The author of two college textbooks and five books for non-academic readers, she is equally at home researching and writing about adolescent mental health, sleep disorders, digital technology, homework and narcissism. She was one of the first experts to warn nearly that smartphones could hold negative consequences for our mental health. A decade after the advent of the iPhone, Twenge went viral in 2017 with an that asked, provocatively, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?”

A professor at San Diego State University, she has collaborated for years with the researcher and author Jonathan Haidt, whose 2024 book was a mega-bestseller that has helped build momentum for school cellphone bans in a growing number of states — .

And she is one of the few experts in the education and mental health world to have appeared on HBO’s .

Twenge’s 2017 book, , looked at how modern teens are somehow both more connected than previous generations and less prepared for adulthood. In it, she theorized that depression rates among teens are rising because they spend more time online, less time with friends in person, and less time sleeping — a problematic combination. 

The dilemmas Twenge identified in 2017 are only getting worse: By 2023, the typical American teen was spending nearly five hours a day using social media, recent research finds, with severe depression rates rising. In , girls who were heavy users of social media were three times as likely to be depressed as non-users.

Her , out Tuesday, offers practical guidelines for parents raising kids in the age of ubiquitous connectivity and sophisticated — some would say addictive — social media.

Twenge doesn’t shy away from challenging harried parents to do better. Among her suggestions: No one — parents included — should have electronic devices in the bedroom overnight. Likewise, she says, the first handheld device a kid should receive is a “basic phone” that allows calls, texts and not much else.

“It’s a really big myth out there that if kids are going to communicate, it has to be on social media,” she said. “That’s just not true.”

Ahead of its publication, Twenge spoke with ����Ӱ��’s Greg Toppo about her rules, her work with Haidt and her belief that we need stiffer laws that keep young people off social media until they’re old enough to drive.

Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.  

I wanted to start with a quote from your book. It’s a parent’s description of his 10-year-old after she got her first smartphone: “She suddenly wasn’t playing with her younger siblings as much. Novels were promptly cast aside. She wasn’t around to help with dinner anymore. She danced less, laughed less. She was quieter. Our home was quieter.” That’s so heartbreaking, but I’m guessing it’s not unusual.

I don’t think it is. Many, many parents describe how their kids are different after they give them a smartphone. And it’s especially heartbreaking when that’s a 10-year-old, but even when it’s a 16-year-old who might otherwise be ready. It’s very noticeable how they change after they get that phone in their pocket.

Were there any particular data points about smartphones and social media that persuaded you they were causing a mental health crisis?

It was a slow process for me, and it wasn’t an immediate conclusion when I first started to see these trends in adolescent mental health. It was first a process of ruling out obvious causes, like the economy, which wasn’t aligned at all, and any other big events that might happen. I would trace it, really, to the big that I work with on teens, where there was just this combination all at once of not just rising depression, but teens spending less time with each other in person and less time sleeping. And then realizing, “Well, wait: What might explain all of those things happening at the same time?” 

And it seemed clear that a good amount of that answer is probably smartphones and social media, particularly after I found a Pew Research Center poll about the ownership of smartphones, that [it] in the U.S. at the end of 2012. And that’s right around the same time all these changes were happening.

I want to dig into a few of your rules. No. 3: “No social media until age 16 or later.” That seems a lot tougher than what most families practice. Why 16? And what do you say to parents who worry about their kids’ social isolation and FOMO or Fear Of Missing Out?

I have not found that with my kids — that they’ve been socially isolated for not having social media. Most other parents I talked to who have put off social media have also not found that with their kids. Social media is just one mechanism for communicating. There’s so many others. Kids can call each other, they can text each other — they do a lot of texting. They can FaceTime each other, they can get together in person. Usually that ends up tilting toward texting, but it does not have to be social media. It’s a really big myth out there that if kids are going to communicate, it has to be on social media. That’s just not true.

And that leads to rule No. 4, where you advocate “basic phones” — your phrase — before smartphones. In a world where even school assignments need Internet access, is that practical for most families?

Yeah, because kids have laptops. And if the family can’t afford to buy them a laptop, almost all schools provide a laptop. So they have Internet access on their laptop even if they don’t have it on their phone. And laptops have come so far down in price too, that if you haven’t bought a laptop recently, or if you use Mac laptops like I do and my kids do now, you might not realize you can get a . So that’s another big thing: Maybe 10 years ago, if a kid doesn’t have Internet access on their phone, then they don’t have Internet access at all. That’s just not true in the current landscape.

Although you do have problems with school laptops.

Oh, yes. I mean, this is a thing! They get Internet access on the laptop, whether it’s a school laptop or a personal one, and then that opens a whole other can of worms. Absolutely true. Laptops are the bane of my existence as a parent, particularly the school laptop, although they’ve gotten a little bit better, at least in my district. 

Actually, that was going to be my next question, this parental controls thing. It sounds like your district is being responsive.

Well, on that issue, they still don’t have a coherent phone policy during the school day. In the high school, it’s especially bad. That’s something I’m hoping will change. It is changing in a lot of schools around the country, thankfully. A lot more schools are doing “no phones during the school day, bell to bell,” which is what needs to happen.

A big message of the book is phone-free schools. And I know you’ve worked with , who has pushed for schools to get rid of phones. A few critics have said that this is a to a complex problem, and that it’s not entirely clear that phones are actually causing the mental health issues that Haidt has become a best-seller writing about. How do you respond to that criticism?

There are a couple of things to unpack there. For one thing, even if you take mental health out of the equation, kids should still not have their phones at school for academic and focus reasons, for the reason of developing social skills by talking to their friends at lunch, for the reason that a bell-to-bell ban is actually easier to enforce than a classroom-by-classroom ban. There are so many reasons for it that don’t even include mental health. 

The second question is [about] the research on phones and social media and mental health: We’ve known for quite a while that teens who spend more time on social media are more likely to be depressed or unhappy. Almost every single study finds that. Where you sometimes get more debate is, “O.K., that’s correlation. What about causation?” But in the last 10 years, we’ve gotten a lot more studies, and the studies that ask people to cut back or give up social media for at least three weeks a month or so, almost all of those studies show an improvement in well-being. And I don’t want to get too in the weeds here, but that’s actually a little bit shocking, because by definition in those experiments, you’re taking people who are at average use and having them cut back to low. 

That’s actually not where we see the biggest effects in the correlational studies. The heaviest users are much more likely to be depressed than the average or light users. So, you know, you can’t ethically do an experiment that would really answer the exact question: You can’t take 12-year-olds, randomly assign them to spend eight hours a day on social media, and then see what happens. At least I hope not.

In the book, you talk about the 10 rules “creating a firewall for kids against anxiety, attention issues and constant insecurity.” I think most parents would get behind that. But let’s be honest, they’re users of these tools themselves. How do we craft rules around web dependence and social media without being hypocrites?

Parents have to be role models. Parents are also allowed a small amount of what I call “digital hypocrisy.” Because they’re adults, they have jobs, they may be responsible for elderly parents, etc. But that said, parents should think about their technology use as well. They should get their phones and electronic devices out of their bedroom at night. They should also consider doing things like not having social media on their phone. If they want to use Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, do it on your laptop. That’s what I do. I mean, I don’t have much social media to begin with. I have X, but I don’t have it on my phone, and that’s very much a purposeful decision. During family dinners, unless there’s a really specific reason for me to have my phone with me, it’s upstairs.

That seems to be an easy one: Phones away at dinner.

Well, you’d think so, but you’ve got to get the whole family on board, and sometimes husbands are not really into that.

I want to skip to Rule No. 8: “Give your kids real-world freedom,” which will probably be met with some resistance. I have a 4-year-old grandson, and when I read your recommendation to let 4-to-7-year-olds go find items a few aisles away in the grocery store, I shouted, “Hell no!”

Why? Why is there, do you think, a resistance to that idea?

I have nightmares about this child being snatched from me at Safeway. I guess I want you to just pull me back from the edge, if you would.

I mean, that is not just unlikely to happen — the chances of that are so infinitesimal it probably shouldn’t even factor into our decision making. There’s one stat in there, and I forget the exact number, but someone calculated that if you wanted your kid to get kidnapped, how many hours — it turned out to be years — would they have to be in your front yard for that to happen? It’s something like 100,000 years. 

O.K., well that helps.

And a four-year-old loves that stuff! They love being grown up. I mean, look, even if you don’t do the grocery store thing, make sure they learn how to tie their own shoes, that they know how to get dressed. I remember when my girls were that age, and it occasionally amazed me when I would be with other moms in various situations and their kids couldn’t dress themselves at that age, and that’s where it starts. 

At pretty much every age, the great thing is that giving kids independence makes it easier for parents. It is easier as a parent if your 4-year-old can dress themselves. It is easier if your teenager makes dinner once a week. It’s good for everybody.

A lot of people might see this freedom rule as somehow contradictory to some of the other rules, in which you talk about adults being “in control.” Can you parse that?

For sure. Jon has said this as well — and I completely agree: We have kids in the real world and underprotected them online, and these principles are just trying to get those two to balance. When you’re talking about the real-world freedom thing, it’s not a matter of letting kids completely run wild and do whatever they want. We’re talking about giving kids some of the freedoms that parents themselves had when they were kids, and to build independence in a way that is really good for kids and good for them as they grow up. 

I can’t even remember who said this to me when I had young kids: “You’re not raising children, you’re raising adults.” And that’s just so true. That is your job as a parent. Giving kids some freedom and independence is a really, really key part of raising an adult.  

I wrote a whole book about learning games, and one of the powerful ideas that I took from that reporting is that many adults don’t realize video games have become. You acknowledge that, saying gaming is the primary way that some kids spend time with friends. But I gather that you see the risks as well. And I wonder if you could talk about that.

It really comes back to the principle of “Everything in moderation.” Many games are not as obviously toxic as social media. Games tend to be more in real time, more interactive. But is it a good idea for kids to be spending five or six hours a day gaming? Probably not. There have to be some limits.

You quote , the Facebook founder, admitting they’re “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology” to keep users on the app. Given social media’s sophistication, are mere parental rules sufficient? I mean, don’t we need a bigger hammer, like legislation and policies? 

Absolutely! Yes! Yes! It would be absolutely amazing for parents and for kids if we had laws that verified age for social media. I mean, ideally, that would be age verification to make sure they’re 16 or older, to raise the minimum age to 16. But even if we just enforced existing law with the minimum of 13, that would be progress, given the enormous numbers of 10-, 11- and 12-year-olds who are on social media, often without their parents’ permission — often explicitly against their parents’ permission — and actually against the law [Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule] that was passed in 1998.

What is the biggest obstacle to getting better regulation, or, to your point, to enforcing the existing regulations?

It’s interesting. The barrier is not the inability to verify age or the inability to verify age without a government ID. There are so many companies that will verify age now that they have their . It can be done in many different ways. The biggest barrier is tech companies themselves. Any time a state passes a law about verifying age on social media or even pornography sites, the companies — every single time. They have sued to keep those laws from going into effect.

Are any emerging technologies that parents should be concerned about? Do your rules need updating for AI or virtual reality or whatever comes next?

AI chatbots are what a lot of parents are rightly worried about. And yes, you could certainly modify or add to the rules and say, “No AI chat bots until 16 or 18 — probably 18.” And of course, it depends on what we’re talking about. It is common for kids to use ChatGPT when they need to look up something for homework or even have it write their essays — that’s a whole other horrible discussion. But what I’m specifically referring to is the many chatbots out there right now that are supposed to be AI friends, or worse, . There’s already been a tragic case of a child who , apparently due to one of these AI girlfriends. It’s just really scary to think of kids having their first romantic relationship with an AI chatbot. It’s terrifying.

The good news is, if you follow that rule about your kids having basic phones, if you give them one of the phones that’s designed for kids, those phones do not allow AI relationship chatbots. It’s on their banned apps, just like social media and pornography and violence apps. Parents have such a tough job, and it’s nice that there are at least a few tools out there that can make their lives easier and keep their kids off of things like AI girlfriend and boyfriend chatbots.

In keeping with the theme of overwhelmed parents, I wonder: If I were to come to you as a parent and say, “Oh my God, Jean, 10 rules is a lot. If I could only do two or three, where would I start?” Is that even a smart thing to do? And if so, where would you start?

I would say, “No electronic devices in the bedroom overnight.” Start there, because the research is so solid on it, and it’s such a straightforward rule, and it works for everybody, of all ages. Your teenager can’t say, “Well, you do it differently,” or, “You get to be on social media.” No, actually, my phone is outside my bedroom when I sleep at night too. So that’s a great place to start. And then, just because they have so much utility, I would probably say the second rule, about basic phones, because even with all of the mess of the laptops, I’m just so happy and grateful that my kids did not have the Internet or social media in their pocket until they were older.

As a parent and a grandparent, I really appreciate you using your real life to inform a lot of these rules. In a way, it hardens them a bit, makes them more durable. Anything I haven’t asked you about that you feel needs to be in the mix?

Two things I’ll throw out there just in terms of pushbacks: With “No phones during the school day,” the pushback is often “What about school shootings?” And it’s actually less safe for students to have access to their phones during an active shooter situation. And I go through the reasons for that in that chapter. 

And then the real-world freedom piece: When you look at the things that I’m suggesting in terms of how to give your kids freedom, obviously letting them go off on their own in the real world is important, and you should do that too. But there are lots of things in that list of suggestions you can do without even leaving the house: teens making their own doctor and hairstylist appointments, for example, or middle-school kids, or even elementary school kids, cooking dinner for the family. Those are great experiences for kids to have without too much parental interference. 

You do have to — and I know this by experience — step back, especially with the cooking piece, and let them do it by themselves and learn how to make mistakes. It’s tempting to just be there when they’re doing that, but you learn quickly that if you leave them alone, they’ll figure it out. And then you can go do something else. Go and read that book you’ve been meaning to read for a while. Go for a walk. Watch TV. Have some relaxation time that you wouldn’t otherwise get. 

I wrote a piece a couple weeks ago on unschooling, this idea of pulling kids out of school and letting them find their own level and their own interests. This almost strikes me as unparenting.

It is — and I’m not a huge fan of unschooling, because it’s a rare kid it would actually work for — but it is. It’s the general idea that not being up in your kids’ business all the time is better for both parents and kids. It’s something we really have to consider more.

Soon after she had gone to jail for trying to get her children a better education, Kelley Williams-Bolar’s teenage daughter Jada confronted her mother with an accusation that will stick with her forever. 

“You’re not there for me,” said Jada, now 26. Like the rest of her family, Jada still struggles with her mother’s 2011 felony conviction for sending Jada and her sister Kayla to a suburban school outside Akron, Ohio, using their grandfather’s address.

By the time Jada stood firmly in front of her, Williams-Bolger had spent nine days in jail, overwhelmed by how a felony could upend their lives, jeopardizing future housing and employment opportunities. She started to defend herself, then went silent. She knew Jada was right.

“But you know, it was my mind that wasn’t there. It wasn’t there for years,” conceded Williams-Bolar, a longtime educator and child care provider. “…Honestly, it destroyed me. It was a lot to deal with. I wasn’t the same mom for my daughters.”

Years after their prosecutions and forced removal from districts, families across the country like Williams-Bolar’s are still paying the price, economically and emotionally, after being prosecuted for acting in the best interest of their children. 

In Pennsylvania, one family ultimately owed over $10,000 for tuition and amassed legal fees into the six figures for keeping their child enrolled in a suburban school after moving out of the district three months before the end of the school year. In Connecticut, Tanya McDowell, whose family was experiencing homelessness, used her babysitter’s address to enroll her five year old in a Norwalk school. She was convicted on larceny and unrelated drug charges, serving . 

Outside of the legal ramifications, many families still struggle with depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress, their family relationships and work suffering as a result. Their children have felt at times like they had lost their parents and interest in school. 

Now seven decades after the Supreme Court outlawed sorting children by race and promised quality education for all in the landmark Brown v. Board decision, experts are beating the drum that continuing to exclude children from quality schools based on their home addresses perpetuates segregation. Advocates have also called for an end to the practice of prosecuting parents who, knowingly or unknowingly, disregard zone lines when enrolling their children.

Williams-Bolar’s daughters were zoned for Akron Public Schools, 15 minutes but seemingly a world apart from Copley-Fairlawn, the predominantly white suburban district where her father lived and often cared for her daughters. Visiting Copley’s schools, she saw acres of land, science fairs, a sprawling greenhouse, and a full computer room. Akron’s schools at the time had rapidly decaying infrastructure. Styrofoam cups filled with dirt were the plants in her daughters’ science classes. 

Night and day, she said. She just couldn’t have anticipated what the cost of enrolling her kids in Copley would be. 

Months later, her trial began. Intense scrutiny on the case made their family recipients of unwanted, international attention. A school district contractor showed up to their front door, looking inside their refrigerator, closets, bathrooms, counting each toothbrush. Teachers and students at her daughters’ school made snide remarks about their mother’s jail time. They’d catch neighbors’ side eyed, judgemental gazes. 

White men started driving slowly by their home at any time of day, never speaking, only staring. This would happen about a dozen separate times. 

Williams-Bolar sometimes stayed in her room crying for days, not knowing how much time was passing. Her depression lingered well after . 

Three years on probation also meant the family couldn’t travel to see relatives in the south. She was also barred from visiting her father in prison for months. Though his involvement with her school enrollment case was dropped, soon after the state convicted him on fraud charges related to government benefits. Williams-Bolar maintains the case against her father would not have been pursued without the unprecedented spotlight on her family. 

“Once you get in the lion’s den, they’re not just gonna let you go,” she said. 

He served 11 months in prison, and died in its hospital one month before release. 

“He loved going out barbecuing in the front yard. He loved all his grand babies coming over, always listening to music,” said Kayla, now 30. “I mean, the greatest grandpa a girl could ever ask for. Damn near like a father to me, and I’d do anything to have him back. But here we are.”

Investigations in and recently confirmed districts still regularly confront families suspected of living outside of their boundaries. Today, their methods are usually less public, with districts hiring private investigators or threatening prosecution to get families to disenroll their children. The thousands known to be kicked out of their schools for address sharing are disproportionately Black and brown. 

In at least 24 states, parents can face criminal prosecution, fines and jail sentences for address sharing. Only one, Connecticut, has decriminalized the common practice. 

To reduce the scale of the issue and promote integration, districts could adopt county boundaries, encompassing more diversity and better reflecting work-life patterns, rather than neighborhood lines that mirror racist housing segregation. But they often “lack the political will,” to do so; quality schools remain scarce by design, said civil rights lawyer Erika Wilson. 

And though Williams-Bolar knows a friend was similarly confronted by the district who believed her family lived outside the boundary, they never prosecuted her or asked her to remove her two children. The friend was related to a prominent leader in the NAACP. Williams-Bolar later met a former Copley student who alleged he lived in Akron, too, and that the school knew at the time, but let him stay because he was an athlete. 

“I think it’s common at these, these selective schools. The problem is it’s very, very selectively enforced,” said Tim DeRoche, author, researcher and founder of Available to All, a watchdog organization. 

‘I remember my wife losing her hair’

Around the same time Williams-Bolar was navigating her trial, just one state over, six year old Fiorella Garcia pleaded with the governor of Pennsylvania to drop charges against her parents. Crying, she said she didn’t want to go into foster care. 

In 2012, her parents Hamlet and Olesia Garcia faced up to seven years in prison, felony convictions, and losing custody of their daughter. The suburban Lower Moreland Township School District alleged Fiorella lived outside of its zone, in Philadelphia. Fiorella and Olesia lived temporarily with her grandparents in Lower Moreland, but failed to notify the district that they had moved out. 

In records reviewed by ����Ӱ��, the Garcias repeatedly offered to pay the district the cost for Fiorella to finish the school year in Lower Moreland so as to not interrupt her schooling. Their requests were denied. 

Their mug shots headlined local news the night they were arrested, alongside headlines that alluded to tax fraud. Olesia, who owned a private insurance company, risked losing her license and business. Their address made its way into coverage, and soon after, their car was vandalized.  

“This has never got off my head … I remember my wife losing her hair,” Hamlet Garcia said, trying to hold back tears. Losing so much sleep, he tried medication and experienced chest pains, which he attributes to the stress. 

Their tide only changed after leaving their public defender, who wanted them to settle for a guilty plea. The Garcias incurred close to $100,000 in debt to instead hire a high profile law team from Florida, money they say would have gone toward their daughters’ college education or family vacations. 

Ultimately, all . The family paid $10,752 “tuition” to the district and a $100 fine. 

In the decade that has followed, Garcia has devoted most of his time to learning education law, organizing for school choice and Republican political campaigns, feeling betrayed by the Democrats he felt were responsible. Fiorella, now 17, is about to graduate from high school. 

Telling her story and becoming a parent advocate has been Williams-Bolar’s “medicine.” She feels she’s a part of changing education policy to expand access to quality schools and “leave a legacy for my dad because he didn’t deserve none of that. He didn’t deserve to die in jail.” 

Today she works at one of Akron Public Schools’ high schools as a paraprofessional: the superintendent refused to fire her after the ordeal.

“Honestly,” said Kayla, who’s also considering going back to school to be an educator, “I’m still trying to heal.” 

Staring down the nearly 80-year history of modern suburbia, Herold finds that the effort produced mostly “disposable communities” across the country. While they served their first few sets of residents — his family included — they have failed to deliver the promise of the American Dream to the families of color who followed. Case in point: He notes that in the north of Dallas, where his reporting takes him, Black mortgage loan applications are now denied at a rate 23 percentage points higher than those of white applicants with similar incomes.

And while many families sought suburban homes in large part for their superior schools, even that isn’t a given anymore, he finds — especially if you’re not white or born in the U.S.A. Instead of an educational upgrade, he reports, many families now find troubled, underfunded schools, intractable bureaucracies, teachers’ union contracts that make “any wholesale changes difficult” and, perhaps worst of all, maddening discrimination in the very place where they’d sought refuge.

A longtime Education Week staffer who now teaches journalism at Temple University, Herold spent four years examining the historical record and found a pattern: As suburbs age, municipal revenues often fall, even as the costs of maintaining infrastructure rise. An “entrenched culture of political backscratching and can-kicking” exacerbates these problems.

In one suburban district in Evanston, Ill., outside of Chicago, crusading superintendent Paul Goren tells Herold, “I landed in a district that had a foundation of quicksand. It was wobbly on the instructional side, with lots of people doing their own thing because that was what they had done for years. We were [also] facing some level of financial doom.”  

Eventually, Herold writes, what befell so many suburbs was what he calls a “relentless cycle of racialized development and decline that took root after World War II, then sucked huge swaths of the country into a pattern of slash-and-burn development that functioned like a Ponzi scheme.”

His book, out Tuesday, follows five diverse families in suburban Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh. He actually grew up in the Penn Hills neighborhood east of Pittsburgh, and finds one of his subjects just three doors down from his childhood home.

Herold spent years getting to know these families, offering a deeply reported and closely observed account of five families’ struggles to capture what his family so easily enjoyed. 

����Ӱ��’s Greg Toppo caught up with Herold earlier this month.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

����Ӱ��: You note at the outset that you’re a suburban kid, raised in Penn Hills. Things for you went as they were supposed to. Yet you report that your dad ended up selling your childhood home in 2014 for one-fourth of what it was worth, to a guy he met on Craigslist. Is this the inevitable fate of inner-ring suburbs like yours? What’s at play here? Why don’t suburbs work anymore, and how do public schools play a part in this failure?

Benjamin Herold: Suburbia worked great for my middle-class white family and millions of others like us who received guaranteed mortgage loans, massive tax breaks and sparkling new infrastructure, including public schools we got decades to mold in our own image. But all that was made possible by trading short-term wealth for massive debts and liabilities that we pushed off on to future generations. Eventually, the bills come due. That’s what we’re seeing now.

You write that America’s suburbs since World War II have resembled a kind of Ponzi scheme that has stuck later investors with the bill. So we’re in the “after” part of the cycle, right?

All too often, it’s newer suburban families of color who get stuck paying for all the opportunity that whiter and wealthier families like mine already extracted. Because this cycle plays out over large geographies and multiple generations, it can be difficult to recognize when we take snapshots of a single suburban community at a single point in time. That’s why I followed five families living in five suburban communities that are each at a different stage of this process.

It’s also why public schools are such a valuable lens — we can only really see the bigger picture when we pay close attention to the anger, frustration and disillusionment that so many suburban parents feel when they’ve done everything right, yet still have to deal with their children being called racial slurs, subjected to unfair discipline and denied access to opportunities like gifted programs.

Just three doors down from your old house in Penn Hills, you knock on a door and find one of your five subjects: Bethany Smith, a Black woman who bought the place with her mother. That Bethany’s experience is so different from your family’s seems to reveal what you’re getting at in the book. Tell us about her. [Note: Herold uses pseudonyms for all of his subjects with the exception of Smith, who writes the book’s epilogue.]

Bethany’s family and mine wanted the same things: a quiet street, good public schools, homes that steadily increase in value, systems and services that just work. The difference is that my white family got most of those things without paying full price, while Bethany’s family had to pay extra to receive declining services, a school district that was raising taxes and slashing services and a stagnant housing market. 

Your subjects — almost all of whom are people of color — seem in many ways left to their own devices when it comes to pursuing these dreams in mostly crumbling, formerly white suburbs. What should communities be doing differently to help these families?

That’s the wrong question. Here’s why: In suburban Atlanta, I followed a middle-class Black family named the Robinsons. Both parents have advanced degrees, good jobs, rich social networks, and a strong spiritual foundation. Both also unabashedly love learning. Nika, the mom, was pursuing her PhD in public health, and Anthony, the dad, was a network engineer and former middle school teacher who stayed up late each night re-teaching geometry concepts to his teen son. Both parents were extremely active in their children’s schools, volunteering in the library, going to every parent-teacher meeting and maintaining running email correspondence with their kids’ teachers. And both Nika and Anthony are extremely kind and funny to boot. So for me, the question becomes: How on earth does a well-regarded system like the Gwinnett County Public Schools not only fail to connect with a family like the Robinsons, but actively alienate them, by gradually whittling away their oldest son’s spirit, joy, and sense of self, despite the abundant resources, assets and gifts the Robinsons bring with them?

So how can we understand the Robinsons’ experience through your lens of suburban decline instead of incompetence at the school level?

By 2019, Gwinnett County was nearly two-thirds Black, Hispanic, Asian, and multiracial. But in many ways, the Gwinnett County Public Schools operated as if it were still the early 1990s, when the population it served was still 90 percent white. During the period I write about, this was evident in big racial disparities in school discipline and access to gifted programs; Black and brown children now made up about two-thirds of all the district’s students, but barely one-third of the kids the district identified as gifted and talented.

Above all, though, this dynamic was evident in the district’s leadership. Prior to 2018, Gwinnett had somehow never elected a person of color to its five-member school board, which was largely controlled by three older white women, one of whom had held her seat for 47 years, and all of whom were vocal in their beliefs that changing the way things had always been in order to reflect the priorities and values of a changing population was tantamount to diluting the quality of the education the district offered. There was plenty of incompetence, but it occurred within the larger context of a $2.3 billion organization with policies, practices, and personnel that too often showed flagrant disregard for the majority of families it served. 

Eventually, things start to fall apart for nearly all of your subjects, it seems. Even the Beckers, a conservative and affluent white family, ultimately give up on the public schools in their exclusive Dallas exurb after a single year. They end up in a private Christian academy in a Plano strip mall. That makes me wonder: Is at least some of the “unraveling” you’re describing just the messiness of life, parent restlessness writ large?

I approached writing Disillusioned from two angles. I wanted to illuminate a big economic, social, and political pattern that we all now live within because America is such a suburban nation. I also wanted to explore the choices everyday families make and the lives we build as we try to figure out our relationship to that pattern. So I don’t think the Beckers’ relentless search for better schools is separate or distinct from the cycle of suburban churn they’re trying to navigate. As with the rest of us, these larger forces help determine the available options, and the choices we make in turn help shape those larger forces. 

You note throughout the book that Black and brown students have always had a fraught relationship with their suburban schools: “For so long,” you write, “so much of suburbia had been organized around trying first to keep those kids out, then treating them as a problem to be managed.” Yet in Compton, Calif., which is now almost entirely Black and brown, you find a measure of promise. Can you say more?

Jefferson Elementary in Compton is housed in a ramshackle facility consisting of several rundown bungalow buildings with narrow slits for windows that are almost reminiscent of a prison. But what I saw inside Jefferson and Compton Unified was a multiracial collection of adults — including a Black superintendent and school board chair, a Filipino principal, and a Latino fourth-grade teacher whose classroom I followed — who were unflagging in their belief that Compton’s children were bursting with talent and deserved all the opportunities and supports the system could muster. 

One of my favorite little examples of this was a narrative essay the fourth-graders were asked to write. The kids had to describe what a typical day would look like if they worked at . A boy named Jacob, whose family I was following, wrote this incredible piece about designing new droids and prototyping new light sabers and having water-cooler conversations with George Lucas. Between assignments like that, after-school robotics clubs, the chance to create a class newspaper, engineering lessons through [a well-regarded STEM-focused curriculum], and a class-wide mock trial, the kids were flooded with opportunities to imagine themselves shaping America’s future. And Superintendent Darin Brawley was extremely intentional about this, at a very big-picture level — he recognized that his retirement and his own family’s progress would depend on how well he prepared the students in Compton Unified, and so he took that responsibility not just seriously, but personally.

Your idea to pay Bethany Smith, the Penn Hills mom, to write the book’s epilogue strikes me as a bold choice. She’s quite blunt, for the record, writing that white people “are always fucking some shit up, then expecting everybody else to go fix it.” Why, among all of your subjects, does she deserve the last word? After the century-long narrative you’ve woven, is this the message you want readers to take away?

I love Bethany’s epilogue. I think it’s just tremendous. I’m so grateful she agreed to write it, and I’m even more grateful she was willing to get really, really honest, even when doing so was painful for her and unflattering for me. 

A central question drove me to give four years of my life to this project. I wanted to know how the opportunities my white family enjoyed in Penn Hills a generation ago are connected to the declining fortunes of the families who live in Penn Hills now. And I think Bethany’s epilogue really helped capture and communicate the answer. But it took me a long-time to actually be able to really hear what she was saying, in part because I had to shed a lot of my own illusions.

The breakthrough came when I finally realized I had to engage these questions emotionally, not just intellectually. And that meant putting under a microscope my own experience as a white person who grew up in suburbia, reaped its benefits and left behind a mess so I could go build a comfortable life somewhere else. Doing that made the book much richer, and that was a direct result of the challenge Bethany issued to me. So I’m extremely thankful to her, and to all the families and educators featured in this book who helped create a space that allowed all of us to give as much of our hearts as we felt comfortable sharing. 

Disclosure: Benjamin Herold received support from at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Greg Toppo is a Spencer Fellowship board member.

Recent surveys of young people show that parents’ concerns may be justified: More than half of U.S. teens spend at least four hours a day on these apps. Girls, who are , spend an average of nearly an hour more on them per day than boys. Many parents are searching for support. 

Perhaps more than anyone, Carla Engelbrecht and Devorah Heitner are qualified to offer it. They’ve spent years puzzling over how families can help understand media from the inside out, and how schools both help and hurt kids’ ability to cope.

Engelbrecht is a longtime children’s media developer. A veteran of Sesame Workshop and PBS Kids Interactive, she spent seven years at Netflix, most recently as its director of product innovation. Engelbrecht was behind the network’s Black Mirror “” episode in 2018, which allowed viewers to choose among five possible endings. 

Engelbrecht is now in public beta testing for , a new social media platform for kids under 13. She calls it a “course correction” for young people’s social media, aiming to teach them to be more mindful, thoughtful and responsible online.

Heitner is an who specializes in helping parents and educators understand how digital technology, especially social media and interactive gaming, shape kids’ realities. Her books include 2016’s and her new work . 

Speaking to either one would be enlightening, but we decided to facilitate a broader conversation by inviting them to come together (virtually) to share insights and offer a bit of advice for both parents and schools. 

Their conversation with ����Ӱ��’s Greg Toppo was wide-ranging, covering the effects of the pandemic, the pressures kids feel online and the women’s experiences communicating with their own children.

The solutions they offer aren’t simple. In Heitner’s words, parents seeking to learn more about their kids’’ media usage should pull back their surveillance and “lead with curiosity.” 

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: Devorah, tell us a little bit about your new book.

Devorah Heitner: I wrote Growing Up in Public because I was speaking for years about Screenwise in schools and all these other environments, and people said, “O.K., I get that we want to think about quality over quantity with screen time. But we also want to understand what kids’ subjective experience is and not just focus on how many minutes are good or bad.”

People lie about that anyway. People are sort of oblivious to their own screen use sometimes and get over-focused on their kids’. A lot of adults are recognizing: If I could have had a Tumblr or a Twitter or Instagram as a kid, I could have really done a lot of damage to my prospects and opportunities by so openly sharing.

What are we doing to our reputations?

As I started digging into that question, I recognized that parents are really part of the surveillance culture with kids. So are schools, with grading apps like or [which keep track of kids’ location, among other functions]. I really started understanding in a fuller way how kids are scrutinized. Kids are growing up very searchable, very public, and some of that is awesome. They have a platform, they can be activists. Some of it is problematic. 

The title of your book, Growing Up in Public, says so much about kid’s lives these days. I saw this term the other day: not FOMO, “Fear of Missing Out,” but FOMU, “.” Are those competing interests for young people?

Heitner: Well, there’s definitely a fear of messing up and especially being called out. There’s a lot of “gotcha” culture going on, and kids documenting each others’ screw-ups. And as much as you patiently explain, as I have to my own 14-year-old, the concept of mutually assured destruction, if you’re on a group text with somebody for long enough, both of you have probably said a few things you don’t want repeated outside of that context.

I think it’s modeled by adults, but this kind of “gotcha” culture is very insidious and terrifying. And it should be terrifying. 

Carla, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Carla Engelbrecht: I’m a longtime product developer and researcher in the kids’ space. I’ve spent a lot of time making products for kids. I’ve seen for years kids wanting access to Twitter and Facebook and MySpace and , all through the generations of social media. And they always want what is not made for them. They’re aspirational.

Kids are just plopped into this. And just as you wouldn’t give a new driver the keys to the car and just say, “Go!” — you need to teach them how to drive — there’s the same concept for me with media use. We need to teach our kids. Parents don’t know what they’re doing, because none of us have really been through this before, and they abstain. They need support in learning how to do this. Where Devorah talks about things from that guidance perspective, I’m looking at: How can we build a product for kids that helps them learn? 

It seems to me like Betweened is a site for parents as much as anybody. 

Engelbrecht: There’s definitely two audiences here. There’s absolutely a path where I could build a product for kids and launch them onto it. But I wouldn’t be addressing all the pain points.

Kids want short-form content. They want to create. They want to connect with their peers. In order to successfully set kids up to do that, parents need tools, too. And so it is really a product for both kids and parents.

Carla mentioned all these different apps coming down the road. Devorah, I’m thinking about you saying to someone recently how you’ve been working on this book for five years. A lot has changed in five years. We didn’t have TikTok five years ago. 

Heitner: Screenwise came out in the fall of 2016, which was a memorable time for many reasons: a lot of social forces happening in our world with Trump’s election. 

And then you have the pandemic in 2020. That’s around the time I had sold the book and was trying to interview people. Suddenly, I’m not in schools anymore. I’m on Zoom with kids, which is a whole research problem: How do you get a wider range of kids, not just the super-compliant kids who show up to a Zoom? And the pandemic was an accelerant to a lot of things happening already with kids in tech.

It was certainly not the beginning of kids being too young and not [the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act gives parents control over what information websites can collect from their kids]. But it accelerated, and there was kind of a push toward things like Kids Messenger [on Facebook] and other things that I even experimented with at the time. 

The pandemic started when my son was 10. We were like, “Oh, what can we do to help him communicate with friends?” We experimented with Messenger. It was a fail for us, but I also talked to the people at and [two mobile phone companies marketed for children]. There are people, in different ways, trying to come up with solutions because they have understood that both the adult apps and the adult devices, like a smartphone that does all the things, might not be the ideal thing to give a 10-year-old. 

What’s changed since 2016 is there used to be more worry about one-to-one computing in schools. Now, every school pretty much is one-to-one. It’s really the outlier schools that don’t have tech or aren’t giving kids individual tech. Even as late as 2015, 2016, I was helping schools negotiate that with parents. And parents were like, “I don’t know. I’m not sure about screen time. I don’t know if I want my kid getting a Chromebook.”

Try to find a school now that doesn’t give kids iPads or Chromebooks or something. That’s probably one of the bigger differences. And then just the explosion in server-based gaming like Roblox and Minecraft and the ways kids interact in those digital communities. You see a lot of very complicated, weird ideas among adults who care about children. Like “I’ll wait until eighth grade to give a kid a phone. Meanwhile,my third-grader plays Roblox on a server with strangers.” 

Engelbrecht: Or has access to text messaging through their iPad.

Heitner: Exactly. And they’re very smugly waiting till eighth grade and I’m like, “For what? For your kid to make voice calls?” That’s the one thing they don’t want to do.

Carla, you come from a game design background. People have lots of terrible takes about video games, which I’m sure you’re used to. How has that background informed what you’re doing and what Betweened looks like?

Engelbrecht: A lot of people come to video games and they’re just like, “They’re evil,” or “They’re awful,” or “They’re violent.” And you can say the same thing about television. You can also say the same thing if you only eat broccoli. Anything in excess is not good for you — like running a marathon every day. I take a very pragmatic approach to most things we can actually find good in.

When I look at video games, I can’t classify them as evil. I instead look for the good things. And it’s the same with social media. Social media as part of a balanced media diet gives parents a lot of opportunities to connect, gives kids a lot of opportunity to express creativity and develop skills. 

I’ll give you an example on the games side of things: Years ago, I did a South by Southwest talk called “What Can Teach Us About Parenting.” Left 4 Dead is not a game that kids should ever play. It’s a violent, first-person zombie apocalyptic shooter. It’s also one of the most beautifully designed cooperative games ever. I’m terrible with thumb sticks on video game controllers. I can’t walk in a straight line in a video game. I’m not great at the actual zombie-killing side of things. But I’m really good at running around and picking up health packs and checking in on people who have been damaged by zombies.

So there are different roles that people can play. I can still participate in the game, even though the primary way of playing Left 4 Dead is not what works for me. 

Also, if I’m playing with people, it fosters communication. I have to talk to people and someone needs to say. “Hey, I need help,” and I can come over. That’s what I’m looking for in games and social media: What are those underlying skills that, with a thoughtful perspective, you can leverage for good?

I wanted to switch gears a little bit and talk about something you mentioned earlier, Devorah: casual surveillance. I think about the stories we hear about parents not even just surveilling their kids — tracking their phones or their cars — but just keeping up in a way that we never even dreamed of. I wonder: Where did this come from? And how do you think a site like Betweened is going to help? 

Engelbrecht: I wish I knew exactly where it came from, but it certainly seems it’s symptomatic of the same thing: Everything has just kind of crept up on us. It’s like, as phones started to be introduced, we just thought, “Oh, well, I need to charge my phone, so I’ll charge it next to my bed.” And then the next thing you know, you’re checking it first thing when you wake up. It’s this slippery slope without the mindfulness of what it’s doing. Something has to happen to stop you, to make you take a step back and think, “How far have I gone? What boundaries have I crossed or what new boundary do I need to establish?” And to Devorah’s earlier point, the pandemic accelerated a lot of this.

Heitner: Part of it is we do it because we can. Even in relationships. I’ve known my husband since before we each had cell phones, but we didn’t used to check in as often because we didn’t have cell phones. It had to really rise to the level of an emergency before I would call him at work.

Remember the days of 9-to-5 office jobs? He left in the morning and was at his job. I was a grad student then and I would go up to Northwestern and not even really have any reachability by phone. Now we have phones, and the expectation is pretty much down-to-the-minute: If I’m 11 minutes late, I’ll probably text and say, “I’m 11 minutes late.” There’s just so much expectation for contact and communication and knowing where other people are. We don’t use location surveillance for that, but a lot of families do, and a lot of people have watches and will check into each other’s location on watches.

Because it’s there, people do it. And then there’s also just tremendous worry right now about kids. Given that we as a society think it’s a good idea for everyone to have assault weapons, parents are a little nervous. That anxiety creeps into everything.

My older daughter is 31, and I remember getting her first cell phone when she was 12 or 13. I remember the intense peer pressure she felt to have a phone. And I really didn’t like it at all. But I kind of justified it by saying to myself, “This is going to keep her safe.” And I remember thinking to myself, “You’re so full of shit. You’re just really trying to smooth things over.” And I guess I wonder: As parents, do we have an overextended sense of peril about our kids these days?

Heitner: There’s a sense of peril. Also, the Internet and online news and targeted algorithms just fuel that worry and outrage. It’s a bit of a vicious cycle.

Engelbrecht: In some ways, it’s almost like there are more risks that could stick with you. There wasn’t social media when I was in college. A bad decision in college couldn’t chase me through my entire life. In that sense, there are risks that feel much larger.

I think about my daughter and I don’t want something to chase her for her entire life. That part of it feels very real. And then it feels out of control. I don’t have the tools or know exactly how I can best help her except for having hard conversations and trying to put some bumpers around her. But there’s not a lot of tools to put the bumpers around her.

Devorah, one of the things you have said is that the kind of surveillance a lot of parents are undertaking is really undermining the trust their kids feel, and backfiring because kids won’t open up to them when they really need to. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Heitner: You just see kids really getting focused on going deeper underground. If their parents are like, “I’m going to get Bark and read every single thing they text,” then you see some kids who are like, “O.K., I need to go deeper underground, I need a VPN or to only text on Snapchat, or I need to do something where I can be more evasive.” And that concerns me, because then there’s no way to make use of the parent when the parent might be useful.

Engelbrecht: I think about how to create space to allow the kid to have a second chance at telling me the truth. For example, if there’s an empty bag of gummies and the kid is the only one who could have eaten it but says they didn’t, how can I create space to talk about making mistakes versus lying or intentionally hiding the truth? Saying, “I’m going to ask what happened to the gummis again, but first I want you to take a moment to think about your answer — it’s OK to change your answer, because I want to understand the truth. We all make mistakes and we can talk about it. But intentionally hiding the truth has consequences.”

If I later find out that the child lied, then there’s consequences. The hope is that eventually, a parent can say, “If you end up at a party where there’s alcohol, don’t drive home. Call me for a ride home. If you try to hide that there was alcohol and make poor decisions, then there’s additional consequences.”

It’s important to be able to say, “I made a mistake” and talk about what to do from there. Hopefully, that provides an alternative to the arms race of increasingly sneaky strategies that Devorah described.

Heitner: That makes a lot of sense. I was just going to say: The surveillance — schools just push it really hard. Every time I go to a school, they’re like, “Are you logged into ?” or “Are you logged into ?” They’re just really pushing it so hard.

Are schools culpable in this? Sounds like you’d say, “Yes.” I don’t know if you’d call it surveillance, though. One of the functions of schools is to keep track of things, right?

Heitner: But what about the location tracking? My kid has to scan a QR code to get into the cafeteria. I skipped lunch every day of high school and ate with my drama club friends in the theater. Was that so bad? They have 3,500 kids QR-coding themselves into study hall. It’s pretty locked down. It’s pretty Big Brother, or if you read Cory Doctorow. 

Engelbrecht: Homework tracking means having full visibility of my daughter when part of what she needs to learn is the executive function skills to actually be able to plan and follow through and do her homework. I don’t want to be in the place where I’m policing her homework. Now that she’s in seventh grade, it’s time for her to be learning those skills before there’s the consequences of missing your homework in high school or college.

So to me, it’s kind of that same thing: The information is there. Should it be provided? How do you use it? And, for me it’s: How do we better equip administrators, teachers or parents to stop and think about how to leverage this information? So maybe a kid who’s consistently missing their homework, yes, the parents should have more visibility as part of a support program to get the kid back on track and help them learn the skills. But to Devorah’s point, it doesn’t mean everyone needs to be badging into lunch.

Devorah, your message to parents is: There are all these things happening. There are all these things you have to keep track of. There are lots and lots of risks to kids being on social media, especially teenagers. But you shouldn’t panic. And I wanted to just throw this out to both of you: Instead of panicking, what should parents do? 

Heitner: Carla, you’re talking about creating a new community space for kids that’s more of a learning space, and that’s one alternative. Another alternative, in addition to, or potentially instead of, for parents who don’t have access to that, is just leaning into one or two spaces they really want to mentor their kids in.

Maybe their kid’s really involved in Minecraft. And if they want to join [a free voice, chat, gaming and communications app], the parents are waiting and saying, “O.K. You can join your library Discord with or your school Minecraft club on Discord, but not general Discord.”

Parents will tell me their kids are playing or they’re on YouTube. But I’m like, “What channels? It’s just like if somebody says, “I’m watching TV.” Well, what are you watching? Because that really is a big differentiator in terms of the experience.

Engelbrecht: It goes back to your “Fear of Messing Up.” I think so much about how it’s important for parents to wade in and get involved with their kids. This has been the advice for decades, whatever the newfangled thing was. I was just doing some writing about encouraging parents to actually do with their kids. It’s an opportunity to bond. It actually requires some planning and practice. It’s physical activity. I assume most parents are like me, that they’re not a great dancer and it’s uncomfortable and you don’t want to mess up.

But modeling that I’ll do something that’s out of my comfort zone and connect with you over something that I know you enjoy, can be very simple. It doesn’t mean a parent has to suddenly learn all aspects of Roblox or Discord, because they can be intimidating. But just find an entry point and connect with the child and participate with them. It just has so many benefits. It’s true whether they’re into Tonka trucks or Roblox. Parenting means, “Get in there with your kid.”

Devorah, you use the phrase, “Lead with curiosity.”

Engelbrecht: Oh, I love that.

Heitner: You want to be curious and have your kid share it with you. Their expertise and experience as well and their discernment — what do they like or not like about this app? How would they change it if they could? Staying curious is an alternative to spying — being curious and asking kids to be curious even about their own experience. Do I actually feel less stressed when I scroll this app? That’s maybe a lot of mindfulness to expect of kids, who have a lot going on and a lot coming at them. But it’s important for all of us to be curious about how our experience is going.

Engelbrecht: That’s one of the ways I’ve been thinking about it from a product perspective: just how to help build in some scaffolds for mindfulness — things like when you start an app, actually having a timer that’s like, “How long do you want to spend on it right now?”

I set a timer for myself when I use TikTok because I spend a very long time on it. So being able to put that in there as a scaffold, to start being mindful and thoughtful about it. We’re posting content, but we’re actually not posting endless scrolls where you could spend all day.

I don’t want to prioritize the traditional tech metric of “time on task.” To me, success is like, “You can come and use Betweened for 20 minutes and then know you can come back another day and there’s lots of interesting stuff for you.” But it’s not all-consuming, must-do-this-all-the-time. And that’s a different perspective on tech products. It’s not how most products are developed.

Being bullied can make your life miserable, and decades of research prove it: Bullied children and teens for anxiety, depression, dropping out of school, peer rejection, social isolation and self-harm.

Adults can be bullied too, often at a job, and they as kids do.

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who studies child and adolescent development. That includes learning how people become bullies – and how they can be stopped.

First, let’s : It’s mean-spirited, harmful behavior by someone with more power or status – like a popular kid at school or a supervisor at work – who repeatedly picks on, harasses, irritates or injures a person with less power or status.

– physical, like pushing, shoving and hitting; relational, such as spreading rumors, keeping somebody out of a friend group or just rude remarks; or sexual harassment and stalking behavior.

Sometimes, bullies target someone because of their race, religion, sexual orientation or appearance. People from the LGBTQ+ community, or who are overweight, or with a physical or developmental disability are . As a result, they , including depression, anxiety and self-harming behavior.

So why do bullies do it?

People learn how to bully others early on through what psychologists call modeling and social learning. This means bullies see other people bullying and they essentially model, or copy, this aggressive behavior.

Media is . When mean or violent conduct is glamorized and gamified in music, video games, TV and movies, bullies will imitate what they see and hear, especially if it seems cool or if it’s rewarded.

Family . If children grow up in a home without kindness and closeness, but with plenty of physical punishment and heavy conflict – including parents fighting with each other – then children view this behavior as acceptable. They can go on to treat their peers this way.

A similar thing happens when a kid falls into a group of friends who are bullies; they become . To say it another way, they bully because they think it makes them look cool in front of their friends.

And bullies bully for . Some do it because it makes them feel better about themselves when they put other people down. Other bullies discovered that force and intimidation worked for them in the past, so it’s a go-to strategy to get what they want. Still others simply have difficulty controlling themselves and can’t calm down when they’re angry.

And with some bullies, it’s just a way to get ahead. For instance, an adult bully in the workplace about a co-worker to keep a rival from being promoted.

How to handle bullies

Fortunately, there are lots of ways to stop a bully.

If you’re a child or teenager, talk about what has happened with a trusted adult – a parent, teacher, principal or counselor. They will help you figure out your next move. Schools are familiar with this sort of problem; they have to protect victims of bullying.

If you’re an adult who has been bullied in the workplace, talk to your human resources department or a neutral supervisor who can advise you on next steps. You are also legally protected – employment laws .

Whatever your age, it’s a good idea to talk to friends or family members who may not be involved in the incident but who will offer support. Engaging in coping activities – like exercising, or relaxing with a walk – .

You can also use the , available 24/7, by texting 741741. Or call the at 1-800-273-8255; the link also provides international numbers. Or call 988 to reach the national .

And a final word: Bullying is not acceptable. It’s not just “kids being kids,” or that you’re “too sensitive.” If a bully is bothering you, don’t try to handle it alone – getting help is the way to get through.

Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.

And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

Through tears, her mother coaches her to make eye contact and regulate breathing.  

Along with artwork and snippets of therapy sessions, the scene is one of many in the new documentary , now available to stream on , Apple TV, Prime Video and Google Play for $5-12, that paints an intimate portrait of families experiencing the youth mental health crisis firsthand.

Created by Oscar-winning documentary director Vanessa Roth and entrepreneur and author Laura Morton, Anxious Nation invites audiences into the world of several young people managing anxiety, OCD, suicidal ideation and depression. Their experiences are interspersed with reflections from a psychotherapist and advocates including Taraji P. Henson.

After a nearly year-long run at regional film festivals across the country , the film is now being brought to select cinemas, high school and college campuses to jumpstart conversations about managing generalized anxiety disorder — top of mind for families now more than ever in recent history. 

Anxious Nation has generated a multi-generational response, with many grandparents attending screenings and sharing letters to the director and cast. Some say the film helped them understand that anxiety is real, or encouraged them to talk to their grandchildren in ways they didn’t before. 

Sevey Morton, the teen from the kitchen table and daughter of filmmaker Laura Morton, said the film helped her find coping strategies through others’ stories. And while initially hesitant to give her permission to use the scene, she now sees the representation as necessary. 

“I remembered what it felt like at my age to be struggling with that and feeling like I was the only person,” Sevey said. “If I can be that person that girls and boys can relate to with mental health and the struggles then that’s worth it … I feel like it’s so needed, I haven’t seen any footage like that or anyone being vulnerable like that on camera.”

“I would have killed to see someone like me who was in a film similar to this, speaking truthfully about their mental health,” she added. 

Rather than having experts to explain anxiety’s history or a mythical solution, filmmakers intentionally centered childrens’ point of view, through reflections, artwork, and vulnerable at-home video of moments previously only experienced by themselves, their parents or mental health providers.

In frank interviews, teens lay out how anxiety has impacted their relationships — to romantic partners, parents, school and even faith communities. 

“Teenagers really are asking to be seen and heard. We, teachers, community members, whether we think something should make them feel anxious or not, or whether we think we know how they should deal with it, doesn’t matter,” said Roth. “We actually need to start from where they are.”

New Hampshire’s Winnacunnet Public Schools Superintendent Meredith Nadeau said Anxious Nation helped their schools begin conversations and be more empathetic about mental health. 

“The film helps to normalize the experience of anxiety in children and adolescents, and, I think, has helped people to better understand what a young person with anxiety might be experiencing,” Nadeau told ����Ӱ�� by email. 

While the youth in Anxious Nation range in age, race and geography, all have had professional support with their anxiety disorders. Many children currently living with anxiety have not yet had consistent access to that level of care. 

“There’s a whole other realm of students and children that we work with that are lacking resources and lacking parent reflection and lacking the ability to articulate what’s happening,” said Heather Cronan, director of school counseling at Winnacunnet High School.

Still, Cronan hopes to one day be able to screen parts of the film in health classes, as it can help jumpstart talks about mental health and family dynamics — something she often sees left out of the conversation. 

The documentary doesn’t shy away from the role parents, caregivers, and the family environment play on children with anxiety. 

In some scenes, parents’ own anxieties about success trigger childrens’ fears and feelings of inadequacy.

“We look at the person suffering, and so rarely do we look at what role and contribution parents have in all of it, whether it’s nurture or nature or both,” said Laura Morton. 

Lynn Lyons, a psychotherapist who specializes in anxiety disorders, also likens anxiety to a “cult leader” that dictates what families can and cannot do. 

The metaphor, she told ����Ӱ��, has been helpful for parents to get distance from the day-day interactions with anxiety. Thinking of anxiety as separate from the child can also remove some blame and shame. 

For instance, one young boy had severe anxiety about attending school. The father found himself “following the cult leader” by attending class with his son, offering constant comfort. This solution, though it felt necessary short-term, was not sustainable and did not help his son develop tools to manage anxiety. 

“We can say, look how powerful this anxiety is … Look how much it impacts your decisions. And we have this common goal, of not letting the cult leader be in charge,” she said. 

Lyons and other experts recommend that children with anxiety develop a toolkit. For Sevey, journaling and grounding exercises have helped with catastrophic thinking. 

“Whenever I get anxious, I really spiral and I think that it’s going to last forever,” Sevey said. “So a way to ground myself is I think about how long is it gonna last? Like, is it gonna matter in five minutes? Yes. Is it gonna matter in five hours, five days, five weeks, five months, five years?” 

Others in the film find relief in a combination of skateboarding, basketball, therapy, socializing and breathing exercises. 

“We might not be able to address the nature of a person that comes into the world,” Roth said, “but we certainly as a society can do better at [nurturing].” 

Confronted with that startling reality, the from the University of Chicago’s Education Lab has identified a cost-effective, school-based model that can support young girls: group counseling and mentorship. 

Attending weekly in-school counseling for just four months through the program decreased PTSD symptoms brought on by witnessing or experiencing violent attacks or or losing a loved one by 22%, depression by 14% and anxiety by about 10%, according to the randomized control trial, considered the gold standard of research.

The program is currently offered to groups of 10 teen girls in about 30 Chicago Public Schools and more in Dallas, Kansas City and Boston.

“[Because of] the violence we see, and there’s violence everywhere, not just in Chicago… they are experiencing a lot of loss,” said Christine Diaz Luna, a senior counselor at Hancock College Prep which serves mostly Latino students on the city’s southwest side. “I’ve seen in my experience that loss, that grief, that longing for connection.” 

The high prevalence of PTSD shocked lead researcher Monica Bhatt, whose team studied over 3,700 9th- through 11th-grade girls across 10 high schools from 2017-19. 

“These are girls who, despite the very, very high levels of trauma that they were experiencing, are coming to school. We see a B average … We don’t see a lot of externalizing behaviors,” Bhatt said.��

“It really adds evidence to this notion … of having a set of latent mental health challenges that do surface later in life, but aren’t apparent early on.” Research has shown that leaving depression and PTSD unchecked can affect girls’ future ability to succeed in their careers and family. 

Earlier this year, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report shed some light into just how pervasive traumatic experiences are for young girls: 1 in 5 nationwide experienced sexual violence in 2021.

The Chicago research is the first large-scale study to look at effective mental health interventions specifically for Black and Latino girls — who are more likely than their peers to experience traumatic childhood experiences and have higher rates of depression and anxiety. 

“Usually, we sort of study program effectiveness on a large sample, and then we try to understand, does this vary for particular student groups?” Bhatt added. “This is a program that was designed particularly with Black and Latino girls in mind … We’re starting to develop a body of evidence where there wasn’t a lot prior.”

Students who are actively suicidal, have learning disabilities or are absent more than 75% of the year were excluded from the Chicago sample. More research is needed to understand how a program like WOW might impact those student groups. 

Researchers believe results would be even greater for girls attending for the designed length, two school years. According to , the local nonprofit that launched the model in 2011, girls who start within clinical range for PTSD and depression have even more success: decreasing symptoms by 62% and 71%, respectively.��

WOW in Action

After her freshman year, whenever TK Nowlin was overwhelmed by family, school and friend stress, she’d get frustrated, and get into arguments, or stop communicating.��

Now a junior at Fenger Academy High School in her second year of WOW programming, she feels more calm and sure of herself. 

“[WOW] helped me work on my healthy relationships … It’s very important to listen to understand instead of listening to respond, and I know that played a big factor in my life, because it was like I always had a rebuttal to something,” Nowlin said.��

Fellow junior Yazmin Hunter told ����Ӱ�� she now has a system when she’s reaching the point of frustration: take a break, sit down, breathe, listen to music, take a walk. 

Once a week, TK, Yazmin and peers across Chicago leave their elective or physical education classes to head to their WOW room. They start with a check-in, sharing a rose, bud, thorn from their week or comparing their mood to songs and colors. 

Her counselor facilitates either full group discussions or individual journaling. Surrounded by colorful walls, affirmations and mirrors, they sometimes pull cards from a container: Who is the most important person in your life? What does success or a support system look like to you? What are your views on parenting? 

Informed by Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Narrative Therapy, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, the sessions get girls to reframe or question negative thoughts, reflect on how their day-day actions align with their personal values and listen openly to each others’ stories.��

“Our thoughts are powerful. And sometimes we think thoughts that aren’t necessarily true. As an example, you look in the mirror, ‘Oh my God, I’m ugly,’” Diaz Luna explained. “Let’s take that thought and break it down. What’s going on there? Where’s that coming from? Have you been told this before by someone else?”

Having the group offered during the school day is critical to reach students who work or have family commitments after school that would prevent them from attending otherwise. Students are never pulled out of core classes or lunch, only electives or physical education. 

Students can volunteer for the program, pending a parent’s permission. School staff can also refer students to the program if they notice someone struggling. 

Cost and space are typically the biggest barriers for potential school partners, Youth Guidance’s chief program officer Nacole Milbrook told ����Ӱ��. 

At about $115,000 per school for one counselor, who works with four to five groups of students, WOW is still about $40,000 cheaper to run than the accepted threshold for similar services.

Surgeon general Vivek Murthy warned Tuesday in a that social media poses a profound risk to children, with excessive use impacting sleep, relationships and depression that can lead to thoughts of suicide. The report may also shape national policy as legislators and courts take on algorithms, privacy and age policies, and access to platforms. 

“We are in the middle of a national youth mental health crisis, and I am concerned that social media is an important driver of that crisis – one that we must urgently address,” Murthy said in a statement.

According to Murthy’s report, even as 95% of teens and 40% of 8-12 year olds use social media, there is no evidence platforms are “sufficiently safe.” Spending more than three hours daily doubles their risk of poor mental health, including depression and anxiety symptoms, the report states. The average daily use for teens is three and a half hours, research shows.

The surgeon general also noted push notifications, infinite scrolls, and public like lists are particularly enticing and concerning for youth in early adolescence who frequently compare themselves to peers.

Citing many of the same concerns Murthy identified, more than 100 school districts nationwide have sued companies including TikTok, Snap, YouTube and Meta for their allegedly addictive algorithms that they say harm students.

Lawyers at the forefront of district litigation said the surgeon general’s report strengthens their claims.

“I think you’re going to see even more file as a result of this advisory,” said Dean Kawamoto, counsel with Keller Rohrback, the leading Seattle-based law firm representing several districts who hope to make platforms less harmful. 

But some lawyers not involved in the case remain skeptical, believing that while the report will inform the national conversation, it does not carry enough weight to make waves in court.

“It is tentative and ambiguous and not really definitive in the way that most courts are going to want when ruling on something being dangerous,” said Rebecca Tushnet, First Amendment expert and Harvard Law professor.

In contrast to the definitive stance on, for example, smoking, the surgeon general acknowledged social media also holds benefits. Platforms can help create a community for marginalized young people.

Active Minds, one of the nation’s leading mental health advocacy nonprofits, urged families and policy makers curbing social media access in the wake of the advisory to consider what may be lost. 

Bans could cut off access to critical sex education or communities where isolated LGBTQ, Black and Brown youth feel they belong — similar reasons other .

“While the harmful impacts of social media usage on youth mental health certainly exist, are well documented, and require additional research…we’ve also heard from many youth and young adults, particularly from vulnerable communities, who credit social media with saving their lives,” Active Minds told ����Ӱ��.

Among the practical recommendations for and tech companies: set limits in the house around meals or bedtime; reach out for help; share data that could further research on health impacts; enforce age minimums; develop safety standards by age; and increase funding for research. 

“Our children and adolescents don’t have the luxury of waiting years until we know the full extent of social media’s impact. Their childhoods and development are happening now,” the report states.

About two thirds of adolescents are “often” or “sometimes” exposed to hate-based content. Six in 10 girls have been contacted by a stranger on social media in ways that make them uncomfortable. Young girls and LGBTQ youth are more likely than their peers to experience cyberbullying or harassment, which about 75% of adolescents believe is poorly managed by social media sites. 

At the same time, in a recent survey of , 64% said they would rather give up their right to vote for one year than give up their social media accounts.

Meta and TikTok did not respond to requests for comment. 

“As a messaging service for real friends, we applaud the Surgeon General’s principled approach to protecting teens from the ills of traditional social media platforms,” a spokesperson for Snap Inc, owner of SnapChat, told ����Ӱ��.

Every day, adults are tasked with supporting young people showing behavioral changes or experiencing a mental health crisis. The problem? Many are unprepared to do so. 

It’s a challenge Deborah Offner came up against so often, as a consulting psychologist for schools in and around Boston, she decided to write a guide. Urgency is only growing: a recent CDC report shows about a third of teen girls contemplate suicide, the second-leading cause of death for children.

Educators as First Responders: A Teacher’s Guide to Adolescent Development and Mental Health, Grades 6-12, , delves into the adolescent brain. Offner pairs the science of what’s happening, at a given age or for those with a particular mental illness, with school-based examples she and educators have had over decades. 

Through it all, she invites readers to take off their adult hats and to see youth behavior in the context of development. How are requests for nudes, for example, registering in a 14-year old’s brain? What are they seeing as the risk and rewards? What other information do you need to know to decide whether to pull a counselor or parent in? 

“Teachers really are playing these significant roles, to help kids develop and manage their emotional lives. They should be a little more equipped and supported to be able to do that in a way that they feel confident about because they’re doing it anyway,” said Offner, who also treats children and young adults in her private practice.

In discussion with ����Ӱ��, Offner reveals the best practices adults can keep in mind and how schools can meet some of students’ emotional needs beyond referral to talk therapy. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Please be advised that some responses reference self-harm and suicide. 

����Ӱ��: As somebody who’s done this work for decades, is thinking of educators as first responders in this way a new paradigm or shift? Why write this now?

When I tell teachers, and other mental health professionals who work in schools, it seems very intuitive. Of course, kids go to their teacher when they’re upset. But it’s not recognized or acknowledged as being such a central part of the role. 

In part I wrote the book to call attention to the fact that teachers really are playing these significant roles, to help kids develop and manage their emotional lives. They should be a little more equipped and supported to be able to do that in a way that they feel confident about because they’re doing it anyway. What are some things I can do and say? I understand these kids as learners, but how do I understand them as people?

You spend the first good chunk of the book with the social contexts that shape adolescence and the psychology behind kids’ actions. Why is that understanding critical and how might educators’ actions change as a result? What’s the danger of what you call an “adult-centric lens”?

One of the things I like to do when I work with schools is to help build empathy in adults for what kids and also parents go through. When teachers understand what’s behind the behavior, there’s a couple of things that change. You don’t take it personally when a kid isn’t paying attention, can’t remember to do something, or has a certain attitude. You recognize that it’s not something you’re necessarily doing wrong, or something that if you just were different would change. It’s what they’re going through, and also, it’s normal.

There’s great benefit to the increased awareness of mental health issues in kids, but at the same time, there’s a lot of things that all kids do that can look a little crazy if you don’t recognize why it is. They don’t have the same controls, the same ways of thinking or organizing themselves and behavior that adults do. So it normalizes some of the funny things that can be perplexing or frustrating; it helps you to have perspective on them.

I’m curious if you have an example from talking to a teacher about this. Any light-bulb moments to share, from when you explained the underpinning of a behavior?

There’s an example I use in the book about a boy who looked really indifferent, kind of lazy, like he didn’t care about his work or about his teachers expectations of him. Teachers would ask him to meet after class and he would just disappear, slink out of the room. He was getting behind and seemed really disengaged. 

As the school counselor, I got an opportunity to speak with a therapist he was working with outside of school and learned from her that he had the worst case of social anxiety she’d ever seen. And once I understood, oh, that’s why he’s avoiding his teachers. That’s why he seems shut down. It’s actually called social phobia, a specific disorder. It’s not being shy or not wanting to talk to people exactly. It’s about worrying that other people are gonna think something critical of you, or bad. He was actually so exquisitely sensitive to feeling like he was letting his teachers down that he was avoiding them. 

Once they knew that, rather than just being angry and taking it personally, they were more sympathetic and could put some plans into place. I helped him to agree to what would work for him so that he could connect with them and do better. It wasn’t a magic solution, but the energy in the room changes when you explain to faculty why a kid is struggling, right?

It’s funny you bring up that example because it’s one I wanted to ask you about. What would you have done if there wasn’t yet a therapist to consult in that case? How would you have gone about finding or meeting his needs without the context?

That’s a great question because in so many cases, kids don’t have one, let alone one that knows them so well that they can offer you that kind of input. What I recommend to anyone who’s in a counseling role, or even like a Dean or administrative role, is to try to sit down with a student and hear their point of view about what’s going on. Often, kids will tell a counselor things that they might not share with a teacher. With the kids permission, you can, in some ways, act as a liaison. Even if the kid doesn’t want you to share everything they’ve told you, if you come to a better understanding of what’s going on, you can share that.

What factors adults can look out for to keep a pulse on a student’s well being while maintaining their boundaries?

Every student has different boundaries. There’s some kids, as we all know, that will tell you everything from what they ate for breakfast to a fight they had with their best friend whether you want to know or not. And there’s other kids that keep their cards really close to their chest. You have to — this is the beauty of teachers — get to know your students. Sometimes it can be as simple as asking, how are you doing? Kids can be almost surprised and even kind of touched that a teacher is interested. That is always a starting point. It doesn’t mean that a kid is going to tell you in the moment about a serious problem they’re having, but showing that you want to know it’s an important step in the direction of kids feeling they could open up to you if they wanted to. 

Obviously if you notice any change in behavior — like a kid who’s usually alert who suddenly seems sleepy — it’s okay to say, are you feeling okay? You seem a little different or not quite yourself today, or you’re quieter than usual.

You mentioned earlier that sometimes teachers are unsure of when to not fly solo and involve a professional clinician or let the family know. What are some considerations that a teacher can think through?

The bright lines that I draw have to do with any physical or potential harm to the student. If a kid is talking about suicide, cutting themselves, or other things that have to do with concrete harm, it’s really important that you not be the only one who knows that, especially when you’re not trained to assess the seriousness, gravity or reality of such a situation. Sometimes kids cut themselves and it doesn’t mean anything other than that they’re trying to manage their distress. It’s not a good sign, but it doesn’t mean that they’re going to necessarily attempt suicide. 

In situations where there’s the possibility of self harm, whether it’s happened or might happen, it’s really important to let the student know that you need to let their parents know or let the school counselor know. You can give them a choice about how you tell their parents, whether they want to tell them and then have them loop back to you, there’s different ways to negotiate the process, but that’s again the bright line. 

Otherwise, I think if a kid tells you something and you find yourself thinking about it after you go home, it’s always great to run it by a mental health professional at the school, even without a name if you want to protect the kids privacy, just to get someone else’s take on it. Someone who’s trained and knows maybe a little more about the specifics of what’s worrisome. 

What are some best practices to keep in mind when a young person discloses something traumatic or difficult for them?

One of the first things that you always want to say if a kid confides in you about something traumatic is to thank them for letting you know, that you’re so glad that they were able to tell you, that you wouldn’t want them to be alone with this experience. Ask, have they told anybody else? Oftentimes kids will confide in a teacher, and it will be the first person they’ve told about something like this. Find out so you’re aware if you’re the only person holding this fact, or if in fact the parents already know. That’s a really different scenario, if you know that another adult is kind of taking responsibility. 

Certainly in that first conversation, do not jump to issues of reporting or filing charges are anything administrative or procedural, but focus more on how they’re doing and to maybe ask for a little bit more detail. Say something like, if you feel comfortable telling me, could you let me know a little more about what happened, is there anyone else who would like to know, or anything else that I can do to be helpful? 

Of course, if someone under 18 tells you they’ve been sexually assaulted, you’re a mandated reporter. There are those requirements, legally. But again, I wouldn’t bring that up in the first meeting. Generally speaking, you should go to your school administration and potentially the school counselor to talk about how the school wants to make the report and certainly not to do it without involving the student and potentially their family. In the moment, it’s just important to be there and sit with the kid and absorb whatever they’re feeling.

Another issue you raise in the book is this idea of compassion fatigue that some educators face. Can you share how that might show up in school and what educators can do to best avoid it or manage it when it comes?

This is a huge theme right now in schools, as we as a culture and country recognize the prevalence of trauma, of being sexually assaulted. So for example, a kid tells you they were sexually assaulted, there’s sort of a vicarious traumatization that happens when you hear a story like that, but it could also be more subtle things like their parent mistreating them or them going through a difficult depression. 

As we bring an empathic response to supporting that child, and the more we do that, it can take a toll on us. The ways to address it have to do with building a network or community, finding a mentor or supervisor or someone that you can share some of the weight. It’s sharing it with another adult or a small group and also taking care of yourself in all the ways that we’ve been told to throughout the pandemic, whether it’s exercise, sleep, making time for yourself, to prevent the kind of fatigue that can happen.

When you saw the latest findings from the CDC about the frequency of sexual assault and suicidal ideation, what was your reaction personally?

On the one hand, as a human as a parent, I was horrified. As a psychologist who works with many girls in high school and college, I wasn’t surprised at all. I would say, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating, that virtually every girl in my practice over the age of 18 has been either sexually assaulted or coerced into sex at least once. Now, I have a small practice but these are girls from all different backgrounds and different schools. It’s really pervasive in a way that continues to shock me, even though I also know it’s reality.

You’ve also worked with youth interfacing with the foster care system and underserved youth in Boston more generally. For educators whose student populations are disproportionately impacted by poverty, homelessness, or adverse childhood experiences, are there specific things you recommend keeping in mind when they take on this first-responder approach?

There are ways to be sensitive and thoughtful if you’re a person who doesn’t come from a background of poverty and you’re not familiar with some of the sort of coping strategies that families may have to use. It’s important to be sensitive, both to the economic strain on families and also to cultural preferences for ways of talking about and dealing with mental health. 

A common thing for our families from Beacon Academy — who are all students of color and low-income, some have parents who have immigrated fairly recently — is that older kids will take care of younger kids on a regular basis. They may spend many, many hours caring for their siblings in a way that more privileged families may not, and often that could interfere with following through on a commitment to an extracurricular activity or something at school. It’s important, if you find a kid who is having trouble meeting a certain expectation, to gently explore and understand. Are there family commitments that are taking up their time? That’s really different than if someone doesn’t feel like getting up in the morning. Maybe their mom had to go to work and they couldn’t afford a babysitter.

That goes back to the idea of building empathy you mentioned earlier. We also know that suicidal ideation, depression and anxiety symptoms are more common in particular marginalized student groups — girls, students of color, queer students. Are there particular supports to keep in mind for them? 

The thing to keep in mind about these identities is that they may make kids more vulnerable, or more worried about sharing information for fear of people judging or criticizing them or not being accepting. What I always have in mind for myself is the kid’s identity, as I understand it and as they claim it, and also my own identity — what the differences are in those. Then I can see and mind the gap. 

How can schools be more affirming right now outside of offering traditional talk therapy, particularly because a lot of students might have family contexts that still stigmatize care or can’t access it? 

I think mental health awareness days are always helpful. I was in a school last week that had a wellness day for the middle and high school. Kids could go to all kinds of workshops; I did one on perfectionism for high school students. They had a dance group come and other speakers to talk about things like body image and dieting. That was a very popular talk because a lot of kids have concerns about that. I think it started off as kids being skeptical and now it’s like a day that nobody wants to miss. They have therapy pets come, someone doing caricatures, but it celebrates that wellness is important for kids. It’s not just about being high achieving academically or athletically. 

There’s other ways to offer support in-school that aren’t therapy, per se. For younger kids, and this could even go through middle school, lunch groups may be held with either a school counselor or someone savvy about kids. They can talk about mental health, relationships; kids could come together and be able to chat with each other and with a teacher for no particular reason. It doesn’t have to be only kids that are having trouble. 

At the school where I am, we had someone come in — he’s not a therapist, more of a coach, who’s going to do some art projects with the kids and provide a safe space for kids to chat with him if they wish. It’s activity-based, but it’s a time for them to just be there for themselves and not have any expectations on them. Doing things that show that you value their well being can be really important and parents never have to pay or give permission for it.

Lastly, are there particular storylines, or aspects of youth mental health that you feel are being misrepresented, over- or underrepresented?

What I feel is probably not addressed enough is family life and the importance of supporting parents so that they can effectively support their kids. You see a lot about either the sort of fetishization of motherhood — maternal love as this kind of ideal, special, gendered state — or parents who are abusive. The extremes of parents. Most parents are obviously somewhere in the middle, either themselves struggling with mental health issues or ambivalent about the pressures that parent parenthood puts on them. 

For today’s kids, there’s so much about social media and the effects of that in terms of mental health, but in my experience, a lot of what determines how kids feel about themselves and how well they do is their relationship with their parents. I wish there was more attention to helping parents be more present in better ways for their kids.

If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Additional resources are available at . For LGBTQ mental health support, you can contact The Trevor Project’s toll-free support line at 866-488-7386.

They’d just watched a three minute, wordless animation — 5,618 frames hand-drawn by Red Mountain High School senior Mariana Myers.

A genderless, ageless figure downloads apps. Dopamine fires in their brain; they appear to float. They seek the feeling out more often, foregoing stretching for a morning scroll, isolating from friends to stay connected online. A chain appears on their wrist. They adopt risky behaviors like using their phone while driving. 

When they realize and break the chain, they fall into an abyss.

The black and white video essay illustrates in painful simplicity how social media addiction and fear of being disconnected, termed nomophobia, can impact young people. 

Researched and produced for her English class, Myers’s work found its way into a 111-page lawsuit in which her home district, the largest in Arizona, is suing TikTok, Meta, YouTube, Snap and Google for allegedly targeting and addicting young people through harmful product design. They are one of dozens. 

“You’ve got 250 people in a room and you could not hear a word and there were tears in people’s eyes,” said Mesa Public Schools superintendent Andi Fourlis. “That begs, let’s do something differently about this. So I have to answer that call.”

Myers told ����Ӱ�� she drew inspiration from independent research, documentaries and real-life observations, of bullying, hate speech, addiction, eating disorders, and friends basing their worth off of likes.

She knew immediately that she wanted to attempt an animation, what she sees as the most powerful art form. 

“You can take any type of idea that you have in your head. It not only conveys an idea, but it can also convey things like movement, emotion, expression.”

A gymnastics coach for kids three through fourteen, Myers has witnessed youth of many ages grow dependent on their phones. Every water break, phones come out, and in-person interaction stops. 

They implemented a new rule: lock your phone in a box as you walk in for the three-hour practice. But some still found a way to keep their connection, hiding their phones in their lockers or deep in backpacks. 

“They just constantly needed… to check their social media in particular,” Myers said. “I would see them on Snapchat or Instagram, messaging friends and I’m like, you’re here to do gymnastics — you can go home and do that. But it was almost as if they couldn’t change that pattern.”  

The phenomenon is one of many she illustrated for the video essay, showing how the urge to connect online can drive isolation with peers in person. 

Particularly in the throes of a youth mental health crisis, experts suggest schools familiarize themselves with warning signs of youth behavior and make schools as affirming as possible. 

While Myers has not struggled with severe addiction, she knows the impact access to professional help can have. Long before she ever downloaded a social media app, she struggled with disordered eating and Tourettes.  

She attended a group for young people in recovery, many of whom pointed to social media as the cause or a contributor to their disordered relationship to food or body image. 

“No matter how subtle, or how purposeful it is, any type of subliminal messaging like that can end up being extremely impactful.”

Though some of her mental health struggles predated her use of social media, she faced the fear of missing out that many children experience as they see their peers’ lives played out online. 

She could see every time her former teammates, who she’d been very close with before getting a concussion, would hang out.

“I was very sad that I had been excluded from a lot… Because that was my team.” The posts became “a reminder that I wasn’t there anymore.” 

She decided at the time to take a break from social media, something she now does often.

Today, she is a self-described mom-friend and therapist for teammates, friends, sometimes family. She’s the sarcastic person many turn to when they’re in pain, mentally or physically. She has a locker full of braces for any body part, “because I’m amazing at getting hurt.”

Professional mental healthcare is a resource she wishes more of her peers had access to.

“Having somebody to talk to that was trained was very helpful,” said Myers. “I wish that was something more people could have, something that had less of a stigma around it… Addictions can be a scary thing.” 

Now, new national data unveil one factor that could be exacerbating the crisis: a record increase in sexual violence.

Nearly 1 in 5 teen girls experienced sexual violence in 2021, forced to kiss or touch someone in their life, according to the the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s released Monday.

A startling 14%, more than 1 in 10, were forced to have sex against their will, according to the report which compiled responses from 17,000 young people surveyed in the fall of 2021. The violence is up 20% since 2017.��

The CDC conducts the survey every other year, though Monday’s report is the first to capture pandemic-era trends. And while there are bright spots — bullying and use of illicit drugs are down overall — the recent findings are grim.

In 2021, at least 18% of girls experienced some form of sexual violence — forced to touch or kiss someone in their life. And while the rate of girls forced to have sex in particular had remained pretty constant for the last 10 years, in the two year period from 2019 to 2021, it jumped from 11% to 14%.��

“This is truly alarming,” said Kathleen Ethier, director of the CDC’s division of adolescent and school health. “For every 10 teenage girls you know, at least one of them, and probably more, has been raped. This tragedy cannot continue.”

Nearly 1 in 3 girls also seriously considered suicide. One quarter of girls and 37% of lesbian, gay or queer youth made suicide plans. Thirteen percent of girls attempted it, the highest numbers in a decade, roughly double the rate for boys.��

While increases in suicidal ideation can be seen across many demographics, Black and Native or Indigenous students remain significantly more likely to attempt and are the students most impacted by housing insecurity.

“America’s teen girls are engulfed in a growing wave of sadness, violence and trauma,” said Debra Houry, chief medical officer for the CDC, during a press briefing Monday.��

“These data are hard to hear and should result in action,” Houry said. “As a parent to a teenage girl, I am heartbroken.”

Research confirms adolescents who are forced to kiss, touch or have sex with people against their will are symptoms of depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress. In children, this can manifest in a number of ways, including withdrawal from friends or social activities, difficulty sleeping, poor , self-harm, substance abuse and suicidal ideation.

Houry said while this report did not look at the connections between sexual violence and the increase in depression and suicidality, prior research has shown “sexual violence is associated with mental health issues, substance use and also long-term health consequences.” 

Girls are also 5% more likely than boys to misuse prescription opioids and more likely to have tried illicit drugs like cocaine, inhalants, heroin, methamphetamines, hallucinogens, or ecstasy, according to the report 

Nearly half of all high schoolers are “persistently sad or hopeless,” the report found, symptoms used as a proxy to measure depression. Numbers are notably higher for girls, queer youth and students of color.��

The feelings, particularly when they are the result of sexual violence, hold the power to have lifelong impacts: “young people who feel hopeless about their future are more likely to engage in behaviors that put them at risk for HIV, STDs, and unintended pregnancy,” the report states. 

Only about half of teens, according to the 2021 findings, used a condom the last time they had sex. And only 5% were screened for STIs within the last year.

Yet many of the challenges facing young people today, Houry added, are in fact “preventable.”

can revamp health curricula to educate young people about sexual consent and managing emotions; encourage school-based clubs like Gay Straight Alliances; and increase mental health training for teachers, peers and staff. 

Healthy relationship and bystander training programs like Green Dot can reduce harm and stigma in talking about sexual or romantic violence, CDC officials said. 

The CDC and advocates also encouraged families to look for warning associated with suicide and regularly ask young people about their feelings or concerns. 

“I wish my family knew these resources and what to look for earlier,” national PTA President Anna King tearfully said during the media briefing. King lost a niece to suicide nearly five years ago.��

“These conversations will help parents learn how to help their child and figure out what’s going on emotionally, building their ability to cope with life’s stressors and show them their feelings matter,” King said. “It also helps them to understand that they’re not alone.”

If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Additional resources are available at . For LGBTQ mental health support, you can contact The Trevor Project’s toll-free support line at 866-488-7386.

A familiar anxiety set in. 

It wasn’t until New York City high school science teacher Joshua Modeste saw photos of the teenagers involved in the December stabbing the tension eased: He did not know her. 

A little over a year had passed since he lost his first student, , 16, shot in the stomach a few blocks away from school. Soon after, he lost another when Benji’s best friend was briefly incarcerated. Ever since, when he hears about violence involving a young person, he feels dread build in his gut.

A few hours passed before he was reminded of why. A student, hanging out in his room over lunch to do makeup work, yelled out, “What?! Oh my God,” before bolting into the hall. The Harlem victim, Saniyah, was her friend.

Modeste felt unprepared, and worn out. Within one year, he and his mostly Black and Latino students at Harlem’s Urban Assembly School of Global Commerce navigated death, prisons, racial violence, a continuing pandemic. As one of the school’s few Black male teachers he shouldered a disproportionate weight through it all, and isolation has become . 

And while the youth mental health crisis mounts, so does the toll for educators on the frontlines — especially as force teachers like Modeste to manage alone. Traction is building for student supports, but some worry teachers are being left behind — a direct hit to learning recovery.

“Nobody in the teaching department or other teacher candidates talked to us about that stuff — trauma and grief, emotions, and how to manage all of that while trying to maintain a classroom of 30 kids who are going through their own situations at home,” Modeste said of his teacher preparation program at SUNY Plattsburgh.��

(While there is no class on these topics at Plattsburgh, the curriculum has been revised since Modeste’s graduation in 2016 and “these themes are woven through many of our courses,” Maureen Squires, chair of the joint bachelor’s and master’s program, told ����Ӱ��.) 

“It was kind of like, ‘If you can’t handle this, then this is not the job for you,’” Modeste said. Still, there’s not a doubt in his mind that he should continue teaching. In fact, he’s flourishing professionally, last year among the prestigious FLAG Awardees for Teaching Excellence. 

But he is struggling. 

Teachers are for experiencing more job-related stress than any other profession. Yet help for classroom leaders is hard to come by. Mental health insurance coverage varies district to district, if visits are covered at all. Even in New York City — where teacher copays for outpatient, in-network mental health care max out at $25 — provider shortages and stigma can prevent educators from accessing care consistently.��

The demand for professional support is also growing rapidly. Anxiety and depression symptoms in teachers are on the rise, highest for early career educators and teachers of color, according to Leigh McLean, a researcher at the University of Delaware. 

Overall in the 2018-19 school year, 4,550 New York City teachers accessed services through their union, the United Federation of Teachers. Last year, the number exceeded 20,000. Daily calls to the program soared, from about 20 to 100 per day; hundreds of school social workers volunteered after school and on weekends to meet the need.��

For McLean, who has studied the impact of teacher depression for years, the reality is simple — educators have been given an impossible task. 

“Especially through COVID, we’re putting the emphasis on teachers themselves to support their own well-being. But we’ve created a system that is not supportive of their well-being,” she said.

Modeste knows this to be true. Now in his seventh year of teaching, he relied on instinct, not training, to meet Saniyah’s friend in the hall that December afternoon. 

He asked about their , whether her mom knew her too, what she might need. He told her grief surfaces in many ways, but “I can’t tell you where that starts or ends,” before offering an empty room for her to cry. 

‘My anxiety lives in my belly’

The son of Trinidadian pastors and youngest of three brothers, Modeste didn’t grow up talking about mental health. Don’t cry, give it to God in prayer. 

“Society has told me that Black men are supposed to be strong and figure things out on their own,” he said. “Black men don’t talk to me about therapy. So it doesn’t seem like something that’s normal.”

But the emotional weight was building each day. Soon after the murder, one of Modeste’s students sat visibly crying in class. Benji’s best friend. He did not know what to wear to the funeral — this would be his first. 

Entering grades at the semester’s end, Benji’s name on his roster stared at him, waiting for an entry. In November, Facebook memories brought back pictures, and emotions, at the year anniversary. The funeral was the first time he had seen many of his students cry, especially the boys.

“I thought I got through it. And then this time of the year resurfaced some stuff for me,” he said.

Psychologists dub the phenomenon or empathetic distress. Studies have mainly focused on clinical staff like social workers or therapists. Tish Jennings, an expert on teacher stress and social-emotional learning at the University of Virginia, said researchers have only recently started to explore how it affects teachers and students. 

“You need therapy when you have trauma exposure,” she told ����Ӱ��. “It’s very hard these days to get good treatment, because there’s such a huge need, and there’s such a shortage of good clinicians.”

Because of the clinical shortages impacting New York City teachers, “members who cannot wait for an appointment sometimes go to a mental health provider outside the networks. These professionals often don’t take insurance and can charge what they want,” said Alison Gendar, a UFT spokesperson.

Unaware of the options provided by the union and in crisis, Modeste urgently searched for a male therapist of color last fall. He ultimately paid over $120 for a month of Talkspace sessions, but could not afford to continue treatment. The NYC Department of Education did not provide grief counseling to staff or students after losing Benji, according to Modeste.

“If you have to deal with traumatized people all the time and you don’t have the skills, you can try to numb yourself as a way to protect yourself from feeling those feelings,” Jennings explained. “You can also become kind of challenged or jaded, sarcastic as a way to protect yourself. And you can also become very overwhelmed and feel depressed and hopeless.”

Teachers’ depression is shown to — teachers plan less, , may rely on independent or group instead of the more demanding whole-class instruction, and are less warm with students. 

High stress , too; Jennings described a scenario where a teacher under extreme stress is quicker to overreact, taking a small disruption personally, “I might not realize this is normal kid behavior and become more punitive in response to that.”

Ideally, teachers should receive training or therapy to become aware of their emotional state so as to, “respond to situations thoughtfully instead of reacting automatically,” she added. 

Modeste is beginning to recognize when physical sensations pop up and articulate his needs, or to meditate — skills he picked up at a mindfulness workshop by NYC Men Teach. 

“My anxiety lives in my belly,” he said.

Experts told ����Ӱ�� teaching mindfulness and compassionate is necessary, but by themselves, cannot reduce the high levels of stress teachers face. The most effective changes are system-wide, not individual: comprehensive health care packages; staff devoted to teacher well-being; professional development; and establishing .��

An invisible tax

They’re the kinds of support that teachers are craving, particularly those who serve students disproportionately impacted by poverty, homelessness, incarceration or violence. For Modeste, constant exposure to violence and death in the community and online weighs heavy on the mind. In his youth, the only time he saw dead bodies was at funerals. 

Last May during class, he confronted what he called a new “death culture:” a student watching the Buffalo grocery store massacre video on Twitch during class. He had mistaken it, like many young people, for a first-person shooter game. This fall, images of rappers Takeoff and PnB Rock’s death circulated.

“I was like, ‘No, why are you watching these things? Do you understand the impact that this stuff is having on you?’” he recalled. “I don’t know if people are processing with them, what that means for you to look at that person, someone that you looked up to or somebody that you listen to their music, to see a picture of them on the floor dead.” 

It’s also not lost on him that, for some students, he may be the only one with whom they’re comfortable talking. Researchers and those in the field refer to this as an “” on educators of color, often among the few adults in a school who represent their students’ racial identities, are more likely to share life experiences.��

Black teachers report having to discipline students of color and be liaisons to families more often because of their race, according to the Center for Black Educator Development. They may also navigate more lack of trust from administrators and colleagues.

Compared to white male teachers, Black teachers spend counseling students outside of class, about five hours per week. Modeste, for instance, shared his phone number with students when they went remote for the first time in the spring of 2020 — a way to stay connected if they needed it. And many did. 

He fielded calls throughout distance learning, while battling his own anxiety and isolation, witnessing anti-Black violence week after week. In sometimes hour-long conversations, he listened to students vent about fights they had with their mother; college applications and whether STEM could really be an option for them.��

Since returning to class, some have opened up about feeling hypersexualized, like they have to perform masculinity and some idea of what it is to be a Black man. Modeste keeps a note from one student, who was suicidal while in his class, in his desk at all times.

While the staff at Global Commerce is racially diverse, Modeste finds himself dispelling assumptions staff place on students — about how they spend their money or why their families live in nearby affordable housing projects — something no one had done for him. And like most other , Modeste is one of the longest-serving teachers.��

“It creates a situation where students feel either abandoned or they feel like they don’t have anyone to connect to … It puts an extra responsibility on me,” he said. 

The research is clear in this regard, according to McLean: “Teachers and students in these underserved contexts are really experiencing the most trauma and are the ones that need the most prioritized and targeted support.”

Modeste knew that would be his reality before beginning his career, but he’s still realizing the toll. 

In December, he briefly tried psychotherapy again through a free Betterhelp trial, offered through a teacher honor society. He had a couple sessions with a Black male therapist and wanted to continue, but the $200 per month price tag stopped him. 

For now, Modeste and his advisory students have started role-play scenarios on setting boundaries and saying no, swapping TV shows and music that helps them cope with feeling overwhelmed. Leaning on cultural affinity groups and colleagues, he is finding ways to “reframe” the parts of his life that serve as informal therapy: journaling, writing affirmations like ‘focus’ and ‘love’ on his bathroom mirror in Expo marker and caring for his pet fish.

In his Ph.D. program at Columbia Teachers College, he’s researching ways to make science education more culturally responsive, and the experiences of male science teachers of color.��

He doesn’t hide emotions anymore, or ignore what’s happening outside of school. His default demeanor is bubbly, but on days he’s going through something, he smiles and talks less. 

“And kids will ask me like, you know, ‘Yo, Modeste are you OK?’ That’s when I open up … ‘Oh, you know, I’m going through some stuff with my family, I just need some space right now,’” he said. “I think that that shows them that when I ask them if they’re OK, the responses that I’m trying to elicit.”

Secondary students at every grade level maintain depression, stress, and anxiety is the most common barrier to learning. And fewer than half of them, regardless of gender, sexual and racial identity, have an adult they feel comfortable talking to when stressed or upset, according to a new YouthTruth. 

The report also reveals drastic mental health disparities, with white students students  at least 7% more likely to access a school psychologist, counselor or therapist than their Black, Latino and Asian peers. LGBTQ youth experienced suicidal ideation more than double the rate of their peers.

“The increase in the mental health load that students experienced during the pandemic has not gone away,  is still very present, even increased and it’s not going away anytime soon,” said Jen Wilka,  executive director of YouthTruth. “For now, we need to adjust to that as the new normal and and think about how we support students.” 

The survey found that last academic year, less than a quarter of students spoke to school counselors, therapists or psychologists about what they were facing. 

“I think that the conversation about learning loss and the academic side of learning is so loud, that we can sometimes lose sight …  of the interconnectedness between emotional and mental health and students’ ability to learn academically,” Wilka added. “It’s really impossible to do one without the other.”

Less than half of the 222,837 students surveyed this fall across 20 states are satisfied with their school’s mental health offerings. “I wish the school did more to train and educate its students on how to identify … warning signs of deteriorating mental health, abuse, self-harm, and violence within their peers – and respond appropriately and compassionately,” one Asian-American high school senior boy wrote.

Gender disparities 

YouthTruth’s findings, disaggregated for the first time by gender identity, also reveal starkly different emotional realities and gaps in access to meaningful care for LGBTQ students.

An overwhelming majority, 83-85%, of trans and non-binary students say depression, stress and anxiety block their ability to learn, rates at least 33% above the average for all students. LGBTQ middle and high school students report twice as much as their peers that bullying also impacts their learning.

Only about a third of LGBTQ students report their school’s mental health support is satisfactory.

“That says that we still have work to do to meet those students where they’re at and be tailoring that support,” Wilka said. 

LGBTQ students want to feel “seen and recognized” in , which would contribute to a positive sense of self. Recent efforts to censor content at school have plagued students’ mental health, write-in responses reveal. 

Curriculum bans launch a domino effect, stifling classroom talks about gender and sexuality. The culture makes it difficult for students to process when they may not freely be able to at home, and to feel a sense of belonging. 

Distinctive Schools, a charter network in Chicago and Detroit and YouthTruth partner, is currently ramping up support for LGBTQ students — encouraging active Gay-Straight Alliances on each campus and making their dress code language more gender inclusive — and expanding their mental healthcare teams to combat mental health stigma.

“I’m giving trainings to teachers that historically you would only get as a clinician…and we can still be doing better, they still need more, and we still can’t keep up with the demand,” Distinctive School’s Director of Clinical Services, Michele Lansing, told the 74. Their suicide or risk assessments are up, the result of peers sharing their concern for one another more frequently. 

“Our students are more educated and getting better at putting words to what was already there, ”Lansing said. 

“They know that their friends deserve help and support.”

Boys were the least likely subgroup to speak with school staff about their mental health or the problems they experience, at about 15%. One young student, in a workshop analyzing his school’s results, hypothesized that a “culture of masculinity” impacts the numbers — there’s an expectation that boys shouldn’t express their feelings. 

“Even though in this data, we might look at it and say ‘oh, boys and young men are doing fine, it’s girls, transgender, and non-binary students that we need to be worrying about.’ We know from other data that boys and young men are not fine,” Wilka said.

“Do better:” Involve students, families 

The overwhelming ask from students’ write-in responses is now “do better.” The plea is a stark shift from past surveys, where students wanted schools to do something, anything, to address the mental suffering they experience and witness.  

“That refrain, ‘talk to us first’ is just exploding in the qualitative data right now,” Wilka said, adding that the message suggests schools can do more to bring students into the process of planning or adjusting offerings. Distinctive Schools, for example, meets each family individually at the start of the year.

“We’re young, but we deserve respect,” one white high school senior wrote in their survey response, criticizing what they felt were inadequate attempts to address needs by adding mental health days. 

“Don’t just hear us, listen to us,” another wrote, “ …You have to work alongside us, or it just doesn’t work. Do something … Do better.”

The new normal is not at all surprising to Makayla, a Black high school junior at one of Distinctive School’s Chicago high schools. She asked her last name not be used to maintain privacy. 

“I have experienced all three — the depression, stress and anxiety, and it definitely did affect my work … I was torn apart, and so many days, I just wasn’t okay,” she told ����Ӱ��.  

Typically a high-achieving student, Makayla found it harder and harder to stay emotionally stable last spring, often sitting in the counselor’s office collecting herself for most of the school day. Her grades plummeted. Yet she was among the minority of secondary school students comfortable enough with her teachers to be honest when they took notice. 

“On the days that I would come to school while I was mentally not okay, my English teacher, she was like, ‘do you need to take a breather? Do you want to just sit here and catch up on work later?’ ”  Makayla said. “…They understand that if you need a moment, then I’ll give you a moment, or however long it takes.”

Hiding in Plain Sight: Youth Mental Illness, a two-part documentary that premieres Monday on PBS, presents the raw accounts of nearly two dozen young people from diverse backgrounds who open up about their excruciating life experiences. Through varied stories that touch on issues like abuse, addiction and discrimination, the Ewers hope their film will give their audience an understanding that they came to themselves: Everybody, no matter their backgrounds, is affected by America’s mental health crisis in one way or another. 

The film, executive produced by renowned documentarian Ken Burns, was screened at the White House Thursday, with First Lady Jill Biden saying, “We have so much work to do to help our children heal,” and thanking the filmmakers for shining a light on mental health.

“It’s impossible not to be moved by the pain that these young people and their families share,” she said. “But there was so much hope there, too. Because they had all found a way from that darkness towards the light.” 

The documentary can be seen at 9 p.m. ET on Monday and Tuesday and will be available on PBS stations nationally, PBS.com and the . It is part of , called Well Beings, to raise awareness about mental health issues. 

“The goal of the film, we hope, is that people will find relatability in their own lives through these kids’ stories,” Christopher, who co-directed the documentary with his brother, told ����Ӱ��. “I felt connected in ways that I can’t even describe to each and every person’s story. Some of them nearly destroyed me as we were filming their interviews because they hit so close to home.”

The young people featured in it range in age from 11 to 27, including a teenager who lost the fight against addiction at the age of 15, a young Native American woman who felt so isolated that she contemplated suicide and a high school freshman who experienced a series of assaults that led to troubling hallucinations. Among them is Billie, a 15-year-old from a rural farming community who endured intense bullying for being transgender. For 14-year-old Xavier, trauma stemmed from an abusive father. 

“Cigarette smoke is a very triggering thing from my past since I associate that with getting beat by wooden sticks,” said Xavier, who recalled getting beaten “for seemingly no reason.”

begin by the age of 14 and 75% occur by age 24, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. 

“The things my ancestors went through, it’s shown through alcohol abuse, addictions, non-stable families, toxic relationships,” explains Alexis, a 21-year-old who grew up on a Native American reservation. “That’s the burden that Indigenous youth deal with everyday, you’re just born into it.” 

New Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data offer bleak insight into the extent of the problem and how the pandemic has made the crisis even worse for millions of teens, especially LGBTQ youth and girls. In a recent CDC survey, more than a third of high school students reported experiencing poor mental health during the pandemic, nearly 20% reported that they seriously considered dying by suicide and a staggering 9% had actually tried. Even before the pandemic, suicide was a leading cause of death among teens as rates of youth anxiety and depression surged. In 2009, a quarter of high school students reported feeling persistent sadness or hopelessness. By 2019, that rate jumped to nearly 37%. 

Though the project has been years in the making, the film acknowledges how the pandemic has made the crises far more urgent. The Ewers are longtime collaborators with Ken Burns and the trio will continue working together to create a series of films examining the mental health crisis in America.

Over the course of four hours, this first film takes viewers on a journey that for many began with traumatic experiences that led to debilitating mental health struggles, but ended with a message of hope. Despite roadblocks including homelessness, arrests, addictions, eating disorders and suicide attempts, many of the young subjects were able to go on and live happy lives thanks to mental health care and the coping skills they developed.

Yet recovery is a lifelong process. It’s a lesson that Erik learned firsthand over the course of filming the documentary, he said. Throughout his entire life, he struggled to understand his emotional issues. Although his parents took him to a psychiatrist while he was in elementary school, it wasn’t until he started filming the documentary that he began to truly address his challenges. The youth in his film, he said, “gave me an education about myself.”

“If the film has the power to do that for me, I can only hope that it will have that power for other people as well,” he said. 

Christopher said the youth interviews hit home for his family, too, as his daughter struggled with mental health challenges of her own. Listening to each of the stories, he said, “gave us the courage and the commitment to see through the proper care for our daughter.” 

As the filmmakers weave the young peoples’ individual stories into a cohesive narrative, the result can only be described as a gut punch. With the goal of presenting an unvarnished look into the pervasiveness of youth mental health crises, the documentary is difficult to watch at times. But sugarcoating the issue would be a disservice to those who are struggling, Erik said. 

“Imagine a kid out there who is literally watching it and we watered it down, which of course, we had not,” he said. “But if they did, they’d be saying ‘Wow, I’m a lot worse than I thought,’ or say ‘This is bullshit.’”

The stigma still associated with mental health issues prevents many young people from sharing their experiences, yet the Ewers brothers said their subjects were motivated to open up on film — and wound up feeling better as a result. They were tired of keeping their suffering bottled up inside and hoped that greater awareness could save lives. 

Alexis, who grew up on the reservation, said that nearly all Indigenous youth are the victims of trauma and abuse to some degree. Yet also embedded in her DNA, she said, is resilience. 

“I know for a fact that my ancestors and my elders, they’re rooting for me and they want me to do good,” she said. “I’ll share my story over and over again. I’ll go through those emotions like a million times if it helps one person.”

The Rand Corp. report shows this year has been especially tough on Latino teachers, with one in three reporting symptoms of depression, compared with one in four non-Latino teachers. Black teachers, however, were less likely to report stress on the job than White and Latino teachers, the researchers found.

“Repairing” teacher and principal well-being, they wrote, “is essential for pandemic recovery” and leaders shouldn’t view it as a short-term problem that will fade once COVID-related disruptions pass.

“Stress on the job can negatively affect educators’ physical health,” said Elizabeth Steiner, lead author of the report. “And poor well-being is linked with lower quality student learning.”

While most educators — about three-fourths — say they’re able to cope with the added pressures, the findings reinforce comments from teachers who say this school year has been the most grueling since the pandemic began. The Rand findings echo the results of a Gallup poll released this week and confirm earlier surveys suggesting sizable percentages of teachers want to leave the profession. The Rand survey shows about a third of educators report plans to quit — up from a quarter of teachers and 15% of principals in January 2021.

The findings point to multiple factors contributing to job dissatisfaction and intentions to leave. In addition to addressing learning loss, other pandemic-related stressors included taking on additional responsibilities because of staff shortages, harassment over COVID policies and balancing child care responsibilities.

But some sources of stress, such as racial discrimination, predate COVID. More than half of teachers said other staff members hold them to a different standard because of their race, and two-thirds of principals said they have faced online or in-person harassment from students’ families because of their race or ethnicity.

Staying ‘past the burnout stage’

The increase in teachers saying they want to leave doesn’t mean they will, nor does it predict “a major disruption in the workforce,” the authors wrote. But Colin Sharkey, executive director of the Association of American Educators, a nonunion group, said an exodus of teachers could be a “lagging indicator.”

​​”It will take time for educators to follow through on a decision that was likely made during this time period,” he said, adding that many educators might stay “past the burnout stage,” to the point that they’re “unrecoverable.”

The Rand findings are based on responses from 2,360 teachers and 1,540 principals, collected in January. The researchers compared the answers to those from a nationally representative sample of working adults. They also interviewed 60 teachers to better understand their experiences.

Roseangela Mendoza, a middle school social studies teacher at The Ethical Community Charter School in Jersey City, New Jersey, is among those who found the return to in-person learning particularly challenging.

“We were exhausted by October” of 2021, she said. “It’s been the worst stress that anybody has ever gone through.”

Teaching assistants have been covering classes when teachers are absent, leaving lead teachers without their usual support, Mendoza said, adding that students, who learned remotely for a year and a half have trouble staying focused and are always bouncing out of their seats to socialize or go to the bathroom.

“They will question you, ‘Why do I have to do this?’ ” she said. Parents also challenge her, asking that their children get extra time to complete work. “Tons of parents want to tell us what we have to do.”

But she says she still believes in the mission of her school, which she joined not long after it opened in 2009, and likes that she can be creative in planning curriculum. Her lessons include making tortillas and quilting.

“That flexibility is what keeps me here,” she said.

The report also points to conditions that make educators feel better about their jobs and less likely to leave, such as involvement in school decision-making, strong relationships with colleagues and access to mental health support.

Teachers and principals with access to at least one mental health program, such as a peer support group or counseling, were significantly less likely to say they were considering leaving their jobs, the survey found.

Many districts have been using federal relief funds to address students’ mental health needs, but some are expanding services for staff as well. The Moore Public Schools, near Oklahoma City, used a new state grant program to add eight positions for mental health professionals, including two employee assistance providers.

The district revamped an unused building into offices with private entrances where employees can see a therapist.

“I think it’s pretty rare,” said Kristi Hernandez, the district’s director of student services. “Most schools partner with outside providers.”

Teachers also just want to focus on teaching and spend less time on other responsibilities , such as meetings and bus duty, the Rand researchers found. And in their interviews with teachers, they heard that pay raises wouldn’t necessarily reduce the stress, but could convince teachers to stay in the field.

Principals listed staffing challenges as their greatest source of stress. But some feel the worst of the pandemic is finally behind them.

“A year ago we were doing temperature checks. We were doing masks,” said Adam Lane, principal at Haines City High School in central Florida, south of Orlando. “The past two and a half years were the most challenging thing we’ve ever had to deal with.”

He said he just attended a statewide administrators conference, where the mood had noticeably lifted.

“We were laughing, drinking, collaborating,” he said. “Even though it was stressful, it was so rewarding to make it through.”

The rates of suicidal thoughts among LGBTQ youth have ticked upward over the last three years, according to the fourth annual survey conducted by The Trevor Project, a nonprofit suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ youth. While 45% of LGBTQ youth said they seriously considered suicide in the last year — including 53% of those who are transgender or nonbinary — and 14% reported they had carried out a suicide attempt. 

The survey comes at a particularly fraught moment for advocates of LGBTQ rights as Republican lawmakers push for rules that prohibit classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity, ban books featuring LGBTQ themes, curb transgender students’ ability to access gender-affirming medical care, participate in school athletics or use restroom facilities that match their gender identities. 

“When we take a group of young people who are already very vulnerable to poor mental health and then we initiate these conversations,” the hardships compound, said Jonah DeChants, a research scientist at The Trevor Project. Not only are young people being targeted by these laws, but they also now have to wake up and log onto social media or turn on the news and hear elected officials talking about their identities in very misinformed, ignorant and in many cases very anti-LGBTQ perspectives.”

DeChants stressed that LGBTQ youth are not “inherently more suicidal” than their straight and cisgender peers. Poor mental health outcomes, he said, are the result of “minority stress” like social stigma and are not the direct result of their sexual orientation or gender identity. 

“It’s the fact that you wake up and you have to navigate a society that doesn’t want to allow you to love who you want to love or express your gender the way you want to express it,” he said. “That is what creates these poor mental health outcomes, not young peoples’ internal identity.”

The survey suggests a simple path forward that could shield young people from serious harm: Welcoming communities. LGBTQ youth who felt strong affirmation from their families reported attempting suicide at less than half the rate of those who lacked social support. Suicide attempts were also reported at lower rates among LGBTQ youth who found affirmation in their schools and broader communities compared to those who felt ostracized. 

Yet fewer than a third of transgender and nonbinary youth reported that their homes were gender affirming. In the face of the stark uptick in anti-LGBTQ legislation in the last year, officials at The Trevor Project argue that affirmation isn’t political — it’s a matter of life or death. 

“The science actually shows that when communities push back against these attacks and choose to affirm LGBTQ young people — whether that’s talking openly about these issues and not banning discussions or books from libraries — those steps are actually potentially life-saving,” DeChants told ����Ӱ��. “Those have a real, positive impact on young people’s mental health.” 

The survey also identified stark racial disparities among LGBTQ youth who attempted to die by suicide in the last year. About a fifth of Black youth carried out a suicide attempt, compared with 12% of those who are white. 

Almost all youth who are transgender or nonbinary — an overwhelming 93% — said they worry about state or local laws denying them access to gender-affirming health care, and a similar share said they were concerned about being denied access to the bathroom. More than four-fifths of transgender and nonbinary youth said they worried about being denied access to school athletics. 

The survey also highlights the extent that LGBTQ youth are targeted with harassment and physical violence — attacks that ultimately heightened their risk of suicide attempts. More than a third of LGBTQ youth reported that they have been physically threatened or harmed due to their gender identity or sexual orientation, and 73% said they’ve experienced discrimination at least once in their lifetimes. 

The pandemic has also taken a detrimental toll on LGBTQ youth, the survey found. More than half of survey respondents — 56% — said their mental health was poor most of the time or always due to COVID-19. 

The online survey was completed by nearly 34,000 LGBTQ youth in the U.S. between the ages of 13 and 24 between September and December 2021 — even before officials in states like Texas and Florida launched the latest round of policy attacks against LGBTQ youth. Among survey respondents, 45% are youth of color and 48% identify as transgender or nonbinary, making it one of the most diverse surveys of LGBTQ youth ever conducted, according to the nonprofit. 

Another recent survey, released in March and conducted by Morning Consult for The Trevor Project, found that or censor school curricula featuring LGBTQ topics. Just 1 in 3 adults expressed support for laws that ban gender-affirming medical care for minors. 

The latest survey results resemble data released in March by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which found that LGBTQ youth were significantly more likely to consider or attempt suicide during the pandemic than their straight and cisgender peers. Reported rates of physical abuse, homelessness and hunger were also disproportionately high among LGBTQ youth, the CDC survey found. 

While 73% of LGBTQ youth reported experiencing anxiety and 58% said they struggled with depression, Trevor Project survey respondents also highlighted major barriers to mental health care. In total, 60% of those who wanted mental health care in the past year said they were unable to receive the help they needed due to a range of issues including the fear of discussing their mental health concerns, the lack of affordability and the fear of getting outed to their parents. 

If you are in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. For LGBTQ mental health support, contact The Trevor Project’s toll-free support line at 866-488-7386.

More than a third of high school students reported experiencing poor mental health during the pandemic, more than half reported being subjected to emotional abuse at home and a quarter said a parent or another adult at home had lost their jobs, according to results from the first nationally representative survey of high school students’ mental health and well-being during the pandemic.

Faced with sudden school closures, social isolation and the fear of family loss or illness, 66% of students reported that schoolwork became more difficult to complete after the pandemic shuttered campuses nationwide in March 2020.

Even before the pandemic, survey data suggests that youth mental health had grown bleeker and suicide was already a leading cause of death among teens. The new CDC data point to a situation that’s grown even more dire, especially for LGBTQ youth and girls, two groups that reported particularly high levels of poor mental health during the pandemic.

In response, public health experts called on policymakers to act with urgency to reverse the trend.��

“Young people and their families have been under incredible levels of stress during the pandemic,” Kathleen Ethier, director of the CDC’s division of adolescent and school health, said during a press call Thursday. “Our data exposes cracks and uncovers an important layer of insight into the extreme disruptions that some youth have encountered.” 

The results come from the Adolescent Behaviors and Experiences Survey, which was completed by a nationally representative sample of 7,705 public and private high school students. The CARES Act-funded questionnaire was conducted online between January and June 2021. Since then, the country has entered a new phase of the pandemic as mask mandates and other public health measures are lifted, but while the . Public health officials acknowledged it’s unclear how youth well-being has fared since the survey was completed.

The figures are key to understanding the pandemic’s effects on the health and well-being of American youth. Previous evidence has suggested the pandemic has had a deleterious effect on youth and contributed to trends like a surge in teen depression and anxiety, but the national survey is the first to asses the national prevalence of disruptions and adversities like parental job loss, personal job loss, homelessness, hunger and the extent of emotional or physical abuse at home.

They also reveal a promising strategy that school leaders can leverage to put youth on a better trajectory. Youth who feel connected to their school, the survey found, were significantly less likely than those who did not to report feeling hopeless or attempt suicide. Yet fewer than half — 47% — of teens reported feeling close to the people at their schools during the pandemic, when millions primarily experienced learning remotely.��

“Although our latest findings present an often-grim picture and there is much work to be done, it is clear that right now young people need all the support we can give them,” Ethier said.

During his State of the Union address earlier this month, President Joe Biden addressed the youth mental health crisis, declaring that students “lives and education have been turned upside-down.” His released this week seeks $1 billion to double the number of counselors and psychologists in schools.��

Based on the CDC’s survey data, these six charts show the challenges students faced during the pandemic — while also revealing promising strategies that could help them recover from more than two years of life-altering disruptions.��

As the pandemic shuttered businesses, many teens were forced to live through the hardships of an economic crisis.

Nearly a third of students reported that a parent or another adult at home had lost their job while 22% of teens reported experiencing job loss themselves. A quarter of teens reported experiencing food insecurity. Among white students 18.5% reported experiencing hunger while 32% of Black students said they lacked enough food to eat. In total, 2% of students reported experiencing homelessness.��

Teachers and other school officials are generally considered mandated reporters, putting them on the front lines of spotting issues like physical abuse at home. Remote learning heightened concerns that such abuse could go undetected at a moment when pandemic-induced stressors could exacerbate the problem. Indeed, the CDC data suggest that the physical and emotional abuse of teens has grown more alarming during the public health crisis.

More than half of respondents — 55% — reported that a parent or another adult at home had subjected them to emotional abuse and 11% said they faced physical abuse. Black students experienced the highest prevalence of physical abuse by a parent, at 15%, compared to 9.8% of white students.��

Those figures are substantially higher than pre-pandemic levels, when 13.9% of students reported experiencing emotional abuse in and 5.5% reported being subjected to physical abuse by a caregiver. These differences, CDC researchers concluded, highlights a reality that “increased stress contributes to violence.”

The pandemic’s devastating emotional toll on high schoolers was clear in the data. Overall, 37.1% of students reported experiencing poor mental health during the pandemic and an even larger share — 44.2% — said they felt persistently sad or hopeless during the 12 months prior to completing the survey.

And while a teen suicide crisis has been billowing for years, the new CDC data show the extent of the problem. While 19.9% of students reported that they seriously considered dying by suicide, a staggering 9% had actually tried.��

The pandemic-era mental health crisis was particularly grim for girls. Nearly half of girls reported having poor mental health during the pandemic compared to nearly a quarter of boys. Similarly, 5.3% of boys reported attempting suicide compared with 12.4% of girls.��

A widely reported found an increase in youth emergency room visits due to suicide attempts during the pandemic. In February and March 2021, suicide-related emergency room visits were 50.6% higher for girls and 3.7% higher for boys than they were during the same period in 2019.

Even prior to the pandemic, youth mental health was a critical public health concern. Among high school students nationwide, 26.1% reported feeling persistent sadness or hopelessness in 2009. By 2019, that rate jumped more than 10 percentage points to 36.8%. During that same period, there was a 5 percentage point increase in students reporting having seriously considered attempting suicide and a 2.6 percentage point increase in youth reporting having attempted suicide.��

CDC data suggest the pandemic has been particularly challenging for students who identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual. Perhaps more troubling, the data were released at a moment when Republican lawmakers have championed legislation that critics say would make life harder for LGBTQ youth. Just this week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis , a controversial law that bans educators from offering instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity to children in grades K-3.��

Nearly three-quarters of gay, lesbian and bisexual teens reported experiencing emotional abuse at home, compared to roughly half of their straight classmates. Similarly, more than a quarter of gay, lesbian and bisexual teens reported an attempt to die by suicide in the last year compared to 5.2% of heterosexual youth.

Although the survey doesn’t highlight the experiences of transgender youth, previous surveys suggest they also faced heightened risks during the pandemic compared to their cisgender peers, Ethier said.��

Between January and June 2021, 31.6% of respondents reported using tobacco, alcohol or marijuana, or misusing prescription opioids. Nearly a third of students who said they’d used such substances before reported using more of them during the pandemic.��

However, CDC survey data suggest that overall teen substance use decreased during the pandemic. It’s possible, researchers concluded, that students who attended schools virtually had limited access and greater parental supervision.

Students who attended schools virtually, the survey revealed, were less likely than those who attended in-person to use substances like tobacco and alcohol. For example, a quarter of in-person students reported using tobacco compared to just 9% of remote learners.��

Because youth get tobacco products from social sources such as friends, access to those products likely decreased during the pandemic, researchers concluded. However, more open alcohol policies like home delivery may have lowered barriers for youth attempting to purchase booze.

The CDC survey highlights the steep obstacles that teens have had to navigate during the pandemic, but it also recommends strategies that could offer a brighter future. While remote learning likely hindered students’ feelings of connectedness at school, experts stressed it’s not too late to make positive changes.��

The CDC survey reveals that feelings of connectedness at school are critical to youth mental health. More than a quarter of youth who felt connected at school reported poor mental health during the pandemic compared to nearly half of those who said they did not feel close to others at their schools.��

Youth who said they experienced racism during the pandemic and those who are gay, lesbian or bisexual were less likely than other student groups to report feeling connected at school.��

To foster greater connectedness and promote positive school climates, the CDC recommended that districts implement programs that focus on social-emotional learning and professional development centered on classroom management and fostering positive relationships between students, their families and school staff. Districts should also analyze school disciplinary policies to ensure they’re implemented equitably across racial and ethnic groups, researchers recommended.

“There is much that can be done to make sure that LGBTQ youth and youth from racial and ethnic minority groups feel safe, supported and connected in their schools,” Ethier said, noting the importance of such school efforts specifically designed to improve the mental health of LGBTQ youth and reduce their risk of suicide. “When schools are less toxic for youth at increased risk for severe outcomes, schools are less toxic for everyone.” 

“If anything good came out of this reporting in 2021, it was that our suicide attempts did not increase during the pandemic,” said Susan Court, state coordinator of the study for the Montana Office of Public Instruction. “Yes, depression increased, but the suicide attempts did not, and suicide ideation did not.”

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Girls felt more depressed than boys, and Native American students felt more depressed than White students, Court said. The survey tracks youth who report feeling so sad or hopeless nearly every day for two weeks in a row or more that they stop doing usual activities.

Court also noted nearly 18 percent of Native American students attempted suicide last year compared to 8 percent of White students, a data point of which tribal health leaders are aware. She also said freshmen and sophomore students were more likely to have attempted suicide than juniors and seniors, and girls more so than boys.

Court provided the report Friday to the Montana Board of Public Education. She said the survey, sponsored by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, tracks health risk behaviors that could result in mortality and morbidity, and she said Montana helped develop the questionnaire back in 1991, and it contains 80 percent of the original questions.

“Montana was a leader then, and we still are as far as the YRBS is concerned,” Court said. “CDC touts our website to other states in the nation.”

During the 2020-2021 school year, 98 percent of all school districts, and 22,576 students in grades seven through 12, completed the survey, the report said. Court noted the report represents the first time in 30 years that questions about youth health behaviors were asked in the midst of a pandemic.

“It was hard on them,” she said.

Court also said studies show an association between poor mental health and screen time, and she said this time, a high of 72 percent of students spent three or more hours on their screens on an average school day, not counting homework time.

She also said some parents have suspected that their children are being pressured by peers into taking risks they wouldn’t take on their own, and she said the data show that to be true.

“If you want to see really sad data, look at the students with disabilities,” Court said. “They are under enormous pressure to belong to groups and are partaking in health risk behaviors at higher rates than all the other groups.”

The data did have a couple of bright points, however. A downward pointing trend line shows tobacco use continues to decline among youth, with just 28 percent of youth having tried cigarette smoking compared to, at one point years ago, 72 percent.

“That is one of the most beautiful trend lines there could ever be if you work with data,” Court said.

Tribal health leaders also were aware that 52 percent of Native American youth reported trying cigarettes, Court said. Twenty-three percent of White students reported trying cigarettes.

Some 48 percent of students have ever tried a vapor product, down from 58 percent in 2019, she said. Court noted the trend that is concerning is that vaping increases as students go from ninth grade to 12th grade, as they’re developing habits for life.

In 2019, Montana hit an unenviable high point: It led the nation in percent of youth who reported texting or emailing while driving. Court said the data represent only students who drive.

This time, the figure jumped up to 57.1 percent, and it has gone up since 2013 when the question first was asked, Court said. She said girls do so more than boys, and White students do so more than Native American students.

“If we were a leader in the nation in 2019, I’m wondering where we will place ourselves when the 2021 data results are released” for the nation, she said. She said Montana was one of just five states to get the survey completed last school year, so the national results for 2021 won’t be released until June 2023.

In Montana, alcohol use also is down, with 31 percent of students having had a drink in the last 30 days when surveyed, Court said. She said girls were more likely to have had a drink than boys, and White students were more likely to have had one than Native American students.

“The race and ethnicity breakdown has been consistent for the last two cycles,” she said. “Native American youth have used alcohol less than their white counterparts.”

Marijuana use among youth was at nearly 20 percent, and it has remained level since around 2003, she said. Some 32 percent of Native American students reported using it in the past 30 days of the survey, and 17 percent of White students used it.

She also said 17 percent of high school students did not eat breakfast at all in the seven days before the survey, up from 14 percent last time, and she said it’s important because breakfast programs exist in many schools, and it’s the most important meal of the day. She also said school nutrition staff at OPI are aware of the data point.

Board member Anne Keith of Bozeman said one thing that jumped out at her from the data as the mother of two daughters is that female risk factors appear higher than male ones, and she wondered about the implications for schools.

“We market messages to men, the male population, more than the females, and maybe we should rethink that,” Keith said.

Court said she made the same observation. She said that trend hasn’t been the case over the years, but it was possible to take a closer look at all the data.

“I don’t know why it was this year,” she said.

Angela McLean, director of American Indian/Minority Achievement for the Montana Office of the Commissioner of Higher Education, thanked Court for her trustworthy work on the data and smart contributions to the state over the years. McLean also said the state is making efforts to support mental health, and she noted a certificate offered at Montana State University for 12 credits as a meaningful tool that will help school leaders serve students.

Court said one important factor in ensuring scientifically sound data was support from schools and families. She said schools do a great job of presenting the information so that parents don’t see it as offensive or an invasion of privacy, and OPI keeps information about specific schools confidential. She also said schools rely on it for grant applications, and she encourages them to share the information widely.

“Schools are using it in so many different ways,” Court said.

In the third and final survey of young people during the pandemic by the national nonprofit YouthTruth, 49 percent of students talked about the detrimental effects of growing mental and emotional issues while just 39 percent said they had an adult at school to whom they could turn for support. The gap in access to social and emotional help has widened even from fall 2020 survey data, at the start of students’ first full pandemic school year.

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YouthTruth Executive Director Jen Wilka said adult connection was actually at its highest at the start of emergency distance learning in spring 2020. Those interactions and energy, which students say is key to learning, are not as strong now a year and a half later, evidenced by the declining number of young people who say they have a supportive adult in their school orbit.

“Students really felt that increase in their teachers making an effort to sort of reach outside and beyond those virtual walls and understand what it is like,” Wilka said. “That has now waned, and is closer to normal, maybe a little bit higher than normal. We saw that really peak in spring 2020.”

One aspect of student-adult relationships in school that has improved over time is respect. Some 70 percent of students said they think adults treat youth with respect — up significantly from the 57 percent who believed that pre-pandemic.

A narrative animation compiles student write-in responses on stress, anxiety, and depression and how it affected their learning in 2020-21. (YouthTruth)

YouthTruth, which solicits student, family, and educator feedback, analyzed data from 206,950 third- through 12th-grade students across 19 states and 585 urban, suburban and rural schools. Open-ended and choice responses were solicited via anonymous 15-minute surveys from January through May 2021.

Previous pandemic-era surveys were conducted in 2020 by YouthTruth from (20,000 students) and (85,170 students). Mental health concerns have consistently been a barrier to learning, and high school seniors’ plans post-graduation continue to be affected by the pandemic. Students have been vocal about the importance of building relationships with their teachers, and their sense of belonging within their school community peaked in fall 2020.

Twenty-one percent of those most recently surveyed attend high-poverty schools, similar to the national average of 25 percent, and students’ racial identities mirror national averages.

For students of all gender identities, depression, stress, and anxiety has become more prevalent as a barrier to learning since fall 2020. For female- and non-binary identifying students, the rates are much higher, 60 and 83 percent, respectively.

Youth cite overwhelming workloads with assignments that lack relevance to their daily life and futures, according to write-in responses and qualitative analysis.

“School restricts me from being content with who I am,” one high school upperclassman shared. “We need to radically change the education system, it’s way overdue for that and it needs to right now. I cannot get out of bed anymore. I hate school more than how I used to. I’m mentally strained because of distance learning […] However, an English assignment and 11 other assignments are due by 11:59pm tonight because grades are so important – more important than surviving and finding new healthy coping mechanisms after all.”

Education leaders across the country are seeking ways to ameliorate growing concerns for students’ emotional and social well-being; a number of states plan to utilize American Rescue Plan funds to bolster mental health access.

In the North Clackamas School District, serving the greater Portland, Oregon area, social and mental health services were established pre-COVID yet leaders saw emotional needs grow during the pandemic. In response to the changing ways students needed access to adults and sought connection, the district partnered with providers and nonprofits to offer telehealth services, devices, and hotspots to youth and their families districtwide.

Through the pandemic, the district sought to make “sure that we had established pathways that were normalized, made very typical and open for families to access a mental health therapist,” Dr. Shelly Reggiani, the district’s director of equity and instruction, told ����Ӱ�� during a YouthTruth press call last week.

In sharing other ways to remove learning barriers and improve engagement, youth said they’d like to see more real-world topics, like applying for higher education, financial aid, and jobs and learning personal finance.

Survey results show that fewer seniors surveyed this spring will head to four-year institutions this fall, a trend also reflected by declining enrollment rates, which saw the worst single-year decline since 2011. And though more will enroll in two-year colleges than in fall 2020 — about 20 percent of those surveyed — the proportion hasn’t yet rebounded to pre-pandemic levels.

Qualitative survey data revealed some of the barriers that persist for high schoolers looking to access higher education. Students recognized “the need for social capital (like from a teacher or sibling) as part of college access,” the confusing nature of the application process, which is typically formally taught during the school day, and felt that finding information and choosing to apply came “too late,” YouthTruth researchers told ����Ӱ��.

“The school is pushing students to go to a four-year college and for most students they don’t want to go to a four-year college because they don’t want to go into debt,” one student said.

“Give us Pathways for the Future,” one of four video animations depicting trends from 480,000 open-ended responses and reflections on the 2020-21 academic year. (YouthTruth)

“They’re really searching for meaning in learning, and that’s an opportunity for us as educators to connect learning, and real life, and relevance to help address students’ needs here,” Sonya Heisters, YouthTruth’s deputy director, said.

Other notable findings

• Secondary school students’ perceptions of learning and belonging returned to pre-pandemic levels
• Many Spanish-speaking students detailed how language barriers became an additional obstacle to their learning during virtual and hybrid environments, and 21 percent of Hispanic/Latino students cited lack of teacher support as an obstacle to learning compared to just 14 percent of other students.
• Providing inclusive curricula, adopting anti-racist policies, and treating students fairly are common recommendations found among data from 5,000 Black / African-American students.
• Many students enjoyed paper-free learning, and hope to maintain access to online materials with the return to in-person school
• Black/African-American and Hispanic/Latino students report feeling unsafe in school at higher rates than their peers, at 11 and 16 percent respectively vs. 9 percent for non-Black, non-Hispanic students.
• 65 percent of students report that their teachers give extra help when needed, but this is more common among students who receive high academic grades

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to YouthTruth and ����Ӱ��. 

For many young people, the seemingly never-ending pandemic and isolation of virtual learning have exacerbated symptoms of depression that researchers documented among this age group long before COVID-19.

In response to what has been described as overwhelming feelings of sadness and hopelessness, some local teachers, like Preshona Ambrita Ghose, have implemented unique instructional tools to better engage young people.

“We talk about the science of living, so that our joy can be at the center,” Ghose, a teacher of 15 years, told The Informer as she explained a three-week meditative project designed to assist her high school students in controlling their thoughts and raising their level of mindfulness.

The project integrates elements of a similar exercise that alternative medicine practitioner Deepak Chopra has endorsed, while building off Ghose’s previous lessons about extracting metaphors from science.

Ghose, who teaches multiple subjects at a bevy of private and African-centered institutions across the D.C. metropolitan area, said that she aspires to teach young people in a manner that will encourage them to apply lessons in their daily life.

For her, this ethos, in tandem with check-ins with students and parents, call-and-response techniques, songs with visuals, dialogue, and short periodic quizzes, keeps students immersed in the learning process while sitting behind a computer.

“I like to take my students through a journey in each subject in a way that makes sense to me, in a more big-picture, ‘right-brained’ sort of way that connects more with living our lives,” Ghose told The Informer. “The universe speaks in patterns, and we have the ability to create our own.”

Though episodes of teen suicide have been on the rise since before the pandemic, and researchers have seen an uptick in phone calls to hotlines, experts have been hesitant to declare a direct link between the pandemic and teen suicide.

Even so, the American Academy of Pediatrics counts irritability, frequent conflicts with friends and family, lack of effort in academic activity, hygienic decline, and suicidal thoughts as the symptoms of teen depression most likely to appear during the pandemic.

Researchers also point to the monotony of home and virtual learning environments as possible triggers, along with the COVID-19-related loss of a loved one. The Society for the Prevention of Teen Suicide, among other organizations, has noted that teens may see the loss of extracurricular activities and peer interaction as an insurmountable obstacle.

The pandemic has been equally taxing for parents, with a majority expressing concern that their children are academically falling behind. Such a perspective has been the impetus for school reopening in school districts across the country, even as the pandemic’s death toll reaches 450,000.

In response to rising tensions at home, some pediatricians have recommended that parents and guardians set a positive tone and provide opportunities for their youngsters to verbally express their feelings.

For Kennedy Center teaching artist Bomani Armah however, doing so requires adults to not take for granted the gravity of young people’s problems.

Armah, a teacher who integrates elements of math and English into arts instruction, recounted hearing about and seeing symptoms of unease, from his teenage sons and his students, shortly after the start of the quarantine period last March.

Such circumstances, Armah told The Informer, further compelled him to help young people under his tutelage explore their artistic talents.

As far as parents are concerned, Armah said he sees the pandemic as a period of recalibration needed to help them rethink how they approach education. He described the status quo, centered on high grades and a rigid path along to graduation, as harmful to the mental and emotional well-being of the entire family.

“If we took our time, we could’ve had socioemotional experiences and arts integration,” Armah told The Informer.

“The entire country is dealing with the pandemic, so this idea that we’re falling behind doesn’t make sense,” he added. “This plays into how we think of ourselves as a community when we have to compete with each other. As a culture, we shouldn’t shame people for staying back. You didn’t fail because of a pandemic.”

This article originally appeared February at and is published in partnership with