Teen years are filled with new, exciting, and challenging developmental tasks. Discovering how to be your own person while still needing the care, support, and security caregivers provide is critical to healthy adolescent development.
Teens are trying to learn and practice the skills they will rely on when they reach adulthood such as independence, autonomy, expanded social circles, and navigating greater freedoms in their world such as driving and even working. Practicing these skills helps prepare them to launch out of the home and into the world. As exciting as these tasks are to teens, they can also cause great anxiety and even fear. To combat the fear of engaging these new and scary risks, their brain gives them greater rewards for risk taking. Research has shown that the teenage brain rewards risk taking to a greater degree than any other developmental age. This is also why they tend to feel invincible and may even act recklessly.
Because teens’ experience has only been as a child, they imagine adulthood as being the opposite of being a child. As obedience is what was expected as a child, adulthood must be choosing for oneself. Because of this, teens are often driven to push against boundaries, seek to make decisions for themselves, and explore experiences previously forbidden to them by parents and caregivers. However, rebelliousness tends to have a negative impact on parents who can also respond with harshness and increase the rigidity of boundaries. Finding the balance between protecting teens from real potential dangers and providing opportunities to practice increasing autonomy and freedoms that prepare them for adulthood is not easy.
These developmental tasks are further complicated by the numerous social and cultural pressures teens face in our modern culture. Expectations, personal and cultural narratives, online communities and social media, and the influence of educators, coaches and other adult voices can cause confusion when these many expectations messages appear to be in conflict with each other and/or long held and practiced beliefs within the family.
Learning how to balance independence out of the home with their need of the support, love, care, and protection a stable home provides them is the core of many issues in adolescents. Trauma, significant life changes such as divorce, relocation, or loss, and other issues can further complicate their growth and development leading to anxiety, depression, acting out behaviors, and even suicidal thoughts and behaviors.
Our therapists have years of experience working with adolescents and are trained to help them navigate the complexities of their unique experience and circumstances. We coordinate with families for support while protecting confidentiality of our adolescent clients to produce the best outcomes possible.
Contact us today to help your teen hold to the path of security, health and confidence as they journey towards independence.