Teenage brains were stressed even before smartphones. How can you help your teen handle the strain?

CNN

2 days ago

Mental health
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If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, help is available. Dial or text 988 or visit 988lifeline.org for free and confidential support.
As teens head back to school this fall, many parents are worried about their mental health. And for good reason: Teens today — especially girls — are much more likely to say that they feel persistently sad or hopeless and think about suicide than they did a decade ago.
Forty percent of high school students reported experiencing persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in 2023, according to the Youth Risk Behavior Survey by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That figure was down from a high of 42% two years earlier, during the Covid-19 pandemic, but is about 10 percentage points higher than a decade earlier.
The journalist Matt Richtel sheds light on the teen mental health crisis and what can be done about it in his new book, 'How We Grow Up: Understanding Adolescence.' Richtel, a Boulder, Colorado-based science reporter for The New York Times, spent four years researching adolescents for the book.
In our conversation, Richtel offered important insight into why teens are so stressed and what we can do about it.
This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
CNN: What explains today's teen mental health crisis?
Matt Richtel: Adolescent mental health is best understood by understanding what adolescents are going through, and there is new science that helps explain it. They have a highly sensitized brain in a period of time when the world is moving very quickly, and they are receiving a ton of information. Sometimes what they experience is a kind of information overload that looks like intense rumination, anxiety and other mental health distress.
CNN: Does a lot of that information overload come from social media?
Richtel: Sort of. There is a misconception that the phone is the singular or overwhelming source of the problem. In fact, the science is more complicated.
In the 1980s, adolescents faced immense challenges with binge drinking, drunk driving, early experimentation with sex, injury and death. Those risks have fallen sharply. What's important about that context is that it tells us there is a larger issue going on during this pivotal life period and that merely taking the phones away will not solve it.
There is reason to limit access to phones because screen time displaces sleep, exercise and in-person interactions. At the same time, the challenges adolescents face come from a larger phenomenon.
CNN: What is the larger phenomenon to explain why adolescence is such a tough time?
Richtel: Adolescence is a process with a very important purpose: the integration of the known and unknown in a fast-changing world. The known is what your parents tell you is true, like you should read books. The unknown is what actually works as this world is changing. For instance, maybe books aren't the thing anymore.
This integration of known and unknown creates an enormous sense of internal conflict for an adolescent. My parents, who love me and feed me, told me one thing, but I am discovering something else.
This is happening against the backdrop of the falling age of puberty. As puberty happens earlier, it sensitizes the adolescent brain earlier in life to all this information at a time when the rest of their brain isn't particularly equipped to deal with it. This creates a kind of neurological mismatch between what an adolescent can take in and what they can process.
CNN: Does this also help explain why teens often don't listen to their parents?
Richtel: Yes. They don't listen to their parents because they're making a transition from being cared for by their parents to needing to learn to care for themselves and their offspring. Some of the research about how teens stop listening to their parents and start listening to strangers is almost funny.
Sometimes when your kids look at you with that blank face, you're not looking at a jerk but at evolutionary biology.
I would say to parents, please don't take this stuff personally. You can say to your kid, 'Hey, please stop! You sound like a jerk. I don't like that.' But that's very different from taking it personally.
CNN: You call this generation of teens 'Generation Rumination.' Why?
Richtel: Adolescents are programmed to explore the world around them. In the old days, that exploration happened outside. 'I'm going to forge this river. I'm going to climb this mountain. I'm going to jump off this roof.' Particularly since the 1960s, but even more so now, a lot of exploration happens on the inward side.
When it happened on the outside, there were a lot of broken bones. In the last few decades, we've seen more people with mental health questions.
Questions have emerged in the past 20 years that no one bothered to talk about previously. Like what is a boy and what is a girl? As uncomfortable as it is for people, it's part of the survival mechanism of the human species, to have adolescents explore for themselves and for others.
CNN: You say that many teens don't know why they feel awful when they have loving families and all their physical needs are met. Why?
Richtel: Here's an example of what it's like to feel like an adolescent. Let's say, as a parent, you get in a fight with your spouse the same day that your boss leaves. Then you get a bad night of sleep, and the next day you're driving down the road and you look over and see a driver who gives you a look. You experience road rage. It's not all about that driver. And maybe that driver was actually smiling. It's about the combination of factors that have led you to feel really intensely. We feel like that occasionally as parents. Adolescents feel like that all the time.
So, when they say they don't understand why they feel that way, I think we can empathize, or at least sympathize as parents, that when you're highly sensitized to your environment with a bit less sleep and a lot of moving parts, it's overwhelming.
CNN: Some people think the reason more teens have mental health problems today is because we diagnose and talk about them more than in the past. Or do more teens actually have mental health problems now?
Richtel: I think both things are true. There are more teens with mental health challenges, and we are scrutinizing it greatly.
CNN: You say that social media affects different kids very differently. Why is this?
Richtel: Some kids, interestingly, are actually in a better mood after using social media. Some kids are in a worse mood. It really depends on your genetic predisposition and how much you use it.
If you use it all the time, you're displacing things we know to be really healthy (like sleep, exercise and in-person interactions). That's really important. But using it in the moment can affect different kids differently. Some kids wind up happier.
If you're lonely and you want to connect with somebody, that's different than if you're predisposed to compare yourself with somebody else and every time you see the ostensibly healthy, wealthy, beautiful person online, you say, 'I am terrible by comparison.' Or you see the fit person online and say, 'I need to stop eating.' But not everybody has that predisposition.
CNN: As kids head back to school, what advice do you have for parents when their teens get overwhelmed?
Richtel: We need to teach our kids coping skills.
Some of what they need is to let the emotion out, not to try to have a rational conversation. If your kiddo says, 'Everyone in the ninth grade hates me,' that's not so rational. It's probably a product of a whole bunch of things, such as sleeplessness, a bad experience or trying to deal with a lot of information.
The coping skills we're talking about here include things like putting your face in the snow, taking a cold shower or exercise, all of which allow your neurotransmitters and neurochemicals to settle down.
If you can afford it, cognitive behavioral therapy and dialectical behavioral therapy are tools that let people understand that these sensations they're having in their bodies can be addressed and let go of, so that the next day you can have the question, 'Does everyone in ninth grade really hate me? Oh, yeah, Doug likes me, I forgot. So does Sarah. It's going to be OK.'
But, in the moment, if you try to have that conversation with your kid, you're adding more information to a brain that's already paralyzed. An overwhelmed kid is like a computer with a blue screen. When we're adding more information, it's like hitting the enter key over and over again. It's not going to do anything.
Let them emote without trying to talk reason. It's hard for them to be rational in the midst of overload, so wait until they're ready to listen to you. Parents really are the biggest influencers in their kids' lives.
Kara Alaimo is an associate professor of communication at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Her book 'Over the Influence: Why Social Media Is Toxic for Women and Girls — And How We Can Take It Back' was published in 2024 by Alcove Press.