The teen years are often marked by heightened stress and increasing pressures. From personal relationships to future plans, teens must juggle expectations from family, teachers, friends, social media, and even themselves. These expectations build up and at times can become overwhelming. And young people are particularly vulnerable because many are still developing coping skills to handle these pressures, potentially leading to feelings of anxiety and burnout.
New research offers a clearer understanding of what influences these pressures and ways we can better support teens through these challenging years.
The teen years are full of change, which can lead to stress and pressure. Teens today feel pressure and juggle expectations around everything from grades in school to future plans and friendships. These expectations tend to accumulate, and sometimes they become overwhelming. And the role of technology in young people's mental health can often lurk in the background.
In our new report, "Unpacking Grind Culture in American Teens: Pressure, Burnout, and the Role of Social Media," we share what teens told us about the varieties of pressure they feel most—from achievement and appearance pressures to social life and friendship—as well as what influences those pressures, and how digital media experiences like social media and gaming can amplify or reduce pressure.
Conducted in collaboration with our friends at the Center for Digital Thriving at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University, this study continues our commitment to keep youth voices at the center of our work. We first recruited teens to provide input on the ideas integral to this survey. Then, teens participated in online focus group sessions to share their insights and offer perspectives on the survey data from their own experiences.
Our findings reveal a complex set of factors that influence the pressures that teens feel. And although social media can sometimes make certain pressures feel a bit more intense for teens, there is more to the story.
Most teens feel at least some pressure that makes them feel bad, and some say they feel burned out.
We asked teens to rate how much pressure they personally feel in six areas, including appearance, friendships, and academic achievement. A majority (81%) of American teens we surveyed reported pressure that made them feel bad in at least one area. More than half of those surveyed (52%) said they personally experience negative pressure in three or more categories.
Here's the breakdown:
Game Plan: 56% of American teens feel pressure to have their future life path figured out (e.g., college, career, relationships).
Achievement: 53% of teens feel pressure to be exceptional and impressive through their achievements (e.g., honors classes, good grades, jobs).
Appearance: 51% of teens feel pressure to look their best or present themselves in a certain way (e.g., following trends, having a certain body type).
Social Life: 44% feel pressure related to having an active and visible social life (e.g., hanging out with friends, going to social events).
Friendship: 41% feel pressure to stay available and be supportive to friends (e.g., responding to texts and social media from friends right away).
Activism: 32% feel pressure to do good for their community or the world, or to be informed about different issues (e.g. ,supporting or giving money to causes, keeping up with the news).
Girls and nonbinary teens (compared to boys) and LGBTQ+ teens (compared to cisgender and straight teens) reported more pressure in every category.
And young people from higher socioeconomic backgrounds and with parents who have higher educational attainment reported more pressure in Game Plan, Achievement, and Appearance pressures.
Alarmingly, more than one quarter of the teens (27%) we surveyed reported struggling with burnout. Usually a problem associated with adults in professional settings, burnout is increasingly being reported by young people as well, a finding that turns out to be correlated with the number and intensity of pressures they face.
Pressures are coming from a variety of sources.
Teens told us that pressures come from many places, including significant pressure from the adults in their lives, as well as their own internal feelings and standards. Parents and guidance counselors, for example, play a big role in Game Plan and Achievement pressures, and coaches and educators also influence Achievement pressures. And teens reported that they themselves are a big source of the pressures they feel around their Appearance.
Social media plays a dual role in pressures—reducing some and amplifying others—but that's not the full story.
Teens are more likely to say that social media consistently increases pressures, rather than decreases them. For example, 48% of teens who feel Appearance pressure point to social media as worsening this pressure, while 7% say social media decreases this pressure, and 31% say the influence is a mix of both.
But social media can at times ease social pressure, alongside other pros like connecting with others, supporting learning, and deepening interests. Meaningful proportions of teens (39–53%) say that social media at least sometimes decreases each of the six pressures we tracked in this report.
It's important to note, too, that for some pressures—Achievement, Game Plan, and Friendship—other contributors were much more impactful, such as their own internal feelings, parents and family members, or adults from school.
Gaming is different from social media—it serves more often as a release valve, or at least a distraction from stress and pressure.
Of the almost 80% of teens who report playing social games, one in four said gaming is an important release valve. However, some youth noted that it can just serve as a temporary distraction that delays awareness of pressure.
Teens who engage in more self-care practices report lower burnout, but most teens are not consistently practicing these behaviors.
Because protective practices are meaningful for well-being, we also examined a variety of self-care practices. Most American teens engage in various self-care practices weekly, but not more often.
Nearly half of teens (45%) fell short of getting even seven hours of sleep on most nights during the prior week.
The majority (60%) did not meet the American Academy of Pediatrics' recommendation for one hour of daily exercise.
Nearly one in five teens did not have a single "deep and meaningful" conversation with a friend in the past week.
Nearly one in six had no time outdoors or in nature.
Qualitative insights from our focus groups indicate that self-care is seen by some teens as "wasted time" and is devalued in a larger cultural context that seems to revere productivity. This may connect to the current attention economy, where teens' time is commodified and their attention drives revenue for many tech companies.
Also responsible, though, are intense schedules that leave some teens with little space for downtime. This overscheduling may be driven in part by families' concerns about ensuring their children have stable, secure economic lives, especially in light of dramatically increasing costs of housing and tuition across generations. This can ultimately manifest as pressure (from oneself, parents and family members, and school adults) to prepare for their future adult lives.
Lowering pressure may make room for healthy habits.
Not all teens experience pressure that makes them feel bad—and in fact, nearly one in five of the teens surveyed did not report any negative pressure in any of the six areas.
Those teens who report no negative pressure(s):
Get more sleep. They are 227% more likely to have had seven or more hours of sleep at least once in the past week.
Spend time outdoors/in nature. They are 66% more likely to have spent time in nature/outdoors at least once in the past week.
Have more open schedules. They are 60% more likely to say that they had more free time than others, and 81% less likely to say that they felt overwhelmed by all they had to do most days or every day.
As long as we continue to face a youth mental health crisis and an epidemic of overwhelmed parents, helping young people reduce the pressures in their lives will remain a critical support for their well-being. The data from this study enriches our collective understanding of what's hard, for which teens, and how. We have an opportunity to remove barriers to self-care and encourage the activities that teens themselves have cited as reducing pressure—like sleep, time outside, and less structured schedules—that can benefit all of us.
Ultimately, the data reinforces that social media warrants attention and intervention, but also that pressures teens feel have many roots—not social media alone. Truly addressing grind culture and burnout for teens will almost certainly require us to recognize social media as one important piece of a larger puzzle.
Emily Weinstein, at the Center for Digital Thriving at Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Sara Konrath, associate professor at Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, contributed to this article.
This article presents findings from "Unpacking Grind Culture in American Teens: Pressures, Burnout, and the Role of Social Media," authored by Emily Weinstein, Center for Digital Thriving; Sara Konrath, Indiana University; Eduardo Lara, Center for Digital Thriving; Beck Tench, Center for Digital Thriving; Carrie James, Center for Digital Thriving; Supreet Mann, Common Sense Media; and Amanda Lenhart, Common Sense Media.
Amanda Lenhart leads research efforts at Common Sense Media. She has spent her career studying how technology affects human lives, with a special focus on families and children. Most recently, as the program director for Health and Data at Data & Society Research Institute, Amanda investigated how social media platforms design for the digital well-being of youth. She began her career at the Pew Research Center, pioneering the Center’s work studying how teens and families use social and mobile technologies.
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