5 smart ways to help your teen cope with stress and challenges. Simple tips for parents to support their teenager’s emotional well-being.
Helping Teens Thrive: 5 Powerful Coping Strategies
Many parents of teens agonize over how to cope during hard times. It’s difficult enough to handle life on any normal day, and adding the struggles of parenting teens onto the mix can make life extremely stressful.
If you’re a parent of a teenager, you understand what I’m talking about.
Think of the stress and anxiety that you might feel today as an adult. All of that worry and stress is piled on your dinner plate and you just put a giant helping on your teen’s plate. Now take a big ol’ spoon to add more things to your teenager’s plate. Choose all or a few of these side dishes:
- Puberty
- Brain development
- Growing pains
- Self-esteem
- Body image
- Peer-pressure
- Competition
- Depression
- Bullying
- Drinking/Smoking/Drugs
- Relationships and/or Underage Sex
- Job/Money
- Grades
- College Testing
- Future Decision Making
- Coping with a Parent’s Stress
- Health Problems
Your teen’s plate is majorly overflowing. Talk about overwhelming!
When the world faced a national shut down, I wrote articles about Boredom Busters for Teens, but now the world seems extra hard again. Let’s take some time to slow down, talk about things and get a handle on life for the future of our kids.
Help Your Teen Through Tough Times: 5 Simple Tips
I’ve chosen five important topics to tackle. I’m not a therapist, only a mom of two teenagers. I don’t have the answers, but I wanted to start a conversation for parents about where we go from here with our teens.
Here are a few things we can work on as parents of teenagers:
1. Talk to Your Teen
I once had a painful talk with my 17 year old son about the world and his feelings. I was happy he opened up to tell me how he felt, but as his mom, it was heartbreaking. I didn’t realize how full his plate really was.
The world most likely seems like total chaos to them. They don’t know what to believe. Is it fake news? Who should they trust? It’s out of their control, so why even care?
Each teenager is different. Take some time to talk to your kids and hopefully they will open up about any stress, fears or anxiety.
How do you get teens to talk who don’t want to communicate?
Here are some things you could do to get teens to talk:
Do something with JUST them.
Have more than one teen? Take one at a time to do something alone together. Go for a drive or walk, watch a movie together, play a game, start a book club together, do something they are interested in… anything you can think of that will help get a conversation started.
Sit down for dinner – no phones allowed.
Dinner is always a great place to get a conversation going with your teenager. Use my printable dinner conversation starters. —> Click here to print 48 conversation starters for free.
Want more help? Read The 5 Love Languages of Teenagers to learn about their love language. This has helped me so much!
2. Be Prepared for the Unexpected
What screws us up most in life is the picture in our head of how it’s supposed to be.
I remember trying to deal with the heartbreak of our kids missing out on major life events during the shut down. Here are a few things to think about to help kids cope.
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3. Teach Teens to Respond with Kindness
It’s easier to deflect an argument with laughter and kindness than hate.
If you’re on Facebook, you’ve seen the arguments and heated discussions over various topics. When I see adults fighting in public, I can only imagine what kids will say to each other at school.
Do your kids keep their cool if things get heated? Do they have the skills to respond with kindness?
Often when I’ve got a kid alone in my car, I like to discuss friendly comebacks for all kinds of situations whether they are online or in person.
For example, let’s say someone says, “You’re so ugly!” your teen could simply walk away, scroll on by, or use one of these replies:
- “Well, at least I don’t have to look at my own face all day.”
- “Good thing looks aren’t everything—imagine if they were!”
- “That’s your opinion. I don’t agree.”
- “Funny, I actually like how I look.”
- “Wow, you’ve been studying my face pretty closely.”
- “You must have run out of better things to say.”
What scenarios can you imagine your teen might have to deal with? What are they already dealing with on social media or with friends they do come in contact with now?
Together with your teen, think of some nice ways to respond to keep their cool. I bet some of your kid’s ideas will be pretty funny and at least give you both something to laugh about!
4. Discuss Ways to Cope with Anxiety
During stressful times, everyone should know a few of these simple techniques to calm anxiety.
Take Deep Breaths
Breath in for 4 counts and breath out for 4 counts for 5 minutes total. This will slow your heart rate, which should help calm you down.
Question Your Thoughts
Ask yourself if the negative thoughts you’re having are actually true or just distorting the severity of the situation. Changing the way you think can help you take back control.
Find more ways to cope with anxiety here.
5. Have Grace and Be Kind
This seems like an easy task, but tensions are super high right now for millions of people.
When you’re worried about an issue with your teenager and don’t know what to do, the best thing you can do is talk privately to your teachers, principals, coaches, leaders or therapists.
It takes courage to talk to the people in charge about a problem. If you reach out with grace and kindness, those people are going to be glad you did. Hopefully they will do all in their power to help.
Most of all be kind to your teens.
Lift them up by telling them you love them, tell them how proud you are of them, compliment them, write them a nice note, give them a gift or clean their room for no reason or just give them a much needed hug.
They might seem okay to you, but understand their plate is overflowing with stress just as much or more than yours.
What’s been working for you and your teens?
Leave a comment below, I’d love to hear what positive changes you have made in your lives.
More articles you might like:
- 5 Things Teen Boys Want from Their Moms
- 10 Tips to Get Your Teens to Open Up
- Take the 5 Love Language Quiz for Teens here
Despite the fact that we are all at home together, we all experience hunger at various times. It’s been terrific since I just decided to gather all the kids to have lunch together two to three days a week.
Even though we’re all home together, everyone gets hungry at different times. I recently decided to get all the kids to sit down together for lunch 2-3 days a week and it’s been great. I told them one of my goals were to use this time to learn more about a topic that interests us, and for me I chose Spanish and the Bible. I shared with them that another one of my goals is to have quality bonding time together, and it’s challenging for me because everyone is at a different age and stage and likes different things. I asked them to be patient and give me some grace. We watch a DVD from the library with a beginner Spanish lesson, and then do some reading aloud.