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Is your child suffering with anxiety, read this… it’s important!

Is your child suffering with anxiety, read this… it’s important! I have received 47 emails from my daughters’ secondary school since September 22 nd nearly 5 a week. I have received at least 36 text messages from my son’s primary school since the end of October and he comes home with at least 6 pieces of paper in his school bag a week. This is some examples of the secondary school communication Drama rehearsals email, lunchtime revision email, National citizenship service email, Duke of Edinburgh , carol singers in the village square email, PTA quiz email, Revision resources, bus pass email, Food technology contribution email, six form open evening email, six form open evening feedback email, Sponsored walk email, New headmaster welcome letter email, Careers talks parent assembly email, parents evening email, parents evening feedback email, forthcoming fundraising events email, foodbank collection email, PTA annual Christmas bingo email, community nativity email, Pre ord

Would you like a better connection with your teenager? here are some of the principles...only some! this thing takes practice.

I recently read a short article by Lorraine Candy declaring that you cannot be a best friend to your teenage children…my response was why would you want to be a best friend? Lorraine, who I must point out is the editor-in- chief of the style magazine, writes a weekly column for the family section of The Sunday Times magazine. In the article she explains a trip to the theatre where there is hardly any conversation amongst her and her daughters and that they film videos of their mother swearing at the over complicated microwave. She concludes that the gradual separation is heart-breaking. A statistic alongside the article is that 75% of adolescents lie, with an average of nearly 3 untruths a day. Well I would like to bet that 65% of adults lie, with 2 whopping untruths a day…so what? what has that got to do with being attuned to your teenager. This kind of article perpetuates the notion that teenagers are these distant, unreachable, difficult people that as parents we a

A breast lump, abnormal cells, a much loved poorly dog and secondary school choices…this is what I did to stay resilient.

Six weeks ago, I went for a routine smear examination, the nurse told me she couldn’t take the smear as she could see something that needed investigating at Colposcopy, she said the referral would be quick as colposcopy are very efficient in our health trust (they are) So there starts my journey, a journey that hijacks peoples thinking and allows the worse case scenario to creep in. I have pain in my breast, but its bearable and so I just get on. I decided I would take a holiday alone (5 days) my mum kindly said she would have the children. I hadn’t had a holiday for a year and my thinking was that if I needed any sort of treatment then I may need to grab the chance while I can. ·        My mum saves me Sunday newspaper magazines, I go through them all and take out the interesting articles and staple them into a folder to read when I am there. ·        I went to somewhere I had been before and that felt safe to me. ·        I planned my time before I got there, i

‘I am a second-rate human being’…girls and the self-esteem void, what parents can do to help.

I read recently that teenage girls on average check their social media accounts 50 times a day. I imagine snapchat to be like Slimer from Ghost busters (its logo is similar) every girl that it touches starts to have a negative attitude towards themselves and all their self-esteem gets sucked out of them into that proton pack and gets locks away. It’s a sad thought but it is true. I was recently travelling on the Virgin train to London when a girl got on at Preston. She was maybe 18, makeup done, headphones in and rucksack. She produced her makeup bag at Warrington Bank Quay and proceeded to do her make up (which was already done) until we reached Stafford (that takes an hour). I can honestly say that she looked NO different as a result of her make up tweaks then when she had boarded the train. She then took a photo once she shifted around in her seat for 5 minutes and then applied some more eyeshadow and took another photo that she was obviously more pleased with. I ob

Little changes to simplify life and dampen down anxiety.

Little changes to simplify life and dampen down anxiety We aren’t talking about anxiety totally going away, this little list will help to stave off overwhelm and help you manage more throughout the day. ·        Leave your home space in a nice way, even if its just make your bed, or stack the dishwasher with last night’s pots. When its been a hard day you then have a nice space to come back to. ·        Tell a couple of people abut your anxiety…not everyone, just two people that seem the most supportive. ·        Think about social media in terms of energy zapping, limit the time to half an hour in the morning and half an hour in the evening. ·        Write down month on month what you feel you can handle socially. 1 night or 2 nights, who with? What activity. That way you do not agree to John’s bowling night at work or Alana’s pizza meal and stop over when you really feel overwhelmed and struggling to cope. ·        Notice your feelings after interactions

The power of the introvert, it’s a positive personality trait in teenagers when we work out what to do to help!

School is a strenuous task for the introverted teenager, the noise, lights, chatter, teacher discipline, dinner que etc, introverts need to recharge periodically, they need to have some alone time. They are not shy, they are not socially anxious (although the interaction, if too much can make them feel that way) A teenage client described going to the toilet and locking herself into the cubicle at break and dinner to have some time in which she didn’t have to interact with ANYONE. This is not how any teenager should be feeling in school. Our teenagers spent 1,110 hours in school in an academic year, 139 of them could be being spent in the toilet cubicles. The school report may often say ‘ Sophie needs to be more vocal in class’ ‘ Sophie is a bright girl, she needs to believe in her ability a bit more’. At parents evening the teachers will reiterate this message ‘Sophie is a great asset to the class, we just need to hear a bit more of her’ So how do we as parents make

Religious, military or hippy parents…How too much of something is never a good thing!

This post may upset some people, or worse still ‘offend’, please understand that when I write this I am not disrespecting any of the above. What I hope to do is raise an awareness of the harm that can be created in a wish to follow something so absolute with no flexibility and a disregard for autonomy that it affects future thinking and well being as a whole. I am writing about the extreme . SOMETIMES when children have been raised by parents where anxiety is high and beliefs and rules are fixed, the expectation doesn’t come from the parents but the code that the family is surrounded by. This is about parents as individuals needing to feel certain, to cancel out any anxiety…and with it any shift in thought and feeling. When parents are extreme in their religious or militant belief or uncompromising in their non-conformist way of being, they leave little room for their children to develop their own signature. Put simply, it in life in all or nothing terms. These

Are you a child of Perfectionism Parenting – “this might make them happy”…How you end up frazzled and anxious!

Are you a child of Perfectionism Parenting – “this might make them happy”…How you end up frazzled and anxious! Last year I saw a client who was studying at university and was aimed for a first by the end of her second year. This was quite amazing as she had started to feel low and lonely, her mood affected her work and she stopped going to 80% of her lectures half way through the academic year, that was when she contacted me for counselling. Her goal for therapy was to regain the motivation she had felt for the course and feel passionate about her chosen subject again. After the initial session and quite a bit of exploration together, I said that in my experience I thought it would take more to feeling better than just university related motivation, her eyes filled up “ yes, I think so, I feel like part of me has always felt this low and anxious” ·        Over the weeks we went on to explore her feelings about attending lectures (she would miss them to join in with frie

What’s love got to do with it? EVERYTHING...Were your parents smothering and intrusive?

Unhealthy control is insidious, it’s under the radar. The feeling it creates is that you are on the back foot, you are either unaware of the nature of it or you just desperately want to make the situation right. It confuses you and makes you angry, sad and sorry all in one go. It does the above things in adult life, but when we are children and we have no separate sense of self, that is where the blue print is created. One element of control in parenting is a parent who restricts their child emotionally, the child ultimately feels smothered. You may now as an adult look back and realise that what you felt as a child was scrutinized and inspected.   As an adult it is confusing, because parents who do this seem incredibly caring and bracket themselves into the ‘worry and fuss too much parents’. Parents who control by any different means do not trust and experience high anxiety themselves. When you have experienced this type of control as a child you may still feel as he

“I want to be unhappy, I want to be controlled to the point of exhaustion. I want to give up on doing things that fulfil me. I want to remain constantly confused, I want to have to check out every decision with my parents or partner. "

“I want to be unhappy, I want to be controlled to the point of exhaustion. I want to give up on doing things that fulfil me. I want to remain constantly confused, I want to have to check out every decision with my parents or partner. I want to be diminished to the point of hopelessness. I want to feel deeply sad for me and also deeply sad and sorry for the other person. I want to hope every day that this is going to change through me having courage or my parents, partner, boss, friend gaining awareness through some incident or event that forces the realisation on them.” NOBODY sets out in life to feel like this! Why a blog series on control and boundaries? Probably because boundaries are the single most important change you can make today to improve your family relationships, your friendships, your working life and your parenting. You could work on boundaries without learning about controlling behaviour, but people that have been controlled in childhood and adulthoo

Teenagers toxic love…Parents can feel distressed and frustrated at the addictive nature of their teens relationship. What's the best way to manage it?

Photo by Oscar Keys on Unsplash Teenagers toxic love…Parents can feel distressed and frustrated at the addictive nature of their teens relationship. What's the best way to manage it? Every teenage relationship has an element of infatuation, they can be on the phone for hours on end, spending every free minute together at school, walking home together etc. This is how all the relationships start off, some remain healthy and happy but some become unhealthy in a short time. Boundaries become blurred, identities become enmeshed and the teenager can quickly lose a sense of self. This can become a huge breeding ground for jealousy. Jealousy is toxic in a relationship that has lost all perspective and the young person has no reference point to hold onto. It starts with probing questions that cause a little unsettling disagreement and progresses to checking phones and logging into each other’s social media. Both boys and girls talk about being ‘located’ on snapchat by th

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