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During the morning strategy meeting, an employee checks her phone—again. Her teenager hasn't been to school in three days, and she doesn’t know what to do. Two floors up, another employee is reviewing quarterly projections when his daughter's school counselor calls with concerns.
Across organizations worldwide, working parents are shouldering the weight of their teenagers' mental health needs—while balancing their professional responsibilities.
For the past eight years, I’ve specialized in teen coaching, partnering with families to navigate the challenges they’re facing. My passion for working with young people and their parents stems from personal experience—I’m raising two teens with atypical learning profiles. My journey has made it clear there are gaps in family support structures.
Fortunately, the divide between home life and work life is dissolving. Employees experience their lives more fluidly now, especially as parents. This shift presents an exciting opportunity for organizations to reimagine how they support families.
Today’s teens face unprecedented mental health challenges
The pressures young people live with can feel intense and relentless. I imagine the teens I work with carrying backpacks stuffed with huge boulders they’re unable to take off, even for a moment of rest.
In light of these pressures, it’s unsurprising that in recent years, we’ve seen rising rates of suicide, skyrocketing ER visits, and high rates of anxiety and depression in young people.
Social media challenges are pervasive. Teens have experienced a profound and rapid shift from play-based to phone-based childhoods. A recent global study found that 11% of teens showed signs of problematic social media use.
While a connected world offers opportunities, it’s also created new challenges for teen development, such as:
- Difficulties in building relationships offline
- A lack of opportunity to develop interpersonal skills
- Poor self-image from social media use
- Managing constant digital stimulation and its effects on focus and mental health
- Navigating peer pressure, which now extends to social media
The need to reimagine how we support teens has never been more urgent. We must help them rediscover the wisdom of play and human connection while building resilience in our digital age.
Loneliness among teens is high
A large global survey recently showed that 25% of young people feel lonely. Many teens experienced their formative socializing years during the COVID pandemic and subsequent isolation periods, causing the challenges of building real-world connections to feel especially daunting.
They often lack the basic tools to navigate friendships, romantic relationships, and interactions with teachers or other adults.
When I coach teens struggling with loneliness, I create a safe space to explore:
- What loneliness feels like for them
- Where they might meet potential friends
- How to initiate conversations naturally
- Ways to overcome fear of rejection
- Techniques to connect with their inner confidence
We work together to help them find language authentic to their personality, ensuring nothing feels forced or fake. If you know any teenagers, you know how important this is.
By helping them connect with their inner leader, I assist them in imagining themselves confidently engaging with others and then putting what they’ve learned into practice in the world. Let’s explore what this looks like in action.
What is teen coaching?
The most important thing to know about teen coaching is that sessions are a judgment-free zone where young people can explore their identity, talk about their struggles, and develop practical strategies for addressing their challenges and goals.
How is this different from therapy?
Therapy tends to focus more on a person’s past and mental health. In coaching, although we might look to someone’s past to talk about important moments, we are more concerned with developing practical strategies for the future.
Accountability is key
Accountability forms one of the cornerstones of the coaching relationship. After each session, I help teens come up with small, actionable steps—called commitments—for which they are accountable, both to themselves and me. We have regular check-ins to help build trust and remind them they’re not alone on their journey.
While coaching isn’t a replacement for therapy, it can serve as a powerful, practical tool for teens who are:
- Feeling stuck in specific areas
- Seeking academic or personal growth
- Looking to develop goal-attainment skills
- Needing support in reaching their next level
One thing that’s unique about coaching is that there’s no hierarchy in the relationship. Teens get to experience a rare space where they’re not being told what to do by an adult and instead, are empowered to discover their own path forward—exploring who they are and who they want to become.
Developing skills and strategies
Every teen’s needs are unique, and I tailor each session to those needs. However, there are certain foundational strategies that I’ve found to prove valuable for most young people.
Success begins with establishing strong daily routines and practical organizational systems. So, for example, we work on things like:
Evening preparation
- Pack backpack before bedtime
- Lay out clothes for the morning
- Ensure devices are charged
- Set yourself up for tomorrow's success
Time management
- Use phone calendars and whiteboards for visual planning
- Implement color-coding systems to make organization creative and fun
- Break tasks into manageable intervals using the Pomodoro method
- Take structured breaks between study sessions
- Use traditional kitchen timers or sand timers for focus periods
These practical tools help teens build confidence and independence while managing their responsibilities effectively. We work together to identify which strategies resonate with their habits and adapt them accordingly.
Early intervention—a key benefit of teen coaching
Teen coaching can serve as an early warning system for potential challenges. A trained teen coach is another set of eyes, in partnership with parents or guardians, to notice subtle changes in behavior or attitude that might signal developing issues before they become more serious problems.
Coaches pay attention to important indicators during sessions such as:
- Changes in body language or energy levels
- New patterns of anxiety or stress
- Academic performance shifts
- Focus and concentration difficulties
- Social withdrawal or behavioral changes
If something concerning pops up during a session, I’ll help the teen develop a concrete action plan for whatever they’re dealing with and evaluate if additional support is needed. This proactive approach is effective in preventing challenges from becoming crises.
Having an outside perspective helps overwhelmed working parents identify when their teen might need extra support while also normalizing asking for help, breaking old patterns of hiding mental health struggles until they’ve reached a crisis point.
Impact on workplace performance
Parents’ work performance directly correlates with their children’s well-being. You’re only as happy as your unhappiest child, as the saying goes.
When teens struggle, their parents or guardians carry that burden throughout the workday, impacting their ability to focus and perform their best. This is something I’ve seen time and time again while working with parents.
It’s easy to imagine a parent with a teen who is struggling in school and refusing to leave the house in the morning, while the overwhelmed adult is rushing to get to work on time.
Organizations that provide teen coaching benefits send their employees a powerful message: they see their employees as whole people with important family responsibilities. This investment builds loyalty and improves workplace performance because parents know their children have access to support.
How leaders can support families with teens
My best advice for HR and benefit leaders is this: include teen coaching in your family care plan. And if you’re not already, take the necessary steps to offer this as soon as possible, knowing this benefit will teach current employees and future leaders the language of self-worth, connection, and communication.
How else can organizations support families with teens? Robust family care support within a comprehensive mental health solution might include:
- A parent or guardian-approved teen experience, including minor accounts nestled within parent accounts, giving teens access to tailored content while parents stay in the loop
- Access to coaches and therapists who specialize in working with teens and parents
- Centralized decision-making within a family-first dashboard so that parents can manage care, access resources, and initiate accounts for teens
- Mental health assessments and check-ins designed for teens
- Proactive outreach from a family care navigator for teens at risk of self-harm
Mental health solutions with family-specific support help break through old paradigms of separating work and home life. Organizations create a stronger, more resilient workforce by acknowledging and supporting the whole employee experience.
Investing in teens is investing in future leaders
Teen coaching champions growth and possibility. It creates space for what comes next and supports teens as they discover who they want to become.
When organizations invest in teen coaching, they invest in:
- Future workplace leaders
- Healthier family dynamics
- Stronger employee engagement
- Long-term organizational success
We need to be teaching teens that although the world is often broken, they are not broken. They’re capable of immense growth, transformation, and resilience as they tackle life’s challenges. Doing this represents an investment that benefits everyone—teens, parents, and organizations alike.
Watch this on-demand webinar to go deeper into the role coaching plays in preventative care.
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