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PAGE 18 | MARCH 23 - 29, 2023
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What if Kids Are Sad and Stressed Because Their Parents Are? David French NEW YORK TIMES
There is a depressing familiarity now to the conversations I’m hearing among parents of teenagers. After the obligatory pleasantries, talk often turns to mental health. Someone’s daughter is struggling, battling body image issues. Someone’s son is sullen and lost in video games. The parental concerns of previous generations (sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll) have been replaced by a new triumvirate: anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation. As a parent of a teenager, I see this world every day. It’s the message I hear from my peers. So I’ve been following the discussion of rising teenage anxiety with intense interest — in particular, the role of social media, secularization and politics in immiserating our children. But there’s a factor that’s received insufficient attention in the debate over external factors in teenage suffering: What if the call is also coming from inside the house? What if parents are inadvertently contributing to their own kids’ pain?
Just as there is a depressing familiarity to parents’ conversations about their children, there is a similar familiarity to kids’ conversations about their parents. I spend much of my time traveling to college campuses, both secular and religious, and I hear a similar refrain all the time: “Something happened to my parents.” Sometimes they share stories about parents obsessed with their kids’ education. More often I hear about parents consumed by politics. And at the extreme end, I hear stories about the impact of conspiracy theories of all kinds. Just as parents are upset about their children’s anxiety and depression, children are anxious about their parents’ mental health. First, let’s map out the very bleak landscape. In 2021, nearly 60 percent of teenage girls reported feeling “persistent sadness,” Azeen Ghorayshi and Roni Caryn Rabin wrote in The New York Times. Overall, 44 percent of teenagers reported “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness,” according to The Washington Post, an increase from 26 percent in 2009. These are the familiar numbers — the scary uptick that has spawned soul-searching across the length and
breadth of this land. But let’s place them in a grim context. The same year that 44 percent of teenagers reported suffering from serious sadness, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 41.5 percent of adults reported “recent symptoms of an anxiety or depressive disorder,” an increase from an already high baseline of 36.4 percent just months before. Moreover, while suicide rates have gone up in the youngest cohort of Americans, they still materially lag behind suicide rates among their parents and grandparents. Deaths of despair have particularly afflicted white middle-aged men, and the numbers overall are simply staggering, especially since they started to increase sharply in 2000. Aside from self-reported statistics about depression and anxiety or the grim toll of drug abuse and suicide, there are other indicators that the adults simply aren’t all right. Partisan animosity, for example, simply keeps rising. Adult anger and pessimism are pervasive: A recent NBC News poll indicated that a record 58 percent of registered vot-
ers surveyed believed that America’s best days were behind it. And when we think about children and screens, let’s also consider the relationship between adults and their TVs and smartphones. Watch cable news, and you’ll see a discourse dominated by fear and anger. If you spend any time at all on political Twitter, you’ll quickly see a level of vicious, personal attacks that differ little from the most extreme personal bullying a person can experience in middle school or high school. This isn’t to say parents are the full story. I’m open to the smartphone thesis as providing the primary explanation for teenage unhappiness, but I’m not convinced that the kids will ever be alright as long as Mom and Dad suffer from their own profound problems. Helicopter parenting is potentially stifling on its own terms, but it’s got to be incalculably worse when the hovering parent is gripped by fear and anxiety. So what is to be done? I don’t mean to make parents feel even more anxious about their own anxiety, but to the extent our mental health is rooted in factors beyond our immediate control it might be worth
3 1/2 Myths About the Bank Bailouts Paul Krugman NEW YORK TIMES
Last weekend, U.S. policymakers went all-in on bailing out two medium-size banks: Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. And yes, they were bailouts. I wish the Biden administration weren’t trying to claim otherwise. Yes, stockholders were cleaned out. But legally, deposits are insured only up to $250,000; by choosing to make all depositors whole, the feds have done holders of big accounts a major favor. It’s true that losses, if any — it’s not clear whether either bank was insolvent as opposed to simply lacking the ready cash to handle a bank run — won’t be made up with higher conventional taxes; the money is coming from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which will recover funds, if necessary, by imposing higher fees on banks. But these fees will be passed on to the public, so taxpayers are de facto on the hook. But was it a bad decision? I’ve heard four basic kinds of criti-
cism. One is ridiculous. Two are dubious. But the last one has me a bit worried, although I think it’s probably wrong. Let’s start with the silly stuff. On the right side of the political spectrum, many have quickly rallied around the claim that SVB failed because it was excessively woke — which is only marginally less ludicrous than claiming that wokeness somehow causes train derailments. For what it’s worth, no, SVB didn’t stand out from other banks in its concern for diversity, the environment and so on. And banks have been going bust for centuries, since long before human resources departments began including boilerplate language about social responsibility in their mission statements. So the talk about wokeness tells us nothing about bank failures — but a lot about the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the modern American right. On to more serious criticism. There is a reasonable argument, one that I largely agree with, to the effect that the failure of SVB didn’t pose a systemic threat in the way that the failures of finan-
cial institutions beginning with Lehman Brothers did in 2008. So why rescue the depositors? Well, one answer is that, like it or not, Silicon Valley Bank had come to play a key role in what you might call the financial ecosystem of the technology sector. Notably, if depositors had lost access to their money, even temporarily, this would apparently have left many technology companies unable to meet their payrolls and pay their bills — which might have done lasting damage. True, killing the crypto industry would be a public service, but there’s also a lot of good stuff that might get hurt. In this sense, the bailout of SVB was something like the bailout of General Motors and Chrysler in 2009, which was also justified on the grounds that it would preserve a crucial piece of the economic ecosystem. And although the auto bailout was harshly criticized at the time, in retrospect, it looks like the right call, even though it ended up costing taxpayers billions. A third criticism is the claim that the feds have now established the principle that all depos-
its are effectively insured without imposing correspondingly tighter regulation on what banks do with those deposits — creating an incentive for irresponsible risktaking. But policymakers explicitly didn’t guarantee all deposits everywhere, and at least so far, we’re seeing an outflow of funds from smaller banks to more tightly regulated large banks. You may not like this; whatever else you may say about big financial institutions, they aren’t lovable. But on balance, we seem to be seeing the financial system move toward reduced, not increased, risk-taking. Which brings me to the criticism I take seriously, although I think it’s probably wrong: claims that the bank failures will undermine efforts to control inflation. It’s true that the bank blowups have caused investors to rethink the future course of Federal Reserve policy: A rate hike at the next Fed meeting, which seemed to be a done deal, now looks uncertain, with markets now pricing in the possibility of a rate cut and two-year interest rates (a good indicator of expected Fed policy over the near future)
asking a simple question: How much fear and anxiety should we import into our lives and homes? Forget teens, for the moment. Are we proving any more capable of handling the information age? It’s a question I honestly ask myself. I know that my experiences online drift into family life. I know that my anxiety can radiate outward to affect my kids. Our own addictions can devastate our families. I think often about the poignant words of a British pastor named Andrew Wilson: “One of the things that has struck me in my last two US visits has been how very painful the culture wars have become for many, many people. Online, you see combatants appearing to enjoy the fight. But on the ground, you see the hurt, confusion and fatigue.” Now it’s time for us to realize that our hurt can become our kids’ hurt, and if we want to heal our children, that process may well start by seeking the help we need to heal ourselves.
By David French © 2023 The New York Times
plunging. And some sensible people I talk to are now warning about financial dominance, in which the Fed puts a higher priority on protecting Wall Street than on stabilizing inflation. But given the way the banking system is reacting to the SVB affair, there are actually good reasons for the Fed to limit rate hikes, at least for a while. The Fed has been trying to cool off the economy; well, banks’ increased sensitivity to risk and the shift of deposits to more tightly regulated banks will probably cool the economy even if the Fed doesn’t raise rates. Some financial newsletters are even predicting a recession. And market expectations of inflation have, if anything, declined. The fallout from banking problems has made a murky economic situation even murkier, and it will be a while — maybe forever — before we know whether policymakers made the right call. But I’m hearing a lot of apocalyptic rhetoric right now, none of which seems justified by the available facts. By Paul Krugman © 2023 The New York Times