What Troubled Youth Are Really Trying to Tell Us

Why deviant behavior might be a hidden form of resilience—and how adults keep missing the message.

By Jack Vaughan

Every few weeks, the media delivers a familiar image: a group of teenagers involved in a violent incident, a frightened community, and pundits declaring a new low for “this generation.” The implication is clear: something is broken in our youth.

But what if the problem isn’t youth at all? What if the real failure lies in how we, as adults and institutions, interpret and intervene in young people’s lives?

Michael Ungar’s groundbreaking book, Nurturing Hidden Resilience in Troubled Youth, forces us to confront this possibility. Drawing on years of clinical experience and research with marginalized adolescents—those entangled in foster care, youth justice, and mental health systems—Ungar turns conventional thinking on its head. His message is provocative but clear: when teens act out, they are often not expressing a disorder. They are, in fact, expressing a form of resilience.

The Dangerous Behaviors We Misread

In the dominant model of youth psychology, resilience is often defined as the ability to "bounce back"—a personal trait that some youth seem to possess and others don’t. If a young person stays in school, avoids drugs, and gets good grades despite hardship, we call them resilient. If they drop out, self-harm, or join a gang, we call them vulnerable or at-risk.

But Ungar challenges this binary. In his view, resilience is not about individual fortitude. It is a social construction—a shared space that emerges between the individual and their community.

Take, for example, the youth who joins a gang. From the outside, this might appear deviant or dangerous. But from the inside, Ungar shows, it may be a rational strategy: a way to gain safety, identity, community, and purpose when other routes—like school or family—have failed. Similarly, a teen who engages in self-harm may not be "crying for help" in the way adults assume. They may be building solidarity and emotional intimacy with peers through shared behavior.

What looks like dysfunction may in fact be an act of discursive resistance: a youth choosing to tell their own story, on their own terms, with the limited tools available to them.

Dangerous Behavior as Discursive Power

Central to Ungar’s theory is the idea of discursive empowerment: the ability to author one’s own story. In systems saturated with expert language—DSM diagnoses, case notes, progress charts—youth are rarely allowed to define themselves on their own terms. This alienation from their own narrative identity, Ungar argues, is a damaging experience that undermines interventions across the board.

Instead of viewing their behavior as purely maladaptive, many youth describe their actions as coherent, necessary, even health-enhancing responses to risk-saturated lives. Suicidal gestures become ways to signal distress to caregivers. Gang affiliation provides community, protection, and identity. Truancy becomes a rejection of institutional labeling.

In other words, these aren’t youth rejecting help—they’re rejecting definitions of help that ignore their lived realities.

A Critique of Systemic Blindness

Much of Ungar’s argument is aimed squarely at institutions: schools, courts, clinics, and even well-meaning therapists. These systems, he says, tend to see youth behavior through a narrow lens of compliance. If a young person rejects the offered help, they’re labeled oppositional or defiant.

But defiance, in Ungar’s research, is often a sign of misalignment—not disorder. it tends to occur because the intervention being offered doesn’t match the youth’s lived reality or cultural context.

For example, a standardized mental health program may assume that success means emotional regulation and abstinence from risk. But for a youth living in poverty, surrounded by systemic violence, success might mean protecting one’s younger sibling, finding a place to sleep, or simply not getting arrested. If our systems can’t recognize these goals as valid, then we pathologize youth for surviving in ways we’ve failed to provide for.

This critique extends to the frameworks used in resilience research itself. Ungar argues that traditional metrics often reflect white, middle-class norms of behavior, and fail to capture what resilience looks like in urban, Indigenous, immigrant, or queer communities. He proposes the concept of “idioms of resilience”—culturally resonant ways of expressing well-being that don’t always fit into psychological questionnaires.

The False Promise of Toughness

We live in a culture that celebrates grit, especially when it comes to youth. From TED Talks to education reform, we’re told that the key to success is internal toughness. But Ungar’s findings—echoed by decades of social ecological research—suggest something very different: what matters most is access.

In his own clinical observations, Ungar estimates that around 70% of youth in high-risk contexts recover without formal intervention, thanks to support from extended families, schools, faith communities, and peer groups. The remaining 30%? Most do well once they receive culturally appropriate and resource-rich support.

The takeaway? Resilience is not about teaching kids to "pull themselves up." It’s about ensuring they have something to grab onto.

A Crisis of Interpretation

The real crisis, Ungar suggests, is not in youth behavior but in how adults interpret it. Standard mental health approaches assume that conformity to social norms equals wellness. But what counts as "normal" is often narrowly defined by race, class, and culture.

Ungar’s work is steeped in postmodern theory, drawing especially on Michel Foucault’s ideas about power and social discipline. In a system where surveillance and control are the dominant tools, youth who act out are treated as problems to be managed—not interlocutors to be understood.

It’s not that these youth are impervious to support. It’s that they want support on their own terms. And the professional systems meant to help them rarely create the space for such negotiations.

Listening Differently

What would it mean to take these youth seriously—not just as clients, but as experts on their own lives?

Ungar proposes a clinical and community practice rooted in humility and narrative flexibility. Therapists and youth workers should begin by asking what resilience looks like from the youth’s point of view, even if it contradicts adult expectations. The goal isn’t to approve of harmful behaviors, but to understand the logic behind them.

Sometimes, this requires looking past the behavior itself. A youth who resists medication might not be in denial. They might be rejecting a label that erases their sense of self. A teen who cuts herself may not be suicidal, but instead may be attempting to communicate pain in a language adults refuse to learn.

Ungar’s core insight is stark: “I have never met a youth who wakes up and intends to make a mess out of their life. I have never met someone who resists an offer of help that respects their efforts to survive.”

Toward a Shared Story of Health

The implications of Ungar’s work are profound. It challenges not just clinicians, but educators, policymakers, and anyone who cares about youth development.

If resilience is a social construction, not a fixed trait, then interventions must be relational, contextual, and power-aware. Helping a young person “make better choices” isn’t enough if the adult world doesn’t recognize the choices they’ve already made—often with incredible ingenuity under pressure.

This doesn’t mean abandoning accountability or endorsing harm. It means crafting spaces where youth are invited to co-author their own health, with guidance that honors their agency rather than overriding it.

In a time of moral panic about “disordered youth,” Ungar’s message is radical in its optimism: young people are already striving toward health. But their path may not look like the one we imagined.

And perhaps the most resilient thing we can do is listen. If Ungar’s model has one consistent message, it’s this: we must move from fixing youth to fixing systems.

The Real Test of Resilience

We often ask whether youth are resilient enough to face the world ahead.

But Ungar turns the question around.

Are we resilient enough to build systems that listen first, adapt second, and judge last?

In the end, the most radical thing we can offer struggling youth may not be therapy or discipline—but the power to name their own experience, and the resources to live it out on their terms.

A Helpful Resource

At YPM, our team has extensive experience successfully guiding adolescents, young adults and their families through the modern landscape of emerging adulthood. Spanning four continents, our work has helped hundreds of teens, and their families, connect with professional youth mentors and expert clinicians whom they can relate to and learn from. 

Our highly skilled mentors are experts at helping their young clients foster engagement, accomplishment, meaning, and connection. Our innovative mentoring programs are specifically designed to help struggling youth learn from their failures, tap into their strengths, and activate their potential. 

With our bespoke approach and discreet care, we can help your struggling loved one recalibrate their struggles so that they become a part of their growth process. Connect with us today to learn more about how we can help your struggling loved one achieve enduring wellness on their own terms and in their own communities.