The pandemic has been the psychological workout of their lives. The next few months can be a time of recovery.In the more than two decades I’ve spent as a psychologist working with adolescents, I have never seen teenagers so worn down at the end of an academic year as they are right now. Whether classes have been online, in-person or hybrid, young people are dragging themselves to the finish line of a frustrating, depressing and, for some, unbearably isolating year of school.But now, with the number of new infections headed down and vaccinations widely available to ages 12 and up, most teenagers in the United States can anticipate a truly post-Covid summer. What should they look to make of it? For me, the answer is not “recover lost ground,” or even “put the past year behind them.” With the stress and constant adaptation of the pandemic now largely in the past, young people can enjoy the payoff of converting that experience into increased maturity and psychological strength.To that end, it’s important to remember that building psychological muscle is a lot like building physical muscle. Any kid who has spent time in a gym knows that you gain strength when a period of exertion is followed by an interval of sufficient recovery.For most teenagers, the pandemic has been the psychological workout of their lives. To put that workout to use, they need time for recovery so that they can enjoy increased emotional resilience by fall. For adults on board with that plan, here are a few guidelines to help.Give teenagers room to process what they’ve been through.For adolescents, as for many of us, the pandemic has been characterized by deep feelings of loss. They’ve missed sports seasons, holidays with grandparents, milestone birthday parties and other plans that are beyond rescheduling. Some have stepped back from friendships that won’t be rekindled. Many have had to experience the deaths of people dear to them.As adults, our loving instinct might be to steer our teenagers away from dwelling on the anguish of the pandemic and toward taking advantage of the now brightening future and expanding opportunities. But we should remember that grieving, though a painful process, ultimately helps us move forward when allowed to run its course.Teenagers may do some of their most productive grieving in the company of their friends. Colin Mooney, 15, of Highland Heights, Ohio, recently got together with several peers whom he hadn’t seen in person since their eighth grade year was derailed by lockdown in March, 2020. Sitting in a circle in one friend’s backyard, they talked about what they lost, including “our field day, our graduation and a special Mass where each eighth grader passes a candle to a seventh grader to make them eighth graders.” Talking through what they’d all missed offered much needed closure. “Sharing as a group,” he said, “really helped ease our minds and remember that everyone was going through the same thing.”Other adolescents may mourn in a more private fashion. Arielle Green, 15, of Brooklyn, N.Y., writes poems to make sense of her feelings. Her recent poetry has centered on “how the pandemic sucks, and how things are still going on in the world that are really horrible.” She said that her poems offer a way “to let it all out.”However your teenager goes about it, expect grief to be part of the summer. Give adolescents time and space to come to terms with the impact of Covid-19 on their lives so that they can, over time, savor what remains and embrace what lies ahead.Be open to negotiating the “must dos.”As with any summer, there will be some non-negotiables when it comes to how young people spend their days. Teenagers may need to get jobs, take over chores or brush up academically. Required activities can certainly be part of a recovery-focused summer, but when possible, let teens have some say in the details.Ava Vestergaard, a 17-year-old senior at Sunset High School in Portland, Ore., needs to earn money for college, but she’s really hoping for the kind of job that will help her fill her emotional tank after a draining academic year. “When there’s a job I like, I enjoy the work and getting to know my co-workers.” For her, a job that’s gratifying might be worth much more in the long run than one that pays a few dollars per hour more but offers little of what she finds restoring.And, of course, ambitious, self-improving pursuits can also fit the bill, so long as they’re more wanted than mandated. Ezekiel Salama, 17, of Shelbyville, Ky., can’t wait to attend the Governor’s School for Entrepreneurs, a selective summer program for teenagers in Kentucky. He’s expecting his constructive summer plans to leave him fresher than ever for the coming school year.That said, everyone has different emotional settings. What energizes one person might leave another spent. Should an adolescent be fortunate enough to have some choices about how she spends her summer, adults may be able to help by tuning in to how much, and what, she wants to do. If you can tell that your teenager is genuinely eager to learn a new language, start a business or write a novel, stay out of her way. But if you get the sense that she’s crafting a punishing improvement regimen in an anxious attempt to compensate for a stripped-down school year, you might invite her to reconsider this approach so as not to risk returning to school feeling more depleted than she left it.In a similar vein, parents may have their own concerns that their teenager has fallen behind academically this year. But if the school hasn’t called for an intervention, it may be best to let it go.Don’t let guilt ruin restoration.Given how much the pandemic upended expectations for what adolescents were supposed to be achieving, teenagers themselves might feel uneasy about the idea of making recovery a priority this summer. “Covid was a lot of doing nothing,” said Kari Robinson, age 14, of Evanston, Ill. “I think I might feel a little guilty if I use my summer freedom to relax.” Help your young people see past this way of thinking. The point of recovery is not to relax, but to grow. And if downtime is soaked in guilt, that growth is going to suffer.Don’t underestimate the value of whatever they turn to — even if it’s “just hanging out” — as they go through the quiet work of rebuilding themselves.There aren’t many upsides to having a virus wreak havoc with one’s adolescence, but on that very short list might be coming to appreciate the growth-giving practice of following stressful periods with deliberate recovery. This may be especially true at this moment in time, and it’s also how we want young people to be thinking about stress, recovery and growth long after the pandemic is over.

Here’s what parents need to know.As a psychologist who cares for adolescents I am well aware of the prevalence of eating disorders among teenagers. Even still, I am stunned by how much worse the situation has become in the pandemic.According to the psychologist Erin Accurso, the clinical director of the eating disorders program at University of California, San Francisco, “our inpatient unit has exploded in the past year,” taking in more than twice as many adolescent patients as it did before the pandemic. Dr. Accurso explained that outpatient services are similarly overwhelmed: “Providers aren’t taking new clients, or have wait-lists up to six months.”The demand for eating disorder treatment “is way outstretching the capacity to address it,” said the epidemiologist S. Bryn Austin, a professor at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health and research scientist in the Division of Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital. “I’m hearing this from colleagues all across the country.” Even hotlines are swamped. The National Eating Disorders Association helpline has had a 40 percent jump in overall call volume since March 2020. Among callers who shared their age over the last year, 35 percent were 13 to 17 years old, up from 30 percent in the year before the pandemic.What has changed in the pandemic?There are several possible explanations for this tsunami of eating concerns in teenagers. When adolescents lost the familiar rhythm of the school day and were distanced from the support of their friends, “many of the things that structured a teenager’s life evaporated in one fell swoop,” said Dr. Walter Kaye, a psychiatrist and the founder and executive director of the eating disorders program at University of California, San Diego. “People who end up with eating disorders tend to be anxious and stress sensitive — they don’t do well with uncertainty.”Further, eating disorders have long been linked with high achievement. Driven adolescents who might have normally poured their energy into their academic, athletic or extracurricular pursuits suddenly had too much time on their hands. “Some kids turned their attention toward physical health or appearance as a way to cope with anxiety or feel productive,” Dr. Accurso said. “Their goals around ‘healthy’ eating or getting ‘in shape’ got out of hand” and quickly caused significant weight loss.For some, an increase in emotional eating in the pandemic has been part of the problem. Attending school from a home where food is constantly available may lead some young people to eat more than usual as a way to manage pandemic-related boredom or stress. “Being at school presents a barrier to using food as a coping mechanism; at home, we don’t have that barrier,” noted Kelly Bhatnagar, psychologist and co-founder of the Center for Emotional Wellness in Beachwood, Ohio, a practice specializing in the treatment of eating disorders.In many households the pandemic has heightened food insecurity and its attendant anxieties, which can increase the risk of eating disorders. Research shows that, compared to teenagers whose families have enough food, those in homes where food is scarce are more likely to fast, to skip meals, and to abuse laxatives and diuretics with the aim of controlling their weight.The Instagram influenceWhat teens see on their screens is also a factor. During the pandemic, teenagers have spent more time than usual on social media. While that can be a source of much needed connection and comfort, scrutinizing images of peers and influencers on highly visual social media has been implicated in body dissatisfaction and disordered eating. Dr. Austin noted that teenagers can be prone to comparing their own bodies to the images they see online. “That comparison creates a downward spiral in terms of body image and self-esteem. It makes them more likely to adopt unhealthy weight control behaviors.”When adolescents take an interest in managing their weight, they often go looking for guidance online. Indeed, a new Common Sense Media survey found that among teenagers who sought health information online between September and November of 2020, searches on fitness and exercise information came second only to searches for content related to Covid-19 — and ahead of searches on anxiety, stress and depression.What young people find when they go looking for fitness information can be highly problematic. They are likely to come across harmful “thinspiration” and “fitspiration” posts celebrating slim or sculpted bodies, or even sites that encourage eating disordered behavior. Worse, algorithms record online search information and are “deliberately designed to feed harmful weight loss content to users who are already struggling with body image,” such as advertisements for dangerous diet supplements, Dr. Austin said.When to worryWith so many forces contributing to teenagers’ body dissatisfaction and eating disordered behavior, how do parents know when to worry?Parents should be alarmed, Dr. Kaye said, “if your child suddenly loses 10 to 20 pounds, becomes secretive about eating, or if you are seeing food disappear,” as becoming furtive about what, how and when one eats is a common occurrence in anorexia, bulimia and other eating disorders.Experts agree that adults should be on the lookout for behaviors that veer from previous norms, such as suddenly skipping family meals or refusing to eat food from entire categories, such as carbohydrates or processed foods. Worth concern, too, is the teenager who develops fixations such as carefully counting calories, exercising obsessively or hoarding food, which may be a sign of a binge eating disorder. Parents should also pay close attention, said Dr. Accurso, if adolescents express a lot of guilt or anxiety around food or eating, or feel unhappy or uncomfortable with their bodies.According to Dr. Bhatnagar, the view of eating disorders as a “white girls’ illness” can keep teens who are not white girls from seeking help or being properly screened for eating disorders by health professionals, even though eating disorders regularly occur across both sexes and all ethnic groups.“Boys are having the same troubles,” said Dr. Bhatnagar, “but heterosexual boys may talk about body image a little differently. They tend to talk in terms of getting fit, getting lean or being muscular.”Dr. Austin also noted that it is common to see elevated rates of eating disorders in lesbian, gay and bisexual youth of all genders as well as transgender and gender diverse young people.“Eating disorders,” Dr. Accurso said, “don’t discriminate.”How to helpResearch shows that early identification and intervention play a key role in the successful treatment of eating disorders. Accordingly, parents who have questions about their teen’s relationship with eating, weight or exercise should not hesitate to seek an evaluation from their pediatrician or family health provider. Trustworthy eating disorder information, screening tools and support can also be found online. And when necessary, online resources can provide guidance and support to those on treatment waiting lists. “It may not be ideal for many,” Dr. Kaye said, “but it’s the reality of the situation we’re in.”Parents can also take steps to reduce the likelihood that an eating disorder will take hold in the first place. Experts encourage adults to model a balanced approach to eating and to create enjoyable opportunities for being physically active while steering clear of negative comments about their teenager’s body or their own. Parents should also openly address the dangers of a ubiquitous diet culture that emphasizes appearance over well-being, creates stigma and shame around weight and links body size to character and worth. As Dr. Accurso noted, “We are not defined by a number on a scale.”Where to find helpThe National Eating Disorders Association, or NEDA, is a good starting place. It supports individuals and families affected by eating disorders.F.E.A.S.T. is an international nonprofit organization run by caregivers of those suffering from eating disorders, meant to help others.Maudsley Parents was created by parents who helped their children recover with family-based treatment, to offer hope and help to other families confronting eating disorders.The Academy for Eating Disorders offers many resources, as do the Eating Disorders Center for Treatment and Research at University of California, San Diego, and the Eating Disorders Program at Boston Children’s Hospital.