Have you ever lost momentum even with the end in sight? This easing up can happen to the best of us, and our students often experience it in the third trimester. As school counselors, we’ve noticed students losing steam and starting to coast this time of year. Whether it’s a slip in grades, a lack of focus, or simply feeling overwhelmed, it’s not uncommon for students to lose momentum and need additional support.

Do you ever wonder how your teen finds the time to handle their academic coursework, vocational training, and other interests and commitments? In the age of achievement culture, teens attend school, participate in numerous after-school athletics and activities, hold part-time jobs, and often feel overwhelmed by the pressure to perform at the highest level. Finding time to do it all successfully can be challenging and usually unrealistic.  

Parenting, like teaching, demands an infinite, inconceivable amount of patience. Especially as your teen heads back to school and adjusts to new routines, you might find yourself prompting them with reminders: “Did you remember to set your alarm, charge your laptop, or do your homework?” What would happen if they forgot those things or you didn’t remind them? Would they have the skills to handle the situation? 

At BVT, we’re all about the trades. So, it’s not surprising while visiting a local construction company, a pledge to mental health poster caught the eye of our School Counseling Team Leader, Brooke Johnson. It featured a hard hat, mental health resources for the workplace, and a call to action that spoke to her. Inspired by this awareness campaign, our counselors thought a similar concept could be creatively woven into the Break Free From Depression curriculum and presented during career enrichment classes.

At any moment, you can scroll through social media and know exactly how someone is feeling just by the emoji that pops up on a post. Imagine how easy it would be to know exactly what your teen is feeling if an emoji popped up each time you engaged with them. Okay, we realize A LOT of emojis might pop up at once — happy, sad, content, anxious, excited, depressed, confident, embarrassed, proud, or disappointed, just to name a few — but there would be no mistaking their emotional state.

In the Game of Life, players must choose whether to begin a career or go to college. Of course, each path has clear advantages in the board game, but when it comes to helping your teen navigate their high school career choices and future career plans, they have more than two paths to consider. 

Let’s agree on one thing; parenting is REALLY hard some days. Whether we’ve chosen to raise our teens as our parents raised us, or we’ve taken a “different” approach, like our parents before us, we must remember our teenagers are growing up in a different world than we did.

What does it mean to be bold, to be brave? The answer can be found in Principal Steele’s welcome speech on the first day of Freshmen Orientation. In this long-standing tradition, he invites the freshmen into our unique community with its strong sense of belonging and a culture of pride, passion, and professionalism. Like a playbook, he sets the tone for their next four years. He challenges them to leave behind the childish ways of grade school, take responsibility for their actions, and most importantly, be respectful of others and our school.

Adolescence is when children tend to start exercising their independence from their parents, and parents tend to grant their teens more autonomy to make decisions. Research suggests that teens don’t always make the best choices when it comes to healthy habits. Like many things in life, the path to wellness is not accomplished in one big leap. There are, however, several small steps adolescents can take every day to balance their physical and mental health. When your teen’s mental health seems unbalanced, it’s time to revisit the basic three tenets of wellness; sleep, nutrition, and exercise. These building blocks influence each other and directly impact a teen's well-being.

Parenting a teenager is complex and in some ways, more challenging than ever. Today’s teens are constantly connected to their peers via cell phones and social media platforms and often have trouble disconnecting and being present. Parents, you have a tough role of managing the balancing act of caregiver vs. disciplinarian.

We know adolescents thrive on routine and predictability. Unfortunately, during the pandemic, our world has been anything but predictable. As parents, you have probably seen some fallout from the many unknowns that your teen has been going through. But in the process, they have learned to expect the unexpected, pivot, and change their course of action at a moment’s notice. Hopefully, you’ve seen their resiliency too.

With months of distance learning under our students' belts, many parents (and their children) have concerns about what it's going to feel and look like to return to in-person learning. To ease the transition, we created these five tips to help your child feel safe, connected, and prepared when they return to school