In my experience, teenagers can be really confusing, with their desire for adult independence one day, then a tearful plea for comfort or cash the next. In our home, all of it has required careful attention, with my now-18-year-old having really tested the limits of my patience during his earlier teen years. I attribute a lot of this to the things happening in the teenager brain, famously slow in developing impulse control; additionally, teens today are under all kinds of social weight, from looksmaxxing to auramaxxing to the pressure to wear crop tops.
Kidding aside, I’ve come up with a useful body language “tell” that is a red flag for my son and other teens in his friend group. It’s a sign that some sort of disquiet is going on, and as a parent, it’s my opportunity to lean in and see what guidance I can give (yes, unbidden—as long as it’s part of my list of what not to say to your teen). This red flag is all about eye contact—when a teen avoids eye contact with you, it’s a sign that they are having some sort of internal disquiet or external conflict that’s making them unable to fully engage with you, as an adult. (Educators say that students’ ability to maintain eye contact is “much worse” than it was even 10 years ago.) While eye avoidance is a guilt, shame or hiding behavior for people of all ages—and can be associated with mental health issues, including depression and addiction—those are not the only things your teen’s wandering or downcast eyes may be telling you. Other issues a lack of eye contact might signal:
- Your teen may be experiencing outsized anxiety: During times when my son obsessed over life events from the micro (why don’t any of his jeans look right?!) to the macro (how is he ever going to be able to balance studying and a part-time job?), he’s been too tense to relax and have a peaceful conversation with family members. Instead, he’ll be trying to distract himself with endless scrolling or Spotify listening or just looking downward. And that lack of eye contact is just exacerbating the problem, according to science: A 2017 study conducted at UC Riverside followed the eye movements of 82 children, aged 8 to 13, and found that children who were more anxious to begin with avoided eye contact during an experiment that exposed them to scary and non-fearful faces. Not only that, but the less the participants looked at the faces, the more afraid they were of the faces.
- Your teen may be grappling with neurological differences: At first, I thought my son’s lack of looking back at me and responding to something I said was just intense disinterest or stubborn rebellion at doing chores, schoolwork or whatever else I was inquiring about. However, once I did some digging—and my son underwent a battery of tests—I had indications that there was some neurodivergency issues with my son. While the science and exact diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder seems to be ever-evolving, studies have shown that for people on the spectrum, making eye contact can be overwhelming, so they opt not to do it. As one brain researcher, Nouchine Hadjikhana, MD, PhD, says of a study she co-authored, “the findings demonstrate that, contrary to what has been thought, the apparent lack of interpersonal interest among people with autism is not due to a lack of concern. Rather, our results show that this behavior is a way to decrease an unpleasant excessive arousal stemming from overactivation in a particular part of the brain.”
