Commentary

In high school, I had a tight-knit group of friends. Like in many teen circles, what one of us did had a way of spreading to the rest. It was a kind of social contagion. We influenced each other in everything, from how we dressed to what we thought was cool. We experimented with drugs, pushed boundaries, and even losing our virginity at a fairly young age became part of that same shared culture.

But one of the most powerful contagions among us was eating disorders.

For a period of my life, I lived on Diet Snapple—peach flavored—and little else. If I ate, I felt guilty. Sometimes I would throw up. Sometimes I would take laxatives. I became progressively thinner. Whether that met the clinical definition of an eating disorder feels almost beside the point. I was engaging in behaviors that harmed my body, driven by a distorted perception of myself.

As a teenage girl, my body was changing quickly. Between the ages of 11 and 16, a young woman’s body transforms in ways that can feel sudden and disorienting. Hips widen, breasts develop, and the softness of childhood gives way to the curves of womanhood. It can feel like your body is no longer your own.

I remember looking in the mirror and seeing someone chubby and unattractive. I was convinced I was the ugly one in my group of friends. Looking back now at photographs, I see something entirely different. I was slender, healthy, and beautiful. What I experienced was, at least in part, body dysmorphia.

Now imagine something different. Imagine that the adults in my life, my parents, my doctors, my teachers, had affirmed my distorted perception. Imagine if they had said, “You’re right. You are fat. Let’s fix it.” Imagine if they had helped me get diet pills, encouraged stricter restriction, or supported the very behaviors that were harming me. Imagine if doctors, by law or cultural pressure, were required to affirm my belief that something was wrong with my body and offer medical interventions to correct it.

That would have been unthinkable.

The adults in my life did not affirm my delusion. They challenged it. Sometimes imperfectly, sometimes inconsistently, but they understood something fundamental: teenagers do not always see themselves clearly, and it is the responsibility of adults to act as guardrails.

Years later, when I was in college, another social contagion emerged: cutting. There were families close to mine dealing with children who were harming themselves. It was heartbreaking to witness. Now imagine if the adults in those situations had responded by affirming the behavior. Imagine saying to a child, “You are in pain, and the best way to deal with that pain is to hurt yourself. Let me help you do it safely.” No responsible adult would encourage that. We understand instinctively that pain expressed in self-destruction is not something to validate but something to guide a child through.

Today, we face another form of teenage distress, one that has spread rapidly in recent years. Surveys suggest that a growing number of teenagers identify as transgender or experience significant distress about their bodies, with the increase being especially sharp among teenage girls.

That does not surprise me. I was once a teenage girl in a tight-knit group of friends, confused about my body and willing to harm myself because of a distorted perception of it. When that kind of confusion takes hold in a close social circle, it can spread quickly. Teenage girls, searching for identity and belonging, can become especially vulnerable to ideas that offer an explanation for their discomfort, even when those ideas lead them further away from the truth of their own bodies.

Adolescence has always been a time of confusion. Teenagers are searching for identity, meaning, and belonging while their bodies and emotions shift beneath them. That instability is not new. What is new is how adults are responding to it.

Today, when a teenager says, “I feel like I am in the wrong body,” many adults feel compelled to affirm that belief immediately. In some cases, that affirmation extends beyond words into medical interventions that can carry lifelong consequences. I can understand the feeling of being alien in your own body. I lived it. Going from a slight, childlike frame to a woman’s body felt overwhelming. At times, it felt excessive, even wrong.

But my body was not wrong. My perception was.

The adults in my life, however imperfectly, understood that their role was not to validate every feeling I had, but to help guide me through them. They did not treat a temporary distortion as a permanent truth. They did not offer me permanent solutions to what was, in hindsight, a passing and developmental struggle.

That is what I struggle to understand today. Where are the adults in the room?

Where are the voices willing to say, with compassion and clarity, that feelings are not always facts, that confusion does not require immediate affirmation, and that the body is not the enemy? Where are the parents, teachers, and doctors willing to stand in the tension between empathy and responsibility?

We have seen social contagions before. We have watched behaviors spread among vulnerable teenagers, reinforced by peer groups, culture, and the media. The details change, but the pattern remains. Teenagers look to one another for cues on how to interpret their discomfort, and when a narrative takes hold, it can shape real behavior in powerful ways.

The role of adults is not to mirror that confusion back to them. It is to anchor them through it.

Compassion does not mean affirming every belief a child expresses. Sometimes compassion requires restraint. Sometimes it requires saying no. Sometimes it requires the courage to stand against cultural momentum to protect a child from making permanent decisions based on temporary feelings.

I am grateful that the adults in my life did not hand me diet pills or encourage my self-destructive habits. I am grateful they did not medicalize a distorted perception of my body. Because if they had, I might have made permanent decisions based on a temporary state of mind.

That is the question we must ask ourselves now. Are we protecting our children, or are we affirming them into consequences they are too young to fully understand?

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