Key Takeaways

  • Teen struggles today are different from previous generations, not necessarily worse. The shift is from physical hardship to emotional, mental and spiritual pressure.
  • Over-validation is numbing teenagers to consequence. When everything feels okay, nothing feels like anything.
  • Social media locks teenagers into the personality they had at 14. The algorithm reinforces it, and the fear of being seen to fail does the rest.
  • Healthy ambition produces an output. Unhealthy comparison produces anxiety. The difference is how you feel, not what you achieve.
  • The algorithm shows you the 99th percentile of every life, every relationship, every salary. Your normal life is being measured against a highlight reel stitched together from the top 1% of every category.
  • Formation, not more information, is what teenagers actually need. Slow, ordinary, daily action is the answer.
  • Ownership and responsibility are the building blocks of a teenager’s sense of self. Start small. Start at home.

The Conversation We Needed to Have

This episode of Finding Sanctuary started with a request from a GP who follows the show closely. Her ask was simple but striking: have an episode that talks to teenagers, not at them, and not about them.

Host Natalie Moujalli brought in two people who work with young people every week. Buddy Bou Francis leads children’s liturgy and trains teenagers at the gym. Will McInnes works for the Catholic Diocese of Broken Bay and runs surf lifesaving patrols alongside young people from the age of 13. Between them, they see the full picture of what today’s teenagers are carrying.

What follows is not a list of things that are wrong with your teenager. It is an honest, grounded conversation about what is actually happening, and what you and your teenager can do about it.

Different Struggles, Not Worse Ones

The first thing Buddy says might surprise you. When asked whether this generation of teens struggles more than those before them, his answer is no. Not more. Different.

Previous generations dealt with physical hardship and material struggle. Today’s teenagers are navigating emotional, mental and spiritual pressure at a scale and speed that no previous generation has had to contend with. The difference is the smartphone. The difference is having access, at any moment, to things that even adults are not prepared to see.

Will puts it plainly. When he started high school, he had a twenty dollar Nokia. By the time he reached year twelve, smartphones were just arriving. What he can access on his phone now, in an idle moment of scrolling, is something he was not exposed to as a teenager. The same content, and far worse, is being handed to your child every single day.

And here is the part that often goes unspoken. When a teenager sees something on their phone that they know they should not have seen, they frequently cannot tell anyone. Because telling an adult means losing the phone. So they carry it alone.

When Everything Feels Okay, Nothing Feels Like Anything

Buddy introduces one of the most striking ideas in the episode early on. He calls it over-validation. The culture of making everything feel acceptable, of softening every consequence, of catching every fall before it happens. And his conclusion is blunt.

When everything feels okay, nothing feels like anything.

Teenagers are becoming numb. Not because they are broken, but because they have never been given the space to feel the weight of a real consequence. And when you take that away, you take away their ability to discern. To sift. To find what actually matters.

The word Buddy uses is formation. Not information. Teenagers in the digital age have access to more information than any previous generation. What they are short on is the slow, daily, ordinary process of being shaped into someone who knows who they are.

Life as a Performance: The TikTok Personality Trap

Here is something worth sitting with if you are a parent or if you work with young people. A teenager who builds an identity on TikTok at the age of fourteen is not just building a profile. They are handing the algorithm a blueprint. And the algorithm then feeds them everything that reinforces who they were at fourteen. The fears. The insecurities. The comparisons. All of it, curated and served back, day after day.

Buddy calls this locking yourself into a personality you are too afraid to change later on. Because once life becomes a performance, failure becomes catastrophic. There is no such thing as a quiet mistake when everything is recorded. There is no swimming carnival fail that just disappears. Every stumble is potentially permanent.

Will adds the contrast. When he was in school, if something embarrassing happened, it was gone. A week later, no one remembered. Today, that moment lives on someone’s phone. Possibly forever. Is it any wonder that teenagers are terrified of trying?

Healthy Ambition Versus Unhealthy Comparison

Buddy has a one-liner for this that is worth writing down. Healthy ambition makes you sharper. Comparison makes you feel sick. One produces an output. The other produces anxiety.

But he goes deeper. On social media, you will see every sin except one. Envy. Because envy is the one they are selling you. You scroll through other people’s lives and you sit on the other side of it, wanting. That is the product. You are the product.

Will offers the test. If you would be proud of something even if no one ever saw it, even if no one ever acknowledged it, that is probably a healthy thing. If the only reason you are doing it is so that someone else will acknowledge that you did it, that is where it tips into unhealthy territory.

The way you feel while you are on your phone is data. Pay attention to it. If you close the app and feel depleted, behind, inadequate or numb, that is not a coincidence.

The 99th Percentile of Everything

Buddy puts the algorithm into language that makes the problem impossible to ignore. The algorithm is not showing you a representative sample of life. It is showing you the 99th percentile of every life, every relationship, every kitchen, every salary, every wedding, every friendship.

Your normal life is being measured, every single day, against a feed stitched together from the top one per cent of every category. That is not a fair fight. And it is why you feel behind. It is why the side hustle feels urgent. It is why the six pack feels necessary. You are not comparing yourself to the average. You are comparing yourself to an impossible composite of the very best of everything, all at once.

Will adds the reminder. The person with the best car does not necessarily have the best house. You are seeing the best of all of them and thinking you need all of it. You do not.

Ownership Is the Answer Nobody Is Talking About

One of the most practical threads running through this conversation is ownership. Will started surf lifesaving at fourteen. His parents told him he could ride his push bike to the beach because they were not driving him. That single act of not being driven gave him something. Purpose. Responsibility. A small piece of the world that was his to manage.

He encourages every teenager listening to find something they can make theirs. It does not have to be surf lifesaving. It can be a bedroom. It can be mowing the lawns. It can be cooking dinner once a week. The point is not the task. The point is the ownership.

And he speaks directly to parents too. If your child mows the lawn for the first time, it will not look the same as when you do it. That imperfect lawn is the price of raising someone capable. It is worth paying.

You Are Not Broken

Buddy closes with something that stopped everyone in the room. If you are a teenager and you take nothing else from this episode, take this.

You are not broken. You are not behind and you are not late. You are not lost. You have not been forgotten by God and you are not too far gone for grace. What you are, what most of us are, is unformed. And the answer to unformed is not despair. The answer is formation through education. Slow, ordinary, daily. No one is asking you to be perfect. You are made by love, for love. That is your identity. That is your manhood and your womanhood. That is the answer to every comparison. And that is the only foundation strong enough to build a life on. Go and build it.

Will follows with a quote from St Teresa of Calcutta. We cannot all do great things. But we can do small things with love. And if we do those small things well, we will do great things with those small things.

Listen to the Full Episode

This conversation is one of the most honest and grounded discussions about teenage mental health, social media and faith that Finding Sanctuary has ever produced. It is worth your time, and it is worth sharing with the teenager in your life.

Finding Sanctuary is a podcast from Hills Sanctuary House, a community built around faith, wellbeing and belonging. To find out more about what we do and how you can be part of it, visit hshl.org.au.