The Pressures on Teens Today: For Better and For Worse

I'm so grateful you're reading Research to Thrive By on Substack! My book, The Breakthrough Years is available for purchase here.

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There’s a new Common Sense Media study about the impact of social media on teens—or at least that was the scope of the study, as it was originally planned.

I heard Emily Weinstein, of the Center for Digital Thriving at Graduate School of Education and lead author of the report, talk about the study’s evolution to a large parent group in Manhattan a few weeks ago. As her center and the other study partners—Common Sense Media and the Lilly Family Center for Philanthropy at Indiana University—listened to teens, they realized they needed to refocus the study to investigate the pressures on teens today and how social media, plus other factors, amplify and reduce these pressures.

Released on Mental Health Awareness Day this past October, Weinstein said social media is “not the whole story and we need to get the story right if we want to help.” The report, Unpacking the Grind Culture in American Teens: Pressure, Burnout, and the Role of Social Media, is based on a nationally representative study of 1,545 U.S. teens age 13 to 17 that began by listening to teens and concluded with teens co-interpreting the results.

In creating a study with, not just about, teens, this study was practicing civic science, a form of research I've used for three decades. With civic science, the so-called subjects of a study become its co-creators—they help shape the questions, interpret the results, and translate the findings into action.

The authors of the Grind Culture study found that when you ask young people how they see the world, you’re likely to discover that they and adults see things differently. It’s always felt to me that adults and teens are looking out at the world through a picture window and at times seeing quite different landscapes.

In the Grind Culture study, the research team found that the majority of teens (81%) feel somewhat or very pressured in at least one of these domains:

The study also asked teens where the pressures are coming from. Is it their parents or the adults at school? Is it their classmates or their closest friends? Do they pressure themselves? Does social media pressure them? The researchers found that all of these factors matter, especially the adults in teens’ lives.

The study also asked whether these people—offline or online—made the pressure better or worse. They consistently found that the impact was both negative and positive. Since social media is frequently discussed as the primary cause of a teen mental health crisis, let's look at what teens report:

• The majority (three-fourths to two-thirds) says that social media (at least sometimes) worsens every pressure they feel.

• At the same time, meaningful proportions of teens (39% to 52%) say that social media (at least sometimes) reduces each of these pressures.

What I particularly admire about this study is that it puts social media in its proper context—as a tool that can both exacerbate and alleviate pressures on teens. I strongly believe that addressing this requires a balanced approach by providing limits plus autonomy.

When you look at the landscape with young people, it’s evident that this landscape is not black and white—its colors are nuanced and we must see things in this nuanced way if we are to help them learn and thrive.

I expect you’ve also noticed that each of these pressures are nuanced too. The pressures are negative but they can also be positive. What parent or teacher among us doesn’t want teens to begin to discover their game plan, to succeed at school, to have a good social life, to have caring friendships and to begin to find ways to contribute to making the world a better place?

Let’s look at the number one pressure—having a game plan—through a nuanced prism. I certainly heard a lot about this issue in the interviews I did for The Breakthrough Years.

Natalie, a seventh grader from Boston, told me:

Teenagers have a lot of pressure. We feel pressured to get good grades. I worry: Am I going to get into a good school, get a good job? A few of my friends are saying, “I know exactly what I want to be when I grow up.” It kind of makes me think, “Oh, my gosh. I might never find what I want to do for a living.”

But I’m just in middle school.

I see this as the downside of a future-oriented culture, a “readiness culture,” if you will. The upside is that children do need to be ready for the next steps in their lives and we know that finding something they care about (a sense of purpose) will help them, but an all-encompassing emphasis on the future can dim the power of the present.

I found a number of young people becoming overly concerned about a faraway future—for example, Natalie thinking she should know what’s typically unknowable, such as what will motivate her in one to two decades. These comments from two sixteen-year-olds sum it up:

I feel as though everything is for the future. In middle school, everyone’s pressuring you to be ready for high school. In high school, everyone’s pressuring you to be ready for college. In college, everyone’s pressuring you to be ready for life.

And:

My parents are always saying: “Oh—when I was young,” and “I wish I were young again.” But when you’re young, everyone’s pressuring you to be older, and they don’t let you enjoy it.”

So, as the adults in teens' worlds, we need to help them navigate not only social media but also all of these pressures, especially having a game plan. We can help young people understand that now is the time to explore possibilities and ask questions, rather than feeling pressured to know exactly what the future holds. Additionally, we need to equip them with the skills necessary for managing pressure.

If we listen to teens, we will be so much better equipped to parent and teach them.

And that’s exactly what happened after the research presentation on the Grind Culture. The event organizers had invited a panel of high school students to respond to the findings.

Unlike most events I attend about teens where the Q&A jumps right into the evils of social media as if that’s the one silver bullet; at this event, the Q&A was about parents wanting to see the same landscape as their kids see. One father—so movingly—asked the panel of young people:

What experiences would be most exciting and meaningful to you in your high school years?

That’s a question that all of us who live with or work with teens should consider!