Political Negativity Is Harming Our Young Americans

In looking at the growing mental health crisis among America’s youth, Derek Thompson describes the epidemic of teenage anxiety as a “tragic mystery” where “nobody knows for sure what’s going on” but potential causes could include a variety of factors from social media to school shootings and climate change to changes in parenting. Ross Douthat just argued the smartphone and tech are to blame. One potential trigger that Thompson and Douthat failed to mention, and which becomes immediately apparent to me as a professor of Gen Z students, is that students today—and notably those on the left—are subjected to repeated calls for nation-changing sociopolitical transformations and this is destabilizing and traumatic.