It Is Not Failure They Fear; It Is Being Judged – Jennifer Oaten
Recently, I sat in on one of our Year 12 public speaking events. The girls speaking were articulate and clearly well-prepared. One of them was speaking about what holds young people back, and she put it plainly. It is not failing that frightens girls most. It is the thought of being judged by the people around them and feeling embarrassed.
It is one of those moments where a student names something that adults have been circling around without quite landing on. And she is right. When I speak with staff about what they notice, the hesitation they describe is rarely about the task itself. It is about the audience, about how peers will respond to what they see.
We all want others to think we are capable, successful, and living the best life. This is mostly what we see on social media platforms; it is rarely the struggles of the failures that people, especially young women, share.
A Distinction That Matters
We have spent a good deal of time in education thinking about the fear of mistakes or failure and growth mindset, and for good reason. But there is a related and distinct fear that sits underneath much of what we observe in girls. Psychologists call it fear of negative evaluation, the worry that others are forming a poor opinion of you, along with a tendency to overestimate how likely that judgement is. Embarrassment is the feeling that follows. The fear of being judged is what drives the hesitation in the first place.
Fear of failure is real for girls, and the evidence on that is clear. A large study of Swedish adolescents, published in the European Journal of Public Health, found that fear of failure was more pronounced in girls than boys and more strongly linked to the stress that followed. What our student at public speaking was describing sits close to this, but is not quite the same.
Fear of failure is about the outcome and whether a girl meets the standard she sets for herself. The fear she named is about the audience, about who is watching her get it wrong.
What the Research Tells Us
A study published earlier this year by researchers at the University of the Sunshine Coast sheds light on this. Led by psychologist Helen Hall and conducted across four independent schools in Queensland, the research studied more than 170 young people aged 13 to 15. It found that those who stayed under the social radar to avoid being judged by their peers reported greater loneliness, along with lower trust, connection and participation in their friendships. Hall described a cycle that feeds itself. A girl withdraws to avoid judgement, then misses the chance to learn skills around trust, joining in, and the give and take of friendship, then feels more alone, and so withdraws further.
What struck me about this research is what it says about empathy. Hall noted that some of the young people most affected by this fear are also those with the most empathy and the strongest ability to see things from another perspective. The very quality that makes a girl thoughtful and attuned to others can also make her acutely aware of how she might be seen by them. These are not girls who struggle socially because they lack social skills. They are often the ones who have great skills.
Hall also pushed back on a piece of advice parents often reach for. Telling a teenager to “stop caring what others think” tends to land as dismissal rather than help, because for a girl who is wired to notice social cues, the feeling is not something she can switch off. What she needs instead are small, manageable ways to take social risks, build trust over time, and learn from experience that being seen, even imperfectly, is something she can come through.
Why This Shows Up in Girls
There is a developmental reason this shows up so strongly in the early secondary years. The fear of being judged is not simply a matter of character or confidence. For many girls at this age, it registers in the brain as a genuine threat.
Recent research helps explain why this intensifies when it does. A 2024 study published in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience examined how the brains of girls aged 9 to 15 processed being evaluated by peers and found that the changes of puberty themselves shape how strongly the brain responds. This matters for how we read our daughters. When a capable girl suddenly seems more hesitant or more sensitive to what others think during the middle years of school, it is not that she has become less confident. She is moving through a period when her brain is, for a time, especially tuned to the judgement of those around her.
What Parents Can Do
The school cannot do this work alone, and I do not think it should. Some of the most important conversations about social courage happen at home, and they are often the ones that get skipped because they feel awkward or because we are not sure what to say.
Ask what she is actually afraid of. When your daughter holds back from something, the real fear is often less about the activity and more about how she will be seen doing it. If she can put that fear into words, she can begin to look at it, and you can help her see that the reaction she is dreading is almost always larger in her mind than it turns out to be in reality.
Tell her about the times you were seen imperfectly. Girls watch their parents closely. A story about a moment you stumbled in front of others, and how it did not define you, offers her something no amount of reassurance can. It shows her that being judged is survivable, because you survived it.
Encourage small acts of social courage. Hall’s advice to parents was to look for one small step rather than a great leap. A question asked in class, a girl invited to sit with her, something said that she had been holding back. Small moments of being seen, repeated over time, do far more to loosen the grip of this fear than waiting for confidence to arrive first.
Be careful not to wave the feeling away. Telling a teenager she should not care what others think is well meant, but it can leave her feeling that her experience does not count. Listening first and then helping her think through what one manageable step might look like tends to be far more useful.
Finding Their Voice
The girl who spoke at our public speaking event was not describing a weakness. She was describing something real, and as the research shows, something common and well understood. The fear of being judged by others is a genuine brake on participation and growth for many adolescent girls (and boys), and naming it plainly is the first step toward helping them through it.
I think often about what it means for a girl to find her voice. It is rarely a single moment. More often, it builds across many smaller ones. The times she spoke before she felt ready, sat with the discomfort of being seen, and found that the world did not end. Our task, at school and at home, is to keep creating the conditions in which those moments can happen.
When your daughter holds back from something, I wonder what question you might ask her to understand what she is really afraid of.
- adolescent girls wellbeing, fear of being judged in girls, fear of negative evaluation, Featured, girls confidence and courage, parenting adolescent girls, public speaking confidence, Santa Maria College parenting, social courage in teenagers, Student Wellbeing, teenage girls and friendship
Author: Santa Maria College
Santa Maria College is a vibrant girls school with a growing local presence and reputation. Our Mission is to educate young Mercy women who act with courage and compassion to enrich our world. Santa Maria College is located in Attadale in Western Australia, 16 km from the Perth CBD. We offer a Catholic education for girls in Years 5 – 12 and have 1300 students, including 152 boarders.
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