What she found in a 1999 study and several more since, however, was a surprise. Using a variety of data that included families with median household incomes of about $150,000, she found that the adolescents in higher-income families had higher rates of substance abuse of all kinds than those in lower-income ones. This makes a certain amount of sense, since they can afford the drugs, the vehicles to go buy them and the fake IDs that help with the procurement of Stoli and Jägermeister.

But there was more. The more affluent suburban youth stole from their parents more often than city youth with less money and were more likely to experience clinically significant levels of depression, anxiety and physical ailments that seemed to stem from those mental conditions. These things began emerging as early as seventh grade.

Were these results attributable to parenting? If a single parent or both parents work (or have faith in the safe suburban neighborhoods), then their children are left to their own devices after school. Or maybe the number of hours parents needed to spend working to make above-average amounts and maintain a nice life in an upper-middle-class community was the problem. Or it could have been pressure from the parents to achieve levels of success similar to their own that was causing more than a few adolescents to buckle.

Ms. Luthar said that she understood how hard it could be as a parent to resist pressuring children. After all, many such parents enjoy their fulfilling, prestigious jobs and have a wide network of friends from their top-tier educational institutions. Most of them desperately want the same things for their own children, and why wouldn’t they? “This is the trap we can fall into,” she said.

Image Thomas Gilbert ran a hedge fund. News reports claim that his son, 30, had earlier argued with his father about his allowance. Credit... Kevin Kane, via Associated Press

But it was also possible that there was something about the affluent communities themselves that was contributing to the troubles seen in many children who lived there. In 2012, Terese J. Lund and Eric Dearing published a study that suggested that the environment mattered an awful lot too. What they found was that middle-class children who lived in middle-class neighborhoods had less depression and anxiety and fewer incidences of delinquency than middle-class children who lived in more affluent neighborhoods. The surroundings seemed to matter.

Still, even if the community is the trigger, that doesn’t mean parents don’t also have influence. “It might be because of something that happens in families,” said Mr. Dearing, an associate professor at Boston College. “They make social comparisons and then put exceptional pressure on adolescents.”