Do you want your teenager to be emotionally healthy?

Why contact with parents is essential for adolescents.

“I can’t stand my parents. I'm just waiting until next year, when I go off to college, and I won't have to worry about it anymore.

“My mom drove me to therapy today because I've been grounded from the car for 2 weeks. I received a speeding ticket. It sucks not having a car, but I guess I understand why they did that.

My adolescent clients have a lot to say about their parents during our therapy sessions. Which of these quotes resembles the experience of connecting with parents?

While we all need connection with other humans, it can be a lifeline for teens and emerging adults. Teenagers discover themselves and find their way in the world beyond the family. On the path to independence, social relationships with peers become a bridge. During this process of trial and error, as they discover themselves and find “their people,” adolescents find themselves in a precarious situation and absolutely need predictable and stable relationships. Parents and other adult caregivers are the issues that support adolescents in a time of great change, growth, and necessary risk-taking. These connections have the greatest power to affect, influence, and impact the emotional health and well-being of adolescents.

The benefits of connectivity are both protective and restorative for adolescents and the adults who love and care about them. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy identified adolescent mental health and suicide rates as a public health crisis in his 2021 advisory on Protecting Youth Mental Health. In 2017, even before the pandemic, the CDC released a report titled “Preventing Suicide: A Technical Set of Policies, Programs, and Practices.” In 2023, Gallup shared a report through the Institute for Family Studies titled “Parenting is Key to Adolescent Mental Health.” All of these studies found one essential intervention in common: strong and secure emotional attachment, a connectivity mechanism, can increase healthy coping and help-seeking behaviors, and has a powerful influence on health and well-being. be children and adolescents.

However, for such a much-needed effort, it can seem difficult to cultivate and maintain a connection with teens as they push and pull away. They both need us and don't always want our life support. Experiencing meaningful connection with teens and emerging adults is a balancing act. Their evolutionary need is to separate from their parents and provide for themselves (“I don't need you. I can do this”). The evolving needs of guardians are to nurture and protect; we're sure we can see a train wreck coming at them from a mile away.

Both are true.

These opposing positions create many dilemmas for parents and adolescents to face, which can potentially lead to greater conflict or greater connection. Achieving this requires awareness and effort to build and maintain a relational foundation that promotes a connected experience for parents and adolescents. The variables contributing to the mental health problems of today's adolescents are numerous and complex. When adolescents struggle with mental health issues, parents can harness great power as a resource within a connected relationship.

My 30 years as a therapist with adolescents and their parents have taught me that:

1. Teenagers desperately to want feel connected with their parents.
2. Parents want to have close, connected, and meaningful relationships with their teens.
3. Parents and teenagers don't seem to know how to do this.

Over decades of speaking with thousands of adolescents and reviewing relevant studies, I, along with a colleague and co-author, have been able to identify 5 key skill sets for creating and maintaining a connected parent-teen relationship: Respect, authenticity, kindness, predictability, And Acceptance can be cultivated and deliberately practiced. As a mother of two emerging adult men, I have also put these skills and strategies to the test while humbly parenting for the past 21 years.

To find a therapist, visit Psychology Today's therapy directory.

Welcome to my first article on “Parenting Teens Through Connection”. Here, I hope parents will feel empowered by having resources for concrete strategies and helpful concepts for handling difficult situations and interactions while having a more meaningful and connected experience raising their pre-teens, teens, and adults emerging.

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