LOS ANGELES — Most U.S. teens aren’t always getting the social and emotional support they need, and most of their parents have no idea, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In a nationwide survey conducted after the most isolating period of the COVID-19 pandemic, only 28 percent of adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 said they “always” received the social and emotional support they needed. However, 77 percent of their parents who responded to a related survey said they thought their children “always” had that support. At the other end of the spectrum, 20 percent of the teens said they “rarely” or “never” had enough social and emotional support.
That realization was shared by just 3 percent of their parents, according to the report published Tuesday by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. This perception gap was shared to some extent by families in all racial and ethnic categories and across all levels of household income, the CDC statisticians found. The same was true for families with teen girls and for families with teen boys.
Parents with college or advanced degrees underestimated their teens’ need for social and emotional support, as did parents with a high school diploma or less. Likewise, parents misjudged their kids’ feelings regardless of whether they were raising their families in large cities, rural areas or communities in between, the researchers reported. Jean Twenge, who has spe.