If you feel like your teen is a mystery, new data may help give you a better look inside their world.
While teen boys and girls are facing many of the same issues, including school pressure and mental health concerns, they may need different kinds of support, according to a Pew Research Center Survey published Thursday.
“One of our main objectives with the research was trying to understand the challenges that teens are facing these days, and specifically how they’re experiencing school, and whether these things differ by gender,” said Kim Parker, Pew’s director of social trends research.
“We’ve been doing a lot of work this year on men and masculinity, and part of that conversation involves what’s happening with boys and girls.”
The survey was conducted September 18 through October 10 among 1,391 teens ages 13 to 17.
While the data did show differences among them –– such as girls reporting more of a pressure to fit in socially and look good while boys said they felt they should be strong and good at sports more often –– many of their perspectives were similar.
Both girls and boys said it was highly important to find a career they enjoy, making money and cultivating friendships in the future, according to the data.
“We are prone to negatively stereotyping teenagers as superficial in their interests, and these results are an excellent reminder that teenagers are serious about the schoolwork they’re doing now, and they are looking ahead to their careers,” said psychologist Dr. Lisa Damour, author of “The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents.” She was not involved in the report.
Teen boys and girls alike reported they felt pressure to get good grades, according to the data.
And for those who didn’t see it as an even split, both teen girls and boys perceived girls as getting better grades and being favored by teachers, the report showed.
What they perceive matches existing data that shows girls on average do tend to get better grades than boys, Damour said.
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But grades aren’t a zero-sum game –– the success of girls in school doesn’t have to mean boys do worse, said Dr. Annie Maheux, assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Winston Family Distinguished Fellow at the Winston National Center on Technology Use, Brain and Psychological Development.
The disparity might be a sign that something in schooling isn’t working for boys as well as it should, noted Maheux, who wasn’t involved in the survey.
“Schools are set up in such a way that kids who sit still and are less impulsive are going to do well, and we know that there’s a big difference in brain development in early adolescence, and that the part of the brain that’s used for health control and critical thinking develops later in boys than girls,” said Michelle Icard, a parenting educator and speaker.
“We are teaching to half of the audience and need to broaden the way we approach education,” said Icard, who wasn’t involved in the report.
More activity and teaching styles that incorporate hands-on learning, for example, might help teen boys do better academically, said Icard, author of “Fourteen Talks by Age Fourteen: The Essential Conversations You Need to Have With Your Kids Before They Start High School.”
There is good and bad news when it comes to what teens said about their friendships.
Only 2% of teens said that they didn’t have any friends, according to the Pew report. And while that number of those without friends would ideally be zero, it is lower than expected and feels positive, Icard said.
Friendships are especially important in adolescent years, she added.
“Teens are at an age where they’re less likely to turn to an adult for support. They’re naturally going to reach out to their peers before looking to an adult, and peers can be great ushers to adults as needed,” Icard said. “But if you don’t have someone who says, ‘Hey, this is a problem you should talk to a grown-up about,’ then that can be dangerous.”
Although most boys reported they had a close friend they could turn to for support, the number was lower (85%) compared with that of girls (95%) who said they could turn to a friend for support, the data showed.
“We need to try to lose the mythology that boys don’t make close relationships,” Damour said. But at the same time, “we need to take very seriously that we continue to socialize boys to feel that vulnerable emotions are unacceptable. And so long as we’re doing that, we’re going to have boys and adult men who don’t enjoy the strong social support they deserve.”
There was a difference in how teen boys and girls perceived their struggles: Both said that girls were more likely to experience anxiety and depression and boys were more likely to struggle with substance abuse, fighting and class disruptions, according to the data.
But those findings don’t mean that one group is experiencing mental health concerns and the other is just facing a behavioral issue, Damour said.
“Under mental health, we should fold in the finding that boys are more likely to engage in physical fights,” she said. “One of our well-established understandings as clinicians is that when girls are in distress, they have been socialized to collapse in on themselves –– they’re more likely to experience anxiety and depression. When boys are in distress, they are more likely to act out and get themselves in trouble.”
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While disciplinary action might be appropriate when a teen is abusing substances or acting out, it is important that such punishment is paired with an understanding that the behavior comes from suffering, which needs to be addressed, too, Damour said.
“When we see anger in a teenage boy, we think, ‘Well, that’s not depression,’ but it might be. Or if you see a boy who’s acting recklessly, you might think, ‘Oh, he’s a daredevil,’” Icard added. “That behavior is a reflection of feeling untethered to other people. So, I wouldn’t presume that boys feel less anxious and less depressed.”
