1. 5 Ways to Support Your Teenager
Understand what worries them
Nurture resilience
Help them to manage stress and anxiety
Promote a healthy lifestyle
Connect with your teenager by listening, talking and setting boundaries
Aims:
To show how parents can support teenage wellbeing
To offer ideas that parents can implement

2. Understand The Teenage Brain
We now know that the brain is continuing to develop during the teenage years and into their early 20’s.
The last area of the brain to go through this process is Pre-Frontal Cortex, which is where: planning, decision making, impulse control, strategic thinking, and weighing up consequences all take place.
Synapses that normally go through the prefrontal cortex go through the amygdala – the emotional centre of the brain. So things are experienced in a much more sensitive way
Teenagers find it harder to make decisions, plan and weigh up the consequences. They are also more emotional.

3. Understand What Worries Your Teenager
Friendships
Identity
Reduced Family Time
School & Exams
Social Media
Body Changes
Peer Pressure
What worries your child? Talk through each concern

4. Nurture Resilience
If a parent is worried about their child's resilience they can talk to us and request support via a resilience programme
“Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say ‘so what’ ”.
Andy Warhol

5. Nurture Resilience
Gently help your child to shift their reliance on support from others (I have the resources)
Help your child to use their internal skills ( I can do/try this)
Nurture Resilience
Build positive attitudes and feelings about themselves (I am good/I am able/ I am kind)

6. Encourage A Growth Mindset
Having a growth mindset supports resilience – Help them to see the benefits of failing
fleas in a jar.mpg

7. Failing is how we learn

8. G R A D U T E I C - N V S H X O L P
Engaging in activities that help them to have a growth mind-set and feel good about themselves

9. Managing Stress and Anxiety
A degree of pressure and stress is not only inevitable, it can be a helpful way of motivating people to perform at their best and achieve more. It is when that stress become excessive that it can create a state of anxiety and ‘flight, fright or freeze’.
Stress is not all bad

10. Managing Stress and Anxiety
Practice 7/11 with your child

11. HOW TO GROUND YOURSELF
· Bring your attention down to your feet on the ground
· Breathe deeply in through your nose and out through your mouth
· Slowly look around you and find…..
· 5 things you can see
· 4 things you can touch
· 3 things you can hear
· 2 things you can smell (or 2 smells you like)
· 1 emotion you feel
This is called GROUNDING – it can help when you are overthinking and feel anxious. This will calm you and connect you to your senses and surroundings
Page 12 of planner to help with stress and anxiety

12. Promote a Healthy Lifestyle
Time to sleep – without technology
Time in - to eat healthily with the family, to share your day and to offer support and set boundaries
Time to focus - to do school work
Time to exercise – to be happy and healthy
Downtime - to listen to music, relax
Time to connect – with friends, family and loved ones
Talk about each one

13. Free Apps ReachOut WorryTime Self-help for Anxiety Management
MindShift
CBT Thought Diary
Catch It – Make sense of moods
Headspace: Guided Meditation
Stop, Breathe & Think
Calm Harm

14. www.youngminds.org.uk www.healthmatters.clch.nhs.uk
On-line counselling
Contacts for support and page 11 of planner