What if being close to your children doesn’t necessarily contribute to their happiness? This is the question that American parents may ask themselves when readinga graph shared by American psychologist Jean Twenge on the Substack website. We see two curves: one measures the degree of satisfaction of American final year students regarding their relationship with their parents; the other assesses their level of satisfaction with life in general. From 1976 to 2012, the two curves evolve in parallel, even getting closer in the 2000s. From 2012, they go in opposite directions. American teenagers appear increasingly happy with their relationship with their parents, but the curve representing their life satisfaction is plummeting. Should we read that the more relationships with parents improve, the less happy teenagers are overall? What a slap in the face for us parents, who might have believed that by being in tune with our children, we would make them happy!
Author of Generations (Atria Books, 2023, untranslated), a book full of statistics and graphs, Jean Twenge relies, for these curves, on data collected since 1976 by researchers at the University of Michigan, who each year enrich the epidemiological study Monitoring the Future through questionnaires administered in schools. She is alarmed by the increase in mental health problems among young Americans: the figures for depression among adolescents have doubled between 2011 and 2021, and the rate of young girls having already considered suicide has never been so high (one in three).
The curve showing an improvement in the satisfaction of the parent-child relationship in recent years has the advantage, according to her, of dispelling the hypothesis according to which the growing uneasiness of young people is linked to increased parental pressure. They are doing badly, but at home, things are getting better and better: still according to the same data, in 2018, less than a third (30%) of final year students said they had had at least five arguments in the last twelve months with their parents. There were almost half of them (48%) in 1986.
Less autonomy, more smartphone
Teenagers who no longer argue with their parents, is that really good news? When the famous curves circulated on X, some found that, on the contrary, it was a cause for concern. Adolescents’ quest for independence is a source of friction: a young person who emancipates himself is expected to argue with his parents. Would the absence of disputes be a sign of a renunciation of independence?
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