It's really important to identify those feelings of sadness that just go beyond what we might normally expect to happen after something bad happens, or something unfortunate happens. These are feelings that go beyond that and stick around, and I think one action parents can take when they're noticing this with their teens, is to observe and share what they're observing with their teens. It's really important to keep the door open for future conversations. We don't have to fix the problem right away. 

Depression can often lead to negative thinking for teens, and the main way parents might be able to notice this, is in how teens communicate. So, this could be feeling guilty
about things that might've happened, overly so, having kind of a low self-esteem or self-image, this could even be thoughts about not wanting to be alive. For a teen who might be expressing some thoughts about not wanting to be here and not wanting to be alive, it's really important to reach out to resources to help make sure that you can establish a safe situation for the teen. This could include the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, or at a more local level, the Region Ten Crisis hotline. One thing that parents can do, is really, not simply just try to encourage the teen to think positively, but to seek
understanding about why exactly these thoughts are happening.

With depression a teen sleep gets disturbed, whether it's not sleeping enough, or sleeping too much, having a hard time getting up in the morning. What happens when we rest, when we're depressed is that we often lose touch with some of the most important activities in our life. We lose some of those opportunities, and so, one of the most helpful things a
parent can do in this situation is to find some manageable ways for their teen to still stay engaged with some of those activities that they do and enjoy.

Break up in a romantic relationship is the most common trigger of a first depressive episode for teens. Additionally, depression can really affect how teens engage in
relationships, in terms of maybe being more irritable, or reacting more negatively to things that happen within the relationship. A parent's role in this situation, I think, is
to notice when these risk factors are happening or when these changes are happening,
and help the teen work through them.

For teens, one of the ways in which depression shows itself is basically making their world smaller, and by that, I mean, less engagement in school, less engagement in socializing, in and outside of school and really less engagement with activities that they might've enjoyed in the past. And so a parent's role in this situation is to support engaging with some of these activities that are enjoyable. That can often have a mood boosting effect. I do want to emphasize that I don't think a parent needs to 
do it alone. Whether, it's getting support from people they trust, I think that
certainly can be one option, as well as support from healthcare and mental health professionals.