Parenting Teen Girls: The Mental Health Crisis and Finding Common Ground
By: Allyn Pivar, PsyD
In February 2023, the CDC released their latest findings from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS). The YRBS is composed of self-reported data gathered every two years from a nationally representative sample of high school students (grades 9-12), with data collected between the years of 2011 to 2021. As shown in the table below, we can see that poor mental health and suicidality has steadily increased from 2011 to 2021.
Furthermore, the data (shown in table below) pointed to an elevated level of distress among female teens compared to their male counterparts. Notably, while the survey did not ask about gender identity, it did ask about sexual orientation and results revealed an even higher level of distress amongst LGBQ+ teens and teens who’d had at least one same sex partner. Table 2 breaks down the percentage of high school students who engaged in mental health risk behaviors by gender and sexual orientation in comparison to the total population.
These percentages have been continually increasing since 2011, indicating that there was an already growing problem prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. These already-present issues only continued to escalate with the pandemic, during which teens faced extreme social isolation, limited physical activity, and an inability to experience many markers of growth and development characteristic of the era of adolescence and young adulthood. Furthermore, these restrictive conditions isolated teens from adults existing outside of their households, many of whom could have acted as additional sources of support and opportunity for interpersonal growth.
In addition to the COVID pandemic, social media use has exacerbated poor mental health for young people. While the internet and social media allows for people to connect and remain in contact with each other, which was particularly important during the pandemic, these entities have also created extremely unrealistic expectations, unhealthy comparison culture, cyber bullying, and increasingly poor self-esteem--not to mention other side effects such as decreased attention span, screen dependency, and even screen addiction.
Issues such as climate change, racial unrest, anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation, the Dobbs decision, and the continued attack on female bodily autonomy in healthcare establishments have continued to escalate and increase a sense of hostility in the world experienced by young people. These issues have real-life impacts on lives, something that many teens are keenly aware of.
While I could never actually know how it feels like to be a teen in today’s day and age, I can imagine that my teenage self would experience extreme difficulty coping with all of these stressors, which, even as an adult, I find quite overwhelming and destabilizing. The experiences of today’s teens seem drastically different from those in my own youth, and I recognize that the challenges I faced as a teenager were unique to an era without smartphones, social media, a global pandemic, climate catastrophe, political violence, threats to our democracy, and so forth. The presence of all these modern stressors faced by teens, combined with a generation of parents who grew up under very different circumstances, is exacerbating the challenges of parenting. It’s very hard for parents who grew up without social media, for example, to understand the impact it can have on our children.
In working with teens, I hear a lot of questions from their parents about how to set limits, what expectations are reasonable, and how to cope with our childrens’ distress while providing structure and stability as much as possible in our homes. How can we bridge this gap of generational understanding and provide the support that our teens need while simultaneously improving and restoring our parent-child dynamics?
Here are some ways we can approach the questions we may facing--now more than ever--as parents trying to healthily navigate the relationship we have with our children in the modern day and age:
Listen to teens and take them seriously. They are the best source of information regarding their own experiences and they have a lot to teach us about what life is like for young people.
Provide compassion and empathy. We can’t know what life is like for them, but only when we have listened openly can we validate their feelings by reflecting on what they’ve told us about their experiences and imagining how we might feel in their shoes. Acknowledging the pressures they feel by responding with “of course you feel that way” or “it makes sense to me that you’re reacting this way” can go a long way.
Collaborate on rules, limits, and expectations. Working together to make agreements for phone and social media use has shown to be more effective than laying down the law without any input from teens.
Reset expectations about outcomes. Kids nowadays are not having the same experiences that we did, so maybe the same outcomes and priorities aren’t realistic. Academic achievement may be high on many priority lists, but if it comes at the expense of a child’s mental health, it may be time to reevaluate and find ways to reduce the stress load.
Prioritize mental health by helping teens build healthy habits to support their mental health by promoting practices such as self-monitoring for frequency and intensity of mental health symptoms. Look for any concerning changes in behavior and sustained periods of such changes. And as always, consult with a mental health professional when these signs arise.
References
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2023). Youth risk behavior survey data summary & trends report 2011–2021.
