Summary: I have two grown boys. The most frequent comment I get from parents who have daughters: you are so lucky; teenage girls are so difficult. The out-of-control, angry, hyper-emotional teen girl has become a common type in American society, even a trope in films and TV. Yet I see no mention of this as a normal phenomenon before the 1970s. What is happening?

Girls on top of boys

The decades-long push to change the lives of girls has succeeded. By 2007, two-thirds of students in the National Honor Society were girls. Girls outperform on every measure of academic performance. A June 2009 paper in PNAS found that girls “had reached parity with boys in mathematics performance in the U.S., even in high school where a gap existed in earlier decades.” It is often said that 70% of high school valedictorians are girls.

Girls are heavily involved in sports programs, even beginning to participate in formerly all-male programs – such as football. Girls Scouts of America has taken the STEM pledge; getting more girls into STEM is its new raison d’etre. Enrichment and other special programs for girls are everywhere. Everywhere I look, girls are a large majority of leaders in high schools and coed youth organizations.

Toxic masculinity is being removed from schools. In 2015-16 the percentage of public school teachers who are women reached a century-long record high of 77%; 54% of principals are women (source).

Liberation has many dimensions. At many high schools, most boys and girls have unisex clothing. In much of the nation, teenage girls have moderately easy access to contraceptives and abortion. Gay lifestyles are widely accepted. Even transgender behavior is becoming normalized.

Side note – Expect a wave of suicides in a few years following this breakthrough. Female to male adolescents reported the highest rate of attempted suicide (51%), followed by adolescents who identified as not exclusively male or female (42%). Source.

These things seemed utopian to most feminists 40 or 50 years ago. This is a five-star success by Leftists, one of the biggest social reform programs in history. But why do so many girls seem unhappy? Data from surveys are consistent with parents’ concerns about their daughters. The largest global survey of this type is the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). See this excerpt from volume III of their 2015 report.

“29% of girls but 39% of boys reported that they are very satisfied with their life …9% of boys but 14% of girls reported a level of life satisfaction equal to 4 or lower on a scale of 0 to 10.” {Note about those numbers: that is a 34% difference in those “very satisfied” and 55% difference number with low life satisfaction.

Unhappy girls become unhappy women. Since 1972 the General Social Survey has asked women about their happiness: today women report lower levels of happiness than they did in the early 1970s (see Table 6 on pp 9-10).

The mental stability of girls appears to have shifted towards the disturbed and unhappy end of the spectrum. That becomes even clearer when looking at the extreme end of the curve.

Girls’ mental health is breaking down

A stunning study in the 21 October 2017 issue of The BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) provided a new level of detail about mental health problems in Britain’s teenagers – and the differences in their incidence between boys and girls (also see The Guardian’s article about this).

By mid-adolescence, girls are twice as likely to develop mood disorders as boys.

Studies show that roughly a third of teenage girls are diagnosed with some form of depression vs. a quarter of teenage boys. Two-thirds of teenagers taking antidepressants are girls.

Girls comprise over 90% of hospitalizations related to eating disorders.

Girls are 3x more likely to self-harm than boys. Hospital admissions for self-harm are up by two-thirds among girls vs. a small rise for boys.

The most common method (84%) of self-harm is poisoning (e.g., drugs) and cutting. Self-poisoning victims are five times as likely to be girls, and the number doing so has risen by half during the past five years. Twelve percent cut themselves. The number of girls hospitalized for cutting themselves has quadrupled over a decade, while the number of boys doing so has doubled (the ratio has gone from roughly 3:1 to 5:1).

Per the CDIC, the suicide rate in the US for boys 15-19 is almost 3x that of girls (guys use guns, and so are more often successful). But the rate for boys has varied within a range while the rate for girls in 2015 was at a record high (since 1975).

A good starting point for information about this is the Textbook of Child and Adolescent Mental Health, produced by the International Association for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Allied Professions’ (IACAPAP). This excerpt from “The History of Child Psychology” (in Chapter J) gives a summary of the problem. Red emphasis added. We lack long-term data, but much of what we know is disturbing.

“Child psychiatric epidemiological research is a very recent endeavour. Lapouse and Monk (1958) are credited with having conducted the first epidemiological study in child psychiatry: the prevalence of parent-reported problems in a representative sample of 482 children aged 6-12. …

“Long-term, longitudinal studies of general population cohorts or selected clinical samples allow hypothesis testing and have offered many insights into clinical problems – for example showing that most psychiatric disorders have their onset during childhood or adolescence …An example of this type of research is the Christchurch Health and Development Study, which has followed the health, education and life progress through infancy, childhood, adolescence and adulthood of a group of 1,265 children born in Christchurch (New Zealand) in 1977 (Fergusson & Horwood, 2001). …

“Behavioural paediatrics as a paediatric subspecialty began to develop in the US in the 1970s in the context of a variety of circumstances, some of them already alluded to, {including} the perceived increase of behavioural and psychosocial problems in children and adolescents coupled with a decrease in the incidence of traditional medical illnesses ….

“Yet, while societies are becoming healthier (in terms of life expectancy) and wealthier, psychosocial problems in children and adolescents appear to have been increasing in the last 50 years: depression, selfharm, autism spectrum disorders, ADHD, eating disorders, etc. Perhaps the most important challenge that we face is to understand why. The impact on children of significant social changes (such as high divorce rates, increasing number of single parent and blended families, same-sex marriages …) are still not well understood.”

There are results today. What will similar surveys show in ten more years?

Conclusions

This might be one of the most important subjects of our time, as the Left rewrites our society’s operating “software” – without experimentation, based only on ideology. Our youth are their lab rats. Although still in its early stages, this project has already reshaped the lives of our youth in many ways. We have made little effort to weigh the benefits vs. the costs.

The War Against Boys has been well-documented (also see The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling ). But the media narrative about girls has been only about continuing oppression and endless “first girl” breakthroughs. The increasing evidence of bad side-effects has been successfully suppressed for decades, but can no longer be ignored.

Next time you watch an old film or TV show, note how the girls are so radically different than those of our time. Certainly, the research cited above should spark intensive research to discover what is happening to our youth. Perhaps some of the changes made to our society have not worked out well for them.

As for lessons learned, we should not allow ideologues to use our children as lab rats in their experiments. They will not stop doing so until we force them to stop.

Trust me. I can build a better society for America!

Important research about this, much of which is kept out of the news …

For your own good, of course.

“An Epidemiologic Study of Behavior Characteristics in Children” by Rema Lapouse and Mary A. Monk in the American Journal of Public Health, September 1958. The first epidemiological study in child psychiatry.

“Maternal smoking during pregnancy and psychiatric adjustment in late adolescence” by David M. Fergusson et al. in the Archives of General Psychiatry, August 1998 – “Smoking during pregnancy …was significantly associated with an increased rate of conduct disorder symptoms in late adolescence (P<.001). This effect was more pronounced for male than female adolescents.” US tobacco use peaked in 1961 – 1963. Fergusson was lauded for this important finding. But not for similar research about the effects of abortion (below).

“The Christchurch Health and Development Study: Review of Findings on Child and Adolescent Mental Health” by David M. Fergusson and L. John Horwood in the Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, June 2001. One of the first big studies of a group over time.

Surprising & important: “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness” by Betsey Stevenson & Justin Wolfers (both profs at Wharton) in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2009 – “By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men.”

Transgressive research: “Does abortion reduce the mental health risks of unwanted or unintended pregnancy?” by David M. Fergusson in the Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, September 2013 – “There is suggestive evidence that abortion may be associated with small to moderate increases in risks of some mental health problems.” This violates the narrative. Even a distinguished scientist had difficulty getting it published.

The best data about happiness: Final Report of the General Social Survey on “Trends in Psychological Well-Being, 1972-2014” – Table 6 on pp 9 – 10 shows that women’s happiness has decreased from the levels in the early 1970s.

A warning about the next wave of suicides: “Sexual orientation and mental health over the life course in a birth cohort” by Janet Spittlehouse et al. in Psychological Medicine, June 2019 – “Over the life course, membership of a sexual minority group is clearly associated with mental health problems of depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation.”

For More Information

Ideas! For shopping ideas, see my recommended books and films at Amazon.

If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about society and gender issues, about feminism, about social engineering, and especially these …

Books about the war on boys

I could not find any books about the conditions afflicting girls that are discussed here, which shows that we are in the “problem recognition” phase – the first and often most difficult of the steps to solutions.

The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men

by Christina Hoff Sommers (2000).

The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It

by Warren Farrell and John Gray (2018).