Is Your Child Lonely? You Can Help
Loneliness is an increasing problem for our kids, so how can parents help?
Hello! I hope you and your family are doing well!
When I was a teenager my parents complained that I spent too much time with friends who wore tattered clothing and had weird hair (yes, I had a punk period, which is hilarious). They grumbled that I should focus more on work and less on socializing.
But today’s parents are more likely to worry about too little socializing rather than too much. While my parents worried about my friends influencing me to do donuts, today we worry about social media influencing our kids to become isolated and lonely.
Today’s parents say things like, “She doesn’t have any real-life friends anymore. She’s so lonely, and I’m scared.”
Or they say, “He never sees his friends in person anymore. Everything happens on his phone and computer, and he doesn’t leave his room unless we make him.”
The script has changed, but the constant is that parents worry about their kids’ social lives. Of course we do!
Humans are hypersocial animals. Even the most introverted humans crave social connection, and we’re biologically primed to seek it, particularly in adolescence and young adulthood.
But today it’s harder for kids to socialize in person and easier for them to become socially isolated.
Loneliness contributes to mental health challenges like anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and body image issues. Social relationships are the most important lifestyle factor in longevity, even more important to health than avoiding tobacco and alcohol.
My teenage friends were kind of weird, and they did some not-great things, but having them in my life was ultimately positive.
Most of us know that socializing is a good thing, and many of us long for our kids to leave their screens and spend time with friends. But it can feel impossible to talk to them about it.
One thing that hasn’t changed since we were young is that it’s incredibly hard for parents to talk to kids about their social lives without being told they’re hopelessly out of touch.
When my parents told me I should hang up the phone and read a book I sighed loudly because they had NO IDEA what I was dealing with and I HAD to talk on the phone and they were most definitely RUINING MY LIFE!
Teenage me dismissed my parents quickly, easily, and definitively, just like my parents did to their parents when they were teens and my teen does with me today.
Dismissal doesn’t mean we can’t talk, it just means we need a new strategy.
The key to having good conversations with teens, especially about tricky subjects like socializing and loneliness, is to not be turned off by dismissal. Keep opening tough conversations and focus on listening. Resist the urge to advise unless they ask for it directly.
This goes against common practice. Most parents think the way to get kids to do things is to tell them how things should be done and how we would do it.
We say things like:
“Call her! You were such good friends in elementary school. I’m sure she’d love to hear from you.”
“You need to get out of the house; it’s not healthy to be in your room all day.”
“Join a club! You’ll meet lots of people who care about the same things you do.”
These things may be true, even helpful. But in the history of teenagers, parental advice like this hasn’t done much to support teenagers in making good decisions.
We want to solve our children’s loneliness problem, but the answer doesn’t lie in advice and demands. Instead, we can help them identify what’s working and not working in their lives and support them in developing their own solutions.
This requires us to listen more than we speak and seek to understand rather than respond. Influencing kids to tackle their loneliness problem takes patience and skill, but it’s possible and powerful. Let me know if you’d like to brainstorm how to do it!
Ginny Jones Parent Coach / More-Love.org
Coaching Notes
Here are some stories from the last few weeks of my coaching sessions with parents who have kids with anxiety, eating, and body image issues:
My clients’ son developed an eating disorder after a traumatic experience on his high school wrestling team. They feel as if they’re walking on eggshells all the time and are uneasy about how treatment is going, so we brainstormed ideas about what they can do to support him.
I offered some ideas to help my client work on her feelings of guilt and shame about her daughter’s eating disorder.
I wrote about how to talk about food and eating with kids and teens, featuring Heidi Schauster from Nourishing Words. If you’d like to read it, you can do so here.
Help Your Child Embrace Change
We can help our kids embrace change by changing how we talk to them about the changes they want to make in their lives. In this 9-page guide and workbook you’ll learn about Motivational Interviewing, an evidence-based method that will help your child embrace and pursue helpful behavior change.
If you’re a paid subscriber, here’s your 9-page printable guide + workbook: