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.”
Defining support in different ways
There also may be a disconnect between the support parents think they’re offering and the type that their teenage children are seeking – even when there are the best of intentions on both sides, said Dr. Lisa Damour, a psychologist who was not involved in the new study but who has written books on related topics and who co-hosts a parenting podcast.
A parent’s first instinct is often to provide advice or guidance, while teens tend to want empathy and reassurance, she said.
“When teenagers come to adults with concerns, I think above everything else, what they’re looking for is for the adult to serve as a steady presence to maintain perspective about what’s happening and help the teenager gain a sense of perspective,” Damour said. “So when we go with our common instinct to offer advice or guidance or ask questions, I think sometimes that feels to teenagers like we are confirming that the problem is every bit as bad as it feels to them, and it doesn’t have the intended effect.”
The surveys from the new report did not define social or emotional support, so it was up to teens and their parents to determine what that meant to them.
And this disconnect between parents and their teens may be exacerbated by broader anxieties that parents have about the mental health crises the US is facing, Damour said.
“Parents may now, more than in recent years, be quick to try to jump in with solutions or corrections because they are anxious about adolescent mental health overall,” she said. “So the net effect is that it is probably harder than it’s ever been for parents to feel like a steady presence in the face of teenage hiccups and bumps, and that may be trickling down to their kids.”
Overall, 93% of parents thought their children always or usually had the social and emotional support they need, but only about 59% of teens felt that to be true, according to the new report. Instead, 20% of teens said that they rarely or never had the support they need, compared with only about 3% of parents who thought the same.
Links with mental health concerns
Support systems are important for everyone but particularly for adolescents, who are experiencing a period of major biological and social transition, experts say.
It’s important for parents to encourage open lines of communication with their teens because, despite the push for independence, they are still reliant on them in many ways, Arnett said.
“The relationship that adolescents have with their parents is central to life for almost all of them. They’re growing up, but they’re still children in many ways,” he said.
And the new report shows that teens who did not feel that they always or usually had the support they need were significantly more likely to report a number of poor health effects than those who did feel supported.
Depression and anxiety were nearly three times more common among teenagers who did not feel emotionally supported than among those who did; nearly a third of those who did not feel supported reported symptoms, according to the new study. Two-thirds of teens who did not feel supported reported poor sleep, compared with about a third of those who did feel supported. And nearly 14% of teens who did not feel supported said that they had poor health or low life satisfaction, compared with less than 5% of those who did feel supported.
Groups of teens who were among the least likely to feel they had the support they need were also among those with the largest gaps in parent perception, according to the new report.
Less than half of Black teens (42%) and LGBTQ+ teens (44%) said they always or usually had the social and emotional support they need, while their parents perceived this to be the case more than twice as often.
Teenage girls were less likely than boys to say they always or usually had the support they need, and there was a larger gap in perception between teen girls and their parents.
Experts say it’s important for adults to make intentional time to connect with teenagers in their life.
This is especially true in the age of technology and social media, when physical togetherness may not always bring emotional connectedness, Arnett said. The US surgeon general has emphasized the importance of protecting youth mental health, most recently calling for a warning label to be put on social media platforms.
“Often, supporting teenagers is as simple as being curious about what they bring our way and then offering empathy,” Damour said. “Take comfort in the knowledge that helping a teenager feel heard and understood is overwhelmingly the most useful and therapeutic thing an adult can do.”