Should Your Teen Take A Pill For Stress?
Your teen is going through a very stressful time with finals, college applications and they also have a job and play soccer year round. They are barely getting any sleep and it has started to show in their disposition. After a conversation at dinner about their overall sense of well-being, your teen poses as a solution, antianxiety medication. What do you say?
Its so tempting to use a pill to get through a difficult time. Sometimes this is necessary (e.g. when someone is depressed or really can’t function), but more often than not it can hurt more than help. Why, do you ask? This is because the very point of these difficult times is for your teen to develop skills to cope with even bigger difficulties in the future. Life hands you challenges in small increments. Sometimes they are huge yes, but frequently they are adjusted huge for the level of maturity. So a toddler’s challenge is how do I find Mom when I’m lost in at the park. A teen’s challenge is how do I balance all I have to do and keep my sanity. What is too much? If you take the pain of the load away, they no longer have the opportunity to make decision. They miss the opportunity to go through that thought process. When the next big stressor comes a long, they buckle from the weight of it. They can’t deal. They have no ability to cope and resort to extreme measures to handle the pressure. Bad ones like drinking, drug use, eating disorders or they become depressed.
Life gives us challenges that we can chose to get through or sleep through. To get through them, your teen must have full awareness and presence of mind otherwise, they end up sleeping through a life lesson that could be invaluable for much more than a good grade or entrance into a respected university. No, this lesson gives them the tools to get through life and that is the most important challenge of them all.
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