It’s the word ‘pandemic’ that is with me today. Having my 18 year old son tell me this morning that the friend he hung out with last year died of an accidental overdose yesterday is incomprehensible.

On Wednesday 22 June, more than 100 parents, carers, and others interested in the mental health of teenagers, gathered at Roseville Cinema for EPICS’s first community event.

The ethical decision making model takes the emotion out of a call to action.  It makes you STOP, LOOK LEFT, LOOK RIGHT and LOOK LEFT AGAIN, think and consider.

Implementing this method will have you feeling better knowing you are making decisions ethically and with confidence!

It starts before their birth, doesn’t it? The preoccupation with worrying about a ‘safe enough’ pregnancy, turns into how to protect a wonderfully curious toddler, and then before you know it becomes “how do I keep my teenager safe”?

What do you feel when you hear the term ‘school suspension’? 

For parents with teens in crisis, who may have experience with student suspensions, this phrase can bring up feelings of rage and frustration. 

Learning to parent our own inner child, to look through the lens of mindful non-judgemental awareness, to allow for honest vulnerability and forgiveness in relationships- and to actively calm and nurture our own nervous systems when we’re stressed-

It’s all learnable and doable.

Where do you start when discussing judgement?

As a parent it can be ingrained from the birth of your first child. Are you breast or bottle feeding? Is your child walking at the right age? Can they read before they start school? If not, what did you do wrong as a parent?

Marginalisation of adolescents in high school is becoming more common place. Students suffering from mental illness, including anxiety and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), can be targeted when their behaviour or participation does not align with the acceptable parameters for learning within the school environment.

Boundaries. Some teens respect them, some don’t. For parents, some find it easy to set boundaries and maintain them, while others are inconsistent.

While it’s true that we survive by adapting to change, there’s also a subtle, almost secret element that can seem counter intuitive until it’s understood. It turns out that we are vastly more resilient when we surrender our attachment to outcomes, no matter what the challenge.

Yesterday I had a win! I wonder if other parents would see it the same. Here’s the scenario:

Ok, so we hate to either assume gender difference, or generalise, but when it comes to parenting there seems to be some correlation between gender and approach.

There’s a lot of advice about raising adolescents out there. Perhaps as parents we’ve heard enough about what we “should be teaching our child” or about the endless list of risk factors necessitating constant vigilance in light of all there is to watch out for.

Yesterday sitting in one of Sydney’s lush green parks, I spoke with my friend about meeting the needs of young people. A short distance from where we sat, his youth centre exists to give teens a place to be- and because he is who he is- they are allowed to just be.