What Changes During Adolescence?

Find a therapist to support kids and teens

Teens are absorbing unhealthy frameworks for intimacy from social media and porn, before lived experience.

New studies confirm that the parent-teen relationship is a strong predictor of health in adult relationships.

Parents can counter the cultural curriculum by asking teens open-ended questions about love and relationships.

One mother noticed her 15-year-old son, Ethan, watching videos about becoming an "alpha" male in dating. She heard advice about status, emotional detachment, and dominance. Another mother saw her 13-year-old daughter, Chloe, spending hours deleting and reposting photos on social media, trying to decide which version of herself looked "hot."

Neither situation is about love, but both show the misdirected lessons in it.

Earlier generations learned about love and intimacy gradually, through friendships, heartbreak, handwritten notes, awkward conversations, and “going out.” The face-to-face fumbling was the education.

Today, the teachings arrive faster and from many sources. Tweens and teens absorb frameworks for adult love through social media, pornography, dating podcasts, and algorithm-driven content that never stops. They adopt the vocabulary of “insecure” or “avoidant” attachment styles, red flags, and toxic relationships without much opportunity to practice the underlying skills to avoid these things. Young people now learn more about emotional and physical intimacy observationally, not through lived experience.

The question is what this is doing to them.

Adolescence as Identity Marketing

The developmental goal of adolescence is identity formation, essentially figuring out who you are, with the contrasting pitfall of role confusion (Erikson, 1968). Today, many adolescents strive for identity marketing instead, figuring out how to optimize outside perceptions. Trends like "looksmaxxing" push boys to focus on physical appearance and social clout. Girls face similar pressure through hypersexualized beauty standards and appearance-based validation.........

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