Are you always walking on eggshells around your teen? Maybe you feel like your teen frequently overreacts to innocent or well-intentioned comments. If so, you may have a highly sensitive teen. Highly sensitive teens have frequent mood swings, are prone to overthinking, and are easily offended. They are often sensitive to external stimuli like sounds and smells.
Does your teen frequently overreact to innocent or well-intentioned comments? And do you wonder why your teen reacts so badly to criticism? If so, you may have a highly sensitive teen. It takes great patience and skill to handle highly sensitive teens. In this video, I’ll explain 5 proven tips that will enable you to get through to your teen. If you think you might have a highly sensitive teen, this is the video for you!
Tip #1:
Let’s start with tip number one. Identify and manage the triggers that overwhelm your teen. For highly sensitive teens, a common trigger is being around a lot of people.
For example, at school, during extracurricular activities, and at social events.
In these types of settings, highly sensitive teens can get easily overwhelmed. If this sounds like your teen, try to limit the number of activities scheduled each day. and if possible, try to limit the amount of time your teens spend with others.
For younger teens, you might have more control over their schedule. It’s important to teach highly sensitive teens that they need to find time to be alone to recharge.
Especially after a group activity. help them identify healthy activities they would enjoy doing during this alone time, so they don’t always turn to screen time or end up overthinking.
Encourage them to use a daily planner. Have them write down their scheduled group activities, like classes or social events. Then suggest that they plan quiet activities after those group activities. They could engage in quiet activities like reading, drawing, or going for a walk.
This way, they’ll get the alone time they need each day another common trigger for highly sensitive teens is criticism. Constructive criticism can help teenagers grow and develop however, highly sensitive teens often experience a lot of anxiety when they receive criticism. Instead of saying to your teen, “Don’t be so sensitive.” Help him or her to process the interaction through emotional coaching.
Tip #2:
Let’s move on to tip number two. Use emotion coaching techniques to help your teen cope with difficult situations. Psychologist Dr. John Gottman describes the research that shows that the key to good parenting lies in understanding the emotions behind your teen’s problematic behavior.
For highly sensitive teens, these emotions are typically related to feeling overwhelmed, anxious, afraid, discouraged, or disappointed. These emotions lead to problematic behavior such as emotional outbursts, poor academic performance, or social isolation. remember, when teens don’t feel right, they can’t act right.
If you don’t address the emotions behind the problematic behavior, the problematic behavior won’t go away. This is where emotion coaching comes into play. Emotion coaching is the process of helping teens understand their emotions, uncover what triggered those emotions, and then effectively process those emotions.
Here’s how you can put emotion coaching into practice. First, recognize that highly sensitive teens experience uncommonly strong emotions every day It’s vital to see these situations as opportunities to build a strong bond with your teen and to help your teen develop emotional regulation skills.
Second, don’t focus on fixing the situation and on getting rid of your teen’s strong emotions. Instead, empathize with your teen. Listen to your teen and validate his or her feelings. Don’t cast judgment on your teen. and don’t nag or lecture.
When teens share their feelings, an effective strategy is to reflect what you’ve heard back to them using different words. This shows that you’re listening.
For example, let’s say that your teenage son had planned to go hiking with two of his friends, but at the last minute, these two friends canceled on him. So he’s understandably upset.
You could say, “It sounds like you’re disappointed that they canceled on you. You feel like they betrayed your trust.” Third, help your teen label his or her emotions.
When highly sensitive teens can distinguish between feelings of fear, anxiety, disappointment, discouragement, betrayal, et cetera, it gives them more control over the situation.
This is because they’re able to specifically, identify how they feel. Instead of feeling like they’re overwhelmed by a cloud of negativity. as a result, they’ll be in a better position to take positive action. Maybe your teenage daughter is in tears because her favorite teacher told her that her essay was poorly structured and that she needed to rewrite it from scratch. Use the emotion coaching techniques we’ve just talked about. Then work with her to create an action plan for what she’ll do next.
Tip #3:
Now let’s talk about tip number three. Don’t look at your teen’s sensitivity as a weakness. As a parent, it’s easy to say to your highly sensitive teen in frustration,
“You need to stop being so sensitive.”
It might be tempting to frequently warn your teen that being too sensitive will cause others to stay away from him or her. But such comments will backfire because they make highly sensitive teens feel rejected and anxious.
So help your teens to see their sensitivity as a strength. Point out times when your teens have just known that something was wrong in a specific situation because of their gut feeling.
This strong intuitive sense can be a helpful tool in enabling your teens to make good decisions. Similarly, highly sensitive teens are typically self-aware. Knowing yourself well can be difficult for many people, but highly sensitive teens are aware of their inner feelings. If this is channeled in the right way, they can become very attuned to the feelings of others, which means they’ll be able to empathize with others well.
Tip #4:
Tip number four, help your teen build a strong support network. In the digital world we live in, it should be easier than ever to connect with others. However, Dr. Brian Primack and other researchers have found that the more time young adults spend on social media the more likely they are to feel socially isolated.
Highly sensitive teens need real relationships built on face-to-face interactions. As a parent, you can fulfill part of that need by supporting your teens, listening to them, and validating their feelings. But your teens must cultivate other healthy relationships. Help your teens foster friendships with peers and other trusted adults, based on shared hobbies, sports, music, volunteering, et cetera.
One idea is to find an activity, such as volunteering at a soup kitchen, which is structured in which you could do together with your teen. Your presence at the activity will reduce your teen’s initial anxiety. Over time, your teen will have opportunities to connect with the other volunteers. If the tips have been helpful so far.
Tip #5:
Tip number five, empower your teen to take full control of his or her life. All the tips in this video have a common goal. To help highly sensitive teens learn to take control of their emotions and their lives, so they can find fulfillment and happiness.
When it comes to regulating their emotions on their own, highly sensitive teens can practice self-calming strategies related to breathing.
For example, The 4-7-8 breathing technique is simple to learn. You inhale for four seconds, hold your breath for seven seconds, then exhale for eight seconds.
Repeat this cycle several times. Research compiled by Very Well Mined shows that breathing exercises like this, can reduce depression and anxiety, improve sleep quality, and lower stress levels among other benefits.
When highly sensitive teens feel as if they lack control in their lives, they often start to panic. So it’s essential to find opportunities where they can gradually take control and manage things on their own.
You can work with your teens to establish routines and habits, so you’ll progressively do less and less reminding. Make it clear to them that you’ll be handing over the reins to them step by step in areas like schoolwork, choice of friends, and screen time of course, the principle to keep in mind is that privileges should be tied to demonstrated responsibility. Take some time to think about what specific demonstrated responsibility will result.