Why Are Teens Growing More Anxious?

It is increasingly obvious that teenagers across the country are experiencing a spike in anxiety, ...

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It is increasingly obvious that teenagers across the country are experiencing a spike in anxiety, often with serious and debilitating consequences. This week David and Curtis speak to one of the foremost experts on the subject, Kara Powell, executive director of the Fuller Youth Institute. Kara’s well-researched and empathetic insights are critical for all of us to help the teens in our lives navigate these challenging times.

Show Notes:

–Faith in an Anxious World: A 4-week High School Curriculum

–Faith in an Anxious World Parenting Podcast

–Matt Richtel (New York Times): “‘It’s Life or Death’: The Mental Health Crisis Among U.S. Teens”

–Tosin Thompson (Nature): “Young people’s climate anxiety revealed in landmark survey”

-Sign up for David’s French Press newsletter

-Follow Curtis’ work at RedeemingBabel.org and specifically check out the course Anxiety as Opportunity for Spiritual Growth

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  1. Avatar photo
    ecislaghi

    Question for Curtis - do you have resources you would recommend related to the practice of contemplative prayer?

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      Curtis Chang

      I highly recommend the resources from the Renovare Institute (founded by Richard Foster - author of Celebration of Disciplines and other books): https://renovare.org/institute/overview

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  2. Kim

    Loved the podcast and have followed the FYI work for some time. We made intentional efforts at my last church to implement Growing Young and found so much of the work dome by FYI to be excellent. I'm looking forward to the resources provided in the show notes.

    I currently live on a military base overseas and I will tell you that there is a lot of free-range, throw back parenting, which can be good and bad. You see kids of all ages playing outside, unattended, and since it's an exceptionally safe environment there really isn't much concern about the safety of the kids. The flip side is that it can get a little "Lord of the Flies" at the playgroungs, and you get kids engaging in age-appropriate jackassery. For example, the other day I looked out to see some young boys breaking bottles at the recycling bins instead of putting them in. It's the kind of thing that's fun when you're a young kid but it's also dangerous. So I stuck my head out and told them to stop because that wasn't okay behavior, and because I'm on a closed community like this people are (generally) comfortable with you saying stuff to their kids about their behavior. All that to say that I think the lack of community involvement in the lives of so many kids really contributes to the anxiety, loneliness, and depression. I think that feeling like you're part of a group of people who know you, see you, and care for you, can go so far in helping mitigate the isolation of modern life.

    One last thing - I really disagreed with your line of thinking about getting kids to "urgently engage" on matters as some kind of nefarious indoctrination. People brought children to civil rights marches in the 1960s - was that an act of trying to recruit the next generation of foot soldiers? These children/teens are the ones whose lives are most deeply impacted by an issue like climate change. Or systemic racism and police brutality. Or the ubiquitous gun violence that saw (apparently) 3 race-driven shootings across the country just this weekend. I don't disagree that age-appropriate conversations are important, but the way you framed the issue of parents involving their kids in social justice/political issues as simply a fundraising tool didn't sit right with me.

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  3. JayJoanFry

    Interesting podcast and I found myself resonating with much of it (I've been retired from pastoral ministry for about three years after about 39). One thing confused me; Curtis mentioned a NYT piece that talked about puberty age dropping as much as four years (did I hear that right) over the last 20 years or so? Did Curtis say that then puberty used to be more like 16 or 17? I'm ten years older than the folks on the podcast (1977 HS grad) and this sounds pretty exaggerated to me. First, puberty is some binary thing, like a switch that turns on. It's a process. I realize that over the last century or two puberty has dropped fairly significantly, but during my growing up years, puberty for girls started around 13, sometimes even 12 (onset of menstruation) and about 13 or 14 for boys. It, of course, continued through the rest of teenage years, but it doesn't ring true to me that puberty "happened" 20 years ago around 16 on average. It doesn't seem to me there has been that dramatic a change as was discussed. As for the contributing factors to anxiety in teenagers, I agree that one is projection of the parents' anxiety. But in the discussion about kids being on their smartphones all the time - their parents are also on their smartphones all the time and therefore not attentive to their kids. I still can't believe it when I see a family of four (mom, dad, two adolescent kids) at a table in a restaurant for a meal together and everybody's staring at their cell phones.

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    1. JayJoanFry

      meant to say "puberty is NOT some binary thing..."

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    Andy Napoli

    My 14-year old daughter has ADHD (diagnosed since around age 5), and was diagnosed with social anxiety sometime around age 10 or 11. She also had signs of depression when she was in 6th grade. It wasn't until the Pandemic that the social anxiety and depression really worsened to the point where we needed to seek professional treatment and a neurological consultation. The depression got kinda scary at one point. Thank God we finally managed to get an appointment (which took a year of waiting on the list) and got a prescription for a generic form of Prozac. It's definitely helping -- her mood is significantly improved and her motivation to do schoolwork and take care of her responsibilities also has improved. I do think that the kids her age spend way too much time on their electronic devices.

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    Phoebe

    Hi! I’m a 14 year old who enjoys listening to this podcast and talking about it with my parents. I’m glad that David and Curtis are talking the very real problem of teen anxiety. I think a future podcast on this topic would benefit from having a teenager on to talk about how they see this issue play out day to day. For a full view of the problem, we need to talk to the people seeing and experiencing it firsthand.

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      Andy Napoli

      Good for you, Phoebe! I'm sure your parents are justifiably proud of you. I often listen to The Dispatch's podcasts when I'm taking my 14 year old daughter to her mental health therapy sessions. She's had a very rough middle school experience (grades 7 and 8). It took us over a year just to get her an appointment with a mental health professional for her depression and social anxiety. My daughter usually rolls her eyes at my Podcast, when she looks up from her own electronic device.

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      Curtis Chang

      Hey Phoebe - just a note to say "thanks" for listening in and I'm super encouraged that a teenager like you is interested in the topics - and talking about the content with your parents!

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  6. Duane Truitt

    I don't think it is possible to compare anxiety levels between generations of teens. It can't be done, it is literally impossible.

    The teen years have always been full of anxiety, and always will be. Anxiety arises in many ways, of course. Anxiety of being accepted by your peers, or ostracized, or just merely "not cool". Forever issue with teens.

    Social activities, sports, dating, school performance, all are heavily laden with anxiety for teens.

    Suicides? Always been a problem with teens, just today we talk about it openly whereas in generations past it was hush hush, for both religious and social reasons.

    Anxiety over what one is to do with their lives as they approach the end of their teen years? Again, that's a forever source of anxiety, from whether to go to college, how to get into the college the kid or their parents want, to whether to take time off and just work or go touring or just vegetate, or join the military ... all these have been forever sources of anxiety.

    At least today's kids in the US don't have to worry about getting drafted into the military and sent off to die in the rice paddies of Vietnam, or the mountains of Korea, or the European and Pacific battlegrounds of World Wars One and Two. Talk about anxiety? That's some serious sh*t!

    Also, today's intelligent kids (many aren't unfortunately) don't have to worry about getting pregnant with today's wide availability of contraceptives and day after abortion pills. If they still manage to eff up and get pregnant, then, well, the dumb ones will always find a way to do dumb stuff and then feel anxious about it.

    Anxiety doesn't end when you turn 20 - actually, that's when anxiety over really big matters begins to crank up. But, the difference is, the older most (but not all) people get, the more they learn that suffering a setback isn't the end of life, but just another opportunity to do better next time.

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  7. Lwj

    I marvel constantly when driving how little I see of kids outside playing in neighborhoods. I live near a very large place that has a school and homes for children in need of help. I frequently think about how much they are structured and not out playing

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    1. Duane Truitt

      Most likely, they're sitting in their bedroom on their smart phones and tablets on social media, or playing video games. But certainly structured time by their parents is part of it too.

      The current parenting generation seem to have determined that financial and social success in life requires that their children must constantly prepare for adulthood, sort of a 24 year long boot camp for life ... rather than just find their own way at their own pace. Helicopter parenting has became a cliche, unfortunately, rather than the exception for most families, it seems. Maybe today's youngsters will decide that their flavor of rebellion - which all kids practice as they near and enter adulthood - requires a rejection of their helicopter parenting and a return to "free range childhood". I certainly enjoyed free ranging as a child of the 60s, and I feel sorry for my grandchildren who are being driven by our kids - who certainly were NOT raised that way by my wife and I - into 24 hour a day supervision. I am pretty sure that my grandkids resent their overweaning parental supervision but who knows what they'll glean from that experience? I hope the pendulum swings back, for my great grandkids sake.

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    Ben Connelly

    Good podcast. You touched on a number of different factors that I think are at play: social media, the pandemic/isolation, less free time, parenting styles, etc.

    Early in the interview Kara said something to the effect that the majority of teen girls are experiencing anxiety. That’s staggering. I was in high school ten years ago and at the time if you’d asked me, I would have said 1 in 10. If you’d pushed me, maybe 1 in 5. (Now it could be partly a definitional thing: are we talking about worrying about a test or clinical anxiety?, etc.)

    I don’t buy the “it was just underreported in the past” argument. We weren’t stigmatizing mental health in 2012. People weren’t underreporting when I was in high school and college! Lots of people talked about this stuff.

    You touched on the sleep factor. I think that’s huge. Lack of sleep is a heavy contributor to all sorts of physical and mental health problems. Combined with other lifestyle factors: lack of exercise, screen time, lack of time outdoors, lack of in person physical relationships, poor diet (including lack of nutrients), sedentariness. This is a factor for adults and kids and while it’s not the only factor it certainly makes things worse. No, anxiety isn’t just a physical symptom of poor health. But unhealthy lifestyles definitely exacerbate it!

    Coddling of the American Mind is a good read on this subject.

    David also mentioned grievance. I agree completely. The flip from a dignity culture to a victimhood culture has made things worse. My entire life we’ve celebrate victimhood and stigmatized stoicism as “repressing your feelings.” We teach kids to be afraid of the world. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

    If you teach someone to be scared, they will become a scared person. If you teach people to be brave in the face of fear, they will be able to navigate the scariness of the world.

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    Silvertide

    I'm not sue that stats are as accurate as we hope. I have a feeling a large amount of the disparity is because older generations did not recognize these mental health issues. I don't blame anyone but I know as a child I was having severe anxiety issues and while it's obvious looking back it was just considered who I was as a child instead of that kid needs help.

    The one thing I definitely agree with is that schools are setup for adults and to be a daycare instead of having school times set for what is best for the kids. We know kids need more sleep and that early classes are not good for them but we do it anyone because they can't be home alone.



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  10. Maddmac

    Because, Fox News, and specifically Tucker Carlson?

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