What Changes During Adolescence?

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Attitudes towards young people's problems vary from sympathy to frustration.

A new report about supporting young people’s mental well-being challenges the snowflake myth.

Common diagnoses of autism and ADHD are often applied too easily, but that is not the end of the story.

Young people seek a diagnosis as the pathway to help, and we need to change this model.

“Snowflake generation” is a term applied to young people who are quickly overwhelmed or “melted” by commonplace pressures and challenges. The rise in young people’s mental health problems and diagnoses of conditions such as autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are sometimes put in this framework, whereby young people today are less resilient and robust than in previous generations of youth who navigated equally, if not more difficult, environments.

Shifting views of young people’s dependence

Getting a sound perspective on young people’s well-being is essential to assessing appropriate levels of support: How much do we help them by offering practical, emotional, financial and professional support, and how much does such support hinder their capacity to grow resilience themselves?

Across the past three decades, my views of young people’s challenges and how much support the grown-ups in their lives should offer have changed. At the beginning of this century, I wrote about the split between young people’s realities on the one hand and cultural expectations about maturity on the other. [1] I argued that expecting young people to be adults when they reach the age of legal adulthood was unrealistic and........

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