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October 14, 2026
Quarterly Article
Neal Halfon
Shirley Russ
September 2026
Mental Health and Substance Use Challenges
Back to The Milbank Quarterly
Policy Points:
The health of US children has deteriorated significantly across multiple indicators with trends accelerating since 2007. From 2011-2023, the prevalence of chronic conditions among 3-19-year-olds rose from 25.8 to 31%, obesity rose from 17 to 20%, and autism and learning disabilities more than doubled. Rates of anxiety, loneliness, depression, early onset of menstruation and trouble sleeping all increased. Biomedically driven policy and practice have improved treatment of certain established medical conditions (e.g., childhood cancers and congenital heart disease), but failed to stem increasing mental health challenges, and neurodevelopmental disorders. Life course models point to fundamental changes in the early developmental ecosystem resulting in profound mismatches between the conditions children are evolutionarily primed and historically calibrated to expect and those they currently experience as primary drivers of these changes. The Industrial Revolution accelerated changes in children’s physical, relational, and nutritional environments; temporal rhythms; and cognitive demands. The Digital Revolution further accelerated the speed and degree of change, potentially outpacing children’s capacity for adaptive developmental responses. These multiple environmental changes do not act in isolation but interact in multilevel, dynamic, and complex ways to form the developmental ecosystems shaping children’s developmental trajectories. In this paper we suggest a reorientation of child health policy and resulting interventions—expanding the focus beyond isolated social risks and behavioral deficits to address ecosystem-level influences and shift population outcomes by altering health development trajectories. We also suggest a suite of actionable state-level policy solutions geared to improve the configuration of these developmental ecosystems. We highlight state policy innovations such as New Mexico’s comprehensive portfolio of early childhood policy changes and infrastructure upgrades along with ongoing population-level measurement of children’s health development to monitor policy impact.