Stepping Back from the Fear to See the Resilience of Young Adults

Today’s recorded interview talks about how the struggles and challenges young adults face are different from those parents faced as young adults.

As someone that’s been coaching teens for two decades, a bigger percentage seem to struggle with things like anxiety, suicidal thoughts, cutting, and addictive behaviors than my clients in the past.

They also have to navigate the effects of social media and electronics in a way parents didn’t have to.

Issues like those can feel a little foreign to parents because they don’t quite understand how to help or influence their kids in a way that protects them.

But parents also end up feeling overwhelmed, unsettled, and intimidated by these things and can get carried away in worry or anxiety themselves, or get into a power struggle with their kids.

What hasn’t changed is that young adults are just as resilient as we were. We dealt with problems our parents didn’t understand or didn’t know about, and we found our way. We were good at figuring things out along the way and learning from mistakes. Today’s young adults are just as capable.

As parents, finding some confidence within yourself about your kids’ ability to navigate life will help support them in the biggest possible way. That’s one of the most essential things my parents did for me when I struggled before I accepted any help.

That’s one of the things I point to in today’s recording.

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This interview was hosted by my colleague Del Adey-Jones as part of a video series. For more videos in this series, click here.

Side note: the live workshop in Los Angeles that I mention in this recording has come and gone. But you can check my website periodically or subscribe to my email list to hear about future offerings.