Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Andy: So I just finished reading your book yesterday, which is about friendship and how the science of attachment can help us to make and keep friends. Talk to me about this topic. This is something you've been interested in for a long time, or what inspired you to write the book?

Marisa: Yeah. So for me it was about realizing that we all feel so lonely in this culture and yet we throw this form of love and connection away. We treat friendship as secondary, unnecessary, auxiliary. To me, it's like gold under our feet as that we see as concrete. So I just wanted to help us create a culture where we're taking friendship more seriously as a form of connection and seeing it as more valuable, kind of leveling this hierarchy that we place on love with romantic love at the top is the only love that makes us worthy or means true connection and seeing other forms of love is not mattering.

Andy: I found some really powerful lines in your book when you were talking about that hierarchy and then you made some points how we talk about oh, we're just friends, as if it's less important or lower than, and so much of just the way that we think about friendship, that it's kind of this secondary type of relationship and really is interesting why we do that.

Marisa: Exactly. We see it in our language, in our policies, in our media that friendship is viewed as a lesser form of connection.

Andy: And what's going on with that?

Marisa: Well, I do talk about in the book that it wasn't always this way. That earlier before the love marriage, people used to get married for resources, reputation. It looks good for our names to be combined. And at that time people didn't expect love from their spouse. And in fact the genders were considered so distinct that the idea was that you can find deep intimacy only with your friends because they have the same gender as you. Well, not always, but yeah in this case.

So friends would hold hands, write their names into trees, share beds, cuddle, write love letters, go on each other's honeymoons with their spouses. This was all really normal. Part of what changed was when two psychiatrists, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Sigmund Freud, they basically changed the way society viewed sexuality. Before them, it was taboo to have sex with someone of the same sex, but sexual orientation as an identity didn't exist and they created it to stigmatize it and say that it indicates that you have kind of this development that had gone awry.

And in doing that, in creating this concept of sexual orientation as a reflection of someone's identity and poor development, all of a sudden there were all these behaviors that became stigmatized that were non-sexual in nature because now a whole identity was stigmatized, a consolation of behaviors, not just having sex with someone of the same sex. So all those things that were natural and normal in friendship, like holding hands and cuddling and sharing these kind of love letters to each other began to become stigmatized as indicating this sexual orientation that they argued was bad indicated that you had psychological problems. So homophobia basically as we know it today, really ravaged friendship.

Andy: Now, you really make a strong case for the importance of friendship and there's some really interesting studies in here talking about just loneliness and how helpful friendship is in so many ways. One thing I found interesting though is you talk about a study when men were alone, they rated an alleged terrorist as more imposing than when they were with friends. Another study found people judged a hill as less steep when they were with friends and I thought that was really cool how friends can really make us feel almost more powerful or more bold or something like that. But it also made me think about our audience and teenagers and a lot of times parents are like, oh, oh whoa, you're going to do more risky things when you're with friends or feeling kind of emboldened and stuff maybe as a double edged sword or something like that and I wonder what you think about that.

Marisa: Yeah. It is complicated because Lydia Dunworth, she's another friendship expert, she talks about how basically when you're around friends as a teenager, risky things come off as more rewarding at the level of your brain. So there is truth to that. But the other truth is that challenges feel less challenging. So that hill seems less steep and that homework assignment, that's why connection is related to academic outcomes for kids because academics seem less challenging. You can access a study group and work with people. So yeah, the more friends kids make in college for example, the more likely they are to succeed.

Andy: Yeah, yes. Yeah, I can do this.

Marisa: Yeah, exactly. I can do this. I have support and I also care about it. When we feel like we belong somewhere, we care about that place. So there's more of a motivation to show up for school because if I lose this place, I don't only lose my academics, I lose my entire community and my sense of belonging.

Andy: You also talk about empathy and specifically talk about saying dozens of studies highlight friendship's unique role in promoting empathy. For adolescence, friendship is a distinct space to practice empathy. So research finds that during adolescence, kindness towards friends increases, while kindness toward family is stagnant or decreases. That sounds familiar. I have experience with that. Yeah. Interesting. Well, so what's going on there?

Marisa: Yeah. At some point in childhood your primary attachment, which means the place that you kind of feel safest and that you're most excited about investing in goes from being parents to peers. So peers become super duper important to your child and to your teenager. And you might seem like they're less interested in hanging out with you and they're more interested in hanging out with their friends and that is developmentally appropriate, not something to take personally. It's going to happen with all the teenagers. I see it happening with my nieces. I'm like, you don't like hanging out with me anymore more? Okay.

Yeah. I think talking about friendship with adolescence is really fascinating because I talk about how our friends have really made us who we are and there's research that finds that whether you have friends in adolescence predicts your self-esteem as an adult and even your levels of empathy, later on your morality. And so there's this way that friendship was at the center of all of our lives at one point. No matter where we are now, at one point in our lives, probably the friend was the person that we felt maybe most closest to in this world.

And there is this amnesia that happens after I see my students, they're freshman, sophomore in college and they're still so invested in friendship and I'm in my early thirties and I just see how there's more of this kind of nuclear families being set up and people becoming more insular with their kids and their families, which is understandable. Kids are a full-time commitment, but all of us have this time where friendship was so, so central. So it's not so far into all of us to consider that friends could be an end into itself, like an amazing relationship in itself rather than I think as we get older or in my age group, sometimes it's perceived as auxiliary, unnecessary because you have this marriage, which I also argue against in the book.

Andy: Yeah. Oh, yeah. I think a lot of people have had that experience of having a good friend who gets married or starts dating someone and feeling like you just got demoted in that person's life or in their hierarchy of something. Yeah, it doesn't feel good. What do you mean by self expansion? Friendship is a powerful trigger for self expansion. That sounds good.

Marisa: Yeah. This theory called self expansion theory basically argues that we're always looking to expand our sense of self, our sense of who we are. And the primary way that we do that is through our relationships. So we're all motivated to engage in relationships with others because others expose us to new ways of showing up in the world and they help us figure out who we are because it's like this friend likes golf. Now I think about do I like golf? I can incorporate that into my identity. It's like friends are a huge marketing team for all the ways we could live our lives. And in that way, they really help us just figure out who we really are.

Andy: So is this a kind of counterproductive to have this whole book all about friendship and how to create and promote friendship? Shouldn't friendship just be effortless and feel natural?

Marisa: No. I mean no, it's not happening naturally. Our friendship networks have been shrinking for decades. Let's not assume it happens organically. I talk about it in the book How For kids. Sometimes it happens more organically because they have what Rebecca G. Adams sociologist considers essential parts of friendship happening organically. Seeing people repeatedly over time in a planned way like school and then being vulnerable, so that's like recess, gym, lunch. But as adults we don't really have that. I mean workplace, I don't know. A lot of workplaces, people don't feel comfortable being so vulnerable in the ways that they might at school.

Adulthood actually thinking that it happens organically is linked to being more lonely over time. But I also think it's important to tell the kids this too that don't expect it to happen organically because even if they can make friends more organically because they have the right setting, they'll make more friends if they take initiative first of all. And second of all, actually Gen Z is the loneliest generation of any generation. And so there's this way that even though it used to happen organically for most of us, for Gen Z, I think because of the role of technology, those connections aren't happening as naturally as they used to for previous generations.

Andy: It seems like it's becoming more and more important to be proactive or you talk about being intentional and you talk about your friend Laurie who during freshman year of college and how you realize that actually Laurie had been really intentional about initiating friendship.

Marisa: Yeah. And we're still best friends because she did all these years later. Yeah. My story with Laurie is like sometimes you think it's happening organically, but that's just because the other person is taking the initiative and you're not.

Andy: And if you just sit around and wait for it to happen organically, then you're also settling for whatever friends happen to initiate or take interest in you or happen to just work out or fall into. Whereas when you're more intentional, then you're actually pursuing friendships with people that you really want to be friends with and there's a big difference there.

Marisa: Exactly. You get to decide. So in my class is on loneliness, one of the classes they hang out outside of class and the other they don't. So I'm trying to figure out what's the difference between these two classes.

Andy: Interesting.

Marisa: Why is one of them hanging out and they send me a picture of 10 of them getting lunch together and the other isn't? And what I determined is that one class has something I call an igniter and igniter is my student who says, "I'm going to lunch, anybody want to come? Everybody's invited." And because she's willing to risk rejection, 10 other people in the class now have community on her behalf.

And so if we can become igniters, I've seen this too because I'm an igniter, obviously. I wrote this book so I'm in a good position of being an igniter. I go to a friend's party, I see five out of seven people there, people that I've introduced her to through my network. The igniter starts the groups and because they start the groups, they get to curate the group, they get to decide what the group does. It's vulnerable. You're risking more rejection. It's a lot more work, but also seven other people have friends now because of you, because they were waiting for it to happen organically and you created that infrastructure for it for so many people. Because we're so lonely, I think I wish we had more igniters and not people just waiting, people that initiated and created that community for so many.

Andy: What do you think that parents can do to help our kids to be more of an igniter, to empower them, to put themselves out there like that?

Marisa: One big tip that I share to make friends is to assume people like you because when researchers told people that they'd be liked based on their personality profiles, this was false, this wasn't true. It made people go out into this group and be more friendly and more likable. So it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Whereas those people that tend to think they'll be rejected, they come off as rejecting, they are cold, they're withdrawn. I see it with my students. They're coming on the field trip to make friends, but they have their headphones in their ears and they're not talking to anyone and who wants to approach that, but they're just really afraid of rejection themselves.

Andy: Yeah. Put these barriers up so that we don't have to face the possibility of rejection.

Marisa: Exactly.

Andy: It's a safe little bubble.

Marisa: Yeah. So when I met a woman who was really good at making friends, she was like, this is what my mom always told me. Everybody wants to be your friend. They're just waiting for you to initiate. That's what we got to tell our kids that hey.

Andy: I love that.

Marisa: People like you kid. They're just waiting for you to initiate it.

Andy: Some of these ideas are pretty simple but really make a lot of sense. You talk in here about Propinquity and this study where they sat people alphabetically, police officers, and they looked at which ones would become friends and it was like 90% of them were that developed a friendship with someone they sat next to, which you were saying school kind of just creates that kind of situation where you're going to get maybe shuffled up and sat next to different people for an extended period of time and get exposed to people and have almost kind of perfect storm to be connecting with people.

Definitely remember noticing after graduating from college and feeling like, wow, it's really different trying to make friends and connect with people when you move to a new city, but you're an adult and you take it for granted that oh, yeah, it's easy to make friends when you just are sitting next to someone for a whole semester or something like that, but not as easy in a lot of adult situations where we just maybe see people one time and never see them again or something like that.

Marisa: Exactly. And that's another tip you could share with your kid because when we consistently are in the same setting with people, we create connection. And in the book I talk about the mere exposure effect, which is this finding that we unconsciously come to like people just from being exposed to them. So there was this study where researchers planted women into a large psychology lecture. At the end of the semester, nobody remembers any of the women, but they like the woman who showed up to the most classes 20% more than the one that didn't show up to any, 20% more.

Yeah. So what that means is first of all, because your exposure effect says if you're more exposed, you begin to like people. When you first meet people, it's going to be awkward and you're going to be weary and you're going to be mistrusting. That's not a sign to jump ship for connection. That's a sign that you're on the trajectory of connection. So making sure we tell our kids that, that connection requires a period of discomfort at first and then it gets better over time and making sure that our kids commit to something that's repeated over time. Any extracurricular really will do this for them.

Andy: Yeah. Yeah. That's why joining different clubs and groups and teams are such a great way to make friends because you see these same people for an extended period of time once a week or twice a week or whatever it might be and it is bonding.

Marisa: Exactly.

Andy: You talk about vulnerability a lot and you talk about something called packaging vulnerability to make it more palatable. The issue with packaged vulnerability is emotions are the cues for other people so they know how to respond. We package our vulnerability to seem less helpless. What does that mean? How do we package vulnerability?

Marisa: It's when we say something that sounds vulnerable. The content of it sounds vulnerable, but the way we express it isn't vulnerable. I'm saying it almost like, oh yeah, my grandma died in a very matter of fact way and that's a way to make it feel a little less vulnerable. You kind of disconnect from the emotion of it, but the problem is that vulnerability and how you express things actually makes people more likely to pay attention. There's a reason why we have this emotional reaction when we're sharing something vulnerable because it signals to other people, hey listen, give me care, give me support. So these people that package their vulnerability and they take the emotion out of it and they think they're being vulnerable because they're expressing something that sounds deep, but it's a disconnect. It's almost like with sarcasm. They don't end up getting the support they need because other people are like, well she seems good. So I mean, sucks about the dog, but I don't have to reach out to her because she seems okay.

Andy: You write that a study found people who suppressed their emotions went on to receive less social support in their first year of college and report less feelings of closeness to others and they're less satisfied with their relationships. That's really profound I think. Yeah.

Marisa: And it makes me think about boys, young boys, the ways that they are taught. I was just talking about this lesson in my class and one boy was like, I don't even remember being taught not to be vulnerable. It just happened automatically. It's in the air we breathe this message that men, boys should not be vulnerable and it harms them so much psychologically. Concealing your emotions is related to distress and even suicidality and it's related to if you conceal something like the death of your spouse, you experience more health problems in the next year.

So I think it's particularly important for parents to make sure that they are encouraging emotional expression of their sons as a way to help their sons find connection because if their sons are never vulnerable, again, you just read the study, their relationships are less meaningful, they're getting less support, feeling less satisfied with their connections.

Andy: What do you think that parents can do to encourage that or to make boys feel comfortable or safe to share more of their emotions?

Marisa: So fathers should be sharing their emotions. A lot of boys report that they kind of look to their role models and how their role models are dealing with things emotionally. So if you as a father are always like, I'm fine, you never cry, you never say anything vulnerable in the context of your family, that's the automatic way that your son is going to become invulnerable too because he's watched you and he witnessed you. So more fathers welcoming therapy, welcoming their own expression of emotion. There's a lot of things that you should not say to your son, like you're a man, so don't cry.

Andy: Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah. Suck it up.

Marisa: Yeah. Not the suck it up mentality that encourages a lot of psychologically harmful internalization and suppression of emotions and literally just, I don't know, asking your kid, all your kids, how does that make you feel? Or what emotions are coming up for you? What was that like for you? Showing curiosity about their own internal world so that they have this practice of sharing with you that they bring in their connections moving forward.

Andy: Yeah. And then obviously validating that when they do share something or not making them feel like they shouldn't have shared it or bad for sharing it or something.

Marisa: Yeah. And don't go into, now let me give you advice on what you need to do better. Resist the urge.