Teens today aren’t just behaving differently. Because of these four cultural and technological changes, they may be wired differently, too. Here’s what parents need to know.
If you’re a parent, you’ve likely noticed this yourself (or heard as much from a teacher or another parent): Today’s teens aren’t like any other generation.
As a clinical team that specializes in working with adolescents, we want to validate that this observation holds some very real truth.
Many of the challenges that teens today are facing are entirely unique to their cohort. It’s not a stretch to say that an ongoing global pandemic, a pivot to virtual learning and smart tech, and the constant and pervasive impact of social media would have major implications for the mental health and well-being of young people today.
Understandably, it’s also made the job of parenting even more complex, as many parents lack a shared context with which to relate to what their teen is experiencing.
These “unprecedented times” have come with unprecedented struggles, and many parents are left wondering how to meet their teens in this crucial moment of their development.
We hope that this article can help shed some light on what teens today are experiencing, and how their parents can better support them.
1. COVID-19 Lockdown (And Ongoing Pandemic)
In truth, we could write an entire book just unpacking the pervasive effects of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
While we can’t accurately estimate how this wave of the pandemic compares to previous ones — especially since federal officials stopped their more comprehensive tracking efforts last year — it isn’t difficult to see how even a temporary lockdown in 2020 has had massive impacts on the mental health and well-being of teens and adults alike.
For teens specifically, it’s important to map this event against their development. Teens today were around 12-13 years old when the lockdown commenced in the United States. Given how young they were, this would have an entire constellation of impacts on their well-being.
Consider, for example, the lack of peer socialization and interaction that would have taken place at a time when, developmentally, peer relationships are crucial for deepening social skills, self-awareness, collaboration, and even just orienting to social norms.
Knowing that much of young people’s connections happened digitally during this time, it’s unsurprising that many teens now struggle in their relationships.
Add the traumatic and inescapable nature of an unknown, widespread, and disabling illness, with no known cure or treatment at that time. This would stoke fears around morality, breakdowns of social order, and a massive disruption to a child’s sense of normalcy, routine, and safety. If that child experienced the hospitalization or death of a friend or loved one at that time, the trauma is only compounded by grief.
It’s also true that many young people experienced at least one COVID-19 infection themselves, which is an illness that can impact every major organ system in the body — including the brain.
We have yet to fully understand the long-term ramifications of contracting COVID-19, especially at a young age, though we know that even mild or asymptomatic infections can sometimes result in chronic and ongoing symptoms, and vulnerability to this chronic condition only increases with repeat infections.
It’s also important to briefly mention the politicization of the pandemic itself. What initially appeared to be a unifying event in US history, in which folks came together to support one another during a time of mass panic, quickly resulted in social splintering.
This occurred even within families, where “hot button” issues like vaccination, reopening schools, and even precautions like masking became highly contested and symbolic, which no doubt impacted the sense of stability and safety teens experienced in the face of terrifying unknowns.
Altogether, it should come as no surprise that teens today are struggling at higher rates with mental health struggles like depression and anxiety, eating disorders, substance use, and even self-harm post-lockdown.
How parents can support
2. Adoption of ‘Smart’ Technology and Virtual Learning
While virtual learning has been around for some time, the COVID-19 lockdown introduced the mass adoption of online schooling.
This shift to general education being entirely on platforms like Zoom, however temporary, had a disruptive impact on the schooling of teens today.
The virtual environment itself is filled with potential distractions (both within the device itself, as well as when attempting to learn remotely), and this large-scale experiment during lockdown would have a downstream effect when students found themselves struggling to keep up academically, and therefore, their foundational education was perhaps shakier than generations prior.
Add to the equation the rise of smartphones and generative AI, and you’ll find that many teens today have an overreliance on digital tools.
We speculate that this can account for some of the decline in teens’ executive function, including their ability to prioritize tasks, plan ahead, set goals, organize information, solve problems independently, and even their short-term memory (sometimes called “working memory”).
We also expect to see continued learning difficulties, like concerns around literacy, formulating original thoughts, discerning between misinformation and reputable sources, and their willingness to engage critically with the media they read and consume.
Because their attention is often split between the present moment and their devices, teens may also find themselves less equipped to sustain their attention on things that truly matter.
When teens “outsource” a lot of these vital skills to their technology and devices, and aren’t practiced in sustaining their focus for longer periods of time, they may become increasingly dependent on this technology to not only understand their world, but to navigate it in a functional way.
We are only beginning to see the long-term impacts of this dependence on technology, and how it uniquely influences teens, especially their learning and development into adulthood.
How parents can support
3. Social Media Becoming the Preferred ‘Third Place’
Have you noticed how teens are less likely to hang around at the shopping mall, and more likely to meet up on Fortnite or in a chatroom?
Sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the phrase “third spaces” back in 1989 to define the casual gathering places that are not one’s home (the first place) or work/school (the second place).
This can include places of workshop, community centers, parks, the mall food court, libraries, and more, and they are vital for social cohesion and collective well-being.
There has been a noticeable shift in recent years, where physical third places like coffee shops and malls are closing at higher rates, while Americans in particular seem to be showing up to third places less frequently, especially after the COVID-19 lockdown.
There to fill the so-called gap in third places has been social media and digital gaming.
This has, no doubt, impacted developing young people, who are therefore spending less time interacting with peers and community members in a physical and more neutral setting, and instead, have shifted their social lives to take place largely online.
We believe that this shift to mostly digital “third places” has had a serious impact on teens’ social skills overall, but also their mental and emotional well-being.
If teens are now constantly bombarded with advertisements and curated versions of daily life, and these now make up a greater proportion of their experience in “third places,” it can shift their entire sense of reality and what’s considered normal.
This can reinforce a mentality that’s referred to as “compare and despair,” in which teens are inundated with aspirational and unattainable versions of daily life, leaving them feeling inadequate, lonely, and alienated from themselves and those around them.
This is the first generation to collectively have no real memory of a life without smart technology at their fingertips. Unlike the adults in their lives, who have a historical reference for a time when such comparison and “unreality” was not the norm, teens today are not equipped with this kind of built-in discernment.
This also means that teens are more aware than ever of the turmoil waiting for them in adulthood, including greater awareness of social and political unrest, earlier exposure to sexual content, hostile and even harassing social interactions (due to greater anonymity and less consequences online), and even greater access to illicit substances and criminal activity via the “dark web.”
It’s unsurprising, then, that rates of depression, anxiety, loneliness, social deficits, self-harm, eating disorders, substance abuse, and even suicide are on the rise in this age group.
How parents can support
4. A Culture of Avoidance and Distraction
You may have noticed that teens today have less and less of an ability to tolerate discomfort. While it may seem like teens are more sensitive, reactive, rude, checked out, or impatient, this isn’t a coincidence — in fact, you might even say it’s by design.
This is because we now exist in a cultural moment in which a distraction is available to us at nearly any given time.
This means we spend less time being with our emotions, sitting with discomfort, or hearing our own thoughts, and more time reaching for our phones, scrolling through social media, or diving into another Netflix binge.
At the first flicker of an emotion we don’t want to feel, or a thought we don’t want to think, we have a convenient way of bypassing all this entirely.
By crowding out our emotional and cognitive realities, we become less and less equipped to process emotions, define our own point of view, or otherwise tolerate anything that distresses us. The effect of this is amplified in young people who have only ever known this kind of “on-demand dissociation.”
In other words, if teens don’t want to feel bad or think too much, they don’t actually have to.
Combine this with a lack of “white space” in our daily lives — a design term that originally described empty or unfilled spaces, but now accurately captures the lack of unstructured time for many of us living in the smartphone era.
So, rather than engaging with external demands or stimuli, “white space” is time spent daydreaming, mind-wandering, self-reflecting, etc.
From a neuroscientific perspective, this state of mind is actually managed by a collection of interconnected regions of the brain known as the default mode network.
When we allow our minds to wander or engage in self-directed thought, the DMN is actually hard at work, helping with how we consolidate our memories, construct our internal narrative and sense of self, process our social interactions, make connections and notice patterns in our daily lives, and even tap into more creative thinking and cognitive flexibility (this is why many of us have such brilliant ideas when we’re in the shower!).
Teens today are presumably spending less and less time engaging their default mode network, which could have major implications for their sense of self, their ability to form memories, how they process the emotions and perspectives of people around them, and even their ability to solve complex problems independently.
Combine this with a larger trend of sleep deprivation, which is worsening in this age cohort largely due to technology usage, and there is a cascading impact on teens’ development that will no doubt show up behaviorally, emotionally, and in their relationships with themselves and others.
