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In this episode of Wake Up, Look Up, Pastor Zach explores the growing tendency for teenagers to self-diagnose mental and emotional struggles and the challenge this creates for parents. He encourages parents to look beyond the labels their children use and instead take time to listen, ask questions, and draw out what is really happening in their hearts and minds. Drawing from Proverbs 25, Pastor Zach reminds us that wisdom means learning to navigate the deep waters of the heart and creating a culture where honest conversation can flourish.
Have an article you’d like Pastor Zach to discuss? Email us at podcast@ccchapel.com!
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What is Wake Up, Look Up?
Check out new episodes of our daily podcast, Wake Up, Look Up, with Zach Weihrauch as he interprets what's happening in our world through the lens of the gospel.
Hello everyone, and thanks for listening to Wake Up, Look Up, a podcast where we connect events happening in real time to the gospel of Jesus Christ. I'm Zach Weihrauch, and in today's episode, we're asking the question, can you hear your child's heart? This is prompted by a very interesting opinion piece I read in the New York Times by Dr. Susanne Garfinkel Kral. She is a psychiatrist, and in the article she talks about a phenomenon she's noticed recently among particularly teenage girls and young adult women. She talks about in the past, there was almost a stigma with mental health with seeing a psychiatrist, even a reluctance when you met with a psychiatrist and were given a diagnosis to fully embrace or allow or own that diagnosis. that's not true anymore. Instead, she says that when young women come to see her, they come with a self diagnosis. Most of the young women she sees will come in, see her, and, and say, I have adhd, I'm ocd, I have severe anxiety or depression. And they're not saying that because a, medical professional told them that. They're saying that because they have decided, sometimes influenced by social media and online sources, they have decided to wear that label. In fact, she estimates that 50% of Gen Z, in general have labeled themselves with a mental or emotional, diagnosis. Again, not one that medical, people are giving them. One they've given themselves. And I thought, this is what's interesting. She wasn't being critical of that as much as she was trying to coach people like me, parents of teenagers and how to engage that. And what she said is, you don't take those labels seriously. I mean, I'm sorry, you take them seriously. You don't take them literally. What she's saying is, look, you can't self diagnose yourself with ADHD or ocd. There's a reason people go to school for a long time to learn about these. And diagnoses that are incorrect can be damaging if a person begins to live by something that may or may not be real. And because of that, she says parents have a tendency to overreact. The minute a kid labels something, they will either overreact in the positive and adopt that label, which can be harmful, or they will overreact in the critical, being dismissive of the label. But what she says is it's not about the label. It's about what that teenager is trying to describe. The teenager who says, I think I have depression and is saying something about what's going on in their heart and in their mind. And the diagnosis is not what's important, it's what's going on in their heart and their mind that is. So a parent who overreacts in either direction is going to miss what's going on actually in the kid's heart. And what she suggests is the parents listen, have a conversation, draw the heart out, in order to actually talk about what's going on in, in their child's life. Made me think of what the writer of Proverbs says in Proverbs 25. the purposes of a person's heart are deep waters, but one who has insight draws them out. I love that proverb because what's going on in your heart, in your head, that is deep waters. deep waters to the proverb writer meant you don't really know what's down there. And the truth is that's true. When I think about myself, I don't always know what's going on in my heart and in my head, let alone a teenager. My goodness, do you remember what that was like? but what the proverb writer says is that wisdom is seeking to discover what's happening underneath the water. And of course, not just in a parental diagnostic way, but in teaching, even teaching our teenagers how to identify what's going on in their heart and in their mind, how to verbalize that and then how to draw that out of other people. the truth is that oftentimes teenagers jump quickly to labels, in part because that's what we've taught them to do in a society. We're not a sit down and have a conversation kind of society anymore. Everything's done in 15 or 30 second sound bites and quick reels that you can scroll up or scroll down through. what parents need to make sure is going on in the culture of their family is the art of conversation. A conversation which lets teenagers say ridiculous and crazy things, even self diagnostic things, because they're just verbalizing the big feelings they have that they don't yet know how to handle. Listen, I know. As parents, our first instinct is to protect them from the future we think might be coming to overreact in the moment when all our kid really might be saying, at least according to Dr. Garfinkel Kral, is I need to talk and I'm sad. Listen, don't miss your child's heart. And hey, by the way, while we're on the subject, we have to learn how to share our hearts, how to draw the hearts out of our friends, out of our spouses, we can all get better at this. Labels are important when they're assigned by people who know how to assign them. But maybe all of us are just in desperate need of a friend who helps us navigate the deep waters. Hey, thanks for checking out Wake Up, Look Up. For more content, be sure to visit the Christ Community Chapel app or website ccchapel.com.
Have an article you’d like Pastor Zach to discuss? Email us at podcast@ccchapel.com!