Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Andy:
Welcome to Talking to Teens. This is the podcast where we talk, not to teens. We talk to people about talking to teens and this is our 200th episode. In this special episode, we're going to listen to some of the highlights of the show so far. First, Ned Johnson and William Stixrud are going to tell us about why it's important sometimes to offer amnesty to our children.

Bill Stixrud:
I was talking with one of my childhood friends who has four kids and the youngest daughter was just a pain in ass all through high school. It was just all through high school, was just constantly testing limits, breaking boundaries, breaking rules, lying to her parents. He said, "We just had a terrible relationship. There's this complete lack of trust. We were trying to clamp down on her and she'd find a way to sneak out or whatever." Told me this story that one night in her senior year of high school, that the mother was out of state doing something. My friend had a church meeting. And so he gets a call while he's at the meeting from a neighbor who says, "You know there's 20 kids. Your daughter and 20 of her friends are at your house. They're all drinking."

Bill Stixrud:
So when the meeting's over, he comes home and the kids must have gotten wind of it because they'd all cleared out. They'd cleaned the place and he confronts his daughter and she says, "There's no party." "Are you saying that John across the street lied?" "Yeah, he must have, because there are no kids here." So my friend calls the neighbor again, and the neighbor's wife is a therapist, and he says, "What should I do? We've taken away everything," kind of idea.

Bill Stixrud:
She says, "Offer her amnesty. Tell her that whatever she did, it's like it never happened." And so my friend goes to her daughter and says that, "If I was talking to my parents and lying just straight to their face, I'd probably feel guilty at some level, so I imagine that you're feeling a little guilty and I'm not going to pile on. So I'm just going to want you to know that whatever happened tonight, you have amnesty. It's like it never happened." And he went to bed.

Bill Stixrud:
Later that night, she came and knocked in his door and came into the bedroom and said, "I had a party and I feel really terrible about lying to you." And he said, "The temperature in their house increased by 30 degrees." Maybe it was that that cold tension can't stand to be ... The warmth of their relationship ... He said it's completely a game changing thing, not to do the knee jerk, "We're going to punish you for this." And what he said later, what he told me later was, "Drinking's not good for the teenage brain but I went to parties and drank sometimes. I wasn't so concerned about that. I was concerned about just the terrible relationship." By prioritizing the relationship, it was complete game changer. He said that we started to communicate more openly, started actually have fun together, started to trust each other more, and her parole officers said she's doing really good.

Andy:
The next episode we are going to visit in on is with Michelle Mitchell. She's going to talk to us about how the brain changes in teenagers.

Michelle Mitchell:
So like we talked about before, whereas kids feel guilty for leaving that little child behind, we want them to know that actually their parents are expecting there's times where they're going to have different ideas and going to push back a bit more. And that they might start sleeping in later and finding organizing themselves a little bit difficult. And they might not, but it's possible. And no matter what changes they go through, their parents are there to fill those little gaps. And I like to explain it to tweens like this, is when their brain starts going offline a little bit and that limbic system becomes turbocharged and it starts to get in charge of making decisions a lot more, your parents are going to look over and start freaking out sometimes and they're going to say, "There's no one sitting where the prefrontal cortex committee of management is supposed to be."

Michelle Mitchell:
And during those moments where parents look over and start to freak out, they're going to start to want to come and fill the gaps and they're going to be saying things like, "It's time to get off that phone now. It's time to go to bed. Have you brushed your teeth?" And they're going to be doing all those things that you'll be able to do all by yourself when you get older. Now, it's so cute to watch them go, "Yeah, that's me. My mom's already doing that. That's me," because they're actually trying to identify with being grown up. And even though it's going to get more intense, they don't realize that yet. We want to give them that understanding that their parents walking in that space in their lives is there to partner with and to help them with the journey.

Andy:
And now let's listen to a piece from the interview with Brooklyn Raney. She's going to tell us an interesting anecdote about her son who used to vape and how he refused the suggestions that his father gave him, but accepted the very same suggestion from the cool drum teacher.

Andy:
Does that mean there's just no hope for parents to get messages through or what?

Brooklyn Raney:
I think that you're hitting on exactly my case for the trusted adult. There is lots of research out there that says a relationship with one trusted adult will change the future of a child so they will be able to adapt and overcome adversity versus bearing lifelong scars. The story you're referring to was the best example of this ever, happened right in front of my eyes, when after this vape incident with my son, of course, our knee jerk reaction is take away the phone, take away this, take away that.

Andy:
Grounded. You're never going anywhere again.

Brooklyn Raney:
Your drum lessons. Yeah, exactly.

Andy:
In fact that you'll never see daylight again.

Brooklyn Raney:
Anything fun, so knee jerk reaction. And then I called this drum teacher and I said, "I'm going to have to pull him from drums, got in trouble." Drum teacher almost served as a support for me in that moment as I'm telling him everything that's going on. And he said, "You know what? If you trust me, why don't we double the session this week because I think that through drums we can have a bigger conversation and I've had my own story in past and I think I have something to offer." And I was like, "Yes." I'm in the middle of writing this book. I'm like, "Oh my gosh, he's totally embracing this relationship and stepping up."

Brooklyn Raney:
Had to negotiate that with my husband like, "It's not a reward. It's more like education. Let's dive into this." Took him to that session. He comes back from that session. We're having dinner, we're chatting about it. And my son is like, "He said something really profound to me. I really connected with him. It was, is a vape going to kill me today? No, but if I make this choice to be this kid that sneaks a vape and goes to the bathroom with other kids who are vaping and then those kids become my friends and then it leads to something else and I've chosen my friend group and who surrounds me and that's the biggest predictor of my future, is who surrounds me. And so this one vape really represents a path to people and those people represent my future path."

Brooklyn Raney:
And I could see steam coming out of my husband's ears and he's turning red. And he is holding his forehead because he honestly had said almost verbatim the exact same thing the night before. And of course, my son was like, "Yeah, Dad. Okay, Dad. I hear you, Dad. Yep. I understand. Can I go now to shower? Can I go to bed?" And then of course, when the cool drum teacher says it, he hears it and comes back and regurgitated in this way that we really felt connected to. And so again, knee jerk reaction is for my husband to be angry and upset that he didn't hear it from him, but what was the end goal? The end goal is that he heard it. Where he heard it is not as important as the fact that he heard it. That understanding of our job as parents right now while he's in this pull away liberation phase is to surround him with drum teachers and coaches and theater directors and grandparents, other people who are willing to hold him accountable, but also love him and listen to him and provide their own context and their own stories and their own way of saying similar things to what we're trying to say.

Andy:
And now we're going to listen to Jake Teeny. Thanks to his background in persuasion psychology, he's going to tell us something about how to get a teenager to do what's best for them.

Jake Teeny:
But what's a compelling argument? Usually things based on logic are very compelling and so there's often two ways you can present things for why you would do it. You could do it in terms of a promotion focus or a prevention focus. So a promotion focus is, "Hey, you should study for this test so you can get an A." That's a promotion. You're focused on this benefit, this goal. Prevention focus is, "Hey, you should really study on this test so you don't get a D."

Jake Teeny:
Let me expand on the promotion, prevention for a second. They looked at the study between parents and children and they looked to see what kind of persuasive messages that the parents just naturally generate themselves. And people who tend to be promotion focused, who tend to think about all the positives they can gain, tend to generate promotion focused messages. All the parents who are prevention focused and think about all the losses that they're afraid they may have generate these loss avoidance messages. Unfortunately, that doesn't always match with how the kids think about things. And so these parents are delivering promotion focused messages to maybe prevention minded children, or prevention focused messages to promotion minded children and it's not as effective. Now in general, as we were talking with the affirmations earlier, if you can frame it in terms of the rewards, it's going to be generally more successful.

Andy:
What's all this stuff about loss aversion, negativity bias, and how the human brain is more wired to avoid loss than it is to ... Okay, so given that stuff, why do you think it is that still framing it in terms of what you can gain is more effective than framing in terms of what you stand to lose?

Jake Teeny:
Yeah. I think a large part of that is when you frame it in terms of what you stand to lose, you're focusing on those negative emotions. You're focusing on guilt, anxiety, and these are all tacitly associated with explicit persuasion, pressure tactics.

Andy:
It feels more manipulative. That's what I was thinking as you were saying that. If someone's telling you, "Hey, if you don't do this, terrible things are going to happen to you," it just feels more like it's going to trigger reactance like, "Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah? Terrible stuff's going to happen to me. Oh, well, we'll see about that." Interesting. Yeah.

Jake Teeny:
And so again, with the promotion focus, it's like, "Hey, this is what you stand to gain. You're free to do whatever you want," again, eliminating that reactance. This is what you can gain. In terms of prevention, it's like, "You will lose this if you don't do that." And again, it's very commanding, like you have to do this, and nobody likes to be told what they have to do.

Andy:
No. No, especially teenagers.

Andy:
And now, Douglas Fields is going to talk to us about how the response to danger differs in the brains of male versus female children.

R Doug Fields:
Well, that's an interesting example of the differences in how the threat response circuitry involving the threat response in the brain differs in males and females. I saw this in Barcelona with my daughter and this research comes from Larry Cahill of UC Irvine, who noticed that in response to sudden threats, activity shifts to the left hemisphere in females and to the right hemisphere in males.

R Doug Fields:
So back up a little bit, we have two brains, believe it or not. And we have these two brains, it's bilaterally symmetrical, and if you think about it, you cannot be synthesizing, gestalt, taking information and making generalizations. At the same time, you're doing the opposite thing of breaking down and analyzing, the reductionist approach, so we have the ability to switch between the left and right. And the left cortex is more analytical, breaking down and analyzing rationally the situation and the right brain is putting together, synthesizing, and getting the big picture.

R Doug Fields:
So as you and I are talking now, you're going about in your everyday life, we're constantly switching between the left and right hemisphere so we can do both things. Yeah. That's very cool. But it turns out, nobody expected, but in the face of a sudden threat, women tend to shift to the left hemisphere and men to the right. And why that is isn't clear. Dr. Cahill doesn't know either, it's just an observation. But I'll tell you, it's true. So when my daughter Kelly and I, and that's the part of the story, but we were chased by this gang for two hours through Barcelona. We'd leave the sidewalk, run down the middle of the three lane boulevard, against traffic, trying to allude these people. It was like a spy movie. You're running in and out of stores in the front, out the back, trying to allude these people.

R Doug Fields:
And it quickly became apparent that Kelly spotted the bad guys before I did. She was always the first to spot. We're hearing a huge crowd. And it was so apparent that I just left that to her and so when you put these two things together, the male and female responses, you have a very powerful outcome, so here's what's going on. She's picking out all the details. She's finding these bad guys' faces in the crowd and I'm thinking the big picture things. What am I going to do when I get these guys? Big strategies, that's what I'm thinking. She's down in the weeds. And again, together is a great combination.

R Doug Fields:
Now he doesn't know why this happens, but here's something he suggests could be, and that's because in most vertebrates and certainly most mammals in sex selection, it's the female who makes the decisions. No more important decision in life than mating. And birds do it based on how well this other bird does the dance.

Andy:
Right. What kind of plumage they got.

R Doug Fields:
What kind of plumage it is and all these little subtle clues about how good a parent that prospect is going to be and it's true for humans. Women make the decision, guys just audition. And profound outcome based on all this little information, whereas the guy is probably thinking big picture. "Yeah, she's gorgeous. I'd love to be with her." And she's thinking, "Is this guy going to take out the garbage, if I get a relationship with him? Is he going to be a slouch?" And all this analytical stuff is going on in this very stressful situation in the female brain, where the guy's thinking of big pictures. We don't know if that's the case, but certainly true that we have this different ability and it splits according to gender.

Andy:
Now, we're listening to Wendy Behary, who's going to tell us what schema therapy is.

Wendy Behary:
There's a certain number of emotional needs that go into healthy, well-adjusted development of an individual. And when those needs aren't adequately met, and they're hard to get met, even the parent with the best of intentions doesn't necessarily adequately meet all the needs of their child because parenting's tough. We say that when needs aren't met adequately, combined with the temperament of the child, schemas conform. And that means that if you grow up with this experience, "I was invisible. I didn't get what I needed from my mother or my father or my teachers. I felt like I wasn't seen, I felt like I didn't matter," narcissists typically grow up with the experience of feeling that there's nothing about just being that's really valuable. It's what they do. It's about performance. It's about competition. It's about achievements. It's about being beautiful, handsome, special, wonderful, the best, extraordinary. So there's a lot of emphasis placed on performance, there's a lot of emphasis placed on ease of life, low frustration tolerance, being spoiled in some cases, a learned dependency.

Wendy Behary:
And so they feel entitled to demand things, to feel superior to other people, to break the rules, to have privileges. And a lot of that comes from their background and the way that with messages, they were given the way they were taught the influences that were in front of them and the lack of unconditional love. So schema therapy tries to identify what those, not only the schemas are, because there's 18 early maladaptive schemas, but what the triggers are. What are the conditions in your life now that activate those old life themes that live in your memory, because it's natural and normal and part of being human, and also activate reactions that you might have had when you were very little when there was little survival power so you did the best you could, but you're doing them still as an adult as if you don't have any other choices?

Wendy Behary:
So a parent of a teen who gets triggered when the teenager is acting unruly or is pouty or is upset or is whining or doing all the things teenagers might do, the parent of the teen who gets triggered back to a time and place in their life without even realizing it because it's so behind the scenes, may react in ways that their parents did that they did as a child. They may actually, to get back to narcissism, work too quick, too fast to take the teen out of distress so much so that the child doesn't learn how to tolerate frustration. And it's one of the hallmark features in narcissism. They can't tolerate not getting their own way, not being frustrated, not being uncomfortable. So I'm constantly urging parents, although it may be hard to resist the temptation to swoop in and make it all better, give your kids a chance to muscle through. Let them be a little uncomfortable because that's good preparation for how the world works. It's preparation for life. But if you're triggered, it's tough to do that, if your schemas get activated.

Andy:
Next, let's listen to what Beverly Daniel Tatum has to say about colorblindness.

Andy:
Isn't it better to just not talk about race and just assume everybody knows what's going on and just not really focus on it?

Beverly Daniel Tatum:
Well, the trouble with not talking about it is when you've got a problem, and we do have a problem, if you have a problem and can't talk about it, you can't fix it, so we all have to be better at being able to have these conversations so we can really work toward real change.

Andy:
You talk about a father in here and there's this little scenario where he's telling you about when he'd pick his daughter up from school and asked her to point out her new friend. And she's trying to point out her new friend from this group of girls on the playground and it's the one black girl in the group, but she doesn't mention anything about race. She's talking about with the girls wearing and the backpack that she has and all these other things. And the dad is telling you about this and he's really proud because his daughter is colorblind. Then you say, "I wondered if rather than a sign of colorblindness, it was a sign that she had learned not to be so impolite as to mention someone's race."

Beverly Daniel Tatum:
Particularly, white families have this idea that their children should be colorblind. And I think what they really mean is that they don't want their kids to be racist or they don't want their kids to be discriminatory. And of course, I want that, too. But to say you don't see somebody else's racial group membership, where you don't see their identity, is to erase a significant part of their experience. So the daughter who might have been thinking it was impolite to say, "Oh, it was the black girl," is perhaps internalizing an idea that there's something wrong with being the black girl and that message that it's so unpleasant that we shouldn't even mention it, is problematic. She should say, "Oh, look up. I've got Susie, the black girl," is the easiest way to point out if she's the only one. That's the quickest identifier. But also, it's like saying the one with red hair.

Andy:
Now, Megan Maas is going to talk to us about porn and sex education.

Megan Maas:
We are moving away from an abstinence-only approach in sex education because the study shows that it just doesn't work. And actually if your goal is, as a family or a parent, to have your kid wait until they're married to have sex or have your kid wait until they're in college or a serious committed relationship to have sex, the best thing you can do is make sure they have comprehensive sex education because that actually requires a ton of vocabulary, lots of skills and comfort with their own body and knowing how their body reacts and being able to say things like, "I'm cool with oral sex or touching," or "I'm cool with kissing but I'm not okay with oral sex. I'm okay with touching and making out or something but-"

Andy:
What are your boundaries? Knowing them beforehand and maybe practicing how to advocate for those in really difficult situations.

Megan Maas:
You need skills versus just saying, "Don't do it," because then what happens is they don't have the skills to prepare for the situations that they will inevitably be in. And so when they get in those situations, they're not prepared with contraception and then it also shows that actually for girls, in particular, then they're more likely to have their first sexual experiences are sexual assault or unwanted experiences because they have no preparedness for those situations.

Megan Maas:
But in terms of porn, the analogy I use and that I used in my TED talk is, thinking about porn as it is to sex as we would to think about how fast food is to eating and nutrition. It's one of these things where you, I just want to think about, it's fast and easy and cheap, but is it giving you what you want out of life? If it's not impacting your ability to be aroused without it, can you masturbate without it? Do you feel comfortable talking about sex to another person and do you feel good about your body and yourself? These are all questions that you need to be asking yourself and these are typically questions that we don't ask of ourselves until we're in our 30s or older because nobody's ever talking to us about our sexual selves.

Megan Maas:
That's an academic term that we use and in my research is thinking about the sexual self, so how you are as a sexual being, how that integrates into your other identities and parts of life and is part of how you express yourself and is part of how you express your love with somebody else. And so porn can hinder that for some people. Porn can help some people with that. And so really figuring out what it's doing for yourself is important. One of the quick and funny analogies I use is that fast food one, just to get people to think like, "Well, if ethically produced porn is like your local farm to table restaurant where everything is humanely raised ..."

Andy:
It's like going down to the farmer's market.

Megan Maas:
People don't have access to that. And if you do, you're usually not able to do it all the time, but you want to have good sex that is healthy and can sustain a relationship and that is healthy and can sustain our culture.

Andy:
Now, let's listen to a segment from the episode with Peggy Orenstein. She's going to tell us how boys might want meaningful relationships, too.

Andy:
There's a point in this book where you got a text from Nate and he is in school in Southern California. And he's texting. He says, "WTF is up with the hookup culture?" He wrote, "It's like an orgy here. Is that the way to live? Should I be investing in that or forming meaningful connections with women?" And so then you are actually with someone else at that point Wyatt, so you guys talk about what would be the best way to respond. And then it says you don't tell us exactly what you say to him, but it was some a summary or something of what Wyatt says. And then he says, "Thank you, really. Thank you, exactly what I needed to hear. This is where my heart is." And I thought this exchange was really interesting for a couple reasons. The one, that he felt comfortable enough to send you this text message and that makes me wonder, "Well, how, as a parent or an adult that's trying to act as a mentor figure, how can you be that approachable?" And then two, what you said or how you figured out what to say that was what he needed to hear.

Brooklyn Raney:
Yeah. Well you forgot the part where he sent me a heart emoji.

Andy:
Oh, that's right here. And then he added a heart emoji.

Brooklyn Raney:
Yeah. That actually is one of my favorite scenes in the whole book. I'm so glad that you pulled that scene out because what was wonderful about that was I was Skyping with one boy who had been heavily into hookup culture and then had come through to the other side of that and Nate texts in and he says what you said. And what I did was I asked Wyatt, the boy I was Skyping with and interviewing, "What do you think I should say to him?" And I read him the text and they had this conversation through me. I was not talking, that I was texting what Wyatt was saying to him and then he was saying, we were going back and forth. And it was this incredible thing because it gave Nate what he needed.

Brooklyn Raney:
And I am still in touch with Nate. I just was texting with him the other day. And I know that conversation continued to affect him. And he really did go into college. He was a boy who really wanted to have connection and meaning in his personal relationships and he stuck with that. And I thought, "These guys are total strangers to one another. They don't know each other's names. They'll never meet. And I'm a total stranger, really. They just know me because I'm writing a book." And the serendipity of them being able to have this conversation is so rare and yet, it was so meaningful. And what could we do? What would it mean if we could create a situation where boys could have these conversations amongst themselves or trusted adult? And that's really at the heart. I think of both Boys & Sex and Girls & Sex, was that I wanted books that that parents could use to understand where teenagers are right now in all these issues, but also that guys or girls themselves could read.

Andy:
Get them talking about it.

Brooklyn Raney:
To hopefully open up more meaningful dialogue.

Andy:
A hundred percent.

Andy:
And now we're going to listen to Esther Wojcicki, Who's going to tell us about how we can use teenager's interests to get them motivated and to avoid depression.

Andy:
You have a story about a student that was being disruptive in class, unmotivated, he's called Caleb in the book. And what you decided to do was find out what he was really interested in. Everyone is interested in something, you say. Turns out he was interested in shoes, of all things, and that simple thing of encouraging his interest was a big turning point for him. He started showing up on time because he wanted to and started doing his work and wanting to talk to you. And I thought that was just such a cool example of how starting with what they're interested in and then you stayed in touch with him and he's not becoming a shoe designer or something, right?

Andy:
Things that teenagers are interested in aren't the things that they necessarily keep doing. It's just a phase that they're going through, whatever, but I think adults are worried that if they show an interest in the thing, then it's like, "But I don't necessarily want them to be doing that or whatever," but by just showing the interest, I think, that's just what teenagers need. And they just want to experiment with this thing. I guess, how do you see past your vision for what you think they should be doing or what they should be doing differently and actually find what they want or what their vision is for their life?

Esther Wojcicki:
So I'm really glad you brought up this example. Yeah, this is actually the key to the success of my journalism program with