Except the biggest drop was among teenage girls. Housing affordability and cost of living isn't usually yet a concern to most teenagers, and to the extent that it is a concern, it is equally a concern to teenage boys who haven't felt the same decline in happiness.
I suspect you're right, in general, but teenage girls may also be more susceptible to "future worry" than the boys are.
Tell the girls that housing will be unobtainable and they start worrying; tell the boys and they laugh. Not saying it's the case (and it's likely that the cause is more social than financial) but it could be.
Right — teenage girls have long been considered to be leading indicator in cultural shifts. So it isn't unexpected that when teenage girls become unhappy that everyone else will slowly start to follow them. It is quite likely that it is going to look a lot worse the next time this evaluation takes place.
But the question is what is it that the teenage girls are seeing that the rest of us are slowly catching up in realizing? The most popular answer is the current social media landscape is creating unhappiness in them (and ultimately the rest of us), but that's the answer given for all woes these days...
Again, it's probably not housing or cost of living. While it is fair to say that teenage girls are not completely removed for that, they're generally not the ones who have to actually face it head on, and these have been considered pressing issues in Canada since before those teenage girls were born! If that made people unhappy, they'd have been unhappy for a long time already.
