Today’s supposedly “depressed, miserable girls” are outrunning everyone

If social-media is driving how Gen Z girls think and act, bring on more social media.

As psychologists Jonathan Haidt’s and Jean Twenge’s, Surgeon General Vivek Murtha’s, and my own generations age into the worst middle-agers and elders ever reliably documented, today’s young women – the ones they relentlessly stereotype as “rewired” and “destroyed” by screens and phones – are racing ahead.

Begin with a crucial index, one that shouldn’t be happening if girls today are more debilitated and depressed.

Figure 1. Gen Z and younger Millennial women are rescuing Americans from Boomer and Gen X men’s educational disasters

Source: US Census, 1981, 1994, 2024.

Look at what messes Haidt’s and Murtha’s male generations of the 1970s and 1980s were – stagnant educational trends for men; greatly increased crime, suicide, unplanned pregnancy, etc. Were Haidt’s predecessors in gloom, Allan Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind, 1987) and Tipper Gore (pop/rap music is destroying our kids) right that younger generations back then were hopelessly uneducable, unemployable, intolerant, mentally ill, and suicidal? This is the “pre-wired” time to which Haidt and others want to see 2020s “rewired” teens restored?

More humbling facts, ones entirely missing from the smug, evasive non-discussion of social media flooding the networks: girls are far better at avoiding suicide and self-destruction (and show the lowest per-capita increases in such deaths in recent years) compared to all other genders or age groups, especially men:  

Suicides, latest year (2022):

Girl age 14:  75

Girl age 17:  108

Woman age 52 (Twenge’s age):  177

Man age 47 (Murtha’s age):  588

Man age 60 (Haidt’s age):  678

Man age 73 (my age):  417

Overdose deaths:

Girl age 14:  43

Girl age 17:  110

Woman age 52 (Twenge’s age):  774

Man age 47 (Murtha’s age): 1,648

Man age 60 (Haidt’s age):  1,527

Man age 73: 191

Exactly why we are entertaining panics over girls when older and male generations are behaving so much worse is another mystery.

We clearly don’t know what today’s teens and young adults, females especially, mean when they say they’re unhappy. The best, unfortunately limited, measures we have suggest the deteriorating behaviors of today’s more addicted, chaotic, politically-crazed grownups are the biggest reason.

Young women’s more pro-social, future-facing attitudes certainly are better adapted to modern challenges than older generations’ and men’s at any age. Perhaps the failings and difficulties of the last two are exactly why we see insistent clamorings in recent years to rein in young Millennial and Gen Z women, force them back into traditional roles, and – especially – to restrict their access to larger worlds misrepresented as dangerous and corrupting to their “fragile mental health.” Who could blame them for finding that depressing?