When Society Stops Praying: What a 30-Year Study Tells Parents About Children's Anxiety

EWTN News reported in August 2026 on a study published in March in Developmental Science that tracked anxiety rates among children and adolescents across dozens of countries over three decades, testing whether a society's values around independence, faith, and interdependence predicted those rates. Brandon Vaidyanathan, professor of sociology at The Catholic University of America, summarized the central finding for EWTN News: "in countries where emphasis on religious faith in childrearing declined, youth anxiety rose."[^1] Presence+ reads that finding through a Catholic Christian anthropology of the person, and asks what it means for how parents actually respond.

What the study found

According to EWTN's report, the study (conducted by Leonard Konstantin Kulisch, Ana Lorena Domínguez Rojas, Silvia Schneider, and Babett Voigt) drew on three decades of data (1989 to 2022) from the World Values Survey, the Global Burden of Disease study, the Human Development Report, and the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study, covering roughly 70 countries.[^1]

Two findings stand out. First, the effect of independence as a childrearing value depended on where a country stood in its own development, not on a child's age. In WEIRD nations (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic), valuing independence tracked with higher child anxiety; the same pattern did not hold in developing countries. Vaidyanathan explained why: "In developing societies [a] shift toward independence accompanies gains in growth and quality of life that may offset its psychological costs, but in already developed societies, it may only intensify competition and achievement-pressure."[^1] Religion worked differently across both kinds of societies, he said, because it is "universal in providing goods that do not depend on development stage."[^1]

Second, and more strikingly, the protective effect of religious faith showed up at the level of the community, not the household. Vaidyanathan put it directly: "The religiosity of the surrounding social environment was a stronger predictor of children's anxiety level than the family's own faith, suggesting the protection comes from the society more than family."[^1] He traced the mechanism to classical sociology: "Since Durkheim, sociologists have shown that integration into [a] shared moral community buffers individuals from anomie," and explained why that buffer matters: "Where the community has clear norms, attachments, obligations, limits … the individual doesn't have to shoulder the burden of ordering life themselves —which is where anxiety comes in."[^1]

What a Catholic Christian anthropology adds

A diagnostic frame that reads a child's anxiety only through symptom clusters finds the disorder in the child and leaves the surrounding web of attachments, obligations, and shared meaning outside the picture. The Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person (CCMMP), developed by Paul C. Vitz, William J. Nordling, and Craig Steven Titus, works from a wider frame: each person is a unity of body and soul with human, moral, and spiritual ends that are never purely private.[^2] Communal religious norms belong, on this account, among the real conditions of psychological flourishing. A child embedded in a community whose norms are intelligible is not left to work out the meaning of existence alone.

The CCMMP reads the person through three states: Created (good, with innate dignity), Fallen (contending with real weakness), and Redeemed (offered new meaning).[^3] Read through that arc, a child's anxiety can register something true: that the shared moral fabric meant to hold a young, still-forming person has thinned. Naming that mechanism does not replace clinical care. It explains what the data already shows.

What parents can do

If the protective factor operates at the level of the whole community, no single household can manufacture it alone. As Vaidyanathan put it: "When that fails, religion becomes one option among many and even a devout household's commitment to their faith is not enough to shield a child in that society. So this is why community norms [or] religiosity matters much more than family belief."[^1]

The practical response follows from the data rather than around it: invest in parish life as a primary commitment, not a Sunday-only one: Mass attendance, parish events, and faith-formation programs that put religious practice inside a child's ordinary social world. Faith-based schooling extends that same fabric across more of the week. Friendships built around shared worship give children working models of adults ordering their lives by something beyond private preference.

A family that prays privately while living inside a fully secular social world still transmits belief. A family embedded in a worshiping community transmits belonging. Belonging, not private devotion alone, is what three decades of data associate with lower child anxiety. The parish, on this account, is not a support alongside the family's work of formation. It is part of what makes that formation possible.

References

[^1]: Tessa Gervasini, "Study Shows Society's Religious Norms Can Affect Children's Anxiety," EWTN News, August 9, 2026. https://www.ewtnnews.com/world/us/study-shows-society-s-religious-norms-can-affect-children-s-anxiety

[^2]: Titus, C. S., Vitz, P. C., & Nordling, W. J. (2020). Personal wholeness (unity). In P. C. Vitz, W. J. Nordling, & C. S. Titus (Eds.), A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person: Integration with Psychology and Mental Health Practice (Chapter 8). Divine Mercy University Press.

[^3]: Nordling, W. J., Vitz, P. C., & Titus, C. S. (2020). Introduction to a Catholic Christian meta-model of the person for mental health practice. In P. C. Vitz, W. J. Nordling, & C. S. Titus (Eds.), A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person: Integration with Psychology and Mental Health Practice (pp. 3–19). Divine Mercy University Press.