This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Teenagers: The Evidence Base challenges the assumption that extreme domestic turbulence is an essential feature of teenagerdom. To make this case, social scientist Matilda Gosling charts the cognitive changes that make this age group unique: their acute emotional sensitivity, their compulsion to distance themselves from their parents and their propensity for risk-taking (which actually peaks in early adulthood). It is during adolescence, she shows, that we first develop the ability to think about thinking.
The book delivers these psychological insights without pathologising or generalising teenagers as an unknowable “other”. Instead, she offers commonsense parenting advice which, at its base, could apply to most interpersonal relationships: communicate constructively, with the appropriate balance of warmth and firmness, and seek more to understand than be understood.
Gosling introduced me to the term “co-rumination”, which illuminated a feature of my adolescence that I could not previously articulate. Co-rumination particularly affects teenage girls. Teenagers generally consider their friendships to be more important than their family relationships; whilst teenage boys’ friendships tend to revolve around shared activities, girls typically form them through exchanging thoughts and feelings.
Teenage girls can thus become caught in a depressive feedback loop, obsessively fixating on negative emotions and projecting negative emotions back onto one another. I saw this “co-rumination” play out in my girls’ school: when we were 14 or 15, my friends and I talked ad infinitum about how unhappy we were, without ever arriving at a solution. Even then, I had a faint sense that we were enabling each other.
Co-rumination explains why mental health mindfulness programmes in schools have been found to make teenagers feel worse; endlessly discussing negative feelings is, in itself, no solution to them. We should also be wary of overdiagnosing teenagers with conditions such as depression and anxiety.
My peers and I sought such diagnoses, perhaps out of a desire to have our experience validated or because diagnosis carries a social cachet. But treating negative emotions as an innate pathology risks entrenching them; teenagers should instead, this book argues, be encouraged to view transient negative emotions as part of the healthy range of human emotion which they are resilient enough to handle.
After I left, my school introduced a “welfare room”. Certain students (often — but not always — those with mental health diagnoses or with ADHD or autism) have special arrangements whereby they are allowed to leave lessons and take refuge there. Staff must let them go even if they suspect abuse of the system.
This is not kind. If you excuse a child from a lesson on the grounds, for example, that they are feeling anxious over an imminent test, you compound that anxiety by depriving them of the chance to overcome it. You also, of course, deprive them of learning time. So they leave school knowing less and less equipped to function in the world. This is the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Alongside resilience, physical activity is another core element of good adolescent mental health. My friends and I were academically high-achieving but no more so than our peers who played sport, who were also, I think, less chronically miserable than us. I daresay we spent more time on social media than our happier peers. And it was online that we first saw depression, anxiety and anorexia as glamorised in-groups to which we, lacking in real-world community, wanted to belong.
Gosling suggests that even online content which ostensibly promotes good mental health (such as content made by “qualified therapists”) may have the negative consequence of glamorising mental illness. This was certainly true for me. I was exposed to content that promoted anorexia from the age of twelve: hashtags such as #ProAna and #Thinpso contained hundreds of images of skeletal women in underwear, often with visible self-harm scars.
Photo captions told me that if I ate less, I would be happy and pretty and loved. But the anorexia “recovery” pages I followed were damaging, because they, perversely, made me want to have the condition.
The glamorisation of anorexia and self-harm may have begun online but soon spread
Though acknowledging these dangers, Gosling remains equivocal about social media: she is not certain it lies behind the persistent decline in adolescent mental health since 2010 and cites evidence that social media improves some teenagers’ wellbeing. That may be so, but I wonder whether this bet-hedging is a function of pragmatism as much as it is of academic uncertainty: getting teenagers off their phones is very probably a losing battle.
Co-rumination also makes girls more vulnerable to social contagion. The glamorisation of anorexia and self-harm may have begun online but soon spread through my school cohort: girls hid food in napkins and displayed massive plasters on their wrists. Every single member of my friend group happened to reveal in the same week that they fancied girls.
Most of us turned out only to be “gay for the stay”, but a more committedly lesbian friend of mine now uses “they/he” pronouns and is raising funds for an elective double mastectomy (sorry: “top surgery”). My sense is that, had we been born a few years later, it is likely that more of us would have identified as transgender and would have done so whilst still at school. Being same-sex attracted females with a collective history of depression, anxiety and eating disorders, we fit the profile for child transition. Trans teenagers are ten times more likely than other teens to be same-sex attracted.
A former teacher of mine reports growing numbers of trans students and tells me she feels unable to challenge their choice to transition without being dismissed as hateful. As last year’s Cass Review shows, the “affirmation” approach to gender dysphoria prevents adults from raising safeguarding concerns about (invariably vulnerable and unhappy) children seeking to undergo often-permanent physical interventions.
It is neither compassionate nor clinically sound to affirm a child’s belief that there is something fundamentally wrong with them which can only be cured through transition, since medical transition has not been found to bring any short-term mental health benefits over taking a placebo. What these girls experience as gender dysphoria seems really to be their discomfort with the feminisation of their bodies during puberty.
But this discomfort is near-universal, and dysphoria is merely the most recent manifestation of it. Previously it was displayed through eating disorders, hence the well-documented correlation between the conditions.
By interpreting this complex body of evidence for a lay audience, Teenagers offers some much-needed clarity to parents questioning how best to help their teenagers navigate an ever more complicated world. It is not going to get any easier.
