Rhonda Bromley has spent much of her life working with students as a teacher, principal, assistant superintendent and executive director of the Utah Association of Secondary School Principals. Because she has so much experience working with teens, she has great insights on how to help them increase their resiliency.

“High school is that time in a student’s life — it’s such a fun time, but it’s such a hard time. You have the best of times and the worst of times all happening at the same time” Bromley said.

“It’s that fork in the road (where students ask), ‘What now? Where am I going from here?’ And our job is just to make sure they’re ready, wherever they’re going to go.”

She says that, as a principal at Lone Peak High School, she stressed to staff that “helping the students learn how to get through hard things” and teaching resiliency is fundamental.

“There’s not a student that doesn’t go through challenges to varying degrees. And so that tool is so important. No matter what road they take, they need to know how to be resilient. They need to know how to get through hard things. They’re going to apply for a job someday and not get it. They’re going to lose a loved one someday. And they need to be able to have those tools that they can work through those hard things.”

So what can we do to help increase resilience in our teens? According to Bromley, we need to understand that adults may have a different perspective than teenagers.

“We have the ability to see things through adult eyes. We need to understand that it’s a very different perspective than a 15 year old or a 16 year old. We just have to understand that they don’t see things the way we do. Things might just seem so logical to us and … just make sense to us.”

Their biggest issue may be “I didn’t get asked to homecoming,” she explains, but no matter how small it may seem to us, it’s their entire world. Another thing Rhonda emphasizes is the importance of listening to your teenager.

“They want to be heard. They want to be seen and validated for the feelings that they have and the person that they are at that time.”

In addition to understanding, listening and validating, we must allow them to struggle. “As a parent, it’s hard to do that. It’s hard to watch your kids struggle. You want them to not hurt and you want to take that away from them and fix it for them. And we need to realize as adults how important it is not to do that, not to take that away, but to help them through it, help them work through it.”

Bromley goes on to talk about the struggle today’s teens can have as a result of social media. They may constantly feel that they need to be ready to be on camera. They may be comparing themselves to other people. They may feel like they are the only ones sitting at home on a Friday night.

“Physical safety is talked about a lot, but I think that emotional safety, we need to talk about that more. That needs to be more of a priority.”

Bromley sums up what she believes is the best thing adults can do — talking.

“We need to have more one-on-one with our kids, with our students, no matter what age, and truly look them in the eye and listen to them, listen to them. What are they confused about? What are they frustrated with? What do they like to do? What are their interests? And really, really listen. They know if you’re listening, they know if you’re multitasking in your brain, or if you’re not really focused on them. So truly look at them and really listen to them. I think this is magical and it can help so much.”

United Way of Utah County is on a mission to help every child in our community feel safe, connected, and confident. You can listen to our latest podcast episode at anchor.fm/everydaystrong (or on Apple Podcast and Spotify). Learn more about us at everydaystrong.org.

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