Adolescent resilience
Why resilience skills should reach quiet teens before a crisis does
Psychologist and CounterPunch founder Mercedas Taaffe-Cooper argues that the teen causing no trouble is often the one being missed, and that early, physical skill building works better than waiting for a diagnosis.
Punching Through Barriers: Mercedas Taaffe-Cooper on Resilience, Youth Empowerment, and Counterpunch
Video from Living the dream with curveball.
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How can parents build resilience in teens before problems start?
Start early and make it physical. Mercedas Taaffe-Cooper says teens learn resilience best through an activity they already value, such as boxing drills, where each small win builds confidence. Linking those drills to real situations, inside a group where they belong, gives teens a toolbox for ordinary adolescent stress long before anyone needs to diagnose a problem.
Most support for teenagers arrives after something has gone wrong: a crisis, a suspension, a diagnosis or a long wait to see a psychologist. Mercedas Taaffe-Cooper, a registered psychologist and the founder of the boxing-based resilience program CounterPunch, thinks that timing is backwards. Her case is simple: teach the skills for handling life before the problems arrive, and many of those problems never take hold.
Speaking with Curtis on the Living the Dream with Curveball podcast, she described the teenagers who worry her most. They are not always the loud ones sent out of class. Often it is the student at the back of the room, rocking on his chair, causing no trouble and quietly disengaging, who falls through the cracks because no service is looking for him.
Her answer draws on four decades of coaching and years of work as a youth counsellor in schools. For parents of teens, the lesson is practical. Resilience is a set of skills that can be taught, and the setting in which it is taught matters as much as the content, especially for young people who will not open up in a counselling room.
Key takeaways
- Teach coping and problem solving skills before trouble starts, rather than waiting for a crisis or a diagnosis.
- The quietly disengaged teen who causes no fuss is often the one that no support service ever reaches.
- Teens often take in tone and body language before words, so physical activity can open doors that talk cannot.
- Lasting change needs an ongoing place to belong, with a path to mentoring, not a program that vanishes after weeks.
1. Prevention beats rescue
Taaffe-Cooper's first pilot of CounterPunch was funded through a mental health and suicide prevention program in the Northern Territory. What struck her was how few of the young people at risk were known to any health service at all. Services existed for teens already far down a difficult path, but the wider group who were simply not coping had nowhere to go.
That experience shaped her view that resilience work should be universal rather than reserved for young people with a label. The aim is not to treat an illness but to give every teenager a toolbox for the normal trials of adolescence, so that ordinary setbacks do not grow into something much harder to reverse later on.
She also moved away from the medical model of psychology, which starts by naming a problem and then trying to fix it. When a young person repeats the story of their problem again and again, she argues, they come to believe it. CounterPunch instead focuses on what a teen can create and build on, which she calls their genius zone.
2. Why words are not the first way in
Part of the reason talk alone struggles with adolescents is biological. Taaffe-Cooper points out that the teenage frontal cortex is still developing while the emotional centre, the amygdala, is fully formed. Teens feel emotions at full strength but often cannot yet explain where those feelings come from, which can leave them confused and overwhelmed.
She also notes that young people, and boys in particular, tend to read tone of voice and body language before they process spoken words. As a school counsellor, she found that bringing pads and gloves into her small storeroom office changed everything. Rapport that could take weeks in a talk therapy setting formed in about ten minutes on the pads.
Inside the drills, the lessons carry over. One tool she teaches is to increase the gap: when a skill feels overwhelming, step back to the first stage and rebuild. If a teen keeps getting caught by the same punch, they learn to change what they are doing to get a different result, and that idea transfers neatly to a recurring clash in a school corridor.
3. Belonging and progress keep teens coming back
Taaffe-Cooper names two needs that drive adolescent behaviour. The first is the need to belong, and she says every martial arts gym and boxing club she has known works like a family. The second is the need to feel competent, which a steady progression of skills and levels supplies, giving teens goals that stretch them without setting them up to fail.
Progress also has to be visible. In one term, her group nearly doubled their one-minute push-up counts, and she uses results like that to teach the habit of small, consistent steps. The shift she wants is from feeling that life simply happens to you to learning that a few deliberate choices, made before the school day starts, can set its tone.
Above all, she argues that programs which arrive for a few weeks and then leave do little good, because trust is only starting to form when they end. Young people need a lasting place to go, with a path from shy newcomer to mentor and leader. Parents looking for support should ask not only what a program teaches but whether it will still be there next year.
