How to Connect With Your Teen: Communicating with Curiosity and Compassion
Parenting a teen can be challenging, especially in a pandemic. Our teens are struggling right now for many reasons, and parents are grappling with how to support them in a meaningful way. How can you be a sounding board for your teen and really connect with them without trying to fix the problem or seem dismissive?
In this Voices of Compassion podcast, Jennifer Leydecker, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) and Clinical Manager at CHC, shares her experience and expertise from years of working with teens. Read more ›
Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield. And it might be the dominant emotion of 2021. 
From attempting to manage remote schooling to rearranging their workdays to fill child-care gaps, there’s no question it’s mothers who are, more often than not, shouldering the increased responsibilities of caring for kids throughout the pandemic. 
With many schools, camps, and daycares shut down, parenting stress and burnout are now at an all-time high. These are compounded by job losses, financial issues, infection anxiety, working while helping with virtual learning, worries about loved ones, decision stress, juggling roles, and sadness about the loss of “normal” life. 
Right now, many of us are feeling mentally, emotionally, and physically exhausted from the ongoing stress of living through a pandemic. Both kids and adults can 
Burnout among parents, in particular moms, has been a defining principle of this global disaster. Clinical-level burnout is defined by a triad of symptoms: exhaustion, a sense of futility and difficulty maintaining personal connections.
We’re experiencing what mental health experts call a “collective trauma”– overwhelm, isolation and the loss of what life used to be. Some have flourished during shelter-in-place and are anxious about re-entry. Others have lost so much that it feels like only thing left to hold onto is hope.
As parents, we can’t control the course of the pandemic. But we can help teens by modeling good coping skills, encouraging healthy habits, and working to understand and relate to what they are going through. 
