, but they use different vocabularies. As human beings we like favoring women. No one would draft pregnant women or even have the same expectations of women. We all like to favor women. That used to come at the cost of opportunity. Now the system is essentially rigged in the favor of the winners, and it is in no one's interest to change it. We will simply return to a more natural order where dominant males have many mates and most men have none. Suicide, addiction and prison and the future for most men, and no one will shed a tear. Males are disposable once again, at least until war becomes normal again.
Sorry meant ‘girls are more at risk than boys’.
The rapid rise in free-floating anxiety and dissociation in all youth and especially amongst females combines with the snail-like success of the feminist movement (more females than males attending college and professional schools, eg, and slower but real success in corporate and political fields) creates an ever-larger population susceptible to Mattias Desmets’ theory of mass formation resulting in a technocratic totalitarianism. This may be the ultimate societal disaster resulting from our smartphone revolution.
Absolutely. Leftover women can bear the children of the elites who do not have the time, while leftover men can fight wars or or be shipped off to settle Mars.
"Regarding the first fact, the ratio of suicides among teenage boys to teenage girls stands at a staggering 3:1. Understanding this significant disparity is crucial for any discussion about suicide. Suicidologists have found that this gender gap in suicide is partly due to the fact that boys tend to use more lethal means than girls, and have higher suicidal intent. Regarding methods, boys tend to use guns or asphyxiation, while girls are more likely to use more reversible methods, such as overdosing on pills (Note that rates of asphyxiation among girls have been rising in recent years)."
Does anyone besides me see the folly in explaining higher attempted suicide rates among females with 'less lethal means' and 'less suicidal intent'? These researchers are quite literally saying that females are *more* likely to attempt suicide because they have *less* intent and are *less* likely to use a method which will reliably get the job done. Such a glaring logical inconsistency really ought to be easy to spot but it doesn't seem to be.
In my view, these rates ought not to be labeled as 'suicide' and 'attempted suicide', but as 'successful suicide attempts' and 'unsuccessful suicide attempts'. This makes things much clearer and shows that males are *BOTH* more likely to kill themselves *AND* to attempt to kill themselves.
Why is this significant? Because it more clearly shows that suicidality is a 'masculine' trait, on the whole. This leads to another theory which could explain why the suicide rate among younger females is rising (which it definitely appears to be) and that is that they are being masculinized through woke feminist influences in society. They are acting more and more like men and assuming more masculine roles in the socio-economic structure.
Ho do you objectively classify which acts are suicide attempts?
Also, even if you have somehow access to objective info, how do you classify a single round of Russian roulette that is motivated by a PARTIAL desire to die by a 12-year-old child?
That's a very important question.
I almost laughed out loud when I read "[s]uicide is a 'hard metric'—it is a number carefully counted (not estimated) by national governments." These incidents, once logged as such, may well be "carefully counted" but that in no way makes them a precise measurement of anything because the determination is in no way definitive or even objective.
Here's just one glaring example of how a predominantly male form of suicide--suicide by cop--is always reported as 'homicide'.
"Results: Suicide by cop accounted for 11% (n=46) of all officer-involved shootings and 13% of all officer-involved justifiable homicides. Ages of suicidal individuals ranged from 18 to 54 years; 98% were male. Forty-eight percent of weapons possessed by suicidal individuals were firearms, 17% replica firearms. The median time from arrival of officers at the scene to the time of the shooting was 15 minutes with 70% of shootings occurring within 30 minutes of arrival of officers. Thirty-nine percent of cases involved domestic violence. Fifty-four percent of suicidal individuals sustained fatal gunshot wounds. All deaths were classified by the coroner as homicides, as opposed to suicides."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9832661/
Yes, good point, and the suicides who drive their auto into a brick wall at 80 mph. That is rarely listed as a suicide but as a traffic accident.
I think you may have missed my point.
To make it a little clearer, one often hears the trope that, for females (or at least more females than males), an attempted suicide is a 'cry for help'. A cry for help can NOT be an attempted suicide because it relies on the assumption of survival. No one can help you once you're dead. I would go so far as to opine that there are at least some cases in which 'successful suicide attempts' are actually 'failed cries for help'.
Again, it makes no logical sense to deny the fact that we ignore people who actually killed themselves when calculating the number of people who tried to kill themselves. Suicide isn't suicide without intentionality. You can kill yourself accidentally, of course, but to fit the current definition of 'suicide', there has to be a legitimate, successful attempt. To fit the current definition of 'attempted suicide', it's only necessary to have survived an event in which the intentionality is ambiguous. And if you question that ambiguity, then how would you explain that the researchers rank 'intentionality' on a scale?
You make an interesting point. "Attempted suicide" as a label might be too inclusive, counting up girls who have done things that would not kill themselves and who never actually intended to kill themselves anyway. However, imagine a girl who decides to follow through on a drastic "cry for help", takes enough pills to cause her own death if she's not treated, and then unexpectedly and against her best efforts is unable to get treatment, resulting in her death. What label should that event have?
As I see it, a person whose goal is attention but whose choices are deadly without intervention should indeed be referred to as an attempted suicide. They attempted suicide for attention-based reasons, but it's not as if they attempted something else entirely. Suicide is the thing they attempted, attention is the motivation. Both can be true.
You are missing my point. What I'm saying is that it's silly to say that women attempt to kill themselves more often than men simply because they fail more often. A successful attempt is still an attempt.
As Kate replied (above) "[v]irtually every night I'm on call in paediatrics the ED has several teenage girls who have 'overdosed' ... preferred drugs are paracetamol and ibuprofen. They take 20 or 30 tablets ....and then they tell someone about it ...ie they want to be saved (They have no clue about liver toxicity.)"
How can one explain that this modality is so common if other than that it is widely publicized and that these girls know that hardly anyone receiving timely medical attention for this will not survive, at least in the short term?
It's often joked that girls are just too stupid to know how to get the job done but, in fact, it's usually the opposite. They use methods that they KNOW they will probably survive.
That's not what I'm suggesting at all. I'm just pointing out that the way things are currently labelled leads to the ridiculously false perception that women try to kill themselves more than men do. They actually, by any reasonable accounting, attempt suicide significantly less often than men.
Biologist here. Holy mackerel this "study" is misleading. Especially the title. A classic case of starting with a premise and attempting to make the data bend to fit it. Which scientists are specifically trained to avoid.
You really went as far as the classic "How To Lie With Statistics" trick of putting 2 graphs next to each other that look identical but use different number scales, resulting in the increase among males appearing to be less next to the increase among females. Presumably to support your inaccurate "especially girls" point.
In a period where the suicides per 100,000 rose from 10 to 17 for US Gen Z males and 2 to 5 for US Gen Z females, you really are trying to argue that the numbers for the girls are more concerning.
Really truly.
If you are a scientist and/or statistician, you've been specifically trained to be wary of the percentages-of-small-numbers fallacy. So much for your training!
Please, please stop posting this biased crap. It is not sound science. And it's encouraging people to ignore the growing gap between male and female suicide rates.
Great work, breaking down the statistics and giving form and comparison. I’m traveling right now and your topics made me a little more observant of the children (or lack thereof) in the East Asian country I’m visiting. I noticed that the children I encountered seemed far more interested in the screens in the environment than the people surrounding them. I work with pediatric populations and it was so surreal to see children so focused on screens (even billlboard type digital displays) whilst seeming disconnected from the humans around them. I found this quite jarring and unusual as ordinarily children (in decades past) would usually be observing people.
Another thought occurred to me is that the in-utero development of preborn children includes hearing speech and these days much of our communication is text-based so there is probably less language exposure and the rhythms and patterns of speech may be less frequent than in the past.
Hope is a requirement to visualize and anticipate a positive future. Our children are being assaulted day and night with scenarios that are so overwhelmingly negative. It’s almost impossible to avoid messages of Armageddon-like dystopian futures with catastrophic predictions. Children in the past would have easily avoided these negative narratives as they would need to pick up a paper or tune into a news channel. Now it is ubiquitous and served up around the clock arriving on your social media feed when you only intended to see cute animal videos or photos of friends.
Friends can help guide you through difficult situations and females need to discuss shared experiences to help them cope with the chaotic changes of puberty. Now these children have fewer friends, and thanks to family planning and divorce, they have fewer siblings, fewer cousins, smaller families.
I apologize for the random thoughts but I do see profound changes in the behavior of children and it’s very unusual compared to past generations. I was intrigued by the situation of “missing” family members and the fact that children have to turn to screens to interact with other children rather than living amongst families and neighbors with plenty of other children to spend time with.
We as humans need to be with other people, children need to be with other children. Isolation is hard yet it is part of the shifting culture where hearing and seeing other children through a screen is a desperate attempt to connect with others.
It's hard for me to see any trend toward children getting more negative information in their lives. A quick look at the content of children's literature over the ages makes it very clear that it consists largely of cautionary tales designed to frighten them.
I grew up watching people kill each other on TV shows and seeing real dead people on the news. Nuclear paranoia was all over the media from 'duck and cover' to Godzilla. I watched police sic dogs on civil rights marchers in real time.
I think the difference, today, is that there is rampant nihilism running through the social narratives that dominate in the media and, particularly, the school system. Children are being taught that there is nothing they can do about any of it. They're being systematically drained of hope and deprived of agency.
That’s actually an excellent point. Certainly the suicide statistics are an alarming sign that change is needed for children to feel the hope they need to go forward in life.
Respect yourself, respect others.