DBT for Teens: Dialectical Dilemmas, Psychoeducation, and Mindfulness

United States Department of Homeland Security

Adolescents face the following barriers to mindfulness training: a tendency to avoid/escape emotions, harsh automatic judgments, and the constant bombardment of technology.
When teaching mindfulness to adolescents, Jean recommends psychoeducation as well as in vivo experimentation, such as testing the efficacy of multitasking in real time.
Precisely because technology is ubiquitous among adolescents, she recommends utilizing technology itself to teach mindfulness. For example, many applications can be used to teach meditation and deep breathing.
In addition to the standard dialectical dilemmas of acceptance vs change and reason mind vs emotion mind, adolescents (and their parents) also face many additional dialectical dilemmas, such as fun vs responsibility, strictness vs leniency, independence vs support, and mental health issues vs typical teenage stuff.