I reread last week’s back-to-school column designed to help parents and grandparents help their children succeed in school and grimaced.

No, I didn’t get any facts wrong. And I still stand by the inference I made about teenagers even though it was based on data collected on 8,000 preteens.

It just makes sense that the link researchers found — regardless of body weight or family wealth! — between better eating and what they deemed “better mental health,” i.e. fewer emotional problems, better relationships with other children, and higher self-esteem, holds true for teenagers as well. It also makes sense to believe that better mental health makes it more likely for preteens and teens to succeed in school.

So what caused the grimace? In between the writing and the rereading, I read Susanna Schrobsdorff’s article “Teen Depression and Anxiety: Why the Kids Are Not Alright” (originally published in the Nov. 7, 2016 issue of Time) about a half dozen times.

The multiple readings made it painfully clear that “better mental health” is a relative term and that — even if you do start each day with an egg-white omelet, whole-wheat toast, and wash it down with a kale-and-strawberry smoothie — being a teenager today is tougher than ever before.

Early in the article, Schrobsdorff summarizes the situation for the “post-9/11 generation.” Not only were they “raised in an era of economic and national insecurity” where terrorism and school shootings were “the norm,” but also “and, perhaps most important, they hit puberty at a time when technology and social media were transforming society.”

You might expect such circumstances to create depression and it has. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, about 3 million teens ages 12 to 17 had at least one major depressive episode in 2015.

But what you might not expect is how anxiety ridden teens have become.

Victor Schwartz of the Jed Foundation, a nonprofit that works with colleges and universities on mental-health programs and services, told Schrobsdorff that “Ten years ago, the most prominent thing kids talked about was feeling depressed. And now anxiety has overtaken that ...”

To help explain this, Schrobsdorff addresses a stereotype about today’s teens: that many struggle emotionally because helicopter parents coddle and spoil them. While Schrobsdorff admits that this is a factor, she argues that even exemplary parents can’t always counteract slurs on social media or a bad school culture.

This is made clearer when a teen who got along well with her parents explains how she felt attending junior and senior high school. “It was,” she said, “like asking me to climb Mount Everest in high heels.”

Interestingly enough, even though Janis Whitlock, director of the Cornell Research Program on Self-Injury and Recovery, believes that helicopter parents and school stress are factors, it’s the “cauldron of stimulus” teenagers find themselves in that creates the most anxiety. It’s a cauldron “they can’t get away from, or don’t want to get away from, or don’t know how to get away from.”

Now you may find Whitlock’s statement to be more enabling than accurate since that “cauldron of stimulus” is a relatively small device that the post-9/11 generation has all but deified: the smartphone. You may feel that if teens can’t handle what’s on Instagram, Snapchat, or social-media feeds, they shouldn’t go there.

I felt that way too — until I remembered Tyler Hamilton, my favorite cyclist from the Lance Armstrong era. In 2002, he was one of the favorites to win the Giro de Italia, a race that’s just as long, just as tough, and just as competitive as the Tour de France.

But Hamilton crashed three different times during the 21-day race. In one of those crashes, he broke his shoulder. His doctors and coaches advised him to stop, but Hamilton pedaled on — despite such intense pain that he ground his teeth together so often and so severely that he needed to have 11 of them capped or replaced after the race.

A race he finished in second place, by the way.

A few years later, Hamilton got busted for doping. Twice. In a 2018 interview for Velo News, Hamilton said, “I don’t think any athlete wants to grow up and dope.” But in the book Hamilton wrote, The Secret Race, it’s easy to see how up-and-coming pro cyclists in the Lance Armstrong era found themselves in a different “cauldron of stimulus” that gave them one of two options: Use performance enhance drugs or make no impression in the cycling world.

Teenagers today face a similar decision: Use social media or make no impression in the teenage world — even though that use often creates the sort of mental unrest that leads to depression and anxiety.

Old-timers like me need to recognize this and show some empathy.