Kids in trouble

During my college days--what now seems eons into the past--troubled kids seemed as clearly understood as they were recognizable. If you wanted to keep kids on the straight-and-narrow, you went on the lookout for smokin' and drinkin' and carryin' on--with "carryin' on" generally connoting the calisthenics that happened at night in parked cars. "Nothing good ever happens after twelve" was a parental rule-of-thumb. 

If, like me, you went to a Christian college, generally there were other stone tablets full of no-nos, like dancing and a host of Sabbath indiscretions, most of which campus authorities claimed led to smokin' and drinkin' and carryin' on. Tough kids weren't hard to identify. 

Things change. According to an alarming essay in yesterday's New York Times, "It’s Life or Death’: The Mental Health Crisis Among U.S. Teens," those sins of o'er are on the wain. By ye olde standards, kids should be doing just fine: there's less early pregnancy, less drug use, and more attention to education. It's true.

“By many markers, kids are doing fantastic and thriving," says Candice Rogers, a psychologist at Cal-Irvine. "Young people are more educated; less likely to get pregnant, use drugs; less likely to die of accident or injury.” 

Behaviors that once gave parents over to premature graying appear less frequent and of less consequence. Kids are incredibly good, a change anyone my age can't help but see if he or she'd been aboard any Christian college campus for the last twenty or thirty years. College students at my alma mater are not particularly bad or  naughty. The truth is, they're really good.

"But there are these really important trends in anxiety, depression, and suicide that stop us in our tracks," Professor Rogers says. "We need to figure it out,. . .it's life or death for these kids."

It's all social media, people say, but the research isn't at all conclusive. Horrible things are said, horrible things happen on line, but wonderful things happen too. It would be nice to be able to blame the problems researchers are finding on one solitary cause, but our lives' dilemmas are always more complex than conspiracy theories corral you into believing. 

Kids get less sleep today, less exercise, and less in-person time with friends. I met a couple who spent two stints, a decade apart, living as dorm parents at a Christian college in Michigan. They claimed that creating community wasn't difficult twenty years ago, but when they returned, the new and all-encompassing pose was students carrying books in one hand and staring at their phones in the other. Their lives are different.

Some propose that anxiety and depression are something of a fad--you know, "everybody's doing it"? Perhaps, experts say, but a definite rising tide of hospital stays for attempted suicide is impossible to ignore. 

What's more--and what's even more worrisome--is that today the emotional problems all around show themselves at a younger age: we're talking about middle school, junior high. Puberty is occurring earlier, a time when the chemical mix in the body's own chemistry creates all kinds of explosions. When that happens to even younger kids, there's going to be a mess.

It's a whole new world out there now, this old man says, and if there's one major takeaway from the rise in kids who abuse themselves, who cut their own flesh or sentence themselves to horrors no one dreamed of a couple of decades ago, it's this: reasons are complex. 

Changes this immense in the way we live--in the way our kids do--don't occur for one solitary reason or simply because of some jerk's villainy. If the Times story is right--and the facts are there!--then we can't successfully analyze those problems we're facing by taking aim at a couple of shiny tin cans. 

It's a long article, but it's worth reading. Have a look here.