Girls who avoid adults, stay on social media, get out into the world, and pursue education and independence are LESS self-destructive

Given authorities’ hostility, callousness, and cowardice in evading real issues, many girls are creating their own solutions to depression.

To recap yet again an ignored, crucial finding from the Centers for Disease Control’s 2021 survey, Gen Z middle and high school girls reported very high levels of emotional (63%) and physical (13%) abuse by parents/adults. Parentally-abused girls were 3 times more likely to be depressed, 9 times more likely to attempt suicide, and 27 times more likely to self-harm compared to non-abused girls.

Google “Surgeon General” and “child abuse,” and you find ONE workshop back in 2005. The disgraceful refusal of authorities led by Surgeon General Murthy to deal with the abusive realities girls and other teens face is a stain on America’s health and political establishment.

In the national hullaballoo over girls’ rising depression, no one asks girls WHAT is making them depressed. We don’t like their answers. Instead, self-serving authorities stampede to blame girls’ depression on girls’ social media use and liberal politics.

So, many girls appear to be creating their own solutions.

By 12^th grade, girls report to Monitoring the Future that they spend little time with parents (only one-third eat dinner with a parent 4 or more days a week, fewer than boys). Are abused girls avoiding parents, or are other factors at work?

Coincident with spending less time around adults, 12^th grade girls report lower levels of being emotionally abused (59%, down from 66% in 9^th grade) and violently abused (9%, down sharply from 16% in 9^th grade) by parents/adults, as well as fewer suicide attempts. Still, around 4 in 10 report frequently being depressed.

Then, a few months later, when girls enter college, The American Freshman survey reports they are much less likely to be frequently depressed (18%). That’s not due to selection bias. Six in 10 young women go to college.

The plummet in college women’s depression accompanies even more liberal politics. The percentage of first-year college women who identify as politically liberal or far-Left (51%) resembles 12^th grade girls’ politics (51%), though the proportion identifying as conservative/far-Right falls from 21% in high school to 13% in college.

That’s important, because those who blame girls’ depression on social media use also blame their liberalism. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt declares liberal girls’ “heavier use of social media…caused them to become more anxious and depressed than other groups” because it led them to embrace “three great untruths”: “that they were fragile;” that their “anxieties” were “reliable guides to reality,” and that society is “comprised of victims and oppressors—good people and bad people.”

Haidt, who accuses girls of fragility, intolerance, and bad attitudes, has never acknowledged the high levels of violent and emotional abuses teenage girls reported to CDC. However, there are better reasons to dismiss Haidt’s prejudices: girls and young women are not acting fragile or self-fixated.

Just the opposite. Today’s girls are invading higher education in record numbers (59% of 18-24-year-old women are in college or hold a degree, compared to 48% of men), so that the female first-year college population increasingly reflects the female high-school senior population.

They’re not fooling around: 72% seek advanced degrees. College women’s 3 most important goals are being financially independent (85%), helping others in difficulty (81%), and exploring other cultures (67%).

What we term “depression” and “anxiety” seem to motivate many modern girls in particular to stunning achievements in education (Figures 1, 2), careers, and global activism, especially surrounding climate change. Four times more liberal than conservative teens use social media for activism.

Young women actively taking control of their lives is not the way depressed, fragile people are supposed to act. The problem is the opposite. The aggressive intrusion of young women into formerly male-dominated education, job, and activist leadership is triggering gut-level anxieties in authorities.

Source: US Census, 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2024.

Gen Z girls are racing past boys and invading men’s territories – but not in the way older men traditionally like. From 1970 to 2022, the percentage of 18-24-year-old women in college or degreed rocketed from 27% to 59%, compared to 35% to 48% for men. First-year college boys are less liberal-left (28%) and more conservative (26%).

Back in 1960, nearly half of 15-19-year-old girls had babies and/or married, mostly with older men in their 20s and 30s; 82% of young women age 18-24 went no further than high school. Flash forward to 2022. Now, girls advance through higher education (59%), not babies/marriage (7%).

The steep drop in young women’s birth rates in the 1960s and 1970s as they became more educated accompanied a growing trend to choose peer males as reproductive partners as young men’s growing education made them more competitive. From 1958 to 1970, teen girls’ birth rates with older male partners fell by 45% while rising 48% with teen males.

That unheard-of trend brought Neanderthal rumblings from tribal elders. Suddenly, in the 1970s, authorities proclaimed “teenage childbearing” an “epidemic social problem” even though it had fallen precipitously since the 1950s and had never been thought a problem before… so long as teen girls liasoned with older men.

Source: CDC WONDER, Natality, Vital Statistics of the United States, 1950-2003.

No; the anger at “teen mothers” only applies when their partners are teen males. The same officially-touted 1997 Urban Institute article that scolded teenage girls who “prematurely engage in childbearing and other adult behaviors” turned around and justified the adult men who impregnate girls as acting “squarely within societal norms.” The endless anger at teenage girls is just that primitively sexist.

Since 1990, teen girls created another revolution: they stopped reproducing with anyone.

As “teen pregnancy” and birth rates fell to all-time lows in the 2010s and 2020s, critics found new reasons to panic. The Right deplores Gen Z for destroying Western civilization by having too few babies. Liberals fret that teens sit behind screens, not romancing and risk-taking the way past critics denounced them for.

The barrage of denunciations hurled at whatever girls do is reflected in a massive, long-term international study of millions ages 15 and older that finds women ages 15-24 benefit from using social media along 7 in 8 dimensions of life satisfaction, ranging from personal happiness to goals – except ONE: community well-being.

As Taylor Lorenz shows in a brilliant summation of authorities’ long history of baseless panics toward teenagers and every new media – dime novels, jazz, comics, television, voice telephones, rock’n’roll, rap music, video games, on and on – rescuing girls’ supposedly fragile mental health has spawned repeated moral crusades employing EXACTLY the same fears, in EXACTLY the same words, decade after decade as today’s social-media panic.

All these findings point to one conclusion: Gen Z girls suffering widespread abuse and depression, get the hell away from your families and communities as early in life as you can. Openly defy backwards crusades to restrict girls’ online freedoms by the same authorities who abjectly ignore girls’ realities.

Move out into the larger world, where today’s young women are flourishing beyond any previous female generation — the real cure for depression.