ReviewClinical child and family psychology review2026
Kids These Days! A Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis of Changes in Emotional and Behavioral Problems of Population-Based Samples Over the Past Decades.
Review in Clinical child and family psychology review, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- Debate: Young people are living in unprecedented times - too much chaos or too little resilience?: No Pain, No Gain? Why articulating distress marks youth resilience.Child and adolescent mental health · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
There is a general belief that mental health problems are increasing in younger generations, though little objective comparisons exist. The current meta-analysis examines changes in subclinical mean-level overall symptom burden and shifts in specific domains among population-based samples of youth (1-18 years) globally over the last four decades. We search systematically in PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, EBSCO and Google Scholar with pre-registered criteria. Included studies (k = 175, N = 418,528) use the standardized and cross-culturally validated Child Behavior Checklist with parent-, teacher-, and self-report. A cross-temporal meta-analysis is conducted with data points between 1981 to 2019. Age, sex, response rate, and geographic continent, used as moderators. Meta-regression analyses, with year of data collection as a predictor, shows overall symptom burden did not change in the past 40 years except for some decreases in early childhood (parent report), middle childhood (self-report) and teenage boys (self-report). There is evidence of change in specific symptom domains. We find strong, multi-informant evidence for decreased externalizing problems (parent report and self-report in girls) including aggression in middle childhood over time (parent report and self-report), and internalizing problems (parent and teacher report of boys and girls) in middle childhood. Single-informant changes show varying patterns in subscales of internalizing problems with increases in anxiety/depression in teens (parent report) and somatic complaints in teenage boys (self-report) next to a decrease in withdrawn/depressed symptoms (self-report of children and youth overall and parent report in middle childhood). Further single-informant changes suggest an increase in social problems in European teens (self-report) and a decrease in rule-breaking behavior (parent report). Finally, contradicting results were found for attention problems (an increase based on parent report and a decrease in middle childhood boys based on teacher report) and thought problems (an increase based on parent report and decrease in teenage boys based on self-report). However, the finding regarding attention problems should be interpreted cautiously given declining reliability of the subscale over time and evidence suggesting potential measurement non-invariance. In sum, our results do not support concerns that young people today have more overall symptom burden than previous generations, rather, they show a different composition of symptom profiles. However, an important limitation of the study is that post COVID-19 changes were not studied.
Indexed as
Identifiers
42667567What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.