11.03.2026
The worsening global state of children and young people’s mental health is a pressing concern, and New Zealand children in particular are doing it tough.
High school students are reporting worsening rates of multiple measures of mental wellbeing, from significant depressive symptoms and persistent low mood to self-harm and suicidal thoughts and attempts.
One in five young people are experiencing high levels of psychological distress, and among high-income countries we have the second highest rates of youth bullying and the highest for youth suicide. In an alarming wakeup call, we were recently ranked last among 36 EU and OECD countries for child and youth mental wellbeing by UNICEF.
Many reasons have been offered to explain these trends, but what is clear is there is no single cause. Indeed, previous work at Koi Tū has shown that mental wellbeing is underpinned by no fewer than 38 interrelated factors across eight domains including biological, family, educational, economic and digital, all acting from early childhood through to adolescence. Overlaying this network of factors is the child’s individual sociohistorical context, such as their experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic, migration, and intergenerational trauma.
A recent paper published in Science by Sir Peter Gluckman and Koi Tū affiliate Mark Hanson introduced a new perspective to our thinking about children’s mental health. They suggest that to better understand the growing prevalence of anxiety among young people, we must also consider the contributions of evolutionary and developmental processes.
This proposal builds on decades of research by the authors showing that adverse early life experiences can raise the risk of non-infectious conditions in later life. For example, obesity and type 2 diabetes are more likely in adults who had experienced undernutrition during pregnancy – this is because an undernourished fetus will ‘predict’ a postnatal environment of scarce food, as was common in our evolutionary past, and has evolved a coping mechanism by adapting its physiological development to be more energy conserving.
While this adaptation helps improve survival, if the baby later grows up in an environment that is instead abundant with energy-dense palatable food, a mismatch occurs, leading to cardiometabolic disease.
We can then see how this concept also applies to mental health conditions such as anxiety. We have previously documented the growing body of research showing that stressful experiences during early life can affect the development of a child’s executive functions that enable important skills such as socioemotional regulation. These stressful experiences include mild to moderate depression during pregnancy (that is, not clinically severe levels), and lack of warm, nurturing caregiving in the first few years of life.
Could these stress cues prompt the growing baby to predict dangerous or stressful challenges that they will need to confront in the future, and thus become hypersensitive to triggering cues? After all, we already know similar predictions and survival-enhancing stress responses are made by the young of various animal species exposed to stressful situations like predators and overpopulation.
And just as an energy-conserving metabolism can help us survive a famine yet be mismatched to today’s nutrient rich environments, a hypersensitivity to stressful challenges could help us be more alert to potential danger yet be mismatched to the actual, relatively benign environments encountered. This mismatch may then be observed as inappropriate levels of anxiety for the actual challenges faced.
So what does this mean for our anxious children, and how can we help to reduce the burden?
Like many other highly complex problems with multiple interlinked underlying causes, childhood mental distress cannot be solved with a single silver bullet. However, understanding the role of evolved developmental processes helps pinpoint specific areas where limited resources may be best be targeted.
Broadly, it indicates we should be taking a preventative approach focused on the early stages of life, from as early as pregnancy through to infancy.
More specifically, it highlights the importance of addressing factors that influence executive function development, including maternal mental health and caregiver-child interactions. It is estimated that nearly half of all NZ mothers experience at least some level of perinatal mental distress, and many families, especially those lacking social or material support are increasingly facing challenges ensuring their children receive frequent warm and responsive caregiving.
Furthermore, as starkly demonstrated by the Dunedin longitudinal study, having compromised childhood executive functions is linked to physical, mental, financial and social challenges later in life.
Supportive policies include universal screening for mental distress during early pregnancy to identify and support affected women, even those experiencing milder symptoms. Other measures to reduce stress include improved paid parental leave, which not only eases financial burdens but also gives parents – including fathers – more opportunity to spend quality interactive time with their new infant.
Social working support services that help families/whānau access wraparound care and guidance from pregnancy through to start of school are another important way to help children have the best start to life.
Achieving meaningful change with such policies will require a coordinated, long-term commitment by policymakers across health, education and social development. But ultimately, such an early investment approach will have innumerable benefits to children, their families/whānau, and to the next generations.
Dr Felicia Low is a Senior Fellow at Koi Tū Centre for Informed Futures. She leads the work on human potential across the centre’s Chloe Wright Policy Unit.
