Why Are So Many Secondary Students Struggling?
In my work with adolescents, I increasingly meet capable, thoughtful and hardworking young people who are exhausted.
They attend school, complete assessments, manage friendships, plan their futures and maintain extracurricular commitments. From the outside, many appear to be functioning well. Internally, they describe running on an almost empty battery.
They come home and collapse. They spend hours on tasks because nothing feels good enough. They cannot sleep because their minds are reviewing everything unfinished - and everything waiting tomorrow. Eventually, some begin avoiding work, missing school or shutting down.
We often describe these students as anxious, perfectionistic, avoidant or lacking resilience. But ideas from Wildhood (Natterson-Horowitz & Bowers, 2019), DNA‑V (Hayes & Ciarrochi, 2015), Ross Greene’s The Kids Who Aren’t Okay (Greene, 2026), and Dr Christina Driver’s webinar The Teen Brain Online (Driver, 2026) suggest a different question:
What if many adolescents are not failing to cope with normal developmental demands? What if their environments are making those developmental tasks increasingly difficult?
Adolescence has a purpose
In Wildhood, Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers describe four challenges young animals - including humans - must navigate on the journey towards adulthood:
1. Safety
2. Status
3. Sexuality; and
4. Self-reliance.
Adolescence is a period of intensive learning. Young people are working out who they are, where they belong, what they are capable of and how to make increasingly independent decisions.
These capacities do not develop through instruction alone. They develop through experimenting, making mistakes, receiving feedback, repairing relationships and discovering that difficult feelings can be survived.
Yet many senior students feel they cannot afford to experiment because everything appears consequential. Marks become connected to university, careers, teacher approval and identity. For perfectionistic students, an English essay is no longer simply an essay - it becomes evidence of whether they are intelligent, hardworking or worthy.
Homework, assessments, friendship uncertainty, extracurricular commitments, family stress and chronic tiredness accumulate like bricks in a backpack. Eventually, one more demand makes the backpack impossible to carry.
The resulting shutdown can look like a lack of motivation. In reality, the student may care so much that they can no longer move.
What is technology replacing?
Dr Christina Driver’s webinar offered a nuanced way of understanding adolescents and technology. Rather than asking only how many hours they spend on screens, she encouraged us to ask:
What are they doing online - and what is it replacing?
Online spaces can offer creativity, connection and identity exploration. They can also intensify comparison, extend school and friendship pressures into every hour, or become the only available escape for an exhausted young person.
The crucial question is whether adolescents’ lives still contain the developmental inputs their brains need: sleep, movement, deep focus, in-person relationships, regulation, exploration and genuine rest.
The adolescent brain is not fragile. It is flexible, curious and deeply wired for connection. But flexibility requires the right conditions in which to develop.
Behaviour is information
Ross Greene’s work reminds us that young people do well when they can.
When a student avoids Maths, misses deadlines, refuses to enter a classroom or repeatedly visits Wellbeing, the behaviour is not the underlying problem. It is a response to a problem that has not yet been understood or solved.
Instead of asking, “How do we make this student comply?”, we might ask:
What expectation are they having difficulty meeting?
What makes it difficult?
What skills or resources might be missing?
What is this behaviour helping them escape, access or regulate?
This does not mean removing every expectation. It means identifying the specific unsolved problem and developing a realistic solution with the young person.
Safety and connection come before strategy.
Working with adolescent development
DNA‑V offers a practical framework for working with adolescent development rather than pathologising it.
The Discoverer learns through experimenting and doing. Students need opportunities to attempt, make mistakes and learn without every outcome feeling definitive.
The Noticer helps young people recognise anxiety, exhaustion and overload before reaching shutdown.
The Advisor is the inner voice that predicts, compares and warns: “Everyone else is coping,” “One poor mark will ruin my future,” or “Asking for help will disappoint my teacher.” The goal is not to silence this voice, but to notice its story and consider whether following it is workable.
Values and vitality remind young people that education may matter deeply, but so might friendship, creativity, health, courage and kindness. A meaningful identity cannot be reduced to an ATAR.
What needs to change?
The answer is not to remove all stress. Development requires challenge. However, challenge is only growth-promoting when it is proportionate and accompanied by support and recovery. Chronic overload does not build resilience; it pushes young people towards avoidance, shutdown and survival.
We need to:
Protect sleep, movement, connection and genuine downtime as foundations for learning - not rewards to be earned once work is complete.
Consider the student’s cumulative load rather than each expectation in isolation.
Separate achievement from worth and treat marks as information, not identity.
Normalise imperfect action: sometimes “done” needs to be better than “perfect.”
Respond to avoidance and shutdown with curiosity rather than judgement.
Collaborate with young people to develop solutions they understand and can realistically use.
Preserve opportunities for exploration, creativity, manageable risks and competence beyond academic performance.
We do not need to solve everything in one conversation. A smaller first step, one question asked of a teacher or one protected period of recovery can begin to create new learning.
Young people are not a fragile generation who need to be toughened up. They are adolescents attempting a complex developmental journey within environments that can be relentless, evaluative and short on recovery.
Our task is not to eliminate every obstacle or rescue them from discomfort. It is to work with adolescent development - not against it.
We can offer meaningful challenge, connection, collaborative problem-solving and room to recover. Most importantly, we can help young people discover that they are capable of carrying difficulty - but that they were never meant to carry every brick alone.
Driver, C. (2026, July 30). The teen brain online: Evidence-based strategies for healthy screen use [Webinar]. Generation Next. https://www.generationnext.com.au/
Greene, R. W. (2026). The kids who aren’t okay: The urgent case for reimagining support, belonging, and hope in schools. Scribner.
Hayes, L. L., & Ciarrochi, J. V. (2015). The thriving adolescent: Using acceptance and commitment therapy and positive psychology to help teens manage emotions, achieve goals, and build connection. Context Press.
Natterson-Horowitz, B., & Bowers, K. (2019). Wildhood: The epic journey from adolescence to adulthood in humans and other animals. Scribner.
