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. 🐻
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).
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.
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.
I feel a little gullible - first I believed social media was the next great thing; then I thought maybe Haight is right; these comments show it's not just social media but parenting. That sounds about right. It's not the tool but its use. The biggest excuse I hear, including my own, is "but I need to know where they are." And I get it. But do you? Anyway, keep it real, keep it simple. I had to tattle tale on one of my patients last week. Hello Mom, she's up all night on the phone. Yep. Following week - kid has much better sleep; appears in a great mood. I try to tell my clients to moderate. I try to frame it as mental healthcare. Nothing is quite how it appears these days. I feel Trump has destroyed decency. We could all use a break.
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.
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
“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
You said that children need guidance and structure in order to thrive, I have mix feelings on this. One problem with demanding parents is that they are vulnerable to fall into the trap of not listening to their kids, especially if the kid has an issue that the the parents don't agree with or consider important.
For my own story, I had guidance and structure in my upbringing (in the 1990s) by strict, religious, well meaning parents, but I did not thrive as I got older. The reason for this being that my social skills were rather poor, so much so that during middle school I was mostly staying home, in my room. But yet because my parents considered other teens as likely to do bad things, drink, smoke, swear, they didn't hit the panic button or seem much bothered by how I didn't participating in the world outside of home. It was easier to see me as a good obedient kid who happened to mostly stay at home then notice the fact that I had little sense of independence or street smarts, had few friends, and no sense of self-efficacy or resilience. The idea of me having street smarts would have absolutely horrified my parents.
Now I do agree that parents need to be more firm, kids need to get off of social media, become more independent, participate in the world, and become more separate from their parents. I'm just worried that the effort to do this will create some negative side effects. Side effects which won't become apparent until at least a decade, probably a couple of decades. I'm fairly confident that 30, 40, 50 years in the future, adults and parents will still be complaining and fearful over the state of the youth.
Most parents agonize between the balance of authority vs permissiveness, unaware that they're asking the wrong question. What children really need is our unconditional love, the kind without any disappointment or irritation, along with consistent teaching. Most of us have never even seen that kind of love. We can learn to find it and share it with out children, with stunning results. And we don't have to figure it out on our own. Go to RealLove.com---entirely free---and benefit from 30 years of extensive research and practical application of unconditional love and teaching.
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.
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. 🐻
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, 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.
Let's not overlook the parenting of all modern social media directors if not also its founders.
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.
I feel a little gullible - first I believed social media was the next great thing; then I thought maybe Haight is right; these comments show it's not just social media but parenting. That sounds about right. It's not the tool but its use. The biggest excuse I hear, including my own, is "but I need to know where they are." And I get it. But do you? Anyway, keep it real, keep it simple. I had to tattle tale on one of my patients last week. Hello Mom, she's up all night on the phone. Yep. Following week - kid has much better sleep; appears in a great mood. I try to tell my clients to moderate. I try to frame it as mental healthcare. Nothing is quite how it appears these days. I feel Trump has destroyed decency. We could all use a break.
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.
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
“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
You said that children need guidance and structure in order to thrive, I have mix feelings on this. One problem with demanding parents is that they are vulnerable to fall into the trap of not listening to their kids, especially if the kid has an issue that the the parents don't agree with or consider important.
For my own story, I had guidance and structure in my upbringing (in the 1990s) by strict, religious, well meaning parents, but I did not thrive as I got older. The reason for this being that my social skills were rather poor, so much so that during middle school I was mostly staying home, in my room. But yet because my parents considered other teens as likely to do bad things, drink, smoke, swear, they didn't hit the panic button or seem much bothered by how I didn't participating in the world outside of home. It was easier to see me as a good obedient kid who happened to mostly stay at home then notice the fact that I had little sense of independence or street smarts, had few friends, and no sense of self-efficacy or resilience. The idea of me having street smarts would have absolutely horrified my parents.
Now I do agree that parents need to be more firm, kids need to get off of social media, become more independent, participate in the world, and become more separate from their parents. I'm just worried that the effort to do this will create some negative side effects. Side effects which won't become apparent until at least a decade, probably a couple of decades. I'm fairly confident that 30, 40, 50 years in the future, adults and parents will still be complaining and fearful over the state of the youth.
Most parents agonize between the balance of authority vs permissiveness, unaware that they're asking the wrong question. What children really need is our unconditional love, the kind without any disappointment or irritation, along with consistent teaching. Most of us have never even seen that kind of love. We can learn to find it and share it with out children, with stunning results. And we don't have to figure it out on our own. Go to RealLove.com---entirely free---and benefit from 30 years of extensive research and practical application of unconditional love and teaching.
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.