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Again, Dr. Twenge fails to acknowledge a crucial trend far more associated with increased student depression, sleeplessness, and poor school performance.
From the early 2010s to the 2020s, in the 25-64 age group comprising parents, parents’ partners, relatives, and other adults influencing teenagers, drug/alcohol overdose deaths (wonder.cdc.gov/mcd.html
Again, Dr. Twenge fails to acknowledge a crucial trend far more associated with increased student depression, sleeplessness, and poor school performance.
From the early 2010s to the 2020s, in the 25-64 age group comprising parents, parents’ partners, relatives, and other adults influencing teenagers, drug/alcohol overdose deaths (https://wonder.cdc.gov/mcd.html) surged from 55,000 to 134,000 and drug/alcohol hospital ER cases (https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/reports/rpt53161/dawn-national-estimates-2023.pdf) exploded from 2.8 million to 5.1 million.
That trend, the iceberg tip of the mammoth adult drug crisis, was hastily dismissed as probably not affecting parents and too “small” to affect teenagers. Those dismissals were demolished when the CDC’s 2023 YRBS revealed a shocking 30% of teenagers reporting drug/alcohol abuse among parents/caretakers, 35% histories of violent abuses, 41% “severe” parent/caretaker depression, mental troubles, and suicidality, and 62% emotional abuse.
These staggering numbers have been all but ignored in the teen mental health furor. While trends in violent and emotional abuse remain poorly measured, clear evidence does show parent/adult drug abuse rose sharply during 2010-2022 as teenagers reported more depression.
Standard regression associates parents’ drug/alcohol abuse with far more teenage depression, sleeplessness, poor school grades, and other risks than social media use. Add other adult abuses and troubles, and social media use disappears as a factor in teen mental health.
In 2023, the CDC found teens from homes with drug/alcohol-abusing adults are 1.8 times more likely to get school grades of D or F, while teens who use social media heavily (daily or more) are no more likely to get poor grades than teens rarely on social media (weekly or less). That 85% of depressed teens come from troubled homes, and abused teens use social media more, means we have to untangle those effects on their mental health before we can delineate smaller (if any) social media issues.