Adults Are Letting Teen Girls Down

Readers weigh in on the causes, and potential solutions, for teen girls’ worsening mental health.

Photo illustration of a teenage girl
The Atlantic. Source: Valerie Winckler / Gamma-Rapho / Getty

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week, I asked readers for insights into why teenage girls might be struggling, citing CDC data showing that the percentage who have contemplated suicide is up nearly 60 percent from a decade ago.

Marcie has a 20-year-old daughter who didn’t get to play much in school:

Years ago, when my daughter started kindergarten, I was so excited for her to enjoy all the fun and interesting things that I got to do, and so disappointed when I found out that’s not how they do kindergarten anymore. There was less time for free play, less time to interact with peers, and (when we moved to a new city with only half-day kindergarten) no time for recess. It was heartbreaking to watch her slowly lose her natural sense of wonder and joy in learning. The rest of her school experience was similar—too much desk work, too little play, and hardly any self-guided play.

My daughter started developing anxiety and depression as a teenager. I often wonder if a better school experience would have made a difference. What if part of the reason so many teens are in despair is that they were denied the opportunity to be children? What if our children have too few opportunities to experience wonder, joy, or fun? What if we’ve forgotten that child-labor laws exist for a reason and now our children all hold desk jobs? Only they don’t get paid.

K points a finger at social media:

I teach high school. Last year, a very bright, high-achieving student had to take a medical leave. She later told me she had an eating disorder. While she did talk about the issue of control, which I think is a common factor for girls like her who develop eating disorders, she largely attributed her struggles to social media. All day every day she is staring at images of “perfect” bodies on Instagram, and it felt like she couldn’t escape the pressure. This student was never even almost overweight; she went from very thin to dangerously thin.

I wonder if people who aren’t around teenagers all day realize their lives are mediated by their phones and they don’t see boundaries between social media and real life the way some of us do. This isn’t an original thesis, but I believe that accounts for a large part of the mental-health struggles we see.

Claire suggests education might be a solution:

Media-literacy coursework ought to begin in elementary school; kids ought to scrutinize and interpret media and learn about engaging respectfully with others in technological settings. By adolescence, they ought to sense Madison Avenue’s cloying artifices, to regard the self-interested theatrics of influencers with cool (or amused) detachment, and to know when to disengage.

Whereas Tara counsels a more radical solution: no social media until age 18. She writes:

My experience with Facebook shaped our house rules around social media. At its best, it helped me stay in touch with friends and family. But mostly I found it to be a huge time sink. At its worst, it prompted loneliness, isolation, or conflict.

When I gave up Facebook, it felt like I’d been given back time and peace of mind. So our house rule was no social media until age 18. We were always open to talking with both of our kids about our decision, but my husband and I both felt strongly that it was the right choice and we stuck with it.

I got a surprise when my daughter made an impassioned plea to be allowed to use social media at 17. I was wavering, thinking maybe we’d waited long enough, and wanted to avoid conflict. But it was her 20-year-old brother who spoke up and said, “Don’t do it, Mom. It’s not a good place.”

In the end, our daughter agreed to wait another year, albeit grudgingly. What convinced her was a conversation we had about her workload and how easy it is to lose yourself in your phone, even when you’re not on social media. She was able to acknowledge the danger of distraction and waited until she turned 18.

There’s no magic switch flipped at 18, but living without social media as long as she did gave our daughter valuable perspective; the house rule protected both kids from a lot of things they were not mature enough to handle. Parenting is complicated, and I don’t mean to suggest that our decision is the only right one. But it is one of the purest parenting wins I’ve experienced. It was one of the best, most valuable parenting decisions we made for our kids, and I have zero regrets. That’s a rare feeling.

My kids grew up with all the same ups and downs, friendship struggles, and broken hearts. But it could have been so much worse had it all happened in view of a much wider and harsher audience.

But John doesn’t think that individual parents acting alone can defeat social media:

My daughter is reading this, so I’ll try to speak carefully, but I remember trying to draw a line in the sand about phones and social media. I knew, in my heart and my head, that her social-media use was causing many of her problems. Social media was making her life worse, I knew, like I used to know her delightful smile and vivacious personality. But when I moved to limit her usage, it led to animosity all around. One parent cannot stand against the horde; parents have to act collectively to get girls off social media.

Heather is switching from teaching high school to middle school because of various problems teen girls are facing. Among them:

1. Social media and the highly successful bullying it enables. I’m talking about SWATting people’s houses, humiliating TikTok montages, fake Instagram accounts and Snapchats, the works. It’s all happening, all of the time. We’re at peak insecurity, suspicion, and meanness right now, and it’s hitting girls where they live: in their friendships.

2. We’re unintentionally telling girls they’re trash if they don’t love STEM, or if they’re not highly competitive “leaders.” We can’t all be type-A, even with medication! It’s also not their fault that STEM is where the high-paying jobs are. We’re all afraid to tell them it’s okay to skip AP Calculus and Physics and take AP Art, because we’ll be excoriated, often by the girls themselves.

In Nordic countries, more (but not all!) women choose people-focused careers and more men (but not all!) choose to work with stuff. But they have some pay equity and universal health-care coverage. At my former high school, 80 percent of girls in honors courses say they’re going into engineering, and we call it a win for feminism. Being a “good student” has become synonymous with being a science and engineering kid, so they conform to that expectation.

This is not feminism!

3. If we push hard enough, girls will convince themselves that they like or are whatever we value. We shouldn’t take advantage of this people-pleasing tendency in girls, because it’s putting them in the hospital.

4. Speaking of hospitals, we’re ignoring their cries for help, at least until the first suicide attempt. Girls are meeting with their school advocacy team after a stint in psychiatric-emergency services, but we’re primarily discussing how to make up their work so they can still compete for a certain scholarship. We don’t even discuss the teen overscheduling problem, much less how we contribute to it. After all, adults let people with still-developing executive functioning decide how many hard classes to take, then hold them to their decision because “accountability.” What did we think would happen? Then the predictable outcome happens and we all meet to “get them back on track.” Which means the same track that was killing them. Great.

Steve is the father of a college-aged daughter. He writes:

I can’t help but think that some of this stress is an unintended consequence of the otherwise remarkably positive gains women have made over the past 25-plus years. Teen girls now compete head-to-head with boys academically, often filling the majority of the slots at elite colleges. Women’s sports in high school and college are as demanding and competitive as those of their male counterparts. Yet, teen girls still have many of the social and cultural pressures that existed before, and social media only intensified things.  

While anti-bullying efforts have made some headway related to physical abuse, we have a long way to go in stopping the difficult-to-see abuse from aptly named “mean girls.” So teen girls now have largely the same pressures as teen boys plus the pressures they historically suffered. Add to this the stresses suffered by working mothers during the pandemic and it could make the future seem bleak for young minds.

This is not to suggest that we turn back the clocks. The gains for girls and women have been long overdue, and frankly, there is still much work to be done. Instead, we have to recognize that progress comes with costs, and look for solutions. Long-term, it is about teaching the skills and providing them with the support they need to develop a healthy response to the pressures (and maybe reducing expectations).

As a grizzled and humbled dad-vet, I would like to make a few short-term suggestions to the fathers out there:

  • Spend less time focusing on your daughter’s successes. While congratulating her is fine, constantly (or, worse, publicly) praising your high-achieving daughter creates the feeling that your love is contingent on her continued success. Let her know you love her without condition.  
  • Can we limit the amount of time we use compliments that focus on how she looks? Instead of calling her beautiful or stunning, tell her she is awesome, incredible, or, even better, perfect.  
  • Just be there for her, physically present and ready to listen without judgment, meeting her wherever she is at. Eighty percent of the time will not be productive (use that time to read more), but that 20 percent where she turns to you will let her know that her father is there for her (which is super powerful). My wife did this incredibly well, and I wish I had understood its value more when my kids were younger.

An easy way to “just be there”: Start cooking and demand family dinners. You’ll get at least 30 minutes to sit next to your perfect daughter.

Scott blames what he sees as social pressure for girls and women to be warriors:

The pressure to reimagine womanhood as fierce, brave, and strong has left many feeling like failures, as if they’ve failed to be that caricature of power they’re told they should be. It’s no longer sufficient to like what they like, be who they are, do whatever they want to do. They must be better, more important, more powerful, and their failure to live up to the hype has manifested as an insurmountable failure in life.

That pressure is coupled with a lack of human companionship, as girls and women are also told they no longer need men—and that men who are less than perfect are unworthy of their company and attention—there is a gaping hole in their world that seems as if it can never be filled. For men, the pressure is lessened by the social expectation that they aren’t all that worthy, and so the failure to achieve success is bad, but not as bad as a disgrace to their gender. They’re still miserable and hopeless, but at least they are not alone in their misery.

Katie, a high-school teacher in San Diego, offers a generational hypothesis:

I was having a conversation with a colleague who mentioned that her son had been born on September 11, 2001; she was watching the news coverage while in labor. I realized that parents may have started parenting very differently in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, probably without even knowing it.

I think that the fear that anything can happen at any moment bled into this generation of parents and kids. I think post-9/11 parents wanted to shield their kids from that fear, pain, and trauma, but ended up doing exactly the opposite: They fed their kids a steady diet of fear and anxiety without the coping skills to process it. It was all just “shake the keys in the face of the sad child and make them happy, no matter what.” Compounded by a new mass shooting practically daily, honestly how could kids not be stewing in a toxic soup of great existential anxiety? As a teacher who had to teach online during the pandemic, students preferred the online version of school for a lot of reasons, and one of them was not having to be sitting ducks in classrooms.

Also, I can say from my observations this year especially, that girls can inflict a special kind of evil on each other, both in person and through social media. I don’t want to generalize too much, or claim that boys aren’t engaging in similar tactics, but the ways that girls use, interpret, analyze, and leverage a single social-media post is actually astonishing.

I do an activity in my AP classes that involves reviewing a fake set of documents about a fictional high-school couple. It includes mocked-up screenshots of an Instagram post, two text-message conversations, and a calendar schedule for both of the kids in the couple. The conversations I overheard this year as my students answered the assigned questions were stunning: They noticed time stamps, battery levels, and background locations. They were like the damn CIA analyzing this fictional high-school couple, and if they’re putting this kind of energy into kids they don’t know (who aren’t even real!), I just sat there imagining the energy they are putting into analysis of their friends’ posts––and worse, those of their enemies. I can’t imagine being a kid on the business end of a teenage girl who has triangulated an Instagram post, a TikTok, and a couple of text messages into a group chat and decided that I have committed some kind of unforgivable high-school sin.

The othering is swift and cold—it’s chilling to watch.

I work with amazing teens who are truly gifted. They are articulate and write beautifully and are so thoughtful and polite and fashionable and aware of the world; light-years ahead of where I felt like I was at the same age. But that awareness is coming with a terrible price, and we’re not acknowledging it quickly enough.

Jeremy, a high-school teacher, worries that kids are too afraid of saying the wrong thing to talk about their struggles:

I see a lot of young people struggling in silence.  

Young women, generally more socially motivated, are more vulnerable to declines in face-to-face social interaction. Depression has been rising among young women for years now.  

Young people in general need guidance in dealing with big questions and heavy topics. Far too many of the students I ask tell me they are uncomfortable talking about controversial or difficult things. As someone who openly talks about his own battles with mental illness in class, and who teaches psychology, I was able to get some kids to open up to me, to leave the door open to conversations about how they are doing. But the bitter polarization of our public discourse stifles those exploratory conversations teens and young adults have on difficult, adult topics. You know, of the kind that people wrestle with at that age? With a caring teacher and the right group of students, those conversations are possible in the classroom.  

The fear of saying something wrong is too great for some students to talk openly. It’s in those moments of open communication that adults can teach our young people to have those hard conversations. We need to do a better job keeping ideology—from all sides—out of our public schools. If teens can’t say the “wrong” thing in a good classroom, a community of learners and peers, where can they?

S. struggled with mental health for most of her adolescence. She writes:

I could probably list 100 reasons why young women’s mental health is suffering: Social media causing body dysmorphia; adolescence being the age that most girls start to realize that they are different from boys in a way that suddenly attracts inappropriate and unwanted attention from adult men; the realization that your gender, which you cannot control, restricts your ability to dream—you scarcely see yourself among world leaders, great historical figures, even artists and musicians and authors.

Being a teenage girl entails realizing that the world is not built for you, and so you start to wonder how you might change yourself to ease the process: be skinnier so that your appearance is accepted; be smarter so that you may be taken seriously; keep to yourself so that you aren’t bossy or annoying. This process only yields failure and disappointment when losing 10 pounds doesn’t mean boys like you and getting perfect grades doesn’t convince them that women can be good at math. That makes you feel even more hopeless.

There is a theory that mental illnesses may be caused by learned helplessness, where the repeated feeling that one has no control over a situation makes one doubt that one is able to achieve anything. I dislike the term learned helplessness because it implies that you are somehow culpable for your faults—you learned them, after all—but the theory describes what teen girls are experiencing.

Girls don’t seek out help, because they don’t think help will improve anything. Having faith that therapy or medication will work requires you to externalize your mental health to some extent: You have to believe that your depression is an affliction that can be cured. As long as you treat your mental health as an immutable trait, you will not seek out help. But gender itself is an immutable trait, and if being a girl is the source of your helplessness, what is the point of intervention?

And suppose that you do decide to speak to a parent or professional. Society and the medical field have a history of delegitimizing the feelings of women: You’re not sleeping enough; you’re spending too much time on your phone; it’s probably just your period; or maybe you’re simply being dramatic. So now not only do you have to convince yourself that things can improve, but you have to convince everyone else that a problem exists in the first place.

The repeated denigration that teenage girls experience due to their gender can exacerbate other risk factors, like genetics, socioeconomic status, family dynamics, and even teenage experimentation with drugs and alcohol. So maybe the best thing we can do for the mental health of teenage girls is simply take them seriously.

Jaleelah cautions against pigeonholing teen girls:

Women are human beings. They are vulnerable to many of the same societal causes of depression as men: mass unemployment, rising cost of living, and lack of real-life community support. It is dangerous to act as though all forms of mental illness are gendered. All human beings need to eat and laugh and live together in order to be happy. Whether you think it is up to the Church or the state to make that possible, you have to acknowledge that the basics of a healthy life are out of reach for many Americans.

That said, I believe that rising hopelessness about misogyny is one factor among many hurting girls’ mental health. I was a 17-year-old girl when the pandemic hit. In my transition to university and adult society, I have noticed that liberals and conservatives alike make it hard for women to feel recognized for their merits.

Conor Friedersdorf is a staff writer at The Atlantic.