The Anxious Generation garnered global attention in 2024 when author Jonathan Haidt detailed evidence that the rise of smartphones and social media contributed to a youth mental health epidemic. “Phone-based childhood” replaced play-based childhood and led to sleep deprivation, social isolation, addiction, and ultimately alarming rises in anxiety, depression, and suicide.
Two decades before smartphones, numerous factors led to General Anxiety Disorder and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder first being included in the DSM-III (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition). Anxious adults are more likely to have anxious children. Research shows cortisol, the “stress hormone,” affects babies’ brain development prior to birth, wiring their brain to be more fearful and nervous throughout their lives. Experts say young children also learn behaviors from care-givers that the world is not safe. Environmental factors such as crime and food insecurity contribute to children’s anxiety, too.
During this decade, the COVID pandemic increased fear of death, loneliness associated with isolation from school closures and social distancing upon return, and a sense of failure from resulting learning loss.
When students returned from COVID to Empower College Prep, a values-based college preparatory school serving more than 1,000 Pre-K- 12th grade students in central Phoenix, the school’s social workers drafted over 104 safety plans for students experiencing acute anxiety, depression, and suicide ideation. This led to the rapid expansion of the school’s social work department.
Nerves calmed and learning soared this past year. Over 90% of Empower College Prep’s graduates went on to college this past year, almost entirely as first-generation college students. But now, Empower College Prep’s social workers are combating a new source of anxiety – raids at workplaces and random stops on the way home from grocery stores by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
One family with four Empower siblings has not seen their mother in three weeks. She was pulled over on the way home from the grocery store after buying ingredients to make dinner. ICE agents explained it was a “random stop,” not due to any traffic violation or suspected crime. She voluntarily shared the papers documenting the legal process her family is undergoing with an attorney they are paying to help them. The ICE agents reviewed the documents, looked up the case, informed her that her attorney had missed a deadline without notifying her, and took her from her car into custody.
Her four children returned to an empty home. The oldest daughter, set to graduate this May, tried to console her baby brother and young sisters who were desperate to learn where their mother was and when she would return. Eventually, their mother was able to call and share she had been taken to a small unit for detainees located in a prison built for and filled with men. She has been sitting and sleeping for three weeks on a metal bed with no mattress. Her body is sore, her heart is broken.
Dozens of other children live in constant fear of the same thing happening to their families. Attendance has plummeted to numbers not seen since students returned from COVID.
Some of the families too scared to come to school are refugees from war-torn countries in Africa. Many, like the four siblings missing their mother, are even more scared of what would await them if they returned than they are of being detained. The children’s dad worked from 5 AM to 2 AM in Honduras for a man who paid him less than 60 cents an hour. When their mother told their dad there was not enough money for them to eat and she needed help with their newborn, he tried to negotiate with his boss. His boss, surrounded by armed men, threatened him and his family. They fled to America.
Even now, their dad remains thankful. He is hopeful his wife will be moved to a facility for women soon, and eventually be released and reunited to him and their children.
“I’m glad to be in America,” he said. “I’m grateful to be able to work and for my kids to be able to learn. Thank you for all you are doing,” he said to the school’s social workers when they dropped off work for the children to complete.
The oldest daughter is just one year away from becoming the family’s first high school graduate and, if she is able to stay, first college enrollee. She just hopes her mom is able to be with her when she walks across the stage.
