“The land of the free”? An appalling new study finds most American parents confine children to house arrest

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| May 2026

Where are children and teenagers supposed to be? Not online. Not out in their communities. If they sat in a lotus in their rooms chanting ohm all day, legislators would ban that.

Generation Z is right — Americans, stop having kids. That issue is raised by the Institute for Family Studies damning new report, “High Tech, Low Play: The Life of American Children.” It is inciting the usual moronic anti-youth media distortions divorced from what it really shows.

The IFS’s latest study follows its February 2026 survey of 24,000 parents of 40,000 children/teens, “Resilient Children, Struggling Parents.” That initial report reached a revolutionary conclusion: parents who want to “raise their children to be independent, free-spirited” and “resilient” must actively DEFY American “cultural norms.”

Great conclusion! The problem: American grownups, especially authorities, fear and hate “independent, free-spirited, resilient” young people.

So, what American “cultural norms” are preventing healthy, challenging youth from growing up? Two stand out.

House arrest. Social media bans.

The IFS reports – stunning indictments of American adulthood because they let the grownups speak for themselves – highlight the percentages of children/youth whose parents do not allow them to walk, bike, or drive outside their homes, yards, and immediate neighborhoods: 98% of 5-year-olds, 98% of 12-year-olds, 73% of 16-year-olds.

In fact, very few parents allow grade-schoolers to leave their house or yard – and 44% similarly confine their 12-year-olds to literal house arrest.

Maybe the parents answering the IFS survey are grossly exaggerating to conform to social norms to “act tough.” But if the survey really reflects how repressive grownups have become, then those concerned for emerging generations must hope children and teens are sneaking out and bravely gaining experience with the larger world beyond their yards.

America’s natural laboratory shows what we do does not work. American adults are monumentally messed up more than any other on earth.

CDC, FBI, Census, and related statistics consistently show our 25-29-year-olds, 30-agers, 40-agers, and 50-agers – the grownups with supposedly developed brains and maturity, the controllers of wealth, families, institutions, politics, power – are exactly the ones setting horrific global records for wildly excessive drug and alcohol overdose, criminal behaviors, gun violence, domestic violence (including killing our own children), suicide, violent death, and political extremism.

Of course, American authorities aren’t about to tell us that. The IFS is gentle on the grownups. Its report only asked parents’ (not kids’) opinions about “kids today.” It never broached tough subjects like parental abuses, addictions, severe mental troubles, and violence – unlike the Centers for Disease Control’s 2023 survey that found three-fourths of teens reported experiencing at least one of these serious grownup household abuses and adversities, half suffered 3 or more, and one-sixth suffered 5 or more in their homes.

A huge part of our failure to solve basic social and health problems is authorities’ constant search for powerless scapegoats to blame.

As grownups get worse, so does the scapegoating

The ban on teens in public accompanies legislation to ban teens under age 16 (18 is next, then 21) from going online.

The ban-teens-from-social-media lobbies fantasize that children and teens will miraculously give up their keyboards and screens (something their own elder generations didn’t and don’t do, spending dozens of hours a week staring at TVs and gabbing on phones) and pour out into the healthy, safe parks and playgrounds to frolic.

Yeah, right. You think the panic over teens being online is crazed (as this substack repeatedly documents)? Just look at the daily ragings against “teen takeovers” – which means any group of Black youth in public in which someone does something that would be perfectly tolerated if they were older adults. I’ll be looking at what police statistics show about these “teen takeovers” and who’s really causing crime in a later substack.

No, the American grownups’ unspoken ideal for middle-schoolers now, older teenagers soon, and young adults within a few years is no exploring, no unsupervised time, no expression, no independence, no socializing, just 24-7 adult and government surveillance by older generations whose failure to manage their own lives is the root cause of the youth problems they complain about.

Demagogues fervently claiming to “protect children!” demand their banishment from online experiences – which, complementing public life, are beneficial to growth and adaptation – because they might encounter a porn image or an insulting message or a remote predator contact on their screens.

It’s the same mentality as the joint police/politician/media crusade to demand bans on all teens in public spaces because a few might cause trouble – a standard of collective guilt adults don’t apply to ourselves (our higher crime, drug, and violence rates are individual problems).

These repressions converge in the demand that children and teens be confined to the very families and established institutions proven to inflict by far the most abusive and dangerous real-life physical, personal endangerments, like churches, schools, sports, youth organizations like Scouting, police custody, and, especially, families.

The IFS’s findings really argue for radically expanding youth access to varied settings. So, naturally, they’re being grossly distorted by culture warriors to justify banning teens from everywhere. That’s their real ideal.

Everything we’re told about “teenage suicide” and “bullying” is wrong (part 2)

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| May 2026

The teenage “bullying” discussion is so disgusting it’s hard to write about. It reveals how depraved, cruel, uncaring – and yes, bullying – today’s authorities are in indulging smug hate speech toward young people to cover up their own derelictions.

The definitive Centers for Disease Control surveys – the ones everyone cites – show, FIVE SIXTHS of teenagers cyberbullied and school bullied (presumably by peers) are ALSO BULLIED AND ABUSED AT HOME BY PARENTS AND ADULTS. (I apologize for caps in this posting, but the whole subterfuge surrounding abuse, bullying, and official cruelty to young people is enraging.)

Five-sixths!

Let that sink in: adult bullying and peer bullying are the same thing, except that adult bullying at home is far more widespread and serious.

Bullying at home creates angry, aggressive youth likely to become bullies themselves, along with passive youth whose defensive behaviors attract larger-world bullying from the fraction of youths and grownups in larger society with mentalities like their parents’.

Yet, NOT ONE “anti-bullying” or anti-social-media loudmouth mentions these absolutely crucial facts.

America’s official bullying toward youth is easily documented

The CDC’s 2021 survey – the first to ask about parental abuses – found 55% of teens reported violent or emotional abuse by parents in the past year, 14% had been cyberbullied, and 13% had been bullied at school.

Two years later, the CDC’s more detailed 2023 survey reported that 62% of the 20,000 teens age 13-18 surveyed reported being violently and/or emotionally abused (bullied) by parents and adults in their homes, 18% had been cyberbullied and 20% had been bullied at school, reflecting post-COVID school reopenings.

Experts know the readily available facts I present here. You don’t have to download the entire data set or file a FOIA petition. Just look at the posted summaries in the CDC’s Data Users’ Guides for 2021 (questions 24, 92, 105) and 2023 (questions 24, 25, 89).

Yet, authorities are not just silent on these tragic realities; they sustain a blame-the-victim mob mentality.

These are cataclysmic findings…

… for the decades long hullaballoo over “bullying,” which interests such as NAPAB, SOB, SB, ABAlliance, and a raft of media-sycophant reporters and pundits wildly deplore. I refuse to spell out the sappy names these entities flatter themselves with. They are not “anti-bullying.” They profit from lying about bullying.

The last phony interest defines “bullying… as the repetitive, intentional harm inflicted by one person or group on another, involving a power imbalance.” Then these entities, aped by mental health professionals and political leaders, blame bullying ENTIRELY on youths. The US Department of Education defines bullying as ONLY occurring among “school-age children.”

By their own definition, “anti-bullying” entities are bullies themselves, exploiting their adult institutional power to harm powerless children and teenagers by stigmatizing young age groups. They bully teens in the name of teaching that bullying is bad.

Journalist/podcaster Anya Kamenetz writes: “The greatest threat to children and teens isn’t social media. It’s adults.” Not just by adults at home, but just as much by mental health professionals and interest groups, I would add.

That parents and household adults are 3 to 4 times more likely than other teens to bully teenagers is now ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN for anyone who wants to participate in the official debate to mention. This level of dereliction and cruelty among so-called political leaders, professionals, and advocacy groups flabbergasts me.

It gets worse

Bullyings tragically compound. Table 1 shows graphically how being bullied online and at school escalate rapidly as a teen is bullied at home by parents/adults.

The table is based on the level and severity of violent abuse, emotional abuse, other household violence, drug/alcohol abuse, severe mental illness, and criminal behavior parents and household adults impose on children and teens.

Table 1. Nearly all cyberbullied and school-bullied teens are also abused by parents and adults at home.

Source: CDC, 2023.

The unmentionable facts the CDC survey shows are overwhelming. They have huge implications for preventing bullying and treating victims. True anti-bullying groups would have leapt on this etiology long ago.

Authorities are worse than silent

They have launched extremist crusades to ban teens from social media, one place where abused teens find help and companionship.

Imagine the multiple tragedies of being bullied at home by the parents and adults you’re supposed to be able to trust… THEN also being bullied at school or online… THEN having your terrible home situation ignored and denied by authorities who are supposed to protect you… and THEN having political and professional leaders blame your own social media use for your depression and victimization and champion measures to take away your online rights.

You’d expect true grownups to be able to confront uncomfortable, unpopular, distressing realities millions of young face. Yet, established interests’ cruelty has become so extreme that major interests now cheer when courts award big settlements to parents who severely abuse their kids (even ones who drive their teens to suicide) and celebrate officials who ignore real-life abusers – as long as it’s in service to blaming social media. That obsession is all they care about.

Everything we’re told about “teenage suicide” and “bullying” is wrong (part 1)

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| May 2026

Let’s begin with “teenage suicide,” which I’ve written about before, with some new information on how derelict authorities are on this life-or-death issue.

The first lie: suicide rates among teens are skyrocketing along with social media use, every news article and every quotable “expert” trumpets.

That’s half true. Social media use has been growing. From 2018 to 2024, the proportion of high school seniors telling Monitoring the Future they spend 3 or more hours per day using social media sites rocketed from 35% to 58%, those using social media 5+ hours a day leaped from 19% to 29%, and those spending 7 or more hours a day on social media leaped from 10% to 15%.

If social media drives teen suicide (as the universal political and media mantra declares, no dissent permitted), we should have seen teens killing themselves in record legions by 2024.

Yet, during that same period, the rate of suicide among teens fell by 18%. A small increase occurred during the COVID pandemic (as for adults), but overall, the teen rate decreased.

This reality is the diametric opposite of the message by psychologist Jean Twenge, who exploits the “correlation proves causation” fallacy to become the most famous advocate for banning teenagers from using social media.

Twenge fixates on the 2007-2017 period, when MTF shows teens’ daily social media use rose from 54% to 83% and suicide rates among teens rose from 8.6 to 15.2 per 100,000 teens. (MTF’s question changed after 2017, rendering pre-2018 trends incomparable.) Therefore, social media use must be what caused more teens to commit suicide, Twenge and her colleagues like Jonathan Haidt and minions declare over and over to fawning media and political attention.

Putting aside all other factors (such as the explosions in parent-age drug/alcohol overdoses and deaths over that period), it is bizarre that no one asks Twenge what happened since 2017 – many years and major events ago.

What happened is that teen social media use continued to skyrocket, but teen suicide rates fell along with suicide ideation. That suggests either that social media was not the cause of changes in teen suicide rates, or if it was, that teens have now adapted admirably to avoid whatever the problem was before 2017.

Figure 1. Does social media use prevent suicide by teens?

Source: Centers for Disease Control, 2026. Note that I use the misleading graphing here common to nearly all news and advocacy presentations, which radically truncates the vertical axis to make trends look far more dramatic than they are.

Why are we even talking about social media?

The second officially unmentionable fact is that suicide and self-harm rates skyrocket the more teens are subjected by their parents and household adults to violent abuse, emotional abuse, household violence, drug/alcohol abuse, severe mental health problems, and jailing.

Table 1. Percentage of teens who self-harm and who attempt suicide by how much they’re subjected to parental/adult abuses and adverse behaviors

Source: CDC, 2023. For method, see ”Alarming New Analysis” substack.

To any sensible person, Table 1 looks really bad, but it’s also a no-brainer. No one fell out of their chair in shock at what it shows. Of course more abusive, troubled parents are going to have more self-harming, suicidal teens. Any idiot would guess that.

But, you see, authorities act like they don’t know that, even though their own surveys are dramatic. Violent, abusive, severely troubled homes couldn’t possibly be why some teenagers feel depressed, and a fraction of those teens harm themselves and attempt suicide to get attention, declares the universal silence and even denial by authorities and quoted experts.

You won’t find parent/grownup abuses cited in any major media, official report, or political forum, except very occasionally buried in a list of factors causing teens’ poor mental health.

But wow will you find a lot of tearful emotings about the tragedy of teen suicide… yet, mysteriously, that grief is reserved only for very rare cases in which authorities, politicians, and media reporters believe they can blame social media messages and cyberbullying.

That grotesque attitude reached an abysmal low when advocates wildly celebrated a Los Angeles civil trial verdict awarding $6 million to a parent whose years of violent, shaming, and abandoning abuses drove one of her daughters to suicide, all because viewing social media images could be blamed for her second daughter’s unhappiness.

Note that none of the advocates or news reports on the verdict even mentioned the first daughter’s suicide at all, nor the parental abuses. That’s not the “teen suicide tragedy” authorities want to discuss.

Rather, it is because teen suicide – and adult suicide, which occurs at much higher rates – are tragedies that authorities’ playing with the issue to popularize themselves, profit, and feel good evidences an adult society refusing to meet its most basic obligations to the young.

“Protect children” crusaders’ zeal to punish teenagers and social media now openly endangers young people

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| April 2026

The ban-teens-from-social-media movement has degenerated into rewarding violent real-life child abusers and officials who ignore predators.

The awkward Jungianism “enantiodromia” describes the bizarre progression of ideological movements into their polar opposites just as their success is peaking.

Until recently, my argument that the global movement to “protect children” by banning teenagers under age 16 (soon to be 18, then 21) from social media spearheaded by psychologists Jonathan Haidt, Jean Twenge, and allies actually endangers young people by distracting policy makers from real dangers while denying youths access to vital online connections, was largely over what scientific information shows.

For example, definitive Centers for Disease Control surveys and analyses along with decades of research amply document that in the real world, parents’ and adults’ abuses and troubled behaviors are the biggest cause by far of teens’ poor mental health and risks. Nothing else, social media use included, even comes close.

Figure 1 illustrates these shocking points for a population advocates claim is particularly vulnerable: girls under age 16.

Figure 1. Parents’ violent and emotional abuses and parents’ drug/alcohol problems are strongly linked to much higher rates of suicide and self-harm by girls. However, girls’ social media use is linked to lower rates of self-harm but is not linked to suicide attempt rates.

Source: CDC, 2023.

Of course authorities and interests analyzing the widely-cited CDC survey saw these unexpected life-and-death results just like I did – ones that call for reevaluation of the entire teenage “mental health crisis.”

Instead, all ignored them. Authorities from the far-Right Heritage Foundation to Haidt and colleagues to progressive Democrats tacitly agreed to pretend domestic abuse, violence, and dysfunction victimizing children and teens don’t exist in order to launch a crusade blaming teens’ use of social media.

Their escapism was bad enough. But I never expected this crusade would cross the line into directly endangering young people.

Now it has

The ban-teens crusade has become so obsessed with blaming social media “algorithms” and “messages” on computer and smartphone screens that they now openly celebrate recent court verdicts awarding millions of dollars to officials who ignore real-life predators and to grownups who physically and psychologically abuse real-life children and teens.

The New Mexico state court case: something has gone horribly wrong

The New Mexico Attorney General’s 225-page civil case against media giant Meta deployed fake profiles of purported “13-year-olds” on social media sites that drew “inappropriate” solicitations from “numerous” pedophiles.

So, did New Mexico’s top law enforcement officer open investigations to identify these evident pedophiles to refer them for prosecution in their jurisdictions?

He did not. He did nothing about real predators his own filing branded a major menace to children.

Instead, his lawsuit blamed the online platform for “addicting” children to virtual media screens where they might be contacted by pedophiles. He cited no cases of real child victims.

That a jury, even one constrained by narrow civil procedures, would award anything, let alone $375 million, to this political grandstander who displayed gross dereliction of duty to enforce laws to protect children is alarming.

Social media giants’ anti-social conduct indeed deserves huge fines, penalties, and strict measures to regulate and break them up – not slopping millions to child-endangering opportunists like New Mexico’s Attorney General.

The Los Angeles Superior Court verdict was even worse

Its jury awarded $6 million in “damages” to a brutal body-shaming parent who for years violently and psychologically tortured her daughters (one committed suicide; the other suffered extreme mental and physical distresses), then abandoned her surviving daughter.

Why? Because the surviving daughter, now allied with mom for the court case, testified that “addictive” online sites made her feel severely bad about herself. She and her mother argued the media platform owed them damages.

I’m not disputing that seeing Victoria’s Secret’s sleek pictures, instagrammers and snapchatters having fun, and slut-fat-ugly-kill-yourself posts and messages can be cruelly depressing, especially for vulnerable personalities. Just like fashion magazines, TV, movies, hallways, workplaces, harsh religions, sports cultures, corporate ads, and (especially) families, all of whom have cruelly body-shamed and bullied vulnerable individuals for decades – and still do, the Los Angeles trial proved.

But the utter insanity of a jury awarding millions of dollars to what court records revealed as an abusive, violent parent who made her daughters’ lives hell for years, then suddenly reconciled when the prospect of big bucks appeared, evidences deep societal sickness.

The still worse aftermath

Far from angrily denouncing these court travesties for grossly endangering children, ban-teens-from-social-media crusaders, political leaders, and media commentators celebrated the verdicts as “victories” for “protecting children.” Many lauded this mother whose abuses had a body count as a hero for “taking on Big Tech.”

By the plaintiffs’, jury’s, and celebrators’ logic, doesn’t the daughters’ father deserve a big court award as well? After all, his violence, abuse, and abandonment heavily contributed to his daughters’ years of distress now used to win court victories. Surely, he’s a hero, too.

Let us consider alternatives

Am I wrong that a child or teenager whose physical bodies are BEING beaten, molested, raped, berated, tortured, and abandoned in REAL LIFE suffers far more than a child or teen who SEES a bad word, pornographic picture, mean text, and/or distressing image on a detached computer or smartphone SCREEN?

I’ve asked this question a hundred times in various forums and have never received an answer, let alone a coherent one. I have come to suspect that advocates like Haidt really do see virtual bad words and images on a screen as worse than physical violence and abuse, but I would love to be proven wrong on that.

One possible explanation is stupidity and incompetence. I don’t buy that. The consensus that children/teenagers being virtually distressed by social media is apocalyptically damaging alongside the silence on vastly more children/teenagers being personally and physically abused in real life is too absolute, too universal across a broad spectrum of interests to just be a mob of pitchfork-waving dumbasses.

So, if not mass ignorance, we are left with a more troubling alternative: today’s self-anointed “protect children!” advocates who are fanatically triggered by rare, largely hypothetical online perils simply do not care about real abuses, violence, and rapes inflicted on children and youth by parents and favored institutions.

Sure, like the parent-victimized Los Angeles daughters in the civil trial, everyone is horrified by the 8 Louisiana children ages 3 to 11 brutally shot to death by a 31-year-old father as this is written (far more dead kids in one city in one day than all the dozens of civil lawsuits allege die from anything attributable to social media anywhere, ever) — incredibly sad tragedies.

But in practical fact, real abuses killing and victimizing real kids, when inflicted by popular institutions like families/parents, schools, churches, Scouting, sports, law enforcement, etc., however traumatic for localized sufferers, are of no sustained importance to broader interest groups and leaders. Nothing much will be done about them beyond lamenting.

Instead, these larger interests prioritize their own concerns and fears. “Porn” and “predators” are codewords for the pretense that the crusade is about “protecting children.” It is not.

It is about inflaming culture-war panics exploiting fears of new technology as justifications to grab more profitable information about users, and to shield elites from potentially dissident young people’s independent, uncontrolled access to global networks.

What Big Tech and allied powers care about is gaining more control over markets and individuals while quashing young people’s independent access to information and organizational networks not approved of by powerful entities – sources from which the young can learn challenging information on vital issues like climate change, the Middle East, social justice, and disturbing controversies.

Top-level researchers have learned go-along-to-get-along. Their studies, media reporters’ fawning articles, commentators’ substacks, op-eds, media interviews, and legislative testimony cascading every day clarion apocalyptic social media dangers while simply leaving out parental abuses, family troubles, and real-life concerns.

Philosophical interlude

These bizarrities radically extend philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s famed 1964 theory that “the form of the medium through which a message is conveyed is more important than the content of the message itself… the medium has a greater impact on human perception and behavior than the specific information it carries.”

McLuhan was considered out-there in the Sixties. Now, he seems mild. Today’s ban-teens-from-social-media crusaders have blown past his theory to announce that the medium is all that matters. Real events, valid information, truthful content (where these even exist any more)… all are irrelevant.

What unites moralistic and elite interests

Moralists like Haidt and elites like Big Tech and political acolytes effectively prioritize the well-being of parents/grownups and their institutions over those of the young. Both view children and teens as mere commodities whose welfare and rights can be manipulated and sacrificed. Both dismiss family and institutional abuses that really harm children. Both view the “crisis” as children/teens independently accessing social media-platformed information and contacts disapproved of by grownups, corporations, and authoritarian governments.

Moralists’ and elites’ unified strategy is to ban children/teens from social media. Shrugging off real-life violence, rape, and abuses against children and teenagers – concerns with the potential to derail their culture-war panic – has now emerged as an openly acceptable part of this repressive strategy. Why so many progressive leaders are going along with this elite power-grab remains a mystery.

Our top health agency’s surveys found what really makes teenagers depressed. Authorities’ deafening silence said: no one cares

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| April 2026

A brief history of how the Centers for Disease Control got the memo: No more honest science; ignore real troubles in teens’ lives; just join the stampede to blame “social media.”

What a difference a few years makes in the lunatic crusade against teenagers and social media. The evolution of today’s panic is disgraceful. Let me recount it.

Back in the halcyon long-ago yore of 2021, the CDC’s biannual Youth Risk Behavior Survey asked its thousands of 13-18-year-old subjects for the first time about parents’ emotional and violent abuses.

Gee, could getting beaten, kicked, degraded, etc., by grownups in their homes (the CDC was too polite to add shot, stabbed, and raped) have anything to do with the teenage “mental health crisis” experts were proclaiming? Ya think?

The results, hardly surprising, were staggering. Teens reported powerful connections between parental abuses and teenagers’ poor mental health, suicide attempts, self-harm, and serious risks that dwarfed all other factors combined.

The more honest CDC led off its 2021 survey press release (now archived and harder to find) with the following:

New CDC analyses, published today, shine additional light on the mental health of U.S. high school students… including a disproportionate level of threats that some students experienced…

· More than half (55%) reported they experienced emotional abuse by a parent or other adult in the home, including swearing at, insulting, or putting down the student.

· 11% experienced physical abuse by a parent or other adult in the home, including hitting, beating, kicking, or physically hurting the student.

…Lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth and female youth reported greater levels of poor mental health; emotional abuse by a parent or caregiver; and having attempted suicide than their counterparts.

It’s hard to believe, but just 5 years ago, our nation’s leading health agency made no mention of social media, even though its survey asked about screen use.

Bad CDC. Since then, authorities’ silence on these issues make it clear the CDC’s statement, however scientific, was out of step. Science was not what authorities and politicians wanted. Spare us about why teenagers are really depressed.

I wasn’t invited to high level meetings. But authorities had to be envying the rocketing popularity of psychologists like Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, whose books, op-eds, and avalanche of worshipful press splashes simply blamed social media and smartphones for “rewiring” and “destroying” young people while never mentioning the rough stuff teens actually endure in their homes.

Some were not yet on message. Media and political interests back then didn’t completely ignore the CDC’s emphasis on parental abuses. One-time squibs in the New York Times, NBC News and a few outlets briefly lamented that teens’ high rates of being abused might be a problem. You’ll never see even whispers in today’s lockstep panic.

2023: Authorities’ silence should have been their first clue

I don’t know whether admirably brave scientists inside the CDC had insisted on bringing the issue of parental abuses and troubles to the forefront of the teen mental health debate where it belonged, or if the CDC genuinely failed to perceive how strongly health, politicians, and media would prefer silence on unpopular complications.

In any case, the CDC expanded questions on its 2023 survey to include parents’ abuses and “adverse” behaviors like parents’ drug/alcohol abuse, severe mental troubles, jailing, and household violence. Those questions were asked of older teens and younger ones alike.

These additional questions yielded even more staggering results. In 2023, 62% of teens (70% of girls, 54% of boys) reported histories of violent/emotional abuses by parents and household adults, up from 55% (62% of girls, 47% of boys) in 2021.

Again, as in 2021, abused teens from troubled families reported frequently poor mental health, suicide attempts, self-harm, and other risks many times more than non-abused teens. For example, having a parent with severe mental health problems boosted the odds of poor mental health among teens by 2.3 times (2.4 times for ages under 16), self-harm by 3.2 times (3.3 times for under-16s), and suicide attempts by 4.1 times (5.1 times).

The CDC’s definitive findings were incredibly useful in designing policy to address family health — but incredibly threatening to authorities’ political needs.

2024: The CDC gets the memo

Finally catching the drift, the CDC led off its 2024 press publicity on its survey results with its own advance report narrowly fixated on popular issues: “Frequent Social Media Use and Experiences with Bullying Victimization, Persistent Feelings of Sadness or Hopelessness, and Suicide Risk Among High School Students.”

It was the reverse of 2021. No mention of parental abuses, anywhere. Teen problems were all just social media and bullying peers.

That report was utter crap. Its own Table 4 (to anyone who scrutinized it) showed “frequent social media use” and school and cyber bullying – even when singled out as the ONLY things in teenagers’ lives – presented only trivial threats to teens’ mental health and no effect at all on teens’ suicide risk.

No matter. The CDC’s initial report received loving media and political forum coverage, as did Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s equally narrow, hugely-quoted “Social Media and Youth Mental Health.”

A sliver of scientific honor did survive. Belatedly, in October 2024, the CDC released the full 2023 survey data set for independent analysis along with a more analytical, disturbing report: “Adverse Childhood Experiences and Health Conditions and Risk Behaviors Among High School Students.”

Unlike its worthless initial media-friendly report, the CDC’s second report (buried in its inhouse journal) did find big things – ones I repeatedly cite because no one else will:

· Of the known factors driving teenagers’ problems, parental abuses/adversities were associated with two-thirds of teens’ poor mental health, 84% of teens’ opiate abuse, and 89% of teens’ suicide attempts.

True to its duty as the nation’s top health agency, the CDC had identified, albeit obscurely, the big reason why 30% of teens reported frequent unhappiness and some abused drugs and/or attempted suicide. Murthy also issued a lesser-noticed follow-up report on “parents under pressure” that did mention abuse affecting children and teens… ONCE, in a list, in 35 pages.

2025: Message received

The CDC’s new 2025 Youth Risk Behavior Survey eliminated all of the 2023 survey’s questions on parents’ and household adults’ drug/alcohol abuse, mental illness, jailing, and household violence. It did retain 2 questions on parents’ emotional and violent abuses, confined to its National High School survey and only older teens.

That is, at a time of national furor over the teenage “mental health crisis,” the CDC eliminated most questions on parent-inflicted troubles its own analysis powerfully associated with teens’ poor mental health — and eliminated all such questions for younger teens.

All authorities, politicians, and commentators want to hear about is social media social media social media. Even here, an irony: Teens in abusive, troubled families average 2 more hours a day using social media than teens in healthy families. Surely, big powers who are so frantic to reduce teens’ social media use might mention that reducing parental abuses and family troubles is one key (haha, this grim essay needed some levity).

My dismal prophecy, happy if proven wrong

Later this summer, I predict, the CDC will release its 2025 Youth Behavior Risk Survey (YRBS) results. The CDC’s press summary, as in 2023, will sensationally blame social media and peer bullying for teens’ mental health problems, especially if these problems increase. Or, if they decrease, the CDC will credit smartphone and state social media bans. No mention will be made of parental abuse findings.

Officials and media will uncritically cheer.

A few months later, in the fall, the CDC will post the raw 2025 survey data set. It will show that, as in 2021 and 2023, parents’ emotional and violent abuses are by far the largest contributors to teens’ poor mental health, and that no other factors amount to doodley-squat.

No one important will care.

That’s because this panic is not about teenagers, not about teens’ mental health, not about the well-being of children. It is about increasingly troubled and irresponsible older generations feeling good about ourselves, abetted by greedy political and media powers taking advantage of our irresponsibility to grab even more power.

The happy-sounding “World Happiness Report” is a reactionary anti-youth shill for authoritarian governments and Big Tech

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| April 2026

Its junk science and repressive recommendations hype social media’s “harm” to adolescents in order to obscure young people’s real issues that threaten corporate/government power.

Just reading the benignly titled World Happiness Report 2026 reveals dozens of fatal flaws, omissions, and biases destroying its credibility so thoroughly that outside refutation seems overkill. But let’s begin.

The World Happiness Report doesn’t even pretend objectivity.

Its executive summary begins: “In North America and Western Europe, young people are much less happy than 15 years ago. Over the same period, social media use has greatly increased.”

So did global authoritarianism, adult opiate abuse, slaughters of children, pandemic shutdowns, polar bears not finding ice, a myriad of causes for worry and unhappiness the report’s hundreds of pages ignore.

Instead, the self-flattering “world’s foremost publication on global wellbeing” declares its narrow fixation upfront: “This report does not attempt a comprehensive synthesis of the academic literature… instead, we started by asking two leading critics of social media, Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch, to lay out their case.”

Apparently fearing insufficient bias, the WHR then adds two more blame-social-media luminaries, Jean Twenge and Cass Sunstein, as lead chapter authors. But somehow, they don’t have room to include any skeptical scholars such as Candace Odgers or Christopher Ferguson refuting the blame-social-media crusade.

The WHR authors then announce their correlation-equals-causation (actually, tiny-correlation-ballooned-into-wildly-exaggerated-causation) method: “We conclude that heavy users of social media are at risk, especially in English-speaking countries and Western Europe… Social media is harming adolescents at a scale large enough to cause changes at the population level.”

What the WHR leaves out is huge

For those impressed by their multi-national samples and slick presentation, consider first what authors omitted from their discussion of “adolescent mental health.”

Nowhere in the massive report can the terms (or equivalents) “child abuse,” “parents’ addiction,” “parents’ violence,” “adult abuses,” “parents’ mental health,” “parents’ criminality,” “family dysfunction,” etc., be found.

The basic variables the WHR excludes are beyond crucial. The US Centers for Disease Control’s analyses of its comprehensive surveys associate parental abuses, violence, addiction, and mental health problems with two-thirds of teens’ poor mental health, 84% of teens’ drug abuse, and 89% of teens’ suicide attempts. Multi-factorial studies that include such factors find they dominate teen problems while social media use is trivial.

The WHR is like a “scholarly study” of Hiroshima’s 1945 mortality that leaves out the atomic bombing.

Omitting vital factors invalidates the WHR on its face

Instead, WHR authors fixate on trivial correlates their own scoring shows explain close to nothing.

“Internet use is associated with several drivers of wellbeing, including trust, perceived social activity, and social connection,” WHR authors begin their truncated analysis. “…Younger generations have faced large declines in interpersonal trust, perceived social activity, system trust, and feelings of safety, leading to sizable predicted declines in wellbeing. Older generations, by contrast, show greater resilience. Improvements in attachment to country and, in some regions, increases in feelings of safety help offset declines in trust, and the stronger causal weight these channels carry for older adults moderates the overall impact.”

The definition of their “problematic social media use” criterion contains elements that overlap with definitions of poor outcomes. Even with this auto-correlation flaw, their analysis’s regression coefficients average 0.15, statistically significant due to the enormous, 300,000-plus sample but barely above random noise in terms of effect size.

Nor do WHR authors consider that maybe the problem is not Facebook or Instagram. Just maybe, valid, real-life reasons – economic attrition, family and social concerns, global mayhem, environmental awareness, etc. – explain why system-subsidized older generations appear “resilient” (authors leave out massive multinational adult opiate epidemics) while “the young experience large changes in key social variables.”

That’s the report’s schtick. Whatever the issue, WHR authors, excluding alternative explanations and shrugging off minuscule effect sizes, insist the problem always must be social media: “Generational differences are widely visible in terms of the happiness gains or losses achieved from heavier use of the internet.”

WHR “findings” are speculative and predictable

Its authors write: “Across nearly all indicators, we observe a substantial deterioration among younger Europeans, particularly among Gen Z in Western Europe. Trust in people and in institutions declined sharply, social meeting frequency fell, and perceptions of one’s own social activity declined even more dramatically.”

Why? Well, authors “suggest” (without analysis): “heightened pressures of online comparison.”

Meanwhile, “older adults increasingly benefit from stable trust levels, improved feelings of safety, stronger attachments to country.”

Why? Authors speculate (without analysis): “Perhaps more purposeful digital use.”

“Younger adults, by contrast, face eroding social capital, shrinking offline social networks, and intensified comparison pressures.”

Why? Authors speculate (without analysis): “Digital environments” and “internet use interacts with these shifts, amplifying vulnerabilities among younger cohorts while offering modest support to older ones.”

Authors then conclude (from statistically trivial findings and without multifactor analysis): “Internet use is most harmful for Gen Z, moderately harmful for Millennials, close to zero for Gen X, and slightly beneficial for Baby Boomers.” Adolescents’ problems “potentially” are “the result of increased social media use among young people, with the effect often found to be more pronounced among girls.”

Could younger generations be having problems because older generations are getting richer as younger ones do worse, with girls bearing the highest poverty rates? Older generations are hoarding resources while younger ones anticipate the brunt of severe climate change, an issue to which girls are uniquely attuned? Older generations are starting wars they send young people to fight? Older generations’ rising drug abuse is endangering young people, especially girls, in families and communities?

These are just a few examples of WHR’s self-flattering recitation. Indulging “perhaps,” “suggesting,” speculating, they return again and again to obsession with social media to the exclusion of vastly more crucial issues and trends.

WHR authors wildly contradict themselves

“Across most regions, adolescents with high levels of problematic (social media) use report higher psychological complaints and lower life evaluation in 2022 than in 2018,” WHR authors declare, deploying “feeling low, irritability, nervousness, and sleeping difficulties” as their measures to evaluate adolescents’ health.

Again, what could possibly be causing that? Abruptly, we get a different answer: “This intensification coincides with the COVID-19 pandemic,” WHR authors admit in a far-down paragraph not repeated in executive or media summaries. Note this bizarrely contradictory paragraph:

“Globally, adolescents aged 15-24 still report higher life satisfaction than adults aged 25 or above…”

[What? doesn’t the entire report blare the young are more miserable?]

“…but the gap is narrowing in Western Europe and recently reversed in North America and Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) due to negative trends for young people. In middle-to-late adolescence (age 15-24), there was a positive 2006-2019 global trend in life satisfaction…”

[What? Isn’t that when so-damaging social media and smartphone use exploded?]

“…which ended with the pandemic, in line with adult trends.”

What? During the eruption in teenagers’ social media use during the 2000s and 2010s, their life satisfaction was high, improving, and paralleled adults’ lower-satisfaction trends… only to decline during the COVID-19 pandemic, along with adult trends.

No matter. WHR authors’ ultimate culprit must always be social media: “One plausible explanation is that the COVID-19 pandemic, which dramatically increased adolescents’ reliance on digital technologies through remote schooling, reduced face-to-face interaction, and expanded online leisure time. These changes may have amplified the psychological and emotional costs of PSMU for adolescents overall.”

In another contradiction, authors go on to admit, ‘way down: “Our study cannot account for bidirectionality, namely that the direction of causality between PSMU (problematic social media use) and wellbeing cannot be disentangled.”

What? Doesn’t the entire report and its PR blame social media for adolescent troubles?

I repeat: the entire WHR is junk. Everyone who considers themselves a scholar owes it to basic academic integrity to distance themselves.

A comic interlude before we turn sinister

WHR authors declare: “Research has highlighted the importance of consulting children directly… Evidence from the health literature further supports children as reliable and accurate reporters of their health and well-being, emphasizing the importance of their self-reported perceptions in understanding their experiences.”

Cue laugh track. The authors (who, like Haidt, must be lobbying for invitations to Davos) demonstrate no interest in what teenagers actually say except when it’s what they want to hear. Here’s yet another pivotal example:

“Compared to light users, a larger percentage of the heaviest users (7+ hours a day) had both the highest level of life satisfaction (10) and the lowest levels (0–4). The same was true for non-users of social media, with higher levels of both very high and low life satisfaction. Thus, there is more variation in life satisfaction among non-users and heavy users of social media compared to light or moderate users. Among girls in most regions, non-users of social media were the most likely to report complete satisfaction with their lives, although in some regions, heavy users were also more likely to report complete satisfaction than moderate users.”

Interesting! Now: why would teenagers who use social media the MOST and those who use social media the LEAST report both the HIGHEST and LOWEST levels of satisfaction compared to teens in the middle reporting moderate social media use?

You’d think mature, brain-developed, critically-thinking scholarly brains would leap at engaging such an intriguing question. Wrong again. The WHR has no use for critical thinking.

That makes me feel like the back-of-the-class kid wildly waving my hand: “I know I know! Call on ME!”

Use the definitive 2021 and 2023 surveys by the CDC (the US’s leading health agency) to divide teens into (a) those who have been abused by violent, troubled parents, versus (b) those raised in non-abusive families. Bingo!

Abusive, screwed-up families drive both more teenage depression/problems and more social media use. The teens in between who use social media moderately, 1-4 hours a day, suffer the fewest abuses and have the fewest problems.

That is why – my turn to speculate – major interests, represented by WHR authors, so strenuously avoid parent and family dysfunction issues. The mammoth, definitive CDC surveys and analyses appear nowhere in the WHR source list, which lists only sanitized, trivial-effect references.

The WHR serves authoritarian and corporate repression

WHR authors find that “low-SES [low socioeconomic status = poor] adolescents bear the greatest costs of compulsive or addictive digital behaviours, while their more advantaged peers are relatively more protected from these harms.”

Naturally, WHR authors fail to incorporate these same SES variables when comparing the happiness indexes of generally poorer adolescent generations to those of generally richer older generations. The authors abjectly obey authorities’ prohibition on teen-adult economic comparisons. Instead, WHR authors ritualistically attribute young-age “unhappiness” — yes, again — to “problematic social media use” and older adults’ “resilience” to “more purposeful digital use.”

Culminating a report whose analyses are drastically self-limited in service to authority are authority-serving policy recommendations.

WHR authors propose to do exactly nothing to ameliorate poverty, raise living standards, confront educational and economic oppression of women, break up global corporations and Big Tech monopolies, and/or forcefully address climate change, war, the adult opiate epidemic, and other global realities critically affecting young people.

Instead, WHR authors recommend mainly psychological interventions: “From a policy perspective, these findings suggest that interventions aimed at improving wellbeing cannot focus solely on individual screen time. Rather, they must address the broader social ecosystem: the decline in trust, the weakening of community bonds, and the highly comparative nature of online environments, especially for young people. Strengthening civic institutions, fostering offline community engagement, and improving digital literacy may help reverse some of these trends. At the same time, thoughtful regulation of social media environments (particularly those that algorithmically amplify comparison and visibility) could play a role in mitigating harmful effects.”

They continue: “Interventions should combine family-level support, school-based digital literacy, and accessible mental health services, while remaining sensitive to cultural and contextual differences in how young people experience and evaluate their lives online. Creating more equitable digital environments will require regulating platforms, as well as strengthening the social resources that help adolescents navigate a highly digitalised and unequal world.”

Basically, WHR authors recommend:

Just restrict teenagers’ social media use while “educating” and psychologically counseling them to accept and “navigate” poverty and inequality. “Regulate” platforms to ban young people from the online information, communication, and expression opportunities they use to challenge the powerful. “Teach” Gen Z to accept inequality and the elite order while strengthening institutions that enforce conformity.

It’s no coincidence the World Happiness Report 2026 echoes exactly the “online safety” repressions pushed by Haidt, Rausch, Twenge, the far-Right Heritage Foundation, Big Tech (X, Meta, Google, Apple, Anthropic, etc.), corporate CEOs, and rising government authoritarians in the USA, UK, Australia, and globally. Their “protect children!” measures feature “age verification” identity schemes that vastly expand the power of Big Tech and Big Government to collect more information to surveil users (especially young users), abolish online privacy, censor information they don’t like, and crush smaller platform competitors.

The WHR is yet another tragedy of today’s academic and institutional capitulation to worldwide authoritarianism. And that is exactly why it will enjoy widespread official acclaim.

Los Angeles mental health authorities and media are hell-bent to convince teenagers they’re terrifyingly suicidal. Why?

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| April 2026

L.A.’s teens’ suicide rates are 60% below the national average and have plunged 40% since 1990 and 75% since 1970. Yet, LA experts and media frantically strive to persuade teens they’re suicidal.

Suicide, except to end irreversible pain and debilitation, is a tragedy. The best science should be applied to prevent it.

Yet, authorities and media reporters distort suicide by teenagers as a mere commodity manipulable to whatever serves their self-aggrandizement, alarmism, and profit.

Back in 1997, before the Los Angeles Times became the closed-up billionaire-owned mess it is today, I convinced a reporter to write an article on the city’s massive decline in suicide, including among teenagers. Figure 1 illustrates the trend.

Source for figures: Centers for Disease Control, Compressed mortality file, 1968-1998; Multiple cause of death, 1999-2024. Includes certified suicides and suicide-suspected undetermined deaths. Rates for teens are all suicides for under age 20 divided by population age 15-19. Trendlines (dotted) are logarithmic (y = a * ln(x) + b).

I had thought such a massive, encouraging decline would break the press’s rigid negativism on covering teenagers. Was I dumb.

The resulting front-page article began by claiming 2 pre-teen children killing themselves had never occurred before in history. (Tragedies? Yes. New? No. I sent them the oldest vital stats record available showing 3 suicides among L.A. children 9 and younger in 1908. No correction, of course.)

Then followed paragraphs and paragraphs of scary sensationalism about how parents and professionals should panic that bleak music, violent games, television, and baffling “teenage” rashness was driving ever-younger 1990s teens to kill themselves.

Oh, by the way, the final paragraphs murmured, L.A. teen suicide rates HAD FALLEN sharply in recent decades. In short, the article you just read was a crock.

I was furious at the time but, in retrospect, should have been grateful. At least the 1997 article mentioned, albeit at its ass end, that teen suicide was declining. The Times back then (but not now) published op-eds like mine challenging such bad reporting.

My naïve conceit was that genuinely concerned, well-motivated authorities would be eager to study why teen suicide fell so much to… you know… learn what might prevent more. L.A.’s pioneering Suicide Prevention Center founded by concerned professionals had organized a conference at which experts would confab on how to build on these highly encouraging youthful trends. They had to cancel it when only four people registered.

Things got worse

In 2026, the Los Angeles Times spiced its unhinged prose on the “social media addiction” trial (an article Taylor Lorenz dismembered) with a link to another recent piece headlined, “As teen suicide surges…”

The headline led an article stuffed with standard-issue garbage: “In California, teen suicide has been rising faster than in most states”; “the age at which children kill themselves has been falling”; “the same strong social connections long considered protective for girls are now putting them at risk”; “the rate among Black and Asian youths is now higher than among white ones”; on “social media… graphic details and salacious speculation are algorithmically funneled to children”; “school policies may be making things worse”; more “pediatric psychiatrists” are needed; the usual.

Rising? Check. Younger? Check. Girls? Check. Minorities? Check. Pop culture? Check. Schools? Check. More shrinks? Check. The article’s boilerplate nonsense appears in EVERY article about teen suicide going back decades.

All junk

Teen suicide has not been “rising in California.” It is not rising “faster than in other states.”

CDC suicide numbers show that L.A., a giant county with 1.1 million teenagers, now averages around 40 suicides among ages under 20 per year, including 7 among teens under age 15 and 14 among girls. Small numbers like these fluctuate, allowing any unscrupulous player to pick any years to compare to declare whatever they want.

The general trends: rates plummeted from the 1970s to around 2000, went up and down in the 2000s, rose in the 2010s, then fell in the 2020s for both teens and adults (see Figures 1, 2). Normally, analysts would look for trends that affect all ages, such as the 2008 economic crash, 2010s opiate epidemic, 2020-22 COVID-19 pandemic, and massive increase in student debt. But that assumes interest in real causes.

Teen girls’ suicides remain rare, even in a huge metropolis

Back in the early 1970s, around 70 L.A. boys and 50 girls committed suicide every year; in the 2020s’, about 25 boys and 14 girls per year; in between, a general decline with small numbers bouncing around. The larger trends are shown in Figure 3.

The Times article hyped girls’ hospital emergency visits for “suicide attempts.” Yet, nowhere did it (or any other article I can find) ever mention that teen girls are far less likely than males of every age and females of every adult age to commit suicide. A teenager is 2 to 3 times more likely to suffer a parent committing suicide than the other way around, but when have you ever seen an article on that?

None of the experts quoted put two and two together to contemplate whether “suicide attempts” are troubled girls’ way to get attention for severe problems before they result in actual suicide. These are forbidden topics. Rigid press rules ban comparing teens favorably to adults or treating girls as anything other than brainless self-destructors.

Instead, the article declared that “new data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show 1 in 3 teen girls has seriously considered suicide, sparking fears among some suicidologists that the same strong social connections long considered protective for girls are now putting them at risk.”

Unconscionably, the article ignores that the same CDC’s survey showed the biggest reason by far that teen girls attempt suicide and harm themselves is not their “social connections.” It is their parents’ abuses and parents’ “severe” mental health, drug/alcohol, and violence problems in their homes.

Blacks’ and Asians’ suicide rates are not “higher than among Whites.”

That subterfuge results from redefining Hispanics as “white” while just omitting Hispanics – beyond ludicrous in 60%-Hispanic L.A.

In short, the Los Angeles Times story apes the same old lying-press dictates:

· Today’s youth are always bad and getting worse.

· Girls, minorities, and “younger and younger” teens are always driving crises.

· Teens may never be compared favorably to adults or to teens of the past.

· Teen problems must never be connected to adult abuses and troubles.

· Teens must never be portrayed as improving (exception: only if a big interest is positioned to grab credit).

· Instead of citing low teen suicide rates (i.e., that 2,499 out of 2,500 L.A. teenagers will not commit suicide at any time during their teen years), every reporter is required to ritually recite in tones of alarm: “suicide is a leading cause of death among teenagers.” (Of course it is; teens rarely die from cancer, heart disease, COVID, etc.)

Reporters – all reporters – follow these dictates so slavishly they might as well carry criminal sanctions.

The tragedy atop tragedy is that Americans stigmatize suicide as a moral failing. Mental health professionals, politicians, and reporters exploit this stigma by relentlessly presenting suicide as a problem of stigmatized populations like teenagers – especially girls, minorities, and younger ones – and by blaming easy cultural scapegoats rather than popular institutions.

Los Angeles has among the world’s most diverse, dynamic youth whose overwhelmingly encouraging trends deserve tough, fair analysis – not the same-old trashings founded in authorities’ and the press’s ancient press dogmas.