“Yes You Can”: When Empowerment Wears a Mask

Monday, June 23, 2025.

Or: How TikTok turned rebellion into a motivational poster for predators.

Teen girls on TikTok are looking into the camera with the intensity of Joan of Arc. Their lips say “Yes you can.” The text over their heads says things like:

• “Go out with him. Age is just a number.”

• “Meet him tonight. You only live once.”

• “Send it. He’s different.”

Cue the applause. Cue the likes.

Cue the algorithm dragging more and more girls into this odd little confidence cult where empowerment gets weaponized into a gateway drug for exploitation.

The #YesYouCan trend wants to look like a pep talk. But for many mental health professionals, it reads more like a pamphlet for digital grooming.

Behind the Glow-Up: What This Trend Really Says

It mimics affirmations. It echoes empowerment culture. But in truth, it’s riding the same neurobiological circuitry that makes teenagers impulsive in the first place.

According to psychologists, adolescent brains are in a state of reward-seeking overdrive—dopamine sensitivity is heightened, emotional regulation is still developing, and peer validation can feel like a matter of life and death (Blakemore & Mills, 2014).

So when a teen girl sees a confident, conventionally attractive peer encouraging behavior that flirts with danger, she doesn’t think: “This could be manipulation.”
She thinks: “This could be my moment.”

Predators, unfortunately, love moments like that.

Grooming, But Make It Relatable

Noelani Sagapolutele, LCSW, put it plainly in an interview with Parents.com:

“This is sophisticated digital grooming disguised as girl empowerment.” (Parents.com, 2024)

It’s empowerment without boundaries, vulnerability without context. The trend takes what girls crave—autonomy, voice, agency—and pairs it with what the internet craves: risk, drama, exposure.

The result? A feedback loop where:

• Teens feel emboldened to cross boundaries they don’t fully understand.

• Predators get cover, because the girls appear to be making their own decisions.

• Parents get sidelined, because to interfere is to seem anti-feminist or out of touch.

In other words: we’ve made it hard to parent without looking like the bad guy.

Not All Affirmations Are Harmless

Psychologist Tessa Stuckey, in her work on digital resilience, warns that teenagers often use social media trends as scripts for self-worth. And when those scripts reward rebellion and risk-taking, the line between empowered and exploitedbecomes a smudge.

One peer-reviewed study from TikTok researchers at the University of Washington found that “affirmational trends” often operate as both performance and identity shaping tool—especially in adolescent girls seeking visibility in crowded social environments (Stephenson et al., 2024).

Translation: if a girl sees risky behavior getting validated in a dozen TikToks, she may not recognize it as risky anymore. She may see it as normal. Even necessary.

What These Posts Actually Look Like (Without Sensationalism)

A girl stares into the lens. Music plays—a slowed-down pop song, moody and cinematic. The caption reads:

“Yes you can. He’s 24. You’re 17. It’s not a big deal.”

Another video shows a teen in a mirror, showing off an outfit she’s wearing to meet someone she only knows from Discord. Again, the caption: “Yes you can.”

These aren’t cautionary tales. They’re invitations.

A Parent’s Digital Literacy Toolkit

Let’s be clear: banning TikTok isn’t the solution.

But blind trust isn’t either.

What parents, therapists, and educators need is a middle path—a way to support teen autonomy without throwing them to the wolves in eyeliner and ring lights.

Here are a few tools to walk that line:

• TikTok Family Pairing: Allows parents and teens to co-create screen time limits, filter content, and manage DMs.

• Media Literacy Education: Help teens analyze content like a critic, not a consumer.

• Peer-Led Conversations: Let teens teach each other what’s empowering and what’s manipulative. They’ll listen to each other before they’ll listen to you.

• Therapy Without Judgment: Give teens safe space to talk about their desire to be noticed, wanted, seen. Then you can talk about safety.

Conclusion: Can ≠ Should

Let’s teach our kids what real empowerment looks like. Not the kind sold by the algorithm, but the kind grounded in choice, consent, and context.

Because yes you can is only empowering when it’s followed by the right question:

Should you?

And if the answer is “I don’t know,” that’s when we need to show up—not to say no, but to help them say yes to themselves without selling off pieces of their safety.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Blakemore, S. J., & Mills, K. L. (2014). Is adolescence a sensitive period for sociocultural processing? Annual Review of Psychology, 65, 187–207. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115202

Parents.com. (2024, April). TikTok’s “Yes You Can” Trend May Be Normalizing Risky Behavior in Teen Girls. Retrieved from https://www.parents.com

Sagapolutele, N. (2024). Interview in Parents.com article cited above.

Stephenson, E. N., Page, C. N., Wei, M., Kapadia, A., & Roesner, F. (2024). TikTok sharenting patterns and privacy violations. Center for Digital Society, University of Washington.

Stuckey, T. (2021). For the Sake of Our Youth: A Therapist's Perspective on Social Media and Adolescent Mental Health. Austin: Self-published.