The kids are not all right
For many, it’s hard to manage their emotions
“Have you ever been restrained?” the girl asked me, looking up with wide blue eyes. I paused. Shook my head. “It really hurts. They hold your hands behind your back real hard.”
I swallowed and blinked. This 11-year-old had been forcibly hospitalized because she was a danger to herself and others. I imagined the scene: adults holding back her skinny wrists, wrestling her 80-pound body into compliance. On the surface, she looked a lot like my own children. She grew up in the suburbs, played soccer and joined a Girl Scout troop. She still felt scared of the dark. She debated whether to be a writer or singer when she grew up.
But anxiety and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder led her into trouble. She struggled to control her impulses. Sometimes she lashed out when upset, harming herself or others. Perfectionism could prompt an outburst when she tore up a flawed drawing. These self-destructive incidents spiraled and eventually led to a stay in a child psychiatric ward.
She’s not alone.
The headlines are full of completed suicides — the loss of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain being the most prominent recent examples — and mental health problems leading to youth violence. A new study in the journal Pediatrics found a doubling in suicidal thoughts and attempts among children between 2008 and 2015. Another study found 1 in 2 children will develop a mood, substance-abuse or behavioral disorder by the time they’re 18. When I first heard that statistic, I pictured a whole generation of children, struggling to regulate their behavior, emotions and thoughts. How could they ever become leaders of our institutions, companies, schools, hospitals and society?
Perhaps, I thought, it’s just overdiagnosis. Or greater awareness among doctors and parents. But the increase in suicidality tells me there’s something different in kids today.
In the past decade, the suicide rate doubled in children 10 to 14 and rose 41 percent in older teens, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Anxiety, depression and ADHD are all on the rise. All of these problems stem from young people’s inability to self-regulate, to manage their emotions, thoughts and behavior.
How can we turn this around? We start by asking how children learn to self-regulate and be resilient. Kids discover that they are capable by experiencing the commonplace bumps and bruises of growing up: a dispute with a playmate, a scrape from falling off a tree, a bad grade on a quiz, a choice that they later regret and internalize as a life lesson.
One illustration of this truth is the Dunedin longitudinal study. Study director Richie Poulton has been following more than 1,000 people born in 1972 and 1973 to track their physical, behavioral and mental health. You might think that the people in his data collection who had an early traumatic experience would develop an associated phobia, but he found the opposite. Those adults who had a serious childhood fall were less likely to develop a fear of heights; those who had an early separation from parents were less likely to have separation anxiety at age 11 or 18, for example.
Unfortunately, adults have been protecting kids against these tough early experiences since at least the 1980s, when child abductions and playground injuries captured public and media attention. As a result, children today enjoy less independence and less freedom to make their own decisions. The area where children are allowed to roam unsupervised has fallen by 90 percent compared with the 1970s.
That’s not to say that the current crisis of self-regulation is entirely due to helicopter parents. Our innate brain chemistry — Mother Nature — inclines us to depression, anxiety or other problems. Many children will require professional help, and possibly medication, to tame intrusive thoughts or overwhelming emotions. But how we’re nurtured can influence whether our genetics result in a crippling mood disorder or a more manageable condition.
Especially in the early years of childhood, parents create that environment. We decide whether to send our children messages of fear and caution — or confidence and problem-solving.
We must face life with courage and refuse to be guided by fear. We must take reasonable precautions, teach our children to be safe and then let them experience life’s difficulties for themselves. If we succumb to our fear of those dangers outside our doors, we’ll invite the fear into our children’s own bodies.