Empowering our children: Navigating identity, worthiness and choices

Last night at dinner, my son shared with me that a few of the children at his school are self-harming frequently and one of the mums recently had to hide the paracetamol in the home for fear of her son taking an overdose. 

We know that the teenage years are vulnerable. It is the time when they look more to peers for information, validation, and if they don't already have it, a sense of worthiness. It also means they are more susceptible to taking on other people’s opinions and judgements and internalising them and making them their own. 

As a teenager, I took an overdose at the age of 15. I had done something that I wasn’t proud of and then felt like I needed to punish myself so my boyfriend at the time could see how sorry I was. 

Sounds ridiculous saying it out loud now, but that was what I was thinking at the time. 

Upon reflecting on who I was at this time and wanting to prevent my children from EVER being placed in that situation and making the choices I made, being the problem solver I dissected what led me to make that choice and how I could have approached it differently, so I could empower my children for their teen years and beyond. 

Here’s what I understand now that I wish I had known then and wish every child knew: 

You have unconditional worth. Your actions don’t define your worth. We all make mistakes, the behaviour was the mistake, not you as a person. You can recover from this. You as a person can learn and grow. 

You are in a developmental stage. Teen years are when we develop all-or-nothing or black-and-white thinking. This is an important developmental stage where we formulate our identity, and discover what we believe, what we stand for, and what we stand against. And if we are to develop out of that stage in a healthy way, we need to learn that rarely is life black and white. The shades of grey are where reality lives. So the choices aren’t just live or die, they are to talk to someone you trust, find some help, and ask the deeper part of yourself what is the best thing for me to do here.  There are so many other options and choices when we are in a struggle than the binary options our minds will have us believe. Side note, I only became aware of being stuck in black-and-white thinking in my mid 30’s. 

Know who you are and what you are good at. We all have unique gifts and when we nurture them and grow them we no longer need to compete with anyone else. We focus on how we can be better than yesterday. I was in a school system that didn’t validate my psychology and human skills and my parents didn’t have the skills to help me identify them at home so for me and so many children out there they can believe that they are not good at anything special. BUT we are. Every single human..adult or child has gifts. Finding them and owning them, I believe is our life’s purpose and contributes to a solid sense of self. Learning the skills to help children understand who they are in the early years, enables them to be comfortable being different in a crowd, especially when they are navigating their teen years.

Own your mistakes by taking radical responsibility. Things happen every single moment of every single day. And consciously or unconsciously we make a decision about how to respond to it. We cannot control what others say or do but we are in control of what we think, feel, say, and do about the situation. Knowing this and owning this is how we take radical responsibility for ourselves and it is where we ultimately can feel powerful in ANY situation. I made a mistake, if I had had the skills to own it and felt I had a choice in how I responded to it, my actions may have been very different. Empowering our children to take radical responsibility gives them the ultimate power to make kinder choices and decisions. 

According to research, mental health in teens and younger children in Australia (and globally) is in decline. This social post really hit this home for me on the problem our young ones are facing that is so different from when we grew up:

There’s so much we can do to support our children now so they can navigate this stage and beyond.  

We can do this together. 

Much love,

Dina