The Importance of Self Care Strategies for Teens
Plus a few tips on how parents and caregivers can help develop them.
“It was more like forced labor than a day camp,” replied the young woman I recently met who once held a summer job at a local farm where my daughters had been campers. She was of the opinion that the owner of the facility took advantage of the kids. My girls thought otherwise of their connection to the farm.
Clean and smiley faced was how they left the car each morning. By late afternoon, they were adorned with dust, manure clinging to their boots, and grinning like Cheshire cats. Car conversation was raucous. They’d talk over each other to regale me in stories of bunnies with babies and cages that needed cleaning, sheep they’d walk like dogs from pen to pasture so they could clean their empty stalls, and ponies they’d brush until shiny, pick hooves until the last pebble was removed, and ride in the arena learning new skills.
They’d spend the rest of the summer drafting imaginary barns, assigning names to horses, horses to stalls, and staff to chores. They’d ride stick ponies with the neighbor kids and award homemade ribbons.
A few summers later they were offered free riding lessons at a local stable in exchange for free labor. Miles of fence line, stacks of wooden lockers, board after board of siding in the arena, the tack room, the lounge – all cleaned and painted. Lunch was in the shade of a cottonwood grove, barn cats on laps, boots propped on chairs, while swapping stories with two other painters. In the afternoon, they’d ride. Some might construe the arrangement as child labor. The kids thought it was heaven.
My husband and I dangled this handy bargaining tool like a carrot and stick as both girls tumbled into their teen years. Chores, grades, and behavior were leveraged against feet in boots and time at the barn. Our behaviorist parenting, gleaned from our upbringings, our culture, and employment, worked well in getting what we wanted. Until it didn’t.
Adolescence brought a tsunami of behaviors that were familiar to our own teen years and many that were not. We blamed cell phones and social influences, lack of sleep, too much homework, too much TV. Our marriage was crumbling from the weight of accusations lobbed across the bed in the dark. Grounding the kids from an activity they loved was fraying our family bond and driving the girls’ self-esteem into the ground.
When push came to shove, we landed in the hands of a wise family physician who steered us through the medical system to ascertain if there were other causes. What we found were two girls steeped in profound anxiety and ADHD. One kid labeled hyperactive. The other inattentive. There’d be no easy path.
My husband and I were counseled to reimagine riding not as privilege but as the self-care it had become. The barn was their safe place to decompress, to laugh, to move their bodies, and to commune with the cornucopia of creatures who neighed, meowed, and woofed. We’d been holding hostage the one place they felt truly themselves.
The kids were counseled to have greater respect for the efforts we were making to drive them where they needed to be and to pay for the lessons and equipment their labor didn’t provide. Give and take. Compromise.
Now when our oldest daughter needs to decompress, she walks to the pasture of equines at her farm and immerses herself in their world. I recently began taking riding lessons not so much for my self-care but to engage in hers. Someday, her younger sister will be able to join us on a ride over rolling hills, but not until we’ve tidied the barn, mucked the pasture, and groomed the horses.
BE THE PARENT THAT IS SEEN BUT NOT HEARD Are you fortunate like I am to have a friend to whom you can vent without judgment and unsolicited advice? Teens need that type of friend, too. This post by Parenting Teens & Tweens offers five ways parents can become a safe space for their teens.
BEGIN WITH TRUST Esther Goetz, in her Moms of Bigs newsletter, tells the story of the day she breached the trust of her daughter and the repair work it took to build it back, including five steps she shares with her readers. Modeling self-care can only serve as a positive influence when your relationship is strong with your teen.
GIVE KIDS A VOICE FOR THEIR FEELINGS It’s never too late to teach kids how to advocate for themselves by naming their needs without shame. Kristen McClure provides simple instructions on the use of the “Color Communication System” to give voice to feeling in her newsletter ADHD Kids, Affirmed. While she mentions it works best for kids ages 3 to 10, I’m including it here because two colleagues use a similar system to let co-workers know how they’re feeling. I bet with some modification it would work well with teens.
PARENTAL SELF-CARE MATTERS This story by Taylor Allbright, Ph.D. is not about self-care strategies for teens. I chose it because it highlights the importance of parental self-care through the adolescent stage. You can’t help others going through crisis if you are going through one, too. How Caring for My Mental Health Benefits My ADHD Kid’s Mental Health
What self-care strategies work for your teens and you? Leave your comments below.
WHAT READERS ARE SAYING My post, Is It Cruel to Abandon a Pet? has made quite a few people think differently about the word “abandoned” and the challenges people often face that force them to make the choices they do.
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Good post. Anything to do with animals always brings my blood pressure down and gets me thinking about things other than myself and my problems.