My depression was triggered by The Lion King. Watching Scar throw Simba’s father to his death, I started crying and couldn’t stop. I was 11, terrified something would happen to my mom—my lifeline, and the parent who had removed us from an abusive situation six years earlier. That night, it felt like a dark room opened inside my chest, filled with feelings I couldn’t name.

The room stayed with me—sometimes growing larger, containing hopelessness and instances of self-harm, and sometimes emptying, only to fill up again with a new sense of despair. Ashamed of this endless loop, I struggled with how to integrate mental illness into my personal narrative.

Those feelings were the catalyst for my new children’s novel, Zia Erases the World, the story of an 11-year-old girl facing her first depression. Zia doesn’t know how to talk about her room of shadows, which she calls the Shadoom, and keeps her secret locked inside her. Upon discovering a magical dictionary that can erase whole concepts from existence, Zia erases fear, pain, and sadness. After the world unravels as a result, she has to make it right.

When I speak at schools around the country, I share two stories: Zia’s, and my own. I acknowledge that today’s students face realities I never imagined, from accelerating climate change to active shooter drills. In 2019 more than 1 in 3 high school students experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, a 40 percent increase since 2009. That same year, 21 percent of American children reported having had a major depressive episode at some point.

In December 2021, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released a landmark advisory on the youth mental health crisis—which he called “alarming” before the pandemic and “devastating” after a year and a half of quarantines and isolation.

But if tweens and teens were given the chance to shape their own narratives, what would they say?

I decided to find out by speaking with them directly. Most of the young people I interviewed were strangers to me. But after more than a dozen interviews, I got to know Diemond, Camryn, Iona, Jaime, Wyatt, and Rayan, all of whom asked me to use their first names for this piece. “Depression feels like a bad dream,” said Diemond, a 19-year-old from New York. “The same dream over and over, and you can’t wake up.”

Camryn, an 18-year-old from Illinois, described depression as “a lot more than just feeling sad. It’s those ups and downs. Feeling empty and not having motivation to get out of bed, brush my hair, brush my teeth.”

Iona spoke to me outside their therapist’s office, two days before their 11th birthday. For them, the depression began as numbness. “When my dog got sick, I felt absolutely nothing. I couldn’t grieve or cry. That was tough. My dog passed away and I didn’t feel anything. It was just like if a snail died.”

“I got worse,” Iona went on. “I started feeling again, and I wanted to hurt myself.” These desires “weren’t scary to me at the time—I just thought they were normal and this happened to everybody. Now that I’m better and taking medication, I realize those weren’t normal thoughts.”

As I conducted more interviews, I noticed that the young people who identified as female or non-binary spoke more about depression. Those who identified as male spoke more about anxiety. My sample size was admittedly small—according to the CDC, boys and girls report similar levels of anxiety. But the statistics do point to higher rates of depression, suicidal ideation, and attempted suicide among girls.

Jaime, a fifth grader from Los Angeles, told me by phone how he tries to stave off his anxiety attacks by focusing on something else. “But sometimes it feels like you’re delaying the feeling, and then it builds up like water boiling. You get that low heat and it starts to simmer, and then you notice it and think, ‘I’ve gotta turn down the heat.’ But at some point, you’ve just gotta throw in the pasta. You gotta let it boil. And then let it pass. Just try not to burn down the house.”

Despite the subject matter, these weren’t depressing conversations. One mom shared that her son came out of his room “looking a foot taller.” He told her, “It felt so good to talk about everything.”

That was the one resounding common thread in all the interviews: Talking helps. Young people don’t want to be forced to talk, but having even one person they feel safe opening up to makes a huge difference, whether it’s a teacher, therapist, parent, or friend.

For 13-year-old Wyatt, the anxiety and depression began in third grade. “My uncle, my grandma, my cousin, and my cat all died, which was pretty hard for me,” he said. Eventually, he tried counseling. It took a couple of counselors to find the right fit, but the second one gave Wyatt tools that helped him move through the grief. “In my house we had this little corner with soft blankets and squishy things. Me and my mom set it up. It felt like you were getting hugged by a whole bunch of penguins. We called it the ‘Cozy Corner.’ I could go lie down and burrow in for a couple minutes or a couple hours, close my eyes and relax.”

Unsurprisingly, the pandemic came up often, and many acknowledged a pervasive sense of loss. “I’m 11,” Jaime said. “Covid was 25 percent of my life. When things finally started to get better, my mom took me to Trader Joe’s, and I just walked around remembering half the products in the store. ‘Look at the Fig Newtons! Look at the mango popsicles!’ I was having the time of my life. Only later did I get sad. I realized what a big part of my childhood I missed.”

Rayan, a high school senior from Syracuse, used the time to be more creative. “I created my first ever documentary during the pandemic,” she told me. “It covered my daily routine, coming to the United States, the fears of being an outsider. I have so many things people hate. I’m Black, I’m Muslim, I’m female.”

When I asked Rayan about mental health, she said she doesn’t like to talk about her emotions. But watching her quiet, haunting documentary, it’s abundantly clear she has found other means of self-expression. “When I write, it’s kind of like I’m talking to my emotions,” she said. “If nobody is listening, at least my notebook will listen to me.”

As a writer, I believe in the power of artistic expression to heal, comfort, and connect. Shaping our own narratives can help us find light amid the shadows: something the tweens and teens I spoke to did with stunning clarity and courage.

As a child, I was fortunate to have adults in my life I could open up to. After The Lion King, I told my mom what I was feeling, and she immediately found a mental health professional to offer support. Even so, it took many years before I could find the right words for my experience. But as I speak more publicly about my depression in the wake of Zia Erases the World, it has put me on a path parallel to Zia’s. Inspired by the honesty of the children and young adults I’ve met, I’m trying to embrace mental illness as a part of my narrative. And by naming my most private pain, my darkest secret, I hope to help young people feel the same way they’ve made me feel: less alone.

At my last school visit, a fifth grader asked: “When did your Shadoom go away?”

The answer, much like depression itself, is complicated. It did go away, and it didn’t.

But what I told her—what I tell everyone I speak to—is that you are always adding tools to aid in your self-care. Therapy. Medication. Friends. Art. Music. Books. If you can name your own dark room, the people in your life can rise up to meet you. Mental health struggles become a means of connection, not isolation. And instead of erasing your story, you tell it as a way to survive.

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Nonetheless, emerging adults are disproportionately arrested and incarcerated. Though they make up just 10 percent of the U.S. population, they make up around 1 in 5 adult prison admissions. This is a tragedy. Data show conclusively that prison has a uniquely negative and often lifelong effect on young people. Prison rips emerging adults away from the peers and social environments they rely upon to grow up in a healthy way. It causes isolation, illness, disruption of education, and permanent disadvantages in job seeking. It can make young people vulnerable to mental and physical illness for years to come. And they are not the only victims: Children of incarcerated adults face a host of health, economic, and educational risks.

In the aftermath of a pandemic that devastated their job and education prospects, emerging adults must become a policy and budget priority. The nation’s future depends on it.

Two hallmark characteristics of emerging adults—their love of taking risks and their intense need for social activity—too frequently put them in conflict with the law. These traits are by no means flaws, however. Risk-taking peaks during this period for a reason: to help young people to strike out on their own, create autonomy from their parents, explore new experiences, and maybe even start families. The pull toward peers allows young people to build a new network of support. Both are needed for healthy development; they lead to a path of mature independence.

Privileged emerging adults have always been more likely than their disadvantaged peers to live in a specific environment that has been tailored to their developmental stage: college. University life surrounds young people with peers who are likely to become a helpful network later in life. Campus disciplinary codes generally keep punishments for minor law breaking, such as drug- or alcohol-related offenses, out of the formal legal system.

But less wealthy Americans, including many Black and brown young people, don’t get such nurturing. Even minor offenses can land them in prison. Incarceration then throws a wrench into the work of entering fully into adulthood: Regimentation, rather than exploration, shapes the experience. Unable to bond with long-term friends or a partner while incarcerated, they also find more obstacles upon release, like parole restrictions on whom they may associate with or where they may live, that keep them from forming groups around common interests or goals.

When emerging adults are removed from places and people that encourage their development, they suffer. So do their communities, which lose the potential of the energy and passion of this group. During the pandemic, the emerging adults of Generation Z became catalysts for change, fueling an upsurge of support for Black Lives Matter and other anti-racist activism. Another way of saying “risk-taking” is “brave.” Another way of saying “susceptible to peer influence” is “eager to act in solidarity with others.”

It’s not easy growing up today. Milestones associated with “settling down,” like finding a life partner, having children, and committing to a profession are all happening at later ages than they once did. The process of establishing an independent life takes longer, and the path is not nearly as clear as it once was. Someone coming of age in the 1960s might spend their adult life working for a single employer, in the community where they were raised, with wages sufficient to support children and own a home. Today’s young people, facing more tenuous employment options and more expensive housing, typically struggle to find a foothold. Emerging adulthood is marked by higher unemployment than later life, and the number of adult children moving back to their parents’ homes has been rising throughout the 2000s as marriage declined and wages failed to keep pace with housing costs. 

And that was before COVID-19 exacerbated these trends and brought the problems of incarcerated emerging adults to peers everywhere. Much like prison, the pandemic imposed upheaval, scarcity, and stress. Students suffered and were cut off from the world when their schools and universities shut down or shifted awkwardly to online learning systems. They lost academic benefits and opportunities to build social and career networks. Research shows that emerging adults experienced increased anxiety and depression during the pandemic, both of which are barriers to healthy development.

COVID-19 upended normal business routines and hiring, too. Unemployment reached almost 15 percent during the pandemic, presenting first-time job seekers with dismaying odds, and forcing many young people to move in with relatives. By July 2020, 52 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds in the U.S. were living with one or both parents, according to the Pew Research Center. This development is problematic. Though some emerging adults may thrive, others struggle with returning to the nest at a stage when they were establishing independence. Their presence can also strain their already overwhelmed families, and at least one study has linked the return to the parental home with depressive symptoms.

It may be difficult for emerging adults to recover lost economic ground after COVID. Research shows that entering the job market during a recession is associated with lower earnings for a decade or more, and even higher divorce rates and earlier death. Furthermore, the economic uncertainty of the moment may inspire older workers to stay on the job longer, which will mean fewer openings for young people. More than ever, policy should adjust to support emerging adults through historic challenges. The harms that have befallen young people in prison have become the woes of young people everywhere.

In 2016, my colleagues and I started the Emerging Adult Justice Project, which aims to promote effective and fair justice policies for 18- to 25-year-olds in the criminal legal system that will allow them to grow into healthy, functional adults. We advocate for a variety of research-informed changes, including placing emerging adults in the juvenile justice system, which is more developmentally appropriate and has a much better track record of producing successes in the classroom, workplace, and family. We also work to change public perception about this life stage.

The post-COVID period is poised to be a difficult one for Generation Z. The coming hardships could threaten their development from impulsive-and-passionate teens to responsible-and-measured adults. No other cohort since World War II has faced such odds, and as such these young people deserve the functional equivalent of a GI Bill to ensure they get the education they need to be successful. Student loan forgiveness, national service, universal high-speed internet access, and extended paid internships that would allow people to simultaneously learn and earn should also be part of forthcoming legislation.

Most urgently, we can end the mass criminalization of emerging adults by including more of them in the juvenile justice system. We can and ought to afford a 19-year-old minimum wage earner as much grace and as much opportunity to recover from a mistake as we do a college student. And we should put policies in place that ensure no emerging adults are punished because they grew into adulthood during a time of scarcity and disruption. We should capitalize on their strengths—their passion for social justice, their technological acuity, their willingness to try new things—to ensure they fulfill their promise as stable and productive adults for decades to come.

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Hinton and Lipsyte clearly were writing a new kind of novel for young adults—one of unsparing contemporary realism that met a need articulated by Hinton herself in a passionate article in The New York Times Book Review published on August 27, 1967. Here’s what she wrote:

Teenagers today want to read about teenagers today. The world is changing, yet the authors of books for teen-agers are still 15 years behind the times. In the fiction they write, romance is still the most popular theme with a horse and the girl who loved it coming in a close second. Nowhere is the drive-in social jungle mentioned. In short, where is the reality?

The answer, of course, was to be found in the pages of her novel. The Outsiders had a mean-streets setting and dealt with urban warfare between teenage gang members, dubbed, respectively, the Greasers and the Socs. Hinton’s mean streets were in her hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma; those of her equally innovative fellow author Robert Lipsyte were in New York City. His 1967 novel The Contender featured one of the first protagonists of color to appear in young adult literature, the African-American teenager Alfred Brooks, who struggles to become a contender both in the boxing ring and in life.

Before these two novels, literature for 12- to 18-year-olds was about as realistic as a Norman Rockwell painting—almost universally set in small-town, white America and featuring teenagers whose biggest problem was finding a date for the senior prom. Such books were patronizingly called “junior novels” and were typically sweet-spirited romances, a genre that defined the 1940s and 1950s and featured books by the likes of Janet Lambert, Betty Cavanna, and Rosamond DuJardin, among others. Indeed, virtually all literature for young readers in those two nostalgia-inducing decades consisted of inconsequential, formulaic, genre fiction: not only romance but also science fiction, adventure tales, and novels about sports, cars, and careers.

Small wonder, then, that this newly hard-edged, truth-telling, realistic fiction filled such a need. Seemingly overnight, a new genre, young adult literature, sprang into being. Within two years, noteworthy novels such as Paul Zindel’s My Darling, My Hamburger and John Donovan’s I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip had embraced real world considerations like abortion and homosexuality, respectively. In 1971, Hinton wrote about drug abuse in That Was Then. This Is Now and in 1973 Alice Childress joined her with A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich, which told a story of heroin addiction.

And then came 1974, and the publication of one of the most important and influential novels in the history of young adult literature. Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War was arguably the first young adult novel to trust teens with the sad truth that not all endings are happy ones. In this unforgettable book, arguably the first literary young adult novel, 17-year-old protagonist Jerry Renault steadfastly refuses to sell chocolates for his school—an act with dire consequences. Cormier took his readers into the dark heart of adolescent anxiety, and turned on the lights, revealing a bleak moral landscape. In The Chocolate War and 14 other novels that followed, Cormier continued to dare to disturb a too-comfortable universe by acknowledging, as he told an interviewer, that, “Adolescence is such a lacerating time that most of us carry the baggage of it with us all our lives.”

The cover for the Laurel Leaf Library paperback edition of The Outsiders. Image courtesy of Flickr.

Young adult literature, as we know it today, has been an exercise in evolution consonant with the evolution of the concept of the young adult itself. It hinges on the obvious fact that there could not be a young adult literature until there were “young adults,” something that didn’t happen until the late 1930s and early 1940s, when there emerged an American youth culture populated by kids newly called “teenagers.”

The word first appeared in print in the September 1941 issue of the magazine Popular Science Monthly. In earlier times, there had been—generally speaking—only two population segments in America: adults and children (the latter becoming adults when they entered the workforce, sometimes at as young as age 10). But in the 1930s and 1940s, driven by a drying-up of the job market during the Great Depression, record numbers of adolescents started attending high school. In 1939, 75 percent of 14- to 17-year-olds were enrolled in high school. A decade earlier only 50 percent had been.

Popular culture took note and teenagers quickly became a staple feature of radio and motion pictures, often presented as stereotypical figures of fun. Boys were depicted as socially awkward, blushing, stammering, and accident-prone, while girls were giggly and boy-crazy. Teenagers were also consumers, editors at the new Seventeen magazine saw in 1945, when they hired the research company Benson and Benson to conduct market research that showed that girls—and boys—now had money of their own to spend. As a result, the entertainment industries began creating radio programs and motion pictures targeted at teens, offerings like A Date with Judy, Meet Corliss Archer, and—for boys—The Roy Rogers Show, Hopalong Cassidy, and Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch. That quintessential teenager Mickey Rooney became a star of the Andy Hardy movies, while Deanna Durbin emoted for girls. Teenagers clearly were more innocent then–or so parents hoped.

Librarians first began calling teenagers “young adults” as early as the mid-1940s. In 1944, librarian Margaret Scoggin wrote a journal article introducing the term, and arguing that the group constituted a new service population. (Scoggin is remembered for her work in helping to establish the New York Public Library’s landmark Nathan Straus Branch for Children and Young People in 1940. The Branch became a template for other libraries that established service for young adults in the 1940s.) Thereafter, the two designations—“teenager” and “young adult”—were typically used interchangeably by librarians and educators. The practice of referring to “young adult” literature was formalized in 1957 when the American Library Association created its Young Adult Services Division, which focused librarians’ attention on how to serve this new population.

Book people were talking the talk in the 1940s and 1950s—but they had a teenage readership without a literature to match its evolving interests and its socioeconomic, emotional, and psychological needs. The genre fiction that was epidemic in the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s could not hope to do that—and the Young Adult Services Division recognized it. For several decades its annual lists of the best books for young adults included only books written for all adults, novels such as Isaac Asimov’s Fantastic Voyage (1966), Charles Portis’s True Grit (1968), and Ray Bradbury’s I Sing the Body Electric! (1969).

It wasn’t until 1970—three years after the formative publications of The Outsiders and The Contender—that a newly emergent, serious young adult literature was recognized. For the first time ever, an actual YA novel, written specifically for readers in that new, in-between segment of the population—Barbara Wersba’s Run Softly, Go Fast, about a teenage boy’s love-hate relationship with his father—was first admitted to the list.

And so, finally, young adults and their literature came together. The rest is a history that has seen young adult literature grow to become one of the most dynamic and influential segments of American publishing, one that is enjoyed not only by young adults but by adults as well. But that’s another story.

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