“Parenting is a very difficult task, and we need all the help we can get,” principal Alan Goodwin said in his opening remarks at the Parent Summit last night.

Yesterday, the Stressbusters Committee hosted its first ever Parent Summit, which was designed to educate parents on ways to help their kids cope with adolescent stress. Clinical social worker Britt Rathbone and psychologist Ed Spector were the two main speakers at the event. Rathbone specializes in treating adolescents with various mental health issues, while Spector specializes in helping adolescents use technology in healthy ways in order to live balanced lives.

The meeting was planned to mirror last year’s Whitman Community Youth Summit, which brought hundreds of professionals into classrooms to speak on mental health issues including depression, technology use, resilience and substance abuse, Stressbusters Committee member Robin Rosenblum said. After the Youth Summit’s success, principal Alan Goodwin wanted to give parents a similar experience.

Before the two speakers took the stage, the audience practiced a mindfulness session led by Dave Trachtenberg, a meditation teacher at MINDS. Employees from the non-profit organization, including Trachtenberg, have been working with students in class over the past several months.

Rathbone then discussed the differences between the natural ups and downs of adolescence and full blown anxiety and depression. He also referenced mindfulness several times throughout the evening.

“Mindfulness teaches us to not react but just notice feelings,” Rathbone said. “When we are anxious about something, it is important to just notice it and not push the feeling away because when we do that, the feelings always come back.”

Educating parents in the Whitman community on anxiety and depression is especially important because students are held to a very high academic standard, Rathbone said in a phone interview.

“There is a lot of pressure in the zip codes that we live in to perform at a very high level academically,” he said. “I talk to kids a lot and they are scared about ‘what will happen if I don’t get into the right college.’ But at the same time, all of the research suggests that there really is no right college.”

Spector distinguished healthy uses of technology from unhealthy uses. One of the central points of his talk was that screens disrupt sleep cycles. When we look at screens, the blue light prohibits our brain from experiencing tired symptoms, he said.

The Stressbusters Committee hoped the Summit would promote conversation among families about the mental health and technology issues discussed, according to Rosenblum.

“These are issues that parents often face within their own families and which can raise questions and concerns,” Rosenblum said. “Parents want to do what’s best for their children. It’s our hope that they will find useful tips and greater knowledge of the issues in order to help guide their children through difficult times and everyday challenges.”