Stop Saying "When I Was Your Age."

You think it's connection. It's actually a door closing.

There is a sentence adults reach for almost automatically when they're trying to relate to a teenager.

"When I was your age..."

It comes from a good place, usually. An impulse to connect. To show that you've been young, that you remember what it felt like, that you're not just another adult talking at them from a distance.

But here's what I've watched happen in gyms, classrooms, and youth programs over fifteen years of working with young people.

The moment that sentence leaves an adult's mouth, most teenagers mentally leave the room.

Not because they're dramatic. Not because they're disrespectful. But because somewhere in their nervous system they have already learned what comes next — and it isn't understanding. It's comparison. And comparison is the opposite of connection.

The comparison move disguised as empathy

When we say "when I was your age," what we are actually doing is borrowing our own adolescent experience and offering it as evidence that we understand theirs.

We are saying: I remember being young too. I survived. So can you.

What teenagers hear is different.

They hear: your experience isn't that different from mine, so you should be able to handle it the same way I did.

And that is where the damage happens. Because the environments are not the same. At all.

The developmental task of adolescence hasn't changed — the brain is still pruning, rewiring, seeking belonging and status, learning to regulate a body that is suddenly flooded with hormones and social complexity. That part is timeless.

But the ecosystem those teenagers are trying to regulate themselves inside? That has changed completely.

The world you grew up in had an off switch

Most adults developing their identity did so in a world where your social mistakes were largely contained to the people physically present when they happened.

You embarrassed yourself — maybe thirty people saw it. Someone didn't like you — the information travelled slowly, through conversations, over days. You had a bad day — you went home and the outside world stopped at the front door.

That front door doesn't exist anymore.

Today's teenagers are developing their identity in a social arena that never closes. Belonging, rejection, status, humiliation — all of it potentially visible at all hours, to an audience not limited by geography, with a permanence that previous generations simply never had to metabolise.

Comparison is not occasional. It is constant. And the metrics of popularity, attention and approval are now quantified in ways that previous generations never encountered.

When we respond to that reality with "we had it tough too," we are not bridging a gap. We are minimising the actual conditions they are navigating.

And the moment a young person feels their environment is being minimised, they stop talking. Not out of defiance. Out of exhaustion.

This is where well-meaning adults accidentally lose credibility

Connection with young people does not come from proving you experienced something similar. It comes from demonstrating that you are curious enough to understand the conditions they are navigating now.

Those are not the same thing. And teenagers can tell the difference.

They are already surrounded by people evaluating them. Teachers assessing them. Parents monitoring them. Algorithms measuring them. Peers ranking them constantly.

What they need from the adults in their lives is not another comparison point.

They need adults who can tolerate sitting in uncertainty beside them without rushing to resolve it.

Adults who can say, honestly: I didn't grow up in this environment. I don't fully understand what it's like. But I'm genuinely interested in how it's shaping you.

That stance does something powerful. It restores dignity to the young person's experience. It also models something teenagers desperately need to see in the adults around them — humility. The humility to recognise that while adolescence as a developmental stage may be timeless, the context it unfolds in is not.

What to do instead

This isn't about becoming a pushover or pretending you have nothing useful to offer from your own experience. It's about leading with curiosity before you lead with comparison.

The shift in language is smaller than you'd expect. But to a young person, it signals something significant.

Try this:

1. Replace "when I was your age" with "I imagine being a teenager right now feels pretty intense — what parts of it feel hardest for you?" Then stop talking and actually listen.
2. When you want to share your own experience, frame it as contrast, not comparison. "I grew up before social media existed, so I genuinely don't know what it's like to have that level of visibility — help me understand what that does to you."
3. Notice when you're rushing to resolve a young person's discomfort rather than sitting beside it. The impulse to say "I went through this too and I was fine" is often more about managing your own discomfort than helping theirs.
4. Ask the questions that don't have a neat answer. "What parts of being a teenager right now actually feel exciting?" Most adults only ask about the hard parts — which reinforces that their experience is a problem to be solved.
5. After a difficult conversation with a young person, ask yourself honestly: was I trying to connect, or was I trying to be understood? The two feel similar from the inside. They land very differently.

The goal was never the comparison

We reach for "when I was your age" because we want to matter to young people. We want them to know that we've been somewhere difficult too, that we're not asking them to do something we haven't done ourselves.

But the goal isn't to win the comparison.

The goal is to create enough space for them to tell us what their world actually feels like.

That requires us to stop performing understanding — and start being genuinely curious instead.

Those are not the same thing. And teenagers always know which one they're getting.

If you work with young people — as a parent, practitioner, teacher, or coach — the single most powerful shift you can make is moving from "I understand because I remember" to "I want to understand because you're here right now." One of those closes the conversation. The other opens it.

Lena Moxon writes about youth development, embodied learning, and what adults keep getting wrong. She is a child and adolescent mental health practitioner and co-director of Geelong Boxing Club.