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Is the decline in teen mental health mostly about parenting?
https://ifstudies.org/blog/parenting-is-the-key-to-adolescent-mental-health
A mildly interesting competing hypothesis in itself compared to "smartphones and instagram wreck teen girls' psyches". But where it really gets interesting is here:
That paragraph actually understates the findings compared to the chart just above it, if you click on the link- just look at the stark discontinuity between 'very conservative' and everyone else. In fact the order by political ideology, on parenting quality, is 1) very conservative 2) blank spot 3) conservative 4) moderate 5) very liberal 6) liberal. And I would hazard a guess that this is majorly correlated with the other two, quality of parents' relationship, factors.
Now there's a couple of hypotheses as to why this is- it could be that parenting has just been getting shittier recently, that more conservative types are somewhat insulated from the trend by being, well, conservative, and that there's some population discontinuity between 'liberal' and 'very liberal'. This could be red tribe-blue tribe ethnogenesis manifesting itself in an interesting way- the red tribe adopted adaptive parenting measures, the blue tribe didn't(or alternatively, they both used to share good parenting practices but as part of ethnogenesis the blue tribe is moving away from them, which I guess is pretty close to the first explanation. It seems pretty clear that they didn't both used to have terrible parenting with the red tribe moving away because teen mental health is a relatively newer problem). It could be a regional difference. It could be that, given fertility differences by political ideology, conservative parents have more role models allowing them to more easily adopt good parenting practices. Personally, I lean towards number two, myself- I'm reminded of a section in Irreversible Damage, describing how nearly every girl with rapid onset gender dysphoria had a liberal mother, and some had country club republican/rino fathers but most of the fathers were liberal as well. The section goes on to claim that at least some parents of daughters with ROGD found success in sending their daughter to live with more conservative relatives, resulting in desistance. That's obviously not conclusive, or even particularly strong, evidence(and it's also confounded all to heck by duh), but it's a second datapoint on a trend.
In any case, it seems like the other interesting question raised by this report is, well:
My assumption is that inscrutable bureaucratic reasons are the main factor in that. But it's worth noting that this is probably the main explanatory factor behind why conservative teens have so much better mental health than liberal ones; after all, the competing "it's smartphones and instagram" hypothesis doesn't explain this. And even if you assume parenting doesn't matter much in the long run, it doesn't pass the smell test to say it doesn't affect kids while they're being parented.
Keep in mind that the 'data' here is a poll by a right-wing think tank. The data basically says that conservative parents said they have a good relationship with their children and that their children have good mental health on a single survey. /shrug.
Polling definitely isn't useless in general, but there are things it can tell you and things it can't. In particular, surveys of minors like this typically contact the parent, and have the parent ask their child questions and then fill in the survey for them; there's bound to be confounds between parenting style and what your child tells you when you ask them these types of questions, 'lying to my strict father that everything is fine so he doesn't get mad' is a trope for a reason.
I can't prove to you post hoc that I would have dismissed this survey if it had come out closer to my preferred beliefs, maybe I'm stupid enough that I wouldn't have, but I hope I would have and I do think I should have, in that hypothetical.
Note that it's not actually inconsistent to say that 'The big decrease in mental health compared to past generations is caused primarily by social media' and 'The biggest factor explaining the differences in mental health between different kids today is parenting style'.
If all kids in your survey are similarly saturated in social media, then social media will explain very little of the variance in your data because everyone gets the same exposure. That doesn't mean that social media isn't having a huge effect on everyone, just that this effect is uniform in your data set.
It's sort of like how intelligence is very very highly heritable if you only measure among affluent college kids who signed up for your study, and a lot less heritable if you take a global sample that includes people with childhood malnutrition and lack of education access. These are all measures of the amount of explained variance in your data set, you have to think about what types of variance that data set does and doesn't capture in order to interpret it correctly.
Does it not?
I guess I don't have evidence on this, but I just assumed that it's still the case that rural children spend less time on screens and more time outside than urban children, even if the gap is shrinking.
Also, if the political difference (presuming one exists) were caused by conservative parents limiting screen time and/or banning social media, that's still congruent with those things being the proximal causal factor.
Am I missing something here? The second paragraph says this:
The author is one Jonathan Rothwell, who is an employee of Gallup. This is easily verifiable by Google. So the polling wasn't done by the IFS but by Gallup. Is Gallup a right-wing think tank? Furthermore, he claims that they surveyed the adolescents as well, quite comprehensively given the large list of topics he describes them covering.
What is the basis on which you're claiming that the results are simply from conservative parents claiming their children have good mental health?
Gallup was hired by IFS to conduct the survey. This is how pretty much all survey firms work, they're not independent research organizations, they take contracts from clients who want the survey run, and those clients then own the data and decide if/how it is released and distributed.
The fact that Gallup is involved is definitely legitimizing, they have a reputation that won't let them intentionally collect biased data or allow clients who mention their name to lie about what the data say too much without speaking up. As compared to if IFS had done the calling internally or with a less famous vendor.
But at the end of the day, IFS still commissioned the poll and determined what it would ask about and how the questions would be formed, and is in control of how the findings are released.
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