Parenting tweens and teens can feel isolating. Find community, seek support, and connect with your kids through quality time to combat loneliness and burnout.
Key concepts:
- Your parenting looks different - so it shouldn’t be a surprise that it feels different, too. Parenting tweens and teens brings up a lot of feelings of loneliness for many parents. This is for a variety of reasons including; issues that feel personal, maybe taboo, and can feel like they reflect poorly on your child or on your parenting, self-shame and guilt, volatile parent-child relationships, the heaviness of shouldering the emotions of our children, hectic schedules, impending adulthood, fears, and worries.
- The topic of loneliness is often not discussed in parenting but is extremely common, as many as 32% of the parenting population across the globe experience loneliness. In a recent survey among US parents, 66% felt the demands of parenthood sometimes or frequently felt isolating, about 62% experienced burnout as a result of their responsibilities as a parent, and nearly 2 in 5 (38%) felt a lack of support in their role as parents.
- Adult research reveals that happiness and longevity is closely associated with adult relationships. This includes a lowered risk of diseases like heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, and dementia. Married people, who had that as a strong connection, even lived longer!
What to do:
- Find a community. Aside from the Cooper community, find a group of people that are meaningful to you. Maybe they AREN’T parents you know, but people who love to hike, or friends from the yoga studio, or work friends who are grandparents or early in their career. Finding a community outside of your children - i.e. not connected to your school, their teams, etc. - can help you to find people that you can confide in openly.
- Get support. Loneliness can be serious, and lead to depression and anxiety. Don’t be afraid to reach out for help if and when you need it.
- Take stock of what is contributing and take a break. Do you need to get off of social media (or at least certain accounts)? Quit a few What’sApp chains? Stop seeing certain parents who make you feel worse, or judged? Avoid your child in certain situations (let someone else take them to tournaments)?
- Give yourself set times to worry. Setting aside worry time can help quiet the noise the rest of the day. Set a timer and write down your worries for 5-10 minutes. Then close the book and let them go. You can always revisit them again tomorrow.
- Find ways to connect with your kids that are FUN and POSITIVE. A little bit of quality time can help to fill your tank and make it possible for you to face a new challenge with a little less loneliness and fear.