When to worry, and when it’s normal teenage behavior

A lot of parents arrive at this page hoping to be told they’re overreacting. Sometimes that’s the right answer.

What is developmentally ordinary

Adolescence involves pulling away from parents and toward peers. That is not a malfunction; it’s the task of that stage of life, and a teenager who does none of it is a different kind of question.

Ordinary, in a young person who is otherwise doing all right:

• Wanting more privacy than they used to, including about their phone
• Preferring friends’ company to family’s, and saying so
• Mood that shifts fast and doesn’t always have a reason they can name
• Sleeping later, both to bed and out of it
• Being on a phone a great deal, including in ways that look pointless to you
• Testing rules, including ones about screens
• Enthusiasms that arrive and vanish

None of that, on its own, is a sign of anything.

The three questions that actually separate them

How long has it been going on? Two weeks of a flat, withdrawn teenager is a bad fortnight. Two months is a different conversation. Most ordinary adolescent turbulence moves — it doesn’t sit still for a season.

Which direction is it going? A teenager who was struggling in March and is somewhat better in May is on a trajectory, even a slow one. One who was struggling in March and is worse in May is on a different trajectory, and the slope matters more than the current position.

Is it stopping them doing things they need to do? This is the one clinicians lean on hardest. A teenager can be moody, private, permanently online and perfectly all right — if they’re sleeping, going to school, holding onto some friendships, and functioning. When those start to go, the question stops being about temperament.

Comparing your child to your child

The most common mistake is comparing a teenager to other teenagers, or to what you were like at that age. Neither is a useful baseline.

The useful comparison is to how they were eighteen months ago. A quiet child who has become quieter is a smaller change than an outgoing one who has gone quiet. A young person who never slept much sleeping less is different from one who used to sleep well.

Change from their own baseline is the measure. Everything else is noise.

Where the line is, in practice

Worth a conversation with someone qualified:

• Something has lasted more than about a month and isn’t lifting
• More than one area has slipped at once — sleep and school, or eating and friendships
• They’ve dropped things they used to care about and replaced them with nothing
• They seem frightened of their own reactions
• Your gut has been saying something for weeks and you keep talking yourself out of it

That last one is not a soft criterion. Parents are usually right that something is wrong. They’re often wrong about what.

Worth acting on today, not after a period of watching:

• Any talk of not wanting to be alive, or of others being better off without them
• Evidence of self-harm
• Giving away possessions that matter to them
• A sudden, unexplained calm after a long period of distress

If any of those apply, call or text 988. All crisis resources.

The cost of getting it wrong in each direction

Watching too long is the more common error, and its cost is time — a problem that could have been addressed earlier gets addressed later.

Acting too early has a cost too, and it’s usually underestimated: a young person who feels surveilled, pathologized, or discussed. That damage is real and it makes the next conversation harder.

The move that’s cheap in both directions is a call to your pediatrician or your child’s school counselor. It isn’t a commitment, it doesn’t label anyone, and it’s the single most underused option available to a worried parent.

Next

What to do first if you’ve decided something is wrong. Should you check their phone? if that’s the question you’re actually sitting with.