A perfect STORM

How to help your teen navigate the choppy waters of growing up

- TANYA MEESON

At the turn of the 21st A century, two groundbreaking movies upset a lot of people. The topic? Teenagers.

Kids (1995) and Thirteen (2003) held no punches. Unlike the popular sugarcoated coming-of-age movies of the day -think Clueless and Mean Girls - these films were not only written by teenagers but aimed to reveal the true face of life as a modern adolescent. That's where the trouble came in. Instead of crushes and petty friend squabbles, both films were saturated with sex, drugs, peer pressure and alcohol- and, significantly, both were revered for their authenticity. For any parent, this reality might seem bad enough for navigating the rough waters of their child's adolescence. But by 2011, a whole new set of complications was inserted into this already volatile mix: smartphones and the drug-like effects of social media. Both are complicating things on a whole new level for this generation of teens.

In the 2019 World Happiness Report, author and expert on generational trends Prof Jean Twenge writes: 'Over the last decade, the amount of time adolescents spend on screen activities (especially digital media such as gaming, social media, texting, and time online) has steadily increased... This fundamental shift in how they spend their leisure time may explain the marked decline in adolescent well-being after 2011.

A graph from the Monitoring the Future Report depicts this in a stark image: as the line for time spent online sweeps up from about 2013, the lines for sleep, in-person social interaction and happiness plummets.

Digital media cyberbullying, 'revenge porn' and 'upward social comparison' are just some of the toxic behaviours injected into the teen experience and responsible for this uptick in depression. Moreover, the relentless connection to the global stage through digital media is exposing them to a lot more of life's realities than any generation previously.