GROW Counseling
GROW Counseling
How do we help teens be ok during quarantine?
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Dr. Wendy Dickinson, founder and psychologist at GROW Counseling, talks with Jill Howgate about the idea of families helping teens be OK during this time of quarantine around our world.
Hi everyone, this is Wendy Dickinson from Grow Counseling. I'm a licensed psychologist and we have a group practice here in Atlanta, Georgia, with several locations throughout the Metro Atlanta area. And we just wanted to take a few minutes, record some podcasts to help with the stress and anxiety that we're all experiencing as a result of being quarantined during this time around the coronavirus. So I have asked several of our staff to come on, and I'm going to be just interviewing them to pick their brains about what would be helpful to you guys in terms of coping skills and resources and ideas and plans and basically ways to just be okay through the midst of this. So the first guest that I have is Jill Halgate. She's one of our therapists in Alpharetta. Jill, thanks for being on today. Thank you. Pleasure to join you. Joining me from your uh closet in your house in Alfaretta, right? That's right.
SPEAKER_01Always a glamorous recording studio here.
SPEAKER_00Well, thanks for coming on. You want to just tell everybody a little bit about your caseload and what kinds of clients that you see?
SPEAKER_01Sure. I am a licensed professional counselor again at Grow. I see primarily individual counselor, uh individual clients. I work with teens and adults. Most of my clients are in some sort of life transition, whether it's a pretty normal stage of life, graduation, or uh starting in the job market or retirement, but uh a lot of transition and a lot of anxiety. That's probably the the single most uh most common topic that my clients are talking about, the stress that comes with transition.
SPEAKER_00Great. I I ask you to start today because I, you know, we're we're good friends and I've spent a lot of time at your house. And I know you've raised two uh boys through teenage hood, and I've seen uh the them move through that and bring all their friends over to the house. And I've been there for spring break. So I I know that you know how to roll with teenagers.
SPEAKER_01So that's uh we have survived the experience.
SPEAKER_00That sounds like a resounding success.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. When you come out on the other side of it, that's a win.
SPEAKER_00So I wanna I wanna jump in here. I know right now a lot of um most of the schools around the country are out for two weeks, three weeks, if not already through the end of the semester and have transitioned to online schooling. Parents who never thought they would utter the word homeschool are now smack in the middle of homeschooling their uh children, no matter what ages there are. So we've got about 17 million high schoolers at home all day long with their families, can't get out, can't see their friends. So I think the question to start with is like, how do we be okay as parents of teenagers and help our teenagers be okay in the midst of all of this?
SPEAKER_01It is a great question, and it is not an easy one to answer. It um to have everybody in this kind of high stress situation and this compressed location, it can fray the the calmest nerve. So I think that one of the things is that everybody, you need some kind of structure, even if some of the structure designates time as unstructured or unscheduled, but just to have some some rules in place or some guidelines in place for how everybody can function well together and get their needs met.
SPEAKER_00I think that's great. You know, I've been hearing a lot about schedule routine and I've seen on uh Instagram or whatever, you know, all these TikTok schedules moment by moment of what to try to, you know, make everybody in the house do. And I don't know about you, but that kind of increases my my anxiety level. And I I thought at some point, you know, this isn't a one size fits all approach. We need to figure out what's what works best for us and what works best for our children and our families rather than just kind of out of stress picking up a schedule and trying to force everybody to to do something altogether.
SPEAKER_01So true. And different people within the families are wired differently. I tend to be really fluid, as you know. My husband is more concrete and likes things to be more well defined. Families in their entirety have a kind of collective culture to them. So finding a fit that works for you guys is may look very different than what works for your neighbors. Um, and I think what this is an area where you can really uh gather some goodwill amongst the family members by kind of thinking collaboratively, but having everybody can contribute individually so that everybody sits down and says, all right, what do you what do you need to be successful? If it's somebody that's now working from home and they say, I need at least two hours of just quiet time away where I'm on the phone or whatever it is that I need to do, or here's my block of when I've got to be on a class or participate in a group chat. Um, sometimes it's just I need some time away to kind of sit and stare at the wall because I'm a little bit of an introvert and all of this going on, I need some decompression space. But I think to be able to sit down together and say, hey, what what's essential for you and what's essential for me to put those on the table right from the start gives you the best chance of success. And I think even with teens, they want to have a really active part of this, but I think even younger kids enjoy the the part of being contributors in this process.
SPEAKER_00I love that. I love the idea of checking in with each person and asking them what they need and how how they want to structure their time. I I think you know, one of the opportunities of all of this may be that we get to know each other better. You know, we we think that we know each other and our families really well, but sometimes we're just on autopilot. And maybe, maybe you knew your elementary kid really well or your middle school kid really well, but your teenagers develop some different needs or their different their personalities are developing differently. So I love the idea of kind of checking in and going, hey, you know, what is it that you need in order to feel like this time is somewhat structured? Um, here's and maybe if they have you know a hard time articulating that, you could say, here's what I'm guessing you would need, but I want to I want to see how that feels for you.
SPEAKER_01Right. And you can you can start by saying, I know for me, yeah, this is really I my day feels better. I am sparklier, everything looks shinier when I have these things in place. And it it gives kind of sets the tone. I'm not gonna have a list of a dozen of them, but one or two things that I can say when these things happen, my world gets better.
SPEAKER_00That's great. You know, one of the things I've been noticing is just about how everybody kind of has a different perspective in this. Talk for a minute about teenagers and their perspectives and how we we interact and engage with them around what they're what they're experiencing and um in in this whole process.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, I think the the thing to to keep in mind is that this is a stressful, unprince, unprecedented experience for our country, really, in the last hundred years. And the way that stress and anxiety show up, it's different individually, but I think it's different in kind of stages of life. And there's there is this perspective for all of us to a degree, but it's this isn't fair. This isn't, this isn't okay. Um, on the other hand, there's this element of kind of if this seems so overwhelming to me, so beyond my capacity to cope with this, I need to minimize this. There's no way that I feel like I've got the skills to manage it or deal with it. So this has to be less scary than it feels right now in order for me to be confident that I am okay in the world. So as a parent, the tendency is to get really frustrated when you see kids, you know, at spring break partying or filling the bars on uh St. Patrick's, you know, the college kids, and to go, where what are they thinking? But it's there's this kind of an anti-panic thing that happens when people are trying to find a way to manage some of this anxiety. So to recognize that that may be going on a little bit, and it it doesn't mean that they are being willfully um, you know, uncaring or blithely disinterested in this really big crisis. It may just be that they're trying to find a way to bring that crisis down to teenage proportions.
SPEAKER_00Sure. I think that's a great point. I was uh talking to somebody earlier about how based on our personalities, we kind of manage stress or engage with stress differently. So some people lean into it and try to control it and really micromanage, and other people distance kind of feels like they stick their head in the sand. You use the word anti-panic. So in the midst of something that seems like it should be really significant, they are calm and going about the day as if nothing has happened. So I think it's a really important thing to pay attention to is like what comes up for you as a parent, and also how might your teenager be expressing stress, even if they seem like they're just kind of going about their day doing things as as usual.
SPEAKER_01Right, right. And and you see different extremes. You may see a lot of agitation, it may be that irritation or frustration is really close to the surface. It may be impatience, um, it may be that the kind of this condescending uh belittling of all the people that are panicking or that are prepping and and fearful, you'll hear it kind of, oh, everyone's overreacting. You know, this this minimization of it. I think that there is this kind of piece of uh pushback. I don't want to accept this. This isn't what I want. And the kind of this isn't fair. It's well, well, I don't want to, what about my prom? And again, the tendency at par at our perspective as parents is to say, I want to keep you alive. The prom is not the most important thing, not even by a long shot. But if we can step back and think, you know, I can remember going to my prom. I remember what it felt like, I can remember how excited we were. To think about missing that, to think about being a senior that's the last game, the last uh dance, whatever that looks like, this is this is their world, and it's kind of fallen out from under them. So I think to kind of join with them in that first is is really valuable.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you're really talking about deep empathy, like like drawing from a place of experience that we have to try to understand what they're experiencing and seeing them as individuals, not just a herd of little children, but as people that have hopes and dreams and you know, feelings about things and trying to validate those, even if there's nothing we can do about it, which I think from an adult perspective is really challenging because we want to fix things for the people we love. We want to make it better. And we're at a point right now, I think, largely across the world, where we're just having to sit with this discomfort and acknowledge, like you said, that things aren't fair. Um, and we're doing something that feels uncomfortable right now. Um, and that hopefully we'll get through it and we'll get back to kind of a normal and we don't know though when that is, which causes stress to go up. So let's just before we wrap up, let's talk about some real practical things people can do to manage that with their teenagers. We talked about um earlier acknowledging that everybody's different, asking them what they need. You have a couple other tips of what would be helpful.
SPEAKER_01I would set reasonable expectations and include yourself in them. You know, things it's it's natural that we're gonna be frustrated sometimes. It's reasonable to be uh angry, it's reasonable to uh disagree, but it's not okay to be mean to each other, it's not okay to be rude, it's not okay to to to express this in really hateful ways. We're gonna, we're not gonna treat each other that way. And when you do, whether it's me or them, it's you circle around and you say, I'm sorry, I didn't handle that well. Um just to kind of keep those expectations reasonable. Um, but take good care of yourself, give yourself the basic building blocks that you need to give to expand your emotional margin, that kind of self-care, sleep well, eat well, stay hydrated, you know, all the basics that were so annoying that your mother was right about. Um keep to the to the extent that you can, hang on to your sense of humor with both hands. Uh it's it's a huge de-stressing component. It helps you maintain some perspective. Um, everything doesn't have to be a parenting moment. Uh you can laugh at the the YouTube videos of teachers getting kicked out of their own group chats by kids that know more about how to work with than they do. It's uh it's the poor teachers, you know, empathize, but still it's okay to to find some of this silly, to laugh together, to to decide sometimes, you know what, we could argue about this, but I think you've got to be as sick of hearing me blather about this as I am about blathering about it. How about we just agree, you know, to to do a redo. Let's start over and just kind of shake it off. I think that that does a lot for everyone's emotional status.
SPEAKER_00That's great. So just to just to summarize, uh, we've talked about staying connected, checking in with what your teenager needs, validating their feelings and experience through empathy, um, setting some reasonable expectations, and um then staying positive and keeping humor a part of the picture as much as you can. Absolutely. Sounds great. Thank you for all this. This is awesome. Um go back to potty training your cats or whatever you were doing before.
SPEAKER_01Valuable things here with this time.
SPEAKER_00I mean, we appreciate you taking the time away to be with us.
SPEAKER_01It's been a pleasure. Stay safe. Bye.