"How is my kid REALLY doing?"
It's a question every parent can sometimes struggle to answer. And sometimes we don't find out until an unexpected struggle or incident shows us the hard truth.
Vashti Summervill gets that. She’s been there as a parent, and now she’s there as a parent coach helping parents navigate all the scary stuff: depression, anxiety, self-harming behavior, disordered eating, suicidal ideation and substance misuse.
On April 8, 2025 Vashti is partnering with You.Me.We.All to offer a free workshop titled “Parenting for Resilience and Peer Support Workshop.” Recently, we visited her at her home to discuss how she helps parents build the tools to face the everyday struggles – and the life-altering dilemmas – that accompany raising a teen.
You.Me.We.All Interviews Vashti Summervill, Parent Coach and Therapeutic Consultant
Q: What are a few things you think all parents need to know – and you wished you learned earlier as a parent?
Here are three big ones:
# 1: How to tame our own anxiety and reactivity.
A lot of our reactions and responses to our kids are because we cannot handle our own anxiety and discomfort. WE ourselves cannot handle any failure our kid has or any social struggle – like not making the team or getting invited to the party. So how can we expect our kids to? The stress and anxiety parents and kids feel these days is one of the reasons I became certified as a Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) teacher.
A lot of harm can happen when we parents are very reactive, when our switch gets flipped and we’re no longer operating out of our rational brain (our upstairs brain), and we’re operating out of our downstairs brain (primitive, reactive brain). I tell parents that no teaching, connection or correction can happen when we’re suddenly very angry, in our downstairs brain.
One of the best things you can say – and model – for your kids is: “Listen, my nervous system is flipped out right now, and I’m not avoiding things, but I need to take a break so I don’t risk harming our relationship.”
#2: How to not overdo things for our kids – or overmanage their lives.
We need to realize that:
We can’t control everything.
We need to let the world be their teacher.
And we need to set and HOLD boundaries.
Let’s say your kid is neglecting their responsibilities because they’re lost in a video game or scrolling Instagram. And you say, “Put that down and set the table. I mean it.” And you keep saying it. And, after five times, no action is taken.
It’s not working. Why? Because there’s no clear boundary.
Instead, you might calmly say: “Here’s your choice. You can put down your device and take care of your responsibilities – or you won’t have your phone for the whole day tomorrow.”
And you don’t explain anything more than that. You set a simple, clear boundary that’s easy to follow through on. And you don’t energize or charge the interaction. You let the consequence “do all the talking.”
#3: How to offer support through validation.
Often, simple validation is all a kid needs. You can just say: “I can see this is hard.”
And then you might add: “And I’m confident in your ability to handle it.”
Our job as parents is to raise capable, resilient, compassionate, independent humans. Kids need to feel a sense of their own self-efficacy and capability – and we need to guide them to become problem solvers.
If we problem-solve for them, they internalize that. And they’ll think they always need someone to jump in and help them.
Q: You’re a parent coach. What is a parent coach and how did you decide to become one?
A parent coach is an educator, an accountability partner and sometimes a mirror on the path of moving from where things currently are – to a place of healthier functioning, ease and wellness.
The goal of the coaching process is to help parents reconnect with and trust their own insight, intuition and expertise. Sometimes, in the midst of all the noise and confusion, we forget that we as parents really do have the power to be agents for positive change.
I got trained as a coach from Parent Coach International (PCI) after being a music teacher for over 15 years and noticing more behavioral issues and more anxiety and depression – in younger and younger kids. At the same time, my own kids were hitting adolescence and I was in a constant state of “fight or flight.” It was really hard and I didn’t have anyone to walk me through it all. So I decided to find a way to combine my lived experience and my experience as an educator to walk alongside other parents.
I knew I didn’t want to be a therapist because I was more interested in the educational aspect of coaching and helping empower people with action steps to move forward. But I often collaborate with therapists and coaching is never meant to replace therapy.
As a coach, the question I work from is: “What can we as parents do to cultivate resilience in the world we find ourselves in?”
Learn more about Vashti’s services at Family Healing Pathways.
Q: There’s so much talk about the need to be resilient. How do you define resilience?
Resilience is an acceptance of all that comes on this journey of being human. It’s an acceptance that we are not always meant to be happy, that life is full of peaks, valleys and plateaus.
Part of being human is being really uncomfortable, a big percentage of the time.
So we don’t need to pathologize that discomfort. Instead, we need to better differentiate between what’s “normal life suffering” and when something is truly pathological.
We’re currently so programmed to be immersed in negative thinking spirals and believing all of our thoughts and feelings. But being resilient means you can step back into the “observer role” and say, “OK, this is here, but it’s not forever, and I’m equipped to handle it.” That way, you don’t get super spun up about things.
We need to accept – and teach our kids – that we are NOT born knowing how to do everything. And that’s the point of the human journey. It’s a series of opportunities to learn.
Q: In addition to being a parent coach, you’re also a therapeutic consultant. What does that mean?
After I started working as a parent coach in 2018, I was getting more and more referrals from social workers and therapists working with struggling adolescents who needed some kind of residential treatment, for things like self-harming, suicidal ideation, disordered eating, substance misuse, school refusal, social struggles, parent/child struggles or severe anxiety or depression.
And that led me to become trained as a therapeutic consultant, helping families who are having safety issues with a child and need a big reset. Through an organization in Seattle called Educational Connections, I tour and evaluate residential treatment programs across the country – looking at them from a safety, history, reputation and what types of kids and young adults they treat and what insurance they may or may not accept.
And because we know the programs very well and we do a very detailed intake with families, we’re able to provide a “matchmaking” service to connect families to the best residential treatment resources available for their specific situation. And, we can also support them during the tricky transition points – before and after residential treatment.
Learn more about therapeutic consulting and therapeutic placement support at Educational Connections.
Q: How do you see technology influencing the mental health of kids?
For a long time, we were “correlating” mental health problems and increased screen time. But now we’re seeing more studies pointing towards “causation.” My parent coaching certification was through Parent Coach International (PCI) and I chose their program because of its focus on parenting in the digital age, which is really THE issue of our time.
Kids are in a constant state of comparing every aspect of their life to other kids. And everything is driven by marketing, which is designed to make them think they’re not good enough. So they start to think, “If only my butt looked like this or I vacationed there, I’d be happy.” They never feel like enough and can hyper fixate on small, perceived flaws.
And it becomes very hard to convince them otherwise. As Carolyn Caldwell says: "In a society that profits from your self-doubt, liking yourself is a rebellious act.”
Teens and young adults are also ingesting a huge amount of news that makes them think the world is ending. And I don’t think we’re wired to take in that much repetition of negative news.
I believe that whatever we focus on grows. So I always try to help kids and parents to focus on what’s in your control and the small actions we can take in our immediate surroundings.
Q: What are a few small actions parents can make?
Action #1: Be honest about your own shortcomings as a way to “make repairs.”
For example, you might say to a child:
“I didn’t handle that situation in the way that I wanted to.”
“I wasn’t being the parent I meant to be last night.”
And that can put a huge deposit in the bank of your relationship with your child. It helps model humanness, instead of just pretending like we always have to have it right.
Action #2: Bring more joy and lightheartedness into your home.
The stress and angst we model is part of why so many kids are not interested in growing up. They don’t see any joy in becoming an adult.
In our busyness, we often only have tiny windows of interaction with our kids. I ask parents to pay attention to the quality of their daily interactions with their kids.
Is it all: “Did you do your homework? Empty the dishwasher? Talk to the English teacher?”
Or have you also had interactions that focus on true connection … or just having fun? We’ve got to ask ourselves: How is what I’m saying and modeling making my kid feel?
Q: How can you tell the difference between normal “rebellious” teen behavior and behavior that requires professional help?
I tell parents to look for patterns.
The first time something like smoking pot or skipping school, it’s an incident. The second time, it’s concerning. And the third time, it’s a pattern.
As parents, we have to be detectives. We have to see when things are becoming patterns that are detrimental to our teen’s health. And then we have to remember that life is not linear. There will be setbacks. But we always want teens to spiral in the right direction – upwards, not downwards. And we want to see that they are getting a little smarter, a little better at making decisions. And when that’s not the case, it could be time to get more help and support.
The questions I tell parents to ask themselves if it’s time to get help for their child include:
Are there significant safety issues here?
Are my teen’s behaviors spiraling downward?
Are they able to rebound well from a setback?
How affected is the whole family by what’s going on?
Does my teen have a vision for things getting better or are they stuck in despair?
Q: Why do you choose to partner with You.Me.We.All to offer a free parenting workshop?
Parenting can be lonely. And it can be really lonely if your kid is suffering while everyone around you is carefully curating their happy family image on social media.
Parents need a place and space to be real with one another. A space to trust their own wisdom and intuition. A space to support each other and remind each other that the small things matter. And they need tools to communicate better with their kids and create a more supportive home environment.
My goal for offering this free workshop and a peer support group is to help parents be change agents – and reclaim any power they’ve lost.
Resources to learn more
Website: Changes Parent Support Network
Website: Other Parents Like Me
Vashti’s book: Letters from the Wilderness of Modern Parenting
Vashti’s website: Family Healing Pathways
Book: Parenting the New Teen in the Age of Anxiety by Dr. John Duffy
Comments