Understanding Adolescent Anxiety, Depression, and Mental Health

Betsy Childs Howard

Hello. We’re so glad you’re here. It’s wonderful to have you with us today. My name is Betsy childs Howard, and I’m going to be interviewing Sandy Taylor. Sandy is a licensed clinical mental health counselor in private practice in New York, and she lives there with her husband, Bill. And Bill’s an elder at Redeemer West Side, and Sandy specializes in working with adolescent girls and their parents as they navigate the challenges of teen years. And she has first hand experience with her own three teenage daughters, Abby, who’s 19, Hannah, who’s 17, and Margaret is 15.

Betsy Childs Howard

And Sandy’s also served in lots of different capacities at Camp Graystone in North Carolina. So she has lots of experience in this area. And as I was thinking about introducing this session, I thought about setting up the problem. But, you know, there’s a problem already, or you wouldn’t be here. You know, this is not an easy time to be a teenager. There are many, many challenges. It’s not an easy time to be a parent of a teenager. You know what those challenges are, and probably most of you don’t feel very well equipped. My kids are not yet teenagers. It’s a daunting prospect, but I’m really thankful that Sandy has done a lot of research and she has a lot of experience, and we hope that after today, some of these things will make a little bit more sense, and that God will help you in whatever capacity you work with teens, help you love them better. So let’s start this is a very basic question, but it’s not an easy question. What is mental health? Yeah,

Sandi Taylor

that’s a great question. I love this question because I think that this topic is really scary for parents today, now that we’re out of the pandemic during which our teens, in particular suffered the disruption of a couple really important developmental tasks. One is making and growing friendships, and the second is moving toward independence, and now we’ve got these books and scary media headlines telling us how dangerous social media and digital technology is and I’ve watched his parents fear levels have grown as well, and that’s understandable. So hopefully today, we will be able to ease parents minds, caregiver caregivers minds, as well as have some practical tools for how to love the teens better that we all want to support. So let’s, let’s jump in. What is mental health? I want to start by challenging the widely accepted idea in our culture today that mental health is about feeling good, we really want to come back to this long understood view in psychology and theology that adolescents, as well as life for that matter, is filled with ups and downs, distress and all sorts of differing emotions from the most comfortable to the least, are going to be part of that landscape. And as wonderful as emotional ease is, we know that it’s unpredictable. It comes and goes. The Bible doesn’t promise it. And you know, as this, mental health awareness has become a front and center topic of concern in our society today, which actually is a great thing. It’s it’s brought, has a lot of benefits to it. Along with it has come this myth that good mental health is about maintaining the Zen, calm, peaceful state all the time and a lack of emotional distress. And here’s the thing, that this is good news, because if we can reframe the way we see emotions, not just for our teens, but for ourselves, and we can, we can understand better, what are they trying to tell us and what’s the best way to handle them? So mental health is not about the absence of emotional discomfort. Rather, this is how we want to think about it. It’s having the right feelings in the right situation, as well as then having the ability and the tools to handle those emotions effectively. So finding a relief without causing harm. In other words, we want the feelings to make sense, right? They want it. We want them to make sense. And then we want, we want to see the person be able to handle them and back, bounce back. And one way you can think about this Betsy is when we think about physical health. Physically healthy people get sick and they seek treatment, and then they recover and get better. And we want to see that in the world of mental health as well. And here’s the great thing, as believers coming back to embracing uncomfortable emotions, it makes all the sense in the world, because the Bible has always taught that. And Jesus says, In this world, you will have troubles. And I think of James one, Consider it pure joy, my brothers, when you face trials of many kinds. Why? Because we know that it develops perseverance, which develops character, and then we grow to maturity and completion. So it’s in the very trials themselves that we become the people God wants us to be and is calling us to be. And it’s like, it makes all the sense in the world. It’s like, oh yeah, Sandy, great. I’m a parent of three daughters. It is so stinking hard right in the moment. It’s like we love our children. We love our teenagers so much, even if we want to strangle them some days, but so we want to get between them and their pain. We want to rescue them. We want to protect them. We want to guard them from hard things. And here’s the thing, if we do that, we not only keep them from developing the the ability that they need. To develop, to be able to hard, handle the hard things that are going to inevitably come their way in life. But the other thing we do is we subvert an opportunity for them to trust the Lord, to turn to Him and to find comfort. And that’s what we want, is for our teenagers to know and to grow to love the Lord. So I’m in it with you. It’s really tough, but what we can do is we can model healthy coping, and we can. We can show them how we turn to the Lord ourselves and the challenging things that we face. So that’s mental health. So

Betsy Childs Howard

if there’s a mother in the audience who’s expecting a baby right now, she can download an app that will tell her, week by week, what her newborns development will

Unknown Speaker

be too much information. Yes,

Betsy Childs Howard

there’s not one of those for teenagers, as far as I know. So could you give us, like, a five minute Crash Course and what adolescent development looks like?

Sandi Taylor

Yeah, I’d love to. I think this is actually really helpful. So at a technical level, we think about adolescents from about age 11 to 19, although if you have girls, puberty can start now as early as nine or 10, just neurologically. So remember that there are two main things that happen, and I’ll talk you through the development a second. But the first thing that happens at the beginning of adolescence is this major brain renovation begins. And it starts in the back, in the lower, more primitive region of the brain called the limbic system, where the amygdala is housed, and that is tasked with evaluating incoming emotion as incoming information, rather and generating emotion. And then the renovation project is all the way up to the prefrontal, more sophisticated parts of the brain, that’s where judgment is, is occurs, as well as getting and maintaining perspective. So in other words, our sweet young teens start out their you know, these puberty years with a highly evolved emotional center and yet comparatively weak perspective keeping centers. And so I think this is why teenagers get such a bad rap. And when people found out I was having three daughters, are like, whoa, wait till the teen years, because everybody’s like, teens are moody and they’re up and down and and that’s because they have, they’re having all these big feelings, and they don’t necessarily have the neurological capabilities to manage them, and so, so that happens. And the other big thing that happens is adolescents are when puberty hits, they embark on this journey from, you know, being completely dependent on mom and dad for everything, all the way through into, you know, all the way to being independent. We want to launch them kind of in, you know, as they head up into college. And so Lisa demore, who’s a leading psychologist in the field, she has identified seven threads that adolescents develop upon. They’re progressive, although they kind of overlap, and I’m just going to knock them out really quickly. I could do an entire seminar on these seven threads, but, but it’s helpful, and I’ll tell you in a second why. So the first is separating from childhood. They start to move away. They want to become more, you know, done with their own time. The second is finding friends. They need friends for that, the adolescent journey, and didn’t, don’t? We all have great memories of making friendships in the seventh grade, right? That’s just really hard. And then it’s May, I know everybody’s like, we all have our bad memories. And then the third the third thread is managing emotions, which I just explained why it’s hard. The fourth is contending with authority, and this is a really good time when they start to push back on you, or teachers or coaches, because what happens at 14, and I’ll take one second on this is abstract thinking comes online. So they can see things from different perspectives now, and they know that we’re we make mistakes, and they have their own opinions, and friction comes into the equation, and so that’s why we can you know, it feels like you’re constantly rubbing with your teenager. That’s very typical. The the fifth thread is planning for the future. So what do I want to do with my life? Where do with my life? Where do I want to go to college? What might I want to study? The sixth is entering the romantic world, so the possibility of a love life. And then finally, the seventh thread, thread is learning to take care of themselves. So physically, emotionally, spiritually, that’s a lot. I mean, let’s take a breath here. And I think if we zoom out, the reason it’s worth running through those is because if we can understand all this work our teenagers are doing just to grow and to become the people that they need to be and to develop, then I think two things. One, we can best figure out where are they on that adolescent journey. How can we best support them? And the second thing is, it helps us take things a little less personally. It can be really hard. It’s really hard to parent a teenager because it’s so bumpy. And here’s the best news, and I’ll close this section with this. All of the research shows that the single most important force for good in the life of a teenager, helping them through these bumpy years, is one good working relationship with an adult who loves them or cares about them, and think about our relationship with God. It’s true in our in our faith as well, right? Because how, how is it that we, we grow best? It’s in the context of loving, safe, Grace based relationship with Christ that we can make mistakes and that we can take risks and that we can do all the things find strength and hope in the life. And so we get, we get the privilege raising teens to be incarnational, steady presence for them, the way that God does for us. So it really, if we can just flip it and reframe it, it’s just an age of opportunity. So

Betsy Childs Howard

so when you were defining mental health, you said it’s not the absence of uncomfortable emotions or distressing emotions. So how do parents know when something is normal, anxiety or depression or sadness, and when they should seek help from a counselor? Yeah,

Sandi Taylor

this is really important. So let’s I’m going to start by defining some I’m going to start by defining stress and anxiety, and then we’ll look at sadness and depression. So let’s start with stress. Stress is that very normal everyday experience that you have when you operate outside. It’s that mental or emotional feeling that that you have, the strain when you operate outside of your comfort zone. So giving a talk in front of 1000 people, or your teenager, maybe going to summer camp for the first time. We’re starting a new high school that is stressful, and all psychologists will tell you, we need stress to grow. It’s essential. And you know, I think of people who run marathons that every week, they push their distance a little bit because they’re trying to stretch their capacity to endure and grow. And that’s what stress does for us, mentally, emotionally. We want our teens to to have that now, we want to stretch. We want stress to turn into strength. So we want to stretch. We don’t want to break, and that’s the key. Stress can become unhealthy if it’s beyond what the person can bear, or if it causes harm in the long term or the short term. So that’s stress. Now anxiety, which is like its first cousin anxiety is more that feeling of like, of dread or fear or panic that you get when something’s not right in your situation, and it’s actually a God given good system when it works in proportion to what’s happening in your life, it’s that you guys probably think about it as, like, fight or flight. So it’s your the alarm bell goes on. Your heart starts to race. You have a physiological reaction. That’s anxiety. Now, anxiety is generally healthy. Most of the anxiety that we experience in life is healthy, and we’ve, we’ve really done ourselves a disservice by clumping it all into unhealthy and bad. And so we want to, kind of, we want to walk back from that a little bit so anxiety, you can have internal anxiety or external anxiety. And internal anxiety is that feeling, you know, when you’re like, nobody in here would do that, but you’re binge watching Netflix, but you really need to be preparing for that work presentation that you need to give, but you’re avoiding it. Or your teenager says, I’m really stressed about this test. And you say, Well, have you, have you studied for it yet? No, they need to. They need to study. And then the anxiety comes down. So that’s anxiety being our friend, saying, I’m trying to protect you so you don’t get fired from your job or bomb your test. External anxiety is we’ve all had this where you’re driving down the road and somebody starts veering into your lane, and you have that freak out, right? And you veer and you get out of harm’s way. It’s a threat response. And again, it’s God given. It’s good when it works in proportion to what’s happening. Anxiety turns unhealthy. Betsy when the alarm bell is going off and you’re having that physiological experience, but there’s no threat, so it doesn’t remember. We said mental health is about emotions fitting the situation. It doesn’t make sense. So that’s that’s when it becomes unhealthy or there’s a disproportionate response to what the situation would warrant. So I had a client a few years back, a teenage girl who was finishing high school, and the school she was at, the tradition was they would go on a senior trip, and this year they were going to Europe, and they had been studying about World War Two, and part of the on the trip, they were going to have a visit to one of the concentration camp museums. And she was excited about going right up until we got close, and she started to really panic about going. And when we unpacked it, she was terrified about all the emotions that were going to flood her when she was there, and thinking about it and what she was going to experience. And so now we all know that we should be sobered and we should have emotional we should have an emotional response if you’re somewhere, like on sacred ground where the Holocaust occurred, and yet we know panic is disproportionate. So that’s what I mean by anxiety. It’s anxiety is unhealthy and unhelpful when it gets in the way of a teen needing to do what they want to do, or what they need to do, like being able to go to school or, you know, go do their job or whatever the developmental task is, that’s when it becomes unhealthy. So, but here’s the great news, we’re really, really good in the mental health world now at treating anxiety. So yeah, so let’s move on to sadness. So sadness, again, is it’s a it’s a typical, normal, expected emotion. It doesn’t need to be treated. Something happens. You can think about it this way, a pet dies, a best friend moves away. Of course, you’re going to feel down, disappointed, sad. It should resolve on its own, and even though the person like your teenager is down, if something good happens, they can kind of perk up. Depression. On the other hand, in clinical depression, it is. Expected. It is a mental illness, and it needs to be treated. It doesn’t resolve on its own. And it’s not about being sad about something. It’s just being sad about everything. It’s not specific and the person, many of you, you, either some of you in here, struggle with it. Have struggled with it. Know people who have it is very, very painful. It doesn’t make sense to the person, and it can feel they can feel really helpless and hopeless. It’s meaning it will meaningfully interrupt life. So changes in eating, changes in mood, and, you know, the things that used to make the person feel better stop working. So that’s, we do want to be concerned. Then that’s, that’s something that needs to be treated so, yeah. So the bottom line is, if you take anything away from this section, is when we are concerned and we need to seek professional help, when emotions are either running the show, or they don’t make sense for the situation, or they’re out of proportion, or they’re getting in what in the way of what your teenager needs to do. The other piece of it is we want to seek professional help when the teen is coping or by trying to find relief by doing harm, right? We want to, we want to find ways that don’t cause harm. And what I mean by that, if they’re smoking, if they’re drinking heavily, to kind of numb and cope, if they are self harming or harming someone else, if they are, if they’ve completely pulled away from friendships. If, if you see signs around eating disorders that’s very concerning, you definitely want to get professional help that said, really normal, healthy anxiety, healthy sadness, ups and downs. We don’t want to freak out. We want to wait and watch and and support as a steady presence. Well,

Betsy Childs Howard

it’s hard to even bring this up, but how do you know if your child was is at risk for suicide? It

Sandi Taylor

is hard to bring up, and yet it’s really important that we talk about this, that we’re not afraid of talking about suicide. I want every parent and caregiver to practice a not shocked face, and I know we kind of giggle at that, because sometimes, I mean, they teens can throw everything at you. But, you know, suicide is a really, it is very serious, and yet we don’t need to be afraid of it. So there’s this myth, I think, that parents feel like, if they bring it up to their teenager, they’re going to, like, give them the idea, we’ve actually studied this, that the research shows the opposite. So for a teen who’s mentally healthy, if you if you ask them about it, they’re going to go, No, I just, I just said I wanted to jump off the bridge because I’m frustrated, right? So they’re going to just give you kind of a spicy response. A teen who is suffering, yeah, no, no. Teens give spicy responses, right? A teen who is suffering, it is an absolute gift. It is a huge relief. It is preventative. So if you have a teen that’s been down for a couple of days, I mean, at the technical level for clinical depression, we would say we want to see a cluster of symptoms for about two weeks before we would say, before making a diagnosis with a teen, two or three days of not bouncing back and being really, really in the depths of despair can be concerning. And so you can say, Hey, I know you haven’t been yourself lately. This might seem out of nowhere, but have you had thoughts of of hurting yourself or taking your life? And again, they’ll say, What are you talking about? Or they will be like, Oh, well, actually, I really have. And here’s what, here’s the gift we give them, whether healthy mentally or having a hard time and having self harm, thoughts you’re telling that teen in that moment, no matter what you tell me, no matter what comes my way, I can handle it, which means we can handle it together. So thanks for asking that. And what would you do? Yeah, no, great. So, so you’d stay with that child. So one of the things you can do is ask, Have you, have you made a plan? Okay, if they’re like, No, I haven’t really made a plan, then you want to go ahead and make a phone call and try to get in to see somebody the next day, and you make them promise that they’re not going to hurt themselves. There is a suicide hotline now. It’s called 988, you can remember it because, like 911 is is the emergency. And you can call them and they will talk you through exactly what you need to do, and it probably will mean going to the hospital make sure that your child gets the help

Betsy Childs Howard

that they need. So with the understanding of normal worry and sadness and that you’ve given us, how can parents or caregivers help their teens with the healthy kind,

Sandi Taylor

right? What can we do if it’s just the normal garden variety every day? So it’s still not easy. It’s not easy, and I’m gonna, there’s a million things I could give you. It’s I’m gonna try to give you a just a couple of tools for your parenting tool belt, or some of you are just caring for teenagers. So let’s talk. Let’s talk about anxiety first. So the number one rule in anxiety is avoidance feeds anxiety. And so let me say that again, avoidance feeds anxiety. So what we want to do is we want to help our teen slowly expose themselves to the thing that they’re afraid of, because in doing so, very often, they realize it’s not so bad as they thought. Our goal is not to banish emotions, it’s to help them manage them. And so yeah, you help them lean into it. Because here’s what happens if I had said to that. Go to my client, oh, don’t worry about going on that trip. Then what’s she gonna feel? She’s gonna feel immediate relief. And what just got reinforced, the avoidance. And so then the anxiety eventually resurfaces, and it actually grows, and we can see full blown phobias if that happens, you know, over the course of time with people who are vulnerable to clinical anxiety. So we we want to lean into that with them. So one of the ways you can think about dealing with overwhelming anxiety and you can, you can, it’s not always helpful to tell teens this, but you can think about it in your head as you’re trying to help them. It’s generally an overestimation of the problem and an underestimation of our ability to handle it. Okay, so that was my job with my client, was, let’s talk about this situation, and then my goal was to help her figure out how she was going to handle the more realistic, you know, discomfort she was going to feel on the trip. And here’s the thing, friends, it’s the short term relief we get from avoidance is never worth the long term exacerbation of the anxiety that the next time they face a similar situation, because it’s going to happen so really quickly with anxiety, let me give you three things to think about. Think about meeting them in terms of their feelings, their thinking, and then they’re doing or behavior. So in terms of feeling, ask them, What are you feeling right now? They’re going to say, I’m so anxious. My heart’s racing, you know, and what we want to do with that one small tool you can do is deep breathing. And every time I bring this up with a teenage anxiety, I get a teenage client, I get a huge eye roll, because it’s like breathing really. It sounds hokey. It works brilliantly, because there’s actually a biological component to it where the breathing is hacking your brain. So you can Google. I can’t have time to go through all the breathing exercises, but breathing is a great, simple tool. I was doing it before I came up on stage. It really works. Okay, thinking their thoughts. So so say, okay, so this is what you’re feeling now. Tell me about it. What are you afraid of? What’s the thought behind that? And one great question you can ask in terms of meeting them on the thought level, is, okay, well, what’s the worst thing that can happen? Don’t say it in a judgy dismissive tone, like, what’s the worst thing can happen? Say, Well, I’m wondering what the worst thing that could happen is. And when they start to answer that question, they start to realize, oh, maybe it’s not quite as bad as I think. And then when they say that, you go, Okay, well, how are you going to handle it? And then together, you begin to brainstorm how they’re going to handle the discomfort and whatever they’re anxious about. And then the last thing they’re doing is, what’s one small step we can do to move toward actually leaning into this fear. So those are super quick, but at least maybe those are some tools you can kind of put in your parenting tool belt. Two other things that I want. Well, really, it’s kind of one main approach to helping your teens regulate their emotions. And everyone in here who is parenting a teen knows you never know when it’s coming, right? And they can have meltdowns that really mimic the time when they were toddlers. And so your role, my role, is to be a steady presence. Remember, we are just we’re in it with them. We’re not trying to fix it, we’re not trying to rescue we’re not we’re not swooping into reassure but we’re just going to be in it with them, and we’re going to do two things. We’re going to help them express their emotions, and then we’re going to help them control their emotions. And by the way, this works with other people too, not just teens, but Express control. And anyone who’s been in counseling will tell you the reason what, what’s so helpful about therapy is just getting it out and somebody listening, who is compassionate and is focusing, is focusing on empathizing and caring for you in that moment. And that’s the secret sauce again, not to fix, not to reassure and go, Oh, you’re going to be fine. It’s really not that bad, because when everyone in here when you come home from work, or you had a really hard day, and you want to tell your husband about how hard it was, and the first thing he tells you is, what if you did it this way? Or I wonder if your boss felt that, and you’re like, No, no, I just want you to listen, right? That’s how our teens fear feel. They just want us to empathize and validate and just, I mean that really stinks. It sounds like you had a really hard day, and sometimes that’s all they need, and they’ve dumped all their hard emotions on you, and you’re like this on the floor. But then they can go do their homework, and they can do the things that they do, and we can give that gift of absorbing their uncomfortable emotions for them. So that’s expression. Then you move on to and sometimes you don’t even need to do controlling. But the reason we need to help our teens control their emotions at time times, it’s when expressing and talking has stopped working. Okay? So this is, this is when distraction is helpful. Because what can happen is teens can get an emotion or a thought in their head that they get really fixated on, and we call this rumination. And rumination is, is can really lead to some clinical problems. So we want it. We want to jump on this. And one of the ways we do this is distraction. So you can say, hey, let’s, why don’t we put this on a shelf? And we’ll, we’ll revisit this conversation, maybe tomorrow or this weekend. And what are we going to do instead? And this is where we can help our teens build a toolbox. And by the way. Everyone in here, you probably have your own toolbox, whether you know it or not, but it’s for me, I like to go for a run and put on music that kind of matches how I feel. Teenagers have playlists of all sorts of different emotions. My girls have 17 for every emotion on the planet. It might be dancing, it might be boxing, if they want to do something physical. It could be going for a walk. It could be praying, right? If your teen loves the Lord, memorizing scripture or, you know, it’s really, I think, genius. Sometimes my my daughters will put on their favorite childhood show, like a like a cartoon, and get under a weighted blanket, and they just need a break from this. And a lot of times, it just resets them. And so express and contain and remember we our goal is not to get rid of the emotions. It’s to help them manage them and to be more realistic about it, and to and to show, okay, this is hard, but this isn’t a crisis. So,

Betsy Childs Howard

so will you just explain the difference between distraction and avoidance?

Sandi Taylor

Yeah. So, so distraction is we only use distraction typically. That’s a great question, because I’ve just spent time saying, don’t, don’t avoid your anxiety, right? You’re like, Well, which one is it? Lady, avoidance is when we don’t want to avoid when the anxiety is something we know we can handle. Distraction is when they’re getting in that unhealthy ruminating. They’re stuck, and they can’t see and you can, it’s like a spiral. Have you ever talked to somebody that they just can’t get and it’s almost like their brain is on a loop. That’s the time that distraction works. And I will tell you, you know, I watch golden retriever videos, and I do that for five minutes, and I’m it’s changed my mood. It’s now I’m a self regulated adult. I’m not, I’m not going to prescribe social media for distraction, because I think our teens are not probably can’t self regulate, but it’s just for the point of getting you out of that, that mindset and moving on to the next thing is that, does that make sense? That

Betsy Childs Howard

we don’t want to avoid the situation that might make us anxious because we it’s like we have to learn to do hard things. It’s probably not as bad as that thing, but we want to avoid the pattern where we’re just digging those groups deeper in our brain.

Sandi Taylor

Rumination is like picking a psychological wound. It’s like pick, pick, pick, and that’s what we don’t want.

Betsy Childs Howard

What what is the effect of screens and social media on teens mental health?

Sandi Taylor

That’s not a loaded question. It’s, I mean, we love it. It’s a mixed bag, honestly. And I know that this is a really, this is a controversial question in our culture today, and I wonder if we can think about it, not in an all or nothing kind of way, because the reality is, technology is here to stay, and we as parents have real, real, valid concerns about the impact of social media on or there are some serious there are some some data that point to serious risks, and yet we have teens who are saying, who are begging for it, not that we can’t say no, we certainly can and should at times, but we’ve talked about having a keeping a really good working relationship with our child, and so that’s not always going to be a really clear, you know, path forward, and so it takes a lot of wisdom. So I want to talk about this section in a couple of ways. I want to start with the concerns that we should have about social media, and then I want to talk about the benefits. And then we’ll look at just some some best practices in the mental health field, if and when you are going to introduce technology. So concerns there, there is some significant data that that makes us think there are safety concerns for our kids who are online. And though the concern is about norms. And and so what, what I mean by norms is what’s being normalized on the platforms that they’re and this should be a concern for us as well. So things like online bullying, meanness and kids are mean to each other online. They really can be not all, but it’s there. Things like misogyny, racism, pornography, soft and hard as well as eating disorders and diet culture for young boys, what we’re seeing now is like this, this fitness culture, like you have to be really buff and have a 16 pack and so you can the here’s the danger in it. And you all that use social media, know that there are these algorithms. So the minute you interact with something on social media. You know, there’s this AI that says, Oh, this is what she’s interested in, because, by the way, now all I get are golden retriever videos on my feed, which is fine with me. But think about this. You have a seventh grade girl who says, I want to get fit to try out for soccer practice or soccer to try out for the soccer team. So she searches, you know something about fitness. Next thing you know, her feet is filled with toxic diet, diet culture, or ways to be anorexic, or have, you know, it can be all manner of things. And so what are they looking on at online? Is the concern? Okay, so content and then in algorithms, and then talk to your teens about this. My girl. Is a great thing. Teenagers, my girls, it makes them mad. I’m like, you know, like, let’s talk about these algorithms. And it up. They’ll stop looking at things because teenagers don’t want to be controlled, right? We know teenagers don’t want to be controlled, so, and then the second thing is dosage. So how much time are they spending on so what are they looking at, content, and then dosage, how much time are they spending on there? And we do have research that shows that teens who interact on social media platforms do better mental, mental health wise, than teens who are just Mindlessly scrolling. Right? And we’ve all done it. You just mindlessly scroll, and next thing you know, you just don’t feel great because someone’s got a better life, somebody’s more social, somebody’s prettier, somebody’s whatever and and that’s that can really affect their mental health. So we and the other thing is like, what’s it displacing teens? There’s so many things in a teens life that that we want them to be doing, spending time with family and friends and exercising and getting, you know, hobbies and sports and service. So how much time are they spending on we want to make sure we keep an eye on that so. So, and by the way, there are benefits. Let’s talk about a few benefits. So I have a really introverted child, and when she was old enough, social media was helpful for her, because it gave her a way to interact socially that she she wasn’t good on the spot, in in live situations, so it gave her a way to find like minded teens. There are, you know, keeping in touch with friends and family and learning to navigate in a savvy way the technological world when they’re older, using platforms for good, for social types of social justice issues. So there are, there are benefits. It may not sway anybody in there. The benefits might not outweigh the risks, but that’s just, they’re just things to consider as you think about whether or not you’re going to allow social media into your teen’s life. Okay, there’s a lot of disagreement in the field. Not a lot. There is some disagreement. There are some things that we wholesale agree on. So let’s, let’s take a second and talk about what are some wise ways and principles we could think about if we want to, if we think, okay, we might allow this at some point, because technology can be super practical as a parent. So what we want to, what we want to do is we, we want to go really, really slowly, and we want to only, only even think about it when they start asking, Okay? And it might still be a long time from when they ask, only give. And I’m going to explain this. Some of you, your hair is going to go up, but only give them as much as they need to stay connected to real life friends. And let me explain what I mean by that what we care most about is real life friendships, right? And when, when, when our kids move into the middle school years. Friendships are everything. They’re really important because they’re moving away from us and they need a safe place to land. And so very often, what you can do, and I’m seeing a lot of parents do this. Now, in my practice is you can give your child a phone that’s basically like a dumb phone, like, I know some parents are like, well, flip phone. Flip phones are really hard to text on, and texting is the way that they can stay connected to their real life, friends, no browser, no apps, no internet, all they can do is call and basically text their friends and so. And you know, my middle schoolers were running around on not running around. I sound like a terrible parent. They were taking mass transit in middle school, and I wanted to be able to get a hold of them. I wanted, I wanted to be able to reach them, and I and being able to text them was, was, was, was helpful too. So, so that’s something to think about. Go slowly and then in terms of social media. And this is true with, you know, whether we give phones or laptops or tablets or whatever, there is 100% agreement, not before high school. And I’m very careful to be prescriptive about anything. But here’s why, remember we talked about, we talked about abstract thinking coming online around 14, that’s about high school wait but, but the consensus is, wait as long as you can if they’re not asking for it. My I had my youngest daughter didn’t ask for it until she was about 15, and even then she she got off at two months later, because she was like, I just don’t. I just don’t. It just doesn’t make me feel good. She got on one platform, and we had all these conversations. Teenagers can be really mature and begin to think for themselves at 1415, and so that’s kind of we don’t want to do it before then. And here’s the thing, if and when you do remember if and when everybody gets to make their own decision. Start, start like, have really strict rules. So it’s never in the bedrooms. We really don’t we. If you haven’t done it yet, don’t allow it. Some of you, it’s fine. My girls have their laptops in their bedroom, but we don’t charge anything at night, so get out of the bedrooms at night. Public spaces only you know, you can set the rules short, nothing on short car rides, no phones at the table, whatever it is, because you can always let. Loose. You can let the rope loose. It’s very hard to dial it back, but I have and you can. And at times it’s appropriate when they’re when they’re not showing good judgment, and you have to either dial it back or you’re waiting for good judgment to be able to give more only if they’re asking. So go slow. Go slow and make the decision in community. Here’s the thing. I, like many of you, just wanted to go we’re just wanted to go. We’re just not going to do it at all, right? And I think, I think just black and white, thinking about these really tricky gray areas, we have to engage. We have to figure out what is the best way to make this wise decision for much because we want to equip them. They’re going to be on technology when they leave our house, and they can’t go to college, and just have to figure it out then. So go slowly, kind of like you teach them to drive a little bit at a time, do it with them, and then let them grow into more and more responsibility. So Well,

Betsy Childs Howard

I really like what you said about talking with them about the reasons for this and helping them. I mean, you know, it can be subtle, but helping them, I’ve met teenagers who have said, Oh, I don’t want social media I see what it does to my friends or things like that. And you know, that may not always happen, but they are. They are learning to think for themselves. And if you give them the data, they may come to the same, some of the same conclusions. I think

Sandi Taylor

we want to equip our kids. I really do. I think being leading with fear or and we model it. You know, I we charge our stuff out of the bedrooms, and I talk about, wow, look at all the gold and retriever things I got. What sort of things do you guys get? You know, we we talk about it, and I think that’s really important. Conversations are key in the teen years and asking good questions, not lecturing, because then the veil comes down and you lose them. So we want to be engaging in coaching and talking, for

Betsy Childs Howard

sure, what should sleep look like for a teen? Oh, I can

Sandi Taylor

answer this in one minute. It’s the glue. It’s the glue that holds us together, and all of our teens are under arrested. Well, maybe somebody has a well rested teen, but it’s really, really tricky. Teenagers need eight to 10 hours of sleep a night. That’s kind of crazy, isn’t it? It’s kind of like when they were toddlers, brain renovation, bodies changing, hormones are growing. They need a lot of sleep. And so I can’t even assess for anxiety and depression in my office. If a teen is under arrested, they have to get the sleep before, because you don’t know what’s, what’s exhaustion, and then what is, you know, some sort of mental health issue. So they need more sleep. And basically, the way to, how do you do it? You you figure out what’s getting in the way. So, are they over scheduled? Is technology in the bedroom? Are, you know, what are we modeling? Do they have a good sleep? You know, sleep is not we have to think of sleep not as a switch we turn off, but as a destination we move towards. So turning off the technology, maybe reading a book. What is going to work for them, but we need to talk to them about it, because they’re exhausted.

Betsy Childs Howard

So anyway, how is parenting teens with mental health issues different for Christians? Oh, yeah. So this both the, um, both sides of this

Sandi Taylor

sort Yeah, I think, I think everything we’ve talked about up to now, I hope is useful for any parent, whether they believe in Jesus or not. I do think that the difference for those who who know Christ, there’s just an enormous amount of hope, because parenting a teenager on a good day is tough, and it’s emotionally draining. It’s it’s more emotionally draining than than when they were taught toddlers, I think it’s more physically draining, but we have so much hope. And I’m just going to hit three quick areas that we have distinct hope. It’s in the truth that our identity is in Christ and our teens identity. And we’re going to then I want to talk about the hope that we have in God’s character, and then the hope we have in his steady presence. So identity, we have to remember that our identity and our teens identity is in Christ, and we don’t want to run past that. What is the question that our teens are trying to answer during these adolescent years? It’s who am I? What makes me valuable? What makes me special in this world, what gives me worth? And right out of the gate in the creation story, God answers that question for us. The Bible gives us an answer that no other secular story gives us, and it tells us we’re made in the image of a glorious, beautiful, worthy, most valuable God. And that is where our, you know, design of dignity comes from, from him. And to the degree that we can model this and we believe this, and we can pray with and for our teenagers about it, they can learn. I don’t have to go conjure up some identity from my achievements and my talents and my abilities and how many likes I have, but I’ve been given an identity by the God of the universe. There’s nothing more amazing than that. And you know, our teens feel like they are not enough every day, most of us in this room struggle to feel like we’re enough. And here’s the thing, in terms of what the world says we’re not, but knowing that we are, our value comes from being made by God, and for him, it’s the best, I mean, it’s the most hopeful thing that we have in terms of identity. So that’s that is so hopeful. And then the second thing, our hope and God’s character, I think of what I think of Space Mountain. Anybody ever been to Disney? I think of Space Mountain being like parenting a teen with mental health issues or not. It’s a roller coaster ride in the dark because you never know when the drops are coming. And right, yeah. And so you can feel really out of control a lot, and when we as parents feel out because our kids feel out of control, when we feel out of control, what we want to remember is that, though our teens are constantly changing, the God who is sovereign over their development and over our parenting, never changes. Hebrews 13 says he is the same, yesterday, today and forever. And he is the perfect parent, because we all know we’re not, and it takes the pressure off. We’re gonna make mistakes, and he he knows what’s best for them. And so there’s so much hope in knowing that right and relying in our perfect parent. And then I would say the last thing I thought would be helpful to mention is just hope in his steady presence. I keep talking about this good working relationship and being a steady presence for our teenagers who are on this ride all throughout the scriptures, one of the theme is, God is constantly telling his people, on their journey in life, some version of Do not be afraid, right? Don’t be afraid. Do not be discouraged, because you know on their journey in life, because he knows that we’re going to face circumstances and we’re going to have emotions that feel overwhelming, and we’re going to be afraid. And yet his, his, he he leads not with, Okay, let me give you these answers, but he leads with what you need most is my presence. And so you think about in the very beginning, when he placed us in a garden and he dwelled with our first parents to guiding the Israelites in a cloud by day and a fire by night, his steady presence with them, to being in the tabernacle with them as they took him with them. Well, he was guiding them on their way to the promised land. And then you think of in the New Testament, Jesus, their incarnation, Emmanuel, God, literally with us to the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, being given to us, to, you know, to live in our hearts, for all of us who believe by grace, to faith alone, that that Jesus is the the risen Savior. And then, and then you think about and the Bible promises that he’s coming back, and one day he’s going to wipe away every tear, and he’s going to destroy all the sadness and sorrow. There will be no more distress and bad emotions of Wait, they’re not bad, right? They’re uncomfortable, okay? They’re going to be gone, right? And we are going to dwell in everlasting joy forever with Him, in His steady presence. That’s what I think about. And so this is so hopeful, because to the degree that we can remind ourselves and cling to that beautiful truth that He is our ultimate steady presence in Christ, then we can be that steady presence for our teenagers. So I think that’s like beyond hopeful, wonderful,

Betsy Childs Howard

and we’re almost out of time. But I know you’ve said there are some things that Christian parents can do very in a very well meaning way, but that might actually make the anxious situation more difficult. I think,

Sandi Taylor

I think what I think about this, I’m so well meaning believing parents will want to use sometimes when their teen is struggling, as a way to say, Well, have you prayed about it? Or let me give you this verse, or almost as like an opportunity to evangelize them, because they’re not sure where they are in their faith. And we really want them to love Jesus and and it’s so well intentioned. Of course, we want our teenagers to know the Lord is their true source of comfort and hope. But if we lead with that instead of Wow, you are in a lot of pain right now, I’m so sorry. What? What would be helpful? And they just feel validated, they just feel seen. Can I pray for you? What would it be helpful? You know, and asking almost for their permission, of course, you know, you’re praying in your head, right? We were doing that anyway, but we want to make sure we’re leading with relationship, and we’re not. We’re not we’re not doing anything out of fear because we’re uncomfortable with their emotions, and we think, Okay, this is a great way for us to kind of push them toward the Lord because they feel it. Teens don’t want to be controlled. They don’t want to feel like they’re being manipulated in any way, particularly in matters of spiritual things. So it’s there’s tension there, right? And honestly, our teens know we love what they know what we believe. They know. We want them to love Jesus and and they’ll get there. They’ll get there.

Betsy Childs Howard

Well, I just want to very briefly, pray for everyone in this room as we seek to apply these things for God’s glory. Father, I thank you that even though parenting teens can feel like a roller coaster right in the dark, you see, even when we don’t see. And I pray that parents and caregivers would know your presence, and I pray that You would help us, help teens learn to know your presence and your peace. We pray these things in Jesus name, amen.