Teenage brains were stressed even before smartphones. How can you help your teen handle the strain?

As teens head back to school this fall, many parents are worried about their mental health. And for good reason: Teens today — especially girls — are much more likely to say that they feel persistently sad or hopeless and think about suicide than they did a decade ago.

Forty percent of high school students reported experiencing persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in 2023, according to the Youth Risk Behavior Survey by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That figure was down from a high of 42% two years earlier, during the Covid-19 pandemic, but is about 10 percentage points higher than a decade earlier.

Journalist Matt Richtel shares insight into why teens are so stressed out in his new book, “How We Grow Up: Understanding Adolescence.” Mariner Books

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