Adolescent Issues
NorthPoint Adolescent Issues counseling is designed to offer your adolescent an opportunity to discuss problems one-on-one with a trained professional counselor in order to gain insight into his/her concerns. Discussion, especially for younger children, is often supplemented with activities and play materials. Discussions and activities are based on your child's age, developmental level, and specific concerns of your children/adolescent. Counseling is available for children and adolescents ages 5 to 18.
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Adults commonly tell young people that the teenage years are the "best years of your life." The rosy remembrance highlights happy groups of high school students energetically involved at a dance or sporting event, and a bright-eyed couple holding hands or sipping sodas at a local restaurant. This is only part of the picture. Life for many young people is a painful tug of war filled with mixed messages and conflicting demands from parents, teachers, coaches, employers, friends and oneself. Growing up—negotiating a path between independence and reliance on others—is a tough business. It creates stress, and it can create serious depression for young people ill-equipped to cope, communicate and solve problems.
The American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT) report that many of our adolescents today have problems and are getting into trouble. After all, there are a lot of pressures for kids to deal with among friends and family.
For some youth, pressures include poverty, violence, parental problems, and gangs. Kids may also be concerned about significant issues such as religion, gender roles, values, or ethnicity. Some children are having difficulty dealing with past traumas they have experienced, like abuse. Parents and their teenagers are struggling between the youth's wanting independence while still needing parental guidance. Sometimes all these conflicts result in behavior problems.
Any number of isolated behavior problems can represent adolescent problems and delinquency-shoplifting, truancy, a fight in school, drug or alcohol ingestion. Sometimes, kids can't easily explain why they act the way they do. They may be just as confused about it as the adults, or they simply see delinquent behaviors as appropriate ways to deal with what they experience. Parents and loved ones may feel scared, angry, frustrated, or hopeless. They may feel guilty and wonder where they went wrong. All these feelings are normal, but it is important to understand that there is help available to troubled kids and their families.1
How Do You Know When To Seek Help?
What are the signs of trouble? Many adolescents get into trouble sometimes. A big question for parents (whether they be "traditional," single, step, or grand-parents), though), is how to know when a youth is headed for more serious problems, or when bad behavior is just "a kid being a kid." Try to focus on patterns rather than an isolated event. In other words, does the behavior happen repeatedly despite efforts to change it?
The patterns signaling the need for help include not only deviant behaviors by the adolescent, but also the presence of other problems in the family or tensions at home. For example, problems in the parents' marriage or frequent fighting or hostility among the family members can also be involved in the youth's behavior problems. The problem behaviors and other family issues can interact and feed off each other, so that it is hard to tell where it started.
Of course, there are also some obvious signs that indicate the need for immediate and effective intervention, including violence against other persons or animals, or when peers are involved in destructive processes (crime, truancy, drugs). Or, a parent may simply have an instinctive feeling that something serious is happening.
An important first step to find out what is going on is to try to talk to the adolescent and other family members about what is happening, possible reasons, and potential solutions. Others who know the adolescent and family, like teachers or caregivers, may also be able to provide information about the youth's mood or behaviors outside of the home to help assess the severity of the problem.
Many factors put youth and families at risk for juvenile delinquency, though they do not necessarily cause delinquency. Such factors include youth attention and hyperactivity problems and learning disorders, volatile temperament, and even the early onset of puberty and sexual development. All these factors affect the way an adolescent feels and acts and also how peers, family, and society view the adolescent. Similarly, parental problems, such as depression, substance abuse, and domestic violence can interact negatively with a youth's developing path of delinquency. Rather than causing delinquency, factors such as these tend to place youth at increased risk, intensify the downward spiral, and in turn add to the difficulty in changing these processes for the better.1
Common Causes and Responses to Stress
Young people become stressed for many reasons. The Minnesota study presented students with a list of 47 common life events and asked them to identify those they had experienced in the last six months that they considered to be "bad." The responses indicated that they had experienced an average of two negative life events in the last six months. The most common of these were:
- Break up with boy/girl friend
- Increased arguments with parents
- Trouble with brother or sister
- Increased arguments between parents
- Change in parents' financial status
- Serious illness or injury of family member
- Trouble with classmates
- Trouble with parents
These events are centered in the two most important domains of a teenager's life: home and school. They relate to issues of conflict and loss. Loss can reflect the real or perceived loss of something concrete such as a friend or money, and it can mean the loss of such intrinsic things as self-worth, respect, friendship or love.1
1Joyce Walker