Luis Valero Aguayo
Professor of Psychology
In principle, the article is not a research, it is a “hypothesis” about the effect that the mother's own anxiogenic situation during pregnancy and in the parents after birth may have on the future of the child in adolescence. It does not present data from a specific research, but an argumentation towards that hypothesis, supported by other authors or research.
We can agree, and it is widely accepted, that neurodevelopment from embryo and environmental changes can modify the expression of one's genes. The study of neurodevelopment and phenotype is an established field. Also, the fact that the incidence of anxiety and stress among today's adolescents seems to be increasing seems proven, but what accounts for that increase is where the difficulty lies.
This article insists that those first two years of development are pivotal to the expression of anxiety in later adolescence. To my knowledge, there are no experiments that have compared stressed and non-stressed childbearing and its effect ten to fifteen years later. There are studies that show the “imitation” of anxiety patterns from mothers (culturally, mostly) to daughters. Boys and girls learn what they see, so other more direct learning mechanisms, and not necessarily neurological alterations, could be hypothesized to explain this later increase in anxiety.
On the other hand, this anxiety in adolescents and young people is also more explainable due to the social and cultural conditions of the moment. Today's adolescents are under much more pressure in all aspects of their lives: starting with the use of cell phones and tablets from the age of one (a continuous stimulation that leads to hyperactivity), imitation and comparison in social networks (which leads to image and self-esteem problems), increasing educational demands (with great anxiety about being judged), excessive overprotection (developing fear of failure) and a long etcetera of factors present in the 21st century that were not present at the end of the century and even less so in the 1950s.
In short, the article is interesting. It is a theoretical hypothesis, perhaps in one part it could be right, but there would be other more direct and immediate factors that could explain this high anxiety in adolescents. From my point of view, if the factors that produce stress are right under our noses, why should we look for them in childhood, even if that is where they start. And the paragraph where he hypothesizes that anxious adolescents look for leaders and a sense of political security, already takes a total theoretical leap.