The photographs of President Jimmy Carter during his time in the White House aren’t unlike those of other men who’ve held that office. Mostly they are dignified snapshots of him shaking hands with dignitaries and voters, offering up that big, gleaming expression of geniality that was his signature, walking across a tarmac or delivering a speech. It’s the images of him in his post-presidency that set him apart.
In these later public roles — builder and teacher and husband to his beloved Rosalynn — their very ordinariness makes them extraordinary. They tend to capture a man full of vulnerability.
And at the end of his life, Carter, 98, allowed this vulnerability to have an even more pronounced role in his life story when he announced Saturday that he would enter hospice care. That, too, is extraordinary.
In the modern era, it’s unusual for someone who has soared to great heights to allow himself to be seen once again negotiating life at ground level in all its uncertainty and complexity. The men who have been president depart the White House and return to someplace larger than what they left when they began their journey to the Oval Office. Perhaps that place is a home that is visibly more luxurious, more expensive, more stately. Perhaps it’s merely a mind-set that’s made plain through the company that they now keep; they’re surrounded by the famous and privileged. Perhaps they aim to make amends for history — or even rewrite it.
Carter’s signature and hand prints are in the sidewalk at the Jimmy Carter Boyhood Farm in Plains, Ga. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
But Carter’s return to Plains, Ga., after his single term in Washington, leaves an indelible memory of modesty and fallibility — even as he continued to achieve great things. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. He established the Carter Center in Atlanta. Yet, some of the most enduring images are those of him helping to build homes with Habitat for Humanity. He doesn’t look especially skilled or adept even though he studied engineering. He’s just a white-haired man in a plaid shirt, work gloves and a hard hat helping to raise a frame on a modest house. He’s part of a group rather than separated from it. He’s engaged in the same work as those around him and if they’re in awe of the former president, their fascination is masked by their own attention to their hammer and nails, and their little piece of the project.
Carter was a Sunday school teacher. And while it’s not unusual for a former president to regularly attend church service or find a way to engage in an act of charity to mark Christmas or Thanksgiving, Carter wasn’t simply showing up. He was not merely a congregant. He was actively educating and questioning. He was taking a lead in a conversation about faith, not from a lofty perch in a pulpit, but at eye level. He was engaged in the task of sorting through the gospel and trying to understand it. He was searching.
Carter addresses members and visitors to Maranatha Baptist Church in 2010. (Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post)
Now, as the country, and perhaps even the world, considers his life, he is also allowing us an opportunity to consider what it means to die. Not suddenly or violently, but after a long and prosperous life. After a good life. Carter has grasped a whisper of control over his own death by ceding control: to God, to fate, to the inevitable. For anyone who has conquered seemingly impossible hurdles, it must take tremendous strength to make the decision that the time has come to stop struggling and to simply be. In a time when technology promises that most anything is possible, he has allowed himself to be wholly human.
In this age of social media, the famous tell their stories in real time and so it’s not unusual to learn about the ways in which they’re fighting a momentous personal demon or facing down a health struggle. The culture reads a lot about the battles that are won — and the ones that are bravely fought but ultimately lost. But rarely is there an opportunity to consider when a battle is no longer warranted. Rarely are we reminded that sometimes saying “enough” is both powerful and empowering. Rarely are we asked to sit with the specter of death and then accept it. This is a lesson.
As a culture, so much energy is rightfully focused on the ways in which life can be prolonged just a little bit longer, the body rejuvenated if only by a few degrees. The focus is on fixing the physical. The spirit too often is left adrift. Carter reminds us that the spirit requires care and concern, too. He reminds us that sometimes the spirit needs to take precedence.
Hospice care is not a matter of giving up. It’s a decision to shift our efforts from shoring up a body on the verge of the end to providing solace to a soul that’s on the cusp of forever. The choice seems of a piece with the way in which Carter has lived in the aftermath of the presidency. His attentions were focused on ending suffering and enabling peace. He aimed to do those things through his advocacy and his activism on an international scale.
But he also demonstrated what it can mean when one turns those same considerations inward.
The un-celebrity president: Jimmy Carter’s simple and modest lifestyle was rare, in sharp contrast to his successors. He declined the corporate board memberships and lucrative speaking engagements and decided that his income would come from writing. He wrote 33 books and has helped renovate 4,300 homes for Habitat for Humanity.
Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter:The Carters were married 76 years, the longest in presidential history. Their love story blossomed in World War II and survived the searing scrutiny of political life. Rosalynn Carter expanded the role of first lady.
Fifty years ago, in early 1973, with U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War coming to a close, the Nixon administration announced the end of draft call-ups. The armed forces, which had been dependent on conscripts since 1940, had to become an all-volunteer force (AVF) overnight.
America gained — and lost — a great deal in that wrenching transition: We gained a more effective military but opened up a new divide between service personnel and civilians.
Admittedly, it was hard to predict either consequence when the draft ended. By 1973, conscription had caused enormous discontent in U.S. society because so many of the well-off had been able to escape the Vietnam War with occupational or student deferments or bogus medical excuses.
Military leaders feared that few high-quality recruits would join voluntarily — and initially they were right. As recounted by James Kitfield in his book “Prodigal Soldiers: How the Generation of Officers Born of Vietnam Revolutionized the American Style of War,” “On standard military aptitude tests between 1977 and 1980, close to half of all the Army’s male recruits scored in the lowest mental category the service allowed. Thirty-eight percent were high school dropouts.” Drug abuse and racial tensions were rife. The all-volunteer force, combined with defense budget cuts, was producing a “hollow Army,” the Army chief of staff warned in 1980.
That changed in the 1980s when patriotism surged and popular culture began to depict the military in a more positive light — we went from “The Deer Hunter” (1978) to “Top Gun” (1986). Congress raised pay and benefits, and the services figured out how to attract recruits with slogans such as “Be All You Can Be.” By 1990, 97 percent of Army recruits were high school graduates and, thanks to mandatory drug testing, the number using illicit drugs plummeted.
FThe AVF went on to win the 1991 Gulf War and perform capably in a long series of conflicts that followed. The United States often did not achieve its political objectives (as in Afghanistan), but it wasn’t the fault of those doing the fighting. They turned the military into the most admired institution in U.S. society.
Now, however, one retired general told me, “The AVF is facing its most serious crisis since Nixon created it.” All of the services are struggling with recruiting. The crisis has been especially acute in the Army. Last year, it missed its recruiting goals by 15,000 soldiers — an entire division’s worth. That is a particularly ominous development given the growing threats from China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.
Military analysts point to numerous factors to account for the recruiting shortfall, the biggest being that the unemployment rate is at its lowest level since 1969. There is also widespread obesity and drug use among young people. Only 23 percent of young Americans are eligible to serve, and even fewer are interested in serving. More than two decades after Sept. 11, 2001, and nearly two years after the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan, war weariness has set in.
Perceived politicization is another issue: While many right-wingers view the armed forces as too “woke,” many progressive Gen Zers view them as too conservative. The Ronald Reagan Institute found that the number of people expressing a great deal of trust and confidence in the military declined from 70 percent in 2017 to 48 percent in 2022.
Those poll numbers reflect a concern among many in the military that the AVF has created a dangerous chasm between the few who serve and the vast majority who don’t. The number of veterans in the population declined from 18 percent in 1980 to about 7 percent in 2018 — and it keeps falling, as the older generation of draftees dies off.
“The AVF has led us to become the best trained, equipped and organized fighting force in global history,” retired Adm. James Stavridis, a former NATO commander, told me. “But we have drifted away from the citizen-soldier model that was such a part of our nation’s history. The AVF has helped to create an essentially professional cadre of warriors. We need to work to ensure that our military remains fully connected to the civilian world, and to educate civilians about the military.”
The easiest way to bridge the civil-military divide would be to reinstate the draft, but there is no support for such a radical step in either the military or the country at large. David S.C. Chu, a former undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, points out that relying on draftees “creates morale and discipline problems” and is “increasingly inconsistent with a highly technological approach to warfare.” In most countries, conscripts serve only a year or two at most — barely long enough to master complex weapons systems. That’s why most nations, including Russia and China, have been relying more on professional soldiers, as the United States does.
Yet, while we gained a more capable military with the advent of the AVF, we have to recognize that we also lost something important when the draft ended. Mass mobilization during World War II broke down religious, regional and ethnic barriers and paved the way for postwar progress on civil rights and an expansion of the federal government to address problems such as poverty. In the post-draft era, America has become increasingly polarized between “red” and “blue” communities.
That has led to renewed interest in expanding national service programs such as AmeriCorps; President Biden, for example, recently proposed creating a new Civilian Climate Corps. Congress should support such initiatives, but we shouldn’t have extravagant expectations for what they can accomplish. The young people who sign up for voluntary service are so civic-minded already that they are the ones in least need of what these programs teach.
To make a real difference, national service would have to be obligatory. Retired Gen. Charles C. Krulak, a former Marine commandant, told me he favors requiring every high school graduate to put in two years of community service out of state while living on current or former military bases.
He is undoubtedly right that such a program would produce young adults “better prepared to become useful citizens.” But there is no national emergency that would justify such a mobilization and no agreement on how we could usefully employ 12 million people (the number of Americans aged 18 to 20). Public employee unions would be sure to object, the cost would be prohibitive, and many would try to evade the service requirement. Obligatory national service is no more likely, in today’s climate, than a renewal of military conscription.
The likelihood is that the AVF can overcome its current problems with some tweaks such as a new Army program for pre-basic training to condition out-of-shape recruits. Presumably, once the unemployment rate rises, the military’s recruitment woes will ease. Bridging the fissures that divide our society will be much harder to achieve. I wish a national-service mandate were practical and possible, but it’s not. We will have to look elsewhere — for example, to expanded civics education — for solutions.
This is extract from the book, Outwitting the Devil from Napoleon Hill, which i consider the best book for all educators to learn.
Reverse the present system by giving children the privilege of leading in their school work instead of following orthodox rules designed only to impart abstract knowledge. Let instructors serve as students and let the students serve as instructors.
As far as possible, organize all school work into definite methods through which the student can learn by doing, and direct the class work so that every student engages in some form of practical labor connected with the daily problems of life.
Ideas are the beginning of all human achievement. Teach all students how to recognize practical ideas that may be of benefit in helping them acquire whatever they demand of life.
Teach the students how to budget and use time, and above all teach the truth that time is the greatest asset available to human beings and the cheapest.
Teach the student the basic motives by which all people are influenced and show how to use these motives in acquiring the necessities and the luxuries of life.
Teach children what to eat, how much to eat, and what is the relationship between proper eating and sound health.
Teach children the true nature and function of the emotion of sex, and above all, teach them that it can be transmuted into a driving force capable of lifting one to great heights of achievement.
Teach children to be definite in all things, beginning with the choice of a definite major purpose in life!
Teach children the nature of and possibilities for good and evil in the principle of habit, using as illustrations with which to dramatize the subject the everyday experiences of children and adults.
Teach children how habits become fixed through the law of hypnotic rhythm, and influence them to adopt, while in the lower grades, habits that will lead to independent thought!
Teach children the difference between temporary defeat and failure, and show them how to search for the seed of an equivalent advantage which comes with every defeat.
Teach children to express their own thoughts fearlessly and to accept or reject, at will, all ideas of others, reserving to themselves, always, the privilege of relying upon their own judgment.
Teach children to reach decisions promptly and to change them, if at all, slowly and with reluctance, and never without a definite reason.
Teach children that the human brain is the instrument with which one receives, from the great storehouse of nature, the energy which is specialized into definite thoughts; that the brain does not think, but serves as an instrument for the interpretation of stimuli which cause thought.
Teach children the value of harmony in their own minds and that this is attainable only through self-control.
Teach children the nature and the value of self-control.
Teach children that there is a law of increasing returns which can be and should be put into operation, as a matter of habit, by rendering always more service and better service than is expected of them.
Teach children the true nature of the Golden Rule, and above all show them that through the operation of this principle, everything they do to and for another they do also to and for themselves.
Teach children not to have opinions unless they are formed from facts or beliefs which may reasonably be accepted as facts.
Teach children that cigarettes, liquor, narcotics, and overindulgence in sex destroy the power of will and lead to the habit of drifting. Do not forbid these evils-just explain them.
Teach children the danger of believing anything merely because their parents, religious instructors, or someone else says it is so.
Teach children to face facts, whether they are pleasant or unpleasant, without resorting to subterfuge or offering alibis.
Teach children to encourage the use of their sixth sense through which ideas present themselves in their minds from unknown sources, and to examine all such ideas carefully.
Teach children the full import of the law of compensation as it was interpreted by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and show them how the law works in the small, everyday affairs of life.
Teach children that definiteness of purpose, backed by definite plans persistently and continuously applied, is the most efficacious form of prayer available to human beings.
Teach children that the space they occupy in the world is measured definitely by the quality and quantity of useful service they render the world.
Teach children there is no problem which does not have an appropriate solution and that the solution often may be found in the circumstance creating the problem.
Teach children that their only real limitations are those which they set up or permit others to establish in their own minds.
Teach them that man can achieve whatever man can conceive and believe
Teach children that all schoolhouses and all textbooks are elementary implements which may be helpful in the development of their minds, but that the only school of real value is the great University of Life wherein one has the privilege of learning from experience.
Teach children to be true to themselves at all times and, since they cannot please everybody, therefore to do a good job of pleasing themselves.
Kids are unwell. Worse than ever recorded, according to two new reports tracing depression and suicidal thoughts and behaviors in teens. There is a frantic search for ways to stop kids from hurting. But if we want to make any lasting difference, it is us, the adults, who need an intervention.
Solutions start with compassionate, radical honesty: American kids are unwell because American society is unwell. The systems and social media making teenagers sad, angry and afraid today were shaped in part by adults who grew up sad, angry and afraid themselves.
First, the kids. This week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released data from the first Youth Risk Behavior Survey collected across the United States since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. It is devastating. Nearly 1 in 3 high school girls reported in 2021 that they had seriously considered suicide. Teen girls reported the highest ever levels of sexual violence, sadness and hopelessness. Another new study based on pre-pandemic data from Iowa raises alarm about bullying and suicide. Rates of bullying were increasing in the state even in 2018, and researchers at Drake University found some forms of it significantly correlated with feeling sad or hopeless and attempting suicide. This echoes CDC findings that young people who are frequently bullied or who bully others are more likely to think about, attempt or commit suicide.
Data on the teen mental health crisis is useful, but surveys and headlines can be like fireworks that punch fleeting shapes in the sky. An Instagram logo: social media! A surgical mask: the lockdown! We need to discern the flares without being blinded by them. Yes, social media delivers concentrated, addictive stress to developing minds that were held captive by the pandemic. No, logging off TikTok and returning to school will not fix the problem — because each teen’s life ricochets off family, friends and neighbors with struggles of their own in a polity with troubles of its own.
So as not to present a problem without a fix, the CDC says schools can make a profound difference. “Increasing the sense among all students that they are cared for, supported, and belong at school” is one, as is growing access to mental health and substance use prevention services for kids and their families and health education classes to teach teens to manage their boundaries and emotions and to ask for help. These positive practices build resilience.
Before then, though, can we acknowledge the weight this puts on underpaid teachers and part-time counselors and nurses? People who, if they haven’t already burned out, are practicing active-shooter drills, catching students up on 18 months of lost learning and ensuring kids have enough food to concentrate in class. A school’s four walls cannot hold back the trauma of society as well as, perhaps, the personal nightmare waiting for kids at home.
Which brings us to the adults. One in 5 — nearly 53 million people — had a mental illness in 2020, ranging from anxiety to depression to bipolar disorder. Nearly 28 million adults had an alcohol use disorder. As many as 3 in 100 people will have a psychotic episode in their lives. We are running companies and the country, serving time and raising families, and we, too, need a sense that we are cared for, supported and belong.
It can be hard for adults to believe that, especially if our own childhoods suggested otherwise. As kids, 61 percent of adults in the United States experienced abuse or neglect, grew up with poverty, hunger, violence or substance abuse, experienced gender-based discrimination and racism or lost a parent to divorce or death. These stressors contribute to chronic health problems, mental illness and substance misuse down the line.
If not you, then someone you know is doing their best to stitch up those invisible wounds.
Preventing adverse experiences in childhood could reduce the number of adults with depression by as much as 44 percent, according to the CDC. Mourn this number for those whose traumas weren’t prevented and rejoice that there is hope. Here’s more hope: Brains wired by toxic stress, such as the sexual violence that 1 in 10 teen girls are facing today, have the ability to essentially heal when exposed to positive experiences. Good nutrition, adequate sleep, mindfulness practices all help. Adults as well as children have neuroplasticity, and family resilience and connection are positive influences.
A person’s mental health is not an immaculate conception of just one brain, body or life. Teen suicide might drop and anxiety might improve as more school programs are funded and kids limit their screen time. But these will be temporary fixes for this generation and the next unless we stop systemically bullying ourselves and each other and find ways to show collective care.
My favorite quote about writing — or anything else, for that matter — comes from George Orwell’s essay, “Politics and the English Language”: “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”
Orwell’s insight was that politicians and institutions use meaningless phrases when they’re trying to obscure the truth, or when they don’t really know what they’re trying to say in the first place.
I can only imagine what Orwell would have made of the nonsensical language of social justice education.
This month, The Post’s Nicole Asbury reported on the latest allegation of antisemitism at Bethesda’s Walt Whitman High School (which happens to be the school my children attend). Apparently, a member of the debate team — a parent-run club at Whitman — accused two leading members of the team of making hateful comments about Jews.
Of course, just because a student reports something as happening doesn’t always mean it actually happened, or that it happened in exactly the way it’s portrayed. But here the allegations, corroborated by at least one other student, were unusually specific.
According to the student who reported the conversation, the two more senior members of the team suggested that specific Jewish people they named should be lured with challah to the secluded Andaman Islands and burned at the stake, among other things.
Assuming that this is even mostly true, let’s give these teens the benefit of the doubt and stipulate that they’re young, that they probably thought they were being devilishly funny, and that young people saying stupid things is pretty much your average Tuesday.
That said, the incident shook a lot of kids and parents, who found out about it only by reading The Post, and especially debate club members. So you’d expect the school to address it clearly and candidly. Not quite.
School systems have protocols around this kind of thing, and those protocols, as at many universities now, rely heavily on a modern lexicon of incomprehensible blather.
According to a letter from Robert Dodd, the high school’s capable and constantly besieged principal, the Montgomery County school system initially moved to “implement restorative practices” with members of the debate team, through the convening of “restorative circles.” Which sounds like something you’d do at a spa for 300 bucks an hour.
Then, given the uproar at school, the county’s “restorative justice facilitators” decided to pause the restorative circles, so they could meet with students to determine what would be required to make them “further heal and feel safe.”
The letter went on to assure us that the school would “partner with MCPS leaders in equity and well-being” to have “critical discussions.”
I don’t know exactly what a leader in equity and well-being does, but I’d assume it involves a bunch of acronyms and maybe some other restorative shapes, like a triangle or a rhombus.
Meanwhile, while all this was going on, according to the school newspaper, the Black and White, the accused students were suspended from the debate club for a month (during which, I’m told, they missed no actual debate competitions). They offered no heartfelt apologies and have thus far retained their leadership positions on the team. That doesn’t sound so restorative to me.
I’m betting that Dodd, were he not trapped between protocols and parents and the ever-present specter of lawyers, would have condemned the incident more plainly and succinctly, encouraging everyone to move on.
But my point here really isn’t about whatever action the school should take, which is best decided by the principal and parents and which ought to be compassionate. Teenagers make idiotic mistakes, and they should have the right to learn from them.
My point is about language — and specifically the language of the cultural left. You can’t tell students, on one hand, that the words you use matter and have consequences, and then turn around and unleash a meaningless barrage of faux-academic mad-libs to make your case.
If we’re going to take the language of intolerance seriously, and we should, then we also have to take seriously the language we use in response. And, to Orwell’s point, if that language makes no sense to anyone who isn’t steeped in the new lexicon of academia, then it can only be because the people deploying it don’t want us to know what they’re really trying to achieve — or, more precisely, because they really have no idea themselves.
From what I glean, most of the students find all of this jargon to be a waste of their all-too-limited time, and I find it hard to blame them.
We’re supposed to be teaching our children to speak with care and clarity. What we keep demonstrating, instead, is a confounding lack of both.
Donna St George Katherine Lewis Lindsay Bever… Washington Post Feb 18th 2023
When Sophie Nystuen created a website for teens who had experienced trauma, her idea was to give them space to write about the hurt they couldn’t share. The Brookline, Mass., 16-year-old received posts about drug use and suicide. But a majority wrote about sexual violence.
“Every time I’ve tried, my throat feels like it’s closing, my lungs forget how to breathe,” wrote one anonymous poster. “I was sexually assaulted.”
These expressions of inner crisis are just a glint of the startling data reported by federal researchers this week. Nearly 1 in 3 high school girls said they had considered suicide, a 60 percent rise in the past decade. Nearly 15 percent had been forced to have sex. About 6 in 10 girls were so persistently sad or hopeless they stopped regular activities.
When Sophie Nystuen, 16, started a website for teens who had experienced trauma, most posts were about sexual violence. (Courtesy of Sophie Nystuen)
The new report represents nothing short of a crisis in American girlhood. The findings have ramifications for a generation of young women who have endured an extraordinary level of sadness and sexual violence — and present uncharted territory for the health advocates, teachers, counselors and parents who are trying to help them.
The data comes from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from a nationally representative sample of students in public and private high schools. “America’s teen girls are engulfed in a growing wave of sadness, violence and trauma,” the CDC said.
“It’s alarming,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said Thursday of the report. “But as a father of a 16-year-old and 19-year-old, I hear about it. It’s real. I think students know what’s going on. I think sometimes the adults are just now realizing how serious it is.”
But high school girls are speaking out, too, about stresses that started before the pandemic — growing up in a social media culture, with impossible beauty standards, online hate, academic pressure, economic difficulties, self doubt and sexual violence. The isolation and upheaval of covid made it tougher still.
This edited photograph was created after multiple “Me Too” comments was captured in the girls bathroom at Brookline High. It is being featured in the Brookline High feminist zine, edited by Sylvia Blaser. (Courtesy of Sophie Nystuen)
‘Teens are really good at hiding it.’
When Caroline Zuba started cutting her arms in ninth grade, she felt trapped: by conflict at home, by the school work that felt increasingly meaningless, by the image her friends and teachers had of a bubbly, studious girl. Cutting replaced the emotional pain with a physical pain.
She confided in a trusted teacher, who brought in the school counselors and her mother. But Zuba’s depression worsened and, at age 15, she attempted suicide. That sparked the first of a series of hospitalizations over the summer and subsequent school year.
Caroline Zuba, 17, started a mental health club at her high school to support classmates struggling with depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts. (Courtesy of Kellie Zuba)
Now a 17-year-old junior at a public high school in Potomac, Md., Zuba relies on therapy, medication, exercise and coping strategies. She started a mental health club at her high school to support classmates also struggling with depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts.
At the lowest point of her depression, she said, she kept many secrets from her friends, parents and teachers because she felt stuck in her role: a cheerful high achiever who had it all together.
“My mom’s like my best friend, and there’s no way she would have ever expected it,” Zuba said. “Teens are really good at hiding it, which is really sad.”
Notes written by 18-year-old Elida Mejia Elias to herself, plastered on her bedroom wall in the shape of a heart. ( Zaydee Sanchez)
Internalizing conflict, stress and fear
While the teen mental health crisis was clear before the CDC report, the stark findings have jolted parents and the wider public.
“These are not normal numbers,” said Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy. “When you grow up with this, I think the risk is thinking, ‘Well, this is just how it is.’”
The reasons girls are in crisis are probably complex, and may vary by race, ethnicity, class and culture. Harvard psychologist Richard Weissbourd points out that “girls are more likely to respond to pain in the world by internalizing conflict and stress and fear, and boys are more likely to translate those feelings into anger and aggression,” masking their depression.
Weissbourd added that girls also are socialized not to be aggressive and that in a male-dominated culture girls can be gaslit into thinking there is something wrong with them when problems or conflicts arise. “They can be prone to blaming themselves,” he said.
Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University and author of the book “iGen,” said that increases in most measures of poor mental health in the past decade were more pronounced for girls than boys.
She said part of the problem is that digital media has displaced the face-to-face time teens once had with friends, and that teens often don’t get enough sleep. Adding to those influences are the hours teens spend scrolling social media. For girls, she said, this often means “comparing your body and your life to others and feeling that you come up wanting.”
That’s not to say everything that people do on smartphones is problematic, Twenge said. “It’s just social media in general and internet use show the strongest correlations with depression,” she said.
Elida Mejia Elias, a high school senior, says teen girls are constantly being judged. (Zaydee Sanchez)
Ben Handrich, a school counselor at South Salem High School in Salem, Ore., said teen girls often feel that “people are watching them — that no matter what they do, there’s this invisible audience judging their movements, their actions, the way they smile, the way they eat.”
Lisa Damour, a clinical psychologist and author of “The Emotional Lives of Teenagers,” said it’s important to note that the CDC data was collected in the fall of 2021, a time when many teens were anxious about returning to in-person school and wearing masks.
“Teenagers were miserable,” Damour said. “It absolutely confirms what we were looking at clinically at that time. We don’t know what the next wave of data will tell us.”
Damour noted that the CDC findings are distressing because today’s teens, in many ways, are in better physical health and more risk-averse than most previous generations.
“We’re raising the best-behaved generation of teenagers on record,” said Damour. “They drive with seat belts, they smoke less, they have less sex, they wear helmets. They do all these things that we did not do.”
And yet they are in crisis.
Whistles and ‘gross comments’
Many girls across the country describe teen cultures of casual slut-shaming, of peers greeting girls with sexist slurs such as “whore” or “ho,” based on what they wear or how they look.
In Los Angeles, Elida Mejia Elias says it’s a no-win situation. “If you’re skinny, they judge you for being skinny and if you’re fat, they judge you for being fat,” explains the 18-year-old, a senior.
In ninth grade, a friend of Mejia Elias’s sent a naked picture of herself to a boy she was dating, at his urging, and he spread it around to his friends. “Everyone was talking bad about her. They were calling her names, like ‘ho,’” said Mejia Elias. “That affected her mental health. She needed to get therapy.”
Tulip Kaya, right, with her family. The 14-year-old says teen girls routinely endure harassment. (Courtesy of Fran Miller Kaya)
In Maryland, at her Bethesda public high school, 14-year-old Tulip Kaya said that girls in her friend group hear whistles or “gross comments” about their breasts and are texted unsolicited penis pictures by boys at school. “If there’s anything slightly unique about you, you’re not going to have a fun time, and you will be targeted,” she said.
Social media can be overwhelming. “On Snapchat and TikTok, you see all these pretty girls with tiny waists and a big bottom. I know I’m only 14, but it makes me feel like there’s something wrong with myself,” Kaya said. “When I start to feel like that, I will delete the app for a little while.”
Girls interviewed by The Post expressed uncertainty and self-doubt over everything from what to wear, what to post or comment on social media, what it meant if someone wasn’t following them back on a social platform, and even in daily interactions. When in-person school resumed, during the fall of 2021 for many, routine encounters and moments felt weird after a year or more of separation from peers.
“Sometimes I don’t want to wear shorts because I don’t have the body type I had in middle school,” said Leilah Villegas, of Eastvale, Calif., who ran track before the pandemic. Now in 10th grade, she’s started running again, but her changed body brings pangs of self-consciousness.
Aanika Arjumand, 16, says school health curriculums don’t cover abuse or sexual violence as much as they should. (Courtesy of Aanika Arjumand)
Aanika Arjumand, 16, from Gaithersburg, Md., who sits on her county’s Domestic Violence Coordinating Council, said she was not surprised by the increases in sexual violence.
“We deal with a lot of cases on like teen dating violence and kind of informing schools about teen dating violence because the health curriculum right now basically does not cover abuse or sexual violence as much as it should,” she said.
School itself can sometimes be physically unsafe, as happened with Harker, a 13-year-old in Savannah, Ga., who spoke on the condition that her full name not be used because of the sensitivity of the issue.
At school, she received unwanted attention from a boy in sixth grade. He would whisper in her ears and grab her shoulders. Once, he seized her across her chest and did not release her until she screamed. A teacher was nearby, but she said the boy went unpunished and remained in her classes. The teen has resorted to learning at home.
“They didn’t believe me even though there were witnesses,” she said. “A boy in school can get away with something, but if I do one mess-up, I get called out for it.
Najiha Uddin, right, with her father and two sisters. The 17-year-old says a White beauty standard is perpetuated in mainstream and social media. (Courtesy of Najiha Uddin)
Unrealistic beauty standards and financial pressure
At the Bronx High School of Science in New York, 17-year-old Najiha Uddin talks about a White beauty standard perpetuated in mainstream and social media, which she says girls of color can’t possibly meet. She and others describe status-oriented peers and media messages about shoes, clothes, styles and experiences that outstrip their families’ means.
For Montanna Norman, 18, a senior at a private high school in Washington during the fall of 2021, the killing of unarmed Black men by police was foremost in her mind after the murder of George Floyd. At the time she was the co-leader of her school’s Black Student Union. “The toll that that took on my mental health was a lot,” she said.
Some of her friends have contemplated, or attempted, suicide, Norman said. “You wish you could do more to help,” she said.
Garvey Mortley, a 14-year-old in Bethesda, Md., who is Black, said she has been teased because of her hair and still feels microaggressions. “Racism can be a stressor for depression or a cause of depression because of the bullying that happens, not just Black kids but Asian kids and Hispanic kids who feel they are unwanted,” she said.
Students who are LGBTQ face some of the highest rates of depressive symptoms and sexual violence, including rape. In 2021, nearly 1 in 4 reported an attempt to take their life.
Rivka Vizcardo-Lichter, a student activist in Virginia, pointed out that high school is a time when many LGBTQ students are still figuring out who they are and solidifying their identity. “Even if you have an accepting environment around you, you are aware that there are millions of people who don’t want you to exist,” she said.
Waking up to a nightmare
Some of the most alarming data collected by the CDC involved the rise in suicidal thoughts among teen girls — 24 percent of teen girls have made a plan for suicide while 13 percent have attempted it, almost twice the rate for boys.
Ella Walker’s parents say they wish someone would have alerted them to the warning signs of suicide. (Devine Dezines)
Rich and Trinna Walker, from New Albany, Ind., searched for a therapist for their 13-year-old daughter Ella but struggled to find one in the overloaded mental health-care system during the pandemic. Once Ella finally started treatment, however, her demeanor seemed to improve, they said.
“I really felt like she was doing so much better,” Trinna Walker said. Ella had been asking her dad how she could earn extra money to buy a birthday gift for her sister. She told her mom she wanted doughnuts for breakfast.
“Then we woke up to a nightmare the next morning,” Trinna said.
Ella died by suicide on Jan. 22, 2022. Her parents said they wish someone would have alerted them to the warning signs. Unknown to them, Ella was being bullied, and she was devastated by a breakup, they said.
Now the couple is urging teens to speak up when their peers are in trouble. “It was like a bomb going off,” Rich Walker said. “It’s like it mortally wounded my wife and me and Ella’s two older sisters, and then it reverberated outwardly to her friends.”
Listen to girls
Many of the girls interviewed for this story asked that adults listen to and believe girls, and stop dismissing their concerns as drama. “Adults don’t get all the pressure that teenage girls have to deal with, from appearance to the way they act to how smart they are, to the things they do,” said Villegas, the Eastvale 10th-grader. “It can be very overwhelming.”
Asma Tibta, a 10th-grader in Fairfax County, Va., said she is “close friends” with her mother but doesn’t talk about mental health at home.“I haven’t told her too much. And I don’t plan to.”
In Savannah, Harker took a break from playing “Roblox” with her friend to be interviewed. Before heading back to the game, she had one request: “I want adults to believe young girls.”
If you or someone you know needs help, visit 988lifeline.org or call or text the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988.
Serena Marshall contributed to this report.
Katherine Reynolds Lewis is an award-winning science journalist covering children, behavioral and mental health, education and related topics. Katherine is the author of “The Good News About Bad Behavior” and former national correspondent for Newhouse and Bloomberg News.
By Donna St. GeorgeDonna St. George is a national education reporter for The Washington Post, where she has been a staff writer since 1998. She previously worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Times. Twitter
By Lindsey BeverLindsey Bever is a reporter for The Washington Post’s Well+Being desk, covering chronic illness, mental health and navigating the medical system, among other issues. She was previously a reporter at the Dallas Morning News. Twitter
Teen girls across the United States are “engulfed in a growing wave of violence and trauma,” according to federal researchers who released data Monday showing increases in rape and sexual violence, as well as record levels of feeling sad or hopeless.
Nearly 1 in 3 high school girls reported in 2021 that they seriously considered suicide — up nearly 60 percent from a decade ago — according to new findings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Almost 15 percent of teen girls said they were forced to have sex, an increase of 27 percent over two years and the first increase since the CDC began tracking it.
“If you think about every 10 teen girls that you know, at least one and possibly more has been raped, and that is the highest level we’ve ever seen,” said Kathleen Ethier, director of the CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health who said the rise of sexual violence almost certainly contributed to the glaring spike of depressive symptoms. “We are really alarmed,” she said.
Ethier said it’s important to determine who is perpetrating the violence, which the survey did not address, and how it can be stopped.
Almost 3 in 5 teenage girls reported feeling so persistently sad or hopeless almost every day for at least two weeks in a row during the previous year that they stopped regular activities — a figure that was double the share of boys and the highest in a decade, CDC data showed.
Girls fared worse on other measures, too, with higher rates of alcohol and drug use than boys and higher levels of being electronically bullied, according to the 89-page report. Thirteen percent had attempted suicide during the past year, compared with 7 percent of boys.
Sharon Hoover, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Maryland’s School of Medicine and co-director of the National Center for School Mental Health, said she was struck by “the magnitude of the increases and the gender difference.”
Hoover and others pointed out it is unclear whether the data is influenced by other factors — if girls were more aware of depressive symptoms than boys, for instance, or more inclined to report them — or whether girls are simply far worse off.
Richard Weissbourd, a psychologist and senior lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, said there is probably not a single cause to explain the data but rather interacting causes that vary by race, ethnicity, class, culture and access to mental health resources.
Even so, he said, “girls are more likely to respond to pain in the world by internalizing conflict and stress and fear, and boys are more likely to translate those feelings into anger and aggression,” he said. Boys are more likely to “mask depression,” he said, while girls may be more vulnerable to social media and “a culture obsessed with attractiveness and body image.”
CDC researchers said schools could be a lifeline as students struggle, pointing to studies showing better mental health outcomes for students who felt connected to their schools.
The pandemic took a heavy toll on adolescents, who already struggled with depression, anxiety and thoughts of suicidebefore it began. Many were cooped up at home for months. They continue to grapple with social media pressures, academic strain and family turmoil. Some lost parents and other relatives to covid-19. “These data make it clear that young people in the U.S. are collectively experiencing a level of distress that calls on us to act,” the report said.
The isolation and stress of pandemic lockdowns were followed by a rise in domestic violence — and may have also driven an increase in the sexual assault of teen girls, said Heather Hlavka, an associate professor of criminology and law studies at Marquette University with expertise in sexual violence.
CDC data do not suggest where the assaults happened or who perpetrators are, but Hlavka said it could be a combination of peer violence, dating violence and violence in the home — and should be a target for more research. “It’s really important to disentangle the relationships between the perpetrators and the victim-survivors to better understand the reasons why,” she said.
CDC researchers have kept an eye on data about forced sex for a long time, Ethier said. Now, “we see this increase from 11 percent to 14 percent of teenage girls saying that they’d been raped just between 2019 and 2021 — and that’s extremely concerning,” she said.
The CDC analysis is based on data collected in fall 2021 from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, taken by a nationally representative sample of students in public and private high schools. The results released Monday, derived from more than 17,200 responses, are the first since the pandemic began. The survey is done every two years, and Monday’s report showed trends that spanned from 2011 to 2021.
The findings about hopelessness and sadness among girls are true to the school experiences of high school senior Riana Alexander, 17, who founded the organization Arizona Students for Mental Health. As a group, girls tend to struggle more openly, she said, while boys “tend to struggle in silence.” The sexual violence figures did not startle her either, she said. “I’ve yet to meet a teenage girl who has not had something disgusting said or done to her by a man,” she said.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual and questioning students were significantly more likely to experience violence,including rape, than their heterosexual peers. They were also more likely to be electronically bullied and to report persistent sadness or hopelessness. Twenty-two percent had attempted suicide during the past year. (The survey did not have a question about gender identity, so the analysis did not include transgender students; future versions of the survey are expected to include the question.)
“These data show a distressing picture,” said Debra Houry, the CDC’s chief medical officer, speaking at briefing Monday. “America’s teen girls are engulfed in a growing wave of sadness, violence and trauma.”
That was not completely a surprise for Laurie McGarry Klose, past president of the National Association of School Psychologists. The first thing that came to mind about the rise in depressive symptoms, she said, was “this is the hard data that shows what we have known anecdotally for the last couple of years.”
Teens were hit hard by the isolation and disruption of the pandemic, but many were also shaken by a series of high-profile cases of racial injustice, Klose said — as they simultaneously navigated personal and family difficulties. “It was trauma after trauma, especially for kids of color,” she said.
The report showed disparities by race and ethnicity. Black and Hispanic students were more likely than White and Asian students to avoid school because of safety concerns, a finding the authors said suggested exposure to violence in the community or at school. Black students were more likely to attempt suicide than Asian, Hispanic or White students. White students were more likely to experience sexual violence than Asian, Black and Hispanic students, and they were the only group to see an increase in it.
American Indian or Alaska Native high school students were more likely than other groups to have been raped.
The report also spotlighted some positive findings: Students reported less alcohol and drug use. Over the last decade, fewer students reported ever having sex, currently having sex or having had four or more partners during their lifetime.
Though usage was significantly down over a decade, girls were more likely than boys to have consumed alcohol and used marijuana during the past 30 days. They also were more likely to have recently vaped or ever used illicit drugs such as cocaine, heroin, inhalants, meth and hallucinogens.
Girls were almost twice as likely as boys to be electronically bullied through texting and social media. The targets of bullying were more likely to be White, American Indian or Alaska Native, or LGBQ+.
In its report, the CDC steered attention to the nation’s schools, saying activities there can make a profound difference in the lives of teens. It recommended improved access to mental health services, more classroom management training for teachers, school clubs that foster gay-straight alliances, high-quality health education and enforcement of anti-harassment policies.
Ideally, schools would take on multiple initiatives: “The more of these things you do, the better the impact in the school environment,” Ethier said.
Research shows that those who feel close to people at school have a significantly lower prevalence of serious thoughts of suicide and feelings of persistent sadness or hopelessness. “Our research has shown that young people who feel more connected in their schools do better, both while they are adolescents and up to 20 years later,” Ethier said.
Those least likely to feel connected to school included girls, students of color and LGBQ+ students, according to the data.
Emily Ozer, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Public Health, recommended more mental health services in schools and even small ways to relieve student stress — whether it’s greeting each student by name as they enter class, responding to an absence with a caring inquiry, or giving the occasional homework pass. Student well-being is also linked to the mental health of teachers and other adults in the building, and they, too, need to be supported, she said.
“It takes a lot to be there for students,” Ozer said, “especially distressed students.”
Strikingly 86 percent of students reported high parental monitoring, defined as parents or other adults in the family knowing most of the time where teens are going and who they are with — also considered a protective factor. Nearly 90 percent of girls reported it, compared with 84 percent of boys.
If you or someone you know needs help, visit 988lifeline.org or call or text the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988.
A lovely aphorism holds that education isn’t the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.
But too often, neither are pails filled nor fires lit.
One of the most bearish statistics for the future of the United States is this: Two-thirds of fourth graders in the United States are not proficient in reading.
Reading may be the most important skill we can give children. It’s the pilot light of that fire.
Yet we fail to ignite that pilot light, so today some one in five adults in the United States struggles with basic literacy, and after more than 25 years of campaigns and fads, American children are still struggling to read. Eighth graders today are actually a hair worse at reading than their counterparts were in 1998.
One explanation gaining ground is that, with the best of intentions, we grown-ups have bungled the task of teaching kids to read. There is growing evidence from neuroscience and careful experiments that the United States has adopted reading strategies that just don’t work very well and that we haven’t relied enough on a simple starting point — helping kids learn to sound out words with phonics.
“Too much reading instruction is not based on what the evidence says,” noted Nancy Madden, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who is an expert on early literacy. “That’s pretty clear.
“At least half of kids in the U.S. are not getting effective reading instruction.”
Other experts agree. Ted Mitchell, an education veteran at nearly every level who is now president of the American Council on Education, thinks that easily a majority of children are getting subpar instruction.
Dig deeper into the moment.
Others disagree, of course. But an approach called the “science of reading” has gained ground, and it rests on a bed of phonics instruction.
(I’m focusing on national policy, but parents also play a role. It can be dangerous to listen to kids — you’ll be talked into buying a video game — so read to them! I’ve offered my suggestions for the best kids’ books ever — and truly one of the best reasons to have kids is the chance to read to them.)
I spent much of the 1980s and 1990s as a New York Times correspondent in East Asia, and children there (including mine) learned to read through phonics and phonetic alphabets: hiragana in Japan, bopomofo in Taiwan, pinyin in China and hangul in South Korea. Then I returned with my family to the United States in 1999, and I found that even reading was political: Republicans endorsed phonics, so I was expected as a good liberal to roll my eyes.
The early critique of phonics in part was rooted in social justice, trying to address inadequate education in inner cities by offering more engaging reading materials. The issue became more political when the 2000 Republican Party platform called for “an early start in phonics,” and when President George W. Bush embraced phonics with a major initiative called Reading First.
For liberals, Bush’s support for phonics made it suspect. That had some basis: The Reading First program was not well implemented, and careful evaluations showed it had little impact. It died.
I became intrigued by the failures in reading after listening to a riveting six-part podcast, “Sold a Story,” that argues passionately that the education establishment ignored empirical evidence and unintentionally harmed children.
“Kids are not being taught how to read because for decades teachers have been sold an idea about reading and how children learn to do it,” Emily Hanford, a public radio journalist who for years has focused on reading issues, says in the first of the podcasts. She told me that the podcast has had more than 3.5 million downloads.
One of the targets of the podcast is Lucy Calkins, a professor at Columbia University Teachers College who has a widely used reading curriculum. Calkins has acknowledged learning from the science of reading movement and from Hanford, and she told me how she has modified her curriculum as a result — but she also says that phonics was always part of her approach and that media narratives are oversimplified.
As Calkins and others revise their materials, skeptics worry that curriculums still aren’t fully committed to phonics but layer it onto other strategies, leaving students befuddled.
It’s easy to be glib in describing these reading wars. Everyone agrees that phonics are necessary, and everyone also agrees that phonics are not enough.
“Yes, phonics matters, but how you do phonics matters, too, and the rest of the stuff matters as well,” said Madden. She runs a nonprofit, Success for All, that is one of the most evidence-based organizations for improving reading, and rigorous evaluations have shown excellent results. (Success for All was one of the nonprofits in my 2022 holiday giving guide; huge thanks to my readers for donating more than $6 million to them.)
What’s clear is that when two-thirds of American kids are not proficient at reading, we’re failing the next generation. We can fix this, imperfectly, if we’re relentlessly empirical and focus on the evidence. It’s also noteworthy that lots of other interventions help and aren’t controversial: tutoring, access to books, and coaching parents on reading to children. And slashing child poverty, which child tax credits accomplished very successfully until they were cut back.
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