Five Ways Adolescent Service Providers Fail or Succeed With Their Clients
I've learned from the teenagers I've served in a wide variety of settings over the last several decades of epic and sometimes traumatic failures by their providers. I, too, have done my fair share of screwing up and making reparations! I offer these lessons learned to help you avoid irreparable damage to your relationships with the teens you work with and to improve the efficacy of your youth program.
1. Be trauma-informed
To be an effective adolescent service provider, you must be at least minimally trauma-informed. Approximately 50% of all teenagers in the US have experienced at least one adverse childhood experience. You can be assured then that a large handful of kids in the adolescent population you serve have experienced or are currently experiencing extreme situations that may lead to trauma responses. Whether you are a religious youth group leader, a middle or high school teacher, a college professor, or a behavioral health provider, being trauma-informed is a must. Without this training and knowledge, the risk of re-traumatizing the teens you work with increases significantly.
There are some programs where being trauma-informed should be an ongoing requirement because the teenagers participating in these programs are almost guaranteed to have experienced trauma or may still be in settings that cause trauma. Being trauma-informed empowers you to track your own vicarious trauma responses and prevent ruptures in the relationships. Some of these settings include:
Alternative high schools
Crisis intervention centers
Adolescent clinical inpatient or intensive outpatient
Teen shelters
Juvenile detention centers
Drug court programs
2. Carefully and ethically navigate confidentiality and boundaries
One of the number one professional failures I hear about from my teen clients is the failure to hold confidentiality for their clients. Confidentiality privilege will vary from profession to profession, agency to agency, and state to state. Know what the privilege is for your teenage clients! Be sure they know what their confidentiality rights are. Have a thorough and frank conversation with parents and kids about these rights. Then hold the boundaries tight. Otherwise, you may have forever lost the trust of that child and the opportunity to make a positive difference in their life.
There is much more to say here, which I will address in future blogs about confidentiality when an adolescent engages in self-harmful behavior, has suicidal ideation, participates in illegal activities, and takes extreme risks. It's important to know that it's not as clear cut as it seems, even with the mandated reporting laws.
3. Manage your fears and judgements about adolescent behaviors
This cautionary advice is really about doing personal work around your own adolescent experience or the experiences you may have had with your own adolescent children. While fear is always valid (because all emotions are valid), acting from your fear means you are operating from a deficits-model. This is a disservice to the growing edges of our teenagers. They need your confidence and trust in them, even when they're screwing up.
The judgements you have regarding their behavior may likely come from those fears. Or from your own uncomfortable learning experiences in your adolescence. Or your feelings of helplessness in the face of the struggles you're witnessing in the teenagers you serve. Get curious about your fears, judgements, and uncomfortable feelings. What you don't want to do is to project them onto the kids you're working with.
4. Respect and validate the teenagers you work with
One of the worst ways to be in relationship with teenagers is to patronize them. Another way that is guaranteed to go sideways is to assert authoritarian power over them. The pushback, acting out, and disrespect from the teens will undermine your program in all kinds of ways. Sometimes these things are an easy fix by simply treating them with respect.
Adolescents are just a few short steps/years away from adulthood. They will not learn how to be a functioning adult if we don't treat them with the same level of respect we treat the adults in our lives. Treat the teenagers you work with the same way you want to be treated. You don't want to be patronized, and my guess is you don't appreciate individuals who enjoy having power over others. As adults, most of us want to collaborate, have choice and agency in the environments we work and play in, and to be spoken to with respect and regard. To do otherwise with teenagers is to be met with the accusation of hypocrisy and with disrespect in return, which will undermine your program's efficacy.
I've written and presented elsewhere more extensively on validating, respecting, and connecting authentically with teenagers, offering tools and practical suggestions for building these skills.
5. Understand the essential nature of adolescence
While this seems like an obvious requirement for those who work with teenagers, I have found in many conversations with trained and educated professionals that there is, nonetheless, a significant lack of understanding and knowledge about the unique nature of the adolescent stage of development. Without this understanding, it's all too easy to pathologize, judge, and misapprehend the actions of the teenagers you work with.
Adolescence is a liminal stage of development, meaning that it is a time when the person is neither one thing nor another—neither a child nor an adult. Without understanding the developmental, physiological, and archetypal underpinnings of adolescence, your patience with their behavior will run thin. You'll be more reactive than responsive, losing opportunities to connect with these marvelous, complicated individuals. You may find the previous video blog on the unique and essential nature of Adolescence helpful, and Richard Frankel's seminal text on the adolescent psyche has been invaluable in my work.
Making an impact
To work with adolescents is, in my opinion, one of the most important, if not the most important, job in the human services industry. I have come to understand that this phase of life is as transformative to the human experience as being born and dying. Adolescing is just as profound as these bookend lifetime experiences. Therefore, those of us who work with, care for and about, and provide services for adolescents have been tasked with some of the most important work out there. Gathering your tools and resources so that you, your kids, and your program are best served is time well spent.