Many teenagers I work with feel hurt or sad about being excluded from friendship groups.  Usually one or more of their “friends” has done or said something to leave them feeling left out or not accepted.  This could be someone avoiding eye contact, ignoring them in conversation, not asking them to an event/gathering or not responding to invitations/communication.  This kind of exclusion can be mild (e.g. over the short term by one person only) or severe (long term and done by many).   

There are some tricky issues about exclusion.  First, many teens find it hard to admit it that it has happened.

Most parents of teens I talk to say:  “most of all, I just want him/her to be honest with me”.  A study of parents desires for teens found that honesty is up the very top of the list of characteristics we wish for our young people.

It is unfortunate therefore, that almost every single teenager lies, and lies frequently.  Some recent research by Dr. Nancy Darling in the US, found that out of several hundred teenagers, 98% of them had lied to their parents in the last few months.  Teens lie to their parents about many areas of life, including what they spent money on, who they were with, what they wore after leaving the house, about whether parties were supervised, what they did after school and who they were in the car with and what was happening at school.

Many people assume that psychologists spend all day telling people how to feel better and cope with life.  In fact, junior psychologists themselves sometimes make this assumption. They think they are supposed to be spending most of the time in session talking, giving advice, providing and information.

Which means they completely freak out when they can't think of what to say.  I remember this feeling very well!  
While giving good advice, helping with strategies and providing good psycho-education IS part of therapy, it's not the most important thing psychologists do.  

The most important thing psychologists do is to ask good questions.  

A sad and tragic fact of our world in 2017 is this:  the most common cause of death for young people is suicide (see Australian Bureau of Statistics Leading Causes of Death report, 2015).  While this data is somewhat misleading for the simple reason that young people don't die very often - (and it's also important to know death by suicide is more common in adults than in young people) - it is still distressing and worrying. This is especially true when we know that rates of deliberate self harm and attempted suicide is higher in young people than in any other age group.

So what can parents do to keep teenagers safe?

Teenagers, like all of us, get angry.  Often, while they are angry, they do things that hurt, disappoint and frustrate us.  And so sometimes our response is to try to reduce and diminish their anger.  It is understandable that we do this – but mostly it doesn’t work.  Anger is in-built into our brains.  At a biological level, human beings are designed to get angry.  Trying to stop anger is like trying to stop breathing.

The clear message we need to send teens about anger is this:  it’s okay to be angry, it is normal to get angry, and we can’t stop ourselves getting angry.  Let’s live with that, and let’s accept it.  Now, what can we control?  One simple thing:  what we do while we are angry.  In other words, we accept the emotion, the thoughts and the feelings - but not necessarily the behaviour.