Americans are united! (in our refusal to talk about the biggest thing depressing and endangering children and teenagers)

We blather on and on, a dozen cloned articles a day, phony “studies” every week, freakouts and bans and finger-pointing… all to deny the reality staring us in the face.

Here’s how American adults pretend to care about young people

We loudly invoke “parents.”

In many families – the ones you never hear about in media or political forums – caring about parents is the same as caring about kids.

But once you raise mental health, suicide, abuse, domestic violence, social media, and other raging furors, parents’ and teenagers’ interests can diverge in large, often tragic ways.

Whenever some luminary – I pick on actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the latest noble hero or dumbass phony (I vote the latter) in a lengthy roster – launches a harangue by declaring, “As a parent…,” we should interpret that to mean: “I don’t give a shit about children. I just care about grownups like me.”

I say that because the conveniently limited view of those who advocate “as parents” is outrage at stories of teens who died from suicides, overdoses, predations, and similar tragedies… but only the very rare ones that can be blamed on social media, and only in absolute conformity to grieving parents’ views.

Gordon-Levitt’s so angry he’s demanding that Congress throw away critical social media freedoms in order to allow Big Tech companies and government to censor and surveil us for power and profit like chickens in a cagelot – all to “protect children.”

It’s utter bullshit

Teens have repeatedly told the Centers for Disease Control’s massive, definitive health surveys exactly what makes around a third of them depressed and 10% or so suicidal: widespread parent- and adult-inflicted abuse, violence, addiction, mental illness, and criminality in their homes and families.

Cold statistics back them up. Child Maltreatment substantiates 700 children and teens are murdered in domestic violence, 45,000 are sexually abused and/or trafficked, 65,000 are violently abused, and 21,000 are psychologically bullied by their parents and grownups caretakers every year.

Substantiated cases are the tip of the iceberg. Parental/grownup abuses and troubles go beyond murder and violence. They affect the everyday lives of millions of teenagers far, far beyond anything even remotely attributable to social media.

This isn’t me touting my pet cause

The Centers for Disease Control’s analysis of its massive youth-risk survey found teens’ exposure to parent/guardian-inflicted “adverse experiences” led by “emotional abuse (61.5%), physical abuse (31.8%), and household poor mental health” (28.4%) is “common, with approximately three in four students (76.1%) experiencing one or more, and approximately one in five students (18.5%) experiencing four or more.”

The CDC analysis associated these “adverse experiences” inflicted by parents and household grownups with teenagers’ “suicide attempts (89.4%), seriously considering attempting suicide (85.4%), current prescription opioid misuse (84.3%),” and sadness and depression (65.6%).

Social media? Barely a problem, a companion CDC analysis’s numbers showed – as do major meta-reviews of social media studies.

Some liberals may cite things like school difficulties (which rank third among known CDC factors (associated with 9% of teens’ depression, in my regression analysis), behind parental abuses (63%) and parents’/household adults’ problems like addiction, poor mental health, jailing, etc. (14%). Personal troubles like lack of sleep, getting sunburned, and sports injuries are associated with another 8% of teens’ poor mental health, followed by social media/cyberbullying (4%), and a host of other factors (6%).

The bad economy for young people, skyrocketing student debt, and concerns over global issues like climate change should be added to surveys – the vast majority of which remain obsessed only with social media.

Bottom line: The CDC, our leading health agency, delineated the parental and family factors driving two-thirds of teens poor mental health, five-sixths of teens’ drug abuse, and nearly 90% of teens’ suicide attempts.

I keep raising this issue because no one else will.

Everyone – from far Right to Center to far Left, from histrionic ban-teens-from-social-media panickers to staunch youth-rights advocates, parents, non-parents, all who incessantly blather about the teenage “mental health crisis” – repeat, everyone – abjectly refuses to talk about parental abuses and family troubles. Taboo. Banned. Off the table.

Miss Rachel, like Mister Rogers and Captain Kangaroo before, really really does care about children. The rest dominating the media “care” only when children can be cited to reinforce whatever they think is wrong with society.

But blaming social media is so easy and fun

Scapegoating social media for teen troubles is the same as blaming teens themselves. They’re too brainless and weak to resist the “addictive” allures of Big Tech. We innocent, healthy adults led by politicians, professionals, and parents must impose repressive interventions to “protect” kids. (And be careful not to bump our halos.)

We don’t talk about real causes because they make us uncomfortable – and worse.

In this 2020s age of existential divisions that threaten to end America, the one thing that unites us, socialist to evangelical, is “save the children!” … just not from anything real.

One can see why Gordon-Levitt’s emotional point garners so much support. It seems cruel to raise other factors in teens’ alleged online tragedies such as parental and household troubles that risk making parents’ grief even worse.

Anyone who would scrutinize the parents and family of a teenager who died after suffering cyberbullying or suicidal advice from an AI bot or other online horror must be the vilest of trolls… or someone who cares about young people enough to refuse capitulation to popular cliches.

Cliches like worshipping junk studies

I single out the latest “study” and media splash (at this writing) among hundreds to reach loud, hard conclusions about teenagers’ mental health while leaving out the single biggest cause of teens’ depression.

“4+ Hours of Screen Time Increases Child Depression Risk by 61%,” blats a 2/9 Android News story of its University of Hong Kong/Connecticut “study” spread nationwide. “Researchers found that using screens often takes the place of exercise and sleep, which are the two most important things for keeping a child’s mental health.”

Baloney. Those aren’t the biggest problems by a long shot.

The journal’s “study” site shows it is unpublished, unreviewed, and may contain “errors.” So, Nature, a once-reputable journal that now sports a sleazy headline-grabbing clickbait site, had no business releasing it.

Also ignore that even taken at face value, the “study’s” big finding (OR=1.61) amounts to a tiny correlation (r=0.13 on a scale of 0 to 1.00) and effect size (d=0.26, barely enough to qualify as “small”) – and its other findings are even tinier. We all know “correlation doesn’t equal causation,” especially not near-zero correlation.

The mathematical problem with this “study” (amid many) is that parents reported only 4% of their children and teenagers were depressed, and social media use had only minuscule effects even on that 4%.

But put those details aside. The ethical problem was even worse.

The Hong Kong/Connecticut “study” is particularly perfidious because the data set it employed, the National Survey of Child Health, is one of the few that includes specific questions on whether children and teens suffered abuse or other serious problems involving parents and household adults. The researchers chose to deliberately ignore those crucial factors.

Just like prominent ban-teens psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge did in their 2022 article supposedly reviewing all the dozens of factors (right down to going to movies, eating vegetables, eating breakfast, etc.) in the 2021 CDC survey that could possibly make teens depressed.

Except, mysteriously, Haidt and Twenge left out the survey’s two crucial ones: parents’ abuses and violence.

What feel-good junk. This is not “protecting children.”

After years banging my head against this wall, I get it

I worked with abused children. The topic is depressing, even if the kids are often inspiring. Blaming parents for children’s and teens’ problems can seem harsh, since many parents also are victims of past and present traumas in a United States that offers little help to troubled families. And many try hard to be good parents.

But I argue that we as adults are obligated to confront what provably harms children and teens’ mental health and physical safety – even (especially) if distressing.

You never hear the far Left like Krystal Ball, Kyle Kulinski, Ryan Grim, the Hysteria and I’ve Had It podcasters etc., nor the far Right bellowers like Fox News’ or CBS’s Bari Weiss, nor anyone in between, ever mention the reality children and teens face in troubled homes.

Commentators and politicians have so much more fun endlessly bewailing evil Big Tech moguls, Nazi groypers, misogynists, AI bots, dark predators, too many or too few guns, porn, cyberbullies, whatever their favorite culture-war bogey, for “radicalizing” or “depressing” or “addicting” or “killing our kids” while self-sympathizing with innocent parents striving to “protect their children” from unheard-of modern dangers.

But when the well-being of children and teens is prioritized over that of adults and our culture-warring distractions, parents and nearby grownups will be seen as the biggest dangers by far to the mental health, safety, and survival of children – disturbing for our culture as that is.