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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.
I am going to call bullshit on this study. There are already a couple of posts in the thread pointing out that children of strict parents won't give honest answers to the survey which reflects on their parents, and that parents won't give honest answers to questions about their kids' mental health that reflects badly on their parenting. Given the existence of social desirability bias, I don't even trust parents reporting their own parenting practices - the reported high quality of "very conservative" parenting could be interpreted as "Very conservative parents are more likely to know the correct answers (as determined by a conservative think-tank) on a how-to-parent quiz."
But even if they have 100% honest answers (which they don't) I don't think this study does what it says on the tin:
Child response bias. They spoke to 6643 parents, of whom 2956 had one or more teenage children who could have been included. (Were the other 3687 parents included in the study? They don't say). Only 1580 children were included - that is a 52% response rate. Are the teens who responded representative of the whole sample?
Over-reliance on parental reports. The published results just don't use the child questionnaire data that much. It is used as part of a mostly parent-reported "index of mental health", and as one item out of six on a mostly parent-reported "index of relationship quality". The methodology section of the paper doesn't say how they combine households with child and parent questionnaires with households with only parent questionnaires to get a single set of results - this seems like the key step in the process to me, and it could mean that the published results are almost entirely parent-reported. "Parents who think they are good parents also think they have well-adjusted kids" doesn't seem like an interesting response to me, and could be Dunning-Kruger just as easily as actual parenting quality.
Chart-crime. The correlations between parenting practices and mental health, and the correlations between adverse experiences and relationship quality on mental health, are shown on different graphs with different scales, concealing the fact that the impact of relationship quality dwarfs the impact of parenting practices. The text points out that the impact of relationship quality is larger. This isn't that bad - I have put out worse charts myself, with the excuse that I was running for public office at the time.
Missing regression. They have the data to compare parenting practices to relationship quality, but they don't. Given that "does authoritative parenting improve child mental health by improving relationship quality or via some other mechanism" is an interesting question, I assume they ran the regression and didn't report the results because they didn't like them. The text even asks the question, saying that the large impact of relationship quality on mental health is evidence that parenting style works via relationship quality. But it isn't the evidence you are looking for - you need to show more of the correlation matrix.
Reverse causation and how. The aspects of "authoritative parenting" which correlate best with mental health are "My child completes priorities I set for them before they are allowed to play or relax" and "My child follows a regular routine", and "I find it difficult to discipline my child" (reversed). Those are measures of a parent's success at implementing authoritative parenting, not their commitment to doing it. And when you correlate that with parent-reported mental health, the direction of causation is obvious to anyone who has parented a difficult child. (I have a diagnosed ASD son - I speak from experience). IFS are putting out an "umbrellas cause rain" study.
Genetic confounding. They mention this possibility, but dismiss it. I am not going to try to work out whether the stuff they cite to say that this study isn't genetically confounded does in fact say that, but my prior is that everything is genetically confounded. Grading on a curve, at least they considered the possibility.
Talking around the 1 vs 2 parent question - WHY? This is the IFS we are talking about, 2 parents being better than 1 is a big part of their raison d'etre. But I can't find a clear discussion of it anywhere in the paper. They show breakdowns based on divorced/married/never-married status and high-low quality relationship with current partner (not co-parent!), but not the straightforward is the kid still living with both biological parents test. Do they have a dataset which shows that 2 parents are not, in fact, better than 1 and chose to hide it? (This is consistent with the small impact on child mental health of "Has a parent who used to live with you stopped living with you?")
Inconsistent data presentation. The way the correlations between parenting style and parent demographics, and relationship quality and parent demographics are presented is completely different to the way the correlations between child mental health and parenting style, and child mental health and relationship quality are presented, in a way which confuses the fact that they are effectively different cells in the same correlation matrix, and also makes it hard to compare effect sizes.
Missing regression. Why not compare adolescent mental health with parent demographics directly? You have the information. Haidt did it - he found conservative adolescents are healthier (particularly daughters). Again I unfortunately have to be specific.
I don't think this is unusually bad for a think-tank writing up some survey research - I do think they made more mistakes than usual because the underlying study is more complicated (there are four major groups of variables with unknown causal links between them - mental health, relationship quality, parenting practices, and parent demographics). But there is enough hinkiness that I can't trust the results, and I don't have a good response if I try and beat a tofu-eating attachment parent with the study and they say "correlation is not the same as causation". I do wonder why the main author (who is an economist at Gallup) didn't run the paper past a professional statistician - Gallup must have them on staff.
Haidt's work is much better at explaining why he thinks his theory is causally correct.
Agreed on all these points. I wasn't impressed with the methodology at all, this seems like your typical progressive study in how rigorous it is but with the political valence swapped.
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