Shoal Creek ParenTeen - The Power of Hope

There really isn't much worse than being in a state of continual hopelessness. Hopelessness that drags on drains the life, and will to keep pushing on, right out of our souls. I think since our teens are still in the earlier stages of their lives, and since they therefore haven't had as many experiences of having "pushed through" successfully into better better waters, they are more at risk of being captured by hopelessness.

However, according to this recently released study/article, having conversations with hopeless and potentially depressed teens actually CAN have a measurable effect on their ability to believe that people and circumstances CAN change and get better. For example:

Researchers started noticing back in the 1980s that many teens felt that social and personality traits were immutable — that someone who is once a loser is always a loser.

So what if we could convince kids that things can change for the better — would that help mitigate the high rates of depression? Yeager tested that out. The results of his latest study, published Monday in Clinical Psychological Science, suggests that it does.

The study divided 600 ninth-graders into two groups. Half participated in a brief intervention program designed to help them understand that people and circumstances can change. These teenagers were shown several articles, including one about brain plasticity, and another about how neither bullies nor victims of bullying are intrinsically bad.

"We didn't want to say something to teenagers that wasn't believable," Yeager says. "We just wanted to inject some doubt into that problematic world view that people couldn't change."

The students also read advice from older students reassuring them that high school gets better, and they were asked to draw from their own experience and write about how personalities can change.

Nine months later, the researchers checked up on all the students. Among those who didn't participate in the intervention, rates of depression symptoms such as feeling constantly sad and feeling unmotivated rose from 18 percent to 25 percent — about what the researchers expected, Yeager says. The group that participated in this intervention showed no increase in depressive symptoms, even if they said they were bullied.

What I take from this is that we all know how hard it can be to see beyond our current difficult circumstances. We all know hard it can be to be hopeful and willing to persevere when it feels like nothing is going our way. Because our teens haven't yet survived as many battles as we have, they tend to be prey to hopelessness, for they doubt that things really can change for the better.

Our job is to "inject" a sense of hope into their hopelessness by sharing from our own stories how we too once were hopeless (in whatever relatable circumstance we can think of), but how we DID survive, and things DID get better. Sharing our stories of making it through the tough times really CAN make a difference in the life of a teen who may be facing a seemingly hopeless situation.

It's just up to us to open up and get verbal about it!