And in spite of that, girls are increasingly outcompeting boys and turning into future leaders.
Amid the avalanche of reports deploring troubled teens and blaming their youthful peers and social media, two new trends are emerging that are both disturbing and encouraging. And teenage girls are the focus of these trends.
On one hand, girls of the 2020s are depicted as miserably depressed, imperiled, and suicidal. But they are also seen as dynamic achievers, increasingly outcompeting men and boys in education, jobs, and activist leadership, all to the consternation of traditionalists. Which is it?
Bad news first—and it is bad.
American girls are being abused and murdered at appalling rates. From 2010 through the most recent 2023 Centers for Disease Control (CDC) tabulations, 6,600 American girls under age 18 were murdered. The murder rate of American girls averages 10 times higher than in the other Western…