Areas › Worry and anxiety › The cost of avoiding
A chart imposed on a fifteen year old will be beaten, ignored or fought. Agree the terms with them instead, in a conversation where they can genuinely change something.
Ask what they think would help, what they would want in return, and what feels unfair about the current version. You are not handing over the goal, which stays as attendance, only the details, and the details are what makes a teenager keep to it in a bad week. Write the agreement down, put both names on it, and revisit it rather than rewriting it after every row.
Qur’an and Sunnah
They have no knowledge to base this on: they merely follow guesswork. Guesswork is of no value against the Truth (Quran 53:28). Assuming what a teenager wants, rather than asking them, is guesswork with a great deal riding on it.
وَمَا لَهُم بِهِۦ مِنۡ عِلۡمٍۖ إِن يَتَّبِعُونَ إِلَّا ٱلظَّنَّۖ وَإِنَّ ٱلظَّنَّ لَا يُغۡنِي مِنَ ٱلۡحَقِّ شَيۡـࣰٔ ا
They have no knowledge to base this on: they merely follow guesswork. Guesswork is of no value against the Truth
Qur’an 53:28read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A transdiagnostic meta-analysis of internet delivered acceptance and commitment therapy found improvements in anxiety, depression, quality of life and psychological flexibility. Online formats attract motivated people and lose a lot of them, so the numbers flatter the approach. It is quoted for one practical point, that a young person can work with this material in a format of their own, which suits an age that resents being managed.
Thompson EM, Destree L, Albertella L, Fontenelle LF. (2021). Internet-Based Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: A Transdiagnostic Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis for Mental Health Outcomes.. Behavior therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
People keep to arrangements they helped make, and quietly undo the ones handed to them.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Where a child is not attending, the adults are often already cross with each other. That argument has to be parked before any plan will hold.
The target is getting through the door, not feeling calm about it. Calm tends to arrive afterwards, and mostly for people who went.
Put it the way a grandmother would. Eat your peas and carrots and then you can have your pudding: go in, and then the thing you have been wanting.