No One Has It All Figured Out: Helping Each Other Through the First Weeks of School
Yesterday I was talking with a group of freshmen about their homecoming dates. One of the girls said, “I have a date, but he hasn’t asked me yet.” I said wait, what do you mean? How can he be your date but not ask you? She said, “Oh, he hasn’t given me my sign yet.”
Now imagine me, an old Gen X-er, thinking this was a “sign” like some kind of cosmic cue or telepathy moment she was waiting for to seal the deal, like him knowing her favorite song without asking, or buying her a Sprite without knowing it was her favorite.
“You know,” she continued, “the sign so we can take a picture, like ‘Hoco (homecoming) would be sweeter with you’, and a candy jar?”
“Oh of course, the sign!” I said, pretending to get it. Like a poster board sign, folks. One that can be posted. On Snap. Or Instagram. So out of the loop.
Last week I attended a session at the Grant Halliburton Foundation’s “When Life Hands You Teenagers” conference titled “It Takes a Village: Partnering with Caregivers to Support Teen Mental Health” by Ahou Line, PhD, LPC-S. Line opened her presentation with a great question: Do you think parenting is harder now than thirty years ago?
I am not a parent, but if I was, I wonder how I would handle homecoming signs and keeping up with all the do’s and don’ts of the 14 year-old social world, especially if my child didn’t have a homecoming date. Parenting certainly has to be harder now than thirty years ago because of social media, as posting and peering into other families’ lives all day must not be great for a lot of parents. Remember when we really only judged other families on what we could physically see, like their front yard landscaping or the outfits they wore to work every day? Now we virtually stand next to people we don’t know in homes we have never stepped foot in and see what they are eating for breakfast, a day-by-day itinerary of their vacations, and even their skincare ritual before bedtime.
Line described how this dynamic has made parenting more public than ever before, leaving parents with an amplified sense that there is a right way to raise their kids and everyone else seems to have it all together. We all fall short when viewing our lives through the effortless sheen of the Instagram universe, so parenting posts and reels must be no exception. Knowing that the economy and college admissions only seem to be getting more competitive and unreliable, parents are worried and exhausted from feeling that every one of their decisions is a make or break moment in their child’s journey to success, creating a national crisis in parent mental health.
Of course the fallacy is that we can get parenting, or any human relationship, just right. But it’s natural we always want to try. I hear the overwhelm in parent voices when they describe the anxiety and tears of their daughters as they run the freshman year gauntlet of making new friends, meeting new teachers, and trying out for sports teams. As a mature adult it’s brutal to see your young one bullied, excluded, struggling, or cut from the team.
And it can be easy to see pictures on social media and think this is only happening to your child and everyone else’s child is thriving as the school year begins. But this isn’t true, and maybe when feeling like we are the only ones failing we can find some ease through remembering how we humans handle change, change being the one constant thing in a teen’s life.
Prior to becoming a counselor this year I was an English teacher for twenty years, so teaching and I were like an old married couple cozying up in matching recliners, watching Wheel of Fortune. I knew teaching’s hours, demands, and daily routines, comfortable in our (mostly) predictable and loving long-term marriage. But in August, during my first few weeks as a school counselor, all of this comfort disappeared and my days were spent questioning if I was being productive enough or earning my keep on my new team.
I guess I assumed my transition to counseling would be seamless and so similar to teaching, I would barely notice the difference in my days. Although a new parking spot, new office, new ID badge, and new business cards supported the thesis that something had changed, I was unprepared to feel like an alien off my spaceship in my new job.
When I am scared or insecure, my mere existence in a chair requires a resume, so my interior monologue during my first weeks went something like this:
Everyone is watching me.
Everyone is wondering if I was the right hire.
Am I working hard enough?
I am not producing enough tangible work to validate my existence here.
Being a human being that helps people is not enough, I need to produce something.
See how fast my thinking escalated? My anxiety made me want to curl up into a shell shape with my arms around my knees because, and here is the big surprise: counseling is not the exact same thing as teaching. In my first week I realized that this work will be so much more about the present moment and walking alongside people rather than producing documents and grading essays. I’m not 100% sure what I was expecting, but I was having a delayed emotional response because I made a major life change right under my own nose when I was looking in the other direction and did not know how I would be proving my worth, which is its own fallacy and can of worms. And imagine this: I am an adult.
Now, imagine teenagers on their first day of school. If I was feeling this much concern and anxiety about a life change with a fully developed brain, imagine stepping into the body chemistry of a 14-year old. As an adult, I gave myself the mother of all pep talks over Labor Day weekend to stop worrying about what I was producing and just be authentically me. That’s going well, you can be sure (insert eye roll).
But for a teenage girl, peer relationships and other people’s opinions of you are everything and they do not have the life experience stacked up to get over themselves. The prefrontal cortex of our brains, or the home base of logic, planning and prioritizing, doesn’t mature until our early 20s. The amygdala, or the part of the brain that controls our emotions and fight or flight responses, is more developed in the teenage years, explaining why teens might make risky decisions in search of social acceptance. It’s all fine and well for me to logically walk myself off the ledge of my insecurity, but a teenager cannot physically do this; their brain is much more attuned to social processes than executive functioning and higher order thinking.
So in these first weeks of school I’m thinking about how I can support parents and students in a time of change and, thanks to social media, it just seems to be easier in every other household. As usual for our writing in this blog, I am back to grounding in our shared humanity and the value of paying attention. Line reminded us that a parent is a whole person, not just a mom or a dad. A million things have happened that have led them to your office, and we can have affection for that person and their journey. Partnering with parents versus just involving them means seeking to understand their story and knowing how we can collaborate as a team.
And I am trying not to judge teen reactions through my own adult brain. It’s hard, because a situation I might handle with logic just has different biological stakes for a teenager, and that is ok. I just need to remember this, because sometimes I forget.
And I am trying not to judge teen reactions through my own adult brain. It’s hard, because a situation I might handle with logic just has different biological stakes for a teenager, and that is ok.
As usual, a young person said it best. During a student panel at the conference, when asked what teenagers wish adults in their lives knew, a student said she wished we knew that they will reveal things to us when and if they want, and they don’t like the pressure to answer or perform; they do enough of that in school. When one of her friends is upset, she asks them, “Do you want to be heard, do you want a distraction, do you want help, or do you want space?” I hope to try this gentle and wise offering in my office. I think all of us, no matter our age, just need empathy and grace, because change takes time, and despite the algorithm’s best efforts to convince us otherwise, no one has it all figured out.
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