Changes in Parents’ Mental Health Did Not Drive the Adolescent Mental Health Crisis

Jean Twenge rebuts another skeptical argument

Intro from Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch:

We love it when critics of our work propose alternative explanations for the youth mental health crisis. Zach and I keep a whole collaborative review doc full of such theories, which we invite you to view and comment on. 

One alternative that some critics have recently proposed is that we shouldn’t be looking to the kids to find the source of the mental health crisis; instead, we should be looking to the parents. These critics argue that because parent-aged adults have higher rates of suicide than teens and those rates have been rising, it might be that parents got more depressed and suicidal in the 2010s, and that has—in turn—influenced their children.  

Jean Twenge has been masterful at testing these alternative theories and showing that all of them contradict the timing, the demographics, or the international dimension of the epidemic. (See Jean’s post: Here are 13 Other Explanations for the Adolescent Mental Health Crisis. None of Them Work.) In fact, Jean’s latest post here at After Babel showed that Suicide Rates Are Now Higher Among Young Adults Than the Middle-Aged.

In today’s cross-post from her Substack, Generation Tech, Jean shows that the “parents first” hypothesis is out of sync with the cross-generational data from the 2010s. Jean’s post is important because—as far as we know—she is the first to use data that distinguishes between parents and non-parents. (This is not possible to do with suicide rate data). Her graphs below tell a powerful story: something happened to the teens, not to the parents, in the 2010s. She also shows that if anything happened to the adults, it seems to have mostly happened to the non-parents. 

Please, send us more alternative explanations. If you have one, put it in the comments at the end.¹

— Jon and Zach

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Several critics of the idea that Gen Z is suffering a mental health crisis have argued that attention should instead be focused on the middle-aged, particularly middle-aged parents. This is the group experiencing high levels of mental health issues, they say.

If so, that could be why teen depression has increased – not smartphones and social media, but depressed and distressed parents. Past research has indeed found that when more parents experience mental distress, so do their children.

In an article headlined “The kids are all right, but the adults are struggling,” sociologist Mike Males wrote, “It’s not the youth who are creating the crisis. It’s their parents’ generation.” He then went next-level, declaring that “College counselors likewise invented a ‘student mental health crisis’ (despite the fact that undergraduate violence and suicide rates are unusually low) to win more funding.”

Psychologist Chris Ferguson recently argued that discussion is too centered on “Gen Z (e.g. ‘…a generation in crisis…’), ignoring that mental health issues are much worse among their parents.” Elsewhere, he contended that the rise in youth depression is not due to smartphones and social media but to their parents’ mental health issues: “It’s intergenerational. Kids are in pain because their families are in pain.”

These statements offer up a testable hypothesis: Are mental health issues worse among the middle-aged parents of teens and young adults, or among teens and young adults themselves? And have mental health issues increased among parents? To my knowledge, no one else has examined mental health trends specifically among parents in the large national datasets.

My previous post showed that the suicide rate for U.S. adults in their 20s is now higher than that for middle-aged adults, reversing a long-standing trend. That happened partially because suicide rates have increased so much among young people. So in terms of the suicide rate, a “hard” statistic uninfluenced by self-report bias, the trends for young adults are definitely worse than for the middle-aged.

In suicide data, however, there is no way of separating the data by parents vs. non-parents. But we can examine depression, suicidal thoughts, and mental distress among parents with children 17 or under at home in the nationally representative National Survey on Drug Use and Health. NSDUH takes a cross-section of the whole population, not just those who seek help from doctors or therapists; thus, trends cannot be due to over-diagnosis or more willingness to get professional help.

We’ll first consider rates of major depressive episode (clinical-level depression according to the DSM criteria). By that indicator, teens are doing much worse than middle-aged adults with children at home (see Figure 1). In recent years, 1 in 5 teens suffered major depression, compared to 1 in 14 of parents ages 35 to 64. Depression rates among parents have barely budged, while rates for teens have more than doubled. The two groups had fairly similar depression rates in the late 2000s, but that began to change after 2011.

Figure 1. Percent suffering from a major depressive episode in the last 12 months, U.S. adolescents 12-17 and 35-64 year olds with and without minor children at home, 2008-2022. Source: National Survey of Drug Use and Health. Analyzed and graphed by Jean Twenge for the Generation Tech Substack. NOTE: Due to privacy concerns, NS-DUH reports age in groups rather than individual years. 35- to 64-year-olds is the age grouping overlapping the most with those most likely to have adolescent children (roughly 35-59).

Not only that, but middle-aged adults with children at home are actually less likely to experience minor depression than middle-aged adults without children at home. And, in sharp contrast to teens, neither group shows an increase in depression since 2008.

Breaking teens vs. parents down by gender shows an even starker pattern, with an enormous increase in depression among teen girls, a smaller (absolute) rise among teen boys, and little change among mothers or fathers with children still at home (see Figure 2). Major depression among mothers actually declined slightly (from 9.6% to 7.3%) between 2011 and 2022.

Figure 2. Percent suffering from a major depressive episode in the last 12 months, U.S. adolescents 12-17 and parents 35-64, by gender, 2008-2022. Source: National Survey of Drug Use and Health. Analyzed and graphed by Jean Twenge for the Generation Tech Substack. NOTE: Mothers and fathers are those ages 35-64 with children 17 or under living in their household.

Depression rates are now higher among teen boys than among middle-aged mothers, a complete reversal from the usual pattern of females being more likely to suffer from depression than males.

What about even more serious issues, such as thinking about suicide? NSDUH does not ask that question of teens, but it does ask it of young adults. Here, too, rates for parents are much lower than for young adults, and the rates for young adults have more than doubled (see Figure 3). By the 2020s, 1 in 8 young adults had considered taking their own life in the previous year. For parents, it was less than 1 in 30, and lower for those in the same age range without children at home.

Figure 3. Percent having suicidal thoughts in the last 12 months, U.S. young adults 18-25 and 35-64 year olds with and without minor children at home, 2008-2022. Source: National Survey of Drug Use and Health. Analyzed and graphed by Jean Twenge for the Generation Tech Substack.

When broken down by gender, there is very little change among either mothers or fathers, while the number of young adult men and women having suicidal thoughts doubled (see Figure 4). The highest rates of suicidal ideation are among young women, where nearly 1 out of 6 thought about taking their own lives in the last year.

Figure 4. Percent having suicidal thoughts in the last 12 months, U.S. young adults 18-25 and parents 35-64, by gender, 2008-2022. Source: National Survey of Drug Use and Health. Analyzed and graphed by Jean Twenge for the Generation Tech Substack.

Major depression and suicidal thoughts are very serious issues. Perhaps parents are less likely to have these issues because they are parents; for example, they may not think about suicide because they can’t imagine leaving their kids on their own. Thus, it might be good to examine less serious but still troubling symptoms of mental health issues, such as mental distress. NSDUH includes the Kessler-6, a 6-question measure of mental distress including questions about nervousness, hopelessness, and feeling everything is an effort. Even if parents aren’t considering taking their own lives, they may certainly be more susceptible to mental distress like this.

Except they aren’t. Serious mental distress is much higher among young adults, where it has more than doubled since the early 2010s. Mental distress among parents is very low and has ticked up only slightly, from 4% in the early 2010s to about 5% in the 2020s (see Figure 5). Mental distress increased slightly 2019-2022 among middle-aged adults without children at home, but not among those with children.

Figure 5. Percentage with serious mental distress, U.S. young adults (18-25) and 35-64 year olds with and without minor children at home, 2008-2022. Source: National Survey of Drug Use and Health. Analyzed and graphed by Jean Twenge for the Generation Tech Substack. NOTE: Scores on the Kessler-6 range from 0 to 24. A score of 13 or higher is considered serious mental distress.

Similar to the other mental health indicators, serious mental distress is highest among young women and lowest among mothers and fathers (see Figure 6). There are large increases among young adults since 2011 and only slight change among middle-aged parents.

Figure 6. Percentage with serious mental distress, U.S. young adults (18-25) and parents (35-64), by gender, 2008-2022. Source: National Survey of Drug Use and Health. Analyzed and graphed by Jean Twenge for the Generation Tech Substack.

Since NSDUH doesn’t allow precision in examining age groups and doesn’t include a consistent measure of child age, it admittedly may be including some people in the parent group who aren’t parents with adolescents. To do that, we can turn to the BRFSS, administered by the CDC, which has age in more precise groupings and – at least in 2021-22 – an indicator of child age.

Middle-aged people with teen children (the 40-55 age group) have fewer days of poor mental health than those in the same age group without minor children at home (see Figure 7). Those with tween children (the 35-49 age group) also have fewer days of poor mental health than others in the age bracket. But who has the highest number of poor mental health days? The youngest adults, those ages 18 to 22. Other analyses of this dataset show a marked increase in poor mental health days among young adults in the last decade.

Figure 7. Days per month in poor mental health, U.S. adults, by children in household and age, 2021-2022. Source: Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. Analyzed and graphed by Jean Twenge for the Generation Tech Substack. NOTE: Graph shows parents with children ages 10 to 14 for those ages 35-49 and parents with children 15-17 for those ages 40-55, to capture the most common ages for parents with tween and teen children, respectively, and compare them to those without minor children at home in the same age range.

Thus, across five metrics — suicide, major depression, suicidal thoughts, mental distress, and days in poor mental health — young people are suffering more than the middle-aged, and that suffering has increased considerably since 2011. None of this is consistent with the narrative that parents’ mental health issues or intergenerational family dynamics are the cause of the mental health crisis among Gen Z. Instead, it must be something happening to the generation themselves.

There happens to be something else that shows the pattern of larger change among teens and young adults and less among older people: Face-to-face social interaction, which has decreased by far the most among the young (see Figure 8).

Figure 8. Minutes per day socializing with others in person, U.S. teens and adults 15 years of age and older, 2003-2022. Source: American Time Use Survey, Bureau of Labor Statistics. Analyzed and graphed by Jean Twenge for the Generation Tech Substack. (NOTE: 2020 data is excluded.)

And what has replaced face-to-face socializing? More online communication, which is not as good for mental health. It should not considered radical to suggest this enormous shift might have an impact on rates of depression.

It should also not be so easy to declare that we’re focusing on the wrong age group when the data so clearly point toward an overwhelming crisis among teens and young adults, and not among middle-aged parents.

These findings are yet another reason why the rise in teen depression is so remarkable: It happened at a time when violent crime, teen pregnancy, problematic alcohol use, family dysfunction, unemployment, and now parental depression are at historically low or at least stable rates. So much is going right for young people these days, including the mental health of their parents. Yet they are still much more depressed than teens in the 2000s, likely because they spent more time online, less time with friends in person, and less time sleeping. That explanation fits the data much better than declaring an epidemic of depression among parents that, by the best data we have, doesn’t exist.

1. One additional explanation we are investigating is “abandonment deaths,” an interesting argument made by David Stein. Another is the role of progressive ideologies that swept through the Anglos in the early 2010s—for an overview of our current response to that, read this post.). Zach is also working on a new Google Doc (it is still in preliminary stages) that is looking specifically at what has been happening to adults—more broadly—since the early 2010s.