What a Child Psychiatrist Learned about Teenagers and Self-Care from a Cat
As a child and adolescent psychiatrist and mom of 3 teens, I know a lot about teenagers, but my cat Pip taught me something profound about teens, mental health, and self-care. Pip is a teenage cat- not a kitten anymore but still super playful and not quite acting like a grown-up cat yet. He was always an affectionate and people-oriented cat. Whenever I walked in the door, even if I'd just been outside for a couple minutes, he would run up to me and greet me with a chirp and want to be picked up. He loved to be carried around, kissed on the nose, and adored.
One day, my husband cut several holes in a large shipping box and gave it to our cats. Pip was immediately captivated by the box. At first Pip wanted to play with us from inside the box. He wanted to jump out and surprise us when we walked past the box. He took his toys inside the box and wanted us to play with him while he was in the box.
After a few days, he started spending all his time in the box. When I walked through the door after being away all day, he wouldn't even greet me. I would ask my family, “Where's Pip?” They would say, “He's probably in his box,” and sure enough he was. He stopped chirping and meowing when he saw me. He stopped seeking affection. He just wanted to hang out in his box.
I thought, “Well maybe that's okay. Maybe this is good for him. He is a little too demanding of attention anyway. Maybe this is what he wants. Maybe he's happy to be in his box.” We wondered if the box felt like a safe place to hide out and get away from our exuberant border collie who constantly tried to herd our cats.
As days and weeks went on, he started coming out of his box less and less. Eventually, he would only come out to eat and use the litter box, and he gained a lot of weight. He wouldn't chirp or meow at all anymore but would just look at me in a sad sort of way, not at all like the communicative cat he was before. He had become non-communicative, overweight, and depressed.
We wondered if he was sick. Did he lose his voice due to some illness? Does he have some medical issue that’s making him act this way and gain weight? Should we take him to the vet? Then it hit us that all this started after we put the box in the living room.
So, we took the box away! He seemed distressed at first. When the dog chased him, he went to the spot where his box was and seemed to look for it. He acted unsure of himself, not knowing where to hang out or what to do. But within a couple of days, he was back to his old self. He would greet me at the door with a chirp again and want me to pick him up. With the box gone, he started to engage with the world and seemed much happier. He quickly lost weight and was perfectly healthy. No vet visit required!
It was so simple, but why didn't we realize that the box was the problem? This made me think about patients that I've worked with, especially teenagers who hide out in their rooms all day. So many parents say their teens only come out of their rooms to grab food, barely interact, and then go back to their rooms as soon as they can. If you knock on the door, they tell you to go away and yell if you dare to enter their room.
The teenager in their bedroom is a lot like my cat Pip, isolated in his box by choice. I thought Pip was happy there, but he seemed to get more depressed and unhealthy the longer he stayed in his box. This experience made me realize that sometimes we have to force or coax our teenagers out of their boxes, whether that box is their bedroom or the box of social media, video games, their phone, etc.
This is much easier to do with a cat. We just threw the box away. How do we do this with teenagers? We can't throw their bedroom away, and throwing their phone, video games, etc. away seems a bit drastic. Cats are much easier than teens, but usually with the right incentives teenagers can be coaxed out of their boxes. It's critical that we make the effort to get them out of their box occasionally and not just assume that they are okay in there.
Too often we think about teenagers the way I thought about Pip. I said to myself, “I guess he's happy in that box. Maybe I just don’t understand his needs. I feel like I never see my cat anymore and he’s acting weird, but maybe I need to let him do what he wants to do.” Pip was happy in his box initially, but it became isolating and unhealthy for him. I needed to pull him out of his box!
Have you ever gotten stuck in a box? I know I have. There have been times when I got stuck in my own point of view. When I wasn't getting out enough, I wasn't connecting with people and that left me feeling down and isolated. When people are going through stressful times, they tend to get stuck in their own mind and overfocus on whatever they’re dealing with to try to fix it. When facing stressful situations, often what we need most is to get out of our boxes and connect with the world so we can see problems from a fresh perspective.
Sometimes we must force ourselves out of our boxes, whether it's convincing ourselves to go out and do something new on the weekend, or try something like meditating to shift our mindset. I think this is part of why going on vacation is so good for us, because it forces us to get away from looking at ourselves and our lives the same way. Getting out of our mental box is one of the reasons why people use substances to alter their mental state. Some people say that getting a new tattoo or hairstyle does this for them. We don't have to get a new hair style to get out of our mental box, but we do need to make a conscious effort to get out of our comfort zone and do something different to get a fresh perspective once in a while.
We also need to model this for our teenagers and help them do this. Drag your teens out to a play, a concert, a movie, or a hike. Make your teens go on vacation with you, go visit weird relatives, meet new people, go do something they’ve never done before. If you need to, bribe them with money or whatever currency works for them (for example, it might be that if they do this activity, you will get them their favorite food after). Explain to them that getting out of their comfort zone will help them shift their perspective and that’s a helpful thing to do. If they’re feeling upset about some drama at school, have them tell you on a scale of 1 - 10 how upset they feel about it before and then right after doing the new thing (it will most likely go down). Share with them that when we do new things, we create new neural pathways in our brain, as our brain rewires itself dopamine is released, and we get happier and smarter. Be deliberate and purposeful about getting out of your boxes together as a family, and this might become a healthy life habit for you and your teens.