Talking to teenagers

Do you feel all squeezed out? Only one week to go… what parents can do to feel recharged as we go into September and the new school year. We are on the home straight now parents. After next week, a different set of arguments will replace the ones about spending money, bus fares, lifts and how there is never anything good to eat in the house. After the pressure of seeing to your children’s needs and priorities for six weeks, you can easily find that your tank is on empty. Added to this, you may have been abroad for a sunny holiday, one that you have looked forward to since early in the year. The holiday is now past and we are entering autumn days. Some people struggle with this. Added to all this your child may be starting secondary school this September, you will understandably have a little anxiety about this, if so please see my previous post. https://helenharveycounselling.blogspot.com/2017/08/is-your-child-starting-secondary-school.html The trick to self- ...

Do you have a child doing their GCSE’s next year? This is how the pressure from school is affecting their future and what you can do to help. Nearly every child in the UK in years 10 and 11 will go back to school in September having at least one assembly a week on G.C.S.E and attainment, and a form period where teachers start of on one topic, but by the end of the 15 minutes in form… somehow, we have ended up talking about ambition and commitment. Some clients reported feeling sick before the assemblies or form time! How do I know this? I worked in a secondary school for 2 years, in that school’s counselling provision team, I am now an adolescent therapist in private practice seeing young people who, most of the time, are anxious and wired about the G.C.S.E process. “THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE TO GET IT RIGHT” “IF YOU DON’T GET THE RESULTS, LET ME TELL YOU, YOU ARE ON THE BOTTOM OF THE PILE” “EVERY EMPLOYER WILL FOCUS ON G.C.S.E S, FACT” This is what mo...

Does your child have a mental health issue that they need help with? NHS...the broken promise. Theresa May has said 'the government should strengthen mental health training and continuing professional development for teachers to ensure they are properly equipped to recognize the early signs of mental illness in their pupils and have the confidence to be able to signpost or refer to the right support. Everyone of England's 3,600 secondary schools will be offered mental health 'first aid' training for teachers in the next two year' I would like to point out Theresa May that the teaching profession is not in the best of health...there were 138,500 sick days taken by 31,900 staff within the education sector last year. 3.5% of school staff take a stress related absence every year averaging 26.9 working days. 78% of teachers have experienced work related anxiousness, 33% per health, 25% have increased their alcohol and tobacco use, 2% have self-harm...

Is your child starting secondary school this time …Here is the important stuff to keep in mind? Most important for parents, above all else (ironed on name tags, P.E kit etc) is to check in with themselves, are you anxious? Are you transmitting that anxiety through asking too many questions, keep fussing and checking your child is ok? This stuff that parents do is perfectly understandable, but what this does is send the message to the young person that there is ‘something’ to worry about. The child begins to feel/think that ‘maybe this school stuff is scary and maybe I won’t cope’. For some parents, their own school experience was not a great one. Maybe they felt anxious, they were excluded or bullied, however that will not necessarily be the same for your child and it might be useful to think about what makes you and your child different (characteristics, resilience, family set up, life circumstances ect) Practical tips Don’t plan much in the month of September ...

‘Everybody form your own groups.’ …SCHOOL SOCIAL ANXIETY HELL! Social anxiety typically begins early to mid-adolescence, the median age onset is in fact 13 years of age. School can be unbearable for teenagers experiencing social anxiety, a time when physical changes are happening, people are forming friendship groups and the drift from parents is naturally widening. Teenagers can find themselves lonely and emotionally alone. So, teenagers take note, the following things are contributing factors in anxiety you may feel in social situations. Self-focused behaviour When all your attention is focused inwards, you are concentrating on things such as ‘ how anxious do I appear’ ‘can they see I am shaking’ ‘am I appearing normal’ . These thoughts block the natural flow of conversation, as does thinking what you are going to say when the other person has said what they want to say. This can be taken as you not being interested. Social performance expectations Thi...

Social anxiety:   Don’t talk to me…. I’m not shy, I’m petrified! A teenage male client recently explained to me that social anxiety for him is the feeling that a big bright stage light is on you, following you about the minute you step out of the house and into the public arena. He then said in a quiet voice ‘ quite honestly, I’d rather not live at all than live like this for the rest of my life . Who lives like this, I’m pathetic’ The answer is that more young people live with this ‘disorder’ (don’t like that term) than any other anxiety related illness. Lifetime prevalence rates of up to 12% have been reported, compared with lifetime prevalence estimates for other anxiety disorders of 6% for generalised anxiety disorder, 5% for panic disorder, 7% for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and 2% for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The distress felt by this, is not feeling just a little shy, just a little introverted. My clients feel the constant fear of being...

Anxiety – The drain on teenager’s happiness and well- being, here are some practical tips! I recently read that anxiety is experienced when there is a fear of a particular outcome and you feel you will be unable to cope with that outcome. This is true in part I suppose for adults experiencing intermittent anxiety, but for teenagers I have worked with, the feeling is different. For teenager’s suffering with anxiety it is a baseline feeling, it infuses every waking hour (sleeping is an escape). It is the feeling that your lungs are never really full when you take that deep breath.   It is the feeling of never being fully relaxed when out and about and you just want the time to pass to be home and to lie on your bedroom floor. It is the dread of somebody starting to tell you a funny story that you can’t concentrate on because your heart is beating out of your chest and it’s enough to think about coping and nothing is funny anyway.   It is the thing that make...

Let’s talk about sleep, teenagers and anxiety…the statistics are unsettling!! Sleep (or lack of it) is one of the biggest contributors to poor mental health. Sleep aids teenagers learning in the waking hours, memory consolidation and aids emotional processing. At the current time teenagers in this country are experiencing a sleep deprivation epidemic. Does that sound dramatic, well I assure you it is true. 1 in 10 teenagers get the 8-10 hours of sleep recommended by researchers and paediatricians. One of the reasons for this is that during puberty there is a shift in melatonin production (the hormone in your body that makes you yawn and stretch and generally feel sleepy) In teenagers this hormone is active later in the evening, around 11pm ish, but with after school activities, school work and the social media activity teenagers need to fit in, 11pm seems early. So, they fight this melatonin production, and the system becomes disrupted. The end result is a teenage...