The Impact of Therapy on Academic Performance for Teens
The school year can come with many challenges, one of them being the focus on academic performance and grades. Helping teens process the educational expectations they have of themselves can be very helpful in managing stress.
Adding therapy during the school year can be very beneficial for teens in guiding them to set realistic expectations and goals for themselves.
Let’s talk about 3 ways therapy can help teens accomplish their academic and personal goals this school year:
Managing Expectations
School can be a very transformative time with a lot of growth and sometimes, challenges. Therapy can ease these challenges by helping teens to understand who they are and how they can navigate their expectations of themselves and their experiences. Therapy helps to address these obstacles by challenging unhelpful thinking patterns, understanding and defining expectations, reseting expectations as needed, and lessening some of the internal pressures that many teens carry. Therapy offers tailored tools to help teens and children reframe their thoughts to more productive and less demanding thoughts that is often associated with perfectionism, which ultimately makes navigating changes, easier.
Building Coping Strategies
Another way that therapy can help is by teaching coping strategies. Teens can utilize coping tools for many situations such as receiving a poor grade, or being nervous about an upcoming test. Being mindful and practicing grounding skills also helps teens to alleviate some of the anxiety that comes with taking tests or preparing for a big project. Therapy is also fantastic for learning and cultivating time management and study skills. These are helpful tools that encourage healthy lifestyle choices which will in turn help with stress. When teens feel better about themselves, it can help with building confidence to overcome challenges within school.
Creating a Safe Space
Giving your teen a safe space outside of school to vent and process issues that they may be facing in school offers a neutral perspective and a safe environment for them to express their feelings. Whether that be a bad test grade, issues with peers, or issues with a teacher, therapy can help them process all of those challenges with an outside support. This type of support is invaluable in helping teens to overcome assumptions and difficult challenges they may be facing as they are learning to navigate new situations in their lives.
As your teen returns to school, and especially if this year is a transitional year for your student, such as a middle school to high school transition, consider connecting with a therapist today who can help your teen and YOU learn how to navigate these changes in a healthy way.