Growing mental health problems affect every teenager and family directly and indirectly – no community is immune to this. If you’re parenting a teen, you’re acutely aware of the teen mental health crisis sweeping the Western world. You’ve either experienced mental health issues up close and personal with your own child or witnessed other children or their families navigating them in your family, school or the broader community. Increasingly, none of us is untouched by the mental health issues confronting teens and as parents, we must think and act deliberately to help our children navigate the tricky teenage and high school years.
A mental health crisis among teens
The numbers from a recent CDC report tell the story of adolescent mental health in the US in particular, and the West in general:
Mental health has worsened across every racial and ethnic group with increases in the number of children who felt persistently sad or hopeless, but with some demographic differences. Girls were disproportionately affected with 57% of them reporting persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness over the past year relative to 29% among boys. Multiracial and Hispanic children had the highest reported percentages, with White adolescents in the middle, and Black and Asian students with lower reported percentages.
So if you’re parenting a teen, what can you do? Here are things I consistently keep top of mind as a parent of three teens. This list is by no means exhaustive but through our conversations with a variety of mental health professionals, coaches, parents and teens, we know these five things have a definitive impact.
Create an environment of open communication
Use regular, mealtime conversations to talk about topics that matter to them and you. You’ll develop your own mix of topics but as an example, in our home, the topics are generally:
- Discussing day-to-day experiences and my husband’s and mine
- Asking about friendships, romantic interests, sex, drugs and alcohol among their peers
- Proactively talking about current events, including politics
- Chatting about family friends and the progression of their children, and
- Sharing our own experiences as teens
Talking openly about their experiences allows them to normalize regular conversations about themselves and actively bringing up sex, drugs and alcohol, allows them to understand and define their own boundaries while fostering an open, communicative environment. Mealtime conversations also communicate that not just parents, but other family members can equally be important sources of advice and support. It takes a village even within a family, for teens to feel supported and realize that no topic needs to be taboo.
Discussing current events and what my husband and I are experiencing at work are important to constantly iterate a broader context. Too often teens get so caught up in their own lives that it’s important to remind them that there’s a broader context we’re all living in. Discussing decisions and actions we’re confronting at work exposes them to our day-to-day so they better understand how we think and what we’re confronting.
Having regular interactions with family friends and their children, and my husband and me talking about our own experiences when we were teenagers, allows our teens to understand they’re not alone. While the context of our children’s childhood might be different, the biology of adolescence remains the same, making many of the obstacles and challenges they confront universal experiences.
Educate and engage. Don’t prescribe and instruct.
The tone you use matters a great deal when dealing with teens who sometimes lack the emotional maturity and experience to see beyond the way you communicate. So focus on:
- Sharing your thoughts and stories honestly and objectively with your teens
- Enabling a tone of emotional connection, equality and friendship
- Expressing and explaining your concerns
- Being a good listener, and
- Realizing that every problem they articulate isn’t them asking you for a solution
Don’t be preachy or talk down to teens, or try to twist facts to suit the circumstances – teenagers have a good BS detector and can always tell when adults are being inauthentic. Trust is the most important quality you’re trying to build and steward with them. If they trust you implicitly, they will come to you first, even during their hardest times. Remember that they’re expecting and wanting to be treated as an adult or friend, but they’re unaware that they still need some parenting periodically. What’s most challenging about the teenage years is the push and pull of this incipient adulthood and the conflict it can often create.
Enable a tone of emotional connection, equality and friendship with your child. When they tell you or you detect something that you’re concerned about, explain the cause for your concern to them so that it becomes their concern as well. Help them think through and navigate the concern so you get to a landing spot that works for both you and them. Don’t just have a contentious discussion about what they want to do that you might or might not be happy about them doing. Have the post-mortem discussion about how it went and what it taught each of you as well. The post-mortem furthers mutual understanding between you and your child and allows the contentiousness to fade into the background.
More than anything else, remember that you are the most important listener in their life. I’ve struggled with this myself in the past where whenever I heard one of my children articulate, I want to propose a solution. Sometimes, they’re articulating the problem as part of their process of thinking through a problem. Listen and ask questions to help further their thought process so they can arrive at a solution themselves.
Pair independence with responsibility
Naturally, teenagers expect greater independence as they get older. They’re often calibrating the measure of independence they seek based on what they observe of you, their siblings or their friends. As you give them greater independence, proactively try to:
- Remember that teens mature and develop asymmetrically
- Create a progression to greater independence
- Pair providing independence with them taking on responsibilities
- Explain that technology and mobile devices are a privilege not a right
- Hold them accountable for fulfilling tasks and responsibilities, and
- Reassure them that your love is unconditional
All children mature and develop in different ways and at different times, irrespective of parenting styles. Any of us that have more than 1 child can attest to this, so it’s all the more important that you create a progression for each child to gain and exercise greater independence. While my girls began walking home from school with friends at their initiative from 5th grade onwards, my son only reluctantly agreed to walk independently in 6th grade.
We gave our children mobile phones as a utility when they began going places on their own. Alongside the independence they gained with having their own phone, we talked explicitly about the responsibility this created for them to proactively inform us about their movements and be responsive to us. While they had their own phones, I also explicitly said that I could check their phones at any time so that they were not surprised when I asked to check through their phone apps. When they got their social media accounts, they were (and still are) required to show and get permission from either my husband or me for any content they want to post. We specifically explained that having their phones was a privilege that went hand in hand with the responsibility to use them wisely.
As children become more independent, it’s equally important that they be held accountable. As their homework and extracurricular responsibilities grow, ask that they take charge of their own schedules and deliverables. That means learning to wake up on their own rather than being woken up every morning, having direct conversations with their teachers when they’re late and being responsible for completing their own work to a good standard and on time. As they take on greater independence and responsibility, reassure them that you’re there to help when they need you. Help them. Don’t do things for them. By making them do it themselves, you’ll convey that your love is unconditional and supportive, while empowering them to ask for help and take charge of their own learning and development.
Think broadly about guardrails
Creating an environment of open communication, educating and engaging rather than instructing or prescribing, and pairing independence with responsibility lay the foundation for a trusting, supportive relationship between you and your teenager. In addition, you can enable them to form relationships with family friends – both adults and children – so they build a broader set of relationships to look to as role models, and as advisors and mentors.
As you foster them on their journey towards adulthood, keep some guardrails in place. When you’re teaching your child to ride a bicycle, you don’t just take their training wheels off and send them off. You stay around them to ensure they develop balance and stability to an adequate level before they can go off and ride on their own. The teenage years are not dissimilar – the training wheels are off but teens still need parents to be present and engaged without judgment as they develop their self confidence to ride off into adulthood.
Also remember that coaching can be just as beneficial in a parenting context as it is in a life or professional context. Many of our ideamix coaches work with individuals on specifically evolving their parenting skills to meet the needs of their children.
