Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Terry Real, author of Us, comes on the show to discuss the importance of healthy conflict in family relationships. We also talk about why parents should encourage boys to be in touch with their emotions and debate the dangers of protecting kids’ feelings.



Full show notes

For many of us, a perfectly harmonious home sounds like a dream. We’d love it if teens came home by curfew, our advice was always graciously accepted, and conflict was totally nonexistent. We’d never have to stress about what to make for dinner or worry about who our kids are hanging out with. Everything would be perfect and easy…right?

As nice as harmony sounds, it’s simply unrealistic–and not necessarily beneficial either. In fact, psychologists (like the one we’re interviewing today) believe that conflict and disagreement are essential to building strong, nuanced, durable relationships with our kids. Without conflict, there’s no repair. Without repair, relationships never grow and evolve.

To explain how parents can embrace disrepair and negative emotions in relationships, we’re sitting down with Terry Real, author of Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship. Terry is a world-renowned family therapist, speaker, and author of multiple other bestselling books about relationships. He’s also the founder of the Relational Life Institute, where he offers workshops for parents, individuals and couples. He also holds professional training for clinicians to adopt his unique relational life therapy method.

In this episode, we’re talking about how conflict is essential to building strong bonds with kids. Plus, we discuss a concerning parenting phenomenon called false empowerment, and explain why parents need to encourage sensitivity in boys.

Relationships are never perfect–and they shouldn’t be, according to Terry. Parents shouldn’t feel bad about having conflicts with kids, and should even encourage a little disagreement sometimes. We’re only human, says Terry, and we’re bound to bump heads. It’s the reconciliation after disagreement that really forms the backbone of a strong relationship, he explains. 

In fact, for teens to have healthy emotional processing in adulthood, they really only need to get along with parents about 30% of the time, Terry says. We don’t have to provide kids with a perfect upbringing–we just have to be human, he explains. If we can bounce back from the discord and survive all the complications of our natural human flaws, we can create strong bonds with our kids.

But how do we find that resolution when conflict arises? Terry explains a few different methods in the episode. One includes providing kids with a path to redemption, no matter how much we want to ground them into eternity. If we discipline them without offering them a way to redeem themselves, we’re not giving them the chance to really learn and change their behavior. In the episode, Terry tells a story about how his own son found a path to reconciliation after refusing to do his chores.

Another thing we shouldn't be afraid to do is criticize our kids, Terry says. In the episode, we talk about how we can help our kids develop healthy self esteem by allowing them to fail and struggle.

We want kids to be confident; there’s no question about that. So we encourage them, giving them as much positive reinforcement as possible. But sometimes we go a little too far, explains Terry. In our quest to give kids high self-esteem, we might just leave them with the impression that they can do no wrong–grandiosity, as Terry calls it.

This feeling of superiority acts as an opposite to shame, which is what happens when kids don’t get enough encouragement, Terry says. Disempowering kids and making them feel worthless leads to shame, while refusing to let kids fail, struggle or take criticism can lead to grandiosity. And while shame might seem like the worst of the two, a superiority complex can be very damaging to teens as they try to swim in the adult world, says Terry.  If we strike the right balance with our encouragement, we can avoid cultivating both shame and grandiosity in our kids, he explains. 

In our interview, Terry shares a tale that helps us understand how parents can bring kids down a notch when needed. When his son had a playdate with a friend but spent the entire time ignoring the friend's wishes, Terry took his kid aside and told him the truth: that the friend seemed miserable through the whole interaction. Although this hurt his son’s feelings, Terry explained that when we invite someone into our lives, we have to make room for their needs and feelings too. These kinds of lessons are an essential part of making sure we raise kids with healthy self-esteem.

Despite the tough love, Terry also believes we need to help kids–especially boys–embrace their sensitivity. In the episode, we’re talking about how we can raise boys who don’t suppress their feelings.

It’s not just parents who might teach boys to feel out of touch with their feelings, it’s society as a whole, Terry explains. The patriarchy starts pushing young men away from vulnerability from around age three to five, often before they can even read! Even if your home is somewhat liberal, kids are exposed to these gender dynamics at school, online, and even on TV, Terry says.

Terry explains that girls go through a similar gender-related experience as they grow older, during the adolescent years. Around this time, girls are known to become less assertive, less bold, and generally less likely to speak their minds. This is also a result of societal conditioning, Terry says, and it’s something that often keeps young women from becoming their best selves.

Parents need to be actively denying this gender conditioning, he says, if we want to raise emotionally healthy kids. He encourages parents to help sons stay connected to their feelings while they’re still young, so they don’t have to do the difficult work of reconnecting to their emotions as adults. The more we can allow them to be vulnerable with themselves and others the better.

The same idea goes for girls–it’s important to help them speak their mind, Terry says. In our interview, he offers tips for helping teens embrace their emotions, especially when they’re pushing you away and don’t seem to want to talk about anything at all. Parents might have to dig sometimes to get teens to share their feelings, but when they do, the results are worth it, says Terry.

We cover a lot of fascinating material with Terry in this week’s episode! On top of the topics discussed above we also talk about:

If you enjoyed this week's episode, check out Terry’s website, terryreal.com. Don’t forget to share and subscribe, and we’ll see you next week!

Follow us on Social Media! We're @talkingtoteens on Instagram and TikTok