It’s never been easy, as Britney Spears sang, to be “not a girl, not yet a woman”. But a new survey carried out for Girlguiding shows that young women are less hopeful than ever of emerging on the other side, with the happiness of seven- to 21-year-olds plummeting to its lowest level since 2009.
At 32 years old, I am profoundly grateful not to be a girl today – or even much younger than I am now. When I was a teenager, through the mid-2000s, there were the time-honoured troubles of growing girls: depression, anxiety, bullying, body image issues, disordered eating, problematic interactions with the opposite sex. But – without minimising those struggles, or being blithely superior about “my day” – there were some limits in place that served as checks against external harm and the adolescent impulse towards self-destruction.
