BOSTON — For teen girls, getting back to school goes beyond making sure they have all the school supplies they need, it’s making sure they feel good about themselves and their friends. National nonprofit Ruling Our Experiences found just 55% of teen girls reported feeling confident.
For a lot of teen girls, wanting to be accepted in their friend group is everything. And if they get “dropped”, it can be devastating.
“So the big thing that’s happening with teen girls right now is something called ‘the drop’, which is when a group of friends drops one of the girls in the group,” said Jacki Carlson, a teen confidence coach. “If someone makes a mistake, it’s often documented. And then it’s replayed over and over again and so it makes it really hard for these girls to forgive one another.”
Jacki Carlson is a confidence coach for teen girls dealing with anxiety. She started Confident Girl Hotline to help teen girls like a high school student on the North Shore Boston 25 spoke with who wished to remain anonymous.
“Everyone wants to push other people down so they can get further up,” said the teen. “So it was mainly because of that. And i just happened to be one of the stepping stones for people to get higher up.”
This student tells Boston 25 social media made it harder, as she saw her friends doing things without her.
“I felt, like I was losing all of the people that I called my close friends and people I would talk to on a daily basis, so it was really hard to even just go to school because I had to see these people that I didn’t even consider as, like, acquaintances anymore that I used to tell everything.,” said the teen. “And it went to a point where, like I would call my mom all the time to come pick me up from school.”
Ruling Our Experiences, a national nonprofit , studied 17,000 teen girls and found 53% of girls reported feeling persistently sad or hopeless. About 67% reported they don’t say what they’re thinking or disagree with others because they want to be liked and two-thirds claim their body image negatively impacts their confidence.
Carlson coaches teens via zoom and also has conversations with their parents. She says if parents notice their daughters spending a lot of time alone, they should share some one-on-one time with them.
“Because what we’re seeing in these high school years is girls are really pulling away from mom because they don’t want to hear advice or criticism,” said Carlson. “And what they want is someone who’s listening to them.”
For teens, Carlson suggests treating a friendship breakup like a romantic breakup—removing those friends from their social media feeds. Try to reach out to new groups of people, by sitting at a different lunch table or join a new club. And then listen and connect with those new friends. And to calm anxiety, she says to toss something back and forth across your chest, which forces both sides of the brain to concentrate, causing anxiety to subside.
“What she’s taught me has so heavily impacted how i go about social situations and decide who my friends are going to be, because I know now to pick wisely and trust people that are good people,” said the teen.
As the North Shore teen gets ready to head into her sophomore year —she tells Boston 25 she’s feeling much more confident about herself and trusts her intuition.
“Always be the person that you want someone else to be,” said the teen. “So even on like the hardest day, try to be as positive as possible because it will make your life easier and it will make you grow more as a person.”
Carlson also reminds teens — anything you do over the phone can easily be clipped or saved. She also suggests unfollowing accounts that make you feel bad about yourself — especially in the age of AI when sometimes teens are comparing themselves to images that aren’t even real.
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