An expert weighs in on how to help your teenager who's missing graduation

Dr. Jen Hartstein reveals how you can help the young person in your life who is missing a major milestone due to the coronavirus crisis.

Video Transcript

JEN HARTSTEIN: If you have kids at home who were ready to experience some major milestones-- high-school graduation, college graduation, heading off into the workforce-- we all know that they are not going to have those things this year. So today we're going to talk about how we're going to cope with those changes and how you can be supportive.

I'm Dr. Jen Hartstein, the Yahoo Life mental-health contributor.

The best thing we can do for them is really be a solid holding environment for them to experience the feelings of loss. We can't change it. We can't make it better. We just have to allow them to experience the feelings of disappointment and sadness and be there as they're processing it and remind them that although this moment everything is awful, things will get better down the road, but allow them this moment.

Although your teenager may be feeling like this is the end of the world, you may not recognize it as the end of the world. They are experiencing it that way. This is something they have worked towards their whole life. They've heard this romantic version of what prom is. They've been waiting for graduation. These are huge milestones that you may have experienced, and you recognize that it's just a blip on the screen, but for your 17- or 18-year-old, this is a major moment. Don't minimize it for them. Allow them to experience the depth of their emotion. Be there to support them and help them work through it.

Some things you can say to your teenager as they are really struggling with this time is I'm really sorry this is happening. I'm here for you. This really sucks. Anything that validates how they're feeling will let them know that you really recognize and appreciate their experience.

Validation is key. That's where we need to spend our time. Really the best thing you can do is validate. You don't want to, well, at least it's not this or at least it's not that because that invalidates them. So just recognizing, gee, this is really hard. I'm really sorry you're struggling. This really sucks. Any of those things helps in the long run.

We can expect that our teenagers and young adults are going to be having a lot of feelings during this time. We want to know the difference between just sadness and anxiety and disappointment and something that might be more problematic. So regular sadness is going to be experienced. They're going to have mood swings. They're going to be up and down. It might come across like anger, but it's fleeting. It might not be so permanent.

Whereas if it stretches over two weeks, three weeks, a month where you're really seeing lack of motivation, major behavior changes, anything that's kind of out of the ordinary, trust your gut that something more is going on. Ask your teen or young adult how they're doing. Don't be afraid to broach the subject. And if you need to reach out for help, do that.

So although we have to change up the ways that we are celebrating, there are some creative ways we can do it, right? So a lot of celebrities are getting in on this where they're creating virtual proms, where they're inviting other celebrities, or they're creating virtual graduations for the whole country so that we're getting access to people maybe we've never had before. Some schools are creating situations where they're setting up timed arrivals where you can get a picture crossing the stage in your cap and gown, and your parents can witness that.

So everybody has to kind of put their thinking caps on and be creative so that we can create new memories and interesting memories and we don't feel like we're missing out on these milestones and that our teens feel fulfilled in that too.