What happens to teenagers’ mental health when parents and grownups actually act the way we boast that we do?

Hope you’re sitting down… major shocker to follow.

I rely on the Centers for Disease Control’s 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey (107 questions, 20,000 teens age 13-18) because it is the ONLY one that includes parent/household abuses and issues.

Bluntly, the avalanche of studies claiming social media grievously damages teenagers’ mental health, makes them stupid, etc., touted weekly in media and political splashes, that don’t include these crucial parent and family variables are worthless. That is why they universally suffer from abysmally small effect sizes. Worse than worthless, in fact. They endanger young people.

What if grownups really acted like popularly-depicted grownups?

That is, perfectly! Which is the way parents are universally portrayed by popular social-media-blamers and their media, expert, and politician fans.

So, let’s focus on the mental health of teens from perfect families. The ones whose teens reported to the CDC survey that parents and adults in their households were present and caring, did not emotionally or violently abuse them, were not violent toward each other, did not abuse alcohol or drugs, did not display “severe” mental illness, and had not been jailed.

Reasonable people might say, that’s unfair: even good families have some yelling, maybe someone drinks too much on occasion, and who among us doesn’t do something certifiable, especially while watching the State of the Union?

Still, the entire teens-and-social-media discourse pretends all parents are this perfect in slavish adherence to the following rigid rule:

· When authorities like what teenagers say (i.e., that many are depressed, sad, cyberbullied, using social media hours a day), we hype it to the heavens.

-BUT-

· When authorities don’t like what those exact same teens say on the same survey (i.e., that many are violently and/or emotionally abused by household grownups, suffer parents with drinking, drug, mental health, absence, or criminal behavior problems, etc.), we ignore it.

The table using CDC survey numbers shows why I argue – ad nauseum to long-time readers – that leaving out family abuses/troubles from “studies” and commentaries on teens’ risks and mental health is like leaving out cigarette smoking in “studies” of lung-cancer causes.

Source: CDC 2024. Perfect families: No abuse, no violence, no alcohol/drug abuse, no “severe” mental health problems, no jailings, no absence. Some problems: Parents inflict occasional or some emotional abuse, occasional violence, occasional absence. Severe problems: Parents inflict frequent emotional abuse and frequent violence, drug-alcohol abuse, severe mental health problems, jailings.

CDC figures from the only relevant survey show 15% of teens enjoy perfect families, 13% suffer hellish families, and 72% in-between families with parents and household adults displaying one to three serious problems.

Teens living in families with problems – most including at least some adult violence – suffer greatly elevated troubles. They account for over 94% of teens reporting poor mental health, 97% of those who attempt suicide, 97% of those who try hard drugs, and 98% of those who harm themselves.

Think about that. Troubled, especially severely troubled, families are where nearly ALL the teenage “mental health crisis” generating 10 years of raging hullaballoo dwells.

That shouldn’t be a shocker, but in today’s discussion, it is. Everyone simply bans parent/family issues from discussion of teens’ mental health. Only social media and peers are permissible to blame. This dereliction is so clinically insane that it should trigger academic disciplinary review and psychiatric evaluation of authorities and researchers who indulge it.

Let’s look briefly at the other side

A fine piece* in Psychology Today by Ph.D. counseling professor Amanda Giordano details what happens when adults provide Positive Childhood Experiences:

“PCEs (also called benevolent childhood experiences and counter-ACEs) have been linked to better health in adulthood (Crandall et al., 2019); less self-harm, mood disorders, and suicidal ideation (Bunting et al., 2023); better mental health and psychosocial outcomes (Kallapiran et al., 2025)” “more PCEs have been linked to less heavy digital media use (Crouch et al., 2025), less problematic social media use (Unsal et al., 2025), less self-harm (Bunting et al., 2023), and less binge eating disorder characteristics (Yoon et al., 2023). Furthermore, scholars found that early memories of warmth and safety were a significant predictor of less mobile phone “addiction” (Zheng et al., 2024) [see article for complete citations].

That is, reasonably positive families and parenting (not the “perfect” parenting described above, just basically humane grownup behaviors toward young people) solve nearly all the serious Gen Z problems social-media-blaming panickers trumpet – including “excessive” social media use.

But to be fair, even with perfect parenting, some teenagers – in vastly smaller numbers, but still a few – report poor mental health and other issues. That is, not all teen problems are associated with abusive/troubled family grownups. Alternative causes of teen troubles also need to be explored, which the CDC survey indicates are led by school problems.

The entire teen-mental-health debate needs a radical shift toward empathy and reality. That won’t happen until authorities and leaders decide genuine professionalism, adulthood, and caring about young people is more important than indulging cheap popularity-grabbing egomania.

*Appreciation to reader for referring me to this article.