Teen Specialists

The teenage years can be difficult for parents and kids alike. The combination of hormonal changes, new academic and social challenges, emotional volatility and shifting family dynamics can feel overwhelming. We offer a broad range of therapeutic services targeted at helping your teen adapt and cope.

At Pineapples Therapy we’ll help you the parent find information and resources related to some of the hot button issues of adolescence, including social media, body image, sexual activity, substance use and sleep. In treatment we will help your teen with the mental health challenges that typically afflict teenagers — among them social anxiety, depression, eating disorders, self-injury, psychosis and suicidal thinking.

Executive Function

If your child has unusual difficulty getting organized, remembering things, doing homework, and finishing projects, he may have executive function issues. Executive functions are cognitive skills we all use to analyze tasks, break them into steps, and keep them in mind until we get things done. These skills allow us to manage our time effectively, memorize facts, understand what we read, solve multi-step problems, and organize our thoughts in writing. If a parent should know one thing about executive function, it’s the potent position EF plays in a teenager’s life. Its impact is so powerful you could design an entire high school around its care and development.

Executive function goes by many names, including “self-control.”

Most researchers agree it’s like the Golden Gate Bridge, a structure anchored by two piers.The first pier is cognitive control, involving things like shifting attention, short-term memory (working memory), and understanding the consequences of one’s actions. The second pier is emotional regulation, which includes impulse control. These two abilities, one cognitive, one emotional, are roped together to achieve a goal of some kind, hence the “getting-things-done” descriptor. You can actually measure EF using psychometric tests, which measure skills, knowledge, abilities, attitude, personality traits, and education achievement. There are lots of success stories. Kids with high EF get better grades, have fewer anger management issues, and are less moody. A kid’s EF score is the only statistic that predicts their future college GPA better than chance. High-EF kids get better-paying jobs when they leave school, enjoy more stable marriages, and work better in teams.

It’s an extremely valuable trait to have running around your brain.

You want lots of high-scoring EF’ers surrounding your life. You probably want to have a high EF score yourself.But can you make that happen? Executive function, like any complex behavior, has origins in both nature and nurture. Nature means biological, which in this case means DNA. EF has a whopper of a genetic component, the highest ever recorded for a complex human behavior.But the skill also has nurture components, just like any behavior. At Pineapples Therapy we believe that every teenager can benefit from skill work on developing and enhancing executive functioning.

Some tips you can try at home before you ever come see us are:

• Get your child involved in regular aerobic exercise.

  Especially if the activity also engages the mind (like an organized sport, as opposed to just running).

• Make sure your child gets enough sleep.

No all-nighters, and no “blue light” exposure on screens in the late evenings, especially before bed. Sleep feeds the brain, and kids certainly need it to build their EF. Adolescents are notoriously sleep-deprived, because of a combination of biology, technology and the demands of school and extra-curricular activities. While teenagers need 9.25 hours of sleep to be optimally alert, multiple studies have shown that the vast majority today are living with borderline to severe sleep deprivation.According to a 2010 large-scale study published in The Journal of Adolescent Health, a scant 8 percent of U.S. high school students get the recommended amount of sleep.Some 23 percent get six hours of sleep on an average school night.10 percent get only five hours.

• Help your child eat the right foods.

The so-called Mediterranean diet (lots of fruits and vegetables, white meat, and if there’s grease, it needs to be olive oil) can improve working memory, a vital component of EF.

• Practice mindfulness meditation—and help your child to do the same.

  But do the right kind. The protocol originally designed by Jon Kabat-Zinn can change EF in as little as 8 weeks. At Pineapples Therapy we introduce your teen to the practice of mindfulness in therapy.

Teen Depression.

Depression in teens can look very different from depression in adults. The following symptoms are more common in teenagers than in their adult counterparts:

Irritable or angry mood. 

As noted, irritability, rather than sadness, is often the predominant mood in depressed teens. A depressed teenager may be grumpy, hostile, easily frustrated, or prone to angry outbursts.

Unexplained aches and pains. 

Depressed teens frequently complain about physical ailments such as headaches or stomachaches. If a thorough physical exam does not reveal a medical cause, these aches and pains may indicate depression.

Extreme sensitivity to criticism. 

Depressed teens are plagued by feelings of worthlessness, making them extremely vulnerable to criticism, rejection, and failure. This is a particular problem for “over-achievers.”

Withdrawing from some, but not all people. 

While adults tend to isolate themselves when depressed, teenagers usually keep up at least some friendships. However, teens with depression may socialize less than before, pull away from their parents, or start hanging out with a different crowd.

If you’re unsure if your teen is depressed or just “being a teenager,” consider how long the symptoms have been going on, how severe they are, and how different your teen is acting from their usual self. Hormones and stress can explain the occasional bout of teenage angst—but not continuous and unrelenting unhappiness, lethargy, or irritability.

Seriously depressed teens, especially those who also abuse alcohol or drugs, often think about, speak of, or make attempts at suicide—and an alarming and increasing number are successful. So it’s vital that you take any suicidal thoughts or behaviors very seriously. They’re a cry for help from your teen.

Suicide warning signs to watch for

Talking or joking about committing suicide

Saying things like, “I’d be better off dead,” “I wish I could disappear forever,” or “There’s no way out”

Speaking positively about death or romanticizing dying (“If I died, people might love me more”)

Writing stories and poems about death, dying, or suicide

Engaging in reckless behavior or having a lot of accidents resulting in injury

Giving away prized possessions

Saying goodbye to friends and family as if for the last time

Seeking out weapons, pills, or other ways to kill themselves

Get help for a suicidal teen

If you suspect that a teenager is suicidal, take immediate action!

For 24-hour suicide prevention and support in the U.S., call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 1-800-273-TALK. To find a suicide helpline outside the U.S., visit IASP or Suicide.org.To learn more about suicide risk factors, warning signs, and what to do in a crisis, read Suicide Prevention.