I am watching my daughter and her teammates play in the final match of the city’s volleyball playoffs. The gymnasium bleachers are packed. It is standing room only. The energy is intense. “This crowd is so hype!” I text my friend (I am a middle-aged mother, but I make no apologies for sounding like a teenager in text). The gym smells like teen spirit. It is infectious. The host school, chosen primarily for its high-ceilinged gym, does not have a team in the final round, so the people who pack the bleachers—parents and friends and siblings—are evenly divided, here to cheer for one side or the other. The crowd participation is remarkably hostile. When a young teen from the opposing team goes to serve, we stamp our feet on the bleachers. Someone has brought an airhorn and blasts it just as she raises her arms. Their supporters do the same for our players.

You’d think this match was for something of real consequence. But in fact, it is simply a match of 14- and 15-year-old girls competing for nothing more than school pride. And they are proud. In defiance of the crowd’s attempts to psych her out, the young teen serving the ball is entirely composed. She doesn’t acknowledge the jeers, the rumble of stomping feet, or the airhorn. She bounces the ball twice, holds it up, and hits it hard. I take back what I said about these girls competing for nothing more than school pride—they are also competing to excel, and for their excellence to be recognized. What creatures they are, these teenage girls!

What stereotype does not latch onto the teen girl? Fragile. Overemotional. Bitchy. Oversensitive. Indoctrinated. Mean Girls. “Swifties.” Sluts. Nothing I see on display at this humble junior varsity volleyball match aligns with the familiar narratives of contemporary youth—and particularly those of the contemporary girl. Conservatives and progressives both have their own preconceptions of the teenaged girl. The former sees them as fragile saps and dangerous activists at once—easily indoctrinated and quick to cancel. The latter views them as mean and powerful, yet too fragile to exercise either self-command or compassion without professional guidance. The girls need the interventions of physicians, guidance counsellors, and of course public-relations campaigns designed to teach them about safe sex, about bullying, about racism, about body-positivity. These, apparently, are things that teens would not be able to navigate on their own without the help of an elite class of experts. 

None of these stereotypes reflects what I see before me in the high-school gymnasium. On display are teenage girls experiencing their bodies as a source of joy and strength. Far from being insecure youth burdened with the unrealistic body standards of Instagram or the dysmorphic feelings of the gender mismatched, these girls are living, breathing proof that the teenaged female can feel perfectly at home in her body and experience her physicality as an exuberant part of reality. Her body seems to bring her into fuller communion with her humanity. Her intellect and her reflexes work together; she must show both restraint and strength. She takes risks and trusts her teammates. All of them must clearly know that they’re beautiful, and that they are the objects of the spectators’ gaze—and likely some desire—but that knowledge is a distant second to their focus on the sport. There isn’t time for body-image anxiety when a ball is hurtling your way and the city championship is on the line. 

More than anything else, I see teenagers striving for excellence, and at times, achieving it. Yet even more surprising than their triumphs are the occasions when they screw up and don’t seem to be rattled by it. That was an easy ball, but she missed it. She was set up to spike, but she hit the net. She botched the serve. In a game of such intensity, you may expect at least one girl to crumple, to look humiliated, to give up. Not these girls. They shake it off. They focus on what is next. They try again. The emotional reserves they are drawing from are a deep well. 

Culturally, it often feels as though we take the lowest possible view of teenaged attitudes and treat them as the only reality. Consider this vignette from daily life: I am having drinks with friends of mine, one of whom is a paediatrician. I mention that my daughter, aged 14, has her first boyfriend. “Have you spoken to her about birth control?” he asks. “Yes. And I’ve told her that she is too young for sex.” “Then you are an idiot,” is his response. “When teenage hormones rage, they won’t make good choices. You’re going to end up with a pregnancy.” “I do not think so. I’m her mother, and I know her,” I say. “Being her mother doesn’t mean anything. You’re acting naively.”

Here is another: I am sitting with the department chair of my university, by all accounts a reasonable middle-aged man. He is gently informing me of a complaint he received about my class from a female student. “I want to preserve academic freedom,” he says, “but I also need you to tread lightly. Students may get upset.” And what was the complaint about? I was being warned not to talk about death. “A student has told me that any discussion of death may be a trigger for others’ trauma.” “But…” I say, flummoxed, “death is a trigger for trauma for everyone. We are all traumatized by death. It’s called the human condition. I thought that’s what we were supposed to discuss in the humanities. And besides, this is a Shakespeare class. How am I supposed to avoid the topic of death? In a Shakespeare class?!” “What can I say?” he responds with a shrug. “Be careful. I don’t want to have upset students.”

Little Liliths

Contemporary feminist thought is correct to identify the male gaze as the default way of seeing, but has largely overlooked the fact that the gaze places power squarely in the hands of women, not men.

QuilletteMarilyn Simon

I’m sure many of us are familiar with both scenarios. Both the physician and the department chair take the same low view of youth. People on the Right typically focus on the sensitivities of contemporary students, and particularly those of the contemporary female student offended on behalf of someone else. We bemoan the fragility of youth. And we complain about it. An awful lot. And yet, I suppose to avoid conflict, we continue to defer to it, and thereby treat the over-sensitivities as legitimate. The physician, too, with his expertise, assumes the fragility of the young. In his view, a young teenage girl is not capable of exercising self-control, or at least she is not likely to. For him, she is neither self-reflective nor self-possessed enough to know her own mind and to act in accordance with it, especially when social forces encourage her to be sexually active. Adolescent sex is therefore a forgone conclusion. Certainly, it is not the job of a parent to impose her imagined authority over a child, who is in any case not competent enough to abide by it. It is the responsibility of the doctor to intervene between a mother and her child because the mother assumes a level of experience to which she has no rational claim—the natural ties of family too flimsy to sustain social and hormonal forces that care little for her outmoded rules.  

This may be a fair observation of a mother’s rules. Vanishingly few teen girls are going to obey their mother in all things. But her rules are not the same thing as her authority. Parents still have the authority to raise their children in a lifeworld they create. It is no doubt true that, as Christopher Lasch wrote about 25 years ago, the modern family is beset by “a little army of counsellors and psychologists.” What Lasch described in 1997 has grown more pervasive in 2024, and the power of schools to teach officially sanctioned morality has only increased over the last quarter-century. I hardly need to detail the effect that social media has had by adding another layer of cultural influence on children and parents alike. I sympathize with the feelings of frustration, even the impotent rage, that I hear expressed by many of my fellow parents. How can they raise a child in a world that defers to teenaged fragility? That seems to treat emotional sensitivity and immaturity as themselves signs of ethical righteousness? How can we challenge the therapeutic regime that is in their school, their music, their entertainment, their phones?

It feels totalizing, but that may be because it is all we focus on. What if we were to combat the cultural forces we feel closing in on us by, first of all, simply paying less attention to the negative press about youth? By reacting to the hysterical extremes of youth behaviour, we may sanction the very thing we wish to dispel. We might want to follow the lead of the teenaged volleyball player who ignores the rumble of the unfriendly crowd and focuses instead on the ball, her teammates, and the game. This is not to pretend that a hostile world doesn’t exist. It is simply to focus on what is worthy of attention. 

We may also want to reconsider what parental authority looks like. Rather than being a set of rules, the government of the parent may simply lie in cultivating a more unafraid lifeworld for the family. I am not going to offer practical guidelines for this because it means having a kind of disposition towards youth that in itself ignores things such as practical expert guidelines. But it is entirely likely that when we worry too much about the forces of youth culture, we participate in the very attitudes which see them as uniquely fragile and vulnerable. It may in fact be counterproductive to feel anxious about teenager anxieties. In my own little parenting world, part of the cure for youth fragility is to be largely indifferent to what experts say are the best parenting guidelines. 

There are a lot of teens who pass through my house each week. (Evidently my snack cupboard “really pulls.”) My impression of them is this: they live and breathe in a world of irony. They’re aware of every iteration of politically correct speech codes, and they have mastered the ability to ridicule them. Contrary to what we might think if we heed the sensitivity gatekeepers of educational institutions, teenagers have no sacred cows. They’re rebellious against authority, which increasingly means against the politically extreme progressive ideology we tend to worry about. From the ground, it seems to feel like the more rigid speech codes and ethics become, the more eye-rolling we can expect from the average teen.  

Iran’s Protest Crackdown and Khamenei’s Doctrine of Violence

The brutality the security forces are unleashing in Iran is not an improvisation. It is doctrine.

QuilletteRoya Hakakian

My sense is also this: teenagers are, in general, truly kind to those who are suffering. They care for the afflicted, but they resist enforced compassion. I teach at a university; the distance between a tenth grader and a 22-year-old is larger than we might think. I am speculating here, but this may be because radical progressivism has fully taken hold within institutions recently; in the previous two decades, woke students may have seen themselves as rebellious by coming against an established order. But no one can now deny that the established order is radically progressive. From where I’m standing, in my perfectly ordinary middle-class kitchen surrounded by laughing teens, the enfranchised power of the progressive regime is starting to look like a blessing in disguise. 

Like the confident volleyball players on the court, all the teens in my house seem to need less protection than those students in my university classes a decade above them. Certainly they have the ability to laugh at the ethical pruderies that surround them. The cacophony of social media, the pervasiveness of ideological extremism, and the powers of institutional authority can feel overwhelming, and no one would suggest that these cultural forces aren’t significant. What I am suggesting is that they appear to be less significant for teens than we might think. When we focus on teenage vulnerabilities to ideological forces, we risk promoting the thing we wish to end.

To see youth as too fragile and incompetent to swim through the growing viscosity of the cultural forces surrounding them is to underestimate the power of youth, which is precisely what the spirited among them do not want us to do. The ideological and polarized world is the one that they’ve grown up in. It is all they know. The teenagers who inhabit it may have more capacity to thrive in it than we might think. We have the authority to be more courageous in trusting their capacity for joy and resilience. They reek of a desire to be treated with hope. It is the smell of teen spirit.