Promoting resilience and wellbeing

  One of the conversations that has become very familiar to me over the summer is how different our teenagers can be when their friends are around.   Their friends come to stay for a few days and suddenly the house is not good enough, the food is not good enough, where we live is boring. It can come across as ungrateful, or spoiled, which feels really hard when we have put in the effort and the money to give them a good experience. As a parent it is really easy to take this personally so it helps to know what’s going on underneath it. Lisa Damour talks about teenagers building a brand. A big part of being a teenager is working out who you are with your friends, separate from who you are with your family. That version of themselves is something they care about and want to protect. So, when their friends are in our house, they start seeing their home life the way their friends might see it, and noticing the bits that don’t fit the version of themselves they want to be. It ...

  Yesterday I was sitting in a café near Alton Towers. There was a dad on the next table and he was talking to an older couple on the table behind him. The gist of the story was that he had been to the park that day with his kids and they had observed a little girl of about six or seven who was screaming and hitting out at her mum, in front of a very long queue of people. The older couple didn't ask any more questions. They knew straight away what the problem was. The child needed more discipline, more consequences, essentially her parents needed to parent her.  They were doing the thing that all of us do, which is to see a behaviour and reach for the story that makes quickest sense of it. A child behaving badly must mean a parent who isn't doing their job properly. I have been thinking about that conversation ever since, and there are three things I keep coming back to. One. Some children just feel things more Nobody at that table wondered about the little girl and why she ha...

  Have you ever bought a fast pass at a waterpark? You know the ones, you pay a bit extra and you get to skip the queues. Everyone without one joins the longest queue, you don't have too. It was half term this week and we went to a waterpark. It was a really hot day, the place was packed with kids and the queues for all the slides were pretty long.  At the entrance I bought fast pass wristbands without really thinking about it and for most of the day we were absolutely delighted to have them. Then in the afternoon a new ride opened.  It was the biggest slide in the park and the whole morning kids all over the park were talking about it.   There was already a queue of kids waiting who had got there before us. We walked straight past them and got on first because of our wristbands. It felt awkward for so many different reasons. We have known from decades of research, going back to Albert Bandura's work on social learning theory in the 1970s, that children learn fa...

  You know the way the whole house changes in the run-up to exams. They're stressed, we're stressed, and most of us start saying things we wouldn't say at any other time of year. Things like this is the one that matters and if you don't do well now you'll regret it. We mean well. We're trying to motivate them, or sometimes we're just worried and it comes out as pressure. But there's a fairly large body of research now telling us that this kind of talk, which researchers call fear appeals , actually makes things worse for the teenagers who are already anxious. It bumps up the worry, gets in the way of their concentration in the exam itself, and is associated with lower grades, not higher ones. So before we get to what we can do, it's worth starting with what's not helping. Because most of us are doing one or two of these without realising. Why anxious thoughts make exams harder We all know our teens have to remember a lot for exams. Frenc...

  As a clinical psychologist, I spend a lot of time sitting with people who are struggling because of something a well-meaning person did for them. Not to them. For them. There's a term in the literature for this. It's called idiot compassion; it comes from Buddhist psychology and means compassion that prioritises someone's immediate comfort over their long-term wellbeing. It feels like kindness. It looks like kindness. And it is almost always motivated by kindness. But it's also motivated by a human need to not feel helpless. As parents of teenagers, we are particularly vulnerable to this. Our teenager comes home and something has gone wrong. Maybe something has happened in their friend group, or they couldn't answer the maths question, and something in us shifts into problem-solving. We reassure, we rationalise, we problem solve. They seem okay and we feel better. This is the short-term gain. The cost of idiot compassion is the subtle message it sends our teenage...

When Alysa Liu skated at the Winter Olympics, we saw this remarkably composed young woman with exquisite technical precision.   What we didn’t see on our TV screens was her relationship with skating.  The long hours she spent practicing a skill she both enjoyed and steadily mastered. That combination, liking something, getting better at it, and using it to meet challenge, is a powerful engine of human motivation. This idea surfaced recently when Reese Witherspoon reflected publicly on the importance of discovering one’s talents. Her point was not about celebrity or success, but about something more ordinary and more consequential: people thrive when they find an activity that feels like a natural fit. Psychologists call this working from one’s strengths. Research in positive psychology suggests that a true strength has three features. It is something a person enjoys. It is something they do well or improve at with practice. And it is something that provides energy rather ...

  Have you ever looked at your teen’s phone and wondered how it is that everyone seems to be doing the same thing at the same time? The matching clothes. The shared slang. The sudden interest in a product or challenge that did not exist last week. What we are seeing is one of the most powerful forces shaping our teens’ behaviour: social norms. Norms are the unspoken rules of a group — the invisible “this is how we do things” that our teens are constantly scanning for. They influence what our teen wears, who they spend time with and which trends they feel compelled to join, online and off. From a developmental perspective, this makes sense. The adolescent brain is built to notice social cues. Belonging is not just emotionally meaningful; it activates reward systems that are still under construction. For our teens, fitting in feels good. Being left out can feel genuinely painful. Social media has amplified this natural sensitivity. Algorithms allow trends to spread at remarkable ...