Raising Healthy Teens
As a psychotherapist who works with teens, I see the toll our highly competitive environment has taken on their mental health, especially when it comes to grades and college admissions. Parents feel the strain too, wanting the best for their kids and eager to prepare them to succeed in today’s competitive world. As a parent and a therapist, I understand how difficult it is to raise kids in today’s achievement-oriented society.
If you worry about these pressures, or perhaps are seeing changes in your teen’s behavior, therapy can provide new tools, perspectives, and insights to enhance their emotional well-being. If you are a parent, struggling with your own anxieties as your teen plans for college, therapy can be useful as well. Working together, we can help you find new ways to manage and understand your anxiety, and can also help strengthen you and your teen’s relationship.
Dealing with Pressure
In my practice, I see some teens pushing themselves, hoping for a coveted spot at a top college. They load their schedules with demanding AP courses, participate in numerous extracurricular activities, and fill their resumes with leadership positions, sacrificing sleep and time with friends and family. Others I see shut down under the weight of the pressure to excel. In short, teens today are overwhelmed and unable to focus on building their own identities, an important task of adolescence.
Unfortunately, as Jennifer B. Wallace, author of “Never Enough” cautions us, kids are picking up the message that their worth is tied to their achievements – their GPA, the prestige of their college- and not who they are as a person. Many feel they only matter to the adults in their life if they stand out and achieve success. They are motivated by external rewards, not their internal drive. These are also the teens whose emotional development was interrupted by COVID. In my office I see their suffering in the form of depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem; and strained relationships with their parents. Friendships are also harmed as students compete with one another. In essence, when parents and the surrounding environment pressure kids to achieve a certain outcome, it can undermine their mental health.
How Parents Can Help
As a parent you can and should continue to rejoice in your child’s accomplishment and help them reach their potential. But you don’t want to do so at the expense of their emotional well-being. Starting when they are young, you can prepare your children for today’s increasingly competitive world by bolstering their self-esteem and helping them develop a stable, healthy sense of self. As Jennifer Wallace recommends:
Help them feel loved unconditionally, by making sure they feel seen, heard, and valued.
Get to know your children as the unique individuals they are, and help nurture their passions and strengths.
Help them have balanced lives by encouraging them to form meaningful connections with friends and family and making sure they engage in activities that bring them joy.
Instill family values such as kindness and concern for others
Encourage your children to develop intrinsic motivation, promoting achievement because it can help them feel good about themselves.
Highlight the effort your children put into school and other activities, not just the outcome.
It is also important to help your children develop the tools to deal with life’s ups and downs. When facing a challenge, promote persistence. Encourage them to work hard on new things, and promote resilience by allowing and accepting mistakes. Help them to deal with disappointments by learning how to make the best of bad situations. Help them to be flexible, encourage them to ask for help when needed, and work together with them to foster collaboration and teamwork.
Therapy can help you and/or your teen find new ways to manage these challenges. Together, we can talk about the pressures and stresses and develop new perspectives and better ways to cope with them.
