“I think there’s really no question what this data is telling us,” said Dr. Kathleen Ethier, head of the CDC’s adolescent and school health program. “Young people are telling us that they are in crisis.”

We all know it: something is not working for the youth in our society right now. Tomorrow,  I’ll share with you a deep dive into the three most likely root causes of the current crisis.  Then on Monday, I’ll share with you how we as a strong MMS community can rally together to support all of our kids’ and teens’ well-being. 

Today, let’s start by immediately empowering you and your family.

Empower

How can we best inoculate our kids against the forces that damage and scar them? How can we respond to the current youth mental health crisis in the U.S. as an opportunity to instill in our kids the inner tools and behavioral habits that will grow their well-being and resilience to benefit them for life?

Here are 10 key strategies:
1. Start With Presence, Curiosity, & Empathy:

Renowned psychologist Dr. Lisa Damour notes, ​​“Too often, ‘mental health’ is equated with feeling good, happy, calm or relaxed…” But it’s more accurately“…about having feelings that fit the moment — even if those feelings are unwanted or painful — and managing them in effective ways.” 

It’s a given that our kids–just like us–will have a wide variety of moods and emotions, so our job is to be present for them to listen curiously and empathetically when they share struggles. Then, it’s to help them understand more clearly what they are going through. Evidence reveals that just giving words to our negative feelings reduces the pain–i.e. “Name it to Tame it.” Dr. Damour shares her approach:

The exercise I use in my own home is that I imagine that my teenager is a reporter, and I am an editor. My teenager is reading me her latest article. My job is to listen so intently that when she comes to the end of the draft, I can produce a headline — the headline being a distilled, accurate summary of what she said that doesn’t introduce any new ideas. That shows them that you’re listening, and validates their feelings. 

By giving this gift of presence, curiosity, and empathy, and clearly reflecting non-judgementally what we hear,  we help our kids grow their own muscles of self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and self-regulation. This validates their experience, which in turn helps them learn to trust and value themselves. 
Additionally, such an approach will help them develop empathy and listening skills as we role-model for them. (This alone is a gift: a well-publicized study found that over the last few decades, empathy in college-aged students declined by 40 percent.)

2. Take Parental Control of the Wild Elephant in the Room: Digital Technology & Social Media

We all struggle with this. Parent shaming isn’t helpful. Tech saturates the lives of most of us. We’re doing our best every day, and few of us have figured out yet our own fully healthy relationships with digital devices and social media. 

New technologies allow for good, too. (I remember witnessing our son learn how to make complicated origami creations, as well as learn how to play the ukelele, all from online tutorials.) For our children and teens though, the verdict is in: most social media and digital tech use, in its current form, degrades our kids’ healthy, optimal development; it’s misaligned with our values and goals for their childhoods and adolescence.

It’s worth considering waiting much longer to give our kids access to social media and digital technology. It’s well known that these are intentionally designed to be addictive, so the analogy to drug and alcohol abuse and addiction science is helpful: 

First, research shows that if kids can wait until they are 18 or older to try drugs or alcohol, they are much less likely to develop substance abuse problems. Second, while many people are able to have balanced, non-destructive relationships with intoxicants, many can’t; stopping their use completely is the only viable option. 

Consider how hard it is for us adults, with our well-developed brains, to resist compulsive tech use. Kids’ and teens’ brains don’t stand a chance. Better to just not introduce them to it for now. 

However, if our kids are already down the rabbit hole and we want to dial back their tech use, it’s hard but not impossible. Just like substance addiction withdrawals tend to dissipate after a few weeks, so too will their tech withdrawals.

What makes tech use and our kids high stakes? Tomorrow I’ll share the data and research, but first here’s my very personal experience: Around the mid-2000s, my wife and I saw that once our kids were introduced to digital devices and video games, the pleasure of the dopamine rush they experienced through using them was wildly powerful and addictive. From there on out, when they had free time, they’d often ask to use digital devices before anything else (e.g. playing catch or ping-pong, swimming, painting, cooking, walking the dog, board and card games, etc.). This set us up for far too many push-and-pull struggles and the need to set and enforce far more rules than we would have preferred. What we experienced is very common. 

We were influenced by our kids’ pleas of “All my friends have this!” “I’m the only one in my class who doesn’t play it, etc.” The competing desires to support their needs for belonging and inclusion, and knowing what they were asking for was misaligned with our values and goals for them, made it a very tough nut. Looking back, we wish we’d had the strength and foresight to have resisted these pleas longer than we did. 

Once our kids are introduced to the devices, it’s arduous and painful to put that cat back in the bag. We did it. And it was sometimes torturous, but ultimately worth it. 

(And, If you think tech use is essential for kids to develop tech skills, check out the recent podcast we recorded with MMS parent Tom Preston-Werner, computer programmer and founder of GitHub, “Why a Low Tech School for a High Tech World.”)

O.K. Friends: No more denial or avoidance. Fist bumps; let’s make the time to deal with this. We’ve got this!: 

Young children:

Resist & Innovate. As much as possible, keep young kids off of digital devices. Instead, if you need something to give them to take their attention off of you, consider possibilities like these screen-free audiobook players and screen-free music players. If stuck in the car, board books, audiobooks, “eye-spy” and songs and singing are each much better options than handing them phones or tablets. 

Skip the “educational” videos. “Baby Einstein” products and similar consumer goods marketed as beneficial for kids’ brain growth “have been linked to developmental issues, sleep problems and delays in learning essential skills like vocabulary.” 

All Children & Teens:

Seriously consider not giving your child a smartphone during their time at MMS, even during their Junior High Years. 

If you believe your kids need a way to contact you and other family members, consider something like the Gizmo Smartwatch (most cell providers have their own version of this), which allows kids to contact only the people you set.  

For older kids and teens, the Light Phone is a brilliant option: It looks like a cool smartphone, but just allows for calling, texting, GPS, and limited apps. (A New England boarding high school recently banned smartphones for faculty and students and gave everyone Light Phones instead; testimonials show it was a tough adjustment, and now the community is happier and healthier.)

To support your child’s interest in listening to music and audiobooks, consider listening devices that don’t include the ability to access the internet. Here is a good list of options. For e-readers or e-ink tablets, select ones without options for searching the internet or other apps. Recommendations here and here. 

Own Your Role & Take Control

If your kids are on devices, set up parental controls (see this comprehensive summary). For Android, use the Family Link app to manage apps and set screen time limits. For iOS, go to Settings > General > Restrictions to limit apps and features. 

This article gives hope: “I Used Apple’s New Controls to Limit a Teenager’s iPhone Time (and It Worked!)”)

Direct links:

Monitor. At MMS, we don’t allow students to use phones at school–including at the Junior High. We know though that sometimes group texts and social media use while they are in their own homes have caused problems. 

If your kids can text, go here to learn how to have their texts forwarded to you and get access to their activity so you can supervise their use and communications. If you notice problematic communications occurring between peers, reach out to the other parents of the kids involved and present a unified front of expectations and consequences.

If your child uses a laptop for school work, consider requiring them to use it in a family or dining room when doing school work. This strategy helps motivate them to stay on task and resist jumping onto other non-school-related sites. Also, investigate the options for installing programs that can be set and timed to block the ability to “surf” while doing focused work. 

Supervise and Collect: If your kids or teens have digital devices, including laptops, set a rule to collect them at a certain time each night and encourage reading before bedtime. Research shows that looking at screens makes it harder for us to fall asleep. Kids 6-12 years old need nine-to-twelve hours of sleep each night, while teens need eight-to-ten hours of sleep each night to maintain their well-being.  Another safeguard is to set your home internet to shut off at a specific time each night.  

3. Knowledge is Power: Media Literacy

Let’s educate our kids with a sober, clear-eyed assessment of the social-media-saturated reality in which they are growing up (including pros and cons). This article from Nemours Children’s Hospital offers a strong starting point.

To give your preteens and teens insight into the ways they are being targeted and persuaded to consume online content–for the monetary profit of others–watch with them “The Social Dilemma” (on Netflix here); it’s powerful and insightful. This will help your kids understand that you are seeking to protect them and that there is a clear reason they get sucked into their screens.

4. Help Them Find Their Meaning & Purpose

Young people with a strong sense of inner connection with something larger and benevolent in life are 90 percent less likely to experience depression. 

The R.O.I. is phenomenal if we invest ourselves in helping our kids develop this sense. Where do you find your strongest sense of connection with life? Live music? Creating art? Absorbing yourself in nature and silence? Activism? Community belonging? 

If we can model for our kids that we attend to our inner lives–not solely focused on external productivity–and share what connects us to meaning, we empower them to attend to their inner experience and development.

How to help our kids find their purpose? Pay attention to what makes them powerfully come alive in their lives.  Notice what sustains their excitement and interest, and support that. 

I recently read that as an 11-year-old boy in Northern Ireland, when music legend Van Morrison expressed excitement about learning guitar, his working-class family invested in one for him. Imagine if they had not? 

Contemporary comedian Seth Rogen tells the story that when he was 12, he shared his interest in comedy with his family. They found a local class for him and shuttled him back and forth; they even drove him to nightclubs to perform.

As a personal example, early in high school, our eldest told us he wanted to become a firefighter. We helped him interview for a position as a “Firefighter Explorer” with Novato Fire Department and then shuttled him back and forth to evening classes. He has since changed his career path toward health care, but the act of validating his inner longings was vital in empowering him with agency and self-worth. 

When our youngest asked for help getting a small computer device to record his acoustic and electric guitar compositions, we did. Over the last three years, he’s evolved this into a thriving online music business (and hasn’t asked us for money for the last three years!) and plans to be a college freshman next year majoring in business with a concentration in entrepreneurship in the music industry (yes…there is that major). 

The bottom line is that when our children’s lives are aligned with what makes them come alive, this is a powerful prophylactic against the negative influences that degrade a young person’s sense of self and self-worth.

5. Cultivate In Real Life Joy and Belonging

Board Games! Here’s a fantastic resource to find games that fit all ages and that you will actually enjoy playing with your kids. Playing together (or bike riding, or drawing, or cooking, or knitting, or…fill in the blank..) saturates our kids with a sense of family love and belonging.

Consider incorporating the idea of a regular “Tech Shabbat” into your family’s weekly or monthly routine. Local author Tiffany Shlain’s book, “24/6: Giving Up Screens One Day a Week to Get More Time, Creativity, and Connection ” shares this practice, and her podcast interview here is excellent: She explains how she and her busy family–with young kids–do this each week and find great value in it.

As our kids get older and enter the fray of the world, the strong foundations of family love we cultivate and strengthen through joyful time together will buoy them for their lives.

6. Act Boldly & Hold Boundaries 

Dr. Montessori observed that as children enter adolescence, they become “social newborns,” not dissimilar to toddlers in many ways: The onset of puberty creates an almost entirely new way of seeing and experiencing the world. It’s confusing. They often feel and act chaotically. 

Just as young children crave predictable order and routine, so do teens–though they will often fight us on this tooth and nail. In reality, clear, consistent boundaries make them feel safe. When they know adults are holding strong guardrails up for them, they can trust that they won’t fall off a cliff (metaphorically and literally) as they explore, work on their identity formation, and individuate from us.

When we sense or get evidence that our kids are unable to manage healthfully enough the freedoms we give them, we need to step in and act and dial back those freedoms. 

The calculus is important though: Failure is vital for learning. 

Allowing kids enough space to struggle, fail, and develop, is essential. However, some behaviors are too high stakes for us to stand by. Jessica Lahey, author of the New York Times bestseller, “The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed” shares her wise insights into how to walk this line in our recent podcast conversation.  Essentially, it’s to ask ourselves, “Is it crucial that my kid does or does not do a certain thing a certain way, or is there room for them to mess up and learn from mistakes on this?” In most cases, there’s room. But sometimes, the risks are just too high stakes. When they are, we need to step in and be the grown-up parents for them.

Clear, consistent boundaries and expectations-setting around our children’s freedoms and responsibilities give them the safety, guidance, and room to explore and struggle that will grow mightily their capacities for successful independence and well-being. The research backs this up too: “Authoritative” parenting (not to be confused with “Authoritarian” parenting) is shown to lead to the most well-adjusted kids; this approach is typified by high warmth and clear, consistent boundaries and behavior expectations. 

7. Support In Person Friendships & Community

Another well-researched and documented prophylactic is positive human relationships (it even dramatically increases life expectancy). When our kids are young, there is so much we can do to help connect them with friends outside of school. It becomes more difficult as they enter adolescence and assert their privacy–most teens cringe at the idea of their parents arranging “playdates” for them. 

That said, they often don’t know how to do it themselves, so offer to host their friends, drive them, and find activities that might interest them and their friends and support these. If they have a special interest or a specific identity they are exploring and developing, help them find groups aligned with this. 

When you host kids or teens with phones, consider a practice like this: have a basket at the front door where everyone deposits these when they come in.  (It’s okay to be the strict, no-fun parent sometimes–they’ll thank you later.)

8. The Gift of Nature

For our family, camping trips and time exploring nature on the weekends (bike rides and hikes), were the times when our kids never asked for, or even seemed to think about, digital technologies. In high school, they each took extended backpacking trips with organizations like the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) and Outward Bound. Our eldest still talks regularly about his 30-day backpacking NOLS trip in Alaska; he experienced this between his sophomore and junior year of high school. For us, it has been essential to give our kids a relationship with the larger presence of nature as a source for grounding and meaning. And, this is timely, too. See the book, “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Kids from Nature-Deficit Disorder.” And a growing body of research finds that time in nature has a wide array and physical and psychological benefits. Currently, doctors in 35 states are formally prescribing time in nature to patients, recognizing the evidence of its health value. 

If we start early, helping our kids cultivate their own close relationship with nature as a source of solace and meaning, this will be a relationship they can come back to again and again, for their whole lives. 

9. Normalize Mental Health Care

Why do we feel comfortable talking about seeing a doctor for high blood pressure, but feel embarrassed to talk about seeing a therapist or psychiatrist? It seems there’s a sense that if we seek mental health care we are somehow weak — as opposed to being inspired by those with the strength to seek help and improve their lives. We don’t think someone with a broken leg is weak for seeking care. And, given that rates of anxiety and depression have increased across all ages in the last few years, why would we ignore this and just suffer in silence? 

Ups and downs of moods, times of sadness and anxiety, these are all normal parts of life. However, when we see them becoming pronounced and sustained in our kids, don’t wait. Specifically, now that we know how poorly our society’s youth are fairing–and the dire consequences of their suffering. Where there is suffering, we need to seek professional help and care. 

Finally, by sharing with our children the ways we care for our own mental health, and by supporting them in discovering what works well for them–including seeing professionals–we send a vital, life-giving message: “You matter. You deserve to feel okay. People are there to help you when you need it. Reach out.”

 

10. Be the Change

Whatever behaviors we want our children or teens to adopt, we have to role model these for them.

Do our kids see us reading books or making art? Do they see us putting away our phones during meals and family time? Do they witness us volunteering? Do they experience us expressing our feelings with self-awareness and regulation? When we do become dysregulated and make mistakes, do they hear us apologize with sincerity? Do we share how we find meaning and purpose in our own lives? Do they see us enjoying time outside and exercising? Do they see us taking time for “in real life” relationships? Kids, especially teens, are all about “do as I do, not as I say,” as they observe our actual behaviors as their potent role models. 

Onward

Tomorrow I’ll share with you the evidence for three root causes of the current crisis among youth in our society. Every generation faces challenges and unprecedented new phenomena. While overwhelming at times, we can come together as a community devoted to the well-being of kids and teens, and meet this moment. We’ve got this.