According to a recent study by researchers at ELTE Faculty of Education and Psychology, it is not true that young people today have more emotional and behavioural problems than previous generations. The study, published in the journal Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, concluded that over the past 40 years or so, it is the nature of these difficulties that has changed: whilst some problems have increased, others have actually decreased.
It is widely believed that mental health problems are becoming increasingly common amongst younger generations. However, there is little objective comparative data available to support this. Researchers at the Institute of Education at ELTE Faculty of Education and Psychology, as part of an international collaboration, utilised data from 175 representative studies from various parts of the world and, through a meta-analytical analysis of the data, sought to obtain an objective picture of changes in the prevalence of emotional and behavioural problems in young people aged 1–18, over the past 30–40 years.
The researchers conducted searches in the PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, EBSCO and Google Scholar databases. The studies included utilised versions of the Child Behavior Checklist questionnaire – which is standardised and validated across cultures – completed by parents, teachers and the young people themselves. The study examined data from 1981 to 2019, taking age, gender, response rate and geographical location into account as moderator variables.
“The analyses showed that the overall burden of symptoms has not changed over the past 40 years,” said Boglárka Vekety, the lead author of the article, summarising the research findings. “At the same time, we found evidence of changes in specific symptom domains. The partial results highlighted that certain emotional and behavioural problems, such as aggression or rule-breaking behaviour, have decreased, whilst others, such as anxiety, have increased over recent decades, depending on age group, gender and geographical location.”
Based on the results, the researchers found strong evidence that, over the past 40 years, so-called externalising problems, such as aggression, have decreased amongst primary school-aged children. This was demonstrated by both parental reports and self-reports. Based on reports from parents and teachers, a decline was also found in primary school-aged children in the area of internalising problems, such as anxiety, depression and various somatic symptoms.
However, according to the analyses, the prevalence of anxiety and depressive symptoms among adolescents increased, as reported by parents, and somatic complaints (e.g. psychologically induced headaches or stomach aches) also became more common among adolescent boys, as reported by the adolescents themselves. The results showed that, over the past 40 years, social problems have increased amongst European adolescents according to self-reports, whilst parents reported that rule-breaking behaviour, on the other hand, has decreased.
“It is interesting to note that, based on parents’ reports, we have found an increase in attention and cognitive problems over the past 40 years. Attention problems were more common among primary school children, whilst cognitive problems, such as compulsive behaviour, were more typical of adolescent boys. However, these changes were not corroborated by other sources; for example, they were not indicated in reports from teachers or the young people themselves. Furthermore, in the case of attention problems, we found that the reliability of the sub-scale decreased over time,” said Boglárka Vekety, highlighting one of the study’s contradictory findings.
The researchers emphasised that, taken as a whole, their findings therefore do not support the concern that the overall symptom burden among today’s young people is greater than that of previous generations. Rather, the analyses suggest that the composition of symptom profiles has changed. An important limitation of the study, however, is that it did not analyse changes following the COVID-19 pandemic.
The research was carried out as part of an international collaboration. The members of the group are: Boglárka Vekety (ELTE) and Zsófia K. Takács (University of Edinburgh), the first authors of the article; Tamás Kói (SOTE, BME); John Protzko (Central Connecticut State University); Heather C. Whalley (University of Edinburgh); H. N. Alexander Logemann (ELTE, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam).
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