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Teens Feel Less Emotional Support Than Their Parents Think They Do, New Report Shows
As a youth mental health crisis persists in the U.S., a new report highlights a significant gap between the level of support that teenagers feel and the amount that parents think their children have.
Only about a quarter of teens said they always get the social and emotional support they need, but parents were nearly three times more likely to think they did, according to a report published Tuesday by the National Center for Health Statistics.
“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.
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 to be true, according to the new report. Instead, 20% of teens said that they rarely or never had the support they needed, compared with only about 3% of parents who thought the same.
How Early Antibiotic Use Could Raise Kids’ Asthma Risk
U.S. News & World Report reported:
Early exposure to antibiotics might increase a kid’s risk of asthma by altering their gut bacteria, a new mouse study finds. Antibiotics could specifically lower gut production of indole propionic acid (IPA), a biochemical that’s crucial to long-term protection against asthma, researchers reported July 15 in the journal Immunity.
“We have discovered that a consequence of antibiotic treatment is the depletion of bacteria that produce IPA, thus reducing a key molecule that has the potential to prevent asthma,” said lead researcher Ben Marsland, a professor of immunology at Monash University in Australia.
“The use of antibiotics in the first year of life can have the unintentional effect of reducing bacteria which promote health,” Marsland said in a university news release. “We now know from this research that antibiotics lead to reduced IPA, which we have found is critical early in life as our lung cells mature, making it a candidate for early life prevention of allergic airway inflammation. “
“It is shaped first by food intake — both milk and solid foods — as well as genetics and environmental exposures,” Marsland said. “Infants at high risk of allergies and asthma have been shown to have a disrupted and delayed maturation of the gut microbiome.”
Is Teen Social Media Use a Crisis or Moral Panic?
Jonathan Haidt’s New York Times bestseller The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness has resonated with tens of thousands of parents who are concerned about the addict-like behavior of their kids when it comes to their smartphones. And it’s not only people with children who are concerned: The American Psychological Association, Common Sense Media, and U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who has called for social media platforms to come with warning labels, are all on high alert regarding the effect of smartphones and social media on adolescents’ mental health.
Still, Haidt’s claim — that Gen Z kids are different from their predecessors in terms of mental health because they’ve grown up on smartphones — as well as his suggestions for dialing it back, have prompted much pushback.
Haidt and his chief researcher, Zach Rausch, are holding their ground in what Rausch calls “a normal academic debate.”
What they are trying to explain, Rausch tells Fortune, is “a very specific change that happened in a very specific time among a specific subset of kids.” Besides, he offers, “I’m totally open to the idea that maybe we’re somewhat wrong about just how much it can explain the change over the last decade. But I certainly think that we are on very strong footing to say that [smartphones and social media] have led to a pretty substantial increase in anxiety and depression and self-harm among young people.”
Short-Term Screen Time Reduction Improves Mental Health in Children and Adolescents
Reducing screen time for entire families — parents, children, and adolescents — over a 2-week period can improve the mental health of children and adolescents, notably by mitigating issues related to internalizing behavior and by promoting prosocial behavior.
Researchers conducted a secondary analysis of a randomized clinical trial including 89 families (181 children and adolescents) from 10 municipalities in Denmark.
Of these, 45 families reduced their screen time for leisure to less than 3 hours per week for 2 weeks (86 children; mean age, 8.6 years; 49% girls) and 44 families maintained their usual screen habits (95 children; mean age, 9.5 years; 60% girls).
In an invited commentary, Henning Tiemeier, MD, PhD, of the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, in Boston, wrote, “What is so novel about this intervention is that it does not recommend a lasting reduction of screen time to some arbitrary guideline level, but it examines a radical short-term break. This intervention could possibly be repeated, constituting an intermittent break strategy.”
This study was led by Jesper Schmidt-Persson, PhD, of the Department of Sports Science and Clinical Biomechanics at the University of Southern Denmark, in Odense, Denmark, and was published online on July 12, 2024, in JAMA Network Open.
Mediterranean Diet Could Improve Your Kid’s Heart Health. Here’s How to Follow It, According to Experts
The Mediterranean diet has been linked to many health benefits for adults. Now, a new study suggests it could be beneficial to children’s heart health as well.
An analysis of nine earlier studies including 577 participants from the ages of 3 to 18 has found incorporating the Mediterranean diet for at least eight weeks had a significant association with lowering blood pressure and total cholesterol, according to the study published Friday in the journal JAMA Network Open.
The research further supports that incorporating healthy dietary habits early in life can help prevent cardiovascular diseases and metabolic disorders, such as high blood pressure and diabetes, which often originate in childhood, researchers say.
Knowing the benefits the Mediterranean diet has for adults’ cardiometabolic health, the findings are not surprising but provide further emphasis on the importance of having a diet of unprocessed foods such as fruits, vegetables, lean meats and fish for all stages of life, said Dr. Stuart Berger, division head of pediatric cardiology at the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. Berger was not involved with the study.
How to Prevent Drowning, the Leading Cause of Death for Young Kids
Indeed, drowning deaths have continued to be a significant — and in some cases worsening — problem around the world. For example, in the U.S., each year from 2020 through 2022, drowning has resulted in over 4,500 reported deaths, according to a study published in the Center for Disease Control’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. That’s an increase of 500 deaths per year from 2019. Yet, the risks of drowning seem to remain deep from the surface of public awareness — which is something that Bloomberg Philanthropies has been seeking to change since 2012.
Not surprisingly, not being able to swim does increase your risk of drowning. And human kids aren’t born ready to swim. Drowning has already been the leading cause of death among 1- to 4-year-olds in the U.S. for a while now, according to the CDC. So, many kids may be having too close encounters with too much water before they have learned how to swim.
You can get by with a little help from a personal flotation device isn’t exactly how the Beatles song goes. But it does apply to everyone, especially those who can’t yet confidently swim in all sorts of water conditions. It even applies to those who already know how to swim. As Larson emphasized, “Anyone can drown.” A change in water conditions, a little exhaustion or a little absent-mindedness can bring down even those quite competent in swimming. Thus, part of the Bloomberg Philanthropies-supported work has been to help stock different swimming areas with personal flotation devices and other types of safety equipment.
While the aforementioned approaches can clearly help, drowning remains a murky topic in many ways. A big problem is data — or the lack thereof. Trying to prevent drowning without enough data on why people are drowning, what current risks are and what interventions may work is like trying to win a football game without knowing the score or any statistics.
COVID May Affect Type 1 Diabetes in Kids, and Not in a Good Way — Clinical Disease Incidence Jumped After Infection
COVID-19 may accelerate the progression of presymptomatic type 1 diabetes in youth, a German study suggested.
Incidence of clinical type 1 diabetes nearly doubled after the pandemic started among 591 youth ages 1 to 16 known to have presymptomatic type 1 diabetes, Anette-Gabriele Ziegler, MD, of the Institute of Diabetes Research at Helmholtz Munich in Neuherberg, Germany, and colleagues wrote in a JAMA research letter.
AI Chatbots Have Shown They Have an ‘Empathy Gap’ That Children Are Likely to Miss
Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots have frequently shown signs of an “empathy gap” that puts young users at risk of distress or harm, raising the urgent need for “child-safe AI,” according to a study.
The research, by a University of Cambridge academic, Dr Nomisha Kurian, urges developers and policy actors to prioritize approaches to AI design that take greater account of children’s needs. It provides evidence that children are particularly susceptible to treating chatbots as lifelike, quasi-human confidantes and that their interactions with the technology can go awry when it fails to respond to their unique needs and vulnerabilities.
The study links that gap in understanding to recent cases in which interactions with AI led to potentially dangerous situations for young users. They include an incident in 2021, when Amazon’s AI voice assistant, Alexa, instructed a 10-year-old to touch a live electrical plug with a coin. Last year, Snapchat’s My AI gave adult researchers posing as a 13-year-old girl tips on how to lose her virginity to a 31-year-old.
