Willough Jenkins spends her days treating some of the most acute cases in adolescent mental health. She is a board-certified child and adolescent psychiatrist, and medical director of the Psychiatric Emergency and Consultation Liaison Service at Rady Children's Hospital in San Diego, California. She is also an associate professor of psychiatry at UC San Diego, and partners with the World Health Organization to combat misinformation around youth mental health.
Speaking with Newsweek, Jenkins said many well-intentioned parents misread ordinary adolescent behavior in teenage girls—moodiness, silence, withdrawal—as something going seriously wrong, when it is usually a normal brain doing exactly what it is built to do at that age. She shared the seven signs in teenage girls that she believes deserve closer attention from parents, teachers and guardians—and what she wishes everyone understood about them. "Teenage girls are not too emotional," Jenkins said.
"They are at a developmental stage where the emotional volume is at its highest, and the brain systems that help regulate it are still years from being fully online." That intensity is often compounded by a second, quieter pattern: the guarded "I'm fine." According to Jenkins, that response is rarely a brush-off. "She is usually in the middle of deciding whether you are safe enough to tell the truth to," she said. "What happens next depends almost entirely on how you respond to 'fine.'" Social pain, Jenkins said, is a third sign too often dismissed as meaningless melodrama.
"Friend group conflicts, exclusion and social rejection are not drama," she said. "They are genuinely painful experiences." Back in 2003, researchers at UCLA found that social exclusion activates the same brain region involved in the emotional experience of physical pain. A follow-up study with adolescents specifically found that teens more sensitive to rejection showed even greater activity in that region, and that a stronger brain response to exclusion predicted depressive symptoms a year later.
Indeed, when a teenage girl says being left out of a group chat feels unbearable, she is not being dramatic. Her brain is registering it the way it would register a physical injury. That is why repeated social rejection during adolescence is worth taking seriously, rather than brushing it off as normal teenage drama, Jenkins said.
A fourth sign—daughters pulling away from their mothers—can look like rejection but rarely is. "It is one of the most developmentally important things she can do at this stage," Jenkins said. "Your job is to stay available for when she comes back." Perfectionism is Jenkins's fifth sign, and one she says is frequently mistaken for diligence rather than emotional distress.
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