Additionally, see Christopher Munsey, “The Kids Aren’t All Right,” APA Monitor on Psychology, January 2010, 22. A recent Time article sounded a similar theme, reporting that anxiety and depression in high school students have been on the rise since 2012, particularly among adolescent girls; Susanna Schrobsdorff, “Teen Depression and Anxiety: Why the Kids Are Not Alright,” Time, October 26, 2016, accessed May 12, 2017, time.com/4547322/american-teens-anxious-depressed-overwhelmed/. Recent data from NIMH concludes that about 30 percent of girls and 20 percent of boys will have had an anxiety disorder. These statistics probably underestimate the actual scope, as the large majority of young people with anxiety and depression do not seek help. Kathleen Ries Merikangas et al., “Lifetime Prevalence of Mental Disorders in US Adolescents: Results from the National Comorbidity Study-Adolescent Supplement (NCS-A),” Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 49, no. 10 (October 2010): 980–89. Also, according to a recent survey in Montana, nearly 30 percent of the state’s adolescents reported that they felt sad and hopeless almost every day for the last previous two weeks. The article emphasized the role of social media in embroiling students in stressful situations of which their parents are largely unaware. “2015 Montana Youth Risk Behavior Survey,” Montana Office of Public Instruction. 2015, accessed May 12, 2017, opi.mt.gov/pdf/YRBS/15/15MT_YRBS_FullReport.pdf.
Moreover, a recent study of depression in adolescents concluded that the prevalence of self-reported symptoms of major depressive disorder in teenagers increased significantly from 2005 to 2014, particularly in young people from 12 to 20 years of age. Overall, there was a 37 percent increase. Ramin Mojtabai et al., “National Trends in the Prevalence and Treatment of Depression in Adolescents and Young Adults,” Pediatrics (November 14, 2016), accessed May 12, 2017, pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2016/11/10/peds.2016-1878.info. Nonsuicidal self-injury has also increased, particularly in adolescent girls. See Jennifer J. Muehlencamp et al., “Rates of Non-Suicidal Self-Injury in High School Students Across Five Years,” Archives of Suicide Research 13, no. 4 (October 17, 2009): 317–29.
2. Madeline Levine, The Price of Privilege (New York: Harper, 2006). Levine hypothesizes that the higher risk of affluent kids is due, in part, to their experiencing heightened pressure to perform but reduced parental support.
3. The results from the not-yet-published study by Stuart Slavin are discussed in a New York Times article by Vicki Abeles, “Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?,” New York Times, January 2, 2016, accessed May 16, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2016/01/03/opinion/sunday/is-the-drive-for-success-making-our-children-sick.html.
4. World Health Organization, “WHO Fact Sheet on Depression,” February 2017, www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs369/en/.
5. Centre for Studies on Human Stress (CSHS), “Understand your stress: Recipe for stress,” accessed August 11, 2017, www.humanstress.ca/stress/understand-your-stress/sources-of-stress.html.
6. Steven F. Maier, “Behavioral Control Blunts Reactions to Contemporaneous and Future Adverse Events: Medial Prefrontal Cortex Plasticity and a Corticostriatal Network,” Neurobiology of Stress 1 (January 1, 2015): 12–22.
7. David C. Glass and Jerome E. Singer, Urban Stress: Experiments on Noise and Social Stressors (New York: Academic Press, 1972).
8. Jonathon Haidt and Judith Rodin, “Control and Efficacy as Interdisciplinary Bridges,” Review of General Psychology 3, no. 4 (December 1999): 317–37. Also, see Joseph Powers et al., “The Far-Reaching Effects of Believing People Can Change: Implicit Theories of Personality Shape Stress, Health, and Achievement During Adolescence,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2014), doi: 10.1037/A0036335.
9. Maier, “Behavioral Control Blunts Reactions.”
10. National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, “Excessive Stress Disrupts the Architecture of the Developing Brain: Working Paper 3,” Harvard University Center on the Developing Child, Reports & Working Papers, 2005, accessed May 16, 2017, developingchild.harvard.edu/resources/wp3/.
11. Michael J. Meaney et al., “The Effects of Postnatal Handling on the Development of the Glucocorticoid Receptor Systems and Stress Recovery in the Rat,” Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry 9, no. 5–6 (1985): 731–34.
12. Maier, “Behavioral Control Blunts Reactions.”
13. National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. “Excessive Stress Disrupts the Architecture of the Developing Brain.”
14. Paul M. Plotsky and Michael J. Meaney, “Early, Postnatal Experience Alters Hypothalamic Corticotropin-Releasing Factor (CRF) mRNA, Median Eminence CRF Content and Stress-Induced Release in Adult Rats,” Molecular Brain Research 18, no. 3 (June 1993): 195–200.
15. Yale School of Medicine, “Keeping the Brain in Balance,” Medicine@Yale 6, no. 1 (Jan. and Feb. 2010), accessed May 16, 2017, www.medicineatyale.org/janfeb2010/people/peoplearticles/55147/.
16. Amy F. T. Arnsten, “Stress Signalling Pathways That Impair Prefrontal Cortex Structure and Function,” National Review of Neuroscience 10, no. 6 (June 2009): 410–22. Amy Arnsten et al., “This Is Your Brain in Meltdown,” Scientific American, April 2012, 48–53.
17. Dopamine Jackpot! Sapolsky on the Science of Pleasure, produced by the California Academy of Sciences, performed by Robert Sapolsky (February 15, 2011; FORA.tv), accessed May 16, 2017, library.fora.tv/2011/02/15/Robert_Sapolsky_Are_Humans_Just_Another_Primate/Dopamine_Jackpot_Sapolsky_on_the_Science_of_Pleasure.
18. Marcus E. Raichle, “The Brain’s Dark Energy,” Scientific American, March 2010, 44–49.
19. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang et al., “Rest Is Not Idleness: Implications of the Brain’s Default Mode for Human Development and Education,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 7, no 4 (2012), doi:10.1177/1745691612447308 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1745691612447308.
20. Robert Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, 3rd ed. (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2004). Linda Mah et al., “Can Anxiety Damage the Brain?,” Current Opinion in Psychiatry 29, no. 1 (December 2015): 56–63.
21. Bruce McEwen, The End of Stress As We Know It (New York: Dana Press, 2002).
22. Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. H. M. Van Praag, “Can Stress Cause Depression?” World Journal of Biological Psychiatry 28, no. 5 (August 2004): 891–907.
23. For a very readable discussion on the effects of early stress on the developing brain, see the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. “Excessive Stress Disrupts the Architecture of the Developing Brain.”
Regarding adolescents’ particular vulnerability to stress, see research by B. J. Casey et al., “The Storm and Stress of Adolescence: Insights from Human Imaging and Mouse Genetics,” Psychobiology 52, no. 3 (April 2010): 225–35. Todd A. Hare et al., “Biological Substrates of Emotional Reactivity and Regulation in Adolescents During an Emotional Go-Nogo Task,” Biological Psychiatry 63, no. 10 (May 15, 2008): 927–34. Additionally, Frances Jensen’s book provides a more popular discussion of adolescents’ susceptibility to stress. Frances E. Jensen, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults (New York: Harper Paperbacks, 2016). Melanie P. Leussis et al., “Depressive-Like Behavior in Adolescents After Maternal Separation: Sex Differences, Controllability, and GABA,” Developmental Neuroscience 34, no. 2–3 (2012): 210–17. See, too, Sheryl S. Smith, “The Influence of Stress at Puberty on Mood and Learning: Role of the α4βδ GABAA receptor,” Neuroscience 249 (September 26, 2013): 192–213.
24. Jensen, The Teenage Brain.
25. Hui Shen et al., “Reversal of Neurosteroid Effects at α4β2δ GABAA Receptors Triggers Anxiety at Puberty,” Nature Neuroscience 10, no. 4 (April 2007): 469–77.
26. Bruce Pennington, The Development of Psychopathology: Nature and Nurture (New York: Guilford Press, 2002).
27. Regard
ing the idea that depression “scars” the brain, see Peter M. Lewinsohn et al., “Natural Course of Adolescent Major Depressive Disorder in a Community Sample: Predictors of Recurrence in Young Adults,” American Journal of Psychiatry 157, no. 10 (October 2000): 1584–91. Also, Kelly Allot et al., “Characterizing Neurocognitive Impairment in Young People with Major Depression: State, Trait, or Scar?,” Brain and Behavior 6, no. 10 (October 2016), doi:10.1002/brb3.527.
CHAPTER TWO: “I Love You Too Much to Fight with You About Your Homework”: The Parent as Consultant
1. Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (New York: Plume, 2006): 101.
2. Diana Baumrind, a developmental psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, conducted extensive research on parenting styles beginning in the 1960s. She identified three primary styles of parenting: authoritative parenting, authoritarian parenting, and permissive parenting. Of the three, authoritative parenting has been found to produce the best outcomes in study after study. Authoritative parenting is a child-centered approach in which parents attempt to understand their children’s thoughts and emotions and teach them to regulate their feelings. They tend to be forgiving and to allow children to explore and make their own decisions. Authoritative parents also set clear standards for their children, and enforce consistent limits. Extensive research has demonstrated that children of authoritative parents are more likely to be successful, well liked by others, generous, and self-reliant. The power of authoritative parenting is explained in many books written for parents, including Laurence Steinberg’s excellent book on adolescence, Age of Opportunity (New York: Mariner Books, 2015) and Madeline Levine’s important and influential book, The Price of Privilege (New York: HarperCollins, 2006).
3. Recall the research of Steven Maier discussed in Chapter One. The rats in Maier’s studies who had control over a stressful experience attempted to exert control in subsequent stressful situations, accompanied by strong activation of the prefrontal cortex, even when they had no actual control.
4. This theory was developed at Gordon Training International by its employee Noel Burch in the 1970s, www.gordontraining.com/free-workplace-articles/learning-a-new-skill-is-easier-said-than-done/#.
5. Rudolf Dreikurs, Children: The Challenge (1964; New York: Plume/Penguin, 1990).
CHAPTER THREE: “It’s Your Call”: Kids as Decision Makers
1. Collaborative problem solving is a method of parent-child interaction that grew out of work with oppositional and explosive children. Dr. Ross Greene and J. Stewart Albon developed this technique when it became clear to them that trying to force resistant children to comply (to show them who’s boss) was ineffective, as neither threats nor rewards offered for compliance had any meaning to a child once he became stressed and could no longer think straight. Although this technique developed as a way of dealing with extremely difficult children, it’s a good model for resolving conflict and for helping all children make good decisions. You can learn more about Ross Greene’s work at livesinthebalance.org. Also, collaborative problem solving is discussed extensively in Dr. Greene’s recent book, Raising Human Beings: Creating a Collaborative Partnership with Your Child (New York: Scribner, 2016). You can learn more about J. Stuart Ablon’s work at thinkkids.org.
2. Lori Gottlieb, “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy,” Atlantic (July/August 2011).
3. Lois A. Weithorn et al., “The Competency of Children and Adolescents to Make Informed Treatment Decisions,” Child Development 53 (1982): 1589–91.
4. The “adultness inventory” is discussed in detail in Robert Epstein’s book, Teen 2.0: Saving Our Children and Families from the Torment of Adolescence (Fresno, CA: Quill Driver Books, 2010). Epstein argues that adolescents are highly creative, intelligent, and capable—and that they are infantilized by contemporary society. He points out that prior to the 1950s, adolescents spent most of their time with adults, wanting to be adults. They listened to the same music and saw the same movies that their parents did, as there was not, as yet, any such thing as a multibillion-dollar teen culture. He champions the competence of teens, who he believes should be able to marry, own property, and play other roles in society currently reserved for adults.
5. P. L. Spear, “The Biology of Adolescence” (paper presented at IOM Committee on the Science of Adolescence Workshop, Washington, DC, 2009). Laurence Steinberg, “Should the Science of Adolescent Brain Development Inform Public Health Policy?,” American Psychologist 64, no. 8 (2009): 739–50.
6. The important role that emotions play in decision making was initially discovered by Antonio Damasio and reported in his book Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (New York: Avon Books, 1994). Damasio’s thinking is also presented in an article based on a recent interview with Jason Pontin, “The Importance of Feelings,” MIT Technology Review (June 17, 2014). In addition, see an excellent discussion of the important role that emotions play in children’s learning and thinking in a chapter by Damasio and Mary Helen Immordino-Yang called “We Feel, Therefore We Learn: The Relevance of Affective and Social Neuroscience to Education,” Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016).
7. Daniel J. Siegel, Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain (New York: TarcherPerigee, 2014). Laurence Steinberg, The Age of Opportunity (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014).
CHAPTER FOUR: The Nonanxious Presence: How to Help Your Kids Find a Sense of Control by Finding Your Own
1. Neil Strauss, “Why We’re Living in the Age of Fear,” Rolling Stone, October 6, 2016, 44.
2. Robert Epstein, “What Makes a Good Parent?,” Scientific American Mind, Special Collectors Edition. Raise Great Kids: How to Help Them Thrive in School and Life. Vol. 25, No. 2, summer 2016. Epstein reports the results of a scientific analysis of parenting practices. The first most effective strategy was showing children love, affection, support, and acceptance through physical affection and spending one-on-one time together, while the second was reducing parental stress and attempting to lower the child’s stress level. Parental stress management ranked higher even than maintaining a good relationship with a spouse (#3) and supporting autonomy and independence (#4). It ranked higher than offering children educational opportunities, using effective behavior management strategies, and trying to ensure a child’s safety.
3. W. Thomas Boyce and Bruce J. Ellis, Biological Sensitivity to Context: I. An Evolutionary-Developmental Theory of the Origins and Functions of Stress Reactivity, Development and Psychopathology 17, no. 2 (Spring 2005), 271–301. The work of Boyce and Ellis is discussed in an article by Wray Herbert, “On the Trail of the Orchid Child,” Scientific American Mind, November 1, 2011.
4. Numerous studies have supported the idea that stress is contagious. For example, a study by Eva Oberle found a link between teachers’ self-reported levels of burnout and emotional exhaustion and higher cortisol levels in elementary school students; Eva Oberle and Kimberly Schonert-Reichl, “Stress Contagion in the Classroom? The Link Between Classroom Teacher Burnout and Morning Cortisol in Elementary School Students,” Social Science & Medicine 159 (June 2016): 30–37, doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2016.04.031. Also, a study of infants and their mothers found that when mothers participated in a stressful task, the babies’ physiological reactions mirrored those of the mother’s; Sara F. Waters et al., “Stress Contagion: Physiological Covariation Between Mothers and Infants,” Psychological Science 25, no. 5 (April 2014): 934–42, doi:10.1177/0956797613518352.
5. Daniel P. Keating, Born Anxious: The Lifelong Impact of Early Life Adversity—and How to Break the Cycle (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017).
6. Marilyn J. Essex, “Epigenetic Vestiges of Early Developmental Diversity: Childhood Stress Exposure and DNA Methylation in Adolescence,” Child Development (2011), doi:10,1111/j.1467-8264.2011.01641.x. There is al
so a good summary of this article in a media release from the University of British Columbia, “Parents’ Stress Leaves Lasting Marks on Children’s Genes,” UBC-CFRI Research, August 30, 2011.
7. Erin A. Maloney, “Intergenerational Effects of Parents’ Math Anxiety on Children’s Math Achievement and Anxiety,” Psychological Science 26, no. 9 (2015). See also an article about this topic by Jan Hoffman, “Square Root of Kids’ Math Anxiety: Their Parents’ Help,” New York Times, May 24, 2015.
8. Malcolm Gladwell, “The Naked Face,” New Yorker, posted on Gladwell.com on August 5, 2002.
9. Robert Sapolsky, “How to Relieve Stress,” Greater Good, University of California, Berkeley, March 22, 2012, greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_relieve_stress.
10. Golda S. Ginsberg et al., “Preventing Onset of Anxiety Disorders in Offspring of Anxious Parents: A Randomized Controlled Trial of a Family-Based Intervention,” American Journal of Psychiatry 172, no. 12 (December 1, 2015): 1207–14.
11. Jeffrey E. Pela et al., “Child Anxiety Prevention Study: Impact on Functional Outcomes” Child Psychiatry and Human Development 48, no. 3 (July 8, 2016): 1–11, doi:10.1007/s,10578-016-0667-y.
12. Edwin H. Friedman, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix (New York: Seabury Books, 2007).
13. For a scientific review, see Michael J. Meaney, “Maternal Care, Gene Expression, and the Transmission of Individual Differences in Stress Reactivity Across Generations,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 24, no. 1161–92 (March 2001), doi:10.1146/annurev.neuro.24.1.1161. Another article that discusses the benefits of fostering rats with genetic vulnerability to anxiety to high-nurturing mothers is by Meaney and his colleagues: I. C. Weaver et al., “Epigenetic Programming by Maternal Behavior,” Nature Neuroscience 7 (published online June 27, 2004): 847–54, doi:10.1038/nn1276. Meaney’s research is also discussed in an article by Carl Zimmer, “The Brain: The Switches That Can Turn Mental Illness On and Off,” Discover, June 16, 2010.
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