Teens feel less emotional support than their parents think they do, new report shows
CNN
As a youth mental health crisis persists in the US, a new report highlights a significant gap between the level of support that teenagers feel and the amount that parents think their children have.
As a youth mental health crisis persists in the US, a new report highlights a significant gap between the level of support that teenagers feel and the amount that parents think their children have. Only about a quarter of teens said they always get the social and emotional support they need, but parents were nearly three times more likely to think they did, according to a report published Tuesday by the National Center for Health Statistics. The findings are based on nationally representative surveys of nearly 1,200 children ages 12 to 17 and their parents, conducted in 2021 and 2022. Parents responded to survey questions from trained interviewers, while children responded to survey questions online after their parents gave approval. The study authors note that the presence of an interviewer may have biased parents to respond more favorably, but significant discrepancies between perceptions of parents and children were found across demographic groups. “This suggests a systematic bias where parents consistently report higher levels of social and emotional support compared with their teenager’s perception, and in doing so may underestimate their teenager’s perceived need for social and emotional support,” the study authors wrote. Teens are often thinking about their feelings, along with their identity and place in the world, but they might not want to share that with their parents, said Dr. Jeffrey Arnett, a developmental psychologist and senior research scholar at Clark University. He was not involved in the new study. “This is sometimes something they discuss with their parents, but to a large extent, it’s an individual project,” he said. “They want to start developing an independent identity. They sometimes feel like they should be independent, so it can get more difficult to talk openly with their parents about how they’re feeling.”
