Feelings of failure

Feeling like you’ve got this whole parenting thing wrong can have a massive impact on the tone you bring to interactions with your teen.

A sense of failure or distress in regard to your competency as a parent may lead to feelings of self-doubt and low confidence where perhaps you don’t need to feel those things. Your teen may have their own perspective on how you’ve handled things, but talking about them can help you get on the same page. Connecting will be difficult when you arrive to a conversation defensive. Acknowledging your fears and regrets may be healing, but so too can offering yourself credit and grace.

Recalibrating Communication

The shifts in parenting responsibility as your children move into teen-hood go far beyond physical duties.

Balancing the emotional experiences that feel new and may be overwhelming for your teen alongside your own confusion at these changing roles may lead to communication that feels unproductive or even nonexistent.

If you are looking for new ways to talk with your teen instead of at them, we are here to help. Communication complications can make connection feel out of reach, but it doesn’t have to be. We want to make sure your teen feels heard and you feel supported in hearing them.

After trauma

Trauma during the emotionally-heavy teen years can be particularly impactful in every regard. If your teen has experienced trauma, ensuring they have proper support and a parent who understands how to support them as they move through it is critical.

There are many types of trauma: addiction, sexual assault, bullying, parental separation, identity questioning, loss, and more. Among them, there is no spectrum or prescribed normal for what they may experience or need. Working with a therapist helps ensure you are getting supportive guidance and collecting tools to support them in their trauma and through processing and healing.

Trouble with tech

Technology has taken front and center in the world over the last decade in ways that were hard to imagine before they happened. Understanding your teen’s relationship with and dependence on technology for so many aspects of their lives is a delicate difficulty. Social media is but the start of worryingly powerful elements of this digital age they’ve grown up in.

Whether you struggle to move through the functions of all the digital tools available at your fingertips, or are concerned about the influence of these things on your teens, we’re here to help you navigate the ever-expanding world of the web and its place in everyone’s lives.

GET COMFORTABLE being u n c o m f o r t a b l e

When our children become teens, it is time to make a key shift in roles that can be painful for everyone. Parents will pass the baton of being the primary decision-maker in their child’s lives and instead become a supporting coach instead. It’s an uncomfortable and confusing transition, but therapeutic support can help make it an enlightening one that cultivates a powerful new relationship with your teen(s).

Respect first

The inflection you and your child speak with takes center stage as they become teenagers. If you want respect from your teen, you must control the way that you speak to them in return. Feeling valued and respected in their relationships is critical to confidence, validity, and their continued willingness to share vulnerability with the adults in their lives. When you don’t understand or agree with your teen, talk to them like an equal.

Ask questions and be willing to learn from them without superiority or assuming you know better. Offering them the courtesy of compassionate and respectful communication (while still expecting the same) can be valuable in shaping your evolving relationship.

Educate. Empathize. Engage.

Focusing on the ways you can grow and empower yourself in your relationship with your teen is a critical benefit of counseling. We can help you develop a more comprehensive understanding of mental health as a whole.

We can explore your own relationship with mental health and revisit your experience as a teenager to build an empathetic space to meet your teen when they need your support. Even when they are actively pushing you away, parenting your teen is largely a conversation of engagement and empathy.

Is it supposed to be this hard?

Yes.

The change in dynamic from supporting every step of their development to working toward supporting their flourishing autonomy is supposed to be difficult, messy and emotional. You move so rapidly from being completely depended on to entirely expendable that it feels like whiplash and walking through quicksand at once.

This is where all those cliches come from- the days move slow but the years are fast. Parenting is hard from the very first day, and this is no different. You aren’t getting it wrong because it’s hard, but we can help make it a bit less painful.

How do I get through to them when every conversation is a fight?

No matter that they’re your child, you cannot force a person to listen to you. Finding a shared space where there is understanding and patience can feel like an uphill battle. Avoiding hard conversations won’t make them easier but hard conversations will help to clear the backlog of emotional stress.

Your teen’s emotions are valid, even if they’re difficult to understand, and so are yours. If those conversations tend to become combative, spending some time developing your points in a therapeutic space may help you work through the rawest emotions and make space for the more tumultuous things your teen may be feeling.

They’ve had an easy life, why are they struggling?

This transition is just as hard for them as it is for you. Much as letting go of your parent-child relationship and creating space for their flourishing lives and impending adulthood is painful and confusing for you, navigating that process is extremely confusing for them too.

There are a lot of big feelings in the process of becoming, identifying beliefs and working through emotions they’ve never felt before. They’re looking to you for support, not judgement, and we want to help you provide it.

Is it angst or depression?

While we cannot diagnose your child based on your perception of their mental health, working through your fears and worries in regard to their well-being will benefit your relationship with them. We are happy to help you in supporting your awareness of their safety as well as processing their big emotions.

Teenage angst is a documented experience that comes along with the turbulent emotional and physical experience of growth in the teen experience. Making space, staying aware, and feeling your feelings about their life in a space respectful of their privacy is valuable in processing this.

Comparison is the thief of joy

Your teen is not you.

That’s an abrupt truth, but it’s an important one that could set you all free of the burden of comparison. They don’t feel like you felt or perceive things like you did.

The landscape of their life and world has changed radically as we have moved through new political, social and health fields in recent times, and their experience is entirely unique.

Take care to remember this and give them (and yourself) the respect of a unique lived experience.

Listen

Above all else, listen to your teenagers. What they have to say may be hard to hear, and we are here to help you deal with the emotions you may feel in response. Hear them though, even when it’s difficult.

Listen to the things they say, and the feelings they don’t.

Meet them in the spaces they’re in instead of the ones you occupy and try to do so with an ear of love instead of condemnation. Listen to your child—they are a whole person with their own ideas and opinions now—and try to truly hear them.

You’re not really the worst

Angry words are hard to hear and impossible to take back. Whether you’ve said things you regret, or heard things that hurt you, you won’t always be in this space. You are here, worrying about your parenting role and seeking ways to support your own growth as well as your teen’s life experience.

Whatever hurtful barbs you’ve heard, whether they came from your teen or your own self-talk, they are not an accurate depiction of the experience you’re having. Words definitely can hurt us but you aren’t the worst. This won’t last forever, and you aren’t ruining them (or yourself).

FIND A THERAPIST WHO UNDERSTANDS YOUR TEEN: