In the seventh grade, there was this boy. There are a lot of “boys” at that age, but he was different. He was the only…

Scrolling through Instagram in bed a few months ago, I saw a picture of my friend Anthony*. Before my brain processed…

The bully moved to town in fourth grade, when social groups were already solidified and best friends were already…

Of all the emotions, it’s humiliation that scars the most deeply. The memory of an embarrassing moment that happened…

Throughout my teen years, I went to a small K-12 school in Kentucky where the bulk of my peers wore more-or-less the…

Having just moved back into my childhood bedroom in my parents’ house after graduating college, I’m in a whirlwind…

Everyone had their spot. They were the places we went to chill, escape or eat, to laugh, make out or decompress, to…

You really would not have been able to tell, from my barely touched and poorly-written teen diaries, that writing was…

Teens today have never known a world where HIV was a certain death sentence. They missed the “plague years” of AIDS—the…

When Focus on the Family launched Brio, a publication aimed at Christian teen girls in 1990, it was destined for…

I was 17 years old when I first experimented with LSD, late one weekend night while my mom was at work at one of her…

Animals, they’re just like us: they breathe, they eat, they like rubbing their genitals on things, they look cool in…

Tough as it may be for the modern teen to believe, once upon a time—back in the technological dark ages—we did not have…

A question inspired by Teen Week 2017: Do teens still drive around with large binders full of CDs?

Welcome to Teen Week!

When I met Sarah Shamoon, I asked her what she was up to this summer like I was a cool adult trying to make a teen feel…

At an “Oktoberfest” carnival in 8th grade, I met a boy with blonde tips who was in an awful band and had a reputation…

As a teen, you could have read the wholesome Seventeen magazine for a lot of reasons. Maybe it was the tasteful fashion…

Some people have a lot of personal or family adolescent traditions, customs centered around summer camp reunions,…

I spent a huge amount of high school wishing I had a boyfriend and self-consciously pretending I didn’t care about boys…