How Do You Raise a Happy Girl?

Teen girls aren't doing well. Can anything be done?

A new CDC report paints a grim picture of the state of American girlhood. As a former teenage girl raising a future teenage girl, the findings are especially upsetting. 

According to the Youth Risk Behavior Survey Data Summary & Trends Report: 2011-2021, teenage girls have experienced sexual assault at astonishing levels, increasing for the first time in a decade to 14%. This may be because more young women have an understanding of sexual consent than teenage girls did a decade ago, and are more able to tell when their boundaries have been violated, but it’s a disturbing statistic nonetheless.

Furthermore, according to the survey, 

Female students were nearly twice as likely to experience persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness and nearly twice as likely to attempt suicide during the past year compared to their male peers; with nearly 6 in 10 feeling persistently sad or hopeless and more than 1 in 10 attempting suicide.

Despair among teenage girls was on the rise across all demographics, but members of historically disenfranchised groups and LGBTQ teens were experiencing the most hardship and abuse. 

I’ve got a pretty good idea of who is behind most of the physical and sexual abuse suffered by teenage girls (it’s boys and men), but the question of why girls across the board are experiencing mental health crises is more complicated. 

The consensus seems to be that social media is behind this. I’m sure the answer isn’t that simple– it never is– but it feels like unfettered access to a hand held machine that enables kids to learn about every bad thing that is happening around the world at any given time, a machine that enables them to watch hard core pornography and ISIS death videos and hyper-edited photos of other girls and also be bullied from virtually anywhere on earth might have some bad effects, long term. 

A female acquaintance recently told me that her tween daughter has gone from bubbly and happy to sad and withdrawn within a matter of months. She traces it back to her daughter’s access to a phone that’s able to access the internet. It’s an epidemic in her daughter’s school, she says– all of the girls are having a horrible time. One of her classmates has been engaging in self-harm, and her parents had no idea. Everybody is sad. All the kids are online. Everybody knows what’s wrong, but nobody knows how to fix it. 

“It’s impossible,” she said. “You give the kids access to social media and they get depressed, but if you try to keep them off it, they’re social outcasts.” It seemed like she felt guilty about a set of circumstances that weren’t her fault.