I also appreciate the analysis by Jonathan and definitely agree that children need boundaries and structure with a foundation of love and attention. One fact that I think is being left out of Jonathan‘s analysis, and one, given that he is an economist, he should consider: the economics of family life. Over the past 50 years Our economy has shifted from a single wage earner being able to support a family and even buy a home, leaving one parent with more energy to invest in the children, to now either both parents are working or it’s a single parent family with that parent working. Parents are TIRED!. Providing structure and authoritative Parenting takes a lot of energy. Being tired is no excuse for not providing boundaries and controls over social media. However, it sure is easier to let your child play on an electronic device when you’re tired. The child seems happy. Maybe you feel a little guilty because you know it’s not the best thing for them but you gotta get to bed and get up the next morning and go to work. The secular trend of increased time working by parent figures in the family is completely lacking in the current analysis and I think it’s a major factor in the rise of social media use by children.
It’s a good point David. In my book, I discuss how economics have changed how we invest in our children—leading to fewer children but more time with each one. Governance can be difficult for sure, but I hope to convey that if you do it early in life, the teenage years become easier. Children will adopt your values and regulate themselves as they mature.
I love how you brought up this point! I think an additional reason to consider about the depletion of energy in parents is our scarcity mindset. In my eyes we have had a scarcity mindset since this country was founded, I think it's just an inevitable shadow side of the desire to progress. Having the desire to progress, I believe, is inherently neutral. But when we start to put un controlled ego into the mix we start to fear that our progress will be taken away from us. As a culture we have come to measure progress through physical items gained. In today's society more equals more. For your kids to have a better life then you had they need more activities, more toys, more entertainment. The beast of consumerism will shake you down for all you have and it does, everyday, to parents who feel they need to pay the game. Things are not how they used to be in terms of being able to live with as much financial ease. But, we as parents still have the ability to take control of the pace of our lives and regulate ourselves. We don't need to deplete ourselves as we do "for the sake of our children's happiness". When we can let go of the scarcity mindset and realign with growth and gratefulness for what is right in front of us layers of stress, fatigue and depletion will fall off.
My daughter is almost 13 and often tells me, after observing other parents’ permissiveness, “Mama, s/he needs to be more strict.” 🫀 Love guides my parenting; I declared it as my religion when I was 8 and I’m now 50. It informs strong boundaries with screens; she has no cell phone and very limited social media (I’d prefer none yet her father’s house has different rules). 😔 Love INCLUDES firm protection of the child. My daughter feels safe with how she is parented, and I hear a strong invitation in this essay for more of us to show our children that Love, in its vast capacity to adore & uplift & liberate them, also fiercely protects them. 🐻
We have come so far away from integrative learning and participation. I ask, how did Native Americans raise their children? You can look it up. Children were brought up in participation of what the adults were doing with observation, participation, initiative once confident enough, a desire to contribute, thus building a role with a sense of belonging for themselves and honoring that for others. If a child was having trouble, the stories told, long known by parents, they told as youth, gave the appropriate view to a child, without calling them out for their misstep. Obedience was not used as control of behavior; this model set the value of participation, and being a part of a successful community, gave a sense of security, inner value and gratitude to the environment in which they lived. Also, very importantly, a child's own interests toward one activity or another was allowed, encouraged, for we all have different intelligences and talents. Successful cultures, Natives living for 10 to 18K years, was built upon these and similar values.
Thanks for sharing this Peggy. We interviewed a Native/American Indian father for the book and his comments overlap with what you say. A theme of my work is that we need to heed our ancestors to a much greater extent when it comes to parenting.
Look, I appreciate being able to comment, which I also freely allow on my substack, but to be frank -- are commentaries like these serious? We have modern CDC surveys that show 35% of Gen Z teens have suffered violent, 30% addicted, 40% severely mentally troubled, 60% emotionally abusive, and 20% actually jailed parents and household adults -- and these teens from abusive and troubled families are exactly the ones who report being vastly more depressed, suicidal, etc.
Parenting style correlates with abuse. Once parental abuses and troubles are factored out, social media use by teens explains just about nothing. In fact, teens from abusive and troubled families are more likely to use social media than teens from non-abusive families. Abused teens who use social media more are less likely to attempt suicide and self-harm, the CDC surveys show. These are patterns that need serious attention.
We have seen an explosion in parent-age drug/alcohol abuse deaths, hospital emergencies, and arrests in the 2010s and early 2020s. Teens with addicted parents report much more depression. Are we just going to keep ignoring this?
84% of teens who report being cyberbullied also report being abused by adults at home. Teens who are abused by parents/caretakers are 6 times more likely to attempt suicide and 12 times more likely to self-harm. Social media use has just about nothing to do with these problems. Are we just going to keep ignoring this and insisting teens' whole problem is Instagram and smartphones?
I hate Big Tech. I realize they see users, young and older, as just commodities to exploit. But we need to stop backing measures like KOSA that vastly increase Big Tech's surveillance power and instead confront family abuses and troubles that really drive teens' depression.
I'm sorry but your nice round numbers are extremely misleading. You can't just say "CDC says 60% of teenagers are emotionally abused by their parents". The CDC does have a report that says around 50% of teens self-report being sworn at or yelled at in the last year, but that absolutely does not correlate with substantiated abuse. CPS reports maltreatment levels at under 1%.
Abuse is of course a real pervasive problem that doesn't have clear solutions and needs better addressing. I myself had a childhood that involved parental drug abuse, violence and neglect. I am not blind or cold to these issues whatsoever. Children and their parents need support, help, and compassion.
But to say that the majority of parents are abusive and that's what is causing the rise in adolescent and young adult mental health crises... That's not accurate, at all.
Teenagers today are more likely to CALL their parents emotionally abusive. However, the hard data does not show an increase in clinically abusive behaviors.
In the teenage years parents are forced to move from having no boundaries to having to scramble reactively for rules when their teenagers start teetering out of control.
Our language has also shifted, and trauma informed highschoolers are way more likely to call something abuse, what would have been run of the mill "my mom yelled at me" years ago.
Again, I'm not saying abuse isn't real. It is and we need to address it better. But conflating self-reported data with substantiated abuse is not helpful, especially if we want to get to the bottom of what is failing our children so miserably right now. There's a huge confluence of reasons; technology, consumerism, and unrest among many others, and the author is simply pointing to rather drastic shifts in parenting styles as an often overlooked one.
Obey is a 4 letter word in our culture. But at it's core, learning obedience is not about control; it's about thinking outside your own will. It's realizing that what you want is actually not the most important thing in the world. It's about living in service of humanity (and yep, God) not in service of your whims (or sins).
Mike, physical and emotional abuse are constructs I take very seriously and measured in my survey. They are distinct and should absolutely not be conflated with demandingness. They do not load with it on factor analysis. They both appear as significant in opposite directions when included in the same model. This is true in other surveys also. So, your vague point about parenting style correlating with abuse is deeply misleading.
Read Maccoby, Baumrind, and Steinberg. There is a large and important literature on parenting here that you seem to be unfamiliar with.
There is also a compelling literature showing that abuse is lower now than in the previous generations, so it is hard to understand how you reach the claims you are making on trends.
As for incidence, you also appear to be way off. Few adolescents report being unsafe at home generally, and fewer still because of abuse from a parent.
Everyone agrees abuse is harmful. Not everyone agrees demandingness is beneficial, but it is.
Anyway, one blog and one comment can hardly be expected to address every problem in society.
Yes but don't overlook the well known even worse critique of that millennial generation, also wealthy enough to spoil their children (delegated to like minded peers).
Today's crisis is not spoiled children. It is rotten-behaving grownups, led by Millennials and Xers in the 25-54 age range -- the range including parents, parents' partners, teachers, coaches, etc. Grownups today are far worse-behaved than high schoolers by every key index. It's time we elders stop denying that harsh reality children and teens have to deal with every day.
I share the author's parenting sensibilities, for different reasons. I've worked in product management and the reason I don't now is because much of the money is flowing to products focused on "engagement," which can be translated to "addiction." If social media can be designed to keep your kids on for 2 hours rather than 15 mintues, it will be. --And it is.
The critic's point on abuse not being mentioned is spot on. Also, abuse is measurable but it's not universal. I'd wager it's predictive, though within a limited context. I don't have the numbers, but we'll get to that in a moment.
Safety is a huge issue in child development and never addressed in the "theory." No numbers here.
My experience as a child and father has been one of love and non-authoritarianism and I turned out fine--great even. Not mentioning love in a parenting model is --well, it's style-less, art-less, ignorant, inhumane.
One context the "theory" ignores (an implicit assumption) is that parenting changes over time. The authority a parent exercises over a 4 year old is different than over a 17 year old. Don't have the numbers here.
(Please don't try to lump safety and love under any of the provided theory's constructs. I don't care if you have a factor analysis of 72,321 people who correlate with a statistically significant p-value. I believe words have meanings, and society only works when those definitions tend towards alignment in each of our heads.)
I think thesis is a better word to use here than theory. It's a perspective backed up by argument. It is not whole. It's meaningful in some context, but that context is not fully explored in the narrative. It's not a theory like Newton's laws of motion, gravitation. Which help serve to get us to the moon. I think this is one of the sins of modern social science--authoritative assertion of something that doesn't hold up. Rocket science is easy. Social science is hard, and honestly, matters more right now.
I found the research references in the text difficult to access. A textbook published in 1983? Really? This is one of the sins of modern academic writing: providing sources that people have to move mountains to follow, so --they don't. Even academics don't check it during peer reviews. I don't have the numbers on this either.
Also, there's a comparison of demanding parents who restrict screens against permissive parents who don't restrict screens. There's are no base rates. There's no variance within the two groups. Just two means. There's no discussion of sample sizes or methodologies. So, I followed the link that isn't even hyperlinked and is in fine print: https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2025-71547-001.html
The conclusion of the study: "importantly, we find that most of the effect is indirect through better perceived relationship quality." The word they used is quality... not authority. They go on to say, "Our findings inform future research exploring more complex causal pathways between parenting and youth development."
Complex. Causal. Pathways. Did the author here ignore the conclusion of the paper, that this is difficult, and cherrypick their graph?
Social science is hard. It does not generalize so simply like physics.
Jeremy, you raise many points. I won’t try to address them all here. Many I discuss in my draft book. This is not an academic paper. I have several of those on related topics, including the one you mentioned. I’ve attempted to condense technical material into something that most readers can understand.
To your point about love, the main theme of my book—which is repeated here—is that the best parents are both demanding and responsive. “Loving” parents do both. Their own children report them as more loving if they do both. The idea that teaching someone morals is not loving strikes me as absurd. If children are never disciplined or punished for wrongdoing, they are unlikely to learn what is right.
I hope you read the book when it comes out. It discusses these constructs in much more detail than I can do on this blog or this comment.
I appreciate these thoughtful comments on my comment, But there are a couple of big contradictions. With regard to the 2023 CDC YRBS, we can argue over whether the 60% of teens who report histories of emotional abuse or the 35% who report histories of violent abuse are accurate or more or less than in the past, or whether "abuse" is being conflated with demandingness (that is certainly not the case for violence).
The problem is, the teens reporting abuses are the same one who, by 3-1 to 12-1 margins compared to teens reporting no abuses, also report frequently poor mental health, suicide attempt, self harm, binge drinking, drug abuse, poor school performance, sleeplessness, etc. So, we would have to conclude either that the answers of the teens reporting abuses are unreliable across the board (which essentially abolishes the "teen mental health crisis"), or that demandingness is associated with more depression, suicide attempt, etc. We can't have it both ways.
One major illustration of the double standard is cyberbullying. 84% of teens who report being cyberbullied also report being emotionally abused by parents/adults. (I can't believe commentators simply leave this crucial linkage out.) If they are exaggerating parental abuse, they are also exaggerating cyberbullying, the latter of which is reported by much smaller numbers and under a looser definition. That would mean cyberbullying is barely an issue.
We have no reliable measures of whether household abuses are increasing (CPS vastly undercounts abuse incidence, since it reflects mainly agency proactiveness and only substantiated cases), nor parental mental health problems. However, we do know from CDC counts and SAMHSA estimates that drug/alcohol abuse in parent-age groups was rising rapidly from 2009-2023 and is widespread. The 30% of teens reporting histories of parent drug/alcohol abuse (comparable to NIH estimates that 25% of children and teens currently live with drug/alcohol abusing parents) then become a serious issue -- much more serious that anything attributable to social media use. We also should be alarmed that 40% of teens report histories of parents/caretakers with "severe" mental health problems.
Finally, CDC itself associates parental abuses and troubles with 2/3 of teens' poor mental health, 84% of teens' opiate abuse, and 89% of teens' suicide attempts; social media use, with nearly none and none, respectively. Certainly, the complete omission of parental abuse/troubles from nearly all studies and commentaries -- comparable to omitting cigarette smoking from studies of lung cancer causality -- explains why those studies suffer such abysmally low effect sizes for social media use.
Some good points, one dispute. Engagement is far from "addiction." If you read engaging books 3 hours a day, we don't say you're "addicted", even if though reading is the ultimate in isolating asocial behavior. Also, I assume the genesis of "demanding" parenting is parents' strong demands that they place on themselves to behave. In a time when high schoolers' rates of major behavioral troubles like drug abuse, alcohol abuse, crime, violence, suicide, loony crazed politics, etc., are far below those of parent-age adults (yes, you read that right), we should be much more demanding that adults act better.
AMEN. Well said, overall. Makes me wonder just how much of the so-called "gentle parenting" bandied about these days is really just the velvet glove for the iron fist of emotional abuse and covert (and sometimes not even covert) narcissism.
I qualified 'spoiled' as wealthy parental delegating to like minded peers: thus, as I trust you know, the well known critique of the wealthier millennial generation.
Bottom line, the glaring primary fundamental cause of all human cultural problems has been the application of counterproductive laws of learning, beginning with counterproductively taught parents and their early delegates.
Thank you for saying this, Jonathan. Many of us have been saying this for years: The mental health problems among adolescents seem to be fairly progressive family-heavy. And it manifests in these kids as adults who think No is a dirty word. It's a word we need to use with progressives of all ages more. The world is full of limits and boundaries, and some of them are good ones.
Thank you Jonathan for this really important article. I would add that Silicon Valley has purposefully paid key parenting gatekeepers to encourage permissiveness on kids' use of social media and screens to drive profits. The three leading pop-culture health organizations providing kids' social media and screen time guidelines have all been funded by Mark Zuckerberg and his related entities. This includes Common Sense Media (millions from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative), the American Academy of Pediatrics (the lead media expert Dr. Megan Moreno receiving funding from Facebook), and the Digital Wellness Lab (from Meta). These three "health" organizations have worked against science to claim that kids' social media use is helpful or not harmful and that screen time is less important.
There's lots of money in providing guidelines on kids' social media and screen use, as long as your findings align with the profit-making desires of Silicon Valley. Thank you again for your work.
An important point to consider is educational pressures from parents.
Although parents may be overall less authoritative, they are more pressuring when it comes to education.
I think a big part of the decline in mental health is related to that, after all, school is shown to be the largest production machine of mental illness (Depression, suicidal attempts, anxiety)
This study is from days ago, far from the best evidence, but it is recent:
Many quasi-experimental studies and experimental studies support this point, I think it should be given much more attention, as it can be solved through policy in many forms
Great point Mohammed. I address this, to some extent, in my book in discussion of strengths-based parenting, by which I mean getting in tune with what drives your child, what engages them, and focusing on that, rather than drilling them to reach arbitrary social goals. I consider this part of truly responsive parenting.
Thank you so much for your post Jonathan. For 10 years, I’ve been anecdotally, surveying my own grade 10-12 psychology students when I teach our developmental psych unit . We talk at length about parenting styles and social media and technology, etc. Everything that you say resonates and correlates with what my students share.
I read this twice. I’ve advised the org Okay to Delay about the fear parents have of making their children angry and frustrated when they aren’t permitted to have phones. “I totally understand how you feel and that you are angry (with me). And, as your parent, it’s my job to look out for your safety and wellbeing.” I could go on!
I gathered from this article is that warmth without clear limits doesn’t feel like freedom to kids, it feels like no one is steering, so something else will. Thanks!
Appreciate this so much. Please check out my book How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid For Success (Holt 2015) which was among the first to identify this shift in parenting and its impacts.
I had a chance to read more, and your book sounds great, Julie. I’ll try to weave it in to my revised manuscript. Thanks for reaching out. A part of my mission is to pull out the great insights from the psychology literature through survey research and data. Coming from Brookings/think-tank world, I can say that psychologists have been largely ignored—to the detriment of society.
It’s worth going further back to the 80s when missing kids were on the back of milk cartons - there became a shift in kids playing outside, then houses started to include playrooms. Then the toy industry became a multi million dollar industry. And then parenting shifted… because kids were no longer out of sight they were in fact under toe. And it’s worth looking at how technology in general has made life “easier” for kids thus disarming them from necessary skills like problem solving, patience and decision making. It all matters! Thank you for being on the pulse.
Parenting is letting your kids gain experiences that they can learn from and don't do permanent damage. It's also a process of letting go, of diminishing authority and responsibility.
I have found, as an adult, a sense of agency to be the opposite of depression.
An alternate approach: a different arrow for the quiver--talk to your kids about social media. Have them define and identify boundaries with caring, parental counsel. Stay engaged and help them adapt their initial approach and build accountability.
Interesting article, Owen. Thank you for sharing. In my data, I find that lower SES parents often do as well overall in discipline; perhaps, however, they do not as well on screen time enforcement specifically
This is what I suspect as well. Having good communications between parents and their kids is important. Even for my own upbringing, being unable to communicate with my parents over my feeling overly fragile, as well as my other issues, was a negative. This is why I realize that while parents need to be more demanding to their kids, this is also creating a risk of parents being unresponsive and shutting off communication.
Having said the above, I do have one question with your article. It seems like in decades past, like in the 1960's, 1970's, and 1980's, kid parent communications tended to be more one-way or authoritarian, centered on the phrase "because I said so", as compared to the present, which has a parenting style that's more equal, valuing a child’s perspective and seeking mutual respect rather than blind obedience. But yet based on what your survey shows, if better communications between kids and adults equals happier kids, then why aren't kids happier in the present as compared to decades like around the 1970's?
Good question. The short answer is that youth well-being appears to have declined largely alongside rising economic pressure on families. Communication helps, but it doesn’t fully offset those broader stresses.
I don’t want to take over the comment section here, but I go into this in more detail in my first post (and a shorter follow-up). If you’re interested, feel free to check those out or ask questions there.
“Permissiveness is the principle of treating children as if they were adults; and the tactic of making sure they never reach that stage.” — Thomas Szasz
I also appreciate the analysis by Jonathan and definitely agree that children need boundaries and structure with a foundation of love and attention. One fact that I think is being left out of Jonathan‘s analysis, and one, given that he is an economist, he should consider: the economics of family life. Over the past 50 years Our economy has shifted from a single wage earner being able to support a family and even buy a home, leaving one parent with more energy to invest in the children, to now either both parents are working or it’s a single parent family with that parent working. Parents are TIRED!. Providing structure and authoritative Parenting takes a lot of energy. Being tired is no excuse for not providing boundaries and controls over social media. However, it sure is easier to let your child play on an electronic device when you’re tired. The child seems happy. Maybe you feel a little guilty because you know it’s not the best thing for them but you gotta get to bed and get up the next morning and go to work. The secular trend of increased time working by parent figures in the family is completely lacking in the current analysis and I think it’s a major factor in the rise of social media use by children.
It’s a good point David. In my book, I discuss how economics have changed how we invest in our children—leading to fewer children but more time with each one. Governance can be difficult for sure, but I hope to convey that if you do it early in life, the teenage years become easier. Children will adopt your values and regulate themselves as they mature.
I love how you brought up this point! I think an additional reason to consider about the depletion of energy in parents is our scarcity mindset. In my eyes we have had a scarcity mindset since this country was founded, I think it's just an inevitable shadow side of the desire to progress. Having the desire to progress, I believe, is inherently neutral. But when we start to put un controlled ego into the mix we start to fear that our progress will be taken away from us. As a culture we have come to measure progress through physical items gained. In today's society more equals more. For your kids to have a better life then you had they need more activities, more toys, more entertainment. The beast of consumerism will shake you down for all you have and it does, everyday, to parents who feel they need to pay the game. Things are not how they used to be in terms of being able to live with as much financial ease. But, we as parents still have the ability to take control of the pace of our lives and regulate ourselves. We don't need to deplete ourselves as we do "for the sake of our children's happiness". When we can let go of the scarcity mindset and realign with growth and gratefulness for what is right in front of us layers of stress, fatigue and depletion will fall off.
My daughter is almost 13 and often tells me, after observing other parents’ permissiveness, “Mama, s/he needs to be more strict.” 🫀 Love guides my parenting; I declared it as my religion when I was 8 and I’m now 50. It informs strong boundaries with screens; she has no cell phone and very limited social media (I’d prefer none yet her father’s house has different rules). 😔 Love INCLUDES firm protection of the child. My daughter feels safe with how she is parented, and I hear a strong invitation in this essay for more of us to show our children that Love, in its vast capacity to adore & uplift & liberate them, also fiercely protects them. 🐻
This is great, Jessica! Thanks for the note—and doing what you are doing.
We have come so far away from integrative learning and participation. I ask, how did Native Americans raise their children? You can look it up. Children were brought up in participation of what the adults were doing with observation, participation, initiative once confident enough, a desire to contribute, thus building a role with a sense of belonging for themselves and honoring that for others. If a child was having trouble, the stories told, long known by parents, they told as youth, gave the appropriate view to a child, without calling them out for their misstep. Obedience was not used as control of behavior; this model set the value of participation, and being a part of a successful community, gave a sense of security, inner value and gratitude to the environment in which they lived. Also, very importantly, a child's own interests toward one activity or another was allowed, encouraged, for we all have different intelligences and talents. Successful cultures, Natives living for 10 to 18K years, was built upon these and similar values.
Thanks for sharing this Peggy. We interviewed a Native/American Indian father for the book and his comments overlap with what you say. A theme of my work is that we need to heed our ancestors to a much greater extent when it comes to parenting.
Look, I appreciate being able to comment, which I also freely allow on my substack, but to be frank -- are commentaries like these serious? We have modern CDC surveys that show 35% of Gen Z teens have suffered violent, 30% addicted, 40% severely mentally troubled, 60% emotionally abusive, and 20% actually jailed parents and household adults -- and these teens from abusive and troubled families are exactly the ones who report being vastly more depressed, suicidal, etc.
Parenting style correlates with abuse. Once parental abuses and troubles are factored out, social media use by teens explains just about nothing. In fact, teens from abusive and troubled families are more likely to use social media than teens from non-abusive families. Abused teens who use social media more are less likely to attempt suicide and self-harm, the CDC surveys show. These are patterns that need serious attention.
We have seen an explosion in parent-age drug/alcohol abuse deaths, hospital emergencies, and arrests in the 2010s and early 2020s. Teens with addicted parents report much more depression. Are we just going to keep ignoring this?
84% of teens who report being cyberbullied also report being abused by adults at home. Teens who are abused by parents/caretakers are 6 times more likely to attempt suicide and 12 times more likely to self-harm. Social media use has just about nothing to do with these problems. Are we just going to keep ignoring this and insisting teens' whole problem is Instagram and smartphones?
I hate Big Tech. I realize they see users, young and older, as just commodities to exploit. But we need to stop backing measures like KOSA that vastly increase Big Tech's surveillance power and instead confront family abuses and troubles that really drive teens' depression.
I'm sorry but your nice round numbers are extremely misleading. You can't just say "CDC says 60% of teenagers are emotionally abused by their parents". The CDC does have a report that says around 50% of teens self-report being sworn at or yelled at in the last year, but that absolutely does not correlate with substantiated abuse. CPS reports maltreatment levels at under 1%.
Abuse is of course a real pervasive problem that doesn't have clear solutions and needs better addressing. I myself had a childhood that involved parental drug abuse, violence and neglect. I am not blind or cold to these issues whatsoever. Children and their parents need support, help, and compassion.
But to say that the majority of parents are abusive and that's what is causing the rise in adolescent and young adult mental health crises... That's not accurate, at all.
Teenagers today are more likely to CALL their parents emotionally abusive. However, the hard data does not show an increase in clinically abusive behaviors.
In the teenage years parents are forced to move from having no boundaries to having to scramble reactively for rules when their teenagers start teetering out of control.
Our language has also shifted, and trauma informed highschoolers are way more likely to call something abuse, what would have been run of the mill "my mom yelled at me" years ago.
Again, I'm not saying abuse isn't real. It is and we need to address it better. But conflating self-reported data with substantiated abuse is not helpful, especially if we want to get to the bottom of what is failing our children so miserably right now. There's a huge confluence of reasons; technology, consumerism, and unrest among many others, and the author is simply pointing to rather drastic shifts in parenting styles as an often overlooked one.
Obey is a 4 letter word in our culture. But at it's core, learning obedience is not about control; it's about thinking outside your own will. It's realizing that what you want is actually not the most important thing in the world. It's about living in service of humanity (and yep, God) not in service of your whims (or sins).
Mike, physical and emotional abuse are constructs I take very seriously and measured in my survey. They are distinct and should absolutely not be conflated with demandingness. They do not load with it on factor analysis. They both appear as significant in opposite directions when included in the same model. This is true in other surveys also. So, your vague point about parenting style correlating with abuse is deeply misleading.
Read Maccoby, Baumrind, and Steinberg. There is a large and important literature on parenting here that you seem to be unfamiliar with.
There is also a compelling literature showing that abuse is lower now than in the previous generations, so it is hard to understand how you reach the claims you are making on trends.
As for incidence, you also appear to be way off. Few adolescents report being unsafe at home generally, and fewer still because of abuse from a parent.
Everyone agrees abuse is harmful. Not everyone agrees demandingness is beneficial, but it is.
Anyway, one blog and one comment can hardly be expected to address every problem in society.
Let's not overlook the parenting of all modern social media directors if not also its founders.
They're mostly lousy human beings, so I assume they're lousy parents.
Yes but don't overlook the well known even worse critique of that millennial generation, also wealthy enough to spoil their children (delegated to like minded peers).
Today's crisis is not spoiled children. It is rotten-behaving grownups, led by Millennials and Xers in the 25-54 age range -- the range including parents, parents' partners, teachers, coaches, etc. Grownups today are far worse-behaved than high schoolers by every key index. It's time we elders stop denying that harsh reality children and teens have to deal with every day.
💯
Mike, he's very serious. I share your critique.
I share the author's parenting sensibilities, for different reasons. I've worked in product management and the reason I don't now is because much of the money is flowing to products focused on "engagement," which can be translated to "addiction." If social media can be designed to keep your kids on for 2 hours rather than 15 mintues, it will be. --And it is.
The critic's point on abuse not being mentioned is spot on. Also, abuse is measurable but it's not universal. I'd wager it's predictive, though within a limited context. I don't have the numbers, but we'll get to that in a moment.
Safety is a huge issue in child development and never addressed in the "theory." No numbers here.
My experience as a child and father has been one of love and non-authoritarianism and I turned out fine--great even. Not mentioning love in a parenting model is --well, it's style-less, art-less, ignorant, inhumane.
One context the "theory" ignores (an implicit assumption) is that parenting changes over time. The authority a parent exercises over a 4 year old is different than over a 17 year old. Don't have the numbers here.
(Please don't try to lump safety and love under any of the provided theory's constructs. I don't care if you have a factor analysis of 72,321 people who correlate with a statistically significant p-value. I believe words have meanings, and society only works when those definitions tend towards alignment in each of our heads.)
I think thesis is a better word to use here than theory. It's a perspective backed up by argument. It is not whole. It's meaningful in some context, but that context is not fully explored in the narrative. It's not a theory like Newton's laws of motion, gravitation. Which help serve to get us to the moon. I think this is one of the sins of modern social science--authoritative assertion of something that doesn't hold up. Rocket science is easy. Social science is hard, and honestly, matters more right now.
I found the research references in the text difficult to access. A textbook published in 1983? Really? This is one of the sins of modern academic writing: providing sources that people have to move mountains to follow, so --they don't. Even academics don't check it during peer reviews. I don't have the numbers on this either.
Also, there's a comparison of demanding parents who restrict screens against permissive parents who don't restrict screens. There's are no base rates. There's no variance within the two groups. Just two means. There's no discussion of sample sizes or methodologies. So, I followed the link that isn't even hyperlinked and is in fine print: https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2025-71547-001.html
The conclusion of the study: "importantly, we find that most of the effect is indirect through better perceived relationship quality." The word they used is quality... not authority. They go on to say, "Our findings inform future research exploring more complex causal pathways between parenting and youth development."
Complex. Causal. Pathways. Did the author here ignore the conclusion of the paper, that this is difficult, and cherrypick their graph?
Social science is hard. It does not generalize so simply like physics.
Jeremy, you raise many points. I won’t try to address them all here. Many I discuss in my draft book. This is not an academic paper. I have several of those on related topics, including the one you mentioned. I’ve attempted to condense technical material into something that most readers can understand.
To your point about love, the main theme of my book—which is repeated here—is that the best parents are both demanding and responsive. “Loving” parents do both. Their own children report them as more loving if they do both. The idea that teaching someone morals is not loving strikes me as absurd. If children are never disciplined or punished for wrongdoing, they are unlikely to learn what is right.
I hope you read the book when it comes out. It discusses these constructs in much more detail than I can do on this blog or this comment.
I appreciate these thoughtful comments on my comment, But there are a couple of big contradictions. With regard to the 2023 CDC YRBS, we can argue over whether the 60% of teens who report histories of emotional abuse or the 35% who report histories of violent abuse are accurate or more or less than in the past, or whether "abuse" is being conflated with demandingness (that is certainly not the case for violence).
The problem is, the teens reporting abuses are the same one who, by 3-1 to 12-1 margins compared to teens reporting no abuses, also report frequently poor mental health, suicide attempt, self harm, binge drinking, drug abuse, poor school performance, sleeplessness, etc. So, we would have to conclude either that the answers of the teens reporting abuses are unreliable across the board (which essentially abolishes the "teen mental health crisis"), or that demandingness is associated with more depression, suicide attempt, etc. We can't have it both ways.
One major illustration of the double standard is cyberbullying. 84% of teens who report being cyberbullied also report being emotionally abused by parents/adults. (I can't believe commentators simply leave this crucial linkage out.) If they are exaggerating parental abuse, they are also exaggerating cyberbullying, the latter of which is reported by much smaller numbers and under a looser definition. That would mean cyberbullying is barely an issue.
We have no reliable measures of whether household abuses are increasing (CPS vastly undercounts abuse incidence, since it reflects mainly agency proactiveness and only substantiated cases), nor parental mental health problems. However, we do know from CDC counts and SAMHSA estimates that drug/alcohol abuse in parent-age groups was rising rapidly from 2009-2023 and is widespread. The 30% of teens reporting histories of parent drug/alcohol abuse (comparable to NIH estimates that 25% of children and teens currently live with drug/alcohol abusing parents) then become a serious issue -- much more serious that anything attributable to social media use. We also should be alarmed that 40% of teens report histories of parents/caretakers with "severe" mental health problems.
Finally, CDC itself associates parental abuses and troubles with 2/3 of teens' poor mental health, 84% of teens' opiate abuse, and 89% of teens' suicide attempts; social media use, with nearly none and none, respectively. Certainly, the complete omission of parental abuse/troubles from nearly all studies and commentaries -- comparable to omitting cigarette smoking from studies of lung cancer causality -- explains why those studies suffer such abysmally low effect sizes for social media use.
Some good points, one dispute. Engagement is far from "addiction." If you read engaging books 3 hours a day, we don't say you're "addicted", even if though reading is the ultimate in isolating asocial behavior. Also, I assume the genesis of "demanding" parenting is parents' strong demands that they place on themselves to behave. In a time when high schoolers' rates of major behavioral troubles like drug abuse, alcohol abuse, crime, violence, suicide, loony crazed politics, etc., are far below those of parent-age adults (yes, you read that right), we should be much more demanding that adults act better.
AMEN. Well said, overall. Makes me wonder just how much of the so-called "gentle parenting" bandied about these days is really just the velvet glove for the iron fist of emotional abuse and covert (and sometimes not even covert) narcissism.
I qualified 'spoiled' as wealthy parental delegating to like minded peers: thus, as I trust you know, the well known critique of the wealthier millennial generation.
Bottom line, the glaring primary fundamental cause of all human cultural problems has been the application of counterproductive laws of learning, beginning with counterproductively taught parents and their early delegates.
Thank you for saying this, Jonathan. Many of us have been saying this for years: The mental health problems among adolescents seem to be fairly progressive family-heavy. And it manifests in these kids as adults who think No is a dirty word. It's a word we need to use with progressives of all ages more. The world is full of limits and boundaries, and some of them are good ones.
Thank you Jonathan for this really important article. I would add that Silicon Valley has purposefully paid key parenting gatekeepers to encourage permissiveness on kids' use of social media and screens to drive profits. The three leading pop-culture health organizations providing kids' social media and screen time guidelines have all been funded by Mark Zuckerberg and his related entities. This includes Common Sense Media (millions from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative), the American Academy of Pediatrics (the lead media expert Dr. Megan Moreno receiving funding from Facebook), and the Digital Wellness Lab (from Meta). These three "health" organizations have worked against science to claim that kids' social media use is helpful or not harmful and that screen time is less important.
wow, that’s fascinating and disturbing, in so far as it affected research and policy recs. Thanks for the note, Richard.
There's lots of money in providing guidelines on kids' social media and screen use, as long as your findings align with the profit-making desires of Silicon Valley. Thank you again for your work.
Thanks!
An important point to consider is educational pressures from parents.
Although parents may be overall less authoritative, they are more pressuring when it comes to education.
I think a big part of the decline in mental health is related to that, after all, school is shown to be the largest production machine of mental illness (Depression, suicidal attempts, anxiety)
This study is from days ago, far from the best evidence, but it is recent:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4642(25)00342-6/fulltext
Many quasi-experimental studies and experimental studies support this point, I think it should be given much more attention, as it can be solved through policy in many forms
Great point Mohammed. I address this, to some extent, in my book in discussion of strengths-based parenting, by which I mean getting in tune with what drives your child, what engages them, and focusing on that, rather than drilling them to reach arbitrary social goals. I consider this part of truly responsive parenting.
Thank you so much for your post Jonathan. For 10 years, I’ve been anecdotally, surveying my own grade 10-12 psychology students when I teach our developmental psych unit . We talk at length about parenting styles and social media and technology, etc. Everything that you say resonates and correlates with what my students share.
I read this twice. I’ve advised the org Okay to Delay about the fear parents have of making their children angry and frustrated when they aren’t permitted to have phones. “I totally understand how you feel and that you are angry (with me). And, as your parent, it’s my job to look out for your safety and wellbeing.” I could go on!
I gathered from this article is that warmth without clear limits doesn’t feel like freedom to kids, it feels like no one is steering, so something else will. Thanks!
Appreciate this so much. Please check out my book How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid For Success (Holt 2015) which was among the first to identify this shift in parenting and its impacts.
I had a chance to read more, and your book sounds great, Julie. I’ll try to weave it in to my revised manuscript. Thanks for reaching out. A part of my mission is to pull out the great insights from the psychology literature through survey research and data. Coming from Brookings/think-tank world, I can say that psychologists have been largely ignored—to the detriment of society.
thank you! will check it out!
It’s worth going further back to the 80s when missing kids were on the back of milk cartons - there became a shift in kids playing outside, then houses started to include playrooms. Then the toy industry became a multi million dollar industry. And then parenting shifted… because kids were no longer out of sight they were in fact under toe. And it’s worth looking at how technology in general has made life “easier” for kids thus disarming them from necessary skills like problem solving, patience and decision making. It all matters! Thank you for being on the pulse.
This seems very much outside the author's "theory," and I think it's all relevant and important.
Parenting is letting your kids gain experiences that they can learn from and don't do permanent damage. It's also a process of letting go, of diminishing authority and responsibility.
I have found, as an adult, a sense of agency to be the opposite of depression.
An alternate approach: a different arrow for the quiver--talk to your kids about social media. Have them define and identify boundaries with caring, parental counsel. Stay engaged and help them adapt their initial approach and build accountability.
Jonathan, I invite you to read Mike Males Substacks that for me convincingly go against your worship of parental authority, here is his latest post:
"Jonathan Haidt, globally acclaimed expert and policy guru on teenagers, mental health, and predators, never mentions Jeffrey Epstein. That’s weird.
Even weirder: Haidt’s crusade to ban teens from social media is enthusiastically backed by Big Tech, Big Money, and Big Government."
https://mikemales.substack.com/p/jonathan-haidt-globally-acclaimed
AMEN
Maybe your book covers this, but there are situations where screen-time limits are unlikely to help.
Using Monitoring the Future survey data, my analysis suggests that the positive outcomes linked to screen-time limits often reflect underlying family dynamics rather than the limits themselves: https://www.owenkellogg.com/p/how-screen-time-limits-fail-and-what
Interesting article, Owen. Thank you for sharing. In my data, I find that lower SES parents often do as well overall in discipline; perhaps, however, they do not as well on screen time enforcement specifically
This is what I suspect as well. Having good communications between parents and their kids is important. Even for my own upbringing, being unable to communicate with my parents over my feeling overly fragile, as well as my other issues, was a negative. This is why I realize that while parents need to be more demanding to their kids, this is also creating a risk of parents being unresponsive and shutting off communication.
Having said the above, I do have one question with your article. It seems like in decades past, like in the 1960's, 1970's, and 1980's, kid parent communications tended to be more one-way or authoritarian, centered on the phrase "because I said so", as compared to the present, which has a parenting style that's more equal, valuing a child’s perspective and seeking mutual respect rather than blind obedience. But yet based on what your survey shows, if better communications between kids and adults equals happier kids, then why aren't kids happier in the present as compared to decades like around the 1970's?
Good question. The short answer is that youth well-being appears to have declined largely alongside rising economic pressure on families. Communication helps, but it doesn’t fully offset those broader stresses.
I don’t want to take over the comment section here, but I go into this in more detail in my first post (and a shorter follow-up). If you’re interested, feel free to check those out or ask questions there.
"It's the economy, stupid!" seems to be the most accurate theory of everything IMHO
Indeed
💯
“Permissiveness is the principle of treating children as if they were adults; and the tactic of making sure they never reach that stage.” — Thomas Szasz
Great quote!
I spend exactly 23 percent of my Internet time quoting Szasz and Mencken.