Culture Post: Survey Shows Teens Need More Support Than They Get

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by HealthDay.

As millions of American teens continue to struggle with their mental health, a new survey reveals a sizable gap between how much support teens say they get and how much support their parents think they are getting.

In the report, published Tuesday by the National Center for Health Statistics, just over a quarter of teens said they always get the social and emotional support they need while parents were nearly three times more likely to think they did.

“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.

The findings were based on nationally representative surveys of nearly 1,200 children ages 12 to 17 and their parents, conducted in 2021 and 2022.

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 was true. 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.

Even more troubling, teens who didn’t feel they always or usually had the support they need were significantly more likely to report poor health problems 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.

Meanwhile, two-thirds of teens who did not feel supported said they got 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.

Source: HealthDay
https://www.healthday.com/health-news/child-health/parents-take-note-survey-shows-teens-need-more-support-than-they-get

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