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

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.