Parenting Through Change: 6 Powerful ACT Principles for Parents of Teens and Tweens

Understanding ACT: A Brief Overview

You might have heard about ACT principles and acceptance and commitment therapy techniques and wonder, what are they? Acceptance Commitment Therapy is a psychotherapy approach which involves aspects of mindfulness, acceptance and behavioural change to encourage the development of psychological flexibility. ACT therapy interventions enhance individuals’ quality of life and overall well-being. It is an approach that focuses on an individual’s values. One’s values are about what matters the most to that person. It can be easy to be pulled away from our values when faced with anxiety, low mood and other difficult emotions. ACT therapy interventions can help an individual to focus on the present moment and move towards what matters to you, instead of away from it. 

Acceptance and commitment therapy techniques also focus on fostering psychological flexibility. Why might that be an important concept in parenting? Well, because children are constantly changing and evolving and parenting skills need to match this. We don’t want to parent a 15-year-old as we did an 8-year-old. And we don’t want to necessarily repeat parenting habits that we might have learned in potentially suboptimal environments. Therefore, ACT therapy interventions provide us with an opportunity to develop our psychological flexibility muscle and allow our children to grow through change – rather than fight against it. 

Read on to understand some ACT principles and how they might be able to help you in your parenting!

Tweens and Teens: Navigating Emotional Turbulence

The tween and teen years bring with them intense periods of developmental change. What types of changes should parents expect in terms of emotions and relationships? These types of emotional and social changes would be considered to be within the realm of typical during adolescence:

1. Increased awareness of emotions and emotions of others: older adolescents will begin to gain greater awareness regarding emotions experienced by themselves as well as those around them. Teens may also have some challenges regulating their own emotions, which might be experienced as a bit of an emotional roller coaster for them and others around them! 

2. Self-esteem changes: changes in physical appearance and social emotional functioning can impact how one views oneself. It can be a challenging time as adolescents often develop in different ways from each other (i.e., speed of changes and acceptance of changes). 

3. Development of independence: teens are navigating how to separate from their parents and remain close to them. This is a challenging balance. Many still want to know they are supported with a safety net, but they also want to experience autonomy and independence. This is often a very hard one for parents to manage. Teens might be setting up boundaries within relationships that feel very different than they did in the past.

4. Becoming interested in sexuality and intimate relationships: teens are exploring their own sexual feelings as well as what it might feel like to be romantically interested in someone else. This stage of development can also prompt questions for teens in terms of sexual identity.

5. Identity Development: Teens may be questioning gender identity as well as their values (about themselves and the world) and what matters to them most. These can be big concepts for teens to be grappling with and trying to make sense of. 

6 ACT Principles: Parenting Applications

ACT counselling can provide parents with essential skills to help guide them through the challenging time of adolescent development. As described, when working in the ACT therapy model, the goal is to develop and enhance psychological flexibility. In this regard, ACT counselling can help an individual accept challenges and hardships that arise during teen development. Once we accept that there is a struggle, we can then figure out how to navigate our lives with that struggle being present. It doesn’t have to take centre stage and it does not have to take over our relationships with our children. Instead, we can learn to navigate our relationships with these challenges and ensure they continue to develop and grow.

Let’s review 6 different ACT principles and see how they can be applied to day-to-day parenting challenges. 

1. Present Moment Awareness: this ACT principle is about gaining increased awareness of emotions and thoughts that arise in the present moment. In doing so, people develop greater awareness of their thoughts and feelings and become more mindful of the current moment. Mindfulness allows individuals an opportunity to make different choices than they might have otherwise made. Within parenting, the skill of being in the present moment is essential. And also very difficult to achieve. Parents are often understandably distracted by the goings on of the day and multiple stressors that arise. However, putting aside those distractions – even temporarily – can allow parents to focus on their children and build strong relationships in which the teen feels validated and understood. Having parents focus all their attention on their child, even for small chunks of time, can allow for growth within that child and within the relationship that parents want to have.

2. Self as Context: this ACT principle is about how individuals sometimes define themselves by their thoughts and feelings. During ACT interventions, we want people to learn to embrace their ideal selves and acknowledge what that might look like. It is important to learn that we are not simply the content of our thoughts, we are also the context in which our thoughts occur. There are different ways in which this could be applied to parenting skills. One way is how parents often can get stuck on the actions of their teens as being the same as their own actions. In doing so, parents can become defined by their children’s greatest accomplishments and greatest mistakes. However, parents need to take a step back and see their teens as functioning within their own context and making their own choices – good or bad. Of course, if the choices being made are dangerous, then that becomes a safety issue and different actions must be taken. However, if teens are making bad choices (their own bad choices) then parents want to take a healthy perspective on this and see how they can help their teens manage the situation. This leads us to our next ACT principle (read on!).

3. Defusion: this ACT principle focuses on helping people to defuse difficult thoughts and feelings. In doing so, we are then able to unhook from thoughts that feel sticky and draw us into experiencing distress, anxiety, frustration etc. When cognitive defusion happens as an ACT intervention, people learn to gain distance from unhelpful thoughts and are able to gain perspective from their thoughts and feelings. How might this apply to parenting? As parents, it is essential to be able to gain perspective when teens engage in behaviours and choices that might be problematic. This would not apply to dangerous or life threatening behaviours, of course. Let’s consider an example. A teen does not study very hard for an exam and ends up failing. Would this be considered a good decision? Of course not! Would a parent be angry and reactive – absolutely! The anger and yelling might be about different things for that parent. They might have wanted their teen to care more and put in an effort, which is understandable. They might also start to go down a rabbit hole of catastrophizing thoughts about their teen, their poor choices and their future. In that moment, a parent would likely benefit from defusing these catastrophic thoughts, bringing themselves back to the present moment and speaking with their teen about what happened and how to manage things differently moving forward. Staying within the present moment can allow for a state of defusion and enable perspective taking and productive discussions with their teen. When engaging in ACT therapy for anxiety, this can be a very useful strategy to make space from anxious thoughts that are hard to let go of.

4. Acceptance/Allowing: this ACT principle involves working towards the acceptance of difficult thoughts and feelings. Although we might not want to experience these, we often still do. That is a reality of navigating the world as a parent and raising teens who are becoming their own person. Parents will not always agree with the choices their children make – rightly or wrongly. Part of teens becoming their own person is affording them the opportunity to make mistakes, learn from them and grow as an individual. This is a big ask of parents as it is natural to want to protect our children from making mistakes and hardships. However, allowing life lessons to be learned, as appropriate, offers great opportunities for parents and teens alike. We all want to be able to live a fulfilling life. The experience of unpleasant thoughts and feelings can sometimes interfere with that – until we make space for them. Teaching these ACT techniques to parents and teens can involve showing compassion towards oneself, allowing for curiosity toward different experiences and making space for challenging thoughts, feelings and body sensations. Modelling these types of skills to our teens can provide invaluable learning opportunities to become resilient young adults.

5. Values: the ACT principle of values is an essential one. We can think of our values as representing the directions of a compass. We never arrive at the destination of “west” but we can keep moving in that direction and visit goals along the way. We never stop wanting to be a “good parent” or a “good daughter/son/child”. We do meet goals that are aligned with our values (e.g., helping our teens with their homework; listening to our teens without distractions).  Values are important discussion points within Acceptance and Commitment Therapy as we want to think about the type of person an individual wants to be and what is meaningful to them. Guiding yourself towards your values as a parent can be very reflective and meaningful. Parents might have had values instilled in them that were both helpful and not helpful. Letting go of some of those values from childhood might be a goal of your parenting journey so that you are potentially a different type of parenting. Exploring that within the context of ACT therapy can be a very insightful and significant therapeutic journey.

6. Committed Action: we finally arrive at the ACT principle that speaks to goal setting and ensuring that the goals we set are related to behaviour change that is measurable and observable. Problem solving within the context of ACT therapy can occur to ensure that goals are being met in small steps that are meaningful to the individual. Parents can also set weekly goals for themselves that follow SMART goal principles. This can allow someone to ensure they are slowly moving towards what is important to them along their parenting journey.

It is important to draw attention to the fact that none of these ACT techniques are implemented overnight. It takes time and practice to learn to react in ways that are different from our typical responses. However, with practice and support, these types of ACT interventions can be very beneficial for parents to learn as they manage some of the challenges faced during tween and teen development.

Does FTPS Offer ACT Therapy?

Does FTPS offer ACT therapy for parents near me? We certainly do! We offer parent coaching using evidence-based Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Our clinicians have completed training in ACT therapy and continue to engage in professional development in order to provide you with the best treatment possible.  We deliver online OCD treatment across Canada, throughout  Ontario, Nova Scotia, British Columbia and New Brunswick. We look forward to hearing from you so we can tell you about our treatment approaches and services. Contact us today

References

https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/therapy-types/acceptance-and-commitment-therapy
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/7060-adolescent-development
https://www.mindful.org/parenting-while-present
https://www.mindtools.com/a4wo118/smart-goals