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A woman yells at a sheriff’s deputy during a protest following the death of George Floyd at the hand of Minneapolis police officers, Thursday, May 28, 2020, in Minneapolis. (Mark Vancleave/Star Tribune via AP)
Friday, June 4, 2021 | 2 a.m.
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An alarming number of America’s children are struggling with mental health issues, and the causes go well beyond the pandemic. Too many of our children struggle to believe in their future and have little faith that problems can be fixed. It’s as if the hopelessness long documented by beleaguered inner-city youths has started spreading to all kids.
This crisis is revealing itself in a number of ways. A few of the signs:
• A recent national poll conducted by the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital in Michigan showed that more than one-third of teenage girls and a fifth of teen boys have experienced the onset of anxiety or worsening of anxiety.
• The nonprofit advocacy group Mental Health America reports that the proportion of 11- to 17-year-olds who sought mental health screening in 2020 was up 9% over the average in 2019. In addition, kids in that age range were “more likely than any other age group to score for moderate to severe symptoms of anxiety and depression,” according to the report.
• Suicidal ideation and suicide attempts among children are at high levels. This week, the largest pediatric hospital in Colorado declared a state of emergency on youth suicides, with its CEO/CMO saying the staff had been “overrun with kids attempting suicide and suffering from other forms of major mental health illness.” At the Aurora-based hospital, emergency room visits for suicidal ideation or attempts were up 72% this year through April compared with the same period last year.
We saw the problem from a heartbreakingly close view in Las Vegas, with reports of a high number of suicides among students during the pandemic, as well as a flood of alerts to a mental health early-warning system maintained by the Clark County School District.
The pandemic played a large role in this, obviously, by robbing children of the chance to socialize and subjecting them to the disruptions of remote learning. Meanwhile, job losses among their parents and other pressures left children worrying about their families and their futures.
But there’s much more involved here than social isolation, educational struggles and domestic issues related to COVID-19.
If the past five years in American life has taught children anything, it’s that they can’t count on adults to solve any problems. All they’ve seen is grown-ups yelling at one another in increasingly apocalyptic terms. We, the adults of America, have given children no evidence that people can work together in humane, optimistic and sympathetic ways. Nor have we shown them it’s possible for people with different viewpoints to find common ground.
Meanwhile, children are inundated with social media that weaponizes peer pressure through its 24/7 combination of easy hate, cyberbullying, phony images of the “good life” and idle conspiracy theories. The impact of this is jacked up by a cruel algorithmic model of information distribution that resembles a psy-ops effort targeting our weakest minds.
And even in conventional media, the message is bleak for our youth. Black, brown and Asian kids are awash in images of people who look like them being killed or injured or caged in a despicable parade of horror. Even something as exciting as a teen learning to drive becomes fraught with anxiety if you happen to be a Black teen learning to drive.
As shown in a number of polls and anecdotally in any number of news stories, children are concerned about climate change to a greater degree than adults. No wonder — for them it’s an existential risk given estimates that irreversible damage is already occurring and will speed up unless drastic measures are taken to curb greenhouse-gas emissions.
“I don’t understand why I should be in school if the world is burning,” a Denver-area student told a Washington Post Magazine reporter last year. “What’s the point of working on my education if we don’t deal with this first?”
Mass shootings are another source of anxiety for students, as demonstrated by the March for Our Lives movement and a slew of polls.
Then there’s the intense pressure many children face to excel academically, fearing that the failure to gain admission to a good college would leave them with crushing student loans and weak earning potential.
“There could be a fire on your right, there could be a tornado on your left, but you are (pressured to be) focused 100% on college acceptance. And nothing will get in the way of that, even if it means students are dying, and even if it means kids are self-harming,” one student told National Public Radio in a report about the Colorado hospital.
These are some of the issues students are grappling with. Children in some communities deal with disproportionate amounts of police violence and poverty. Children in some communities suffer PTSD from wildfires or other environmental catastrophes. Children everywhere have seen the rise of political tribalism, right-wing violence and assaults on American democracy.
And all the while, a lack of funding for mental health services leaves children with inadequate help.
As the Colorado hospital leader told NPR, “our kids have run out of resilience. Their tank is empty.”
This leaves us with a question as a society: Are we, as adults, going to make progress in solving these issues, or are we going to let our children continue to suffer?
The answer is obvious. It’s time to act like grown-ups. Our kids didn’t cause these problems and shouldn’t have to pay a price for them. Our conversations on public policy should focus on one thing — what’s best for the young and future generations — and not on political ideology, power issues or anything else.
America’s children are literally crying out for help. We can’t fail them.
