The awkward phase isn’t a glitch in adolescence. It’s part of growing up.
Open an old middle school yearbook, and you’ll find a record of experimentation: haircuts that seemed like a good idea at the time, outfits that aged badly, brief allegiances to bands, styles and personas that disappeared before the school year did.
We tend to look back at the evidence of our experiments and cringe. However, embarrassment is the least interesting thing about it.
“Without awkwardness, we wouldn’t be as socially sophisticated as we turn out to be as adults,” Mitch Prinstein, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told The Epoch Times.
The awkward phase is a quintessential coming-of-age experience, a period when children learn resilience and become more comfortable with who they are.
Today, however, the awkward phase is unfolding in a world that offers teens more scripts for how to look and present themselves—and one that is better lit, more editable, and harder to escape.
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So What Is All That Awkwardness for?
Adolescence is a period of exploration, when kids begin pulling away from childhood and toward independence.
It is also one of the brain’s biggest renovation projects. Other than the toddler years, Prinstein said, adolescence is the period of most rapid, dramatic brain remodeling. Beginning roughly two years before the visible signs of puberty, brain regions become “filled with dopamine and oxytocin receptors.”
“That makes us very interested in our peers, and very interested in whatever kind of attention we’ll get from our peers,” said Prinstein, who is also the co-director of the Winston Center on Technology and Brain Development and author of the book “Popular: The Power of Likability in a Status-Obsessed World.”
This intense interest is what fuels the awkward phase.
Almost overnight, the social world feels like a stage. Prinstein calls this the “imagined audience”: the feeling that everyone is watching and judging you. Teens become acutely aware of who is popular, what people are wearing, who sits with whom at lunch, how everyone else seems to fit in—and, most of all, how they are being seen.
This heightened sensitivity is what makes adolescence feel so awkward—and it has a purpose.
During the awkward phase, teens begin trying on interests, friendships, styles, values, and ways of behaving.
To parents, these shifts can look random. To the teen living through them, they’re part of exploring their identity. These experiments can’t happen without an audience.
“Peers are super important for adolescents forming their sense of self,” Sophia Choukas-Bradley, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, told The Epoch Times.
That audience is part of what makes the experiment work.
How Embarrassment Builds Social Confidence
Not every experiment goes well. Someone says something that lands badly. A friend gets angry. A teenager is left out of a group chat. At that age, these moments feel enormous. However, each one creates an opportunity to figure out what happened and what to do differently next time.
“During adolescence, a key developmental task is to learn how to be vulnerable in peer relationships, navigate conflict, and tolerate embarrassment,” said Choukas-Bradley.
Those experiences give young people repeated chances to practice emotional regulation, empathy, and social competence.
That takes practice. A young person who shows up in the wrong clothes has to survive the embarrassment and figure out what to do next. Saying something awkward means deciding whether to laugh it off or apologize. Getting rejected means absorbing the disappointment without letting it define you.
These are small rehearsals for adult life: how to tolerate discomfort, repair a relationship, absorb rejection, and keep participating in the social world.
Peer relationships provide the feedback: larger social groups establish norms and let teens know when they have crossed a boundary. Closer friends do something more delicate. They offer support, but also honest pushback and another perspective when something goes wrong.
Through those relationships, teens get better at navigating an increasingly complex social world—and carry those skills into the adult relationships that will depend on them.
What Happens When the Experiment Moves Online?
Social media has not eliminated awkwardness. If anything, it has raised the stakes. Teens still experiment, make mistakes, and worry about what their peers think. However, the conditions surrounding those experiences have changed. Their audience is no longer limited to a hallway, cafeteria, or classroom. Social media makes reactions immediate and public.
A 12-year-old no longer has to invent a makeup routine, a personal style, or even a sense of humor. Millions of polished examples arrive daily, delivered by algorithms that reward confidence, consistency, and visual perfection. Before teens have the opportunity to ask: Who am I?, they’re already absorbing answers to a different question: How should I look?
Teens can “curate the perfect image of themselves, both their appearance and their overall life,” Choukas-Bradley said. They can plan, pose, and edit what they show others, and compare themselves with polished versions of their peers.
“When adolescents are preoccupied with how they appear to an online audience, they are more likely to experience body image concerns and other developmental issues,” Choukas-Bradley said. The pressure is especially pronounced for girls, she said, who are taught that looking attractive and effortlessly perfect is essential, though it is increasingly true for boys, too.
The more teens focus on “performing perfection for an online audience,” she said, the less they may “practice living messily in the real world.” That dynamic, she said, contributes to later social difficulties.
What Teens Still Have to Practice
Social media can create the illusion that a teen has skipped the awkward part. It gives young people more scripts, more examples, and more control over the version of themselves they put forward.
However, polished does not make adolescence less awkward. And knowing how to present yourself is not the same as knowing how to be with other people.
Prinstein worries that a lifetime of relating through profiles, posts and numbers can make it easier to see people in flatter terms: as good as their last post, either for us or against us, rather than as layered people with competing feelings and unfinished stories.
“Kids are having relationships with numbers rather than people,” Prinstein said. “You know how many followers, how many likes, rather than the people behind those likes.”
Numbers can tally attention. They cannot replace the complexity of being with another person. A like can tell you someone approved of a post; it doesn’t tell you why. A carefully chosen photograph shows what someone wants others to see, but little about what lies outside the frame.
Face-to-face, the information is harder to quantify—and much harder to fake. There is the hesitation before an answer, a change in tone, the expression that doesn’t quite match the words. A friend may say everything is fine while looking anything but.
Learning to read those discrepancies is part of becoming socially attuned: imagining what someone else might be feeling, recognizing that two things can be true at once and adjusting accordingly. A friend can be excited and anxious, affectionate and annoyed, fine with one part of a situation and unhappy about another. Learning to hold those contradictions at once—to see another person not as a profile or a post, but as a whole, complicated person—is part of the work of growing up.
These skills are what carry children from adolescence into adulthood. Prinstein said they shape how people navigate work, long-term relationships and, eventually, parenthood.
Letting Teens Practice
Prinstein calls for a more balanced “social diet”—one that includes some online interaction but doesn’t crowd out face-to-face and voice-to-voice relationships, where some of the hardest social learning takes place.
Parents can’t give their kids the adolescence that they had. However, they can make room for the experiences that are harder to have through a screen: time with friends, conversations that unfold in real time, and the freedom to make a mistake without immediately being able to edit, delete, or escape it.
They can also resist the urge to make every uncomfortable moment go away. When a teenager comes home embarrassed or upset about something that happened with friends, the most useful response may not always be to solve the problem. Sometimes it is to listen and help the teenager think through what happened and what they might want to do next.
The goal is not to protect teenagers from awkwardness. It is to give them enough room to work through it.
“Our awkward phase is a huge learning window,” Prinstein said. “We learn by making mistakes. We learn by being overly self-conscious. We learn by having empathy for others who are similarly feeling awkward.”
