The author of The Breakthrough Years shares what adolescents want their parents to know.
Remember what it was like to be a teenager?
Chances are that you’ve got vivid recollections of the victories and defeats you experienced in this highly formative (and often highly awkward) stage of life, but it goes without saying that parents’ memories of being a teen differ significantly from what their children experience today. Adolescents are grappling with the challenges of social media, the pressure to get into the “right” college, and questions about what emerging technologies like AI mean for them — to name a few — and they’re doing it all during a time when their minds are deeply impressionable. As Ellen Galinsky puts it, they’re experiencing “heightened brain plasticity with extensive neural change.”
Galinsky knows what she’s talking about. Her book Mind in the Making set a high standard for understanding the brains of children, and now she’s turned her attention to the next phase with her latest work, The Breakthrough Years: A New Scientific Framework for Raising Thriving Teens. Working on the book involved a robust study of teenagers and their parents, which offered Galinsky fascinating insights into how teens think — and how their parents’ behaviors influence the adults they’ll become.
As parents across the country take up increasingly public campaigns to maintain a grasp on their children’s development, Katie Couric Media spoke to Galinsky about her most notable findings, the things teens say their parents get wrong about them, and what these breakthrough years should look like in an ideal world.
Katie Couric Media: What did you discover in your research about how the mental health of teens has changed over the last couple of generations?
Ellen Galinsky: Since 1991, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has tracked the well-being of nationally representative groups of high school students. Their latest findings show that the mental health of teens has significantly worsened. In 2011, 28 percent of high school students reported experiencing such persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness over the past year that they couldn’t participate in their regular activities. By 2021, that figure had jumped to 42 percent.
Data from the nationally representative study we conducted for The Breakthrough Years of 1,666 9- to 19-year-olds and their parents are quite similar: 34 percent of 9- to 19-year-olds reported experiencing depression, as did 39 percent of high school-aged young people.
In the study, we asked those surveyed: What would you like to tell the adults of America about people your age? Thirty-eight percent — quite a large percentage for an open-ended question — asked adults not to label them, not to generalize, not to stereotype them but to recognize their strengths. They wrote, “Some of us, but not all of us” are addicted to technology, are troublemakers, are sad, etc.
When looking at the statistics about mental health, we need to heed their words and remember that it is “some, but not all” teens. We need to refrain from labeling their whole generation as depressed or anxious. In the Breakthrough Years study, I found that relationships are the “swing vote factor” in whether teens felt stressed or hopeful about their futures; in whether they felt engaged in learning in school or turned off; in whether they felt lonely, sad, or happy.
Just as we have basic physical needs for food, water, and shelter, we — children and adults — have basic psychological needs, including the need to belong, be supported, have some autonomy, be treated with respect, feel competent yet challenged, and find ways to contribute to making the world a better place. When teens in my study had these needs met by relationships at home, with their friends, in school, in out-of-school activities, and online, they were much more likely to do well during the pandemic.
The Breakthrough Years is well-timed, as we’re in the midst of a spirited public conversation about how social media affects teenagers long-term. Would you say platforms like TikTok and Instagram are the most influential force acting on teens’ development today?
I wouldn’t say that. Parents are the most influential force in teens’ development today.
Parents may not realize how influential they are — our survey found that 37 percent of parents feel they have little influence on their adolescent children — but they are. A review of the literature from a neuroscience perspective by Ahna Suleiman of the University of California, Davis and Ron Dahl of the University of California, Berkeley concludes that parents are “highly influential” in adolescents’ development.
The debate about social media is a spirited one. The December 2023 consensus report on “Social Media and Adolescent Health” by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine says that while there’s a strong temptation to see a causal link between the declines in adolescents’ mental health and the increase in their use of social media, their scientific review led them to “more measured conclusions.” They found that “some features of social media can harm some young people’s mental health.” Again, it’s some, but not all.
A recent piece from The Cut argues that to truly address their children’s phone addictions, parents must curb their own relationship to their screens. What do you make of that?
This question addresses parents as role models — and yes, that’s critically important, too. In its May 2023 consensus advisory on social media use in adolescence, the American Psychological Association states that there’s evidence that parents’ use of social media (for example, not paying attention to kids because we are using social media) can affect adolescents’ usage.
I think, however, that this question is best answered by the words of adolescents writing in response to my question about what they want to tell adults about people their age. Although they were writing about lots of issues, not just social media, their observations are very applicable to social media.
A 13-year-old boy wrote, “We are watching u.” Similarly, a 16-year-old girl stated, “We understand what’s going on in our parents’ lives, even if they don’t tell [us]. We’re not stupid.” And a 14-year-old boy said, “You may think we are young, but we absorb everything that is said to us and that we see.” “We need you to be good role models,” a 15-year-old girl wrote, because, as another girl that age said, “We do hear what you all are saying, but we also see how you are behaving.”
So yes, we need to live how we want our children to live.
How does what you’ve learned from your research make you feel about proposals to ban TikTok in the United States?
The issue of the impact of social media is much larger than proposals to ban TikTok in the United States, which is about protecting Americans’ privacy and security from a Chinese-owned company. Here’s the main issue: The digital world, including social media, was not designed with children’s development in mind.
Right now, the responsibility for the use of social media is largely left up to parents, but parents can’t fix the algorithms that keep kids scrolling; they can’t fix the bad actors on media. These are roles for legislators, for tech companies, and for schools. The National Academy of Sciences calls on schools to teach digital literacy using evidence-based programs, and I totally agree.
The bottom line is that social media needs to be redesigned with children’s development in mind. If this happens, it would be very good news.
Teens who responded to your survey reported feeling misunderstood by the adults in their lives. Why is that, and what can adults do better to meet their children where they are?
From the very first focus groups and interviews I conducted for The Breakthrough Years, teens reported feeling misunderstood. “You were a teen once,” they said. ”Why don’t you understand us?”
I took that question very seriously and used the nationally representative study of adolescents and their parents to try to better understand it. One question we asked was particularly helpful: When you hear the phrase “the teen brain,” or “the adolescent brain,” what one word comes to mind?
The results were telling. Only 14 percent of parents used positive terms, like “exploring,” “creative,” “fun,” or “the future”; 27 percent used neutral terms, like “growing” or “changing”; and 59 percent used negative terms, like “forgetful,” “stupid,” “clueless,” “distracted,” “know-it-all,” or “bratty.”
Even more telling were the actual words that parents used to describe the adolescent/teen brain. The most frequent word was “immature.” It was used 11 percent of the time. That’s a remarkable convergence for an open-ended question. Another 8 percent wrote down “un-“, “in-“, or “not” words, including “undeveloped,” “unfinished,” and “incomplete.”
These words indicate that many adults are using an adult yardstick to understand adolescents and are finding them lacking. Young people aren’t adults. We wouldn’t say that toddlers are immature preschoolers when they’re learning what they can and can’t control. Children of this age are doing exactly what they are developmentally primed to do — what they need to do for their brains to develop.
Yet, I found that too many of us seem to think about our teens as immature adults, even though they, too, are doing exactly what their brains are priming them to do. They’re moving further out into the world, so they need to be highly sensitive to social and emotional situations. They need to become environmental detectors to determine what’s OK and what’s worrisome (and to react strongly) because their parents aren’t necessarily there to help them. They need to explore their identities and what it means to be and become them. They’re highly sensitive to what matters to them and to experiences where they can begin to figure this out.
Our study found that when parents have negative views of the teen/adolescent brain, those adolescents weren’t doing as well nine months later as those young people whose parents have positive or neutral views. The next time we’re motivated to tell a teen to “stop being such a teenager” or we use negative words about them — “you’re a hormonal minefield” — we might be the ones who need to stop.
You write of a friend who asked you two important questions as you were working on this book: “What kind of world will we leave our children?” and “What kind of children will we leave our world?” What is your sense of how our society could change in generations to come if parents, teachers, and caregivers don’t take these issues seriously?
It’s my fervent hope that we do take these issues seriously, and we know how to do so. Wonderfully, adolescents’ insights about the most important parenting and teaching strategies align with the scientific literature on what it takes to bring about change for teens.
The first strategy mentioned frequently by adolescents is to listen, or in the words of a 12-year-old, “listen more than you talk.” The second was to understand their development. I especially love the way one adolescent put it: “Listen with your when-I-was-a-child mind, not just your now-I-am-an-adult mind.” That means using a child development lens with them, and recognizing how powerful autonomy is to their development. A third strategy from adolescents about parenting and teaching skills was “if we are the problem, we need to be part of the solution.”
Thus, our efforts to improve their lives need to strengthen their skills, not just fix problems for them. This has been a main tenet of what’s called autonomy-supportive caregiving. Despite what the word “autonomy” may connote, autonomy-supportive adults do have clear expectations and rules consistently applied, but they encourage adolescents to problem-solve about how to make adult expectations work.
One 16-year-old I interviewed is named Hope Shinderman. During the pandemic, when schools went online, she noticed that while her teachers were working hard to keep her and her classmates engaged in digital classes, the teachers’ own kids were suffering. She could see that their children were bored and that the teachers were stressed in trying to work and parent at the same time. She had an idea: What if she tutored some of her teachers’ children? She invited four other classmates to be tutors with her. Within five days, they had 32 tutors serving 200 children.
That was 2020, and the initiative they created with their parents’ help was called Bored of Boredom. Hope has gone on to college, but Bored of Boredom lives on as a constructive way to use the digital world. Today, 800 high-school and college-age tutors reach thousands of students. Hope brought hope during the pandemic.
I wonder how many other Hopes are out there. I wonder: What if we gave them opportunities to make the world a better place for themselves, and what if we helped them do so? Then we could truly make these years the breakthrough years they deserve to be.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
