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Supporting Youth Mental Health with Dr. Rhonda Boyd

Supporting Youth Mental Health with Dr. Rhonda Boyd

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​By Allyson Nesmith, Digital Content Contributor

Now that my little sister has been away at college for a few months, my dad is constantly calling me with questions like, “Do you think she’s worried about anything? Her classes? Making friends?” “Should I call her, or give her space?” or “How do I make her feel supported?”

Hearing his endless string of questions (the latest of my oldest-daughter responsibilities) had me wondering—how can parents and other caring adults positively support the young people in their lives, especially as it relates to their mental health? When should they step in, or should they back away? To help me tackle these questions, I spoke with Rhonda Boyd, PhD, who is an Associate Professor in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and a member of the National Scientific Council on Adolescence.

Her first piece of advice? Remember that it is okay to check in with the young people in your life.

“We often have to remind parents that it’s actually okay to check in,” said Rhonda. “You should be checking in about how they’re doing.”

It can be especially important to check in with youth when you notice key changes in their behavior, such as changes in relationships (friends, partners), and/or changes in their routines. In many cases, youth want to discuss these changes as they’re happening, but aren’t equipped with the language needed to accurately convey how they’re feeling.

As you’re checking in with your young person, make sure to express the importance of experiencing all types of emotions—both positive and negative.

“Feelings are feelings,” said Rhonda. “We all have them. Even ones that are viewed negatively.” Share with youth that it’s okay if they are feeling angry or feeling sad. There is nothing wrong with that! “They need to be validated in how they’re feeling,” Rhonda said.

She described a summer program she participated in, where the goal was to teach young people resilience and coping strategies for dealing with their emotions. They used techniques such as deep-breathing exercises if they are anxious or stressed, and counting backwards from 10 to 1 if they were angry.

“We would tell youth, ‘You’re angry about that? Well, you have a right to be angry about that.’ The next question becomes, ‘All right, so how do we work through those big feelings?’” said Rhonda.

Helping youth maintain a consistent bedtime schedule and routine can also help to positively influence their mental health. If you notice youth staying up late to complete a homework assignment, for example, see if there are ways you can help them with their time management, or understand any potential difficulties they may be facing in school.

Additionally, try to keep the bed/bedroom as a space exclusively reserved for sleep, Rhonda suggested. Oftentimes, we (myself included) use the bed as a place to do homework, eat food, or stay up late on the phone. Associating the bed as a place only to sleep can help youth as they create their bedtime routines.

Policymakers can also play a crucial role in ensuring that parents and other caring adults are equipped with the resources and guidance they need to support youth and their mental health. “I hear from policymakers all the time that they want to prioritize youth mental health, but I don’t see the actions and finances to show it,” said Rhonda. “We need more programs that focus on youth and their mental health. We need more mental health screenings. We need more mental health providers.”

Finally, as caring adults, it’s important to remember that just as we are observing youth, they are observing us. “Kids watch adults,” said Rhonda. “If adults have healthy coping skills, and handle emotions well, then kids can learn from that.”

Key Takeaways: What Adults Can Do to Support Youth Mental Health

  • Check in with the young people in your life about how they’re doing--especially when you notice key changes in behavior, relationships (friends, partners), or routines.
  • Validate all types of emotions—both positive and negative—and support young people to work through those big feelings.
  • Remember that youth are observing and learning from how we manage our own emotions, so our own coping skills matter.
  • Help youth maintain a consistent bedtime schedule and routine and encourage them to reserve their bed/bedroom as a space exclusively for sleep.
  • On a policy level, we need more programs that focus on youth and their mental health, more mental health screenings, and more mental health providers.

To learn more about youth mental health and helping young people learn to cope with big feelings, listen to our Adaptivity podcast episode, “How Facing Big Feelings Can Help Build Mental Health,” with Dr. Lisa Damour, psychologist and New York Times bestselling author.

Additional Resources

The Connecting Adolescent Brain

Fact Sheet

This fact sheet gives an overview of adolescent brain development and explains how access to resources, opportunities, and meaningful relationships during adolescence can build connections within our brains and with the world around us that support us into adulthood.

Brain development during adolescence is fundamentally a story of connections.

Around age 9 or 10, hormonal changes kick off a period of intense learning and development, when brain cells form, strengthen, and streamline connections in response to our experiences more rapidly than in any period of life after early childhood.

Activity increases especially in the brain networks that propel us to explore the world, learn from our mistakes, and connect with others in new ways. In turn, these new experiences prompt our brain cells to connect with other neurons in ways that help us adapt to new events and new information. These neural connections become stronger the more we use them, while unused connections are pruned away, helping the brain become more efficient at acquiring and mastering new skills and new ways of thinking.

This brain-building learning happens through direct experiences in our environments and interactive, responsive relationships—with our families and peers, in our classrooms and neighborhoods, in community activities, and even online. The resources, opportunities, and experiences we as adults provide in and out of school can help young people’s brains build the extensive networks of connections that will manage the complex knowledge and behaviors needed to navigate adulthood.

Learning by Exploring the World Around Us

One of the networks that changes significantly with the increase in hormones and dopamine at the beginning of puberty is the “reward system” in our brain. Heightened activity in this system increases the feeling of reward we get from exploring the world, taking risks, and learning from the results.

Meanwhile, the network of brain regions that make up the “social brain” also changes during adolescence. These changes help us tune into social and emotional cues, like facial expressions or social rejection and approval, and increase our desire to earn respect and contribute to others. It also enables us to learn the nuances of changing social contexts in ways that help prepare us for adult relationships.

The prefrontal cortex (the region of the brain that orchestrates critical thinking and behavioral control) undergoes its most rapid period of development during adolescence. It builds on many other systems within the brain to manage our responses to the flood of new information and intensifying emotions. Engaging with other people and our environment and learning from our successes and our mistakes, known as “action-based learning,” helps shape the prefrontal cortex by strengthening the connections within it and between it and other brain networks. We learn through repeated practice—which includes trying and sometimes failing—what is adaptive and appropriate in different situations and how to guide our behavior accordingly, in ways that equip us to pursue new forward-looking goals.

When adults provide youth with opportunities to try new things, to practice navigating emotions, and to learn from failures along the way, it helps build the brain connections that we all need to grow into healthy, thriving adults.

Policies, Experiences, and Mindsets Shape the Connecting Brain

Although we can continue to learn new skills and behaviors as adults, the adaptability of the brain during adolescence means that these connections are much more likely to form quickly in response to experiences. The extent of these changes make the adolescent years a critical window when investments in the right policies and programs for youth can shape long-term positive development.

Likewise, this makes the adolescent years a time when negative experiences including racism, other forms of discrimination, poverty, or abuse can create steeper hills for young people to climb toward a healthy adulthood. When adults ensure that all young people, especially those who have experienced earlier adversity, have what they need along their journey, they can build the skills and capacities they need to thrive as adults. This includes opportunities to explore and take healthy risks, to connect with and contribute to those around us, to make decisions and learn from the outcomes, to develop a healthy sense of identity, and to rely on support from parents or other caring adults.

Understanding how and why the brain develops during adolescence lets us provide the support young people need to build healthy connections—in their world and within their brains—that will help our youth and our communities thrive.

Promoting Positive Development and Decreasing Risk in Online Spaces for Early Adolescents

Science Spotlight | Education | Community Engagement | Mental Health | Digital Tech

This spotlight provides research-based recommendations for ensuring that digital technology used by early adolescents promotes healthy development while keeping young people safe online.

The science of early adolescence—roughly ages 10 to 13—tells us this is a key time of exploration, discovery, rapid learning, and social and emotional change. As youth transition from childhood into the early stages of puberty, they develop their identities, learn about interpersonal relationships, and navigate novel and complex social contexts. What does this mean for adolescents growing up in the digital age?

Over the past 20 years, developmental scientists have begun to understand how young people are using digital technologies and the impact that doing so has on them. While we still have much to learn as young people’s use of digital platforms evolves, digital technologies change, and new online spaces are introduced, current research tells us that digital technology has both benefits and risks for young people, and during early adolescence, its effects can be amplified. We also know from research on brain and social development and on the impacts of technology during these years that we must craft standards and regulations for digital tech used by adolescents that can support and protect our young people. Specifically, we must craft policies and programs that:

Support Healthy Development and Well-Being

Developmental scientists have identified many core aspects of positive development that occur in adolescence and during the transition into adolescence, including exploration and risk-taking, decision-making and emotional regulation, and a heightened focus on respect and social status. In today’s world, early adolescents are increasingly approaching these developmental milestones in online spaces and benefiting from the new opportunities afforded by these spaces. The design, regulation, and use of digital technology should be focused on promoting the positive development of these core developmental milestones.

During the transition to adolescence, young people experience an acceleration of pubertal and sexual changes, rapid brain development, changes in self image, intensification of peer relationships, and more diversity in the sources of information and social interaction that they seek out. Young adolescents are going through an immense period of learning, independently reasoning through complex social situations, exploring new social interactions, and testing adult limits. Questions of identity also become central as youth think about who they are and their place in the world. This development of identity subsequently influences attitudes, motivations, and behaviors.

Early adolescence in particular is a time of profound change when these key milestones of development are happening simultaneously. As they go through these changes, young adolescents are especially sensitive to external social and emotional influences, and compared to older adolescents, they are not as able to regulate their responses to these influences. The sheer degree of change during this time means that both healthy and potentially harmful influences abound, and supports that promote positive development and limit harm are especially important.

➢ Options to avoid sleep disruptions, time limits on particular applications (perhaps depending on the educational or wellness value of the app), and tools to limit or discourage use at times when digital technology might interfere with other activities (such as during school or after bedtime) should be built into platforms and applications.

➢ Default settings could also include auto-shutoff features that further promote health, safety, and well-being (such as shut off features on non-academic platforms during class time). These protections should all be automatic unless youth and their parents elect to change their default settings.

Keep Young Users Safe

Currently, the digital technologies that are heavily used by young adolescents are not required to submit to any standardized regulations or oversight. So as young users explore, discover, take risks, and connect with peers in positive ways online, they must also contend with limited control or assurances related to their own safety and privacy. Youth development experts have identified specific types of data sharing that promote youth safety and positive development.

While the threshold for risk is lower for some adolescents, for example, those with existing mental health problems, those who are more sensitive to social appraisal and rejection, and those who may be already struggling with body image issues may experience more harm from digital technology.

The research also shows discrepancies in the online platforms that adults are familiar with and concerned about versus the ones that young people are actually using the most. Most digital technology platforms designed for adults are, at a minimum, lacking features that promote positive youth development. In many cases, they are inappropriate for youth consumption given current standards (or lack thereof) for consent, privacy, and targeted advertising. Experts in developmental science (researchers), experts that serve youth (including teachers, school counselors, and therapists), and experts in youth digital product design can provide critical insight into the creation of youth-centered digital programs and platforms.

➢ Default settings should protect the privacy of young users. Default profiles could be set to private and not allow sharing of any data collected from non-adult users.

➢ Targeted advertising should be limited for users below a certain age.

➢ Digital technology features that pose known risks for long-term consequences (including public sharing and storing of private data) should be highly regulated for early adolescent users.

Incorporate and Advance the Best Available Research

The body of evidence related to early adolescent use of digital technology is continuing to grow and as additional evidence becomes available, researchers and digital technology companies should make educated decisions that reflect the evolution of the science.

Some companies have already taken positive steps to protect young users and make evidence-based resources for well-being more accessible. For example, YouTube has initiated an algorithm that applies an age rating to all content as well as supervised accounts for younger users. Similarly, Snapchat now provides suicide prevention information as part of their website support and provides a 24-hour crisis line and in-app, expert-based support when users search for mental health topics (such as those related to depression, anxiety, grieving, bullying, and body image).

➢ Digital technology companies should partner with researchers to evaluate and refine these efforts to support youth well-being.

Provide Access to Positive Learning to All Young Adolescents

All young adolescents should have reliable access to the level of digital connectivity and devices required to fully participate in their education and learning. Accessibility of devices, data plans, internet, and guidance about how to use digital technology differs for youth from different demographic groups.

For example, early adolescents who are economically disadvantaged may have less access to fee-based platforms and other technologies. In addition, some young adolescents with visual or hearing impairment may benefit from inclusionary measures like image and video captioning that are not typically built into the platforms they use.

➢ Policymakers and digital technology companies should ensure that all young people can benefit from positive opportunities available in age-appropriate online spaces.

Six Insights to Support Adolescents’ Fundamental Need to Contribute to Others

Science Spotlight | Education | Community Engagement | Mental Health | Out-of-School Time

This spotlight provides research-based insights into how opportunities to contribute and to have those contributions recognized can build autonomy, agency, and a healthy sense of purpose during adolescence.

Adolescence is an important time for contributing to others. During the developmental period between childhood and adulthood, we forge our sense of who we are and how we want to contribute to the world. Throughout our adolescent years, our physical, cognitive, and emotional capabilities mature in ways that allow us to contribute to our friends, family, schools, and broader community in deeper, more meaningful ways than when we were younger.

Opportunities to contribute, to reflect on the meaning of our contributions, and to have our contributions recognized can build our autonomy, agency, and identity and support our sense of purpose—the forward-looking feeling that our lives are directed and significant. All of these are important to positive development during adolescence, helping us navigate adversity and set and achieve goals in ways that can impact us into adulthood.

Brain and Behavioral Development Makes Adolescence a Key Period for Contribution

One of the important developmental tasks of our adolescent years is learning who we are and how we can contribute to the world around us. Contribution becomes especially important during our adolescent years—the beginning of puberty, around 9 or 10 years old, initiates a series of interacting changes in our bodies, social lives, and within our brains that make us particularly sensitive to our social environments as we continue to build and refine our cognitive and social abilities.

During adolescence, our sensitivity to social interactions increases and combines with other developmental changes including a growing ability to consider the needs and perspectives of others, motivation to explore and pursue new experiences,6 and a new desire to create meaningful relationships and feel respected by others.

Neural Systems Underlying Contribution

Research has highlighted a network of brain regions that support our emotional and social responses when we contribute to others.

The ventral striatum, which is active in how we process rewards, matures relatively early in adolescence. High levels of activity in the ventral striatum are associated with greater tendency for contributing behavior and a heightened ability to understand the perspectives of others. The temporoparietal junction and the medial prefrontal cortex, which continue to develop into our early 20s, are also involved in contributing to others, supporting cognitive functions such as memory and attention as well as sociability.

Opportunities to Contribute During Adolescence Support Physical and Mental Well-Being While Strengthening Our Communities

Creating opportunities for adolescents to engage with and contribute to the broader community can help foster social and emotional skills, cultivate positive relationships, shape identity, promote civic engagement, and impact well-being across physical, cognitive, social, and emotional domains.

Social and emotional development

Research suggests that contribution, service to others, and other prosocial activities play an important role in adolescents’ social and emotional development. Opportunities to contribute and to see contribution modeled by others can increase young people’s empathy and compassion, two essential skills for building positive and meaningful social relationships. Indeed, adolescents who engage in helping behaviors more frequently tend to have stronger relationships with their peers and are also more likely to be accepted and popular among their peers.

Mental and physical health

Research has linked contributing in adolescence to lower rates of depression as well as to decreases in depressive symptoms over time. For example, one study found that young people tend to experience higher positive moods on days they engage in helping activities. Another study showed that an intervention that assigned youth to perform acts of kindness for others increased positive affect and decreased stress in adolescents who tend to be more altruistic.

Contributing may also support physical health. Volunteering and other forms of contribution have been linked to lower inflammatory markers, cholesterol levels, and body mass index, and may reduce the negative effects of stress on health outcomes.

Adolescents with higher levels of depression show especially strong associations between prosocial (positive or helpful) behavior and positive mood, suggesting that interventions that support contributing might be especially effective for adolescents who are depressed. The positive impact of volunteering on adolescents’ depressive symptoms has even spurred experts to argue that volunteering should be incorporated into existing treatments for adolescent depression.

Social identity formation and belonging

Contributing within a community involves navigating new social environments and working with diverse groups of people towards a common goal. This process can help young people gain a deeper understanding of their role in society. Recognizing (and being recognized for) the impact of their actions on others can help young people feel a sense of purpose and self-efficacy, improve self-esteem, and boost a positive sense of identity.

Contribution can also help youth feel a sense of belonging and connectedness, increasing their motivation to improve society and enhancing their sense of civic responsibility. Research suggests that the skills young people learn from contributing support academic and career success, as contribution has been linked to better academic performance in adolescents. In addition, more civic engagement (including volunteering, voting, and activism) in adolescence is linked to higher income and education level in adulthood.

Educational outcomes

Incorporating contribution into classrooms and school curricula can help support positive development in adolescence. For example, a school-based intervention for middle school students that provides activities, conversations, and lessons about prosocial behavior was shown to increase helping behavior and decrease aggression40 and increase students’ grades by the end of middle school.

INSIGHT: Adolescents with higher levels of depression show especially strong associations between prosocial (positive or helpful) behavior and positive mood, suggesting that interventions that support contributing might be especially effective for adolescents who are depressed. The positive impact of volunteering on adolescents’ depressive symptoms has even spurred experts to argue that volunteering should be incorporated into existing treatments for adolescent depression.

An after-school program called Youth Empowerment Solutions (YES) was designed to promote middle school students’ positive behaviors despite institutional disadvantages (such as racism) they might have faced. The goals of the program included providing students with opportunities to learn about African history and African-American contributions to U.S. history, and to work to prevent youth violence and make other positive changes in their community. After completing the YES program, the young people involved were more likely to show helping behaviors toward others and less likely to engage in verbal or physical aggression. These benefits continued over the following year and were especially strong for Black youth, highlighting the potential for fostering positive youth development through programs that help youth develop confidence in themselves, think critically about their community, and become involved in community change efforts.

  1. Values Alignment: Contribution is most impactful when it aligns with a young person’s interests, values, and skills. Conversely, a mismatch between contributing activities and a young person’s interests, values, and skills may lead to stress and negative outcomes.
  2. Agency: Youth should have agency or a role in choosing the type of service, its parameters, and its evaluation.
  3. Impact: Adult facilitators should ensure that the project has a real impact, even if the impact is only on an individual person. Youth will discern if they are simply doing “busy work.”
  4. Reflection: To reap positive developmental impacts from service and attach meaning to the experience, youth should be given opportunities to reflect through discussion, journaling, or other outlets–either individually or with peers.
  5. Challenge: Youth develop a sense of efficacy through opportunities that challenge them to stretch themselves or otherwise extend some effort in attainable ways as they contribute to others.
  6. Connection: Social connections are important for adolescents and can encourage youth to contribute to others. Research has shown that adolescents’ (but not adults’) real-world helping is guided by their friends’ prosocial moral values. And when youth provide emotional support to their family, they are more likely to support their friends the next day, and vice versa.

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