“Stop being so dramatic and grow up.”
“If you stop talking about your personal life, then maybe the harassment will stop.”
“Got a crying teenager? Just wait 10 minutes. She’ll be fine.”
“Girls are fine as babies and little kids. It’s when they hit the teenage years that they’re the worst. They’re so emotionally unpredictable.”
My peers and I heard versions of these sentiments throughout my teenage years from adults who were supposed to understand and empathize with what we were going through: parents, teachers, counselors, and other authority figures. The message was consistent, even when unspoken: Teenage girls are dramatic, irrational, vapid, and not to be taken too seriously.
Naively, I thought things had changed in the last 30 years on the subject of teens’ mental health. That was proved otherwise when I read U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s perspective on the experience of teenage girls in America.
“What occurs to me,” Kennedy said, “is that I’m around a lot of young girls all the time, and they all seem, like, really crazy at that part of their lives. Most of them just get through it and figure it out. But if you put them on a regimen of psychiatric drugs at that age, they may not be able to go through the things that they need to go through to find the techniques for coping with anxiety and uncertainty and fear — and all of that stuff that makes people go crazy.”
Nowhere in these comments is there any accountability or intellectual curiosity as to why teenage girls are struggling and what circumstances are making them react in a “…like, really crazy” manner. The most troubling conclusion is that girls’ emotional difficulties during their teenage years are random, inevitable, unpredictable, and unavoidable ― the same message my generation received.
Today, teenage girls are navigating a dangerous social media landscape, online harassment, destructive body image pressures, and growing social isolation. Yet many adults still respond to their pain with the same tired refrain generations of girls have heard before: They’re just being dramatic. It’ll pass, and they’ll forget about it. That response is not neutral. It shapes how suffering is interpreted and whether it is taken seriously at all.
Why do these defeatist attitudes and pessimistic messages persist despite a better-informed mental health field? Because this country would need to collectively acknowledge that trauma isn’t a required childhood experience nor a rite of passage. Such an admission would require policymakers, elected officials, subject matter experts, and the large-scale care systems to create and maintain solutions that increase the chances of positive mental health outcomes for teenage girls.
The environment that American girls are currently growing up in is the result of choices about what we notice, what we minimize, and what we decide is normal.
The problem is not that teenage girls today are “crazy,” overly sensitive, or incapable of coping with life. The problem is that generations of adults normalized dismissing girls’ pain instead of asking what caused it. When public leaders reduce teenage girls’ struggles to an unavoidable, silly phase, they reinforce the dangerous idea that suffering is simply part of growing up female. It does not have to be.
Teenage girls, including my peers and former teenage self, deserve more than mockery, stereotypes and emotional minimization disguised as wisdom. They deserve adults willing to listen, take their experiences seriously, and build systems that support their mental health before crisis becomes inevitable.
Maria Reppas lives with her family on the East Coast. She lived in Iowa from 1978 until 1999. Visit her at mariareppas.com.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: RFK Jr. calling teenage girls ‘crazy’ is neglect, not wisdom | Opinion
Reporting by Maria Reppas, Guest columnist / Des Moines Register
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