Tween Girl Looking at Phone

The Death of Tween Culture: Are Our Kids Growing Up Too Fast?

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My college age stepdaughter said something to me recently that I couldn’t stop thinking about. She told me there is a conversation happening on TikTok about the “death of tween culture.” At first, I wasn’t exactly sure what she meant. But the more she explained it, the more it made sense. There used to be this weird little stage between being a kid and being a teenager. We eventually gave it a name: tweens. You weren’t playing with little-kid toys anymore, but you weren’t expected to act like you were seventeen either. And our culture actually created a space for you. There were television shows made specifically for that age group. There were stores like Limited Too and later Justice. There were magazines, music, movies, clothing, celebrities, and entire brands aimed at kids who were somewhere between childhood and adolescence. You were allowed to be in between.

I don’t think 10-, 11-, and 12-year-olds stopped wanting their own culture. I think something else happened. They gained access to everybody else’s.

An 11-year-old can open TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube and encounter many of the same influencers, beauty routines, relationship conversations, fashion trends, fitness content, celebrity gossip, and lifestyle content being consumed by people ten or twenty years older than they are. That’s a significant cultural change.

Kids have always wanted to be older. There’s nothing new about that. When I was young, we watched older kids. We wanted to dress like them, talk like them, and eventually do some of the things they were doing. But there were natural barriers that slowed the process down. If you were ten years old, your social world was mostly your family, your neighborhood, your school, and whatever came through the television or radio. Television networks decided what programming aired at four in the afternoon.

Parents could see what magazine came into the house. If you wanted to know what high school kids were doing, you generally had to know some high school kids. If you wanted adult content, you usually had to intentionally go looking for it, and sometimes convince an adult to let you have access to it. Even shopping created barriers. Kids’ clothes were in the kids’ department. Tween stores marketed to tweens. Teenagers had their stores, and adults had theirs. The culture wasn’t perfectly separated, of course, but there were lanes.

There was also something else we don’t talk about much: geography created a barrier. Your social world had physical boundaries. A twelve-year-old in Nebraska wasn’t waking up every morning comparing herself with thousands of beautiful, carefully edited people from Los Angeles, Miami, New York, London, and everywhere else on the planet. A kid might compare himself with the most athletic boy in school or the best-looking kid in his class, which could certainly be difficult. But there were limits to the comparison pool. Today, that pool is practically infinite.

Time was another barrier. When you came home from school, you actually left school. If somebody embarrassed you in the cafeteria, it hurt, but eventually you went home. The social government didn’t necessarily follow you into your bedroom. There were hours when you weren’t receiving constant information about who was hanging out without you, who was dating whom, what everyone was wearing, what party you weren’t invited to, or how many people liked somebody else’s picture. There was a natural interruption in the social pressure. Today, for many kids, there is no intermission.

Even access to older people used to be different. A tween could certainly admire an older sibling, athlete, musician, or celebrity, but most of the adults and older teenagers influencing them weren’t talking directly into their ear for several hours a day. Today an eleven-year-old can follow a twenty-three-year-old influencer, watch her morning routine, learn what products she uses, hear about her relationships, watch what she eats, see what she wears, tour her apartment, hear her opinions, and begin modeling her lifestyle.

The influencer doesn’t know the eleven-year-old exists, but psychologically that relationship can still carry influence. That’s what has really changed. The barriers between developmental stages have become much more porous.

Technology didn’t invent the desire to grow up. It removed many of the speed bumps.

A kid no longer has to wait for the culture of the older teenager to eventually reach them. They can enter it immediately. And I think that matters because children don’t just consume content. They consume value messages.

In Value Up and my parent book, Talking to Brick Walls, I talk about something I call the Social Government. When kids are little, adults largely determine what’s important. Parents choose their clothes. Parents determine where they go. Teachers establish expectations. Adults provide much of the feedback children use to understand themselves. Then adolescence arrives and another government begins gaining power: the Social Government. Friends. Popular kids. Athletes. Group chats. Social media. Likes. Followers. Looks. Comments. Silence. Acceptance. Rejection. The Social Government has its own rules, and I’ve always thought of this transition as something that intensifies during adolescence. But I’m starting to wonder whether technology has pushed the Social Government downward in age. An eleven-year-old doesn’t have to wait until high school to discover the social hierarchy anymore. It can arrive in elementary school through a phone. This is what concerns me most.

Kids don’t just consume videos, products, music, or fashion. They consume messages about what makes a person valuable.

You need to look like this. Wear this. Own this. Have these many followers. Get invited here. Have a boyfriend. Have a girlfriend. Be attractive. Be funny. Don’t be awkward. Don’t look childish. Know what everybody else knows. And underneath all those messages is another message: This is what you need to become if you want to matter.

That’s an enormous burden to place on an eleven-year-old!

One of the concepts I teach students in my school assembly program is something I call the Invisible Number. Imagine everyone walking around with a number between one and ten above their head representing how valuable they believe they are. Not how valuable they actually are. How valuable they believe they are. That distinction is incredibly important.

A student can be surrounded by people who love them and still secretly believe they’re a three. Adolescence is already a time when that Invisible Number can become incredibly unstable. Now imagine introducing standards of beauty, popularity, consumption, relationships, success, and social status that originated with much older people into that equation several years earlier.

An eleven-year-old looks at a twenty-two-year-old influencer and thinks, “Why don’t I look like that?” The obvious answer is: because you’re eleven. But that’s not necessarily what their brain tells them. Their brain may say, “Something is wrong with me.” That’s a Dirty Mirror.

This is also where I think adults sometimes misunderstand what’s happening. We see a kid obsessing over a skincare product, clothing brand, water bottle, makeup trend, or whatever the next big thing happens to be, and we think, “That’s ridiculous.” Maybe the product is ridiculous. But the product probably isn’t the real issue. Belonging is. I’ve said for years that a hungry need is a dangerous need. When the need to belong becomes hungry enough, kids will do some pretty extraordinary things to feed it.

They’ll change the way they dress. Change the way they talk. Hide things they enjoy. Pretend not to care. Buy things they don’t need. Participate in things they don’t really want to participate in. Sometimes they’ll even become someone they don’t particularly like. Not because they’re stupid. Because they’re trying to belong.

I don’t think the solution is to panic about TikTok or somehow try to recreate 2005. Culture doesn’t work that way. Technology isn’t going away, and there are plenty of good things young people gain from having access to a larger world. But I do think parents, educators, coaches, and anyone else who influences young people need to understand what has changed.

We have removed many of the barriers that once allowed kids to grow into adolescence more gradually.

That means we may need to become more intentional about creating new ones, not walls that keep kids ignorant, but healthy boundaries that give development time to happen. We need environments where kids aren’t constantly pressured to perform adulthood. Where being innocent isn’t embarrassing. Where not knowing something isn’t humiliating. Where an eleven-year-old doesn’t feel behind because they haven’t experienced something a sixteen-year-old has. Where kids have permission to develop at their own pace. Where awkwardness isn’t treated like a character defect. And most importantly, where their value isn’t constantly being negotiated by the culture around them.

A huge concept that I teach students, educators and parents is that Behavior follows belief. If a young person begins believing, “I don’t measure up,” behavior follows. If they believe, “Nobody wants me,” behavior follows. If they believe, “I have to become someone else to belong,” behavior follows. But something very different happens when they begin believing, “I have value before anyone approves of me. My appearance doesn’t determine my worth. Popularity doesn’t determine my worth. What I own doesn’t determine my worth. Being included doesn’t increase my value, and being excluded doesn’t reduce it.” Now we’re giving kids something sturdy enough to stand on while everything around them is changing.

Maybe the most important question isn’t whether tween culture died. Maybe it’s what replaced it? Because something always fills the vacuum. If we don’t intentionally help young people understand who they are and what makes them valuable, the culture will gladly answer those questions for them. And the culture’s answer usually comes with conditions: Look like this. Own this. Achieve this. Get invited here. Be desired by these people. Collect these many followers. Then you’ll matter.

Value Up offers a radically different message:

You already do.

Maybe one of the greatest gifts we can give this generation isn’t figuring out how to bring tween culture back. Maybe it’s giving kids enough security in their own value that they don’t have to rush through childhood trying to become somebody else. Let them grow. Let them develop. Let them be awkward. Let them figure things out. Let them be kids.

Because their value isn’t waiting for them somewhere in adulthood.

They already have it.

"Race Cars and American Idol" by Mike Donahue

Race Cars and American Idol

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I love the game “Two Truths and a Lie” because I always win. One of my truths that is almost impossible to believe about me is that I was on American Idol, the TV show. See, you don’t believe me either. A few years ago, I was speaking in a school in Idaho. When I was finished, a girl came right up to me, stood about a foot from my face, and said, “I really loved your assembly.” I said, “Thank you.” Then she fired right back with, “But I’m still going to smoke pot.” As the speaker, I suppose I should have been offended right? After all, I just got done speaking to the whole school for an hour about right choices. But instead of being offended and doubling down on my message to her personally, I asked her some questions. I asked, “What is your name?” She said, “Rose.” I asked, “What is your story, Rose?” She went into detail about her crazy life. Both parents had died before she was fifteen. She had been couch hopping with different relatives that really didn’t want her there, and she was now living with a friend from school and her family until she graduated.

She went into a lot more detail, and I thought to myself, no wonder she’s self-medicating with marijuana. Her life is chaotic, with absolutely no stability at all. Then I asked Rose, “What is your dream? If you could do anything with your life, what would you do?” She didn’t hesitate. She talked for twenty minutes about singing and making a difference in the world. She shared pieces of her worldview and what she thought was wrong with society; she went on and on. It was precious. I talked with her about those things and encouraged her to pursue her dreams at any cost. I said, “Rose, you can’t change your past, but everything in front of you is your choice now. Go make it happen. That’s how you will end up living a fulfilled life.” I gave her a copy of my book and thought I would never see her again.

A year later I got a call on my business line from her, and the first thing she said to me (after she explained who she was and where she was from) was, “You helped me get off drugs and live my dream, and I just called to say thank you.” I was taken off guard a bit, so I said, “What is your dream? What are you doing?” She said, “I’m a singer now. I sing.” I said, “Oh, that’s great, where are you singing, at church?” She said, “No, I was on American Idol.”

At first I was a little skeptical, but the more she described what happened after she met me, the more convinced I became that she was telling me the truth. Eventually I saw the episodes that she was on, and we became friends. She made it to Hollywood, made it through the first couple rounds, but then got eliminated. She tried out the next year and made it again. I was on the set with her when she made it the second time, and there is a two second clip of me hugging her next to Ryan Seacrest when she came out of the room from trying out. So, I can honestly say that I was on American Idol. The whole thing was surreal and very exciting.

Let me go back to something that Rose said, though it wasn’t quite true. She said, “You helped me get off drugs.” I suppose in a way that might be true, but I promise you I didn’t say a word to her about drugs that day in the school. We talked about her dreams and what she wanted to accomplish. I told her that she was a “racecar” sitting in a parking lot. The racecar is still worth a lot in a parking lot but that’s not what it was built for. It was built to go 180 miles an hour around a track. It still looks good in a parking lot, but it won’t be happy until it is doing what it was built for. I said, “Rose, you were built to do great things with your life. Go do it. She got excited, and she realized on her own that drugs would just hinder her from getting to where she wanted to go. All I did was point her in the direction of purpose, and she came up with the details. I love this quote from Mark Twain. He said,

“The most important day of your life is the day you were born; the second is the day you discover why.”

I believe that there is a seed of greatness in all our children. We must help them discover what that is. If we just focus on keeping them away from the bad stuff, all we end up doing is policing their behavior instead of coaching them in their purpose. I think you get a lot more out of parenting when you are talking about things that have to do with the bigger picture.

In my assemblies I talk about the bottom shelf and the top shelf. The bottom shelf is where all the bad stuff is—drugs, alcohol abuse, cutting, vaping, sexual irresponsibility, and so on. The top shelf is where your dream is, which is another way of saying where your purpose is. I believe that if young people can see the top shelf in their lives, they won’t reach for the bottom shelf; but if those young people take their hand off the top shelf, it gets easy to reach for the bottom shelf. That’s why I don’t ask my children if they are doing drugs; I don’t have to. The conversations I have with them are about their dreams. I know the dreams of all five of my kids. I can tell when they are starting to take their hands off that top shelf.

We must have those conversations with our children because there is a measure of hopelessness when they stop dreaming. What good does it do to focus on the response to hopelessness? That is what the bottom shelf and self-medication is all about; it is a reaction to how they are feeling about themselves. They may not believe that their life has value, so they make choices that match that value. That is why I say in my assembly, “I don’t care about what you’re doing as much as I care about why you are doing it. Why you are doing something says more about you than what you are doing.” Behavior follows belief. So, should we really be spending all this time and money warning adolescents how bad the bottom shelf is, or should we do everything we can to help them to see and succeed in their purpose?

"Why Doesn’t My Kid Talk to Me Anymore?" by Mike Donahue

Why Doesn’t My Kid Talk to Me Anymore?

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Your teenager really does want to talk to you about their personal life, but they are not going to and it’s going to feel a little awkward when they start getting cryptic and protective with information. If your child is holding back things from you, you may be asking yourself, “What Happened, when my kids were younger, they had no problem talking to me.? Do they hate me now?” That’s what it feels like, doesn’t it? Like suddenly, when they turned twelve, they decided you weren’t cool anymore and shut down communication. That’s not what happened. They didn’t decide you weren’t cool anymore; they decided they couldn’t trust you with important information anymore, because they knew you might not like what you were going to hear.

Here is a typical conversation with an eight-year-old boy and his dad.
The child comes home from school, and his dad says, “Hey buddy, how did things go at school today?” His son replies, “Awesome! The principal bought our class ice cream bars, because we came in first in the science fair. Our class built a robot that walked and talked.” Then dad says, “That’s great buddy, what else happened?” Then his son goes into a twenty-minute blow-by-blow of all the things that happened that day. The communication is clear and uninhibited. Most eight-year-olds love talking to their parents about their day and everything in it. They can tell you everything in 3rd grade, because you are not going to have a problem with most of it.

They have no problem talking to you, because right now their world is your world, and there is no tension. The tension comes when social expectations come. The social pressure that you felt growing up doesn’t compare at all to what your child may be feeling today. You must take those old lenses off when dealing with your child. Social media and smart phones have changed the social landscape completely. There is a lot more information that your teenager must process today than you ever did. I’m not trying to insult you, but you need a baseline understanding that their social world is incredibly demanding, and it is adding tremendous pressure to their lives.

Let’s fast forward six years to when the same child is fourteen. This is how the conversation may go now. “Hey buddy, how did things go in school today?” “Fine.” “What did you do?” “I went to school.” “I know, but did anything happen?” “No, I just went to school.” “Okay, I was just wondering how your day went.” “I told you, fine.”

It doesn’t feel good when the conversation goes like that. It hurts. It feels disrespectful and rude. It is easy to take that personally and get offended, but let’s look at it for minute.

The question “how was your day” is a seemingly common and basic question to you, but for a teenager, “how was your day” is a loaded question. Like I said earlier, they want to tell you, but they will not, because they don’t trust you with the real answer to that question. The real answer most likely will raise some red flags with you. So, instead of going through the hassle of having to explain all of that to you, they blow you off with, “Fine, my day was fine.” You know there is more to it than that, so you get frustrated and try to pressure them for that information. They shut down harder, and now there is a wall.

It’s very ironic because at the time that communication needs to be the clearest between you and your child, it is going to be the most challenging. They’ll put up walls and shut down emotionally, right at the time when you need to know what’s going on in their lives. That boy’s dad probably didn’t need to know all about the science fair, but what’s happening in his fourteen-year-old’s life now is more crucial because there are potentially dangerous roads ahead.

At first glance you might say that the communication gap is a teenager’s fault. If they really loved and respected their parents, they would be honest with them. I’m going to be upfront with you and say something that might be hard for you to hear but most of the communication problems between teenagers and adults are the result of bad communication techniques coming from the adults.

Honest and clear communication is not the responsibility of young minds that are still developing. It is our job as adults to foster an environment that values honesty over desired behavior. If we favor “right” behavior over honesty, we inadvertently will create liars out of our children. Having behavior expectations without truly understanding the complexities of their social world can create dishonesty in their communication with us.

They want to talk to you, but they need you to let them know it’s safe to do so. My advice, do a lot more listening than lecturing. Try to understand their world from their perspective. Take the old lenses off and listen.

Adapted from “Talking to Brick Walls” by Mike Donahue. Mikedonahue.co