One Trick to Fighting Teen Anxiety

1997 – I sat in the small, basement bedroom I was renting from a local family. It was my first semester as a college freshman. I won’t lie - things seemed bleak. Society was going to hell in a handbasket. That’s what everybody said anyway, and what I was learning in school only seemed to verify it. I would often lose myself on weeknights watching movies from the 1950s, when life seemed simpler, better.

That night, I watched an old show called The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, about a group of college students. (Fun fact: the Dobie Gillis characters actually inspired the Scooby-Doo cartoon characters.) The episode that night was about the college class preparing to put a time capsule at the base of a statue on campus while repairs were made to it. The episode changed my perspective for the rest of my life.

1961 – Dobie (Fred) tried to comfort his friend Maynard (Shaggy), who had read a newspaper for the first time in his life and flipped from being an optimistic beatnik to a doomsdayer, repeating: “Boom, boom, kerboom!” According to the news, the world was corrupt and everybody was going to die. For context, 1961 was the year of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the construction of the Berlin Wall, and the Russians beating the U.S. in the space race by sending a man into orbit. The world scene was - like - bleak, man.

At the end of the episode, they made a surprising discovery. As they broke apart the base of the statue to repair it and enclose the class’s time capsule, they found another time capsule. The workman forced it open as the crowd eagerly waited. The first thing they pulled out was a newspaper. The university president read the headline: President Says War Inevitable. Future Term Hopeless. Civilization on Verge of Collapse. Mankind Headed for Calamity.

Maynard felt vindicated. All his fears were justified. When was the paper printed? 1911. 50 years before. Then Dobie said, “Don’t you see, Maynard? Everybody’s own time seems like the worst time in history when they’re living in it. I guess our time seems that way to us, but that doesn’t mean we’re not going to survive and grow, and maybe even turn out better. That’s the way it is with people.”

Zelda (Velma) reiterated: “Still struggling, but still around.” That’s what I needed to hear that night in 1997. I wasn’t the only one who felt forlorn, and it was okay. People made it through.

2024 – I sat on our living room couch where we were having a family meeting. A lot had happened since 1997. I listened as my fourteen-year-old son told me how fearful he was for the future, and I remembered that episode from Dobie Gillis that had aired 63 years before. Thanks to YouTube, I could pull it up and we watched it together (photo linked).

Dobie, Maynard and girl x

My son’s feelings aren’t unusual. Research shows that many kids experience a rise in stress around the upper elementary and early middle school years—often 5th through 7th grade—when puberty is underway, academic demands increase, and social dynamics become more complex. Add to that greater exposure to global issues like climate change, and it’s easy to see why some young people feel the weight of the future. But these stress spikes are not universal, and many adapt well when they have support at home, positive peer relationships, and a sense of belonging at school.

So the question becomes: How do we help the ones who are struggling to build resilience?

The Dobie Gillis episode came close to an answer—by looking to the past. There’s growing evidence that one of the most underused tools for building resilience is helping kids know their family stories.

Psychologist Martha Driessnack (2017) highlighted research by Duke, Fivush, and Lazarus showing that children who could answer more “Do You Know?” questions about their family, like where their grandparents grew up or how their parents met, tended to have higher self-esteem, a stronger sense of control over their lives, and greater ability to bounce back from stress. These benefits weren’t limited to sunny stories; hearing about challenges and how relatives overcame them was just as valuable.

In experimental research known as the “ancestor effect,” Fischer and colleagues (2011) found that simply thinking about one’s ancestors, positive or negative, before taking a test improved college students’ problem-solving performance compared to peers who thought about friends or general historical figures. The idea is that connecting to your lineage, even briefly, can boost confidence and persistence.

Dr. Judith Landau’s work adds another layer. She found that adolescents, especially girls, who knew stories about their grandparents or great-grandparents were less likely to engage in risky behaviors. In some cases, knowing family stories with themes of resilience offered the strongest protection, but even stories of vulnerability were more protective than knowing nothing at all.

Of course, family stories aren’t a cure-all, and they don’t erase the real challenges today’s kids face. But they do offer something uniquely grounding: a way for young people to place themselves in a longer narrative, one in which their family has faced storms before and found ways through.

From 1911 and long before, we have struggled and we have survived. When teens connect with that part of themselves, the survivor in their family stories, they’re not left alone when facing the fears of an unknown future. They carry with them the knowledge that their people endured, adapted, and sometimes even thrived, and that they can too.

References

Driessnack, M. (2017). “Who are you from?”: The importance of family stories. Journal of Family Nursing, 23(4), 434–449. https://doi.org/10.1177/1074840717735510

Duke, M. P., Lazarus, A., & Fivush, R. (2008). Knowledge of family history as a clinically useful index of psychological well-being and prognosis: A brief report. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training, 45(2), 268–272. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-3204.45.2.268

Fischer, P., Sauer, A., Vogrincic, C., & Weisweiler, S. (2011). The ancestor effect: Thinking about our genetic origin enhances intellectual performance. European Journal of Social Psychology, 41(1), 11–16. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.778

Hickman, C., Marks, E., Pihkala, P., Clayton, S., Lewandowski, R. E., Mayall, E. E., Wray, B., Mellor, C., & van Susteren, L. (2021). Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: A global survey. The Lancet Planetary Health, 5(12), e863–e873. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(21)00278-3

Landau, J., Garrett, J., & Webb, R. (2000). Family connectedness and women’s sexual risk behaviors: Implications for prevention. Family Process, 39(4), 461–475. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1545-5300.2000.39406.x

Ojala, M. (2012). Hope and climate change: The importance of hope for environmental engagement among young people. Environmental Education Research, 18(5), 625–642. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2011.637157