Normalizing difficult conversations
By Indra Owens
The typical school day for school counselors across the country looks something like this: the sky is clear, the sweet chirping of birds awakens most of us, and the morning commute is welcomed with calm traffic and good news on the radio. We pull up to the school building at 7:45 a.m. and parents are already waiting at the door greeting us warmly—I’m sure we all silently pray during the commute that it’ll be a quiet day.
OK, wishful thinking interrupted…
By 8 a.m., I am supporting administrators who are communicating with concerned parents, broadcasting the morning announcements, working with the nurse to support a student with an annoying ear infection or a sudden bloody nose, deescalating a crying student in the middle of a crisis. All day long, I’m mediating dozens of conflicts.
During my lunch duty, kids are smiling, socializing, eating, laughing and enjoying these moments when they can just be kids. This seems to be the only safe space for me as a school counselor—and even that can be daunting at times depending on the phases of the moon.
Yet there’s an underlying concern for me that continues to arise, and that’s the social, emotional and mental health of our students and their families. As mental health professionals, school counselors must consider the mental health issues of our students and highlight and share effective strategies and resources to better support our students and their families. If not us, then who?
In the words of actor Shannon Purser, “Mental health affects every aspect of your life. It’s not just this neat little issue you can put into a box.”
Caring for students, families and ourselves
When discussing the mental health issues and concerns of the students we serve, we cannot have an honest dialogue without first considering their home environments. We must also consider the post-traumatic stress that has followed in the wake of the COVID 19 pandemic. The pandemic has exacerbated latent and untreated mental health concerns that had already existed in many of our students and their families.
We also need to think about how we as professionals must personally and professionally combat compassion-fatigue and burnout—protecting our own mental health as we support others.
A recent study published in the Journal of Research and Practice asked parents to report their children’s mental and physical health as well as their own mental health. The article, “Associations of Mental Health Among Parents and Other Primary Caregivers With Child Health Indicators,” reported that one in 14 children aged 0–17 years had a parent who reported poor mental health. Those same children were more likely to have poor general health, to have a mental, emotional, or developmental disability, to be living in poverty, and to have had adverse childhood experiences such as exposure to violence or family disruptions including divorce.
As educators, we have to be emotionally and culturally sensitive and empathetic to the needs of all the students we serve. What used to be considered normal or healthy has changed, in definition and context, as we strive to educate and serve the next generation of students.
Create partnerships with parents
Our students often have much younger parents, who in many cases, have their own trauma and sets of not-so-positive experiences in the school and community. Our students are heavily engaged and influenced by social media. Additionally, I believe that the COVID pandemic and the emphasis on technology integration into the classroom/homeschooling environment has made it even more challenging to get through to the average middle school student. When we look at serving and supporting students and families through this lens, there is an urgency to create healthy partnerships with parents.
I want to believe that parents, even those who may seem negligent on the surface, are just as frustrated at home as we are at school. With that frustration as the common denominator, the questions become, what are WE going to do with these kids and how can WE partner to make sure they are successful?
The reality of latent trauma
The children we serve—preteens, looking for affirmation and validation—aren’t really children in their own minds. At home, many are living lives with adult responsibilities. Often they are caregivers for younger siblings, staying up late and taking responsibility for their own care and behavior. They often lack the structure, security and rules many of us took for granted in our own childhoods. Some have been victims of physical and sexual abuse. Some have been exposed to pornography, gun violence and domestic disputes.
Trauma and contextual stress can negatively impact children and adults’ functioning, often undermining parenting efforts, family relationships, and family functioning, and increasing the risk for family violence (Jaffe and Wolfe 1986; McCubbin & McCubbin, 1993; Appleyard & Osofsky, 2003; Scheeringa & Zeanah, 2001; Green, et al., 1991).
It has long been understood that a family and its individual members, especially its children, are interdependent (Minuchin, 1985). Each member and family subsystem performs vital roles and functions within the context of multifaceted family relationships. Families can be negatively affected by chronic exposure to trauma, including the trauma and stressful conditions associated with living in poverty.
As school counselors, we must be prepared to have honest conversations with students and parents about mental health. We have to become advocates for our families to seek individual and family counseling and therapy.
As school counselors, I believe that we have to normalize having hard conversations to help foster new generational patterns in the lives of our students and their families, redefining mental health awareness, advocacy and support in all communities and building resilient families. Although it is hard to start these conversations, there’s no better feeling than hearing success stories from your students and parents about the benefits they’re experiencing because they were trusting enough to take your advice.
Trusting our journeys as school counselors
In the midst of the pandemic, when my own resilience tank seemed to be treading on empty, quarantining at home with a fourth-grader, attempting to juggle parenting and professionalism, making sense out of the nonsensical, and having multiple daily pep talks with myself and my daughter, I started a project called Trust Your Journey (TYJ). Through TYJ, my mission is to engage, educate, empower and equip.
- Engaging: Creating safe spaces and healthy partnerships with parents by being relatable, honest and fact-based at all times. This can turn resistant parents into receptive partners.
- Educating, empowering, equipping: once parents become partners, provide them with the tools and resources that help them. Make sure the resources and tools are easy to understand and follow. I typically never give parents more than two resources or tools at a time, and I rarely share resources and tools with parents that I haven’t used myself—or at least researched.
As school counselors we can lose ourselves in the pursuit of helping and serving others. We too have to protect our own peace, be steadfast in serving without overextending ourselves, getting comfortable with using our “NO,” and taking proactive intentional approaches to maintaining and sustaining our mental health and keeping our resilience tanks full.
Indra Owens is a school counselor at Pennsylvania Avenue School in Atlantic City. She was named the 2020 New Jersey School Counselor of the Year by the New Jersey School Counselor Association. She is the author of Trust Your Journey: Balancing Personal Life, Power Moves, and Parenthood. Owens can be reached at trustingmyjourney2020@gmail.com
Helping students by helping parents
Here are some ways to address students’ mental health needs by creating healthy partnerships with parents:
- Accentuate the positives; highlight students’ strengths.
- Talk candidly about students’ behaviors at home and at school.
- Identify triggers.
- Refer to parents by their names, making the relationship personal and valuable.
- Recommend counseling and have resources readily available.
- Share mental health exercises/games/activities, such as an emoji chart to talk about feelings.
- Integrate self-care/coping skills into everyday life such as talking walks and riding bikes.
Have a list of extracurricular activities available; most have an indirect mentoring component that helps our students, giving them other safe spaces with adults not at home or school.
Addressing latent trauma
Here are some ways to help students’ mental health needs when related to latent trauma:
- Encourage parents to seek individual and family counseling; have resources readily available.
- Using positive affirmations; using uplifting language versus language that tears down and discourages or hurts.
- Have honest conversations with parents about the negative effects of “trauma bonding” with their children. Remind parents to avoid exposing children to adult conversations, involving children in family feuds and domestic disputes, having negative conversations in front of children about an absent parent, or venting their frustrations with their children.
- Encourage parents to seek individual and family counseling; have resources readily available.
- Using positive affirmations; using uplifting language versus language that tears down and discourages or hurts.
- Have honest conversations with parents about the negative effects of “trauma bonding” with their children. Remind parents to avoid exposing children to adult conversations, involving children in family feuds and domestic disputes, having negative conversations in front of children about an absent parent, or venting their frustrations with their children.
- Encourage parents to seek individual and family counseling; have resources readily available.
- Using positive affirmations; using uplifting language versus language that tears down and discourages or hurts.
- Have honest conversations with parents about the negative effects of “trauma bonding” with their children. Remind parents to avoid exposing children to adult conversations, involving children in family feuds and domestic disputes, having negative conversations in front of children about an absent parent, or venting their frustrations with their children.
Self-care
Self-care is crucial! Making time for yourself is essential to keeping your resilience tank full. We cannot effectively serve others if we don’t take good care of ourselves, physically, mentally and emotionally.
Here are some ways to address your own mental health needs when helping others with theirs:
- Create clear boundaries; remain professional to avoid absorbing the issues of your students and the families you serve. Keep office hours and do not work outside of them!
- Use your “NO”—School Counselors tend to become the glue that keeps the school building functioning; sadly, this “super power” will often have us taking on more responsibilities that aren’t counseling related. Learn to say, NO!
- Have at least one “vent buddy” or therapist you can talk to regularly.
- Get the sleep you need—at least eight hours—you need to reset each day.
- Balance—make time for the things you enjoy—pampering sessions, bike riding, gardening, golfing, painting, sewing, vacationing, spending time with family
and friends.