Last night, I settled in with my large hot chocolate on the couch to watch the movie on eating disorders - “To The Bone”. 

For those of you who haven’t seen the shorts – this is a movie about a young woman with anorexia who gets treatment for an eating disorder.  She has a short stay in a group home facility, meets others with eating disorders, has some family therapy, a short romantic relationship with another person with an eating disorder and ponders whether she really does want to get “better” and overcome her eating disorder.

Having worked with many kids/teens with symptoms of disordered eating and struggles with body image over the last 20 years, I was keen to see whether this was going to be a useful movie I could recommend to families.

Unfortunately, I don’t think it is. 

But as usual when it comes to these kinds of issues, I have mixed feelings.  Here are my thoughts.

The data suggests that 20-30% of teens have sent or received a sexually explicit photo in the last 12 months.  This means the average secondary school will contain 150 -200 students who have recently sent or received a naked or semi naked picture of themselves.
Given the prevalence of this issue, we can’t bury our head in the sand.  Teenagers everywhere are doing this.

There are a couple of big problems with sexting.  First, Australian laws as they exist today allow teens to be charged with distributing child pornography if they send or receive a sexually explicit text – even if this photo is of themselves.  Being charged with distributing child pornography can lead to being labelled as a sex offender and the consequences of this are very serious.  This is clearly a ridiculous situation and the laws must be changed.  Nevertheless, it is a very real risk for young people, and the police visit hundreds of teens each week.

A frustrated Mum sad in my office this week,  describing her 10 year old daughter: “Jess has always been very capable at school but she is constantly anxious about getting things wrong.  If she can’t do it perfectly, she won’t do it at all.  She digs in her heels and it doesn’t seem to matter what I say to her.  Getting homework done in a reasonable time is a daily battle.”

I very often see students who struggle with perfectionism.  Here are some typical behaviours of perfectionistic young people:

• Unwilling to put up their hand to answer questions in case they get them get wrong
• Reluctant to start tasks until they are 110% sure they know what to do
• Unwilling to start homework tasks because they feel they are not going to do it “right”
• Being dissatisfied with a standard of work which others see as acceptable
• Get very upset if they get work wrong/receive low grades/make mistakes
• Work very slowly in order to be excessively neat or to not make mistakes
• Starting over repeatedly in order to make work perfect

Teens get down just like adults do.  They feel sad, miserable and depressed.  For some teens these times pass fairly quickly.  For others, they last a long time.   In either case, parents are crucial in helping sad teens cope.  Here are six ideas to consider.

1. Sympathise and don’t try to “talk them out of” being sad

It is hard to see teens feeling sad.  We feel upset to see them suffering.  And because they often act irritably when they are feeling sad, we get frustrated.  For both of these reasons, we often try to “jolly them out of feeling bad” or minimise their sadness.  We say things like “you'll be okay” or “don’t be upset”, “it's not that bad” or similar.  

Unfortunately while meant well, these kind of statements can make teens feel worse.  It can suggest to the teen that it's not okay that they are upset, which makes teens feel like no-one understands or cares.

Teenagers are often worried about their friends being depressed, in fact in some surveys teenagers rate “teenage depression” as one of their top 3 concerns.  This doesn’t surprise me:  Teenagers quite frequently talk with me about not just about their own depression, but about the struggles of their friends.

Sarah, 16, had been working with me for a while on coping with her Mum being really sick and the stress of Year 12.  One session she wanted to talk about her friend, Eva.  She said that Eva broke up with her boyfriend a few weeks ago and since then had been acting really depressed.  Eva had told Sarah that she had been cutting herself and she didn’t want to talk to anyone at recess or lunch.  She was often crying and wrote things on Facebook like “I hate my life”.  Sarah was worried about her, and said she was thinking about her all the time.  She said that sometimes she felt frustrated with Eva, and sometimes she felt hopeless.  She really wanted to know what to do to help her.