I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how hard it was to be a teenage girl when I was growing up.
And it was hard. There was pressure to be liked, to be thin, to be chosen.
For the Gen X and elder-Millennial moms reading this: remember when the biggest tech drama of our adolescence was sending “143” to someone’s pager and hoping they knew it meant “I love you”? Three numbers. One tiny digital confession. And then hours of overthinking what it meant.
The pressure was real. But it was slower. Smaller. More contained. Our mistakes weren’t immortalized. Our insecurities weren’t algorithmically amplified.
Now? Oof.
Being a girl today feels like running a gauntlet. And to understand why, we have to look at what’s shaping their days — and their identities.
The World Girls Are Growing Up In
Let’s start with the most obvious shift: technology.
Girls today are growing up inside devices that never turn off. Social media isn’t just where they connect; it’s an always-on mirror, reflecting back who they’re supposed to be and how they’re supposed to look. The algorithms reward comparison. Perfection. Performance. Girls learn quickly what earns attention and what gets ignored.
And the data tells us this isn’t just nostalgia talking.
Nearly three in five teenage girls reported feeling persistently sad or hopeless — the highest level recorded in over a decade. One in three seriously considered attempting suicide. Pediatric emergency visits for self-harm among girls have climbed in recent years.
But if this were only about screen time, we could potentially fix it with settings and time limits. The deeper issue isn’t technology alone. It’s the culture technology reflects and magnifies.
Social media didn’t invent the idea that girls’ bodies are open for commentary. It didn’t invent the pressure to be thin, pleasing, perfect. It just made that pressure constant.
Now add AI to the mix — people are uploading photos into chatbots so they can manipulate images, undress bodies, distort reality in seconds. According to The New York Times, AI chatbot, Grok, created and then publicly shared at least 1.8 million sexualized images of women.
But technology didn’t create all of this misogyny. It scaled it
When Culture Looks Away
Just look at the Epstein files — a constant reminder of how many powerful men have exploited girls for years. And what follows is just as telling: the minimizing, the excuse-making, the euphemisms.
Reporters calling victims “underage women.” There is no such thing as an underage woman. There are girls. And when we soften the language, we soften the crime. When we blur the words, we blur responsibility.
That’s cultural permission. Harm becomes negotiable. Girls become abstract.
When Doubt Becomes a Business Model
And none of this skips economics.
Social media companies profit from engagement and these platforms know that engagement thrives on emotion, comparison, outrage, insecurity. Internal research showed that Instagram worsened body image issues for one in three teen girls who already struggled with them.
The beauty and wellness industries are projected to surpass $590 billion globally by 2030, with anti-aging and “self-care” products marketed to younger and younger consumers. The message lands early and often: fix yourself. Improve yourself. Don’t fall behind.
Girls’ doubt isn’t just tolerated. It’s profitable.
The Power to Name Harm and Trust Their Instincts
Precise language is protection.
When girls have words for what they’re experiencing, they are far harder to gaslight. Saying, “That made me uncomfortable,” or “That’s not okay,” isn’t dramatic — it’s boundary-setting. It shifts the burden off them and onto the behavior.
But language alone isn’t enough. For generations, girls have been taught to override themselves: to smooth things over, stay agreeable, and avoid making a scene. We have to teach them something different.
Discomfort is information.
That tightness in their chest. The quiet sense that something isn’t right. Those feelings aren’t weakness, they’re signals. And when girls learn to trust those signals, they become far harder to manipulate — by peers, by platforms, or by men in power.
Parents can help by modeling clarity at home, refusing euphemisms, and validating their daughters’ instincts instead of dismissing them. Organizations like RAINN offer practical guidance on talking with kids about consent and coercion to help them understand that girls should not have to soften reality to make adults comfortable.
The Power of Collective Protection
No family can solve this alone.
One parent saying no to smartphones doesn’t undo algorithmic pressure. One household choosing a different path doesn’t shift cultural norms.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has helped catalyze a growing movement for smartphone-free schools. His research links the rise of smartphones and social media to declining well-being among adolescents, particularly girls, and his argument is simple: no one family can fix this alone. Communities can reset the norm.
Across the country, they are. Today, 34 states and D.C. require school districts to ban or restrict students’ use of cellphones in schools. Families are joining movements like Smartphone Free Childhood and pledging to delay smartphones and social media together. Some are even bringing back landlines.
That’s what collective protection looks like: breathing room.
The World They Deserve Won’t Build Itself
Loving our daughters right now isn’t about panic or perfection and it isn’t about shielding them from every force shaping the world.
It’s about giving them language. Teaching them to trust themselves. Surrounding them with community. And being clear — again and again — that the problem is not their confidence. It’s the systems that profit from eroding it.
Being a girl has always been hard. But today’s girls are smart. Ambitious. Clear-eyed. They are not the weak link in this equation.
They deserve a world that meets their brilliance with dignity.
And that world won’t build itself. We have to be its architects.
Action Center
We ❤️ Moms
Shout out to the moms who are going to be up past midnight tonight, signing 24 Valentine’s cards in handwriting that definitely does not match their child’s.
We see you.
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We can’t control every force shaping our daughters’ world. But we can be clear about what we refuse to normalize. We can give them language, self-trust, and community and we can keep building a world worthy of them.
Let’s be the architects,
Reshma Saujani