The teen mental health crisis also afflicts parents

Much has been said about the pandemic-era crisis in teen mental health. A new study suggests parents may be just as bad off. 

Results from a national survey by Harvard researchers, released Tuesday, found nearly equal levels of anxiety and depression among teenagers and parents. Eighteen percent of teens reported anxiety, along with 20 percent of mothers and 15 percent of fathers. Fifteen percent of teens reported depression, joined by 16 percent of moms and 10 percent of dads. 

Researchers estimate that more than one-third of teens have a parent suffering from anxiety or depression. Two-fifths of teens voiced concern about a parent’s mental health. 

“There is a largely untold story about parent mental health in America,” said Richard Weissbourd, senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and lead author of the report. “Parents’ and teens’ mental health are deeply interwoven, and we need to do much more in this country to support parents and to promote their mental health.” 

The findings, based on surveys conducted in December, appeared in a report titled Caring for the Caregivers: The Critical Link Between Parent and Teen Mental Health. It comes from Making Caring Common, a project of the Harvard education school. 

The mental health of teens has been in steady decline for at least a decade, a trend that the COVID-19 pandemic seemed to accelerate. The share of high school students who reported persistent sadness or hopelessness rose from 28 percent in 2011 to 37 percent in 2019, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).  

By 2021, 42 percent of high school students and nearly 60 percent of high school girls reported chronic sadness or hopelessness. Nearly one-quarter of girls said they had made a suicide plan. 

Up to now, researchers have mostly overlooked the mental health link between teens and parents. For the new report, researchers interviewed hundreds of parents and teens in the same families.  

They found that depressed teens are five times more likely than nondepressed teens to have a depressed parent. Anxious teens are three times more likely to have an anxious parent. 

“This harm can be compounded,” the report states, “when both a teen and one or both of their parents are depressed or anxious – depressed or anxious parents and teens can inflame and wound each other in many ways.” 

The more depressed the teen, the less likely she or he will reach out to a parent for support. Depressed and anxious teens said they go to friends for help, rather than parents, by a margin of 56 percent to 32 percent. 

The report’s authors urged parents to seek guidance on how to listen to their teenage children, how to support teens with anxiety and depression and how to treat their own mental health challenges.  

The Harvard report includes a hopeful finding. Researchers found rates of teen depression and anxiety far lower than the levels reported by the CDC.  

Harvard researchers found anxiety among 24 percent of teen girls and 12 percent of boys, and depression among 22 percent of girls and 8 percent of boys.  

The CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey, by contrast, found that three-fifths of female high school students had experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in 2021.  

One reason may be the simple passage of time. The CDC data came from surveys given in the spring of 2021, a moment when teens “were still immersed in the pandemic” and attendant mental health challenges, the report states. The Harvard survey came at the end of 2022, a time when the worst of the public health crisis had passed.