Journal Prompts for Teens: 49 Prompts by Theme, and How to Offer Them Well

About this tool

Journal prompts for teens are open-ended topics that give an adolescent somewhere to start when a blank page is too much. Good prompts are specific enough to spark a memory or an opinion and open enough that there is no right answer: a friendship that changed this year, the pressure that is hardest to explain to adults, what the future looks like on a good day and on a bad one. The prompts on this page are grouped by seven themes that run through adolescence: identity, friendship, pressure, body, future, anger, and loss. They are written for the adult who will offer them, which means a few things about how to offer them matter as much as the prompts themselves.

The reason journaling helps, when it helps, has been studied for forty years. James Pennebaker's expressive writing research, beginning in 1986, found that people who wrote about their deepest thoughts and feelings on a difficult experience for fifteen to twenty minutes on a few consecutive days showed modest improvements in health and mood compared with people who wrote about neutral topics. The proposed mechanism is partly that putting an experience into words organizes it, turning a swirl of feeling into a story with a shape, and partly that not having to hold something back frees up attention. A 2015 meta-analysis of expressive writing in adolescents by Travagin, Margola, and Revenson found small average effects, larger when the writing was spread over more sessions, and not uniform: some teens benefit clearly and some do not.

Those limits deserve plain statement. Expressive writing is not a treatment for depression or anxiety, and the effects in most studies are small. Writing about a painful event can make a person feel worse in the hours afterward before any benefit shows, which is why the research protocols warn participants of this in advance. A teenager who is already overwhelmed does not need to be steered toward the hardest material. And journaling does nothing for problems that need action: a bullying situation, a learning difficulty, an eating problem, a home that is not safe. The honest claim for journal prompts is that they give a teen a private place to think, which is valuable, and which is not the same as help.

Privacy is the condition, not a nicety. A journal a parent reads is not a journal; it is a report, and teens know the difference within a week. The developmental task of adolescence, in Erik Erikson's well-known framing, is working out an identity that is one's own, and that requires a space where thoughts can be tried out without being evaluated. If the journal is monitored, the writing becomes performance: either what the adult wants to hear or nothing at all. So the deal needs to be explicit and kept. You will not read it. You will not ask what was written. If they want to show you something, that is theirs to decide. The one exception, which is best said out loud at the start, is that if you ever come to believe they are in danger, you will act, and you would rather they told you than you found out.

That exception is real and worth preparing for. If a teen shows you, or you accidentally see, writing about wanting to die, about hurting themselves, about being hurt by someone, do not treat it as a private matter you can wait out. Ask directly and calmly whether they are thinking about suicide; asking does not plant the idea, and it tells them you can hear it. Stay with them, take away the means if there are any, and contact a clinician or, in the US, call or text 988. Writing about dark feelings is normal for adolescents and is often how they process them; writing about a plan, a method, or a timeline is not, and it changes what you do next. Most of the time what you will see is ordinary misery, and the right response is to say you noticed, you are glad they wrote it down, and you are around.

A few practical points make the difference between a prompt sheet that gets used and one that gets lost. Physical notebooks tend to feel more private than phone notes; let the teen choose. Short and often beats long and rarely, so ten minutes a few times a week is a better ask than a daily page. Prompts work best offered as a menu, not an assignment. A teen who hates writing may do better with lists, drawings, song lyrics with a line of commentary, or voice notes; the structure matters more than the medium. And it helps if the adult journals too, visibly and without discussing the contents, because it shows that the practice is not a corrective aimed at them.

Who is this for? Most teens between about thirteen and eighteen can use prompts like these, and the themes adjust themselves to the reader: a fourteen-year-old and a seventeen-year-old will write very differently about the future. Prompts are especially useful for teens who find talking hard, who are going through a change such as a move, a divorce, or a bereavement, or who have more feelings than words at the moment. They are a poor fit as a substitute for conversation with a teen who is withdrawing, as a tool a school imposes with grading attached, or as a way of getting a reluctant teen to disclose. Therapists sometimes assign writing between sessions and discuss it only if the client brings it; that is the model to copy.

Common mistakes, in roughly the order parents make them: reading the journal; asking what was written; offering only the heavy prompts, so the journal becomes a place for problems rather than a place for thinking; correcting spelling or form; reacting to a shared entry with a lecture; and giving up after a week because nothing visible happened. Journaling is quiet. The sign it is working is usually that the teen keeps doing it.

See a professional if a teen's mood has been low most days for more than a couple of weeks, if they have withdrawn from friends and things they used to enjoy, if eating or sleeping has changed markedly, if you see or suspect self-harm, or if anything they write or say suggests they are thinking about suicide. A therapist who works with adolescents can use the same themes in a setting that can hold them. Psychology.com's directory lets you search for child and adolescent therapists at no cost.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Checked that the page addresses the adult rather than the teen, that the expressive writing evidence is stated with its limits, and that the guidance on privacy and on responding to worrying content is sound.

References

1. Pennebaker JW, Beall SK. Confronting a traumatic event: toward an understanding of inhibition and disease. Journal of Abnormal Psychology. 1986;95(3):274-281.
2. Pennebaker JW, Smyth JM. Opening Up by Writing It Down: How Expressive Writing Improves Health and Eases Emotional Pain. 3rd ed. Guilford Press; 2016.
3. Travagin G, Margola D, Revenson TA. How effective are expressive writing interventions for adolescents? A meta-analytic review. Clinical Psychology Review. 2015;36:42-55.
4. Frattaroli J. Experimental disclosure and its moderators: a meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin. 2006;132(6):823-865.
5. Erikson EH. Identity: Youth and Crisis. W. W. Norton; 1968.

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