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In many generations, being a teenager has been tough.
It’s just possible that the present moment in American cultural history might be the toughest of all.
According to a recent report from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 13% of high school-age girls have attempted to take their own lives, while 30% have seriously considered doing so. Boys are four times more successful at self-harm than girls, and suicide is currently the second leading cause of death for 15–19-year-olds in Canada.
Those heart-wrenching numbers began to spike around the time of the 2020 pandemic, apparently due to feelings of isolation and despair. So far, those trends are not declining.
What might be at the root of this adolescent crisis?
Journalist Jia Lynn Yang notes that an increasing number of kids are being identified with psychiatric diagnoses.
An astonishing one in four 17-year-old boys have been classified as A.D.H.D. She writes, “The numbers on autism are so shocking that they are worth repeating. In the early 1980s, one in 2,500 children had an autism diagnosis. That figure is now one in 31.
“Nearly 32 percent of adolescents have been diagnosed at some point with anxiety; the median age of “onset” is 6 years old. More than one in 10 adolescents have experienced a major depressive disorder… New categories materialize. There is now oppositional defiant disorder, in addition to pathological demand avoidance.” Kids, in other words, are becoming medical mysteries to be solved.
Such labels may help parents and school counselors navigate the choppy waters of medical intervention. But they almost certainly do little to help girls and boys feel more confident as they face the challenges of growing up.
Yang acknowledges there are no easy answers. “No doubt the causes of the mental health crisis are multifaceted. Some disorders tend to run in families. [Flat] screens have thoroughly invaded childhood, supplanting the sleep, exercise and socializing in person that can ward off depression and anxiety.”
Indeed, San Diego State psychology professor Jean Twenge has compiled impressive evidence that many recent adolescent struggles coincide with the arrival of the smart phone in 2012.
Kids are simply spending an incredible amount of time transfixed by screens.
According to a JAMA Pediatrics study, teenagers average one-and-a-half hours a day while at school looking at their phones. For 25% of kids, it’s more than two hours. By the eighth grade, the average kid spends four-and-a-half hours per day on social media – mostly watching videos. These are hours in which a child or a teen isn’t exercising, hanging out with friends, or reading a good book.
Political and societal pressure to raise student performance levels has impacted school schedules. For most kids there’s not much free time, let alone time just to breathe.
Before the 1980s, American children could always look forward to recess. By 2016, only eight states required daily recess in elementary schools. What about lunchtime? According to recent research, children often have little more than 20 minutes to walk to the cafeteria, wait in line for food, eat their lunch, and take a bathroom break.
What’s the need of the hour?
Many observers agree with Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College and author of “Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life.”
In other words, it’s time to let kids play.
For followers of Jesus, this raises an interesting question: Does the Bible endorse everyday human realities like joy, laughter, and play?
The answer is yes, yes, and yes.
At first glance, this doesn’t seem to be the case. The Old and New Testaments come across as oh-so-serious, and when a child asks, “Mommy, are there any jokes in the Bible?” she will probably be hard pressed to find one.
But Ecclesiastes 3:4 makes it clear that being alive includes “a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance.” Dancing and laughter are part and parcel of what it means to be one of God’s children.
When the prophet Zechariah looks ahead to the way that God will bless Jerusalem, he writes, “The city streets will be filled with boys and girls playing there” (Zechariah 8:5).
In a culture that tended to diminish the significance of little ones, Jesus said, “Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3). It’s a good bet he wasn’t thinking about anxious, depressed, or over-stressed kids, but the inherent playfulness, innocence, and trust universally associated with the first dozen years of life.
Proverbs 17:22 is a timeless prescription: “A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.”
It may sound strange, but one of the reasons we are beckoned to live with a child’s sense of joy and trust is that God’s own heart overflows with such qualities.
Early in the 20th century, the British journalist and social critic G.K. Chesterton made these observations in his book Orthodoxy:
“The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy… Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again:’ and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.
“But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them.
“It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”
What can we do with that insight in the middle of this summer?
Laugh. Play. Rejoice in the Lord.
And pray that God, by his Spirit and his power, will descend this very day into the hearts of teens who are desperate to find out if life has a joyful meaning worth living for.