You have an appointment with a 14-year-old youth you last saw for an annual camp physical. He had screened positive for depression, and you had referred him to a local therapist. He did not have an appointment until after camp, and you have only met a few times, but since you had spoken with him about his depression, he set up an appointment with you to ask about medications. When you meet him you ask about what he had been doing in therapy and he says, “I’m learning ‘coping skills,’ but they don’t work.”
From breathing exercises and sticker charts to mindfulness and grounding exercise, coping skills can be crucial for learning how to manage distress, regulate emotions, become more effective interpersonally, and function better. Similarly, parenting interventions, which change the way parents and youth interact, are a central family intervention for behavioral problems in youth.
It is very common, however, to hear that they “don’t work” or have a parent say, “We tried that, it doesn’t work.”
Dr. Schuyler W. Henderson
When kids and parents reject coping skills and behavioral interventions by saying they do not work, the consequences can be substantial. It can mean the rejection of coping skills and strategies that actually would have helped, given time and support; that kids and families bounce between services with increasing frustration; that they search for a magic bullet (which also won’t work); and, particularly concerning for physicians, a belief that the youth have not received the right medication, resulting in potentially unhelpful concoctions of medication.
One of the biggest challenges in helping youth and parents overcome their difficulties – whether these difficulties are depression and anxiety or being better parents to struggling kids – is helping them understand that despite the fact that coping skills and behavioral interventions do not seem to work, they work.
We just have to do a better job explaining what that “work” is.
There are five points you can make.
- First, the coping skill or behavioral intervention is not supposed to work if that means solving the underlying problem. Coping skills and behavioral interventions do not immediately cure anxiety, mend broken hearts, correct disruptive behaviors, disentangle power struggles, or alleviate depression. That is not what their job is. Coping skills and behavioral interventions are there to help us get better at handling complex situations and feelings. In particular, they are good at helping us manage our thoughts (“I can’t do it,” “He should behave better”) and our affect (anger, frustration, rage, anxiety, sadness), so that over time we get better at solving the problems, and break out of the patterns that perpetuate these problems.
- Second, kids and parents do not give skills credit for when they do work. That time you were spiraling out of control and told your mom you needed a break and watched some YouTube videos and then joined the family for dinner? Your coping skills worked, but nobody noticed because they worked. We need to help our young patients and families identify those times that coping skills and behavioral interventions worked.
- Third, let’s face it: Nothing works all the time. It is no wonder kids and families are disappointed by coping skills and behavioral interventions if they think they magically work once and forever. We need to manage expectations.
- Fourth, we know they are supposed to fail, and we should discuss this openly up front. This may sound surprising, but challenging behaviors often get worse when we begin to work on them. “Extinction bursts” is probably the easiest explanation, but for psychodynamically oriented youth and families we could talk about “resistance.” No matter what, things tend to get worse before they get better. We should let people know this ahead of time.
- Fifth, and this is the one that forces youth and parents to ask how hard they actually tried, these skills need to be practiced. You can’t be in the middle of a panic attack and for the first time start trying to pace your breathing with a technique a therapist told you about 3 weeks ago. This makes about as much sense as not training for a marathon. You need to practice and build up the skills, recognizing that as you become more familiar with them, they will help you manage during stressful situations. Every skill should be practiced, preferably several times or more in sessions, maybe every session, and definitely outside of sessions when not in distress.
We cannot blame children and parents for thinking that coping skills and behavioral interventions do not work. They are struggling, suffering, fighting, frightened, angry, anxious, frustrated, and often desperate for something to make everything better. Helping them recognize this desire for things to be better while managing expectations is an essential complement to supporting the use of coping skills and behavioral interventions, and a fairly easy conversation to have with youth.
So when you are talking about coping skills and parental behavioral interventions, it is important to be prepared for the “it didn’t work” conversation, and even to address these issues up front. After all, these strategies may not solve all the problems in the world, but can be lifelong ways of coping with life’s challenges.
Dr. Henderson is associate professor of clinical psychiatry at New York University and deputy director of child and adolescent psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital, New York.