Helping Your Teenager Through a Breakup

Do you remember your first relationship? For teenagers, first love is new and exciting — you feel like you’re on top of the world with that person. But sometimes, it’s just not meant to be.

Romantic relationships and breakups are relatively common among teenagers. A 2015 Pew Research Center survey estimated that around 35% of teenagers aged 13-17 years experience some kind of romantic relationship. Even in regular adult relationships, a breakup is fairly common. But it doesn’t make it hurt less.

Breakups affect everyone differently, especially teenagers. Big factors play into how they perceive and move on from breakups. For them, first breakups are a significant emotional experience that can affect their mental health if not addressed properly.

It’s a heartbreaking experience to see your children’s first love ruined. You may have had your fair share of break-up experiences and know it will improve. But your teenager won’t know that just yet. So, how can parents help in this situation? This article will delve into how to help a teenager through a breakup.

Understanding the emotional impact of a breakup on teenagers

Even though it’s common to get together and break up during adolescence, feelings do get hurt for some more than others. Romantic breakups are one of the most common challenges for teenagers who seek out counseling sessions across all ages and genders. Break-ups take a huge emotional toll.

If it hurts, the parent should always be able to sense it first, right? Turns out you don’t always know everything about your children.

A breakthrough study explores suicidal thoughts, and whether parents know that their children have them.

An astounding 50% of parents are unaware that their children once thought about suicide. The study concluded that there are important things parents don’t know about their children’s struggles. This revealed that parents should be more attuned to their children instead of just assuming everything is alright.

But before you can help them, it’s important to know why teen break-ups are different from adult breakups.

On another note, you should also understand why romantic relationships, even though they can hurt, are very important for your teen’s development.

The intensity of teenage emotions

Break-ups are hard, but they might be harder for your teen than you think. The period of adolescence is sometimes referred to by experts as ‘storm and stress’ or ‘storm and strife.’

This is where your teen feels more stressed out, sometimes to the point of lashing out. Teenagers experience more volatile emotional experiences compared to adults.

This is because there are various significant changes your teen experiences during this period, such as:

Entering a new school
Meeting new peers
Starting to desire more independence, etc.

All of it comes with certain struggles to adapt.

Simultaneously, while all of those are happening, your teen’s brain experiences heightened emotionality. They are more sensitive to many things happening around them, including break-ups.

The development in this part of the brain precedes the development of emotional regulation, essentially making them experience strong emotions that they aren’t yet able to control.

This is proven by neuroimaging studies that prove that teenagers exhibit increased neural activity in the amygdala while reduced neural activity in the prefrontal cortex, or PFC — the one responsible for emotion regulation.

The role of romantic relationships in adolescence

During this phase, your teen goes through the identity formation stage, where they explore many possibilities to discover their ultimate identity.

This stage is often where you notice your children pulling away from you just a little. This is natural since they want to explore who they are through interactions with their peers, including romantic relationships.

This is not to say that parents don’t influence the children’s identity formation stage. Parents lay the foundation for children’s identity.

Then, during adolescence, they go through multiple stages of trial and error in figuring out who they are. Getting into a romantic relationship and breaking up is part of that trial and error your children eventually embrace.

Research shows that teenagers who date moderately reported higher life satisfaction and experience less loneliness in early adulthood compared to their peers who have never been in a relationship.

So, even if it hurts now, do not deter your adolescents from being in romantic relationships because they are still meaningful.

This is not to say that teens who rarely date will be living a less-fulfilled life. On the contrary, the research found teenagers who had little minimal dating life are less likely to be depressed than their peers who dated.

These findings implied that there are more dependencies than straightforward answers about the benefits of dating during this age.

The verdict: let your children date. If they haven’t found someone, let it happen naturally. If they already do and broke up, be there to comfort them. Because being a supportive parent is the best thing you can offer to your children in the moment of heartbreak.

Practices for helping your teenager through a breakup

You might know that usually, teen love doesn’t last very long. Parents need to be careful when approaching these subjects with teens as they could feel very vulnerable. It’s essential for a healthy parent-child relationship that you know how to handle these low points in their lives.

Below is a list of how to help a teenager through their first breakup without antagonizing them.

Teach open communication and active listening

This is the foundation of every positive relationship, including the parent-child relationship. This requires you to be there, actively listen, and be judgment-free. Here is how to implement this:

Ask open-ended questions. This helps your children arrange their thoughts about the break-up. A few examples of questions are: “Hey, I heard about what happened, and I am so sorry to hear that, do you mind telling me what led to this?” or “If you feel like it, do you want to talk about what happened?”
Don’t interrupt. Refrain from interrupting your children with something like “I told you he/she is bad news,” etc. Let them finish telling their story.
Validate their emotions. When your children want to talk about what happened, listen to them and validate their emotions. You don’t have to always agree, but they need to know that you understand what happened from their perspective.

Offer comfort without minimizing their feelings

Your teenager is suffering; they feel sad and dejected. Offer them comfort. They do not need the judgment, especially if they know that you disapprove of their relationship beforehand. Forget about all that and just be there for them. Here are a few ways you can do that:

Avoid saying anything that dismisses their feelings. “It’s just puppy love, you get over it,” “You’re better off without him/her anyway, stop crying.” This sends a message that you don’t want to hear them, and they would be more reluctant to share.
Be close, but don’t be intrusive. Let them know you are always there whenever they are ready to talk. Avoid badgering for answers. Let your teen arrange their thoughts.
Opt for non-verbal gestures. If they are not yet ready to talk, just give them a hug or pat on the back that signals all will be okay.

Teach coping mechanisms

Breakups are a stressful experience. You can help your children alleviate that feeling by teaching them activities that fit them.

This is referred to as a coping strategy. They are a set of activities that manage, tolerate, and reduce stress. Below are some coping activities you can try to recommend to your teens:

Journaling. Writing and reminiscing about the positive aspects of the break-up might feel hard to do, but it’s proven to increase positive emotions. Start small by just writing about the good memories, and then what they learned from this relationship.
Self-care. If you see your teen start to waste away after the breakup, encourage and accompany them on a self-care journey. For example, slow nature walks, exercising, doing skincare, or watching TV together.
Positive self-talk. Don’t let your teen wallow in misery; encourage them to give themselves compassion. Examples: “This break-up happened for the best, and I am grateful for all the good memories.” or “It’s gonna get better, give it time, you can do this.”

Encourage social support and peer connections

Your teen’s inner social circle or friends are also important social support in times of hardship. In fact, high-quality friendships between teens can enhance their happiness, self-esteem, and subjective well-being.

Encourage your teens to go out or have a sleepover with friends to mend their broken hearts. Also, encourage them not to wallow alone and continue their regular routine with family and friends.

Foster resilience and perspective

Resilience is the ability to bounce back from stressful or negative emotional experiences by adapting. Even though it’s hard right now, convince your children to understand that in every situation, there is a lesson to be learned and reflected. This could help your teen to embrace any challenges ahead of them.

Understand that it’s hard for them to bounce back quickly, so do not set high expectations for them to get over their breakups right away.

Instead, follow these steps on how to build your teen’s resilience after a breakup:

Help them identify their emotions. Identifying emotions can help teens process and cope with the negative experience of break-ups and come to terms with their feelings. You can do this by helping them map out their feelings about the breakup and their ex.
Encourage reflection. Unless your children are in a toxic and violent relationship, encourage them to take time to reflect on the good times and the bad times. After that, help them identify anything that went sour in the relationship, and this will lead to the road of forgiveness and acceptance.
Encourage them to accept the uncertainty ahead. While it might be scary for your teen to think about what is next in their life, ultimately, it’s not the end. Encourage them always to acknowledge any uncertainties ahead and focus on things they can control. Keep them moving forward.

In conclusion

Breakups are always a very hurtful experience, especially for a teenager experiencing their first heartbreak. Even though this is a very normal part of adolescence, not all teenagers are equipped with the capacity to process and regulate their negative emotions. Therefore, parents must understand it’s not gonna be easy for their teens to get over their break-up on their own.

Despite teens usually putting more emphasis on peer relationships than parents, your role as parents is still very much needed. A few strategies you could try are implementing open communication and active listening, offering them non-judgmental comfort, teaching them coping mechanisms, encouraging social support, and helping them foster resilience.

Watching your teenager go through a breakup is very disheartening. You might feel like you cannot do much besides support them. They might be embarrassed or too sad to come to you for help.

But ultimately, it is your job to help them stand up again and move forward. Following the practices above is a good start.

If you are looking for more resources on adolescence development, check out the Parenting Science Labs. The lab uses the research of the Institute for Life Management Science to produce courses, certifications, podcasts, videos, and other tools. Visit the Parenting Science Labs today.

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Best Tips for Helping Your Teenager Through a Breakup