Do you ever wish your teen came with a “how to” manual? While healthy parenting practices go a long way toward helping children grow into confident, responsible, and stable adults, it's not always enough to support a teen facing challenges.
Teen years come with emotional stressors regardless of what level of academic performance or talent a child exhibits. Growing and developing into a person with boundaries, self-awareness, and unique gifts and limitations requires both physical and psychological energy.
Therapy tailored to your child can help maximize their performance during crucial secondary and post-secondary education years and secure their access to further learning and career goals.
Therapy as a Practical Support of High Achievement
High performers in the business world aren’t created in a vacuum. Along with mentorship, coaching, and training, therapy is a tool that successful adults often employ to develop better habits, manage difficult emotions, set and accomplish goals, and improve skills such as assertiveness and self-motivation.
All of these lessons can benefit teens’ educational and social success, and there’s no reason to wait for therapy that helps fine-tune cognitive and emotional functioning. With a greater ability to self-regulate emotions and conquer goals and behaviors, teens can use therapy to:
Take ownership of their academic progress and success
Improve focus
Increase attention span
Reframe distracting and catastrophizing thoughts
Reduce anxiety by differentiating their intrinsic value from their academic performance
Therapy Benefits for All Teens in Northern Virginia
Therapy solely as a response to crises is an old-school model. The behavioral tools and self-knowledge gained in therapy are valuable to individuals regardless of emotional or psychological conditions.
Positive psychology—an approach that encourages behavior and self-knowledge to lower stress, improve relationships, and increase well-being, happiness, and gratitude—is growing as a force within education and therapy worldwide. It provides a combination of prevention and skills growth similar to annual physicals and regular exercise for the body.
When you work with a clinic that utilizes neuropsychological testing as a starting point, you can also pair treatment for contributing challenges such as:
Neurodevelopmental conditions including autism and ADHD
Processing and learning disorders
Emotional concerns and mood disorders such as depression and anxiety
Disordered eating or sleep behaviors
Regardless of your child’s unique needs, a personalized treatment plan that incorporates self-awareness and practical techniques to support holistic emotional and psychological health is the keystone to improving achievement.
Proven Success: Therapy Linked to Academic Success
Studies link academic performance and therapy in several ways. Some psychological characteristics are just as critical to positive academic outcomes as underlying cognitive ability, including:
Motivation – Motivation is linked to the ability to learn and learning engagement, affecting effort level, persistence through difficulties, and amount of time focused on tasks. Academics in teen years increasingly move toward self-guided studies, and therapy provides tools to help teens develop internal motivators.
Self-perception – Students who believe they can achieve a goal are more likely to do so. Separate from innate abilities or acquired skills, optimistic and confident self-perception is critical to academic success.
Resilience – The ability to rebound from failures and comparisons with others is critical to learning engagement. Students are constantly being evaluated and ranked through testing, grading, and social networking. Therapy helps them learn to remain resilient in the face of imperfect results.
How to Get Started
At Fairfax Mental Health & Wellness (FMHW), we start with personalized attention. Every prospective patient (or parent) receives a call from a real person who discusses your needs and matches you with the right type of provider and services. We offer:
Psychological Testing
It can be difficult to identify what may be significant struggles or needs among what looks like teenage growing pains or attention-seeking behavior. In Northern Virginia, along with other areas in the United States, families can opt for a detailed professional evaluation.
Rather than a quick visit to a pediatrician or school counselor, FMHW’s psychological testing uses a neuropsychological framework to comprehensively identify a plan to support your teen’s unique needs (including identifying the need for educational accommodations).
Individual Counseling
One-on-one therapy is effective and useful when a patient is matched with a compatible counselor with relevant skills. Our supportive and highly qualified therapists understand how to balance empathetic caregiving with practical, goals-focused care.
Customized Treatments
Your child is one of a kind. We’ll work with you to incorporate elements that meet your family goals. FMHW can provide individual counseling, group therapy, and specialized care such as VR and sleep therapy.
Talk to a Teen Therapist Specialist Today
Ready to learn more about therapists in northern Virginia with the skills to help? Submit an inquiry or call us today to find out how we can support your teen’s academic performance, health, and happiness.
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