A new academic year is a marker of time and transitions, for young people and families. Puberty, peer groups, achievement, anxiety —it’s a lot for adolescents in particular.
Consider a 10-year national Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, funded by the federal National Institutes of Health (NIH) and partners.
My son is in his eighth year as a study participant. Each year, from age 10 to 17 so far, he has completed interviews and surveys, sometimes accompanied by Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI) brain scans, along with cognitive tests. There are gauges of screen time, drug use, mood, peer and family relations, along with physical growth and academic progress (through release of school grades). Saliva, urine, hair, and blood may be monitored. Effects of, say, nutrition, physical activity, and concussions can be estimated.
For caregivers, too, come an array of questions —about employment, education, finances, time, conflict, mental health, drugs and alcohol. We offer our perspectives on our children, while both their and our own answers remain confidential.
The study follows “over 10,000 children from pre-adolescence into adulthood. Data gathered … will allow the creation of baseline standards for normal brain development (similar to those that currently exist for height, weight, and other physical characteristics).” The engaged research institutes, hospitals, and universities span some 17 states —red and blue alike— with rural, urban, and suburban demographics.
Already by 2018, the New York Times and “60 Minutes” were reporting on early results of the ABCD Study. Years later, the results are more substantial, with events including a pandemic having intervened. More than 1,000 papers have been published based on the study.
One of those papers, as NPR reported in June following a JAMA article , links screen addiction to suicidal thoughts and behaviors. Now, schools including my son’s are banning cellphones, a policy change that may provide more data about students, time, and attention.
Social media— related threats, virtues, and unknowns —invite scrutiny, along with lamentations about youth reading time and skills, and socialization.
A spring 2025 Harvard poll finds “Young people who became socially isolated during COVID report higher rates of depression, especially those who were entering high school or college during the pandemic” and concludes it’s a “generation that feels disconnected from institutions.”
In Connecticut, there is already a “spike” in mental health needs as the 2025-26 year begins. A Harvard study suggests schools could provide additional screenings, though related resources would be required; schools are asked to do so much as it is.
Challenges go well beyond today’s teens and those in the United States. The Global Flourishing Study documents deficits worldwide—in happiness and health—for young adults ages 18-29. Still, our focus here is the U.S.
There is “an epidemic of loneliness and isolation,” as a 2023 U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory termed it, in emphasizing “healing effects of social connection and community.”
Thomas Insel, M.D., former head of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), in his book Healing, cites a colleague’s admonition about “three Ps. It’s people, place, and purpose.” These are key not only to “recovery” but also to prevention of isolation and anguish.
Prevention, connection, and healthy “management of feelings”
In her book The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, Lisa Damour, Ph.D., notes that even before the pandemic: “serious mental health concerns [were] on the rise. From 2009 to 2019, the percentage of high school students who reported feeling persistently sad or hopeless jumped from 26 percent to 37 percent…. In about the same time frame, the percentage of high school students reporting significant levels of anxiety rose from 34 percent to 44 percent.” She points also to “evidence of … systemic racial disparities in health care.” The “central premise” of her book is that “mental health is not about feeling good” but about healthy “management of feelings.”
My interest is not just that of a parent, or a long-ago adolescent myself. My professional work involves children and youth who have experienced abuse and neglect.
These young people, whether in foster care or at a prior stage known as Protective Supervision, are at disproportionate risk for a range of factors. Their often high number of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) correlates with everything from chronic school absenteeism and dropout to bullying, mental health crises, substance use, trafficking, homelessness, and “crossover” from the child protection to the juvenile justice system(s).
So, lessons from the ABCD Study and similar endeavors may be valuable in helping social workers, attorneys, judges, educators, health professionals, families and young people themselves to remediate and ultimately prevent problems.
For example, I attended an informative September 8 webinar, “Inside Adolescence: Substance Use Patterns, Predictions, Risk, and Resilience in the ABCD Study,” with experts sharing findings on early substance use and “potential protective factors that could prevent or delay it.”
Much depends on accidents of birth —on inequalities of income and inheritance, neighborhood and schooling. But we don’t have to accept such accidents passively, or allow them to become “social determinants” of health and wealth.
Study, learn, invest, act
Let’s continue to support research like the ABCD Study, learn from it, and back further exploration —by the NIH and other federal agencies —that benefits Americans, humans, of all backgrounds. Study, learn, invest—in children and youth, and in the institutions that increase possibilities and unlock potential for all.
Josiah H. Brown, a parent of two, is executive director of Connecticut Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA), part of the national CASA movement for children. His son participates in the ABCD Study site at Yale University in New Haven.