If you feel that the adolescents of today are navigating a world more complex and daunting than any previous generation, you are not mistaken. The data confirms it. In 2025, we are witnessing a profound crisis in teen resilience, a perfect storm of intersecting pressures that is overwhelming the natural coping mechanisms of young minds.
The concept of resilience—the ability to bounce back from setbacks—is not failing because teenagers are ‘softer’ than their predecessors. It is failing because the scale and nature of the challenges they face are unprecedented. As detailed in Dr. Sujata Kelkar Shetty’s groundbreaking book, Resilience Decoded, understanding this isn’t about assigning blame; it’s about diagnosing the problem with compassionate clarity.
Today’s teenagers are not dealing with a single source of stress, but a cascade of interconnected crises that create a state of chronic, pervasive anxiety.
- The Mental Health Epidemic: Rates of anxiety and depression are at an all-time high. Emergency departments are seeing a shocking increase in visits for self-harm and suicidal ideation. This isn’t just teenage moodiness; it is a clinical crisis playing out in our homes and schools.
- The Social Media Trap: Where previous generations found respite in their local community, today’s teens live in a global, digital arena. Excessive social media use doesn’t just damage self-esteem through comparison; it actively weakens real-life community connections, leaving teens feeling profoundly lonely in a hyper-connected world.
- Economic and Domestic Instability: Financial insecurity and housing pressures trickle down directly into the family unit, creating environments of uncertainty and stress that erode a child’s fundamental sense of safety.
- The Shadow of a Warming Planet: Climate change is no longer a distant threat. For many young people, it is a source of deep-seated anxiety and helplessness, a global problem that makes planning for the future feel futile.
- The AI Onslaught and Information Overload: Just as they grapple with the social world, a new frontier has emerged. Artificial intelligence introduces existential worries about future job markets and personal agency, while the 24/7 news cycle delivers an overwhelming torrent of alarming information, leading to intense anxiety and rumination.
The outcome of this perfect storm is as predictable as it is tragic. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports a steady and alarming rise in attempted suicide rates among high school students. More than 40% of students report feeling persistently sad or hopeless, a statistic that should serve as a deafening alarm bell for our society. We are seeing not just more sadness, but an increasing prevalence of severe behavioural mental health conditions.
So, what is the solution? In Resilience Decoded, Dr. Kelkar Shetty argues that we must move beyond generational nostalgia and techno-panic. The goal is not to return to a mythical, simpler past, but to equip our children with the tools to thrive in this complex present.
Her work provides a masterclass in this new approach:
- Reframing the ‘Ferrari Brain’: She explains that the teenage brain possesses a Nobel laureate’s cognitive horsepower but with the impulse control of a ‘caffeinated squirrel.’ Understanding this neurological reality helps parents see baffling behaviour not as personal attacks, but as developmental data points. This shift from punishment to understanding is revolutionary.
- Building Digital Resilience, Not Just Setting Limits: Instead of draconian screen bans, Dr. Kelkar Shetty advocates for concepts like a ‘digital sunset’—a common-sense winding down that frames tech boundaries as self-care, not punishment.
- Listen First, Fix Later: The most powerful tool in a parent’s arsenal is often silence. Most teenage outbursts are not problems to be solved, but emotions that need a witness. The simple maxim of ‘listen first, fix later’ can de-escalate more family drama than any reactive discipline.
The resilience deficit is the defining challenge for today’s youth, who spent so long shut away in lockdowns. But it is not insurmountable. Resilience is not a mysterious birthright; it is the ‘ordinary magic’ that is forged when scientific understanding meets unwavering compassion. By moving away from seeing adolescence as a problem to be solved and instead viewing it as a biological phase to be understood, we can provide our teenagers with the compass and first-aid kit they need to navigate the tornado. The stakes have never been higher, and the need for a decoded, practical approach to resilience has never been more urgent.
Rose Campbell is based on the south coast and is a mother of three teenagers. She works in publishing.
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Sorry but I find this argument extremely unconvincing; the causes of stress and anxiety cited are all, to me, bogus.
Mental Health epidemic – worse than in previous generations because everything is now labelled as a syndrome (and an excuse for poor behaviour), it’s no longer seen as a weakness to shout about one’s claimed mental health problems and in some cases it’s almost celebrated. Recreational drugs also can be responsible.
Social Media Trap – entirely self-inflicted.
Economic and domestic instability – nothing new and the safeguards better now than in the past (except that entitlement delusions outstrip reality).
The shadow of a warming planet – rubbish science for the gullible. OK youth bombarded with this in education but belief in matters taught is ultimately personal (and based on observation).
AI onslaught and information overload – technology marches on and if it offends then ignore it, it is possible to survive.
An interesting article but this jumped out at me as “typical” of our times: “The goal is not to return to a mythical, simpler past.”
How do these authors know that the implied better past was “mythical”? I was a teenager in the misnamed “swinging sixties” when the world was changing, big time, and the very definitely much simpler past was being mocked by those who screamed that, for example, a happy marriage was a myth, that “free love” was (to quote the Beatles) all you need – with the ensuing early signs of nihilism – young people were being taught that, essentially, there is no right and wrong any more, ignore authority, make your own choices, get on “the pill”, and so we ended up with the mental health issues which were notably top of the issues affecting teenagers according to “Dr. Sujata Kelkar Shetty’s groundbreaking book”. It seems to me that this book is no more groundbreaking than every other attempt to convince readers that there are new solutions to teenage problems that boil down to the same problem faced by parents for centuries – young people lacking knowledge of their own human nature, with the accompanying lack of confidence in how to deal with the issues they encounter in life, some old and some new.
Dr Sujata Kelkar Shetty’s solutions are not groundbreaking at all, in my considered opinion. She assumes that parents dive in and punish without listening/conversing with their offspring first – “listen first, fix later” – whereas most parents I know, certainly do “listen” first, and more, they enter into an intelligent conversation explaining the physical, as well as the mental, dangers of, for example, too much screen-watching. The fact is, the modern diseases – for that is what they are, the screens, the climate nonsense and so much more that didn’t exist in the “mythical past” – are so embedded in society, where adults are setting a very bad example by using screens ourselves, by believing the climate emergency (and other) lies, that the problem of trying to help youngsters, including teenagers, is compounded. I mean, in her teenage days, did anyone tell Rose Campbell that if she would prefer to be a boy, that could work? The NHS would provide the “treatment”, the “procedures”? No big deal?
One last thing – and I apologise for arguing points not really covered in the article but that, really, IS my point; like so many similar books this author appears to have decided to ignore the elephant in the room – the pressure to be sexually active from a very young age, certainly the teenage years, which I vividly recall being pushed on us and which certainly didn’t happen in the “mythical past”, it was sold to us as a “breakthrough”, caused lots of anxiety in young people, especially young girls.
I remember one sixth former, a lovely girl, asking me if I thought she was “gay”. I was astonished and asked her what made her think like that. Her reply (and this was in the mid nineties) was that she was focused on her studies and didn’t want boyfriends, just wanted to get her A Levels, but her friends had drawn that conclusion and it was worrying her. I assured her that – and don’t laugh – not only was she not “gay” but in the “mythical past” she would have been the normal person and her classmates would have had a very different label attached to them. She laughed, more in relief than at the said labels which I gladly provided.
It’s testimony to how far we have fallen in the depravity of these times that the author of that book did not, it appears, consider worthy of a mention, the “sexual revolution” which tainted, if not quite spoilt, my own teenage years.
Growing up in a society where it was the norm to marry before having a sexual relationship and children, where discipline in schools was the norm (albeit, with punishments which were admittedly sometimes too harsh) where there were no screens until the TV entered homes in the fifties and served as a means of family entertainment, where the whole family could watch films/movies which did not contact graphic violent or sexual content – none of that is mythical.
Life will never be perfect. Nothing is perfect. However, it is not true to say that life is better today than it was in previous generations. We are materially better off, but that has not brought happiness; we are reliably told that suicide rates, for example, have rocketed in recent years. So, I vote for Government policies and changing attitudes to help us restore some, at least, of that “mythical past”.
Because this article is still preying on my mind, I can offer two unmentioned reasons why teenagers are more vulnerable these days (despite still being in doubt thaf they are).
1 The lack of parent/child boundaries, with many seeking to be their offsprings best friend with discipline, nurturing and guidance replaced with over indulgence and trying to impress with material possessions and sympathy/understanding for every childish whim.
2 Educators who are more drawn to teaching as a means to indoctrinate others, rather than to educate, backed up by the Unions, management and their inability or unwillingness to correctly use discipline (even of the types still permitted) because of the likely intervention of parents and/or colleagues.
…. not to mention both parents at work (assuming both are still together) and their offspring unloaded on to the State.
Both good points; parents who put income generation for the ‘right type’ of lifestyle above all else, especially their children, and parents whose offspring spend most of their time being cared for by others, only for parental time to be short due to tiredness and material compensation offloaded as a sop to their novelty offspring.
John Billot,
You hit on something that I omitted from my earlier comment, but which Dr Shetty obscures somewhat when she refers to “Economic and Domestic Instability: Financial insecurity and housing pressures trickle down directly into the family unit, creating environments of uncertainty and stress that erode a child’s fundamental sense of safety.”
Well perhaps, but poor people, families struggling to pay the rent and put food on the table, managed without seeing professional counsellors back in that mythical past. What really changed in our times, and I suppose Dr Shetty touches on this with her “domestic instability”, has been the effects of divorce and remarriage – the creation of “blended” families”, as if life isn’t difficult enough dealing with our own parents and siblings! Its pretty well established by now that children do not fare as well when families split. They just don’t. The children who do well in every area of life, academically, socially, and who are overall happier, are those who are raised with a mother and father living under the same roof. Good times and bad, sickness and health, till death… etc. All that stuff from the mythical past. That provided a secure and happy environment for children, despite the frustrations and arguments – most of us witnessed parental disagreements, for example, but would sooner live with them in that less than perfect family situation, than with divorced parents.
So, divorce, family breakdown, is a proven cause of mental ill health among young people. Add to that, the outcome of the “free love” and “as long as its consensual” mentality which brought us single-parent families, usually mothers, who are victims of the unthinking mantras of recent years: the “who needs marriage anyway” brigade, and the “don’t wait for marriage – get yourself some “experience” first, get to be good at the “performance” that way lies happiness. And so, what if some of those single-mothers end up with different fathers for their children – it’s all about choice, isn’t it?
All of this, more than financial and housing worries, is a recipe for poor mental health, if not suicide, or so it seems to me. Those peddlers of immorality, the “experts”, who continue to corrupt the young in ever new and imaginative sexual behaviours, should struggle to sleep soundly at night given the damage that has resulted in the lives – bodies and souls – of the young victims of their permissive philosophy. So, again, allow me to repeat, I vote for Government policies and changing attitudes to help us restore some, at least, of that “mythical past” where people who engaged in sexually immoral activities and those who broke their marriage vows, divorced, at the drop of a hat just about, were, shock-horror, frowned upon.