Mental health
fromPsychology Today
9 hours agoThe Secret Advantage of Not Doing It Alone
Social support enhances performance, reduces stress, increases well-being, and can be experienced through imagination and helping behaviors.
If the application of behavioral techniques does not produce large enough effects for practical value, then the application has failed. Practical value is whatever you define as meaningful for your child's life.
Isabelle Valdez, 15, and Lois Lippert, 14, were accused of plotting to murder a classmate, with Valdez admitting to planning to use a knife found in her backpack. In an apology, she expressed feelings of being 'disgusting, cruel, and useless,' indicating deep-seated issues.
Without effective tools and preparation, many parents understandably default to instinct and use common ineffective tactics, such as warning, advising, informing, or trying to control their teens. The adolescent brain has been compared to a car with a powerful gas pedal and weak brakes when in the presence of other teens or when expecting to be seen by them (Bulow, 2022; Steinberg, 2008). Further, they are drawn to peers, and then instinctively rev each other up into risky experimentation and sensation-seeking.
Being a target of negative experiences by one's peers has consistently been related to decreased self-worth, poor engagement in school, and worse grades among children and adolescents. One of the most consistent of these consequences is depressive symptoms. Put simply, kids' mental health is strongly impacted by being picked on by their classmates at school. Our recently published study examined data from over 100,000 Brazilian adolescents to disentangle how pernicious the effect of being victimized was on reports of symptoms of depression.