(2010-01-31) Rise In Childhood Anxiety And Depression

Peter Gray on the rise in childhood anxiety and depression (Teen Mental Health). Today five to eight times as many high school and college students meet the criteria for diagnosis of major depression and/or an anxiety disorder as was true half a century or more ago. This increased psychopathology is not the result of changed diagnostic criteria; it holds even when the measures and criteria are constant... In a research study published a few years ago, Twenge and her colleagues analyzed the results of many previous studies that had used Rotter's Scale with young people over the years from 1960 on through 2002.[3] They found that over this period average scores shifted dramatically--for children aged 9 to 14 as well as for college students--away from the Internal toward the External end of the scale. In fact, the shift was so great that the average young person in 2002 was more External than were 80% of young people in the 1960s. The rise in Externality on Rotter's scale over the 42-year period showed the same linear trend as did the rise in depression and anxiety... Twenge's own theory is that the generational increases in anxiety and depression are related to a shift from "IntrinsIc" to "ExtrinsIc" goals... My guess is that Twenge is at least partly correct on this, but I am going to suggest here a further cause, which I think is even more significant and basic. My hypothesis is that the generational increases in Externality, extrinsic goals, anxiety, and depression are all caused largely by the decline, over that same period, in opportunities for free play and the increased time and weight given to Schooling... By depriving children of opportunities to play on their own, away from direct adult supervision and control, we are depriving them of opportunities to learn how to take control of their own lives... Children today spend more hours per day, days per year, and years of their life in school than ever before. More weight is given to tests and grades than ever before. Outside of school children spend more time than ever before in settings where they are directed, protected, catered to, ranked, judged, and rewarded by adults. In all of these settings adults are in control, not children... School is also a place where children have little choice about with whom they can associate.