How to understand and support our teenagers mental health and resilience?
Recently, I had the pleasure and privilege to be working with parents, educators, and local practitioners in teen mental health as a part of Hereford Cathedral School’s Public Lecture series. It’s always so inspiring to gather in community with fellow parents and get beyond the headlines to talk about our homelives and supporting our wonderful teens and young adults.
One of the themes that resonated so strongly was the foundational idea that our relationship is the key protective factor in a world that is both giddy from the unprecedented pace of change and uncertainty AND infused with competing, compelling, commercially-driven influence.
I shared my experiences with working with large groups of teens at scale as a speaker, as well as my coaching work supporting individuals up-close. The key message I have taken from this experience – over twenty years as a wellbeing specialist – is that parent crave connection with their teens. But also, teens – even when they are at their most cynical and disaffected – ultimately want to be seen, heard, and understood by their parents. They want to belong. They want to be wanted.
So what gets in the way?
Sometimes, our expectations are way off. There is so much mythology about this transitional phase in the teenage years. We seem to capitulate to the low expectation that distance is the destiny – that it’s somehow right and natural for them to close off from us and turn to their peers.
At the same time, we have very high – often societally driven – expectations for them to perform and continue to rise in their performance in a steady way across as many areas of the curriculum as possible. And in my workshops, young people identify the intrusion of work-focused, more functional interactions around schooling – from Year 4 onwards and accelerating in Year 5 as the engineering towards the 11+ accelerates.
We expect them to roll their eyes, be sassy, and impulsive…but we also expect them to have the executive functioning skills to manage a complex workload, their time, and energies, and their screen-time or gaming-time.
As a society, we have created a teenage pressure-bubble where they are at once separated off from the adult world in a full-time, full-on school-life where they have little to no choice or autonomy…and concierge their lives around pursuing school success, and building the CV that will take them on that gilded path to ‘success’…
If we want to think about the set-up our children and teens are living in, I think about Gabor Mate’s comparison in The Myth of Normal. In his introduction, he points out that in in-vitro circumstances, in a lab, when we create a culture to grow cells in, the benchmark is high for it to be labelled a ‘healthy’ culture – the culture in the petri-dish needs to sustain cell growth and viability at a rate of over 85%. The bar is high.
By contrast, when they label a culture ‘toxic’ in lab conditions, this is when over 30% of cells have their viability compromised in some way. When we look at teenage mental health, the statistics are not looking good – they are far off reflecting a health culture. According to current data from NHS England, 20.3% of 8-16 year olds, and 23.3% of 17-19 year olds have a probable mental health disorder. It is a rather urgent and pressing concern that this level of suffering is so close to approaching what would in scientific terms be considered toxic.
As parents, we cannot really wait for politicians and educators to fund and change things to make it better. Neither can we pin all our ideas on calling social media and smartphone companies to account.
When we think about what eases stressful conditions for young people, it’s 3 things – according to the US National Scientific Council on the Developing Child:
- Respite – the chance to recover.
- Access to a supportive caregiver.
- A sense of control.
A wealth of research over time has shown diminishing control in the lives of young people, above and beyond screen-time stressors, their lives have become less playful – from an early age, less independent since the 1980s. (See William Stixrud and Ned Johnson’s book, The Thriving Child, Vicki Abeles book Beyond Measure, and her film, Race to Nowhere, and Professor Peter Gray’s meta-analysis Decline in Independent Activity as a Cause of Decline in Children’s Mental Well-being: Summary of the Evidence – Journal of Pediatrics 2023)
Their time to play has shrunk at the same time the testing regime and homework demands have grown. Their daily chance for recovery from the exertions of learning in group life have also declined in the more-is-more world of CV-building activities – all highly supervised.
Back in my carefree childhood, there was a Woolworths and a bottomless supply of 10p Mix-ups on every high street in the nation. The only thing we had to worry about was the six-monthly reckoning at the dentists…Now in South East UK, there are Kumon Maths after-school classes. Or prolific amounts of online tuition. On the flightpath to the 11+ and GCSEs the tutorial industry is booming. Perish the thought our teens might not have a full house of top grades…when we can buy in the extras to get them over the line…
And where is the chance to recover from the full-time, full-on week’s work, when weekend mornings are also filled with extra maths, top up classes to get ahead from being behind…?
It is not only smartphones, it is an always-on, high stress, low control lifestyle which means pupils are under-rested, over-revved, and underslept. If we want the answers to why learning behaviours, and pro-social behaviours for collaborating and benefitting from group work are compromised…look no further. This is why at numerous prep-schools, I am helping support parents with looking at instilling self-regulation skills, and the routines that support a well-regulated nervous system that gives the developing child and teen the foundations they need to develop executive functioning skills and the readiness to learn and become the resilient lifelong learners our fast-changing culture will need.
I believe that now, more than ever, the major point of traction as parents is in our locus of control. In our home lives, and in the relationships we have with our children and teens as they grow. We need to wake up from the trance of achiever-parenting, and embrace the unfurling identity of the children we have got. To tune in – and help them to tune in to who they really are, what their aspirations are, what their values are. To champion their strengths and develop their sturdiness in a commercial world that benefits from them feeling less and being in deficit.
If we can make our homes a low-anxiety, high-connection, safe-harbour for our teens, then we’re already on the path to helping them feel sturdier, hold their ground, know their value, and find their intrinsic motivation.
What a low anxiety, high-connection approach may look like:
- Trusting them to make good decisions – informed decisions, not a free-for-all. (Stixrud and Johnson – The Thriving Child)
- Helping them to set realistic goals based on their strengths, interests, intentions.
- Giving them room to prioritise the investment they want to make in their subjects and extra curriculars.
- Giving them room to be ‘good enough’ in some areas – this does not mean lowering expectations, but gives them choice to orient their efforts.
- Having a healing home – enabling them to tune in to what feels right, to understand what it feels like, what they are capable of when they are well-regulated. This may be in terms of enjoying food and meeting their nutritional needs, what contributes meaningful rest and recovery, how to achieve refreshing sleep. Providing them with a safe space to vent, be vulnerable, be real with us – without us taking over or freaking out.
- Actively managing the nervous system of the family. Are there ANY times in the week where there is more spaciousness, no activities or structure? Watching out for the accumulations that clutter up routines. Taking on new clubs, adding in tuition or even therapy should involve a stock-take of the sense of balance…It’s all too easy to keep adding things in. Down time is necessary for the brain’s recovery – it ought to be a non-negotiable of recovery time.
- Backing off from comparison, judgment, or prescriptive ideas of success. When you look around you, at your own life and the lives of your peers, there are many varied routes to a secure and fulfilling life. Many people who did not succeed in school do great things later. Many of us do not continue in the field we chose as a degree.
Emerging Adulthood – a new reality for 19-30 year olds…
In all of this, I am very mindful of recent research by Dr Jeffrey Arnett of Clark University- Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens through the Twenties.
His studies of tens of thousands of 19-30 year-olds in the US shows that it is the only demographic to not have bounced fully back in terms of mental health metrics post-COVID. And the reasons for this are clear. The sure and certain path of school success, university success, is subject to massive change. Young people are not tending to reach settled adulthood until later. They may have all the grades, and all the awards, and glittering CVs with all the experience to die for – but it’s getting harder to launch onto the job market.
In this ‘Emerging adult’ phase, 19-30, this demographic can expect to change jobs and relocate several times. They will have intermittent independence – but still require parental support to weather the economic and social aspects of multiple changes. They will also change partner more often before settling down as a couple much later.
We need to ready them for this roller-coaster of change, and for them to have a healthy mindset around notions of success. They will need a lot of resilience, and self-regulation skills to weather the storm of serial rejections which may well be entirely random and cursory, thanks to AI recruitment processes. They will need to be able to keep the faith in themselves, and be able to handle rejection, change, and uncertainty. They will need adeptness with social skills to sustain friendships from afar and reach out and make meaningful connection in order to avoid isolation when moving from place to place.
So our eyes need to be on a different prize. To be in connection with the teen we’ve got – not the teen we’d like to have, or the teen we think we have. To focus less on their achievements, and more on their identity and support the beauty and originality of it’s unfolding. To help develop their humanity, their ability to collaborate, create, and connect from a well-regulated place, and adapt to change in discerning and healthy ways.
To prepare them to be the sturdy emerging adults who will make it through various tides of change prior to achieving a healthy settled adulthood in their 30s. This does not mean infantilizing them, but mentoring them and scaffolding their agency and adaptive capabilities.
Challenge: are we looking at our teens through the dutch cheese lens?
How sturdy is the substance of our mentoring…
What do we see? The cheese? Or the holes? This was the assessment one of my coaching clients made of his teenager’s revision process ‘more holes than cheese’…What is our perspective? This shapes the world of our relationship with our teenagers? Which emphasis has more structure, more substance to build something meaningful on? The holes – or cheese…
This deficit lens is fully understandable. And it feels right and safer to question, check, intervene, plug gaps…But the pitfall is that it can mean we are chasing grades rather than sustaining connection.
The more strategic enquiry is from a point of genuine interest and accountability. How they feel about the work they’re doing. What they are getting out of it? What they need to get out of it to do the things they would like to do? To have ideas about what their gifts are and how they might want to use them to make contributions to the world.
It’s actually more important that THEY know how well their work is landing than we ‘see’ them work…
No one else has the same brief that we do: to help develop our teen’s inner world, to help build their intrinsic motivation and sense of purpose. We outsource this at our peril – and the online world makes it all too easy for our teens to have their mindsets shifted from the drip-drip-drip-feed of influence.
In a world of AI competition for entry-level professional jobs, and in a world of AI companionship that will also compete for affection and influence, we need to provide our teens with space to grow into who they are, and not corrall them in treading the narrow conventional paths of the knowledge economy, that in this changing world, no longer guarantee success.
Making this re-orientation is likely to be more rewarding, more connected, more sustainable. But it will take practice and commitment. The parent ‘fear talk’ and ‘fix-and-solve’ instinct is strong. We don’t all have a sturdy working model of the connection we seek. Most of us don’t – but we do need something different – our lives are much more likely to be entwined – both until our children reach settled adulthood – and once more, when we approach the need for increasing care. It makes sense on all levels, to take real care of our relationship, to build a sturdy and sustainable foundation for a lifelong connection of trust and care.
Sometimes reading the books and having the intentions only get us so far before we are surfing the net for another tutor or self-help book. What I am talking about here is stepping into a more spacious identity as a parent – and that dream needs underpinning – support, strategy, skill-building, accountability.
Consider whether coaching may be something for you – bespoke scaffolding and reflection space to become more spacious and have more meaningful connections at home. We care so much, and want our children to have an easier and better life. We’d like them to avoid the mistakes we made and not have to struggle with setbacks – but we also have to acknowledge that the getting of wisdom and becoming an individual doesn’t really work like that. It’s a real inside job to work on the mindset of abundance and spacious possibility.
