Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Andy: So, you've got a really powerful book here, man. You're talking all about this trip that you took with your son, and getting to know him better after his Asperger's diagnosis... And really, some cool stories in the book, and really powerful journey that you take with the son, but also some really important points you make in here, just about parents in general, especially in this country and the expectations that we have for our kids and what is all wrapped up in that. Can you talk a little about what inspired you to write this book or where all of this came from and what the process was like?

Ron: I sure can. First, the title, Love That Boy, comes from President George Bush, an admonition he gave me, in a story that I start the book with... Where he realized my expectations for my son weren't lined up with the realities. Very intuitive moment with the president. The book was inspired, not just by Tyler, my son, but really by my wife, Lori. I like to say Tyler is the star of the book, but Lori's the hero of it. Literally as we walked out of the clinician's office with our fresh diagnosis that our 12-year-old boy was autistic, with at the time what they called Asperger's Syndrome, high-functioning autism... With tears in her beautiful blue eyes, she said, "You got to step up." And what she meant by that was, I had spent a lot of time fulfilling my ego and chasing my dreams and fulfilling my duties as a single bread winner, going around the world with presidents...

I was covering the presidency in The White House for the Associated Press, and presidential candidates during the presidential year. So I would go around the country, starting with Ohio and New Hampshire... And that took me away from the family a lot. And she said, "You got to step up and use this job that took you away from our family to connect with our son, our youngest boy, Tyler." And literally, as we're getting in the car, she says, "Specifically what you're going to do, whether you want to or not, at least one week in a month, you're going to take a road trip with Tyler..." She called them road trips, I called them guilt trips. Isn't that great?

Go to a presidential library or a presidential home... Presidential historical site, because that's one thing we had in common. We didn't have sports in common, which is what I thought I had to have in common with my son, it's the only way I knew to parent. But he loves, he still does to this day, loves history... And I was covering it, in effect, out of my house. So off we went, to spend about a year on the road together, me learning about him... He didn't really have to learn about me. And what started out to be, what I originally wrote as a story about Bill Clinton and George Bush... Because the last trips we took were visits with those two former presidents... Tyler spent an hour with both of them.

Andy: Wow.

Ron: And I learned something new about both of them that was very revealing, and I'd known them and written about them for decades. So I wrote this political piece, and my editor at the time, threw it back to me across his desk and he said, "Hey buried down there in your 15th paragraph, you mentioned that Tyler... You have this poignant scene," I can read it to you later if you want, "where Tyler feels like he's letting you down at The White House. How did that make you feel?"

And I start crying in my editor's office. I said, "It made me feel horrible. What kind of father makes his son feel shame like that and feel guilt like that?" He says... And he threw my hard copy at me, and said, "Go write that story." So with a lot of research, a lot of soul-searching... And then with a lot of research, I realized that I had these expectations for my son, that were shaping and misshaping my son. And son of a gun, all of us parents have different expectations for our children... They come out of love, but if we're not careful, they will hurt our relationship with our children and actually hurt our children. Now in my case, I thought that my son had to be a jock like me, and it was the only way I knew how to communicate with him.

But boy, I talked to a lot of parents, talked to a lot of parents, Andy, and I heard parents saying... And talked to a lot of teenagers. I realized that parents expected children to be normal, whatever normal is, not to be abnormal, like having autism... When in fact, none of us are normal. We expect our kids to go to the right schools, to marry the right woman, to be a star at something, whether it's the flute or football. To have the right career, go to the right college. We have all these expectations, and they warp our kids.

What I realized with Tyler, and what I want all parents to realize in reading this book, is that, while no, I did not have my idealized son, I didn't have the jock that I thought I needed to have to be a good father, but son of a gun, I had my ideal son. And instead of me spending all this time trying to make him a shallow version of me, I'd be a better man if I was more like him. That's what I realized. And it took a year writing this book and a lot of soul-searching to realize that I could learn more from him than he could from me, and I needed to adjust my expectations to fit his life instead of the other way around.

Andy: I think that's so common, that we see our role as parents is to teach them something and to help them figure it out, when if we can flip our mindset to be learning from our kids and to be almost alongside them on this journey and learning with them, that's really powerful.

Ron: Right. We want to teach them to find their own best path. And whether that means that they're going to study history instead of being a jock, or they're going to go to the University of Illinois instead of the University of Michigan, or they're going to be gay rather than straight, or that they happen to have a disability rather than not have one, or they marry somebody of a different religion than we want them to...

Andy: Yeah.

Ron: That's not our job. Our job is not to carve their path. Our job is not to burden them with our expectations, or to try to have them fulfill our unrequited dreams... I couldn't be a quarterback for the Detroit Lions, so Tyler's going to be. No, that's not our job. Our job is to give them the tools and the guidance and the support to find their own path and then damn well support them on whatever that path is. Even if it's one that you're not familiar with. Easier said than done.

Andy: You talk about the dreams that we have for our kids and you say they come from many places, and the first place is found within every parent. What do you mean by that?

Ron: We are wired as human beings to procreate, to have children. And we are wired to be afraid of death. Therefore, we are wired to make our kids be our legacy, to when we're gone, that we have a carbon copy of us... Some figment of us that is left behind. So therefore, whether we realize it or not, most of us want our kids to be, either what we are or what we wished we were. And so the expectations start with our baggage that we drag into parenthood.

Andy: It starts before the kids are even born, we're creating these dreams for what they're going to be.

Ron: I make that point in the book. Yeah, I draw a picture of the typical nursery. And look at your typical nursery, it's loaded with those expectations. First of all, it's pink or blue, so my kid is going to be straight women or male... If you got sports posters up there or you got ballerina posters...

Andy: Yeah, you mentioned buying a little baseball mitt before your son is even born.

Ron: Tyler hates sports, but boy, we nicknamed him before he was born, Tiger, because of Tiger Woods and the Detroit Tigers. And we loaded his room filled with sports memorabilia... And here we go... So we go to age 12, I'm still trying to connect with him through sports.

Andy: Aye.

Ron: We are in the room and we are hearing his diagnosis from a great doctor, Dr. Minnie Quinn in Arlington... And she goes through all these attributes of someone on the spectrum to describe Tyler. He has a hard time making eye contact, he has an unusually deep voice, he has an unusually high IQ, he doesn't like having conversations... And then she says, "And like a lot of children on the spectrum, your son has problems with mobility, with dexterity, with his fingers, and he runs stiff-legged." And what did I say? I said, "Doctor, is that why he's no good at sports?" I had turned his diagnosis into a scouting report.

Andy: Right.

Ron: She looked at me, and my wife looked at me... Only like two very smart women can, with a side-look... "Yes, Rod, that also might be why he doesn't like sports."

Andy: Yeah. Right.

Ron: It took me 12 years to realize I had pushed all these expectations on him... Out of love.

Andy: Totally.

Ron: Not because I'm a bad dad, I think I'm a good dad... But why was I trying so hard to connect with him through sports? Okay, I'll have to try harder to connect with him through history, or through animals, or through Star Trek... through one of his interests... But that's my job, or at least let him pursue his interests.

Andy: You mentioned a lot of the different categories of expectations that we have for our kids, and one of the big ones that you talk about in the book is being normal... And I guess just so natural that we just want our kids to fit in, to be in the middle of the pack, just to feel normal and not to get made fun of... We fear so much that if they're weird or different that they won't fit in and they won't be accepted and they'll be ostracized or made fun of. That's such a core human thing, I feel like, that's really hard to get past.

Ron: That's the first chapter of the book. What I do is, every chapter deals with one of our expectations. And I started with that one because it's fundamental and it's very representative. It's fundamental because it's easier to get along in society if you're not seen as different. And it's universal because all of us, out of love, we want our children to fit in, as you say. So, me wanting my toddler to be normal is out of love... My wife saying... When all three of our children were born, "Do they have all their fingers?" It was out of love.

But think of the expectation we're setting. First of all, it's impossible to be normal because there is no normal-

Andy: There's no such thing.

Ron: We're all made differently. Right, we are all snowflakes.

Andy: Yeah. Right.

Ron: In the sense that every snowflake is different. So when you raise a child to be normal, you're raising a child to fail. What we've got to do instead is to help our children embrace their uniqueness. And in Tyler's case, one of his uniqueness is the fact that he's on a spectrum... Embrace it, and then help him navigate society and be proud of his uniqueness. And if you can't, something I'm trying to do, at least on autism, I'm trying to change the world, so the world will adapt to people like Tyler, instead of changing people like Tiger to fit into the world. That took a long time.

Andy: How did you get past your desire for your kids to be normal? Or what did it take for you to set that aside?

Ron: It was this book... Writing this book was therapy. I know that's a...

Andy: Yeah.

Ron: But it really was. I spent a year on the road with Tyler thinking through this stuff, and then I spent three or four months writing a magazine article... And I already told you the process of that. And then another year and a half writing a book. It was really writing the book, when I had to make the book work I had to do research on each of these expectations, to get the social science behind, what does normal mean? And what is academic pressures? How does that affect kids? What is the real meaning of happiness? That's one of the chapters.

And in doing so, I just, word by word, research by research, I realized... And I can't remember the moment where it clicked in, where I realized... What the hell, none of us are normal. That it's an impossible goal to set for a kid because there is no cookie cutter human being. I'd be better off if I helped him be proud of who he is. Proud enough that he could withstand the expectations of the rest of the society for him to be normal.

Andy: Well, that's also a really powerful point of the book too, because you also have a chapter about genius and you talk about your daughter and feeling like you and your wife really didn't have a lot of pressure that you need to be a genius or go to this amazing college or get straight A's or anything like that... But that you had this moment of realizing that she was putting so much pressure on herself, and that's not really coming from us, where's that coming from? And it's the world that she's in, it's her genes, it's whatever... But-

Ron: Yeah, it was a combination of her genes, and we were raising them in DC, in a very high-striving school district, that held a high standard for kids and expected everybody to be genius... And 99% of the kids had to go to a college, and you really weren't worth the school if you didn't go to an Ivy League college and she was-

Andy: They give an award to the kids who get into all of the Ivy schools.

Ron: Exactly, exactly. And so we really don't think that we were pushing those expectations on that child, but we were ignorant and blind to the expectations that she was dealing with, to the point where we got a call one day when she was in high school from the school counselor, saying, "You need to come to school, your daughter is thinking of killing herself." We had no idea she was in that state, partly because we were blinded... We were focused on her brother, and we're blinded to the expectations that she was dealing with.

Andy: Why do you talk, in the book, about counting your children's friends?

Ron: Because that's another expectation that... It's out of love, we want our children to fit in, to be normal, to be popular. For all the reasons that we, on first, that's what we push for. We are not the only parents who counted our children's friends, and one way we gauged how successful they were adopting was how many kids came to their birthday parties.

Andy: Right? Yeah. Did the kids want to come hang out at our house on the weekends and after school?

Ron: And again, we do this because we love our kids... I'm not indicting parenthood or parents, but-

Andy: Totally.

Ron: … we have to be more self-aware. That you know what? Your child can be pretty happy, just like by the way you could be as an adult, with one really good friend. A friend who does good things that are hard with you. A friend that sticks with you through thick and thin. A friend who gives you unconditional love. A friend who makes you better. A friend who you make better. You're better off, as a human being, with one friend like that than a thousand, what I call Facebook friends.

Andy: Yeah.

Ron: Transactional friends. Friends who not just are friends on social media, but friends who show up for a birthday party or who come by your Christmas party, if you're an adult, or who are a friend at work... Transactional, passing friends aren't the same as those really deep embedded friendships... And all of us, especially when you get to be adulthood, none of us have more than a handful of really true, deeply embedded friends. And we should help our kids identify and foster those friendships, and be that kind of friend, rather than helping them collect a bunch of Facebook friends.

Andy: That's the type of friends that we're really looking for when we're counting friends, we're just looking for how many more is better?

Ron: How many people say hi to me when I'm walking down the middle school hallway? Or how many people pat me on the back as an adult when I walk into the Detroit Athletic Club? This has always been a problem in society... Social media exacerbates it, because now we get that like and we get those endorphins. But it's always been a problem, where we mistake that shallow friendship that feeds our ego and kicks off those endorphins, we mistake that with the friends that are so close, they're almost family.

The friends who would tell you hard truths. Who you can argue with and fight with, but still love. The friends that... We have one set of very, very close friends in Washington, and they like to say, friends are the family you choose. The ones you choose but you treat like family, and you make a member of your family. You are only going to get a handful of those in your life. What can we do to help our kids find those friends and be that kind of friend? That's much more valuable of a parenting lesson than how do you have 25 kids show up to your birthday?

Andy: I love this chapter where you're talking about, it's really not just academically that we want our kids to be stars, it's in all kinds of organized activities... Or we see our job as, to find the thing that they can be good at and then to just load up all the attention and coaching and whenever they need to excel at it, so they can be a star at something.

Ron: I like the way when you're describing that your voice got manic. We're desperate. We're desperate to have our kids be a star of something... Again, because we love them and we think they got to be a star to be successful. This was a good example of my editor really helping me out... Because I wanted to write about how I wanted my kids to be successful in sports because it was how I could bond with them. But I had to make this book universal, and she's the one who said, "Don't you think we all want our kids to be stars at something?" And it donned on me, yeah... And I'm thinking of my friends and the people I know... Yeah, we all want our kids to be high-achievers in school, or to be the best flutist, or to be the best pianist, or to be... We want them to be the best at something.