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.
By Colbert I. King Columnist|Follow Washington Post February 11th 2023
In this second week of Black History Month, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) reintroduced their bill to award the Congressional Gold Medal to approximately 200,000 African Americans who served with the Union Army during the Civil War. My great-grandfather Isaiah King of New Bedford was among them. He was a soldier with Company D of the Fifth Massachusetts (Colored) Cavalry, having enlisted at age 17 on Jan. 16, 1864.S
Those brave Black soldiers served with honor in a system that paid them less than it paid White troops and under adverse conditions, including the risk of enslavement and torture if captured by Confederate forces. Their valor is largely unrecognized or unappreciated.
Getting a pension was another ordeal. It took Great-Granddaddy King 13 years to finally get his pension.
With that as a backdrop, I enter into this year’s observance of Black History Month. It’s a step that I take without warm feelings.
Yes, I join in paying tribute to accomplished Black trailblazers and their contributions to the building of America. I have been doing that since grade school in the 1940s, when the celebration was conducted under the banner “Negro History Week.” It was important then, as it is now, to show that Black contributions extend beyond the fields of sports, entertainment and military service. This country is also a commanding figure on the world stage because of the fight for human rights by the descendants of enslaved Black people — a struggle that inspired independence and anti-colonialism movements around the world.
What stays with me, however, is the reason for continuing to set aside a special time of the year for this observance.
Renowned historian and author John Hope Franklin said Carter G. Woodson, who founded Negro History Week in 1926, always believed that the day would come when there no longer would be a need to set aside such a time, because the history of African Americans would become an integral part of American history to be observed throughout the year. Until Woodson’s death in 1950, Franklin said, he continued to express hope that Negro History Week would outlive its usefulness. It hasn’t. But not for the best of reasons.
The observance served a necessary purpose for Black youngsters in my generation. We needed to hear about the role of Black people in the making of America because we were being told by White people of our day that there was nothing about us, or our mommas and daddies, or other people who looked like us, that White people were bound to respect. And that disdain was expressed in tangible ways.
I’m not talking about Black experiences learned from reading a book or classroom lectures, or from tales told by elders. I lived that history — that long, darkened slice of life that affected my heart and mind in ways unlikely ever to be undone. Those experiences will be with me until my dying day.
Try living with knowledge that White Washingtonians have given the sanction of law to prevent Black-skinned children from attending their schools and our parents, preachers and teachers from entering their theaters and restaurants. Try growing up in a city that, by custom, denied Black people the chance to try on clothes in department stores or sit at drugstore counters; try having to tolerate a racial etiquette in which White men and White women were always addressed by “Mr.,” “Mrs.” or “Miss,” while first-name usage was reserved for Black men and women — regardless of rank, station or age.
Imagine, if you can, what it’s like as a young teen looking for a job to open your morning newspapers and see job advertisements for Whites only. To know that the key reason you could not work inside a bank, a department store, a downtown office building or in a service station, drugstore or restaurant — except for menial jobs — is that you were born Black.
Try knowing, even as a child and young adult, that you were receiving that kind of treatment because White people in our nation’s capital wanted to instill in you a sense of inferiority.
That was my world.
Legalized racism is now off the books, albeit not voluntarily, but by court orders and federal laws. Few employers, store and shop owners, public school leaders or neighborhood citizen associations of my day stopped, looked around and said, “Naw, I don’t want to do that anymore. Let’s do the right thing.” Law, not conscience, made the changes.
Negro History Week, now Black History Month, seeks to refute racial denigration. But that the observance is still needed speaks volumes about where we are as a country. To think: Some states are banning teaching about the impact of racial bias in the pursuit of democracy under the guise of eliminating critical race theory. African American history is American history with all its warts. Period.
…”Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.
And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor…”
Black History Month is a time to celebrate the rich cultural heritage and immense contributions of Black individuals throughout history. It is a time to reflect on the struggles and triumphs of the Black community, and to acknowledge the incredible impact they have had on shaping our society. This month-long observance is a reminder of the incredible strength and resilience of Black people, and it is a time to show gratitude and appreciation for their contributions to our world.
Here is a collection of videos, books, and articles you can share freely with your teams to support their learning journey. There are an infinite number of resources, and these are ones I curated.
Books:
Ibram X Kendi his book Stamped from the Beginning
Isabel Wilkerson her books Caste and The Warmth of Other Suns.
Maryland’s historical legacies of opportunity and openness to diverse immigrants continue to characterize Montgomery County, as a third of its residents are foreign born and over forty percent speak a language besides English. Concurrently, Native peoples and the descendants of colonial settler families continue to be part of the fabric of the county.
Posts by Paul Costello1
