Teens are more worried than ever about a recession as the coronavirus forces them into homeschool

• Nearly half of American teens surveyed by Piper Sandler said they're worried about the economy.
• The percentage of Gen-Z fearing a potential recession is up from 28% last year, the Wall Street firm said.
• In fact, the first mention of coronavirus by a respondent even pre-dated most Western governments' responses.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

American teenagers, largely stuck at home with their parents and relegated to online school, are growing increasingly worried about a potential economic recession.

47% of US teens surveyed by the Wall Street firm Piper Sandler in its semi-annual Gen-Z survey said the economy is getting worse, a major uptick from previous years.

"There were several more mentions of the economy and the stock market than in prior surveys," the firm noted. Last year, only 28% of the group said "they believed the economy was getting worse."

The survey of 5,200 US teens was taken as the coronavirus accelerated from largely a foreign concern in February and concluded in late March, the very week a record number of Americans lost their jobs as non-essential businesses closed across the country. The pandemic was the second most-listed social/political concern, the firm said, behind the environment.

"In fact, the timestamp of the first teen who highlighted 'Coronavirus' as a concern was from February 18 - much earlier than most Western governments," the analysts said.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, young peoples' economic concerns, while rising, still trail their parents. According to a Gallup poll released at the end of March, the percentage of American adults worried that the coronavirus is "very likely" to cause a recession nearly doubled to 61% in two weeks' time. That's even before weekly jobless claims skyrocketed to more than 6 million, doubling the previous week's record.

As of Wednesday morning, nearly 400,000 cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, were confirmed in the United States, according to Johns Hopkins University.