How to Connect With Your Teen: Communicating with Curiosity and Compassion
Parenting a teen can be challenging, especially in a pandemic. Our teens are struggling right now for many reasons, and parents are grappling with how to support them in a meaningful way. How can you be a sounding board for your teen and really connect with them without trying to fix the problem or seem dismissive?
In this Voices of Compassion podcast, Jennifer Leydecker, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) and Clinical Manager at CHC, shares her experience and expertise from years of working with teens. Read more ›
Being a parent is hard. Being a parent to a teenager is even harder. A young adult shares how parents can connect better with their teenagers who seek a balance between disciplinarian and friend. 
While active listening can be a difficult skill to learn in any relationship, it’s particularly challenging when one party is meant to occupy the role of authority figure. Parents need to realize that engaging in active listening does not mean never giving teens much-needed advice or discipline — it simply means ensuring that the teen feels heard and understood during the process. 
Having a healthy and trusting parent-child relationship during the teenage years is more important than ever. Staying close isn’t easy, though. Here are some tips for navigating the new terrain. 
Who are you going to be with? Where are you going? When will you be home? The who, what, where, when, and whys we asked were the hallmarks of caring, active, involved parents. But the strategy didn’t work as well as hoped.
Feeling anxious about coming out from behind your computer screen? You are not alone. According to the APA, nearly 50% of Americans say they feel anxious about getting back to ‘normal’ post-pandemic, enough for psychologists to coin the phrase “re-entry anxiety.”
Parenting can be stressful under the best of circumstances, but moms and dads of children with developmental and mental health challenges often have to deal with strain of a different magnitude. Caring for a child with special needs can become a full-time job — and an overwhelming one at that, if you don’t have adequate support. Without enough help, parents may be headed toward caregiver burnout, which negatively affects everyone. 
Between kindergarten and twelfth grade, students are expected to learn how to study, schedule their time and complete sizable assignments without procrastinating. Yet these skills often aren’t taught explicitly. With the increased self-sufficiency necessitated by virtual education, educators and parents can help students learn and manage their goals more effectively by directly teaching study skills. 
We’re experiencing what mental health experts call a “collective trauma”– overwhelm, isolation and the loss of what life used to be. Some have flourished during shelter-in-place and are anxious about re-entry. Others have lost so much that it feels like only thing left to hold onto is hope. 
For those with social or situational anxieties, sheltering-in-place may have brought comfort and control, and even the anticipation of re-entry can be debilitating. But these stressful times can also be a teaching moment, for us to validate our kids’ feelings and model healthy coping strategies.
