Children like her make up around a third of all teenagers, says psychotherapist Stella O'Malley. Here, she shares coping strategies for 'nightmare' adolescents
Kids like her, she reckons, make up around a third of all teenagers. “One third is benign; one third is a challenge; one third is a nightmare,” she explains. But in her own case there was a very obvious reason why she was a nightmare: her, and her family was seriously dysfunctional. Her father’s drinking “left a heavy shadow across the family. I didn’t know how to handle that, and one of the ways I handled it was doing just whatever I wanted.
There are all sorts of “accepted traumas” in children’s lives right now. “It might be a broken marriage; it might be that one of the parents has aThe result might be bad behaviour orin the under-tens, and that’s cope-able with; and then suddenly – wham! – you arrive on planet teen, and everything falls to pieces. “The teenager isn’t happy at all: they’re in their room all the time, they’re very distressed. And the parents sense they’ve got things wrong.
In many ways, adolescence has been on a downward slide since the day it was invented. “The concept of the teenager started around 1904 with an American psychologist called G Stanley Hall; and during the 50s the idea really took off. But then in the 60s and 70s, and teenage distress became an issue, and it’s still ongoing. And I would certainly argue that it’s very distressing right now to be a teenager.
So, number one: get informed. Learn strategies to communicate better, to understand better where they’re coming from. Clarify their issues; empathise with what they’ve got going on. Understand that even when it feels as though nothing you say is making any difference whatsoever, it is.
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