St. Joseph-Scollard Hall Parent Council hosted an information session this week entitled “Communicating with the Teenage Brain.” Attendees were treated to a light dinner and heard a keynote presentation from Trish Tessier, Mental Health Lead at the Nipissing-Parry Sound Catholic District School Board.
“Information sessions like this are extremely important for our parent community,” says Derek Belanger, Principal at St. Joseph-Scollard Hall. “The challenges facing teens today are different from when we were teenagers, so it’s important for our parents to be able to talk about their experiences and learn strategies to help them, help their child.”
The discussion included a broad range of topics such as the development of the teenage brain, understanding what stress behaviours look like and the impact of texting and social media. Tessier says it is important for parents to understand that parent-child communication is an important feature of healthy adolescent development.
“The good news is that as parents we can learn strategies to talk to our children about stress and other challenging emotions,” says Tessier. “We touched on a few ways parents can communicate with their children, so they can become self-aware, self-assured and able to advocate for their needs,” she says.
