How parents’ political views are affecting their kids’ mental health

[Ptarmigan]

How parents’ political views are affecting their kids’ mental health
https://nypost.com/2023/03/11/parents-political-views-affectt-their-kids-mental-health/

American teenagers are having a tough time. Teenage girls are having a particularly tough time. According to a recent CDC report, nearly 60 percent of U.S. teen girls experience persistent sadness or hopelessness, double the rate of boys.

In 2021, said the report, 30 percent of teen girls seriously considered committing suicide — up nearly 60 percent from a decade ago. What is going on? Why have young people suddenly become so disillusioned?

Social media, we’re constantly told, is to blame. And TikTok may soon be banned or restricted by the Biden Administration. However, social media cannot be entirely held responsible.

Children do not raise themselves — and the attitudes and ideologies of their primary caregivers have a profound impact on their mental wellbeing.

Being a teenager is tough. Social media is not the only factor.

This includes political ideologies, which experts now conclude can directly shape how a child sees the world. And liberal parents appear to be creating a generation of left-leaning and deeply disaffected children.

Consider a recent study out of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Department of Epidemiology. Released in December, the research – which focused on the intersections of gender and politics – revealed that teens who identify as liberal are much more likely to be unhappy than teens with more conservative views.

According to the report, female adolescents are more likely to be liberal than male adolescents. And liberal girls are the most prone to depression. How prone? Between 2010 and 2018, they noted, symptoms of depression rose by more than 50% for “female liberals.”

Having leftist parent(s) can be detrimental to one's mental health.

Because, more often than not, teens adhere to the political beliefs of their parents – particularly mothers, according to research from political scientist Grant Michael Armstrong. That’s bad news for children whose parents lean left.

“People with conservative political attitudes tend to have better health than their liberal counterparts, largely because “the former place greater value on personal responsibility,” writes Scott McGreal in Psychology Today.

A recent Pew survey has also shown a clear correlation between progressive beliefs and compromised mental wellness – particularly among caucasians. According to Pew, over 60% of white respondents who described themselves as “liberal” or “very liberal” have been told they suffer from mental health conditions, more than twice the level of conservatives and three times the levels of moderates.

[Ptarmigan]

Does Liberalism Cause Mental Illness or Does Mental Illness Cause People to Become Liberal?
https://www.culturcidal.com/p/does-liberalism-cause-mental-illness

The fact that conservatives are happier than liberals has been so conclusively proven in research and so often discussed that it wouldn’t feel like breaking any new ground to even write about it. However, this outstanding piece by Musa al-Gharbi (Hat tip to Ann Coulter for the article) touches on the subject in the process of speculating about the enormous gap between conservatives and liberals in mental health. What we’re going to do is cover some particularly relevant portions of that article while adding some comments here. It’s really a great piece and it’s worth your time to read the whole thing:

Liberal girls tended to be significantly more depressed than boys, particularly after 2011. However, ideological differences swamped gender differences. Indeed, liberal boys were significantly more likely to report depression than conservatives of either gender. The authors also found that the more educated a teen’s family was, the more likely the young people were to be depressed, and the more dramatic their rise in depression was after 2012.

...Why is it that liberal teens are more consistently depressed than conservatives? Why might familial education correlate with heightened depression for liberal youth? Why was there a spike in depression (and a growing ideological divergence in depressive affect) after 2011, corresponding with the onset of the “Great Awokening”?

First of all, what al-Gharbi refers to as the “Great Awokening” was a dramatic increase in mental illness, woke politics, and behavioral changes that occurred at colleges across the country that was most likely driven by the digital syphilis that is social media. Social media has had an extraordinarily negative effect on American society and as I’ve said before, you could make a really good case for banning social media for the same reasons we ban meth and over-the-counter landmines. From here, al-Gharbi goes on to discuss some of the extensive research showing that conservatives are happier than liberals (click over to his article if you want to see the citations):

Long read. Worth reading.

[Eupher]

digital syphilis that is social media.

And Twitter is the biggest chancre sore on the planet.