The role family support plays in contributing to a teenager’s mental resilience cannot be emphasized enough. This is yet the best gift a family can offer their teenagers to help them build confidence and resilience.
The transition from adolescence to teenagerhood comes with a lot of challenges that impact the mental state of a teenager. The key foundation for most teenagers is the family, which offers emotional, psychological, and social support that could make or break a teenager.
Therefore, family support acts as a solid foundation for teenagers that will influence and shape their mental resilience, as explored in this post.
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Through Emotional Stability
A fundamental aspect played by family support in establishing mental resilience lies in offering emotional stability to their teens. There is an evident whirlwind of emotions among teenagers due to the confusion they undergo transitioning.
Many times, emotional stability from the family becomes challenging to attain. Emotional instability could result in a negative impact on the mental state. You should, therefore, seek professional help for your teenagers. They will be accorded teenage therapy to help them calm their emotions, which results in building mental resilience.
The teenagers are likely to trust their family if the family seeks professional support to help them have an environment where they can express their emotions with zero judgment.
Enhancing Communication Skills
Effective communication skills are critical for building resilience in teenagers. Teenagers are faced with the challenge of expressing their innermost thoughts. This is because they try to understand the changes in their physical, mental, and social environments.
Everything they learn from childhood may seem very confusing; thus, they try to seek answers to these changes. When teenagers fail to communicate effectively about or against the main issues they face in life, they tend to have poor mental strength in times of adversity. For example, bullying in school or abuse from loved ones takes a toll on the mental states of teenagers.
However, if the family offers a listening ear, they can speak against such acts and bring the culprits to justice. Abuse could cause long-term traumas, which must be dealt with early enough.
Sense of Belonging
One of the best ways a supportive family can help teenagers build mental resilience is through fostering a deep sense of belonging. A sense of belonging helps teenagers form a strong awareness of self-identities. There is nothing more confusing than lacking an identity.
Family support can come in to offer understanding, acceptance, and unconditional love to help them develop a strong sense of security. Security will act as a shield against external and internal stressors that contribute to mental resilience. Teenagers only need to believe that their family has their back. In this way, they can face life challenges coming their way.
Building Self-Esteem
Self-esteem comes in two different forms: high and low self-esteem. Teenagers require constant assurance of their self-esteem as the changes they are undergoing could make them shy away from real-life scenarios. Family support is the foundational stone on which teenagers build their self-esteem.
Strong self-esteem allows teenagers to know and understand who they are and the values they stand for. This gives them time to work on the parts of their lives that require improvement, such as academic, social, or health excellence. However, low self-esteem exposes teenagers to destructive habits that could ruin their mental state.
Some of these habits include drug and substance abuse, addictions, withdrawal from society, and generally appear as social misfits. However, if the family support available is adequate, the teenagers are able to navigate and stand on the positive values they believe in because they have well-balanced self-esteem, thus shaping strong mental resilience.
Nurture Problem-Solving Abilities
Mental resilience and good problem-solving abilities go hand in hand. A teenager may be facing mental stressors because they fail to have good problem-solving skills. However, this situation will not help the teenager build mental resilience.
Family support should teach effective problem-solving skills from when the children are young. You should create problem scenarios, guide them on how to identify the problem, brainstorm on possible solutions, evaluate the best solution among the many, and implement and even monitor these solutions.
In this way, the teenager may relate these lessons to what is currently happening in their life. If you get stuck on the problem at hand, you might break mentally from the challenges life throws at you. The biggest challenges teenagers face is the peer conflicts and influence.
Therefore, these groups need to have some teens with great problem-solving abilities to solve conflicts and combat and manage bad influences.
Teenagers have the most fragile mental, emotional, and social states. This is because they are at a stage of transitioning from childhood to almost adulthood. They get confused in all the aspects as their bodies are changing, hormonal imbalance, and in many other aspects.
Therefore, family support becomes their strongest pillar to lean on. Family support can help them shape mental resilience as life can become so unpredictable. If you are not prepared enough to face life, you can easily break mentally. It is, therefore, important to seek professional help when you feel overwhelmed by your teenagers so that they can get better help.
