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[quote=Anonymous]The high rates of high school students in my area (competitive public in the DMV full of pushy UMC parents, not TJ) seem to coincide with the controlling nature of the parents, IME. Here’s an article I read recently that talks more about that:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/10/why-are-kids-so-sad.html

It’s a bit rambling, but the relevant bit is that kids need autonomy in order to develop “the sense that your choices and actions affect your life, that they matter” (what psychologists call an “internal locus of control”). By contrast, having one’s life controlled by others (an “external locus of control”) has been shown to correlate with “hopelessness, depression, and suicidiality.”

The teen depression crisis is being driven by a perfect storm of societal-level factors, and there’s only so much one family can do to counteract all that. But giving the kids some control over their own decisions and choices may be one of the biggest.

I get the fact that we live in late stage capitalism and wealth inequality is at an all-time high, but I think the pushiness so common in the DMV to have our kids on the “right” side of that divide is harmful to our kids’ mental health.

What do you think? [/quote]

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