Are teenagers just lying when they report on CDC surveys that many parents and household grownups are severely troubled and abusive?

The obsession with blaming social media is a dangerous distraction. Authorities should refocus on the real causes of depression.

As lawmakers push more extreme bans and restrictions on teens using social media, experts are playing dumb. Social-media blamer David Blanchflower says with a straight face: "I don't know of anything else” other than “screen time” that explains teens’ poor mental health. “So, if that's not it, what is it?"

What else could it be? Is he serious? While an avalanche of worshipful media, political, and professional commentaries praise Australia’s planned ban on social media use by youths under age 16 as if authorities had cured cancer, none I’ve read mentions grave statistics from Australian child abuse agencies: 45,000 children have been removed from parents; 1,200 are reported abused every day.

Soaring grownup drug/alcohol addiction, which has killed tens of thousands in this small nation as Gen Z grew up, is the chief driver of this “growing problem” of abuse. “Urgent action needed to address a national crisis,” Australia’s leading addiction institute declares. Drug abuse casualties have exploded among ages 30-59 – the ages parenting teenagers – over the last 15 years, the period teens’ depression rose. What a coincidence.

Parent-age drug and alcohol abuse has exploded across the Anglo world. Statistics UK reports that drug misuse deaths among ages 30-69 surged from 1,961 in 2010 to 4,110 in 2021 – the iceberg tip of parent-aged drug and alcohol abuse – during the period teens’ depression rose. Statistics Canada reports a soaring “crisis” of 47,200 deaths and 180,000 hospital treatments for opioid abuse alone since 2016, with the highest rates among ages 30-39 and 40-49.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control reports soaring overdose and suicidal casualties among ages 25-64 over the last dozen years, reaching 110,000 deaths and millions of hospital emergency cases in 2022 – as well as far more powerful ties between parents’ addiction, depression, and abuses and teenagers’ depression than anything attributable to social media. More than half of U.S. teens now are raised in homes where parents are abusive, violent, addicted, severely depressed, suicidal, jailed, and/or frequently absent.

Are authorities serious (“what else could it be”)?

Those who blame social media for teens’ problems ignore the CDC’s bombshell 2023 survey and analysis indicating that amid adults’ rising drug and alcohol crises, millions of teens suffer parent/grownup abuses and problems. A few authorities are starting to grumble that those teens must be lying or exaggerating.

Here’s Big Problem No. 1 (of many) with that argument: these are the same teens social-media blamers fall over themselves to believe when the kids report being bullied by peers at school or online, as well as depressed, sad, and suicidal. But when those teens report more widespread and damaging parental and grownup abuses and troubles far more tied to poor mental health, authorities suddenly go deaf.

As I pointed out, 80% of the teens who report being bullied at school, 82% who report being cyberbullied, 83% who report suffering poor mental health, 84% who report harming themselves, and 87% who attempt suicide also report being emotionally abused by parents and household adults. Similar proportions report having been violently abused by parents or caretakers.

Big Problem No. 2: teens who report emotional and violent abuses by parents also report a clear dose-response effect: more abuse reliably accompanies more depression, suicide attempts, self-harm, sadness, binge drinking, sleeplessness, and other risks. The more frequently a teen is abused, the more depression they report. Girls and LGBTQ teens are the most likely to report adult abuse and violence, and also the most likely to report being depressed. To produce such a regular pattern, teens who over-report parental abuse would have to carefully coordinate their answers to match on other questions. That takes a lot of work.

If social-media blamers and other authorities claim teens are lying, their entire anti-social-media case falls apart, the product of faulty surveys. Social-media blamers solve these big problems by simply ignoring the CDC survey numbers and studies they don’t like.

Are teens just stupid?

The dismissal of teens’ reports of abuses by parents and grownups reflects social-media-blamers’ evident contempt for teenagers.

Their books and posts decree, in effect, that modern young people have no legitimate, real reasons to be depressed or unhappy. Today’s adults, models of exemplary health and behavior, have created a perfect world, other than being too permissive toward an adolescent generation bent on frivolous self-destruction and corruption via social-media addiction. Therefore, teenagers have no real problems except their own shallow, self-centered obsession with looks, consumerism, and status, mean peers, and media moguls who exploit teens’ weaknesses.

Beyond denial of obvious problems, it’s also time to admit there’s a lot we don’t know. Despite compelling studies that teens (especially girls) are depressed by larger issues like social injustices, global conflicts, and failure to act on climate change, chief social-media-blamer Jean Twenge speculates (offering no evidence) that really, teens are just shallow, cruel, and ill-motivated:

“The Lancet seems to be arguing that 12-year-old girls are cutting themselves because they are worried about the planet warming. Isn’t it more likely they are cutting themselves because social media provides an endless way for other kids to be cruel, they can never achieve the perfect bodies they see on Instagram, they are constantly judged for their appearance in the endless selfies they are compelled to post, unknown adults can sexualize them, they are continually stressed about how many likes they’re going to get, and some social media accounts glorify (and even instruct about) self-harm? Any or all of these reasons, and more, might be why heavy social media users are more likely to self-harm.”

No, that’s not “more likely.” The 2023 CDC survey shows 4.5% of girls ages 14 and younger who never or rarely use social media harm themselves seriously enough to require medical attention — more than the 3.6% who use social media daily or more.

More to the point: 6.3% of girls age 14 and younger from troubled families (whose parents violently and emotionally abuse teens and/or suffer from drug/alcohol abuse, depression, suicidality, jailing, domestic violence, and absence) self-harm, compared to NO girls from homes with none of these parental/adult problems. Twenge and others have proven extremely reluctant to talk about documented, troubled/abusive parents and families that teens do not enjoy privileged academics’, professionals’, politicians’, and pundits’ luxury to ignore. Hopefully, that’s changing.