A Growing Darkness: Anxiety & Depression on the Rise

As much as we’d love the elementary and middle school years to be made of “sugar and spice and everything nice,” the statistics around today’s tweens tell a darker tale.

  • Depression and anxiety rates have skyrocketed to never be- fore seen highs.2

  • Girls are more than twice as likely to be diagnosed with de- pression or anxiety than boys their same age.3

Some of these girls need to have less busy schedules or just more time to talk things out. Others require Christian counseling or medical intervention. But there’s one thing all of them could ben- efit from: time in God’s Word. In spite of the fact that many moms and grandmas have learned to comfort their own hearts with biblical Truth, only thirty percent of church- going moms report that their tween daughter is building the habit of daily devotions or studying God’s Word.4

Take some time to invest in helping your daughter or granddaughter learn the spiritual discipline
of being in the pages of her Bible regularly. An easy way to do that is to join True Girl’s upcoming on- line Bible study based on the book of Ruth. It runs March 15–April 12 and is led by Dannah Gresh and True Girl lead teacher Staci Rudolph

Dannah Gresh

Register Today

2 Edo S Jaya and Sri Wulandari, “Psychotic Experiences, Depressive Symptoms, Anxiety Symptoms and Common Mental Health Risk Factors of Urban and Non-Urban Dwellers in Indonesia,” Psychological Research on Urban Society 1, no. 1 (2018): p. 3, https://doi.org/10.7454/proust.v1i1.21.

3 MD Ron J. Steingard, “Mood Disorders and Teenage Girls,” Child Mind Institute, July 17, 2020, https://childmind.org/article/mood-disorders-and- teenage-girls/.

4 Statistic from focus groups conducted by Dannah Gresh while writing A Mom’s Guide to Lies Girls Believe and the Truth That Sets Them Free.