Eight in ten American girls between 5 and 13 years old are scared of growing up. Not nervous. Scared.

That’s the finding from a 2026 Girl Scouts of the USA study conducted by Wakefield Research, which surveyed 1,000 girls across the country. Fifty-four percent said adulthood “sounds scary.” The number that really stops you, though, isn’t the overall figure. It’s what happens when you break it down by age.

Among girls ages 5 to 7, 41% said they’re frightened by the prospect of growing up. By ages 8 to 10, that number climbs to 62%. Among the 11 to 13 group, it’s still 60%. The closer these girls get to adulthood, the worse it looks to them. That’s not a small thing.

If you’re raising a daughter in the suburbs and you’ve been assuming she can’t wait to grow up, this data will reset that assumption fast. We tend to push kids toward independence before they’re asking for it. We put the toys away too soon. We hand over devices and figure they’ll sort it out. The study suggests something harder to sit with: girls this age are watching the adult world carefully, and what they see is making a lot of them anxious.

Bonnie Barczykowski, the CEO of GSUSA, didn’t soften the finding. “This data confirms what we’ve long understood: girls are coming of age in a world that’s changing faster than ever, and they’re carrying the weight of that change while still trying to be kids,” Barczykowski said. “That’s why it’s so important for girls to have supportive adults in their lives, like Girl Scout volunteers, who can help them navigate the world around them, build confidence and develop skills that stay with them as they grow.”

Think about what a typical Tuesday looks like for a girl in this age range. She’s at the dinner table when adult conversations happen. She hears your voice change when you take a work call. She catches news notifications on whatever screen is nearby. She doesn’t have the framework yet to process what any of it means, but she’s absorbing all of it. Anxiety steps in to fill the space where understanding hasn’t formed yet.

That’s worth sitting with.

The American Psychological Association’s resources on childhood anxiety back up what this survey is showing. Children don’t need to be living through a crisis to develop real anxiety about the future. Exposure to adult stress, economic uncertainty in household conversations, and ambient bad news are enough. What the Girl Scouts data adds is specificity about how that anxiety intensifies across the 5 to 13 age band rather than leveling off.

There’s a piece of the study that doesn’t fit the anxious-kids narrative, and it’s worth flagging. Eighty-five percent of girls said they look up to people for what those people can do, not for how they look. Only 15% said appearance was what they admired most. So while these girls are scared of adulthood, they’re not orienting themselves around celebrity culture or image. They want capable role models. They want to see adults doing real things well.

That’s actually useful information for parents. Your daughter isn’t asking for reassurance that adulthood will be fine. She’s watching what you do. She’s watching whether the adults around her seem competent and grounded. She’s tracking whether the people in her life can handle hard things without coming apart.

Girl Scouts of the USA points toward some practical responses. Teach her something real, something with stakes she can manage. Let her work through a problem before you jump in. Give her a setting where she can try something new and fall short without it mattering too much. These aren’t programs or structured interventions. They’re the small stuff that builds confidence over time, the kind of thing that happens on a Saturday morning when someone decides to let a kid figure it out instead of doing it for her.

According to the full findings covered here, the 2026 study points toward mentorship as the highest-return investment parents and community adults can make right now. Among girls who had a trusted adult mentor, confidence scores were measurably higher across the board.

Fifty-four percent is a lot of kids who think adulthood looks scary. That number doesn’t fix itself.