Children undergo tremendous changes as they are growing—bodies, hormones, relationships, living situations, etc. It’s no wonder they feel a great deal of emotional stress at times.
If you grew three inches in one summer, got your period, and heard the guy you like really likes someone else, you’d be stressed.
If you had your first wet dream, you became suddenly aware of these wonderful creatures called females, and your voice cracked as you were talking to the most popular girl in school, you’d be stressed.
Now add sibling squabbles and overhearing your parents fight about money to that mix. Throw in trying to keep your competitive edge with your peers. That would be a boatload of stress, wouldn’t it?
Such stress, if left unchecked, can pile up and lead to depression, eating disorders, cutting, and suicide attempts, to name a few top concerns of parents.
One of the greatest mistakes parents make is assuming that all is “fine” in their kids’ lives if they aren’t “acting up.” Your child may look like she is coping well with life on her own. But because every child craves the understanding, support, and unconditional love of her parents, she’s doing her best to hide her imperfections from you. She’ll do so especially if you tend to criticize things she does or point out how she can do something better.
Because “self” issues are internal, what symptoms do you look for to know if your child is in trouble?
Parents ask me all the time, “My kid seems really down. How do I know if this is only a phase or she’s really depressed and needs help?”
I’m never one to immediately recommend that you run to your neighborhood shrink if you think your child is acting depressed. That’s because some children are easily stressed. When things don’t go perfectly, they fall apart. They cry because they’re upset. Or they withdraw to their bedroom for an evening or a day. Part of their behavior is purposeful so that you will know life is not working out for them and feel sorry for them. They want you to feel their pain.
If you overplay your cards with these kids, they will work you as a parent. They know where your buttons are.
Let’s say your daughter had a terrible day because she was betrayed by her friend group. She’s crying when she walks in the door and refuses to come out for dinner. She won’t even eat the special dessert you made because you knew she was feeling low.
What do you do? You hover outside her door, meal tray in hand. “If you eat a little, you’ll feel better,” you call in tentatively.
“Go away! I don’t want any dinner!” she yells in a muffled tone through the closed door.
That’s because right now she doesn’t want to feel better. She wants to feel what she feels, which is angry, betrayed, and sad. Until she’s done feeling those feelings, she won’t want anything you put on that food tray. That includes the dessert you slaved over to make her feel better.
Parents try too hard to wave the magic wand. When a child is feeling discouraged, the best thing to do is acknowledge what you see. “I can tell you’re feeling really down right now. If you ever want to share with me what’s going on, I’ll listen. And if you’re not ready, that’s okay too. You need time to process whatever happened to you.” Then you turn and walk away. You allow your child to seek you out when she’s ready.
Now that’s respectful behavior.
Every human being has bad moments, bad days, even bad months where they’ll be discouraged. But don’t be quick to jump to the potential label of depression.
Clinical depression is almost always accompanied by severe changes in mood, personality, behavior, dress, and grades. It’s a pattern, not a one-time or two-time event. If your normally effervescent child turns quiet, isolates herself night after night in her room, doesn’t pick up her friends’ calls and texts, forgets to shower, doesn’t seem to care about her cat anymore, and starts to slide in her grades, those are signals that she needs help. She’s stopped caring about life and herself due to some hit she’s experienced. That child needs professional assistance as fast as you can get her there.
I’d always start, though, with a visit to your family physician. Because of all the hormonal changes going on in your child’s growing body, your physician can run tests to see if her emotional low is a result of that. If so, it can be easily rectified. Other times that physician may refer you to a professional psychologist or psychiatrist.
A psychologist is someone like me, who can talk with your child about the issues happening in her life that are causing her to feel depressed. A psychiatrist is a medical doctor who can evaluate what types of medication could help her get back to emotional and mental wellness.
Some parents immediately rush their kid to counseling if they think the kid is discouraged. However, in most cases it’s not the kid who should go, it’s the parent. The parent is the one who needs the advice about how to do things differently in their responses to their child.
The majority of children who are experiencing depression tell me that their parents don’t listen to them, don’t understand them, and don’t take them seriously. Their parents do too much for them or too little for them. Because there is no established, comfortable relationship between parent and child, the child must deal with any hardships on their own.
Many parents make appointments with counselors based on their own guilt. Typical comments I hear are:
“I had no idea he felt like this until . . . ”
“I should have known.”
“I wish he’d talk to me, but . . .”
“If only I hadn’t gone on that business trip, he’d . . .”
But counseling isn’t the cure-all parents think it is. They should have saved their time and money, because they accomplish nothing with their child. Yes, if a child is clinically depressed, she needs the help that medicine can give to get back on an even keel. But medicine alone won’t fix the situation. The specific internal hurt issues need to be resolved.
Why is your child feeling discouraged? What issues is she coping with but not handling well? What is causing her so much stress that she’s shutting down emotionally?
Until those issues are identified and steps are taken to learn how both parent and child can better handle them, no medicine in the world will be effective.
Eating Disorders
Anorexia nervosa, also known simply as anorexia, is a psychological disorder that’s characterized by an obsessive desire to lose weight by refusing to eat. Bulimia nervosa, also known simply as bulimia, is a psychological disorder in which a large quantity of food is consumed in a short period, with feelings of guilt and shame following.
A person with anorexia has a distorted body image. She looks in the mirror and sees a fat person even if she’s only 100 pounds. A person who has bulimia is caught in the cycle of binge eating (eating a whole pan of brownies, for instance), and then may follow it by purging (self-induced vomiting), using laxatives or diuretics, fasting, or excessively exercising in an effort to avoid gaining weight. Such behaviors take the already tumultuous teenager on a roller-coaster ride of physical and emotional ups and downs.
Though most who suffer from anorexia and bulimia are female, males are not immune. “Males account for an estimated 5 percent to 15 percent of patients with anorexia or bulimia and an estimated 35 percent of those with binge-eating disorder,” says NIH Medline Plus. “Some boys with the disorder want to lose weight, while others want to gain weight or ‘bulk up.’ Boys who think they are too small are at a greater risk for using steroids or other dangerous drugs to increase muscle mass.”4
With anorexia, your child may view a carrot, a leaf of lettuce, and an apple as a gourmet meal. She may even spread them throughout the day and count the calories religiously. When I was a dean of students at the University of Arizona, a female student brought up the subject of food in my office. She proudly showed me the food she was going to eat for that day—it was a tiny amount wrapped in aluminum foil. The “egg and ham” dish was a miniscule dollop of eggs the size of a pea and bits of ham dried to a point that I couldn’t even recognize them. That young woman was carrying around her “feast” with her.
With bulimia, it’s not uncommon for a 16-year-old to stop at Dunkin’ Donuts after school, pull over in a parking lot, and wolf down a dozen donuts. Then she visits the john at the gas station on the way home to stick her fingers down her throat and make herself vomit so she can purge everything she ate. Over a period of time, such behavior takes its toll on her teeth, digestive system, body in general, and mind.
With binge eating, a boy might find himself gaining 30 pounds and losing 40 pounds, then gaining 20 pounds. These wide swings can cause hormonal imbalances that affect him down the road.
An eating disorder doesn’t have to do with eating as much as you might think. That’s why urging a child to “eat more” or “just eat one instead of a whole pan” doesn’t work. For such children, there is a wide gap between the ideal self (who they want to be) and the real self (who they are). That gap creates all sorts of emotional dissonance internally.
Perfectionism is the number one psychological trigger in children who develop eating disorders. Every child has a myopic view of herself as not being good enough. The behavior that results is self-defeating and self-punishing. Eating disorders are not a simple disease you can easily cure. You can’t do it by yourself. If this is going on with your child, you need professional intervention.
Cutting
“I don’t understand,” the agonized mom said to me. “Why would he hurt himself on purpose?”
Her son was a cutter, and she’d unwittingly discovered his secret when he refused to wear anything but long sleeves on a hot summer day.
Cutting is a self-harm disorder, in which a person deliberately cuts the surface of their body to cope with emotional pain, anger, and frustration. Those who injure themselves in such a way feel a lack of control over their life. The only way to get some of that control back is to inflict physical pain on themselves. They can control how much they cut, when they cut, how far to cut. This method of pain release can become psychologically addicting, much as an addict with drugs. Children who cut do so on their wrists, forearms, even their stomachs—places you are least likely to see.
Perfectionism is the theme that runs through the lives of cutters. As with those who have eating disorders, there is a wide gap between the ideal and the real.
Though cutting is self-destructive behavior, it’s also your child’s secret revenge against those who control him. If he’s cutting, you must ask yourself some hard questions:
“How much control do I exert over my child’s life?”
“Do I expect him to be perfect?”
“Do I allow him to make his own choices? Or do I always decide what’s best for him and pursue that route?”
The candid answers to these questions are often painful to any parent. But unless you identify your own tendencies and flaws, you’ll be unable to help your child. When his revenge has reached the self-destructive stage in cutting, both of you need professional help. Neither of you can tackle the behavioral change and shift in thinking that need to happen to take the path back to mental, physical, and psychological wellness.
Suicide
Suicide doesn’t happen only to those down-and-outers of society who look like the type. People can appear well-adjusted on the surface, like Richard Cory in the poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson,5 yet take their own life.
A common theme from parents is, “We never saw it coming.”
When parents lose a child through suicide, there’s nothing I can say to heal the unfathomable hurt and the guilt they live with. I can only say humbly, “I’m sorry. I hurt for you,” and give them a hug.
The act of taking your own life is a desperate, last-option move. At times a child will leave a note, but no note could ever adequately explain to a grieving parent the complete why of this last act.
Losing a child in a car accident or through cancer is difficult enough. The pain is intense. But losing a child through suicide is an arrow to the heart from which parents rarely recover. That’s because the action was self-directed and filled with self-hate.
If cutting is a secret revenge, then suicide is the ultimate revenge. It’s anger turned inward. What is the kid saying in this final act? “I couldn’t express how I felt in my life because I wasn’t allowed to. I couldn’t solve these problems I struggled with or take on that nemesis. No one helped me. So those issues swallowed me up, and I lost the fight. I hurt so much and feel so inadequate to deal with life that I’ve decided to get out. I’m done.”
If your child dies through a disease or accident, people rally around you and grieve with you. When your child kills himself, people don’t know what to say, so they sidestep the issue. From the day of burial on, they talk with you about anything except that death. They pretend like your son didn’t exist. They don’t do what you really want, which is to hear a wonderful memory about a time when your child touched their heart.
Any child who chooses to end his life has gone through several psychological steps to get there. First, he’s tried to gain your attention in a positive way. If that failed, he tried negative behaviors to provoke you into paying attention to him. If that failed, depending on his personality, he either withdrew from you or ramped up his efforts through unacceptable behavior. In his final stage, he’s decided he simply doesn’t care anymore. Ending his life is far easier than living.
If the child is gunning for revenge, he may decide not only to kill himself but to take others down with him. That’s the type of behavior you see in school shootings, when a kid guns down teachers and other kids and then turns the gun on himself.
If your child is showing hints of this type of discouragement, you need to get him professional help immediately. You also need to educate him to be street-smart about the following stages, particularly as he reaches the adolescent years. Such education could both save his life and help his friends.
Stage 1: Seeking attention.
Stage 2: Developing power.
Stage 3: Seeking revenge.
Stage 4: Losing hope; deciding life isn’t worth living.6
You, parent, are in a unique position to help your child. It starts by being aware of these stages and your child’s behavior, including his need for your attention. And your kids aren’t the only ones who need attention. We all need to know that somebody cares about who we are and what we do. Did you know that 70 percent of people in the workforce today don’t feel like anybody cares about them at their job?7
That’s why your relationship with your child is so important. You do care about him and what he does. But he doesn’t always know it. Every day you walk a fine line between helping him find solutions to his problems and not solving the problems for him.
Your child may be grappling with difficult issues right now. The best antidote to any self issues is a good relationship with you, parent. That means you are always open to listening without reacting or judging. You allow your child to drive his own life car. You aren’t the backseat driver who constantly pontificates about what he should do differently or tells her where to go. Instead, you sit in the passenger seat. You are the traveling companion who points out sights along the way, gives a few tips about what to look out for, suggests she brake every once in a while, and encourages him to stop and rest when he needs it. Above all, you are solidly entrenched in that car, along for the ride.