Coping Skills for Teens: What Actually Helps and How to Offer It Without a Lecture

About this tool

Coping skills for teens are the strategies a young person uses to get through stress, strong feelings and setbacks, and most of the useful ones are learned by watching adults and by being offered a choice rather than by being told what to do. This page is written for the parent, carer, teacher or clinician who wants to help a teenager cope better. It covers what teenage coping actually looks like, why adult scripts land badly, approach versus avoidance coping, the role of sleep and friends, and how to offer a skill without a lecture. It is not written for the teenager and is not meant to be handed to one.

Start with what teenage coping looks like, because much of it is invisible to adults or looks like the opposite of coping. Headphones on, a door closed, three hours of a game, a friend at 1 a.m. and silence at dinner. Most of this is coping, not the absence of it. Adolescence brings a brain in which the reward and emotion systems are running ahead of the regulating prefrontal cortex, as Laurence Steinberg's work on the teenage brain lays out, so feelings arrive bigger and faster while the tools for managing them are still under construction. Privacy is a developmental need, not a rejection.

The distinction that helps adults most is approach versus avoidance coping. Approach (or engagement) coping moves toward the problem or the feeling: solving part of it, asking for help, putting the feeling into words, reframing, accepting what cannot be changed. Avoidance (or disengagement) coping moves away: denial, wishful thinking, numbing, pretending it is fine. A large meta-analysis by Bruce Compas and colleagues of coping in children and adolescents found engagement coping consistently linked with fewer emotional and behavioral problems, and disengagement coping with more. The nuance matters: distraction is not the same as avoidance. Gaming for an hour after a bad day and then doing the homework is a bridge. Gaming so the homework never happens and the feeling never gets named is the problem. The question to ask about any coping habit is not whether you approve of it but whether the teenager comes back from it.

Adult scripts land badly for predictable reasons. Calm down tells someone their feeling is a problem for you. Just talk to me puts the burden of fixing the relationship on the person with the least power in it. Advice arrives before the teenager has finished explaining, so they stop explaining. Underneath all of it is autonomy. Many adolescents resist instruction about their inner life, because learning to run that life themselves is a large part of what adolescence is for, and teenagers differ in how much steering they will accept and from whom. A skill that is prescribed is often resisted. A skill that is modeled and offered is sometimes picked up, often later, usually without credit to you. That is success.

Sleep and peers are not side topics; they are two of the coping resources a teenager leans on most. Adolescent body clocks shift later, so a 10 p.m. bedtime fights biology and early school starts cut the morning end. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends 8 to 10 hours for 13 to 18 year olds; most get less. A sleep-deprived teenager is more reactive, less able to reappraise and more likely to reach for whatever coping is nearest. Protecting sleep (a consistent wake time, screens out of the bedroom at night, no caffeine after mid-afternoon) is a coping resource in its own right, and worth attending to alongside anything else you offer. Friends are another. A friend is usually the first call, and that is appropriate. Your job is to help the friendships stay good, to be the second call, and to notice when a friendship has become the stressor.

Offering a skill without instructing is a method, and it is laid out step by step below. The short version: model it out loud (I am wound up, I am going for a walk), offer a menu rather than a prescription, do the thing alongside them with no agenda to talk, ask what has helped before, name the feeling tentatively and accept the correction, take no for an answer and keep the door open. And time it right. Many teenagers open up sideways, in the car, late at night, while doing something else, more readily than when sat down for a talk; others prefer a direct conversation. Learn which yours is. Dialectical behavior therapy for adolescents, developed by Jill Rathus and Alec Miller, is the most thoroughly worked-out version of these skills for teenagers whose emotions run very high.

The evidence is honest but uneven. CBT for adolescent anxiety and depression is well supported. DBT for adolescents at high risk of suicide reduced self-harm more than a comparison therapy in a randomized trial led by Elizabeth McCauley. Universal school coping programs show small effects. A printed list of coping skills on its own has little evidence behind it: the research keeps finding that the relationship with a steady adult is the thing that carries the skill. The list is the excuse for the conversation, not the intervention.

Know when coping is not enough, and act on it the same day. Warning signs include withdrawal that lasts weeks rather than days, a collapse in sleep or appetite, a drop in grades or dropping activities they loved, giving things away, talking about being a burden or about death, self-harm, and using alcohol or drugs to manage feelings. Ask directly about suicide: are you thinking about killing yourself? Asking does not plant the idea; the research consistently finds the opposite. If the answer is yes, or you are not sure, do not leave them alone, remove access to means, and get a same-day assessment. In the US, call or text 988; in an emergency, call 911 or your local emergency number. If a teenager discloses self-harm, stay calm, do not punish, and get an assessment. Punishment drives it underground.

The common mistakes: banning the coping you do not like (gaming, the closed door) without offering anything in its place; demanding they use their skills in the middle of a meltdown; comparing them with a sibling; making their feelings about your anxiety; and treating a single bad week as a crisis or a dangerous month as a phase. If you are unsure which it is, a therapist who works with adolescents can assess. The Coping Skills Library on this site is the general version of this list, the Suicide Safety Plan is the tool a clinician will use if risk is present, and the Parenting Worksheets hub has more for the adult side.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Reviewed the adult-facing framing, the approach versus avoidance coping distinction, the evidence claims and the crisis routing for accuracy.

References

1. Compas BE, Jaser SS, Bettis AH, et al. Coping, emotion regulation, and psychopathology in childhood and adolescence: a meta-analysis and narrative review. Psychological Bulletin. 2017;143(9):939-991.
2. Steinberg L. Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 2014.
3. Rathus JH, Miller AL. DBT Skills Manual for Adolescents. Guilford Press; 2015.
4. McCauley E, Berk MS, Asarnow JR, et al. Efficacy of dialectical behavior therapy for adolescents at high risk for suicide: a randomized clinical trial. JAMA Psychiatry. 2018;75(8):777-785.
5. Paruthi S, Brooks LJ, D'Ambrosio C, et al. Recommended amount of sleep for pediatric populations: a consensus statement of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine. 2016;12(6):785-786.

Coping Skills for Teens FAQ