Life On Mars #8
The grandparent effect, more evidence against universal school mental health interventions, and sensitivity to light and noise in anxiety
This fortnight’s Life On Mars covers the latest study, this time from the Department for Education, suggesting that universal school mental health interventions are sometimes linked to worsening teenage mental health. It also looks at links between ‘grandparenting’ (an awful term; I am only the messenger) and the mental health of teenagers and younger children, and at a study suggesting links between teenagers’ sensitivity to noise and other external stimuli, and how anxious they feel.
There is a grandparent effect – but is it a direct one?
Study title: Associations of Grandparenting Dimensions/Styles with Mental Health in Children and Adolescents: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (February 2025)
This review looked at links between so-called ‘grandparenting’ styles and child/adolescent mental health, pooling data from twenty different studies.
Researchers found links between positive elements of these styles – being warm, for example – and less anxiety and depression in children, and negative elements – such as being rejecting or overly interfering – with higher incidence of poor mental health. This link becomes weaker as children get older.
The study’s authors point out that grandparents, who are often caregivers while parents work, are important influences on their grandchildren. ‘Caregivers’ warmth toward children and adolescents indicates that they are loved and appreciated, which can promote positive feelings and reduce the negative feelings of children and adolescents,’ they write. ‘By contrast, caregivers’ psychologically controlling (e.g. shaming) behaviors may increase negative mental health outcomes among children and adolescents if they do not behave according to parental or grandparental expectations.'
Takeaways: if there are links between grandparental behaviours and the mental health of teenagers and younger children, it’s unsurprising that these are ones that also work well in parents – being warm, providing plenty of structure and the rest, while avoiding being overly controlling, punitive or permissive. This review was based mainly on Chinese data, however, where multigenerational households are more common – so it may have little relevance to our more atomised societies, especially once the more independent teenage years kick in.
And the authors appear to have missed something else that may explain any links: we tend to learn how to be a parent from how we ourselves were brought up. If we had a decent model in our own parents (behaviours they probably haven’t forgotten by the time they reach grandparent age), we’re likely to be good-enough parents, thereby supporting our children’s mental health. It may be generational patterns and learning that explain any link, rather than a more direct grandparental effect. (For any grandparents reading this: let me caveat this paragraph by saying that you are definitely the exception.)
More evidence that universal school mental health interventions sometimes make mental health worse
Study title: Effectiveness of School Mental Health Awareness Interventions: Universal Approaches in English Secondary Schools (February 2025)
The Department for Education has just reported on a trial involving more than 12,000 pupils across secondary 153 schools: AWARE (Approaches for Wellbeing and Mental Health Literacy: Research in Education), which tested the impact of two previously established mental health interventions. These were:
Youth Aware of Mental Health (YAM) – five lessons using role play to get adolescents thinking about how to have good mental health and how to support each other to solve related problems;
The Mental Health and High School Curriculum Guide (the Guide), which trains teachers to deliver six sessions to students about common mental health problems, while also addressing stigma and discussing potential ways to get support.
The trial used a control group of schools that had lessons as usual. Schools were allocated randomly to the intervention and control groups, while ensuring both groups were balanced according to their current mental health provision, region, deprivation levels and whether they were based in a rural or urban location. Schools in the control groups were asked not to introduce similar content to YAM or the Guide over the period of the trial.
Pupils were asked about their emotional difficulties and whether they intended to seek help for problems at three times: before the interventions took place, six months after they started and nine to twelve months after they finished.
While pupils in both intervention groups showed some short-term benefits, they had more emotional difficulties by the final measurement point compared with the control group. In other words, it seems that the interventions may have caused a decline in students’ mental health – the opposite of what was intended.
As I’ve written previously, there’s already good evidence that universal mental health interventions in schools sometimes result in worse mental health in teenagers. Drs Lucy Foulkes and Jack Andrews, who hypothesised that greater awareness of mental health conditions can cause some teenagers to fixate on their problems and experience a later inflation in symptoms, published a paper two months ago in the Child and Adolescent Mental Health journal arguing that ‘the field should move away from universal prevention and instead invest our limited resources in the refinement and dissemination of interventions with a stronger evidence base, such as one-to-one, targeted and indirect approaches’. The results of this trial lend further weight to their recommendation.
Takeaways: if you’re a parent and your child’s school is still running mental health programmes for all students rather than those with pre-existing mental health problems, you might want to discuss the latest evidence with them. My November feature for Teach Secondary magazine summarises this evidence (though without this latest just-published study). It’s available here.
There is a link between anxiety and teenagers’ sensitivity to noise/other external stimuli
Study title: The Relations Between Sensory Modulation, Hyper Arousability and Psychopathology in Adolescents with Anxiety Disorders (February 2025)
Anxiety physically manifests through symptoms such as an increased heart rate, nausea, shaking and shortness of breath. People who feel anxious are often highly sensitive to their environment – jumping at loud noises, for example, and being hypervigilant to threats.
This study looked at links between adolescent anxiety and ‘sensory modulation difficulties’, manifested (in the case of this study) in being over-responsive to stimulation from the outside world. A teenager with effective sensory modulation can tune out irrelevant information and focus on the task at hand. One with poor sensory modulation might struggle with loud noises or bright lights, and be sensitive to touch or certain types of food.
The researchers theorised that teenagers who are over-responsive to sensory information find it hard to manage cues from their environment, meaning that they become hyper-aroused and display symptoms of anxiety.
Just over 100 Finnish adolescents, a mix of Child and Adolescent Mental Health Clinic patients and healthy controls, took part in the study. The teenagers completed questionnaires to measure symptoms of anxiety as well as sensory modulation. Researchers then measured their heart rate and sweat response after a sudden noise. They found that teenagers who showed more of a startle response and who struggled with sensory processing were, as they predicted, more likely to suffer from anxiety.
Takeaways: the researchers concluded: ‘Since sensory modulation plays a crucial role in the way we perceive the world, connect with others, and function, [sensory modulation difficulties] should be evaluated in adolescents with anxiety disorders.’
Their focus was on professionals, not parents or teachers. But for any adults with anxious teenagers in their lives, awareness of this link may be useful. The study didn’t go into causes and outcomes, but we can guess that a quieter, less technicolour environment – or, at least, the shape of a day that includes time without too much stimulation – may be useful for some teenagers.
My book about teenagers was reviewed in The Times on 8 February (‘bracingly no-nonsense’). The February review in The Critic (‘helping your teenagers escape the doom loop’) is now online.
You can buy Teenagers: The Evidence Base here, if you haven’t already. If you have a copy, and you haven’t yet reviewed it, I’d be really grateful if you were able to do so here.
Please comment below and share this Substack with anyone you think might find it interesting.
Is there any research on who or what influences the mental and emotional health of grandparents?