This episode is tough, but important. After a local completed suicide by a teenager, we wanted to talk about lessons learned and ways to protect our kids as much as possible.

All of this information illustrates clearly the importance of starting to have hard conversations with your kids from an early age. The teenagers I talked to talked about how bad their mental health is and how their parents respond to them whenever they talk about their struggles. Overall, teenagers feel invalidated and unsupported by the adults around them and don't have an outlet to actually communicate their thoughts and feelings.

Teenagers are supposed to be selfish and self-centered and their struggles are always going to feel like it's the worst.  Even if we as parents don't understand or believe what they're going through is hard or legitimate, we can respond with validation and support.

If you have a difficult relationship with your teenager, it's really hard for them to take you seriously and trust you when you act differently only when there's some kind of emergency or crisis.  It's our responsibility as parents to make sure we're meeting our kids' attention and connection needs in healthy, safe ways, to hopefully minimize the need for them to get that in a more negative way.

The big things have to be ok with us as parents, and that starts when the "big" thing is that someone wouldn't sit beside them at lunch or their Pokemon cards. Everything is important to them and it's supposed to be, and it's crucial that what's important to them is important to me, always. If we only respond when what they're talking about reaches a level that we deem important as adults, we teach them we don't care about the other stuff.

It's important we're starting to have conversations with our kids, even when they're uncomfortable. We give some thoughts about how those conversations can go and how you can talk to your kids, without giving them all the details and information, and protecting them as much as possible.

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