When a teenager is struggling
A mother in Southborough describes her evenings. Her 15-year-old son comes home, goes straight to his room and stays there. Any question about school ends in a slammed door. She has tried giving him space and she has tried pushing. Both make it worse. She has asked for help through the GP and been told the wait for specialist support will be long.
She is not alone. In Kent, monthly mental health crisis presentations among children and young people rose from around 85 before the pandemic to around 140, and waits for specialist services can run to many months. Add in the pressure of the Kent Test and selective schools, and many families around Tunbridge Wells feel they are holding things together alone.
The Argentine psychiatrist Salvador Minuchin, who founded structural family therapy, noticed that families under strain tend to drift towards one of two shapes. Some become so close that a young person has no room to grow up. Others become so distant that nobody quite knows what anyone else is feeling. Neither is anyone’s fault, and most families move between the two. But seeing the shape can make the slammed doors make more sense.
The evidence for involving families with teenagers is strong in some areas. For adolescent anorexia, NICE recommends family therapy as the first-line treatment, building on research at the Maudsley Hospital in London. Eating disorders need specialist care, so please speak to your GP urgently if you are worried about one. But the broader principle applies widely: a teenager is part of a family, and change is easier when the family changes with them.
If you’re a parent worried about a teenager, sometimes the most useful starting point is helping you find a different way in. Get in touch and we can talk about what kind of support would fit, including whether another service would be better placed to help.