Help Me Help My Teen: Maggie Dent’s final book aims to help parents and kids navigate ‘wonderfully bumpy ride’

Before Maggie Dent was a teacher, before she was a counsellor, before she was a beloved parenting guru, penned bestselling books or sold out auditoriums, she was a troubled teen who tried to take her own life. Growing up in WA’s Wheatbelt, even with plenty of friends, good marks at school and a passion for basketball and the outdoors, young Maggie hated herself, profoundly. In the first six months after moving to the city aged 17 to study journalism at university, the country girl saw someone shooting up drugs, was mugged and had her room broken into. A failed politics essay was her breaking point. “I walked out of there thinking there was no point living. I am not good enough. I’m never going to be good enough,” Dent remembers, speaking to STM ahead of addressing a packed conference in Perth on resilience in children. “When I (survived the suicide attempt) that’s when I sat down and thought, I need to go back into schools. I’m going to go and teach. I want to be in space where young people are who could also make that decision.” On her first day in a classroom, Dent knew, without doubt, this was where she was supposed to be. Since then, she has helped countless adolescents and children first as a teacher, then a counsellor, then as a world-renowned parenting specialist and author. Dent hadn’t planned to write another parenting guide after 2022’s Girlhood. But as statistics swirled about mental illness and suicide in today’s teenagers, she knew that her wisdom could be life-saving. And so it was, in part, to her teenage self that Dent turned when she wrote her tenth and final book, Help Me Help My Teen, to be released next week. Its aim is to help parents of teens, and kids themselves, understand the tumultuous stage of metamorphosis they are in and how to navigate the “wonderfully bumpy ride”, in a digital world that has created a generational chasm, rather than a gap. Teenagers are facing myriad challenges often completely foreign to their parents, Dent concedes. The statistics around anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicide are terrifying and getting worse. Social media, negative body image, cyberbullying, online pornography, sexting and more stand in their path. But, Dent says, there is hope. Teens can handle those pressures in a positive way with the presence of just one safe adult, according to research. Dent’s book highlights the importance of “lighthouses” — the term for other adults in a child’s life who support and guide them, whether it be teachers, grandparents, aunts and uncles or family friends. “It’s dark in there, inside the teenage brain and in their bodies and in their hearts, and anything that brings light brings hope,” she says. “We can keep reminding them that it is just bumpy for a while and it’s going to get better. You are not defined by your grades. You’re not defined by your last mistake . . . Don’t assume they are OK, even if they have a great, loving family; just say, ‘there is always a bed at my place for you’. Just be available.” For Dent, it’s also about reframing the teenage years from something to be feared into a period of growth and transformation, during which parents need to also give their children space to become young adults. The book gives practical advice on being the “rails on the bridge” and how to react constructively when their teenager inevitably does something foolish. The first thing to do is to deal with their own anger first; Dent likens it to a stirred up jar of glitter, which must be allowed to settle. “Teens are wired to take risks, to not make good decisions, to be driven by what their friends are doing, and when something really scary happens, the first reaction of every parent is to get angry,” she explains. “That is actually a normal response; you are not a lousy parent because you lost it with your kid because they crashed your car. But if something awful happens at a party, or if they’ve just failed the most important exam of their life, what do we want our teen to think in that moment? Do we want them to say ‘someone please call my mum and dad’ or ‘please don’t tell my parents’? “I think that’s why I wrote the book, to be able to communicate that — tell teens ‘no matter what happens, we’ve always got your back and together, we are going to work out how to get through this. I’m not going to tell you what to do. I’m not going to fix it for you. But I’m going to stand by you and we’re going to get really good information, and I’m going to be here while you work this out’.” The first section of the book explains what is happening for today’s teens, including how changes in their brains contribute to the things that so often infuriate parents, from messy bedrooms to mood swings, impulsive behaviour, forgetfulness and monosyllabic answers. The second provides practical advice for tackling the most difficult issues, including vaping, sex, mental health, gender identity, drugs and alcohol, bullying, phone use, body image, self-harm, gaming and grief. Dent says that while the changes in the brain in early adolescence makes them vulnerable, they are also able to learn at a faster rate than at any point after the age of five. The trick is to find their “spark”, a passion that lights them up, and encourage them to embrace it. “They can pick up a musical instrument and language, improve their art, improve their soccer, their basketball, whatever, if they throw themselves into it, but it’s in that same window that they feel useless and stupid,” she explains. “Unless we shine a light on that potential, some of them don’t necessarily leap into that space; they’ll hide online and get addicted instead to social media or vaping or something else. We need to tell them that this is an exciting window, where you have potential for enormous growth, even if you don’t like who you are at the moment.” It was also vital to guard against enemies assailing teens, including the at-all-costs pursuit of high marks and the toxic side of life online. Over-testing has long been one of Dent’s biggest bugbears — she describes the school system as “stealing childhood” and reveals that as an “anti-homework queen” in terms of primary school, every Wednesday afternoon, her four sons were encouraged to eschew study in favour of the beach or the park. “We know the pressure to do well at school now is one of the key drivers of poor mental health,” Dent says. “Parents judge themselves by the grades that their kids get, and we’re now finding that parental disappointment is really a huge factor in what crushes some of our children: the thought that they are letting their parents down. We need them to know that there are so many ways we can get to wherever we are meant to be, other than grades.” She also rails against social media giants, accusing them of “marinating” teens in harmful content, including misogynistic values and unrealistic body images. At SXSW Sydney in October, she’ll headline a session with Hamish Blake, Nova’s Michael “Wippa” Wipfli and Felicity McVay, the former head of entertainment at TikTok, about the 36 Months campaign to raise the age for social media access from 13 to 16. “(Tech companies) can see, statistically, the harm they’re causing and they could change it tomorrow, but they just won’t,” Dent says. “We want to make parents really aware of the harm we see and that we have to do something, but we also want the teens to get angry. They’re being used to make profit. Kids actually want (the age for social media raised) because they see the harm.” Giving teens agency, allowing them to take risks and insisting they work to solve their own problems, is a vital step towards adulthood, Dent says. “Teens can be moody and difficult and disrespectful and untidy, but when you find a pathway in, you can have some really big conversations with them about the world,” she says. “They’re wired to do things in a way that expands their confidence and their sense of self and their autonomy. And one of the mistakes we make with modern parenting is we’re more likely to avoid letting them have too much autonomy, because we think we know better and we want to keep them safe. “But this is about how we can come alongside them and really listen. That’s why I have so many (suggested responses from parents to to teens in the book) like ‘what’s your plan for this scenario? What’s plan B?’ We want to help them think about overcoming things. “I’m really big believer in second chances, and third chances. Punishment doesn’t teach. A parent will say, ‘if they did that, I’m going to ground them for the rest of their life’. Well, OK, but that’s actually not going to help them learn, it is not going to help them grow and it is probably going to damage their relationship with you, which is fundamental for them to go forward in a positive way.” But Dent says the reality is that friction, mood swings and negative behaviour is normal as teenagers push against boundaries, with parents as those rails on the bridge. The book contains advice and templates for parents to bolster communication — “the three Cs: come with calmness, come with curiosity, and come with compassion” — as well as helping teens develop strategies to both understand and manage their feelings. When Dent unboxed the first copies of Help Me Help My Teen recently, she became emotional. Her voice catches as she talks about how she feels she has come full circle from that early decision to help struggling teens. “It took me back to the beginning, when I wrote the first one thinking, ‘God who’s gonna read this?’ Now I get stopped by dads nearly as much as mums and that makes me emotional, too. Because that’s why I did it: I thought I could help and I think I have,” Dent explains. “I was in Canada in April and a lady reached out to me at the Vancouver aquarium and help my hand and said, ‘Maggie Dent, you changed my life, mum of three boys here’. “I looked at her and I suddenly thought, ‘how has a little girl from the farm in Wandering done that?’” Help Me Help My Teen by Maggie Dent, $36.99, published by Macmillan Australia, will be released on Tuesday, July 30. Lifeline: 13 11 14.