03/04/2026
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The route out of poor teenage mental health is long and zig-zaggy. As a parent, you never know what the day might hold. It might be good day or a bad day. Or a catastrophic one. Your senses are on high alert, your brain scans for threats, fear and worry are ever-present.
The little moments of positivity offer a breath of respite but the reversals that follow land like a gut punch. Harder each time.
You find yourself fighting repeatedly for your teen – with school, with medical professionals, with your partner. It’s exhausting. Not to mention the fights with your teen - and being used as a punchbag for their feelings - even though (as you keep telling them) you’re on their side.
The impact of parenting a teen through mental health challenges is brutal. It’s always there, under the surface. It grinds you down so when the sudden shocks come, they floor you.
Except you can’t stay down. You have to get up and face it all again.
Parents are struggling alone here. Child and adolescent mental health services are overwhelmed by demands they simply cannot meet. And even if you get support, that might just be an hour a fortnight for your child (and nothing at all for you) – leaving all the other thousands of hours for you to manage alone.
For some parents, work can become a respite and a place of predictability and steadiness. But, for many, the constant interruptions and disruptions of a teen’s mental health needs make performing at work almost impossible.
So, when your colleague mentions that their teen is struggling to go to school because of anxiety, or has an eating disorder, or clinical depression, those words are just the tip of an iceberg.
This is what’s going on beneath the surface ☝️