Why it’s difficult to be a teenage girl in this day and age
IT HAS never been harder to be a teenager, with experts claiming young girls are feeling increasingly anxious and overwhelmed in our fast-paced modern society. Here are some of the challenges they face.
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THEY get a pretty bad rap in the community — drama queens, princesses and overly emotional are just some of the labels they cop.
The truth, though, is it has never been harder to be a teenager, with experts claiming young girls are feeling increasingly anxious and overwhelmed in our fast-paced modern society.
For parents who have experienced the door-slamming, name-calling, tear-jerking behaviour at the heart of the stereotype associated with this group, it can be a frustrating time.
But experts claim if we understand the pressures these young women are under, and the physiological changes their minds and bodies are going through, we can help them navigate the often confusing teen years a little easier.
“There’s a lot of real strength with teenage girls that is often ignored in society,” author and clinical psychologist Dr Sarah Hughes tells BW Magazine.
“Some of the things over which parents end up butting heads with teenage girls are the kind of characteristics that end up making them really strong women. Teenage girls really start to have their own opinions and want to think for themselves, which is such a great thing, but if you’re used to not dealing with that, and then all of a sudden you are, it can be the cause of a lot of conflict.”
In her new book Skip The Drama, Hughes outlines many of the more common behaviour traits associated with young women, such as being selfish, procrastinating, being a drama queen and moody, and offers practical tips and advice to deal with the behaviour.
She also tackles the more serious issues parents face such as young girls who want to diet and have issues with body image, wanting to have a boyfriend and cutting, or self-harm.
Marina Passalaris, the CEO and founder of Beautiful Minds which provides self-esteem and confidence education to pre-teens and teens, says the main issues concerning teenage girls are anxiety, friendship issues and body image.
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These topics on their own are not new and may well have been around for generations, but Passalaris says the fast pace of modern society, where everyone is connected 24/7, has overwhelmed a generation of young girls.
“I was in a Sydney high school presenting a program to Year 8 and 9 girls … and these are the issues the majority of teenage girls are concerned about,” she says.
“Particularly in young girls engaging in social media, they are feeling overwhelming pressure to live up to unreal expectations, there are a lot of comparisons going on. Also, young girls are a lot more aware of world events and often feel unsafe in their own world.
“As adults we can see bombings, for example, on the news, take a step back and put it into perspective, we can disconnect. But young girls cannot. Because of their access to smartphones and devices they are consuming media that is not necessarily correct and all this leads to anxiety.”
Hughes says she has felt the need to ditch the social media herself because she has found it overwhelming in the past.
“I joined Instagram for about five minutes once because I was pregnant and looking up different products,” Hughes says.
“I had the worst morning sickness, was throwing up about 10 times a day for seven months and I kept seeing all these posts of pregnant women loving life and enjoying pregnancy. And it made me feel like crap.
“We’re wired to compare ourselves to others and I had to disengage from it all. It brought home to me that I was an adult with pretty good coping skills and it still impacted me and I got sucked into it.
“So imagine teenage girls, without any of those skills, dealing with that.”
In her book, Hughes explains how the teenage brain develops and why it can sometimes be difficult for teenage girls to act in a mature, responsible manner.
“One of the last regions of the brain to mature is the prefrontal cortex,” the book claims. “(This region) is involved in everything from planning, emotional and behavioural control, to problem-solving and decision making.”
This immature brain is forced to cope with so many new strains, experts claim, and combined with modern pressures such as connectivity through technology, a greater number of households where both parents work full time, and an over-scheduling of activities, modern teens are under a whole new level of stress.
And nowhere is this more obvious than in their friendship groups.
“It seems to be getting a lot worse for adolescents,” Passalaris says.
“Finding a place among the social network has never been so important, it truly is survival of the fittest.
“Groups change so often … You can be in a good place one week and two weeks later completely frozen out. Add to this the pressure of always being connected to these friendship groups through social media and it can wreak havoc. We give teenagers these adult tools to stay connected but they don’t have the adult brain to manage it.”
To combat this, Passalaris takes young girls back to basics and talks to them about the importance of sticking together and that being a good friend is a great skill to have.
“A big part of our education is teaching kindness and being empathetic,” she says.
“It’s about raising their self-esteem so they can make good decisions and not be one of the worker bees pulled in all different directions at the whim of the queen bee. We teach them how to move into or out of friendship groups.”
GIRLS TORN BETWEEN LIFE AS AN ADULT AND A CHILD
THERE’S nothing awkward about this beautiful group of teenage girls. But an “awkward stage” is exactly how southwest Sydney teen Gigi Dooley describes girls her age. The 14-year-old says one of the most difficult things about being a teenage girl is that they are stuck in a world between almost being adults and still being a child.
“It all comes down to us wanting to grow up and also stay a kid,” she says of her group of friends, including Taylah Piper, 13, Lilli Parker, 14, and Romy Glass, 15.
“It’s kind of an awkward stage and it can be really difficult because it’s only human nature for us to want to grow up and be older than we are.”
She says social media is driving this desire to grow up too soon, with her Instagram feed and YouTube accounts filled with older celebrities including Kendall Jenner who has about 94 million Instagram followers.
“For us it’s like 18 is the golden age and we aspire to it because we see so many people doing wonderful things in the world through social media,” Gigi says.
“We see growing up as being able to have more opportunities and freedom to do amazing things.”
Gigi says on the plus side, social media helps teenagers explore a wider world than previous generations were able to.
But on the down side, it has made friendships difficult to navigate.
“The hardest thing among girls is definitely the growing nature of cattiness,” Gigi says.
“I’m sure that’s been around a long time but with social media, you can’t get away from it. I really feel we need to start respecting each other before we can expect others to respect us.”