Check out our article on validation to help resolve arguments with your teen that come up around their social behavior.

While Quentin Crisp’s take on the teenage years doesn’t come from a scientific perspective, it does start to answer the burning question, “Why are teens so socially awkward?”.

If you’ve taken our course on Teenage Motivation you know we go on ad nauseum about how engaging in social situations is one of the primary drivers of teenage behavior. If this is true and teenagers are obsessed with thriving in social environments then how are they so clumsy and awkward in social situations?  

Well, there are a number of factors at work here so let’s take a moment to examine a few individually.

1. Personality development is in full swing

The area of the brain that sees the most development during adolescence is the Prefrontal Cortex. You’ve probably read about this area of the brain many times before, it’s responsible for much of what makes us human. One thing you may not have read is that the Prefrontal Cortex (let’s just refer to it as the PFC) is the area of the brain responsible for our personality and self-expression. 

So during adolescence, while this area of the brain is developing, our sense of self is also getting a major overhaul. In a sense, teenagers are learning to navigate having a new identity, one that’s actively growing and adapting. Remember when they were first learning to walk? They fell down a lot, right? Well now, learning to walk around in a new identity and sense of who they are, they’re falling down a lot too, just in a social sense instead of a literal sense.

2. Adolescents are biologically motivated to seek out and participate in new social situations

Here’s where Quentin Crisp’s quote comes into play. Millions of years of evolution have taught us that once we become adults and leave the protection of the family unit we need to have strong social bonds with other people in order to survive. During adolescence, a switch is flipped in the brain that screams at kids to get out and be social with peers. All of a sudden their role models become people their own age, the social scripts they learned when they were younger become burdensome and outdated, and there’s a physical need to be a member of their peer group, distinct from being a member of the family group. 

Basically, all of the social scripts that they’ve learned up and to this point become obsolete and distasteful to them. These are scripts based on them being a child, a protected member of a family unit. Now they need to develop new social scripts where they are an individual, a member of society, someone not dependent on their parents for survival (even though they still literally are). So not only are they navigating a new identity but they’re learning to act and behave according to a whole new set of social guidelines. 

3. They’re very self-conscious

One thing the adolescent brain does to promote this process of getting out in the world and becoming a member of society is it floods the brain with a hormone called oxytocin. Oxytocin has been referred to as the ‘bonding hormone’ or the ‘love hormone’, it’s a big part of what makes us feel connected to others. It’s also related to the feeling of self-consciousness. A side-effect of feeling connected is the feeling of being watched or observed by those you are connected to, often connected to a desire to impress. 

Psychologically teens are in a process of discovering who they are in relation to a wider world this means that they’re more self-conscious which makes them more awkward. If you’re a human being you’ve had the experience of being self-conscious and then being even more awkward because of this self-consciousness. We all have memories of ourselves like this that make us cringe, many of them from our adolescent years. Of course, this aspect of feeling like you’re constantly being watched, observed, or evaluated has not been improved by social media. Teens have it tough, so go easy on them.

4. You might have something to do with it

Adults also have some adjusting to do when the kids they’re used to being around hit adolescence. 

Unlike adolescents, adults are not programmed to discard their previous social scripts with kids in their lives when they hit adolescence. Adults, and parents in particular, want to cling tightly to the social scripts they had with their kids. Much of the awkwardness between parents and their adolescent kids specifically comes from parents trying to play out a social script that their kids have abandoned (ex. going out for ice cream on the last day of school might be something your 14-year-old used to love but now they don’t want to be seen doing it in front of their friends). This can make parents feel left out, confused, or lonely, but just because the script has been abandoned doesn’t mean that the relationship has been. It’s just that as a parent you now need to create a new script for how to interact socially with your kid.

So if you find yourself stuck in an awkward moment with an adolescent just try to ride it out and don’t judge them too harshly. Adolescents are incredibly fast learners, especially when it comes to social nuance, so the likelihood that they’ll make the same social fopa, over and over, is pretty low.

And if you do find yourself stuck in the same awkward moment, again and again, you might want to evaluate what social script you’re trying to follow that might no longer be appropriate in the eyes of the adolescent in question.  

Are you stuck with an outdated idea of who the teenagers in your life are? Our article on Schema might help you understand why.