Narrating Adolescence

Jamel Shabazz, Back in the Days, photos from 1980s NYC.

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation (2024) and Matt Richtel’s How We Grow Up (2025) are stories about adolescence. I will be talking through each book in the next episode of the New Thoughts Podcast, but here are a few, quick thoughts (subject to significant future revision) about adolescence—as it is narrated by Haidt and Richtel. 

Haidt and Richtel likely experienced happy childhoods. If they didn’t, they have become the type of adults capable of imagining such a childhood (a huge achievement either way!). Their growing up stories are about evolution, cells, hormones, social media, mental health, adventure, play, and (mostly) second chances (tragically, not everyone survives growing up).

At least two substantive threads link the books together: biological determinism (by which I mean that they seem to think that, if left undisturbed, a genetic process will unfold, a second birth, making us who we are) and social media. They both agree that adolescence is a fraught period of time when our genetic composition unfolds in surprising and obviously highly consequential ways.

Haidt and Ritchel (and the best existing evidence) agree: social media fucks up our unfolding. The solution, Haidt argues, is two-fold: much, much less social media, holding off exposure to it (ideally) until we are 18—or (more realistically) until we are 16—combined with opportunities for risky, less adult rule-based play.

Richtel’s narrative is appealing because he starts out with a philosophical question: What is adolescence? He then introduces us to the history of adolescence (not a thing until the 18^th-century) and to the history of adolescent studies, beginning with Stanley Hall (1904).

Tracing the development of adolescent studies from Hall to modern neuroscience, Richtel further introduces what he considers the “outdated” theories of psychoanalysis. He cites Anna Freud’s description of how this momentous time feels to tweens and teens:

I take it that it is normal for an adolescent to behave for a considerable length of time in an inconsistent and unpredictable manner . . .  to fight his [sic] impulses and to accept them; to ward them off successfully and to be overrun by them; to love his parents and to hate them; to revolt against them and to be dependent on them; to be deeply ashamed to acknowledge his mother before others and, unexpectedly, to desire heart-to-heart talks with her; to thrive on imitation of and identification with others while searching unceasingly for his own identity . . .  (How We Grow Up, 39, emphasis added).

Haidt’s narrative is mostly about Gen Z. They are the first to go through puberty with the smartphone and social media apps like Facebook and Instagram.

Haidt focuses on the mental health decline of adolescents caused by social media—especially the devastating impact of Instagram on tween and teen girl mental health (tween and teen boys have not fared better, but for different reasons)—from 2010 onward. His story is historically rich and complicated, starting out in the 1980s with rise of “safetyism” in parenting.

It’s an important development, as the parental imposition of the phantasm of danger on the real world traps kids inside the home, or under the eye, if you will, of their parents. And thereby fucking up their genetic unfolding.

With the advent of the smartphone in 2007, further developed in 2008 to download social media apps, the virtual world breaks into the inner lives of increasingly real world averse kids. In 2009, Facebook and Twitter evolve to include the “like” (FB) and “retweet” (Twitter) buttons, making these apps nearly irresistible to developing young minds.

The real world, however, is also turbulent with change. Physical strength, for example, has become less relevant in the real world. Nowadays, the information complex real world requires skills like emotional regulation, negotiation, and empathy.

Brains kill the villain (Musical trivia! In what musical does a sensitive prince found in a book teach this?). Girls are doing much better in the real world.

Boys find a type of “salvation” in the virtual world of video games and porn. The evidence is clear: more and more boys are failing to castaway (Richtel) or to launch (Haidt) into the world as competent adult males, lovers, and citizens.

One real world way to solve for failure to launch is, according to Haidt’s story, more male mentors for boys. Research suggests that boys need male teachers in their extended family, neighborhoods, and in their schools to help them castaway or to launch, to discover their unique adult male voices.

Normative or traditional psychoanalytic theory supports the idea that “normal” development, leaving home, for boys entails identifying with their fathers. The point is: only a male can save males.

From 2010 on, boys and girls arrive at the same, hellish spot—though by different pathways. The X is revealed in certain empty emergency rooms (an overstatement, of course).

Less risky play (i.e., minimally supervised play in the world with other tweens and teens) means fewer thrilling experiences the brain needs to develop well—and fewer broken bones. Interestingly, Richtel points out that between 900-1500 C.E., broken bones = the experience of growing up—and, until very recently, such injuries were common, especially for boys.

Real world averse, boys are ending up in a place traditionally more populated by girls: the world of internalized discontent (boys have more traditionally acted out). Social media apps are causing skyrocketing rates of sadness, anxiety, and loneliness among both tween and teen boys and girls. Emergency rooms are filling up as a consequence of internalized or mental health wounds.

All that makes sense to me—and while the situation is bleak, especially for cis straight white boys from lower-income households (a social fact backed by a bunch of data)—it is well within the reach of our collective power to co-create a world in which all our kids can thrive.

One way to redeem the hellscape of contemporary tween and teen mental health is not mentioned (but there is still hope, as I have not yet finished Richtel’s book): non-exclusionary feminism for tweens and teens.

While Richtel cites Anna Freud’s description of how adolescence feels—he makes nothing , so far, of what Freud identifies as the longing of (male?) tweens and teens to have “heart-to-heart talks” with the maternal figure(s) in their lives. Freud’s idea does not seem “outdated” to me.

In fact, given that women are finding success in a rapidly changing real world—a world that is often actually harmful to them—does it not make sense to create social pathways by which both girls and boys can learn from inclusionary feminists—and perhaps even learn to identify with various maternal figures with whom they can fashion “heart-to-heart talks”?