How and When to Intervene with Our Kids
The content of this post comes directly from our recent webinar on the topic of interventions, featuring expert information from our collaborator, Shayna Abraham of Prepare to Bloom.
Shayna is an expert consultant who works with families to support with crisis interventions. In the following post, she helps us to better understand when to intervene with our kids, specifically teens, many of whom are struggling with mental health challenges as a result of pandemic-related changes in their lives.
What’s Happening Now
It’s been a hard year for everyone. The pandemic has taken an already mounting mental health crisis in our country and made it worse.
Some recent stats on teen mental health:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that through most of 2020, the proportion of mental health-related pediatric emergency admission was 31% higher than it was in 2019.
Healthline article released on 3/15/21 it was reported that 1 in 3 girls and 1 in 5 teen boys have experienced new or worsening anxiety.
American’s Promise Alliance did a study on “the State of Young People’ studying urban, suburban, town, & rural. It revealed that more than 1 in 4 young people reported an increase in losing sleep because of worry, feeling unhappy or depressed, feeling constantly under strain, or experiencing a loss of confidence in themselves.
Some of the challenges teens face include remote schooling, lack of routine and predictability, loss of sports and physical activity, loss of friendships, stress in the home, stress in the community, safety concerns for themselves and other family members, Zoom fatigue and social media overload.
Many teens have experienced major upheaval to their usual routines as a result of the pandemic, including more screen time.
Some increase in stress levels should be expected, given all of these changes. But when should parents start worrying that they need to bring in professional support? Where do we draw the line?
The warning signs
Shayna Abraham, who has spent her career consulting families about how to best intervene with teens during a crisis, says there are a few warning signs parents should consider when deciding how to approach their child.
First of all, Shayna urges parents to trust their guts. “If you feel like things are off they probably are,” she says. In addition, parents should consider the following questions:
Have sleep patterns changed? Sleeping too much? Too little?
Has your child become withdrawn from the family and/or friends?
Have you noticed increasing isolation?
Teens may be saying they need help without actually saying anything.
4. Is your child more irritable?
5. Is your child lashing out? Is your child more angry or do they seem to overreact to everything?
6. Is your child overeating, or not eating enough?
7. Missing or avoiding virtual school. Computer on without camera, not logging on, or not engaging in school.
Shayna says often parents will know instinctively that something is “off” about their kids, and that’s the time to reach out to a consultant like her for support.
When to intervene
Here are a few guidelines Shayna suggested for knowing when to intervene:
Safety - If your child has become unsafe that is the time when a higher level of intervention is called for immediately.
Nothing else is working - If you have tried all other home-based interventions and nothing is working.
Your child is unable or unwilling to participate - At this point, parents need to use their best judgment to intervene on their child’s behalf.
What to do
A parent who has decided to intervene has a lot of options. I have listed the options Shayna shared below:
Outpatient Therapy
Intensive Outpatient Therapy (IOP)
Partial Hospitalization Programs (PHP)
In-home intervention
Acute Hospitalization
Short term assessment and stabilization programs (wilderness, hospital and residential)
Therapeutic Boarding Schools/Residential Treatment Centers
Gap Semester or Vocational
Young Adult Transitional Programs
It can be helpful to hire a consultant like Shayna to help navigate all of these options and decide which one might be optimal for the child and family.
How to do it
Here are some of Shayna’s suggestions for how to best intervene with teens:
Assist them in creating a plan. Do not create it for them.
Your own fear of them leaving the house during COVID19 cannot stop them from launching into adulthood. Find support for you.
Empathize with the grief and loss of their expectations for how the past year was supposed to be. (Find support for your own grief and loss.)
Make note that if your child’s mental health is keeping them from being able to create a plan, You can hire a professional to help you navigate this (Alternatives to College).