Why Are Kids So Sad?

FASCISM? –

Oct. 11, 2022 – But the technology thesis hasn’t performed well under critical examination, as the Times package notes. What possible reason could there be for American young people to be particularly unhappy in the 2020s? It’s hard to see the forest for all the low-hanging fruit: There’s the pandemic that has trapped kids inside with their families, a recipe for unhappiness all around if ever there was one; the rise of right-wing political extremism and rapid advance of various hate groups; and global warming, the imminent end of the world as we know it.

When it’s framed as a “youth mental health” crisis, the solutions are individual, one malfunctioning brain at a time, even as the issue is obviously social. The scholarship on long-term developments in cohort mental health suggest it’s not individual disasters that matter but rather enduring social changes. America has become an increasingly difficult place to be a happy child, and it’s well past time to start treating that as an urgent political problem.

When I researched affective trends in American youth for my 2017 book, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, the negative indicators were already well evident.