February 14 – While the older generations often like to believe the “back in my day things were tougher” adage, it may not be quite as true anymore.
After all, as children, the older generations didn’t have active shooter drills in public schools or devices in our hands that allowed us to feel bad about ourselves 24/7.
Growing up in the world today can be a sometimes agonizing experience.
In fact, the Centers for Disease Control announced results from a study that show teen girls today are experiencing record levels of sadness and suicide risk.
Officials at the CDC are citing violence and trauma as being some of the main sources for these alarming trends.
The 2021 Youth Risk Behavior Survey shows that 60 percent of the teenage girls surveyed felt persistently sad or hopeless.
And 30 percent have apparently seriously considered death by suicide – that’s a 60 percent increase over the last ten years.
About 22 percent of all students surveyed had actually attempted suicide.
The survey has been conducted every other year for the last 30 years, according to the CDC. The 2021 study surveyed more than 17,000 US high school students.
Attorney Clint Barkdoll said, “I think the common thread here is the proliferation of social media. We know that so many of these kids are absolutely addicted to social media platforms. We know from the Facebook whistleblower that Instagram specifically was targeting teenage girls because they had internal research that showed how addictive it was.”
The question is what if anything will be done about this?
Some officials in the government are suggesting legislation that would require users to be at least 16 to open social media accounts, but how that can be implemented is another hurdle.
Michele Jansen of NewsTalk 103.7FM noted, “We know girls are particularly susceptible and that is true throughout history. The anorexia bulimia that took off in the 70s and that was just from movies and TV. Now social media pushes this stuff constantly. They’re very susceptible to social contagion. Eating disorders are way up. The whole gender identity has flipped from majority male to majority female now, mostly because of these teenage girls. We’ve got to take a critical, hard look at how this whole gender ideology is affecting these teen girls, throwing them into chaos in terms of their own identity, their own body image, even Tourette syndrome. There’s a false Tourette syndrome that’s picking up, especially among teenage girls.”
Pat Ryan of NewsTalk 103.7FM asked, “Whatever happened to the whole girls are more mature than boys thing?”
“Not when it comes to this kind of thing,” Jansen said. “They’re very susceptible to being in the in-crowd and being influenced. They have a lot of empathy, which makes them kind of relate and especially these sympathetic YouTube and other media platform people. They really suck in the girls more than the boys.”
