She said she will first acknowledge their feelings and say, "Okay, this is really hard," when they talk about their sports seasons or proms being canceled.
"I mean the list can go on and on for all the losses," Kozak said. But she said based on the experience of her husband's deployment, when he missed out on several significant family moments, she is encouraging them to focus on the things they can change and can do at this time.
"My husband missed a lot in my kids' eyes. He was not there for my daughter's eighth grade graduation. There was a ton that we lost in time. And I said, 'But we were able to create other memories of him being overseas and us being here using technology. So how can you create different things using this gift of technology that we have?'"
She has also been encouraging her kids and students to rely on prayer - something that got her through the loss of one of her children, Liam.
"The question can be asked, how do you feel God in the sense of a pandemic? And I say to them: I have to go to prayer. And for me, the prayer I go to when I have no words, that my grandma taught me, is the rosary. When she had no words, when her husband died or my cousin died, that was her go-to. And so that then became my go-to," she said.
During her online Zoom classes with her students, Kozak said she has also gotten to know her students in a "whole new way" because of the pandemic. When she is done teaching, Kozak breaks her students up into "family" groups, and she then checks in with each family to see how everyone is doing.
"There's been more sharing of the heart and just the shared experience of it all. It's allowed us in many ways to get closer than in our other semesters," she said.
Daniel Johnson is a Catholic marriage and family therapy associate with Divine Mercy Clinic based in Duarte, California, who frequently works with adolescents experiencing depression, suicidal ideation, self harm, and anxiety.
Johnson told CNA that it's important for families to recognize that teenagers are in many ways facing the same feelings of loss and isolation and fatigue that adults are experiencing during these times of sheltering at home and social distancing.
"What I'm seeing...in my teenage clients is really the reaction to a dramatic change, and then not knowing the length of time that they have to endure this. Which is really true of all of us," Johnson said.
"It might be manifested differently in the teens, precisely because so much of their normal development is centered around their peer group and the cues that they get from other teens," he added.
"Many of them, especially the ones who go to traditional school, or larger schools, they're going to have a particularly difficult time not having those peer groups or the cues that they get from the social setting, which they are very used to," he said.
Cues like graduation, or end-of-the-year academic or athletic banquets, or final performances that signal the end of something and the completion of a goal, are now gone.
"They had a game plan and they were working towards a goal. And that goal, at least...the sign that they're achieving that goal - prom, graduation, whatever sort of thing schools do to mark the end of the year - those have been ripped away from kids. And so there is isolation and there is that kind of sadness," he said.
Johnson said the first thing he does with his clients who are struggling with the isolation and the drastic changes brought about by sheltering at home is to acknowledge to them that what they are feeling is normal and understandable.
"It's just acknowledging the emotions that are going on, or normalizing, to use the clinical term, the fact that you know, 'yeah, I'm sad and I'm angry and I'm stressed and I don't know what to do.'"
Johnson said the second thing he does to help his clients is to encourage them to connect in new ways to their support group, whether that's family or friends or a combination of both.
"Things that involve other human beings as the focus, not things that involve being in the same room as other human beings while other stuff is going on, like TV," he said.
The third thing Johnson said he has found helpful for his adolescent clients is to help them focus on short term goals and establishing a routine - especially since it is currently unclear when and how they will be able to accomplish some of their longer-term goals, such as going to college in the fall when some of those colleges may be closed, either permanently or at least to in-person classes.
"What I mean is really settling into a routine, finding the four or five things that are essential to you having a good day. And let's just make sure we do each of those every day," he said.
"For a lot of clients, it's something as simple as some daily exercise, talking to one or two other people, doing some prayer, and getting some work done on a class. Those kinds of things. It's focused on what is necessary for these 24 hours to be a good 24 hours."
Johnson said he would encourage parents to be on the lookout for especially concerning signs of depression or self-harm, but that some level of depression is probably normal for their teenagers right now.
"In the most clinical mind, we're all probably more or less clinically diagnosable as depressed at the moment….The problem is that, at the moment, there's some darn good reason to be depressed."
Johnson said parents could look for signs of their child not grooming themselves for more than 24 hours, or spending a lot more time sleeping than usual, as possible signs of concern.
"I think the real difficulty at the moment is, we judge depression and anxiety in relation to a baseline. We judge too much sleep by the last couple months. I've gotten about six hours of sleep every night, suddenly I'm sleeping nine hours. The problem is right now, we're all having a difficult time figuring out what our baseline is. It's even harder to get that baseline for our teenagers."
The most powerful thing that can help teenagers at this time are parents who remain calm and collected, Johnson said, or who are able to honestly acknowledge their own feelings and experiences with their teenagers.
"I think in some ways the best thing a parent can do really is, take a deep breath, put on a calm demeanor for their kid and then, late at night, go outside and yell at the moon or something...whatever you need to do to decompress," he said.
"Or alternatively, if it's hard to hide it from the kids, be honest with your kids about the emotion that's going on in that and transparent about one's struggle to keep it together," he said.
Shasserre said that she has found it helpful for her to acknowledge her own feelings of sadness and loss at the things she is missing out on in Cathy's senior year.
"It doesn't help when we dismiss it. It's helped when we've been able to talk about it with Cathy also by saying, 'I am really sad that we won't get to go to the senior parent Mass and breakfast. I was really looking forward to doing that.'"
"And when she responds, 'Well, it's okay. I understand. There are bigger things in the world,' I will say, 'Yes. I'm glad that you can see that. But it doesn't diminish that this is still sad.' There's a grieving process. There's a loss that they have to go through."
Mary Farrow worked as a staff writer for Catholic News Agency until 2020. She has a degree in journalism and English education from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.