It’s more than teenage angst
Your teen might not be balancing a checkbook yet, but they are absolutely aware of the world’s financial instability.
The stress of high school is now compounded by immense anxiety about the future—from the crushing weight of college applications to the relentless headlines about student debt and unaffordable housing.
If your teenager seems overwhelmed, irritable, or plagued by thoughts of impending doom, it may be more than teenage angst. They may be experiencing a sense of existential dread fueled by real-world financial fears.
This constant uncertainty can make youth scared of the future, and as a parent, it’s heartbreaking to watch.
This guide will help you understand this new wave of anxiety and give you practical tools to ground your teen without minimizing their very real concerns.
The new pressure: When future tripping becomes a daily habit
Mental health professionals have a term for obsessively focusing on worst-case scenarios down the road: future tripping.
For today’s teens, it often starts with “If I don’t get into the right college, I’ll never get the right job, and I’ll be poor forever.”
This anxiety is pervasive among today’s adolescents for several reasons:
- Financial worry: According to a survey by the American Psychological Association, money is a significant source of stress for teens, particularly regarding affording college and living expenses. This stress is often compounded for teens who witness financial strain at home.
- A world that feels unstable: Unlike previous generations, today’s teens have grown up witnessing financial crises (2008), pandemics, and political polarization. This contributes to a general fear of the future that is difficult to shake.
- Academic pressure: The stress to succeed academically goes beyond grades. Higher education is often viewed as the only gateway to economic stability. Unsurprisingly, academic pressure often intertwines with financial dread.
Grounding strategies: How to not worry about the future
You can’t magically make college free, but you can teach your teen effective strategies to stop worrying about the future and anchor themselves in the present.
Here are some tips:
- Don’t minimize their worry: Dismissing their fears (“You’re too young to worry about that,” or “It’ll all work out”) only encourages them to stop sharing their feelings. Validate the reality of the problem: “That is a huge burden to carry. It makes sense that you feel stressed about college debt.”
- Focus on the next small step: Future tripping thrives on broad, catastrophic thinking. Help them break down the overwhelming future into manageable, concrete tasks. Instead of worrying about how they will afford life in five years, help them focus on one task they can do today to move forward (e.g., studying for one test, researching one career path).
- Model healthy boundary setting: If they are consuming endless stressful news reports or regularly engaging in financial doom-scrolling, encourage boundaries. Explain that healthy coping includes limiting exposure to things that trigger anxiety.
- Emphasize process over outcome: Remind your teen that success is built on skills, adaptability, and resilience—not a college acceptance letter. Help them identify specific skills they are building now, such as the soft skills emphasized by Pew Research Center data on the most important career skills. This reframes their current effort as a valuable lifelong asset, making them feel less dependent on external validation.
When future anxiety needs professional support
Everyone worries about the future.
However, if your teen’s fear of the future is constant, paralyzing, or interfering with their ability to sleep, eat, or concentrate, it has likely crossed into a clinical anxiety disorder.
This kind of distress can be treated.
Our compassionate therapists at Avery’s House specialize in helping teens locked in a future tripping cycle. We use evidence-based therapies to equip them with tools for managing overwhelming thoughts, distinguishing between solvable problems and hypothetical fears, and building an inner resilience that is stronger than any economic forecast.
If your teen needs to overcome their worry about the future and step back into the present, we’re here to guide them.
Contact Avery’s House today to find support for your teen’s anxiety.
