U.S. teens need far more emotional and social support

U.S. teens need far more emotional and social support

April 18, 2025

Addressing loneliness and isolation is crucial to fighting the youth mental health crisis

by Kirsten Weir

American Psychological Association, Monitor on Psychology, Apr/May 2025

Key points

Parents and practitioners alike can help children and teens practice a skill that is hard at any age: asking for support.

While peer support is important for teens, it does not replace the importance of strong relationships with caring adults.

Psychologists are among those working to boost connections between teens and adult mentors.

Social support is sorely lacking for many U.S. teens. Only 58.5% of U.S. teens always or usually receive the social and emotional support they need, according to a report by researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The report drew on National Health Interview Survey and National Health Interview Survey–Teen data collected from parents and adolescents in 2021 and 2022.

While almost 2 in 5 teens said they were not getting the support they needed, a whopping 93.1% of parents believed otherwise, reporting their child received adequate social and emotional support. Unfortunately, what parents don’t know might hurt them. The CDC survey also found that lack of social support was associated with worse mental and physical health. Teens who reported not having the support they needed also reported worse health and worse sleep and were more likely to report anxiety, depression, and low life satisfaction.

The findings are just one snapshot of the nation’s youth, but they align with other worrisome trends. In a 2 023 advisory, the U.S. Surgeon General called attention to a national “epidemic” of loneliness and social isolation. Teens are not immune to that societal shift toward seclusion. “Adolescents are affected by the same community and societal forces that lead anyone to feel disconnected,” said Mary Ann McCabe, PhD, a clinical child and adolescent psychologist and member-at-large of APA’s Board of Directors. Yet teens might need that connection more than anyone else. “Adolescents are the most sensitive to social support. Their brains are developing with a really heightened need for peer belonging and validation,” McCabe said.

The mental health of the nation’s youth has famously reached crisis levels, as evidenced by the 2021 U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory on youth mental health (Protecting Youth Mental Health: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory, 2021). To address that crisis, shoring up social and emotional support is crucial—especially for adolescents with distinct risk factors or challenges, such as LGBTQ+ youth and those living in rural areas. And friends, families, communities, and mental health professionals all have a part to play.

Youth at risk

Today’s adolescents are wrestling with challenges that their parents’ and grandparents’ generations did not face, including frequent school shootings, the worsening threats of climate change, and the aftermath of COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns and learning disruptions. “Adolescent social support really took a hit during the pandemic,” McCabe said. For many young people, the opportunities for in-person connection have not rebounded.

Yet even before COVID-19, kids were spending less time with friends than they once did. In 2017, American adolescents and young adults spent about 22 fewer minutes per day on social interactions compared with young people in 2003. That adds up to 140 fewer hours of social time each year (Twenge, J. M., & Spitzberg, B. H., Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Vol. 50, No. 6, 2020).

While face time has decreased, screen time has soared. And adolescents who report low in-person social interactions and high social media use report the highest rates of loneliness (Twenge, J. M., et al., Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, Vol. 36, No. 6, 2019). “Kids are more ‘connected’ than ever, yet they feel lonelier,” said Sophia Choukas-Bradley, PhD, an associate professor of psychology who studies teens and young adults at the University of Pittsburgh.

There is evidence that digital connections may provide some beneficial opportunities to connect with others and form healthy friendships, especially for kids who are not getting the support they need in their daily lives (Health Advisory on Social Media Use in Adolescence, APA, 2023). Yet social media can expose kids to bullying or harmful content, and social interactions on digital platforms are often superficial. “Kids are spending more and more time on social media, but they aren’t getting the support from those interactions that they would derive from face-to-face interactions,” Choukas-Bradley said.

The kids who are not getting that boost of support may be those who need it most. Girls, LGBTQ+ youth, and kids of color report some of the highest rates of mental health difficulties, according to the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey. They also report low levels of social and emotional support. Less than half of sexual and gender minority teens (43.9%), for example, report always or usually receiving support. “If an adolescent does not feel safe or able to come out and disclose their identity to those around them, then they can’t ask for the support they need,” Choukas-Bradley said.

Black and Hispanic teens are also less likely to perceive adequate levels of support than White and Asian teens. And boys (64.8%) are more likely than girls (52.0%) to have always or usually received needed support. That could be because young people who identify as female tend to have different social needs than their male counterparts, said Choukas-Bradley. “Girls’ friendships are complex. Girls feel a strong need to engage in talking about hard emotions with their peers,” she said. “Historically, boys have reported less of a need for those intimate, disclosing conversations. Many boys report that they get their needs met just through hanging out with friends and having shared interests.”

Adults supporting teens

As teens develop, they naturally begin to pull away from their parents. That does not mean a parent’s job as support staff is done. Parents continue to be an important source of practical, or “instrumental,” support (driving teens where they need to go) as well as emotional support (offering a sympathetic ear at the end of a bad day). “Adolescents very much need those different dimensions of support from their parents,” McCabe said. The catch, she added, is that many adolescents would never admit it. “They might argue and debate with everything their parent says but still very much rely on them to empathize with what they’re going through,” she said.

Indeed, while peer support is important, it does not replace the role of caring adults, said Lisa Damour, PhD, a clinical psychologist specializing in teens and senior adviser to the Schubert Center for Child Studies at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. “The single most powerful force for adolescent mental health is strong relationships with caring adults. A relationship with a great adult is like the fluoride in the water of adolescent mental health care,” she said.

As children mature, though, what they need from parents begins to look different. Parents, for instance, often go into problem-solving mode if their teen is struggling. But the child may be seeking validation. That disconnect might explain why most parents think their teens are getting plenty of support, while their children say otherwise. Experts recommend a less-is-more approach to conversations. For instance, instead of urging your child to email their teacher if they think they received an unfair grade—or calling the teacher yourself to complain—it might be more effective to say, “That sounds really frustrating. How do you think you’ll handle it?” “As parents our instinct is often to jump in with advice, but it’s very rare that that’s what teens are looking for—and that’s not necessarily what’s going to invite them to keep bringing their concerns our way,” Damour said.

“When adults envision connecting with a teenager, they often picture a conversation where the teenager bares their soul and the adult says helpful things, and then everybody hugs,” Damour added. But teenagers are more likely to feel connected when watching a TV show with their parent or sharing an interest in what is playing on the car radio. “Teenagers often feel supported not through a conversation but through our steady presence. It’s about being around and available,” she said.

Teachers, coaches, and other nonfamily mentors also play an important role in supporting youth. Adolescents who have supportive non-parental adults in their lives have been found to have higher levels of academic functioning, better self-esteem, fewer behavioral problems, and lower rates of mental health problems and substance use, as described in a review by Emma Sterrett-Hong, PhD, now an associate professor at the University of Louisville (American Journal of Community Psychology, Vol. 48, No. 3–4, 2011).

Psychologists are among those working to boost connections between teens and adult mentors. One such intervention is Relationship Mapping, a new tool developed by Richard Weissbourd, PhD, a psychologist who directs the Making Caring Common Project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Relationship Mapping charts the relationships between students and staff, helping to identify which students do not have positive connections with any adults in the school community—a critical first step to reach youth most at risk of falling through the cracks. After a small pilot last school year, Weissbourd and his colleagues are now implementing the tool in a larger sample of U.S. schools and collecting data about its outcomes.

Such programs can do a lot to help kids get the support they need. But in addition to new ideas and interventions, communities should not forget the importance of old-fashioned investments in schools, teacher training programs, and extracurricular activities, Damour said. “We need to be very cautious about cutting arts programming or after-school programming,” she added. “So many teenagers are saved by their drama teacher.”

Meanwhile, parents and practitioners can continue to help kids develop the social-emotional skills they need to nurture supportive relationships. One way adults can help, Damour said, is by being clear with young people about the kinds of concerns that are too big for kids to tackle on their own, including worries about eating disorders, self-harm, or other serious behaviors. “Kids turn to one another often for support, and they are incredibly good at caring for one another. But sometimes they are so attentive that they try to help friends with challenges that really need to be addressed by adults with professional training,” she said.

Parents and practitioners alike can also help children practice a skill that is hard at any age: asking for support. “Most adolescents struggle with being assertive and asking for what they need. We can help them articulate what they feel they’re missing, and practice how to ask for it: Is it feeling understood or validated? A sense of belonging at school? Guidance or advice?” McCabe said. “Social support isn’t one-size-fits-all.”