Suicide Rate Among Preteen Girls Nearly Catches Up to Boys, New CDC-Based Study Finds

The Numbers

For decades, boys aged 10 to 14 died by suicide at roughly twice the rate of girls the same age. That gap has all but vanished, according to research from Jean Twenge, PhD, of San Diego State University, published in JAMA Pediatrics.

In 2017, the suicide rate was 3.28 per 100,000 for boys versus 1.66 for girls, Twenge found using CDC mortality data. By 2024, boys stood at 2.38 and girls at 2.28, a gap of just 4%.

Twenge told MedPage Today this is the first time the rates have come this close in the available records. Suicide remains the second leading cause of death for this age group, behind accidents, she said, noting that most 10- to 14-year-olds are in fourth through ninth grade, mostly middle school.

What Changed for Girls

The boys' rate dropped 35% between 2018 and 2024. The girls' rate rose 13% over the same stretch. Zoom out to 2007-2024 and the divergence is starker: boys' suicide rate nearly doubled, from 1.20 to 2.38. Girls' rate more than quadrupled, from 0.51 to 2.28.

According to Newsy Today's reporting on the same study, the narrowing gap held across non-Hispanic Black, Hispanic, and non-Hispanic white children. The suicide rate for Black girls actually exceeded that of Black boys in 2024. Urban and suburban girls also outpaced boys, while Twenge said the trend in rural areas was less clear.

Twenge pointed to a similar pattern outside the U.S., saying female suicide rates among 10- to 19-year-olds have overtaken male rates in Japan, South Korea, and Spain in recent years.

Her explanation for the shift centers on risk factors that hit girls harder: social comparison, relational bullying, heavy social media use, and self-harm behaviors. "Efforts to reduce suicide rates may have been successful for boys since 2018, but they have not been as successful for girls," she told MedPage Today.

Echo Song, a community outreach representative with New York City's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, told NTD (The Epoch Times' sister outlet) that parents should watch for withdrawal, irritability, self-deprecating talk, neglect of hygiene, sleep and appetite changes, slipping grades, and compulsive or disrupted social media use, tracked over six months to a year rather than a single bad week. Song's advice: listen without rushing to fix and skip comparisons to "when I was young."

A Separate Study Draws Scrutiny

While the suicide data show a female-skewing trend in one part of adolescent mental health, a separate and unrelated federally funded research effort has run into its own controversy over sex and race breakdowns.

The National Institutes of Health gave Children's Hospital Los Angeles a grant of up to $10 million over nine years to study the psychological and physical effects of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones on participants ages 8 to 20, led by Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, who has since moved to private practice. The Daily Signal reported that The New York Times first disclosed in late 2024 that the study's nearly 100-child dataset would not be published in part because Olson-Kennedy worried the findings would be "weaponized."

The final report, obtained by the watchdog group Oversight Project and shared with the Daily Signal, shows the study's population was 67% white, 9% Hispanic, 3% Asian, and 4% Black. The hormone-treatment cohort ran 65% female, meaning most participants were girls seeking to transition to male. The puberty-blocker cohort was closer to even, 52% male and 48% female.

Citing that imbalance, the report set a goal to "enhance the diversity and size of existing cohorts by enrolling additional youth of color" and more participants "assigned male at birth," language the report frames as reflecting "increasingly diverse clinical populations." Broadening a research sample to better match the population it's meant to represent is a standard, defensible goal in medical research, and a small, heavily white, majority-female cohort limits how far the findings can be generalized. The Oversight Project's Neal, identified as the group's director of state litigation, argued the more relevant finding buried in the numbers is that the study "looked at more girls who think they want to be boys" than the reverse.

Neither Children's Hospital Los Angeles nor Olson-Kennedy responded to requests for comment cited in the Daily Signal's reporting.

What's Unresolved

Twenge's suicide data run only through 2024, since CDC mortality figures take time to finalize, so it isn't yet known whether the narrowing gender gap held into 2025 or 2026. Whether the same social-media and bullying pressures she cites are driving the female skew in gender-clinic populations remains an open question the sources here do not answer. The NIH-funded transgender youth study, delayed for years and now public only through a leaked copy, still has no confirmed publication date in a peer-reviewed journal.