Mental Wellness Basics

Speaking broadly, awareness is about noticing the people and situations around us. One form is self-awareness (sometimes called emotional awareness): recognizing our own feelings and our own perspectives and ideas about the world. Another is social awareness, which helps us connect to and collaborate with other people. This type of awareness helps us successfully navigate social relationships, such as building friendships and working with others.

Like many skills, self-awareness and social awareness skills tend to be learned by observing others and through practice. Awareness is a great skill to model for your teen so that they’ll learn to use it themselves. You can also practice it together.

Six ways to practice different types of awareness with young people

• Go for a walk or visit a new place. Notice what you each see and hear.
• Model emotional awareness by identifying and naming your feelings at a challenging moment. For example, you might say, “I felt unheard at work today when my coworker talked over me in a meeting.”
• Help young people link feelings to experiences. You can model this by verbalizing your own observations. For example, you might say, “I feel so clear-headed when I take a walk” or “I feel really tense when we’re stuck in traffic.”
• Together, try noticing whether and how one person’s feeling or actions might affect others. For example, point out how someone’s face lights up when they receive a compliment.
• Join community service activities together. This may help young people understand the experiences different people have and show that anyone can make a difference.
• Have rituals of checking in as a family, like at dinner. Give everyone a chance to talk about the best and worst parts of their day. Talk about ways you can work better as a family and treat each other well.

While caregivers tend to make plans for young children, learning to make and carry out concrete plans themselves helps adolescents gain independence and practice skills like time management and organization.

Four strategies to help teens develop planning skills

• When opportunities for Opens in a new tabproblem-solving arise, encourage teens to identify the problem and brainstorm possible solutions. Allow them to make mistakes.
• When your child has a long-term project, such as a research project or college applications, sit and talk with them about how they want to get it done. Let them come up with ideas before you do!
• Involve them in planning family activities or vacations. Let them make some of the decisions (even if you don’t always agree).
• Avoid micromanaging. Instead, set ground rules for things like homework, sleep, and family expectations. Step in only if your child has a hard time meeting those expectations.

Focus is the ability to concentrate on what’s important at a given moment. This can be especially challenging in today’s device-driven world. It’s crucial to help young people learn to focus despite digital distractions.

Three tips to help with focus

• Talk about how digital and social media can interfere with daily life, and help your child come up with strategies to manage the distraction. Model setting screen limit times for yourself, and not being distracted by your phone when talking with your kids or others.
• Have screen-free meals and family time.
• Encourage hands-on activities that don’t involve screens like preparing meals, building things, doing crafts or DIY projects, or gardening.

Take some time to think through tough situations that you’ve encountered. How do you handle feelings like anger, frustration, or sadness? How do your feelings and reactions affect others? The best way to teach young people self-control is to model it.

Five ways to help young people learn self-control

• Learn about and try using co-regulation to help calm challenging moments.
• Talk about feelings and share strategies for managing strong emotions — like taking a deep breath, stepping away from the situation, or meditating.
• Debrief after upsets. What could everyone have done differently?
• Help your child be aware of how their behavior affects others.
• Model healthy conflict resolution by demonstrating appreciation of differences, tolerance, and how to be respectful despite disagreement.

Flexibility can be described as an ability to adapt to new situations, changes in plans, and unexpected challenges. Young people need structure and routine in their lives, but can also benefit from learning to be flexible enough to adjust to bumps and inevitable curve balls.

To help young people practice flexibility, you can:

• Help them prioritize so they can decide which things can be missed or postponed when something positive or negative happens.
• Encourage spontaneity to help them take advantage of opportunities such as accepting a last-minute invitation to go to a movie with a friend.
• Model adaptability by pivoting when your own plans change. Show ways to tolerate frustration and cope with upsetting feelings when circumstances change unexpectedly.