The Secret life of the American teenager.

For centuries, parents have been obsessing over what their teenager daughters are doing when unsupervised. In Dr. Leonard Sax’s article “Inside the Dangerously Empty Lives of Teenage Girls” Sax covers what he believes as the way teenage girls act today. In this article most of Dr. Sax’s opinions were biased. This article response covers the anxiety in teenage girls today, rising sexual activity, and regulating your child’s time on a computer and how most of these issues he discusses are not true, or blown out of proportion. Some of these topics have been proven true but most are American statistics or examples.

The first issue in Dr. Sax’s article is the anxiety levels of teenage girls. This is true to some degree, as girls generally have more things to worry about then young boys. Dr. Sax states that when you “sit down and talk to a girl, she will tell you that she’s waking up at 2 am upset about the pizza that she ate for dinner”. Girls also have a lot more pressure put on them in school and teams, since they tend to be more hard working and focused then a teenage boy. One of the things that wasn’t correct in this article was that Sax claims that 36% of girls “self mutilate” (cutting, burning, etc) but the statistics also said that this survey came from Yale university. Sax tries to manipulate the American statistics into a Canadian article.

The second issue that was mostly false was the rising sexual activity in teenage girls. Dr. Sax claims that girls who are 12-13 provide sexual favors to 17-18 yr old boys. This may be true to some extent but the part about girls “cornering boys” and begging to perform oral sex on them is highly untrue. Also Sax states that he got that information from a letter from a student in California. Again, Sax tries to include this information in a Canadian article. In this article he also discusses how teenage girls “regard sex as a commodity that girls provide to boys”. In many ways this can be true and this warped thinking leads to girls having troubles with anxiety.

The last issue with this article was how Sax states that if you want to keep your teenage girl safe, limit their time on computers or cell phones by “no more then 30 minutes on school nights.” And “monitoring software to know what your daughters doing online.” These ideas are a complete invasion of privacy and it doesn’t matter what a parent does or says, if a child wants to do something, they will, they just get better at lying. This statement is also very sexist because Sax doesn’t mention anything about not letting teenage boys be on the computer, and generally boys spend a lot more time playing video games or even looking at pornography.


Dr. Sax’s article may cover some true points in the Canadian society, but the majority of it is highly false. It seems a little unfair to have American statistics and manipulate them into a Canadian article in which Canadian families and parents read and now will stress about what their children might be doing.