COVID fears and restrictions may be affecting teen mental health. Click here to visit Scripps.org to learn more.
Teens face untold pressures even during the most ordinary times. COVID-19 has added new pressures and they have taken an emotional toll.
Studies show COVID fears and social restrictions have had a negative impact on the mental health of teens, those between the ages of 13 and 19.
According to a recent national poll, nearly 50 percent of parents say their child or teen had shown signs of a new or worsening mental health condition during the pandemic. The poll by researchers at the University of Michigan surveyed 977 parents of teens, and found:
1 in 3 girls and 1 in 5 teen boys have experienced new or worsening anxiety.
More parents of teen girls than parents of teen boys, saw an increase in anxiety and worry or depression and sadness.
3 in 4 parents said COVID restrictions had affected their teen’s connections to friends.
COVID and mental health
COVID has affected everyone in one way or another. Four in 10 adults reported struggling with mental health or substance use in a pandemic-related survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Young people, ages 18 to 24, reported the highest rate of having suicidal thoughts, according to the CDC.
Mental illness among young people was already on the rise when the pandemic hit. COVID and the COVID-related changes, such as social distancing and virtual learning, added new stressors and for some exacerbated existing mental health conditions.
“Teenagers can be moody and temperamental at times. Keep in mind, they’re going through physical changes and asking questions about who they are and what they want to do with their lives as they become more independent,” says Gurinder Dabhia, MD, a pediatrician at Scripps Clinic Rancho Bernardo. “But while occasional bad moods and acting out can be normal adolescent conduct, these types of behaviors also can indicate underlying depression or anxiety.”
Because normal behaviors vary as children and teens develop, it can be challenging to know if your teen is going through a temporary phase or is experiencing depression or anxiety. However, there are warning signs for both conditions that can help parents.
COVID and teen mental health
For the past year, COVID restrictions have limited the type of social interactions and peer group activities that are so important in the lives of teenagers and for their development, such as sport activities, school performances, proms and graduations.
While a return to normal is on the horizon with the arrival of COVID vaccines, the struggles of the past year will likely continue to affect families for some time.
Dr. Dabhia recommends parents to continue checking in with their teen and watch and listen for signs of depression or anxiety.
Symptoms of teen depression
Signs that may indicate depression include:
Sudden bursts of anger coupled with irritability
Negative thinking
Extreme sensitivity to criticism
Sulking
Feeling misunderstood
A drop in school grades, attendance or not doing homework
High-risk behaviors, such as using alcohol and drugs
A change in sleeping patterns or trouble sleeping
A change in eating habits, such as eating more or less than usual
Difficulty concentrating
Unexplained aches and pains, such as headaches
Withdrawal from family and friends, including texting and video chatting
Symptoms of teen anxiety
Everyone experiences feelings of anxiety at times, and it is a normal reaction to stress. When anxiety seems to be continually out of proportion to the situation and affects your teen’s daily life and happiness, then it may signal an anxiety disorder. Symptoms include:
Excessive worry most days of the week
Trouble sleeping at night or sleepiness during the day
Restlessness or fatigue during waking hours
Trouble concentrating
Irritability
“Depression and anxiety often occur together, although they should be diagnosed separately and treated as two separate issues,” says Dr. Dabhia.
When to see your pediatrician
If your teen exhibits signs of either depression or anxiety that persist for more than two weeks, make an appointment with your teen’s doctor or pediatrician.
The doctor will ask the appropriate screening questions, usually with the parents present, and will also have a confidential discussion with your child. If necessary, your doctor can refer you to a specialist.
“Be ready to discuss specific information about your adolescent’s symptoms, including how long they’ve been present, how much they’re affecting your teen’s daily life and any patterns you’ve noticed,” Dr. Dabhia says.
In addition, bring up any family history of close relatives who have been diagnosed with a mood disorder or mental illness, as well as events in your own immediate family.
Sometimes depression or anxiety may be triggered by changes within the family unit, such as a divorce, remarriage, a new sibling or move. During the pandemic, it could be a loss of a family member or friend to COVID or another illness or the loss of a job.
Suicide prevention
Pediatricians can screen for depression and ask about other concerns like anxiety or trouble coping with stress. They can also screen for suicide risk.
Any suicide talk should be taken seriously. Seek help immediately by calling the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK or texting the Crisis Text Line by texting ‘TALK’ to 741741.
“It’s important that parents stay positive and that they keep the lines of communication open with their teen,” says Dr. Dabhia. “Most people think these conditions are difficult to treat, but there are a variety of options that can help, including talk therapy. Early treatment can shorten the period of illness and help your teen cope.”
How parents can help
The University of Michigan poll noted what parents were doing to help improve their teens’ mental health during the pandemic. Many relaxed social media rules. One in four said they sought help from a mental health professional for their teen. Most said it had a positive effect. Many also reported using mental health apps.
“Make sure to talk to your teen frequently and offer your support,” adds Dr. Dabhia. “Make it clear you are willing to offer whatever support they need.”
Be persistent, she says. “Don’t give up if your adolescent refuses to talk at first. Talking about depression can be tough, but helpful.”
Also, don’t lecture. “Accept what your teen tells you without judging or criticizing,” Dr. Dabhia says. “It’s important to validate their feeling,” she says. “Don’t think you can just talk your adolescent out of his or her anxiety or depression. Learn to take the stresses and worries of your teen seriously and never dismiss talk of suicide.”
If your child or teen is expressing suicidal thoughts or feelings, we can help through our Douglas S. Feldman Suicide Prevention Project. To learn more, click here.
The pandemic has been the psychological workout of their lives. The next few months can be a time of recovery.
In the more than two decades I’ve spent as a psychologist working with adolescents, I have never seen teenagers so worn down at the end of an academic year as they are right now. Whether classes have been online, in-person or hybrid, young people are dragging themselves to the finish line of a frustrating, depressing and, for some, unbearably isolating year of school.
But now, with the number of new infections headed down and vaccinations widely available to ages 12 and up, most teenagers in the United States can anticipate a truly post-Covid summer. What should they look to make of it? For me, the answer is not “recover lost ground,” or even “put the past year behind them.” With the stress and constant adaptation of the pandemic now largely in the past, young people can enjoy the payoff of converting that experience into increased maturity and psychological strength.
To that end, it’s important to remember that building psychological muscle is a lot like building physical muscle. Any kid who has spent time in a gym knows that you gain strength when a period of exertion is followed by an interval of sufficient recovery.
For most teenagers, the pandemic has been the psychological workout of their lives. To put that workout to use, they need time for recovery so that they can enjoy increased emotional resilienceby fall. For adults on board with that plan, here are a few guidelines to help.
Give teenagers room to process what they’ve been through.
For adolescents, as for many of us, the pandemic has been characterized by deep feelings of loss. They’ve missed sports seasons, holidays with grandparents, milestone birthday parties and other plans that are beyond rescheduling. Some have stepped back from friendships that won’t be rekindled. Many have had to experience the deaths of people dear to them.
As adults, our loving instinct might be to steer our teenagers away from dwelling on the anguish of the pandemic and toward taking advantage of the now brightening future and expanding opportunities. But we should remember that grieving, though a painful process, ultimately helps us move forward when allowed to run its course.
Teenagers may do some of their most productive grieving in the company of their friends. Colin Mooney, 15, of Highland Heights, Ohio, recently got together with several peers whom he hadn’t seen in person since their eighth grade year was derailed by lockdown in March, 2020. Sitting in a circle in one friend’s backyard, they talked about what they lost, including “our field day, our graduation and a special Mass where each eighth grader passes a candle to a seventh grader to make them eighth graders.” Talking through what they’d all missed offered much needed closure. “Sharing as a group,” he said, “really helped ease our minds and remember that everyone was going through the same thing.”
Other adolescents may mourn in a more private fashion. Arielle Green, 15, of Brooklyn, N.Y., writes poems to make sense of her feelings. Her recent poetry has centered on “how the pandemic sucks, and how things are still going on in the world that are really horrible.” She said that her poems offer a way “to let it all out.”
However your teenager goes about it, expect grief to be part of the summer. Give adolescents time and space to come to terms with the impact of Covid-19 on their lives so that they can, over time, savor what remains and embrace what lies ahead.
Be open to negotiating the “must dos.”
As with any summer, there will be some non-negotiables when it comes to how young people spend their days. Teenagers may need to get jobs, take over chores or brush up academically. Required activities can certainly be part of a recovery-focused summer, but when possible, let teens have some say in the details.
Ava Vestergaard, a 17-year-old senior at Sunset High School in Portland, Ore., needs to earn money for college, but she’s really hoping for the kind of job that will help her fill her emotional tank after a draining academic year. “When there’s a job I like, I enjoy the work and getting to know my co-workers.” For her, a job that’s gratifying might be worth much more in the long run than one that pays a few dollars per hour more but offers little of what she finds restoring.
And, of course, ambitious, self-improving pursuits can also fit the bill, so long as they’re more wanted than mandated. Ezekiel Salama, 17, of Shelbyville, Ky., can’t wait to attend the Governor’s School for Entrepreneurs, a selective summer program for teenagers in Kentucky. He’s expecting his constructive summer plans to leave him fresher than ever for the coming school year.
That said, everyone has different emotional settings. What energizes one person might leave another spent. Should an adolescent be fortunate enough to have some choices about how she spends her summer, adults may be able to help by tuning in to how much, and what, she wants to do. If you can tell that your teenager is genuinely eager to learn a new language, start a business or write a novel, stay out of her way. But if you get the sense that she’s crafting a punishing improvement regimen in an anxious attempt to compensate for a stripped-down school year, you might invite her to reconsider this approach so as not to risk returning to school feeling more depleted than she left it.
In a similar vein, parents may have their own concerns that their teenager has fallen behind academically this year. But if the school hasn’t called for an intervention, it may be best to let it go.
Don’t let guilt ruin restoration.
Given how much the pandemic upended expectations for what adolescents were supposed to be achieving, teenagers themselves might feel uneasy about the idea of making recovery a priority this summer. “Covid was a lot of doing nothing,” said Kari Robinson, age 14, of Evanston, Ill. “I think I might feel a little guilty if I use my summer freedom to relax.” Help your young people see past this way of thinking. The point of recovery is not to relax, but to grow. And if downtime is soaked in guilt, that growth is going to suffer.
Don’t underestimate the value of whatever they turn to — even if it’s “just hanging out” — as they go through the quiet work of rebuilding themselves.
There aren’t many upsides to having a virus wreak havoc with one’s adolescence, but on that very short list might be coming to appreciate the growth-giving practice of following stressful periods with deliberate recovery. This may be especially true at this moment in time, and it’s also how we want young people to be thinking about stress, recovery and growth long after the pandemic is over.
Illustration by Yifan Wu
Lisa Damour is a psychologist and the author of the New York Times best sellers “Untangled” and “Under Pressure.” Dr. Damour also co-hosts the podcast “Ask Lisa: The Psychology of Parenting.”
North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center has announced that its Jonathan Krevat Memorial Golf & Tennis Classic is back this year at a spectacular new location, Nassau Country Club in Glen Cove! The event, which will be held on June 14th, raises money for the Guidance Center, Long Island’s premiere children’s mental health organization.
“Our work bringing hope and healing to kids and families is more important than ever,” said Michael Mondiello, one of the event’s co-chairs and a Guidance Center board member. “The pandemic has created enormous stress and anxiety, and we are here to help address the crisis in children’s mental health.”
Co-chair Michael Schnepper concurred, stating, “The past year has been difficult for adults, but in some ways it’s been even harder for young people. Their entire normal routines with school, friends and extracurricular activities were upended, and the impact is going to continue long after COVID-19 is behind us. That’s why this fundraiser is such a crucial event.”
The Krevat Cup is one of the Guidance Center’s most anticipated events of the year, providing a full day of activities. “Golf may be the main feature, but tennis is my game,” said Troy Slade, co-chair and board member. “And we’re adding pickleball to the event for the first time ever, so that’s going to provide even more opportunity for friendly competition.”
While all current health and safety protocols will be in place to protect the safety of guests and staff, most of the event will be held outdoors, making it a perfect opportunity to enjoy great games while benefiting an important cause. “The golf course is among Long Island’s best,” said board member Dan Oliver, this year’s newest Krevat Cup co-chair. “It’s going to be a terrific day, including a delicious breakfast, lunch and cocktail hour. I hope many community members will join us to support the life-saving work of the Guidance Center.”
The event will also feature an exclusive silent auction, which is open to everyone, regardless of whether they buy tickets for the day. Bidding begins on June 1st.
For those interested in participating, becoming a sponsor or placing a journal ad, it’s not too late! Contact Nicole Oberheim, Noberheim@northshorechildguidance.org, (516) 626-1971, ext. 337
Guidance Center executive director retires after 45 years.
When Andrew Malekoff retires in July, it will have been after spending his entire 45-year career at Roslyn’s North Shore Child and Family Guidance Center. When he arrived as an intern to do his second-year field placement while working towards his masters degree at the Adelphi University School of Social Work, little did Malekoff know he’d leave four and a half decades later as the executive director. It’s an experience he treasures and attributes to how special a place North Shore was to work at all these years.
“It was really inspiring for me to become a part of an organization that was exclusively devoted to working with children, youth, teenagers and families,” he said. “We saw anybody that needed us without turning anybody away for inability to pay. Being able to be a part of an organization that had access to universal mental health care was really exciting. It was also innovative and saw children not as broken part. We invited the whole person to participate in the work that we did, so there was a kind of culture and tradition that I became a part of and was ultimately able to carry forth. That was really exciting. It felt like the right fit for me and was a big part of why I stayed there for so long.”
Having had a front-row seat, Malekoff saw changes in the clientele that sought North Shore’s help. “Just being able to observe things from the waiting room alone, you could see there was a big change over time.” Malekoff recalled. “It was a much more homogeneous, white, ethnic population [in the beginning]. Over time, there were more people of color and different religions. People dressed differently—some with religious garb. There were different accents, languages and so forth. Different groups over a period of time that were more reticent about going outside of the home and wherever they might traditionally go to seek help—for them to see that this was an alternative they could take advantage of versus what was available.”
During Malekoff’s run, he spent 15 years as a monthly contributor to Anton Community Newspapers. Publisher Angela Anton invited him to pen a column that initially started out as Parenting in February 2007 before it evolved into Parenting Matters a few years later. Despite having extensive experience as the author of a widely used textbook (Group Work with Adolescents: Principles and Practices, now in its third edition) and being the editor of the professional journal Social Work with Groups, the New Jersey native admits this new outlet required a creative pivot on his part.
“The discipline of writing a monthly column was something new to me,” he said. “It was a great opportunity and I like to take on new challenges like the experience of coming up with ideas and then putting something into 500 or 600 words and appealing to not just a professional audience, but to the regular citizenry so to speak. At the time, the column was called Parenting and I had wanted to change it and discussed that at the time with Angela. We changed it to Parenting Plus. I wanted to put the ‘Plus’ in because I felt there were things that I could write about that would fall outside of the more rigid guidelines of writing about parenting and kids. I thought [it could encompass] other issues whether it was government, policy or with certain news events that were reflections of issues of mental health that people would be interested in and give me a little more latitude.”
Over time, Parenting Plus became on of Anton’s more popular columns, always generating plenty of interest in print along with a heavy flow of traffic on the web. For Anton, bringing Malekoff into the editorial fold was an easy decision, particularly given the work she’d seen him do in his role at the North Shore Child and Family Guidance Center.
“I have know Andy from the start as a board member and as a dear friend,” she said. “He was responsible for starting many new programs and receiving many government grants at the North Shore Child And Family Guidance Center. The center was stronger because of him and as a columnist, we will always cherish the insight he brought to every story he wrote.”
Future Executive Director Andrew Malekoff got his start with the North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center as an intern in 1977
Malekoff’s path to a career in social work wasn’t readily apparent in the beginning. Born in Newark, he moved to the leafy Jersey suburb of Maplewood, eventually going to Rutgers University on a football scholarship as a linebacker, eventually being one of the two defensive captains of the 1972 Scarlet Knights football team. And while he earned a bachelor of arts in business, the idea of serving others came via work with volunteer organizations, first at Rutgers and then following his university graduation.
“When I was attending Rutgers University. I joined something called Rutgers Community Action, which was sort of a Big Brothers-type program,” he said. “That was my first exposure that I had to anything that would be considered close to social work. I majored in economics and thought I would go into business. [Social work] wasn’t anything I pursued. After trying a few different things after college, I joined VISTA, which is Volunteers In Service To America, which is the domestic equivalent of the Peace Corps. I went out to Grand Island, NE, where I lived and worked in a Mexican-American community for about three years. It was during the course of my work with teenagers and families there that I decided that I wanted to pursue this as a career.”
Having spent 45 years helping families and youth get through trauma, one thing Malekoff says hasn’t changed is the anxiety and depression young people continue to experience. For him, these experiences require quite a bit of self forgiveness for the people going through these trials and tribulations.
“It’s a harsh world and it’s easy to be too hard on yourself,” he said. “Anthropologist Joseph Campbell came up with a favorite quote of mine ‘Perfection is not lovable. It’s the clumsiness of a fault that makes a person lovable. It’s something that’s a little longer than go easy on yourself. I give that out because sometimes I think people can be too hard on themselves and think that they have to be perfect. It’s a great lesson for parents and for parents to give to kids. It doesn’t mean you don’t try to hard or strive for excellence. It means you go a little bit easier on yourself than otherwise.”
Top photo: from left: North Shore Child and Family Guidance Center board member Rita Castagna, North Shore Child and Family Guidance Center Executive Director Andrew Malekoff and Anton Media Group publisher Angela Anton
By Emily Esfahani Smith, Originally published in the New York Times, May 4,2021
When schools shut down last spring, Carson Roubison, a charter school student in Phoenix, was initially relieved. There were some difficulties in those early days at home — when classes went online, Carson and his parents, both public-school teachers, had to share the sole family computer. But Carson’s stress levels fell as school became less demanding during the transition to distance learning.
“I wasn’t aware of the giant impact the pandemic would have,” he said, “so I was excited, to be honest, to have some time off school.”
But things changed in the fall. The academic load went back to prepandemic levels, even though learning was still remote. Carson, a senior, struggled to stay motivated. His mental health suffered. He hoped to attend community college the following fall, but grew increasingly “terrified” that the education he’d received in high school over the past year would leave him unprepared.
“I’m afraid I’m going to get to community college,” he said, “and be held to the same standards as past students, and fail. That’s the biggest source of my anxiety.”
Carson’s story is not unique. The pandemic has taken a toll on the mental health of millions. But adolescents have been hit especially hard. According to a national poll conducted in January by the University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, 46 percent of parents say their teenagers’ mental health has worsened during the pandemic. More alarmingly, a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Preventionfound that the proportion of 12- to 17-year-olds visiting emergency rooms for mental health reasons rose 31 percent for most of 2020 compared with 2019. And this is all on top of an already existing mental health crisis among young people.
While many experts believe that the reason adolescents are struggling today is that they’re away from friends and school, a closer look at the research reveals a more complicated picture. According to psychologists who study adolescent resilience, one of the biggest threats to the well-being of today’s teenagers is not social isolation but something else — the pressure to achieve, which has intensified over the past year.
Psychologists define resilience as the ability to adapt well to stress. For decades, they have studied why some kids are more resilient in adversity than others. Suniya Luthar, emerita professor of psychology at Columbia’s Teachers College and a leading resilience researcher, believes the pandemic is a “natural experiment” that can help answer that question: When you expose adolescents to an event that changes their lives significantly, how do they cope?
Dr. Luthar began her career studying resilience among urban youth living in poverty in Connecticut in the 1990s. At the urging of one of her students at Yale, where she was teaching, she also started studying teenagers living in middle- and upper-middle-class suburbs like Westport, Conn., where many of the parents are high-achieving professionals who emphasize the value of status and achievement to their children.
Comparing these students with the poor, urban adolescents, she was shocked to discover that the suburban children were doing worse on drug and alcohol abuse. They also had higher rates of anxiety and depression as compared with national norms. Researchers knew that social conditions were important determinants of resilience, but they hadn’t known that living in success-oriented cultures was a risk factor.
In the years since, Dr. Luthar and her colleagues at Authentic Connections, a research group that works to foster resilience in school communities, have studied tens of thousands of teenagers attending “high-achieving schools,” which she defines as public and private institutions where students on average score in the top third on standardized tests. The students in these samples come from a variety of racial, regional and socioeconomic backgrounds. In one group of students Dr. Luthar studied, for example, one-third were members of ethnic and racial minorities and one-quarter came from homes where at least one parent did not attend college.
But regardless of these differences, many of them were struggling in the same way. In a paper published in 2020 in the academic journal American Psychologist, Dr. Luthar and her colleagues — the psychological researchers Nina Kumar and Nicole Zillmer — reviewed three decades’ worth of research findings showing that adolescents at high-achieving schools suffer from symptoms of clinical depression and anxiety at rates three to seven times higher than national norms for children their age.
What’s driving their misery, the research shows, is the pressure to excel in multiple academic and extracurricular pursuits. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundationsuggest children living in an achievement-oriented culture are at risk for adjustment problems, like those facing more predictable forms of adversity, such as poverty and trauma.
The pandemic offered a rare reprieve for students — at first. Since 2019, Dr. Luthar and her colleagues have surveyed thousands of adolescents each year at public and private schools across the nation. Replicating findings of earlier research, these students reported suffering from anxiety and depression at higher rates than national norms before the pandemic. But when schools closed last spring, something unexpected happened — the well-being of these students actually improved.As classes and exams were canceled, grading moved to pass/fail and extracurricular activity ceased, they reported lower levels of stress, anxiety and depression compared with 2019.
But these improvements were short-lived. Dr. Luthar and her colleagues found that beginning in the fall of 2020, as schoolwork ramped back up, the mental health of adolescents returned to prepandemic levels or worse. According to research that will be published in Social Policy Report, a quarterly publication of the Society for Research in Child Development, the strongest predictor of depression among these students was perceived parental criticism and unreachable standards.
“Even though I’m trying my best, it never really goes the way I wished,” a student Dr. Luthar studied wrote, “and my mother adds stress because she is always saying that I NEED to have a 90 or higher averages in all my classes.”
Other research supports these findings. In a nationally representative study conducted by NBC News and Challenge Success, a nonprofit affiliated with Stanford’s education school, researchers studied over 10,000 high school students in the fall of 2020. Comparing the experience of these students with about 65,000 adolescents surveyed between 2018 and February 2020, these researchers, too, found that many students reported feeling more stressed about school during the fall of 2020 than before the pandemic. A chief cause of their stress: the pressure to achieve.
Nearly half of all students reported that the pressure to do well in school had increased since 2019, and over half said their school-related stress over all had risen. Grades, workload, time management, lack of sleep and college fears were the most commonly cited sources of stress. These findings held across socioeconomically diverse schools. At underresourced schools, students were more likely to report being stressed about family finances, according to Denise Pope, a founder of Challenge Success, but the top stressors were still grades, assessments and college.
“My school is giving too much work,” a 10th grader in this study wrote, “even though times are tough for everyone. At first, this was just a break from school, but now all I feel is stress, anxiety and pain.”
Parents appear to play a big role in this phenomenon. Fifty-seven percent of students said that their parents’ expectations for their performance stayed the same during the pandemic, while 34 percent said their expectations increased. The stereotype of the adolescent aloof from parental influence doesn’t seem to apply to these students, who report feeling more stressed about family pressure than peer pressure.
When Dr. Pope asks parents to define success, they inevitably say that they want their children to be happy and healthy, have loving relationships and give back to society. But when she asks children how they define success, many describe a narrow path: getting good grades, going to college and securing a high-paying job.
Dr. Pope believes the gap is due in part to how parents praise their kids. Many parents reward their children when they perform well, which sends a signal to the kids that the approval and love of their parents depends on how much they’re achieving. So inevitably, if they believe they are falling short of their parents’ expectations, their sense of worth and well-being suffers.
Larger cultural forces are also pushing students to define success narrowly. As inequality rises and two major recessions in the past decade have left millions out of work, many students may feel compelled to climb the ladder to ensure their economic security as adults. College admissions at top-tiered schools has become more selective over the same period of time, leaving students competing harder for fewer spots — only to receive an education that will likely leave them or their parents in debt for many years to come.
If we want more-resilient kids coming out of the pandemic, then we need to heed a lesson of this past year — that the pressure to achieve is crushing the spirits of many young people and should be dialed back. Parents can play a vital role here. They can help ease their children’s anxiety by reminding them that where they attend college will not make or break them — and that getting Bs does not equal failure.
They can encourage them to prioritize their health and well-being by getting enough sleep and making time for play and leisure. And above all, they can teach their children that loss is an inevitable part of life by speaking to them about the grief of the past year. This doesn’t mean parents should necessarily lower their standards. But they might emphasize different benchmarks for achievement, like those they themselves claim to most value for their children — happiness, health and love.
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK). You can find a list of additional resources at SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources.
Ms. Esfahani Smith is a doctoral student in clinical psychology and the author of “The Power of Meaning.” At the beginning of the pandemic, she wrote about how a key to surviving the mental-health trials of isolation is to look for meaning rather than happiness.
If your child or teen is expressing suicidal thoughts or feelings, we can help through our Douglas S. Feldman Suicide Prevention Project. To learn more, click here.
Illustration by Kensuke Koike; Photograph via Getty/Digital Light Source
