Teens and Anxiety: How Parents Can Help

Anxiety is the number one mental health issue facing people today, and teens are not exempt. The causes are many—school pressure, relationship struggles, social media issues—and the results can be debilitating for your teen. If you are noticing concerning behaviors in your teen, such as an increasing discomfort while out in public, nervousness in everyday social interactions, a loss of interest in doing things with friends, a poor appetite, or even growing irritability or outbursts of anger, there are ways you can help.  

Counselor Eliza Huie gives parents a biblical overview of how to respond to your anxious teen with simple tools to alleviate the immediate effects of anxiety. Helping them become calm is the first step to digging deeper into the root causes of their anxiety. You do not have to be a professional counselor to have a listening ear and empathy for your anxious teen. You are caring for them well by providing a loving relationship where they can share their struggles, know they are not alone, and learn that the Lord is near and will help when we call on him. 

AUTHOR

Eliza Huie, MA, LCPC, is the Director of Counseling at McLean Bible Church in Vienna, VA, and the Dean of Biblical Counseling at Metro Baltimore Seminary. She is the author of Raising Teens in a Hyper-Sexualized World,Raising Kids in a Screen-Saturated World, Raising Emotionally Healthy Kids, and the minibook Teens and Anxiety, as well as the coauthor of The Whole Life. Eliza and her husband, Ken, have three grown children and a daughter-in-law.