Staying patient with your teens can be challenging, but it's crucial for maintaining a healthy relationship. Set realistic expectations, communicate openly, and actively listen to their concerns. Choose your battles wisely and avoid unnecessary power struggles. Foster mutual respect by acknowledging their perspectives and validating their emotions. Practice empathy and understanding, remembering your own experiences as a teenager. Celebrate their achievements and support them through their struggles. By staying patient and empathetic, you can strengthen your bond with your teens and guide them effectively through adolescence.

1. suggestions for parents: staying patient with your teens
Patience is one of the most important skills to learn as a parent, yet one of the most difficult ones
to implement. How many times have you wanted to grab your teen and shake them, or just say
“Because I said so” rather than dealing with the issue at hand with composure?
As a parent, we can think of patience as the ability to deal with difficult situations or problems in
a calm and rational manner. Feelings may still be a part of the thought processes and the
discussion at hand, but they’re able to be brought to the table in a level-headed manner. Patience
also involves a level of compassion and love for self.
Science shows us how important patience is to teen and adolescent development. A 2023
study showed that children who had parents who emphasized patience had higher levels of
motivation and greater self-esteem than children who did not. Studies have also shown that
when parents use patience, it is a modeled behavior for children, in turn making them calm and
patient.. It has also been proven that being patient with our children, leads to us being more
patient with ourselves. Being patient with ourselves is proven to lead to higher self-esteem,
greater motivation, and improved mood.

2. Here are five things you can try to make sure you’re staying patient with your
teen:
 Understand what makes you lose your patience. Take note of times when you feel like
you’ve been quick to anger, or had a difficult time staying level-headed. If you can
understand when these situations occur, you may be able to avoid them in the future. You
can try de-escalating before you lose your patience, letting your teen know that you’re
struggling to stay patient, or removing yourself from the situation.
 Understand why you lose your patience. If you’ve identified what makes you lose your
patience, you can also understand why those things make you struggle to stay calm and
rational. Is there a theme to all of the things you’ve identified? Identifying why those
things make you lose your patience allows you to communicate that to your teen.
Teenagers are smart - help them help you.
 Ensure there is open communication. Your teen may struggle to stay patient too. Create
open communication in your home. Allow for space for your teen to tell you when
they’re having a hard time staying patient. If they know they can share things with you,
and you’ll be patient and calm in the face of whatever they share, they’re more likely to
maintain a level of openness with you.
 Practice and plan for de-escalation. We will all have moments where despite our best
efforts, we do lose our patience, fail to stay calm, or struggle to communicate rationally.
Make a plan for when those moments happen. Find a strategy that works for you when
you do lose your patience, and see if you can find one that works for your teen as well.
Both of you need to be calm and reset in order to return to the original problem in a
productive way.
 Turn that patience on yourself. Being patient with yourself leads to greater patience with
your child. You will never be perfect as a parent, there is nothing called “Perfect”. You
will not always have a kind, caring, response to your teen. You will never be able to keep
the house conflict-free. Be patient with yourself. Be kind to yourself. Take a few
moments.
Patience can be a difficult practice. Be patient with yourself as you grow, but ensure you’re
committed to learning. If you’re interested in learning more about parenting and patience,
visit GenZ&U!
Boca, D. D., Flinn, C., Verriest, E., & Wiswall, M. (2023, September 14). Parenting with
patience: Parental incentives and child development.
SSRN. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4568760

3. The power of patience. Cornell Cooperative Extension. (2015a, August
10). https://warren.cce.cornell.edu/family-community/parent-pages/just-for-parents/the-power-
of-patience
Young, T., Rohwer, A., van Schalkwyk, S., Volmink, J., & Clarke, M. (2015). Patience,
persistence and pragmatism: experiences and lessons learnt from the implementation of clinically
integrated teaching and learning of evidence-based health care - a qualitative study. PloS one,
10(6), e0131121. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0131121
Coping with Burnout: Student Edition
Many of us seek higher education late in life. Being a student is absolutely exhausting. Between
school, your personal life, and a job, your time is stretched thin, and taking care of yourself often
becomes the last priority. This leads to burnout. But what is burnout, and how do you address it?
Burnout is an individual’s response to chronic stress. It develops progressively, and is acute or
chronic. It tends to manifest both physically and psychologically, with people experiencing
everything from insomnia, weight loss/ gain, and chronic fatigue, to irritability, a loss of joy in
day-to-day life (called anhedonia), and decreased emotionality. Burnout impacts all areas of life.
It creates issues in professional environments, because of its effects on your productivity and
work attitude. It can also interfere with your personal life by influencing your interpersonal
intersections, your overall ability to be a good friend/partner/parent/child, or your general
attitude toward those around you.
Among students in the USA, ⅓ report feeling burnt out, and 4 in 5 will experience burnout at
some point in their academic career. Knowing this, and that it can cause emotional disconnect,
decreased productivity, and increased physical health issues, how do you cope with it?
Research shows that the most effective ways to cope with burnout are emotional venting and
behavioral disengagement. Emotional venting could be anything from talking with friends and
family about how you’re feeling, to joining support groups or online chats, to formally seeking
therapy. Emotional venting allows you to release some of the physical and psychological stress
builds in the body, without adding the strain of problem-solving. Problem-solving is important to
coping with burnout as well - but that comes later, in the recovery period when some of your
burnout symptoms begin to reduce. Behavioral disengagement is what it sounds like disengaging

4. with the behaviors that have led to your burnout. When you have academic obligations this can
be tough; however, it’s possible to find little ways to reduce stress. Sleep in on the weekends.
Skip a week of clubs or extra circulars. Set aside time each day to take breaks, and when you
have formal time off from school, do not engage with school during that time.
Burnout is rough to experience, but there are ways to cope. Give yourself grace, space, and time
to recover. If you’d like to learn more about burnout, its effects, and ways to cope, come over to
GenZ&U.
Edú-Valsania, S., Laguía, A., & Moriano, J. A. (2022). Burnout: A Review of Theory and
Measurement. International journal of environmental research and public health, 19(3),
1780. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19031780
Montero-Marin J, Prado-Abril J, Piva Demarzo MM, Gascon S, García-Campayo J (2014)
Coping with Stress and Types of Burnout: Explanatory Power of Different Coping Strategies.
PLOS ONE 9(2): e89090. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0089090