Teen Culture Has Always Been Co-opted. In 2026, It's Reached New Heights
Way back in 2010, Teen Vogue ran a story called “13 Going on 30: Are You Growing Up Too Fast?” that clearly hoped to impart some necessary advice to its younger readers. “Throughout the aging process, the grass is always greener on the other side,” the writer sagely informed us, noting that, “teens are desperate to be seen as more adult, while older women struggle for youthfulness.” The story went on to warn against developing interests or personal style “just for show” and singled out soapy teen shows like Gossip Girl as potentially damaging influences.
This all sounds rather quaint compared to what teens are up against in 2026, and 16 years later, the language and much of that story’s messaging feel pretty dated (the less said about Lycra or “Cougar town,” the better). However, the overall sentiment—that kids are in too much of a hurry to grow up—is a familiar one. Adults have been fretting about what the youth are up to for centuries, and the transitional nature of adolescence is part of what makes it so scary. Whether they’re cutting up at the sock hop or racking up followers on TikTok, American teenagers have always been a threat to the status quo.
The word “teen” dates back to 1818, the same year Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was published, but it wasn’t until the 1940s that the teenage years started getting widely recognized as a distinct phase of life. For millennia, what we now see as an amorphous halfway point between childhood and adulthood (“not a girl, not yet a woman,” in early-2000s pop-star parlance) was understood in much starker terms: You were a child until you weren’t, a shift that generally happened once you hit puberty or reached a specific religious or cultural marker.
After that, you were considered an adult, and were expected to act like one. Childhood was a fleeting thing, generally followed quickly by marriage, childbirth, and entrance into the workforce. For many, work came even earlier; millions of children labored in cotton mills, coal mines, factories, farms, or on the streets. Between 1890 and 1910, 18% of American children aged 10-15 had a job; by 1920, it was 1 in 12. Several early attempts to outlaw or lessen child labor fell flat, with one such proposed amendment smeared as “a communist-inspired plot to subvert the Constitution.”
It was only during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when millions of adult men who were struggling to find work found themselves competing with young people for jobs, that the federal government decided it needed to do something about all those industrious teenagers. In 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act set a minimum age for working outside the home, which had the effect of ushering teens out of the workforce and back into high schools, which had seen attendance numbers plummet during the Depression.
As writer and historian Lauren Fadiman explains in her article “The Making of the Teenager” for Jacobin, this lasted only until the US entered World War II, when teenagers streamed back into factories to take advantage of a boom in high-paying war work. As the war wound down, though, the Roosevelt administration worried that ambitious teens would take up jobs that should go to returning servicemen, and launched a variety of programs to entice those teens back to class. It was a tough sell. These young men and women had taken on adult-level responsibilities and been paid handsomely for it. Why go to school when you could go buy a car? The era of the teenager-as-consumer had begun.
Thanks to the postwar economic boom, conditions were right for all the middle-class niceties we now think of as vintage “teen culture”—ice cream, rock and roll, pin curls, high school dances, Cadillacs, Grease. As teenagers morphed into a unique demographic, they also became a coveted market for advertisers, who scrambled to sell them beauty products, music, and magazines. Once the war was over and the grown-ups’ jobs were safe again, it was perfectly fine for the youth to earn a little money—as long as they pumped it right back into the economy.
Where big business was concerned, consumption was a virtue, and money made at the soda fountain or in dad’s office was equally green. The same was true during the mod years of the 1960s, the tie-dyed 1970s, the acid-washed 1980s, all the way through to the present day. Teens are big money, and corporations want a piece of that multi-billion-dollar market; USA Today reported that Gen Alpha alone (those aged 8-15) controls $95 billion in spending, according to a recent study by DKC, a communications and marketing firm.
The messier aspects of youth, including antiwar protests and mass political engagement—which fueled the movements for women's rights, queer liberation, Black power, disability rights, Brown power, Native sovereignty, and incarcerated workers—that defined the ’60s and ’70s, are far less attractive to the people who want your money (unless they can use it in a Pepsi commercial).
The way corporations target the adolescent audience looks a little different now than it did in previous decades. For one, many beloved teen magazines have gone the way of the dodo, including Sassy, Teen People, and CosmoGirl! And icons like Tiger Beat, J-14 (thank you, dear readers, for supporting Teen Vogue, by the way!). The shopping mall, a once-hallowed hallmark of youth-consumer culture, is on life support; and while a majority of teens actually prefer to do their shopping in person, digital behemoths like Amazon work aggressively to capture their dollars.
Now, teens primarily get their news via social media and online content creators, which means companies have to be far more tech-savvy than their predecessors to break through the noise. Instead of being limited to magazine adverts or TV commercials, brands can now, virtually, follow you home—or, at least, insert themselves directly into the media you consume through targeted advertising, sponsorships, and partnerships with popular celebrities and influencers. Beauty brands that once focused on adults have started targeting a much younger audience and ushered in an era of teenage skin-care influencers, some who promote products engineered for much older skin. And some makeup companies have skipped high school entirely and gone straight for preschool, shilling products for children as young as three years old.
The fears expressed in that 2010 Teen Vogue article are still very present. How many video taglines have you seen that ask something like, “Why do teenagers look 25 now?” or “Why is Gen Z aging so fast?” Much of that (unfair) perception can be blamed on misogyny, and is a reaction to the influence of filters, plus the popularity of heavily contoured makeup techniques and cosmetic procedures like Botox and fillers.
A much more legitimate concern is the high stress and anxiety levels affecting many in Gen Z, and even Gen Alpha, and the impact that technology, social media, and political crises are having on their mental health and social development. While many teens find community online, others are struggling to cope, and teen loneliness has become a major issue. Many mourn the disappearance of “third spaces,” locations that are neither home nor work where teens can socialize, connect, and simply be in a safe and welcoming environment—without being expected to shell out large amounts of cash. Some cities and beach towns have gone so far as to criminalize the very presence of teens by instituting age-based curfews in the name of “public safety.”
Even more sobering is a recent study from Nature Medicine, which found alarming evidence that younger generations are biologically aging faster than those who came before them. (Biological aging reflects a body’s physical and functional health, while chronological age is years since birth.) “Between 1990 and 2019, cancers diagnosed under the age of 50 years increased by 24% globally and continue to rise,” the study states. “In the US, compared with people born before 1950, those born circa 1985 have approximately twice the risk of uterine cancer.”
It’s hard to be a teenager in 2026. It was hard in 1906, too, and in 1916, and 2016, and all the other years one could mention. Ever since the word “teenager” was coined, the young people it describes have been treated as a somewhat mysterious, vaguely threatening “other." Whether you were a 17-year-old mechanic in 1945, a Vietnam War protester in 1975, or a fast food worker in 2025, someone with more money, more power, and more experience has seen you as a problem to solve; before the 1930s, though, no one thought much about you at all unless they could make a dime on your labor or marry you off for a profit.
Milestones that earlier generations often took for granted—college, a stable job, home ownership, marriage, children, retirement—have been pushed out of reach for many by the same kind of moneyed interests that keep trying to sell retinoids to preteens. The world seems to expect you to be a good little worker bee, yet chastises you if you don’t “act your age.” If you go to prom with a full beat, you risk being told you have “cosmeticorexia”; if you speak out about the climate crisis, you may come up against people who feel that “children don’t have a right to say these things.” No wonder teenagers are trying to grow up as fast as possible—it’s the only way out.
That 2010 story did get one thing right, though: "For right now, it's OK not to have all the answers," clinical psychologist Limor Kaufman, PhD, told Teen Vogue. "This is a time of asking questions and building your identity."