Stomping Stigma About Anxiety in Teens

Take a moment to reflect on when an elder would say, “Oh, I remember when I was a teenager. Those were the best years of my life!”

Well, for some, but for others, it’s a season of confusion and heartache.

As a young adult, I think about how anxious I was as a teenager in a socially disconnected generation. I think of the lack of resources I had to cope with the social anxiety disorder I was wrestling with constantly. I think of how much information about the anxiety I didn’t know, and how unaware I was about mental health disorders. When I was a teenager, I would cry from being overwhelmed, and I couldn’t understand why it felt like a cat had gotten my tongue and why my palms would start to sweat when I walked down the hallway next to another person in my grade.

Anxiety can be best defined as a feeling of worry or nervousness typically about an event or something with an unclear outcome.

What is happening in our teenagers’ lives that trigger feelings of worry? While there reasons that range from brain chemistry to genetics, take into consideration the following outlier that seems to be the most significant root:

There’s always going to be an extra shove in academics that represent a bigger ultimatum. Students have the choice to either pass or fail. If you pass, you’ll succeed. If you fail, you’ll work at a fast-food restaurant for the rest of your life. Success for every child looks different. One may want to become a manager in the service industry, the other a CEO of their own company, and another perhaps a real estate agent. We must stop putting a stigma on what success looks like for our teens. The pass or fail approach to learning is merely a fear tactic that contributes to anxiety in teenagers. Though the outcome may be that the student performs better, it’s not worth dimming a multifaceted realm of possibilities mindset that flourishes in a teenager.

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