So I have talked about why sending your teen for therapy without appropriate assessment and heal your family first won't help you change your teen's behaviour.
Now let's look at the next support system that every family goes for help - School
Sadly school can't help you change your teen's troubled behaviour either, and here's why...
There are two areas to look at. First area is if your teen is struggling to go to school or having behaviour difficulties in school and 2nd is if your teen is presenting troubled behaviour at home or in the community.
First - if your teen is struggling to go to school
School is definitely the best place to ask for support because the school's remit is to make sure your teenager attend school, and achieve their potential educationally.
However, the success rate is pretty low from my observation and experiences working with schools.
Why?
The common strategies/intervention school offers are ...
reducing timtable - since your young person is stressing out about coming to school, or staff members struggle manage his behaviour in school due to lack of resources, let's put him on part time timetable to reduce the stress. My professional view is that this doesn't work. You need your teenager to build relationships in school, to learn that school can be a fun place, to learn that they can do well and make good friends. When you reduce your teenager's timetable, your teenager has more unstructured free time and it's counter-productive.
have your young person see a counsellor in school if there's one so they can talk to them. This will not help either becasue you still don't know what's going on with your teenager, why they don't want to go to school and why they misbehave in school. You still don't have the strategies at home to make a difference.
suspension - having consequences in place is definetely important as it teaches our young person what's right and wrong and how to make informed decisions, but it all needs to be in context. If your young person misbehaves in school because they hate school, and if the consequences is for them not to go to school for a few days, that consequences are now working as a reward, not a consequence for your teenager.
Make sure you consider these things to avoid further challenges down the line.
Of course there are things the school do well really well, but I will come to that in another blog.
Now let's look at asking school for support for challenges outside school. It is a bit like going to your GP for sugar and flour. It's not going to help
The school is not equipped to help you with the challenges outside school and the best they can do is to signpost you, refer you to other agencies for support or invite other professionals to the table to look at what support can be offered to your family.
Don't get me wrong, I am all for support, but what's really important is the ASSESSMENT. School and yourself as a parent need to know why your teen is behaving the way they are, so then you can access the appropriate support.
Stopping your teenager's troubled behaviour (in this case, not going to school, or/and misbehaving in school) doesn't mean applying any intervention blindly.
A good analogy is here is food allergens. Have you ever had the experience of being allergic to a certain kind of food? Well the long way to find out what the allergens are to elimiate each kind of food one by one and the results are not always accurate either. Now you can have a blood test and find out what you are allergic to straight away.
That blood test is the assessment I keep talking about.
If you don't have the assessment in place to find out why to determin who and what support you need, this is what's going to cost you a lot of money and many years of pain to learn that these things don't work.
With that said, If you are ready to take the first step to stop teenager troubled behaviour for good and heal your family without years of therapy or spending money on things that don’t work, start with our Heal Family First 5 day taster here
Pei-I
There's always hope, endless hope.