Photo: supplied/ Oxford University
Even though terrifying for parents, we need to let teenagers take some risks, a UK academic says.
Dr Lucy Foulkes is an academic psychologist at the University of Oxford, where she leads research into adolescent mental health and social development.
In her new book, Coming of Age, she draws on decades of research to reveal why teens behave the way they do.
It was perfectly understandable why adolescence could be a tumultuous time, she told RNZ's Nine to Noon.
"It's this massive period of transformation. So, you start being a child dependent on your parents, and at the end point, you have to be a reasonably independent adult that can function in the world and have adult relationships on their own.
"And those two people are incredibly different, so it's inevitable that the road to get from one to the other is going to be experimental and bumpy."
All this was going on at a time of hormonal upheaval too, she said.
"All of that is happening while there's massive changes happening in your body, which means you're not so good at regulating your emotions, and you care very deeply about being rejected by your peers."
And while these changes were going on, teenagers were dropped into a high school environment, she said.
"You drop them into the very context where all the things they care about are going to start playing out.
"So, you couldn't design a better scenario where dramatic self-shaping memories would play out."
Her book was based on research and real-life recollections, she said.
"I got incredibly lucky with people who got in touch to share not only powerful things that had happened to them, but things that they were able to reflect on really well.
"And that's a really important part of the book, or message of the book, is that it's not just what happens to you in adolescence, but it's the story you tell yourself about what happens."
Some of themes which emerged from those recollections showed just how hierarchical school was, she said.
"Friendship groups are organised into a social hierarchy. And I find that very interesting, because I think it's the context in which everything else happens in your adolescence.
"I was fascinated by how many people that I interviewed just spontaneously brought that up, they would say 'I was in the popular group', or someone said, 'I was in the group of socially adept nerds'."
Risk-taking was a natural and necessary part of the adolescent experience, she said.
"We have to try things out and figure out what works and what doesn't. It's all about reaching that end point of being an independent adult who understands and can navigate the world, and inevitably that involves some trial and error which then happens in adolescence."
Sex too was something which parents might want to "bury their heads in the sand about," she said.
"It absolutely can be, especially for girls, the riskiest thing that you can do as an adolescent, but at the same time, there's plenty of ways in which it can happen safely, and actually should happen gradually and safely, because you want to have a functioning sex life as an adult, and in adolescence, that's laying the groundwork for that."
She takes an equally pragmatic approach to porn and teens.
"If you teach them too late, they've already seen it without that helpful context.
"If you teach them too young, you are potentially explaining it to them when they didn't already know about it."
She believed some of the narrative about the risks to teenagers' mental health from social media and phone use was overstated and not "fully representative of the evidence that we have".
There were numerous reasons why teenagers might be more anxious, she said.
"Different economic factors, the pandemic, changes in educational pressure, a transformation in how we talk about mental health, which would change how people report it. Social media is probably relevant, but it's an inaccurate oversimplification to say that that has been the cause of the increase in child and teenage anxiety."
It shouldn't be forgotten that adolescence could be a happy time, she said.
"Some teenagers are struggling massively, but a lot of them are resilient by default and are coping and navigating through this stormy period of life.
"And some of them are having fun, I think that gets lost as well. At times they had a lot of fun as a teenager, and it does still exist. And when we talk about teenagers, we shouldn't just focus on the bad stuff and actually try and celebrate it as a potentially fun, interesting period of life as well."
