Teenage social anxiety: What’s normal?
Parenting a teenager can be tough at the best of times, but parenting a socially anxious teenager can be torturous. It can be incredibly difficult for parents to know how to support a child who feels that they don’t fit in, because peer acceptance has such a huge impact on self-worth and self-esteem. Social media doesn't help. It can make young people feel that unless they are part of a massive social network, they are a social pariah. In reality, psychological research has shown that young people who have a small number of secure friendships have higher self worth and lower levels of social anxiety and depression at age 25. In contrast, teenagers who had much bigger, but less intense friendships were more likely to experience social anxiety.
If your teenager is struggling, clicking on the ‘friendship’ topic tag in the Tellmi app will reveal just how common it is to feel this way. Showing them that they are not the only one will help to normalise the experience and that will make it much easier for them to talk to you. Providing alternative social distractions can help too. Making them attend family dinners, trips to see grandparents or ‘engineered’ social events with friends who have kids of the same age might induce groans of despair, but these activities will stop them from brooding. Get them signed up to extra curricular activities to broaden their social networks and ask siblings or cousins to include them when they are going out.
It can be helpful to ask them to think about what they need rather than what they want from a friendship group. They might ‘want’ to be part of a bigger group so that they get invited to social events, but what they really ‘need’ is to find one or two friends that they trust and that they can be themselves with, so that they feel less alone. The good news is that social difficulties in adolescence tend to be transitory. Social acceptability is very fluid in the teenage years and young people can go from hero to zero and back again in the time it takes to find the Kleenex. Sooner or later everyone learns what it feels like to be left out and by the time teenagers are at, or beyond GCSE level, they have generally found their people.
Most young people eventually find the right friendship group, but one in six young people now has a mental health disorder, so parents need to know how to tell the difference between normal social anxiety and anxiety that indicates a more serious mental health issue. If a teenager is refusing to go to school or has stopped performing academically, if they seem to have no motivation or energy and are avoiding friends completely, if they are having trouble sleeping and are self-harming, or having suicidal thoughts, you definitely need professional advice. An appointment with your GP is a good place to start and if they think that your teenager could have an anxiety disorder, they may refer them for an assessment with your local children and young people's mental health services. If your teen doesn’t want to see a doctor, or the waiting list for NHS mental health services is too long, they may be able to get help from a local counselling service through Youth Access and they can always access safe, anonymous pre-moderated peer and counsellor support through the Tellmi app.