Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, rates of clinically significant generalized anxiety and depressive symptoms in large youth cohorts were approximately 11.6%¹ and 12.9%,² respectively. Since COVID-19 was declared an international public health emergency, youth around the world have experienced dramatic disruptions to their everyday lives.³ Youth are enduring pervasive social isolation and missed milestones, along with school closures, quarantine orders, increased family stress, and decreased peer interactions, all potential precipitants of psychological distress and mental health difficulties in youth.^4-7 Indeed, in both cross-sectional^8,9 and longitudinal studies^10,11 amassed to date, the prevalence of youth mental illness appears to have increased during the COVID-19 pandemic.³ However, data collected vary considerably. Specifically, ranges from 2.2%¹² to 63.8%¹³ and 1.8%¹² to 49.5%¹³ for clinically elevated depression and anxiety symptoms, respectively. As governments and policy makers deploy and implement recovery plans, ascertaining precise estimates of the burden of mental illness for youth are urgently needed to inform service deployment and resource allocation.

By school entry, 1 in 4 children shows deficits and delays in developmental outcomes such as language, communication, motor skills, and/or socioemotional health.^1,2 Thus, many children are beginning school inadequately prepared for learning and academic success. Gaps in development tend to widen vs shrink over time without intervention,³ creating a burden on education and health systems in the form of greater government and public expenditures for remediation and special education.^4,5 Consequently, there have been efforts to identify factors, including children’s screen time,⁶ that may create or exacerbate disparities in early child development.

For decades, there has been scientific debate as well as considerable public discourse as to whether screen use, defined as television or screen exposure, helps or hinders early child development. This debate has been reignited in the last decade, as children’s access to and consumption of digital media is on the rise.^1,2 The debate primarily centers around quantity vs quality of screen use. In terms of quantity of screen use (ie, hours per day/week), it has been argued that screen use can be a passive or sedentary behavior that can displace critical learning opportunities for growth and development,^3,4 such as language. That is, when young children are exposed to screens, they are not engaging in verbal dyadic exchanges that have been shown to promote communication and language acquisition.^5,6 However, there is research to support and refute the notion that increased quantity of screen use is linked with delayed language acquisition.^3,5,7,8

Sexting—the sharing of sexually explicit images, videos, or messages through electronic means—has received mounting attention from the popular press and an accumulating amount of attention in the empirical literature. However, the true public health importance of youth sexting is unclear at present because the field is handicapped by inconsistent information regarding its prevalence. With the published rate of youth sexting ranging from 1.3% to 60%,^1-3 the extent to which health care professionals, school personnel, policymakers, and parents should be concerned about this behavior is unknown.

Twenty years ago, meta-analytic results (k = 19) confirmed the association between caregiver attachment representations and child-caregiver attachment (Van IJzendoorn, 1995). A test of caregiver sensitivity as the mechanism behind this intergenerational transmission showed an intriguing "transmission gap." Since then, the intergenerational transmission of attachment and the transmission gap have been studied extensively, and now extend to diverse populations from all over the globe. Two decades later, the current review revisited the effect sizes of intergenerational transmission, the heterogeneity of the transmission effects, and the size of the transmission gap. Analyses were carried out with a total of 95 samples (total N = 4,819). All analyses confirmed intergenerational transmission of attachment, with larger effect sizes for secure-autonomous transmission (r = .31) than for unresolved transmission (r = .21), albeit with significantly smaller effect sizes than 2 decades earlier (r = .47 and r = .31, respectively). Effect sizes were moderated by risk status of the sample, biological relatedness of child-caregiver dyads, and age of the children. Multivariate moderator analyses showed that unpublished and more recent studies had smaller effect sizes than published and older studies. Path analyses showed that the transmission could not be fully explained by caregiver sensitivity, with more recent studies narrowing but not bridging the "transmission gap." Implications for attachment theory as well as future directions for research are discussed.