Do You Want Your Teen to Be Emotionally Healthy?

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“I can’t stand my parents. I am just waiting until next year when I leave for college and don’t have to deal with them anymore.”

“My mom drove me to therapy today because I’m grounded from the car for 2 weeks. I got a speeding ticket. It sucks not to have a car but I guess I get why they did that.”

My teen clients have lots to say about their parents in our therapy sessions. Which one of these quotes sounds like the experience of connection with parents?

While we all need connection with other humans, it can be a lifeline for teens and emerging adults. Adolescents are discovering themselves and finding their way in the world beyond family. On their way toward independence, social relationships with peers become a bridge. During this process of trial and error, as they figure themselves out and find “their people,” teens are in a precarious place and critically need predictable and stable connections. Parents and other helping adults are the stakes that ground teens during a time of great change, growth, and necessary risk-taking. These connections have the greatest power to affect, influence, and impact adolescents’ emotional health and well-being.

The benefits of connectedness are both protective and reparative for teens and adults who love and care about them. The Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, identified teen 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 put out a report titled, “Preventing Suicide: A Technical Package of Policies, Programs and Practices.” In 2023, Gallup shared a report through the Institute for Family Studies titled, ”Parenting is the Key to Adolescent Mental Health.” All of these studies found one critical intervention in common: Strong and secure emotional attachment, a mechanism for connectedness, can increase healthy coping and help-seeking behaviors, and has a powerful influence on health and wellness for children and teens.

For such a requisite endeavor, however, it can feel challenging to cultivate and nurture connectedness with teens as they push and pull away. They both need us and do not always want our vital support. Experiencing meaningful connectedness with adolescents and emerging adults is a balancing act. Their evolutionary need is to separate from parents and self-sustain (“I don’t need you. I can do it”). Caretakers’ evolutionary urges are to nurture and protect; we're sure that we can see a train wreck coming at them from a mile away.

Both are true.

These opposing stances prompt numerous dilemmas for parents and teens to navigate, which have the potential for either greater conflict or greater connection. Achieving the latter takes awareness and efforts to build and maintain a relational base that promotes a connected experience for parents and teens alike. The variables contributing to mental health challenges for adolescents today are numerous and complex. When teens are experiencing mental health struggles, parents can harness great power as a resource within a connected relationship.

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

1. Teens desperately want to feel connected with their parents.
2. Parents want to have close, connected, and meaningful relationships with their teens.
3. Parents and teens seem unsure how.

Over decades of talking with thousands of teens and reviewing relevant studies, I, along with a colleague and co-author, have been able to identify 5 key skill sets to create and maintain a connected parent-teen relationship: Respect, Authenticity, Kindness, Predictability, and Acceptance can be cultivated and deliberately practiced. As the mother of two emerging adult men, I have also put these skills and strategies to the test while humbly parenting over the past 21 years.

To find a therapist, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.

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