Welcome to The Practical Parent.  We’re living in an ocean of information about parenting. We aim to help you navigate the waters. This is an online community for discussing everything related to parenting teens. We’ll overlap some content with the newsletter (Practical Parent) published by Practical Help for Parents.com and give you a place to talk about the challenges of parenting teens and pre-teens.

Michael Y. Simon, MFT, is the publisher of the Practical Parent and founder of Practical Help for Parents, offering timely, evidence-based information to support parents of teens, educators, administrators and mental health professionals that serve youth daily. His specialty is in understanding and making accessible by translating into practical terms, the immensity of information around parenting teens and adolescent development in general. He is the former Director of Counseling & Student Support for Bentley School, an independent high school in Lafayette, California and a psychotherapist in private practice for close to 15 years.

After teaching philosophy and psychology at the university level for many years, he worked as the Director for several organizations, including the San Francisco Psychotherapy Research Group, the Marina Counseling Center and the Harm Reduction Therapy Center. He is now a highly sought-after local and national speaker on parenting teens, and is currently writing a book on teens and status, looking at the complex relationship regarding anxiety over status and contemporary American youth culture.

Know the prevalence of Major Depression: Major depression strikes about 1 in 12 adolescents. In any given 6-month period, about 5 percent of 9- to 17-year-olds are estimated to be suffering from Major Depression. There are other forms of Depression as well. Check out the Model Web Resources at Practical Help for Parents website regarding depression (www.practicalhelpforparents.com).

Know the symptoms of Major Depression. All too often, depression is left untreated because people fail to recognize the symptoms and believe that it is just normal sadness, a phase that a teen is going through, or a sign of weakness. This can be a terrible mistake. It is important to know the symptoms, so that you can distinguish depression from occasional normal sadness or moodiness.

Common symptoms of depression include:
o Sad or irritable mood
o Loss of interest in activities that were once enjoyable
o Large changes in appetite or weight (eating too much or too little)
o Difficulty sleeping or oversleeping
o Slow or agitated movement; Loss of energy
o Feelings of worthlessness or guilt
o Difficulty concentrating
o Frequent, intrusive or ongoing thoughts of death or suicide

Most teens experience some of these symptoms occasionally. But if a teen has a number of these symptoms for more than a few weeks, he or she is likely to have major depression, and may need professional help.

Teenagers often show depression in other ways as well. Some other signs to watch for in teens include:
o Frequent headaches, muscle aches, stomach aches or tiredness, without a medical cause
o Frequent absences from school or poor performance in school
o Talk of or efforts to run away from home
o Boredom, sulking; ongoing lack of interest in spending time with friends or family
o Alcohol or substance abuse
o Social isolation, poor communication
o Fear of death
o Extreme sensitivity to rejection or failure
o Increased irritability, anger, hostility, or crying
o Reckless behavior
o Neglect of clothing and appearance
o Difficulty with relationships
o Changes in mood

If you suspect that your teen may be suffering from depression, talk to a mental health professional and get some help…even if you just “check things out” to make sure everything is okay.

I just attended the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program at the Violence Prevention Conference in San Antonio, Texas.  As we approach the April 20^th anniversary of the Columbine shootings, and in the wake of the tragic and preventable suicide of Phoebe Prince at South Hadley High School, this seemed a crucial time to address the topic of bullying.

On January 14, 2010 Phoebe Prince, a recent emigrant from Ireland, hanged herself at the family home in South Hadley, Massachusetts. She had been relentlessly and brutally teased, taunted and bullied by classmates at her high school and online. She decided she could no longer endure the torture. Six of the teens (three are female) will be indicted on charges connected to Prince’s suicide. They are charged with violating Prince’s civil rights, criminal harassment and disturbing a school assembly. Two of the indicted students, a 17-year-old male and an 18-year-old male, will also be charged with statutory rape. Criminal complaints were filed against three other students. Three of the students remain at school and three have been expelled. In many ways this case is not unique but like the horrific tragedy at Columbine, it is going to forever change our country’s understanding of and approach to bullying.

What is Bullying?

Part of the problem with getting schools, parents, students and communities to respond to the issue of bullying is that it is too often misunderstood as “kids being kids.” Social aggression, dominance hierarchies, ordering/rankings and even routine violence appear natural throughout the animal kingdom.  While we don’t want our children to bully or be bullied, we usually throw up our hands and think of bullying as “part of the real world” or something that kids just have to tolerate or “get tougher” about. But Dan Olweus, the world’s foremost researcher and writer on school bullying, begs to differ.

He explains that bullying is, at its root, peer abuse. “Bullying,” writes Olweus, occurs “when someone repeatedly and on purpose says or does mean or hurtful things to another person who has a hard time defending him or herself; it always involves an imbalance of power and the person bullying derives satisfaction from the act(s) [italics mine].” Dr. Olweus’ definition makes clear the distinction between normal and even healthy, playful teasing and the sort of behavior that can lead to violence against self (as in Phoebe’s case) or another (as in the Columbine shootings). And contrary to what many believe, those who bully do not suffer from low self-esteem; in fact they have average or even high amounts of self-esteem, believing that they are special—the regular rules don’t apply to them and they somehow deserve to be “above” others.

You’ll notice that I’m avoiding talking about “bullies” and “victims” in static terms. The research on bullying shows us that these roles can shift: those who end up bullying may have been bullied (at home, by teachers or by peers). And bullying is never just about “bullies” and “victims.”

Direct bullying (in the form of taunting, teasing, name-calling, hitting, kicking, shoving, spitting or physical assault) or indirect bullying (in the form of getting another person to bully, spreading rumors or causing another person to be socially isolated) occurs often because disengaged onlookers allow the behavior to happen. In other words, bullying prevention is not a simple matter of getting bullies to change their behavior or victims to “toughen up” or “stand up for themselves.” It is about the long-term work of changing the community and culture so that passive witnesses and disengaged bystanders begin to intervene.

Come on, it’s not that bad, is it? Well, a 2003 Harris poll of 2,279 girls aged 8-17 reported that forty-one percent of tweens said they were two times more afraid of bullying as war, terrorist attacks or natural disaster; fifteen times more worried about bullying than losing a loved one and worried, on average thirty times more about bullying than about grades. Bullying prevention is about basic safety, civil rights and about education: when kids are afraid they do not learn.

Work at Clemson University, supported by the decades of ground-breaking research by Dr. Olweus in his home country of Norway, along with numerous studies done since the early 1990s have shown us what works and what doesn’t work in keeping children safe (Olweus, 1993; Charach, Pepler and Zieler, 1995; Juvonen, 2003; Fekes et al., 2004; Buhs et al., 2006). The largest model program on bullying prevention is currently being conducted in Pennsylvania, with big insurance companies, research agen-cies, local governments and school districts getting in on the act. In the wake of Phoebe’s senseless death, Massachusetts will surely (and soon) pass one of the toughest anti-bullying laws in the country. Let’s not wait until something happens in our communities to begin to understand more about bullying and its prevention.

Web Resources

National Youth Violence Prevention Resource Center

http://www.safeyouth.org/scripts/topics/bullying.asp

Olweus Bullying Prevention Program

http://www.olweus.org

Center for the Study and Prevention of violence, University of Colorado, Boulder

www.colorado.edu/cspv/blueprints/

Cyber Bullying Quick Reference Guide for Parents

http://www.cyberbullyhelp.com/Cyber%20Bullying%20Guide%20for%20Parents.pdf

Roots of Empathy

http://www.rootsofempathy.org/Mary.html

Roots of Empathy is an evidence-based classroom program that has shown dramatic effect in reducing levels of aggression among schoolchildren by raising social/emotional competence and increasing empathy

Books/Publications

Please note that there are now hundreds of books on bullying and bullying prevention, but unfortunately, many of them advocate methodsthat eitherdo notwork or cause additional problems for individuals and schools that try to implement suggestions piecemeal. I personally favor a research-based approach and consider the work of Dan Olweus and his colleagues to represent the most thoughtful and thorough approach.

Cyber Bullying: Bullying in the Digital Age (Kowalski et al., Wiley and Sons, 2007)

Bullying at School: What We Know and What We Can Do (Olweus, Blackwell, 1993)

The Bully, The Bullied and The Bystander: From Preschool to High School (Coloroso, HarperCollins, 2003)

“Bullying Behaviors Among U.S. Youth,” Journal of the American Medical Association 285, No. 16 (2001): 2094-2100.

Best Friends, Worst Enemies: Understanding the Social Lives of Boys (Thompson et al., Ballantine, 2002)

Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls (Simmons, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002)

Tyler is about to turn 16. He’s got it all—intelligence, charm and good looks. His parents love him dearly and think he’s something special. He is uncharacteristically sweet with the younger kids at school and at the summer camp where he volunteers. And if you ask him about hip hop culture and music he’ll tell you about a particular rising star, his latest CD and tour, tracing his credentials and lineage back to earlier artists. He’ll engage you in a discussion of the politics and philosophy of hip hop culture and has pretty well informed, thoughtful opinions on most things. He has also stopped doing his homework, every day now punctuated with parental battles about getting his work done or doing even one chore.

His mind is active but mostly with worry. He seems both “slow” and “fast” at the same time. Getting him to do anything, though, usually results in “slow.” Forget about him doing something on time. It isn’t going to happen.

Tyler also smokes a significant amount of weed and sells it now, too. His parents know he smokes, convincingly telling them he’s got it under control. He can’t turn his brain off at night and struggles to turn it on during the day. Thinking about doing homework exhausts him.  He’s averaging a B-minus during sophomore year but his parents are used to his earlier A’s and glowing comments from middle school teachers. Conversations turn into arguments, fueled by Tyler’s defensiveness. He seems to know it all, but doesn’t seem to be able to put that knowledge into action or use it to his benefit. His backpack is a complete mess and he often loses things—valuable things. And if he had a motto it might be: “what’s your problem, it’s not my fault!!”

What is AD/HD Inattentive Type?

We casually joke about and have seen the young child (usually a boy) who looks like they have a constant motor running: he won’t sit still and is abnormally and destructively impulsive. “He’s so ADD!” we think to ourselves. But Attention-Deficit / Hyperactivity Disorder (Primarily Inattentive Type or “ADHD-PI”) is a subtype of ADHD and a clustering of mal-adaptive symptoms lasting at least six months which includes a different profile: failing to pay close attention to detail, difficulty sustaining or finishing most tasks (not including watching television or being online, though!), not following instructions, difficulty with organization, avoidance and intense dislike of anything requiring sustained mental effort—often the symptom relieved by self-medicating with marijuana—frequent loss of items necessary for tasks or activities and frequent forgetting.

Okay, so you think we all have ADHD-PI. Well, we might have these symptoms on occasion, in the fast-paced, information-overloaded culture in which we live. But kids with ADHD-PI are positively paralyzed by these symptoms. Parents often complain, through tears, that they are incredibly scared about their child’s future. They privately feel shame and intense anger that their child isn’t “living up to potential” and they just KNOW that if he or she tried harder, things could be much better. They hate to think it, but they often feel their child is just lazy and defiant. The guilt and shame isn’t helped by the fact that ADHD is a highly heritable trait. According to researchers at Johns Hopkins University, if one parent has ADHD there is a 50 percent likelihood their child will have it. And ADHD-PI it is often mis- or under-diagnosed in females, who exhibit different symptoms than boys like Tyler do. Girls also seem to be (slightly) more likely to have PI-type than the hyperactive type of ADHD.    Dr. Stephen Hinshaw—one of our country’s leading researchers and experts on adolescent ADHD—notes that girls with ADHD-PI often show up as “shy” yet high achieving. They may be getting good grades, but it is at tremendous personal effort and emotional cost.

The bind that all parents of teens with ADHD-PI invariably find themselves in centers around balancing helping versus “backing off.” Parents of teens with ADHD-PI often frustratingly alternate between doing too much and doing too little. They constantly wonder whether they should have done more (or less).  The problem is that most kids with ADHD-PI don’t come to severe inattention difficulties until middle school, making it all the trickier to diagnose. In fact, other diagnoses are usually made before an ADHD diagnosis (especially with Inattentive Type; see graphic). But an ADHD diagnosis can both relieve and create more anxiety for parents; while it can explain a lot of difficult behavior, it can also reveal underlying and co-occurring (co-morbid) conditions, since ADHD doesn’t usually occur on its own.  In the end, though, knowing what’s really happening and why is the entryway to effective help and support. It doesn’t provide all the answers, but it can illuminate travel on what mostly felt like a poorly paved, dimly lit road.

Resources:

Children and Adults with Attention Deficit Disorder (CHADD)

http://www.chadd.org

Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

http://www.jaacap.com

The Learning Disabilities Association of California LDA Library (ADD and Children)

http://www.ldaca.org/library/ADHD_for_Children_and_Teens/1

LD Online (LD and ADHD, Schwab Learning)

http://www.ldonline.org/adhdbasics

National Resource Center on AD/HD

http://www.help4adhd.org/documents/WWK8.pdf

The Challenges of Private School

by Michael Simon, MFT

Status anxiety, something so universal that it rarely gets mentioned directly, is a kind of deep anxiety and suffering about what others think of us; it’s about whether we’re judged a success or a failure. Status anxiety is an intensive and pervasive worry about whether the world loves you. Author Alain De Botton notes that “we see ourselves as fortunate only when we have as much as, or more than, those we have grown up with, work alongside, have as friends or identify with in the public realm.”

Thanks to the Internet, television, film, radio and mass-market books, teens now have virtually the entire world to identify with, when it comes to figuring out whether they’re a winner or loser. It is exceedingly easy now—perhaps more than any other time in history—to see who is judged “successful” and what kinds of goodies are awarded to those people.

The job of a teenager is, especially in high school, to develop a unique identity. Teens can’t help but care deeply about status because status is about the value accorded to their identity in the world. In my travels across the United States, I have found that many American high school students, especially those in the independent school world, almost regardless of geographic location, socioeconomic status, cultural and ethnic background now feel that they have the right to be rich, to have high-profile publicity, celebrity looks and high status jobs. Who can blame our teens? Their mindsets are partly the expression of belief that everyone has equal opportunity to acquire status in America. And the desire to be rich, look great and have high status matters so much to teens because they are in a period of life where they desperately need the approval (and love) of the wider world. As De Botton wrote, “the desire to be successful, to be accorded respect, to be noticed and to have what is noticed valued is hard to escape.”

I’m not saying that having a “good” life through the acquisition of status rewards should or can be avoided. But parents ask me all the time whether the problems of adolescents are unique in the U.S., for example: drugs, binge drinking, Internet addiction and issues of sexuality. They’re not unique–well, not exactly. But it’s worth noting that these problems are starting to become more common in other countries as consumerism becomes a part of those cultural and national psyches. In addition, globalization and the Internet are exporting American culture and values throughout the world.

The roads to misery are legion: violence, poverty, racism, homophobia, sexism, depression and other mental illnesses, the loss of loved ones and so on. These are sometimes unalterable tragedies, through which we become aware of power and powerlessness. It is not hard to suffer or feel miserable if you experience these in your lifetime. But the misery caused by the anxiety over status is something changeable through awareness of its causes alone. The suffering over status is not something necessary, even though it is ubiquitous. Part of the beauty (and difficulty) of parenting teens is that we are still close enough to help them understand that there is more than one way of being “successful” at life.