I’m a child psychiatrist—these 7 signs in teen girls deserve more attention

Dr. 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.

Their Emotions Are Appropriate

“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.

“Perfectionism in teenage girls is very often anxiety wearing a socially acceptable costume,” she said. “When a girl is praised constantly for her performance, she learns that her value is conditional.”

There Is a Right and Wrong Way To Provide Advice

The sixth sign is a familiar piece of parental advice that Jenkins says misses the point entirely: telling a girl to simply stop caring about what others think, or what they are saying about her.

“That is not actionable advice,” she said. “Belonging and connection are biological needs during adolescence, not personality flaws.”

The seventh sign, Jenkins said, is really about what makes the other six manageable: girls who talk openly with their parents tend to share one thing in common.

“The teenage girls who talk openly to their parents are the ones whose parents stopped making the conversation cost something every time,” she said.

Asked about the biggest misconception she encounters, Jenkins pointed to how parents interpret distance itself.

“Parents often think conflict or distance with a teenage girl means something is going wrong,” she said. “Pulling away from parents is actually a normal, expected part of adolescent development—it is not a sign of a broken relationship.”

Jenkins wants parents, teachers and guardians to present without pushing, show up consistently even when she does not want to talk, and remember that availability matters more than conversation. When conflict does arise, she says it is best to name the emotion out loud rather than arguing the facts of the disagreement.

The goal should always be repair, not winning.

Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Charlotte Nisbet and James Debens