12 Common Teen Issues & How to Support

12 Common Teenage Issues

People often idealize adolescence and focus on the positive developments that occur during this period. Unfortunately, teens face significant issues that can throw them off-course. These issues include depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and a variety of other significant challenges. Family background and family cultures can shape the ways in which teens face situations, but it’s almost impossible to protect a teen from risks to their well-being.

Teenagers are hyper-connected to their social groups and the power of social media to convince someone to try something or feel a certain way about themselves is immeasurable. While in the past, teens would be calling their social group virtually 24/7, now their phones offer connection to social media sites that have very dark pockets where teens may innocently wander in but be unable to surface to their prior state of emotional wellbeing.

While it’s impossible to keep teens protected from harmful influences, physical or mental health ailments, and poor behavior choices around the clock, parents and caregivers are in a position to provide support and patience as they help their child manage their issues.

The following are 12 common problems teens face:

1. Depression

Teenage depression is becoming increasingly common and 13% of teens acknowledged having experienced at least one depressive episode.² Girls are more likely to experience depression than boys and this may reflect the role that social connection and social acceptance play in their lives. Not every teen who has experienced depression in adolescence will carry the symptoms of depression into adulthood, but there is a higher likelihood of it occurring.³

2. Anxiety

Teen anxiety has greatly increased over time and 31.9% of teens have experienced some form of a teen anxiety disorder.⁴ There are many reasons that anxiety might arise including school anxiety, teenage social anxiety, worries about family issues, and worry about the world. When anxiety keeps a teen from showing up in social settings, it impairs relationships.

3. Peer Pressure

One of the most impenetrable negative forces that affects teens is peer pressure. Adolescence is the time when being accepted by others is the most coveted status. When there is a sense of social rejection from others, it can generate anxiety that keeps a teen from risking further rejection or lead to feelings of depression. This leaves teens feeling isolated and resolved to the belief that efforts to engage with others are hopeless.

4. Bullying

While bullying has been an unwelcome part of campus cultures for centuries, the arrival of social media opened the door to more invasive and harmful methods of bullying including cyberbullying and slut-shaming. In fact, around half of all teens in a Pew Research Study indicated they had experienced cyberbullying.⁵

Cyberbullies are able to post hurtful words online anonymously and the shaming of young women can cause lasting emotional damage. Unfortunately, technology allows for the immediate massive sharing of these posts and pictures which multiplies the harm done exponentially.

5. Body Shaming

While women and men have always aspired to meet the cultural ideals of body shape and size, social media has upped the game. Not only are there so many more images available for comparison by a teen, but by teens posting images of themselves online it opens the door to body shaming and hurtful comments.

6. Social Media

Social media provides opportunities for teens to stay connected to friends in a myriad of ways that were impossible a generation ago. Unfortunately, when social media takes the place of other forms of engagement and activities, it can become harmful. There are many ways that social media affects teens.

Focusing too much on curating images of oneself for others to view or spending too much time experiencing envy of others can both create distress for teens. However, the desire to appear as something more than you are reflects the complicated relationship between social media and self-esteem. When teens build themselves up through social media, this may positively affect their self-esteem; however, the effect can be short-lived if their exaggerations or falsehoods are exposed.

7. Academic Challenges

Academic pressure is a constant for most teenagers and the more pressure a parent exerts on a child to perform well in school, the greater the harm these demands might cause. When teens feel incapable of mastering a subject, this can cause them to lose confidence, and if parents have little empathy for their child’s struggles, this adds to the feelings of distress.

In addition, students who struggle with speaking in public, a condition called glossophobia, may have difficulty succeeding in school. When success in school is a teen’s “job,” they can feel immense pressure to meet expectations. If the student feels they are in over their head, they may not feel comfortable or know how to access resources.

8. Low Self-Esteem

It can be a challenge to overcome low self-esteem. Not surprisingly, the teen years are a period when self-esteem is universally pretty low.⁶ Self esteem takes a hit after childhood due to the intensity of peer pressure and feeling the need to measure up.

With the constant bombardment of media images and potential for anonymous bullying online, self-esteem can bottom out. Self-esteem issues can negatively affect a teen’s social world and social engagement. When teens feel bad about themselves, they may lack the social confidence necessary to forge healthy relationships and this may impact their overall wellbeing.

9. Stress

Teens today are more stressed than other generations have been. Today’s teens don’t just worry about academics or making the team, their concerns include mass shootings, climate change, global warming, suicide rate increase, immigration issues, and personal safety.⁷

Today’s teens are yesterday’s “overscheduled children” and they’ve been dealing with stress all their lives, but larger scale issues now increase their stress levels which can lead to anxiety, depression, and overall compromised wellbeing. When stress about grades interacts with stress about social connections, romantic attachments, academic performance, and homelife issues, it can become a huge burden.

Some teens may experience toxic stress, which refers to stress that is chronic in nature and does lasting damage.

10. Risky Sexual Behaviors

Sexual curiosity and exploration begin in early adolescence and some teens run the risk of engaging in risky sexual behaviors. The media, including entertainment such as music videos, movies, and video games, as well as social media play a role in sexualizing youth and adolescents.

The risk of being drawn into risky sexual activities through sexual coercion can increase through online relationships, and the consequences for these behaviors can be high. Research from the CDC indicates that some risky behaviors are increasing.⁸ However, when teens feel pressured by a partner or by peers to take unnecessary risks, these behaviors can lead to grave consequences including pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. When these are revealed to family members, teens may be subjected to rejection, punishment, and shame.

11. Substance Use and Abuse

The teen years are prime years for pushing boundaries and experimentation of all types. When teens are presented with opportunities to step outside the rules, they may easily be enticed by the satisfaction found in rule breaking. While there is some evidence that overall alcohol and drug use is decreasing for teens, there are still too many teens who experiment with these substances and struggle with addiction.⁹

Teen substance abuse can negatively affect a teen’s ability to succeed in school, participate in extra-curricular activities such as athletics, and maintain healthy relationships with their families.

12. Gambling

An increasing number of teens are engaging in online betting as the internet has opened up the opportunities for individuals to participate from their own homes. Teens also gamble socially as they wager on games of chance, sporting events, or other games and events. While only a small percentage of teens are addicted to gambling, the teen brain is primed for addiction and gambling is designed to keep them hooked as they hope for their next big “win.”¹⁰

Early warning signs of overindulgence or addiction to gambling include falling academic performance, worries about earning extra money, spending too much time online or being uninvolved in normal friend and family activities, and increased worry and anxiety. The need for cash may lead to criminal behaviors that may begin with money or valuables being missed by family members. Gambling can become a process addiction and it is important for family members to recognize the gravity of their teen’s behavior if an addiction develops and to seek professional treatment for their child.

How to Support a Teen in Overcoming Their Issues

The most important step a parent or caregiver can take is to establish open communication and the second most important thing is to maintain it even when it gets difficult or feels impossible. Recognizing that boundary-pushing is normal, but that true risks to health and well-being need to be contained can be a delicate balancing act.

Parents need to allow an adolescent increasing freedom as they move through the teen years, so curfews can get later and freedom can increase, but when a teen is showing signs beyond the normal moodiness and secretiveness of adolescence, they should check in with their teen in a way that makes it okay for their teen to reveal their concerns.

Below are ways to support your teen in overcoming their challenges:

Ensure Communication With Your Teen is Healthy

Healthy communication means that it runs both ways – you not only talk to your teen, but you also listen to them, as well. Too often, parents want to jump in to fix things or to tell the child what they’re doing wrong, but parents often need to listen more than lecture. By making it okay for a teen to tell you what’s troubling them, you’re already working on the solution to the problem.

Create a Safe Space

To allow for healthy communication, parents and caregivers need to create a safe space where teens won’t feel so judged that they’re too afraid to share. Being judgmental won’t be able to retroactively keep the teen’s issue from starting. The teen is already feeling some distress about the issue, so don’t shut them down by not being invested enough to let them share what’s going on without jumping to judgment.

If a teen is dealing with issues such as self-esteem, depression, or anxiety, they may feel a stigma about their mental health concerns, so assure them that there is no shame in dealing with emotional or mental distress.

Make It Okay for Them to Stumble

Some parents send the message to their children that the child needs to be perfect and toe the line 100% of the time. While obedience may be what is desired, adolescence is always going to be a time of pushing boundaries and potentially making mistakes. If teens are not given the chance to learn from their mistakes and only castigated or punished, they may work harder to continue their behavior but work harder not to get caught.

Let teens know that you understand their need to experiment or test boundaries, but that their behavior may lead to some significant and unpleasant consequences. If they feel it’s okay to stumble, they are more likely to reach out to you for support sooner.

Encourage Them to Seek Support

When you feel that your child is dealing with something more than just normal teen moodiness and you feel that they would benefit from outside support, offer to help. You can encourage them to reach out to the school counselor or mental health provider. In addition to individual meetings, there might be in-school group counseling meetings for students experiencing similar concerns as your child.

If a teen’s concerns seem to be growing and your efforts at support haven’t been as successful as hoped, you might want to consider seeking out a counselor for your teen. A counselor or therapist can help your teen develop coping skills for anxiety, depression, or any other mental health struggles. While not every therapist specializes in adolescent therapy, it is possible to find a great therapist for your teen.

Build Their Self-Esteem

Being a teen has never been easy due to the social pressures and the tension between wanting to push the boundaries but not wanting to push parents and caregivers so far that the price is too great. Today’s teens face social pressure and social comparison in much more personal ways than earlier generations.

Images of others’ successes and online engagement, such as cyberbullying, social comparison on social media, and online sexual baiting and coercion are happening in a teen’s home on their own cell phone or even the family computer.

Help teens learn to validate their accomplishments and self-esteem on internal measures, not the false and photoshopped images online. Help your teen identify their strengths and acknowledge the ways in which they shine. When teens feel appreciated for who they are by their families and friends, they may be better able to manage peer pressure.

Don’t Catastrophize but Don’t Ignore the Problem

When a child is presenting concerning behavior, the best response is a careful, concerned, and loving response. When parents pretend a problem doesn’t exist, they send the message to the teen that it’s not okay to need support. It may also suggest that their parents don’t notice or care about them.

On the other hand, don’t catastrophize the situation, either. Adolescents misstep, but that doesn’t mean that they are doomed to fail again. By keeping a balanced approach, you help the teen feel capable of getting past the issue. Seeking outside help may be needed, especially if addictive or harmful behaviors are involved, or your teen might just need a break from social media for a while. Assess the situation before you lose your cool.

In My Experience

The adolescent years are extremely challenging for today’s teens. There are unrealistic expectations promoted through the media, previously unequaled levels of access to illicit substances, prevalence of cyberbullying, and less time spent socializing face-to-face with peer groups and friends. These challenges leave teens vulnerable to psychological and emotional distress as well as to risky coping mechanisms including alcohol, drugs, and other behaviors.

Recognize that things are tough for your teen and ensure that you create an environment in which your teen can share with you what is going on in their lives. Learning to withhold kneejerk negative reactions and to foster a clear sense of unconditional love can create the space your teen needs to reach out to you for help without feeling that there will be harsh punishment or rejection.