Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Andy: Wow. So we're just talking about your book, Us, today, and also about your course that you have on your website for parents. And I'm really excited to get into this, I think you have some amazing stories and ideas in this book that I think will be really beneficial for parents.

Terry: Great, great. Thank you for that.

Andy: So, this is not your first book. You've been doing this for a while. You've got books on marriage on, well, I Don't Want to Talk About It, How Can I Get Through to You? So you've been writing and working and thinking about communication and relationships for really a long time.

Terry: Really a long time, I'm an old guy. But the first book in particular might be of interest to parents of a boy. The first book, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression, it was written a long time ago, back in the 90s. But it is not just about male depression, it's about what patriarchal culture does to boys. It's about what I call normal boyhood trauma and what the consequences of that normal boyhood trauma is for grown men. If I can just dip there for- the way we traditionally, "Turn boys into men," and even that is insane. We don't talk about turning girls into women, but we obsess about turning boys into men.

Andy: Interesting.

Terry: The way we turn boys into men to this day, it hasn't changed, is through disconnection. We teach, we insist that boys cut off from their emotion, from vulnerability and from others. What we know from the feminist literature about girls is that the great wound of girls happens at the age of adolescence, 10, 11, 12, in which girls famously lose their voices and move into that over accommodating, kind and nice and stop telling the truth and become disempowered. And the healing work for girls and women across the board in this culture is empowerment. The wound to boys, do you know how old boys are when the wounding occurs, Andy?

Andy: Oh wow. I'd say pretty young.

Terry: Three, four, five.

Andy: Yeah.

Terry: Which is clear, before our boys hit kindergarten, they are showing less willingness to express emotion, particularly vulnerable emotion. They still have it, but they're too smart.

Andy: Yeah, they figured it out, right?

Terry: They've figured it out.

Andy: That's not what we do.

Terry: Yeah. I say before our sons have learned to read, they've already read the code of masculinity. And do you know what? If you are in a gender progressive, liberal, hot house, nuclear family with your sons, God bless, that's great. But when they leave your home and they're out on the playground, they know the goddamn score. And after 50 years of feminism, when a girl crosses over to boy-land, there may be trouble, but when a boy crosses over to girl-land, the response is outright violent. And so what I say in that first book, I Don't Want to Talk About It, is that the cost of disconnection in boyhood is a disconnected man. And the healing move for men is reconnection, reconnecting them to their hearts, to their feelings, and to others. And across the board, women are asking for more emotional connection from their men, then we raise boys to ha-

And we have to change that, we have to raise relational boys. And this idea in particular, that comes from psychology that a boy must, "Separate," from his parents, particularly his mother, in order to be autonomous and all of that, it's all crap, it's nonsense. Mothers, hold onto your sons, don't expect that this... can I tell you a story to tell a story? You know I like to tell a story.

Andy: Of course.

Terry: So I have two boys now, 32 and 35. And when my 35-year-old was young, very young, I was driving him to a hockey practice, I live in Boston, so it was hockey, hockey, hockey. I was driving him to hockey bracket and he was only eight or nine, and he's in the backseat of the car and it's one of those typical boy things, "How was your day?" "Fine," "How are you feeling?" "Good," [inaudible 00:04:54] and I pulled the car off to the side of the road.

This is a true story. And I said, "Hey, listen, Justin, let me explain something to you. I'm in the middle of doing you a favor. I took off from work to pick you up, to drive you to hockey practice. That's a favor. You're in the backseat and you can barely give me a sentence for an answer. That's not acceptable to me. So here's what I want, if you want me to drive you to hockey practice, I want one thing you felt, one thing you enjoyed and one thing you learned today." And my little nine year old said, "Okay, okay. Okay, here's something I learned." "So what's that?"

Since we're going to hockey practice, he goes, "When I'm in hockey practice, there's a difference between the kids who go to private school and the kids who go to public school." And I go, "That's really interesting, what's the difference?" "I don't know, but it's not okay between them, there's a tension between them," he didn't say a tension, "But there's something between them," and I go, "Can you describe it?" He goes, "I can't really describe it, but it's very like the difference between Black kids and white kids." Now, my little nine-year-old was sitting in the back of my car talking to me about class tension, at nine, brilliant little kid, great conversation. It would never have happened if I hadn't insisted on it.

Andy: Right.

Terry: So, moms, you insist on your boys being relational, don't buy in to this nonsense that boys will be boys and you don't have any rights. You raise the bar and expect your daughters to be strong and vocal and assertive, and expect your sons to be open-hearted and have feelings and be able to articulate a sentence or two about them. And then of course, non-binary kids, they need all the support you can give them. But I want strong, competent girls and I want big hearted, sensitive boys, and I want us to move beyond these traditional roles. They're bad for everybody. Let's get past them.

Andy: I think we give boys so much, we just assume that that's... yeah, you know those kind of one word answers and not really opening up and stuff. We kind of give them permission to do that because we just have this narrative that's how it's going to be and that's how boys are and especially as they start getting closer to being teenagers and, "Yeah, well, that's just kind of to be expected," and, "Oh yeah, my kids are doing that too." And we don't really feel like we can put our foot down like you did or demand that sometimes because we just assume that's how it has to be.

Terry: Yeah. Raise the bar.

Andy: No. I like that.

Terry: Raise the bar.

Andy: You talk about dominance in your book and you write here on page 41 that, "We position ourselves as apart and above in many relationships. We attempt to control our partners, our kids, our bodies, and even the way we think. Take a step back and you'll see that running your relationships from a place of power and control is lunacy."

Terry: Lunacy.

Andy: What are you talking about? Aren't we in control? We're the boss and our kids, they're in the lower position on the social hierarchy and they have to do what we say.

Terry: Oh, yeah. Are you a parent, Andy? Do you have kids?

Andy: Nope.

Terry: My next question is, when was the last time you told a kid, "You will do exactly what I say you do?" And how well did that work?

Andy: "Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah, sure, dad."

Terry: Look, here's a bitter pill for parents, and I do want to say, if you go to my website, Terry Real, just by name T-E-R-R-Y, R-E-A-L, terryreal.com, there is a course on relational parenting that I would love to invite people to sit and listen to. The first sentence of my course, I say to the listeners, "If I ever write a book on parenting, I'm going to call it, Steering on Ice." You have approximate control, you do not have control, you do not have traction. If you want to teach yourself that a of a gun to their head, no human being controls another human being, just look at your kid and say, "You will do this. You won't do that," and watch what happens. They're going to let you know in no uncertain terms that you can fly off.

Now, look, parents, you cannot control your kids. Here's what you can control, you can control the environment around the kid. And so what you want to set up with your kids are what I call, "If, then," statement. "If you do, this will happen." "If you don't do, this will happen." You can control the rewards and consequences, but you can't control the kids. "If you want to do that, I don't advise it, I think it's bad for you, but I can't control you. However, if you do that, you're going to lose this and this. It's up to you. If you do this instead, you're going to be rewarded with that, that and that. It's up to you. But at any given moment, it's not up to me, it's up to you."

Andy: You talk a lot in the book about repair and that repair is really when we make progress in our relationships, but wouldn't it be better to just not get disconnected in the first place? Couldn't we just keep everything nice and stay connected and not have to repair things?

Terry: Then you would be in the realm of angels. Angels, I guess, float around in harmony all day, but we humans, on this planet... I got this from the great infant observational researcher, Dr. Ed Tronick, T-R-O-N-I-C-K. Look him up, he's got great... he wrote a book called The Power of Discord, which I love. And what Ed figured out, Edward, along with Barry Brazelton, one of the first of a generation to, unlike Freud and all of our psychotherapists, to infer what happens between parents and infants by listening to adult patients, and instead, he stuck a video camera and-

Andy: To actually go see-

Terry: Of mothers and infants and now fathers, and did a close analysis of what went on. And what Ed is famous for, and I mean, he should win a Pulitzer Prize for that. What Ed is famous for is all relationships are an endless dance of harmony, disharmony, and repair, closeness, disruption, and return to closeness. Think about infants, the infant is... here's the tape, you can watch this on YouTube. Starts off, the infant is what we call molded, that's the technical term, not a bone in their body, it's just like they're a noodle in mom's arms. Then there's a noise or gas or hunger or God knows what, and the infant starts freaking out. Then the mother tries to comfort the infant, doesn't work. Now the mother starts freaking out. Now they're both freaking out and then the mother gets pissed, and then the little infant takes her little arms and crosses them over her face to shield herself from the mother's angry-

And then the pacifier's accepted, the gas passes, whatever, and they're back to molded and the mother's happy and the infant's happy and it all goes well. That goes on... oh, what I just described, by the way, you can actually see the video, 40 seconds, that's what it takes, 40 seconds. This mother, the child played that out in less than one minute. Harmony, disharmony, repair can go on 50 times during one dinner conversation, but it is the essential rhythm of relationships. It's like walking, harmony, balance, imbalance through balance. And what Tronick taught me and a generation of child psychologists is, trust between infant and parent does not come from unbroken harmony. Trust comes from surviving the mess together. You and I got through this together, we got through our human imperfections together, and that my friend is intimacy.

Intimacy is not the avoidance of imperfection, intimacy is the handling of imperfection and it's the mess, and sometimes it's pretty and sometimes it's a mess. Now, in our culture, we worship the harmony phase, a good relationship is all harmony, just like a good body is a hard body and a great sex life is a 19-year-old sex life. Come on, get human. We all long for this divine, uninterrupted, but that's not where the action is. If I had a parent with a child and the parent said, "I want you to give me a pill that's going to be all harmony between me and this child," I would say, "Ugh, that's the last thing I would wish for you."

Andy: Yeah, right.

Terry: Real parenting is a goddamn mess and you struggle your way through it and it's fine. Can I tell you a story?

Andy: Of course, Terry.

Terry: True story. So when I was a young therapist, he is probably retired at this point if he's still alive, the great expert on adolescents and family was a guy here in Boston named Ed Shapiro, psychoanalyst. And I had the privilege of being one of about a thousand therapists in an audience, listening to him give a talk, the keynote address on normal relations between adolescents and their families, not sick ones, but perfectly normal relationship. And he started, he said, "You want to learn about normal relationships between adolescents and their family? Okay, I'll tell you what a patient told me just last week as I was preparing this talk, let me tell you the story my patient told me. A moms' got a 15-year-old son in the backseat, she's driving him to some a appointment, mom's texting. Kid's in the backseat giving her grief, I mean, really giving her a hard time. And she's like, 'I'm sorry,' blah, blah. More hard time. 'Look, you got to stop busting my chops. I said I was sorry.' More hard time. 'Look, you're not being reasonable. More hard time."

"And the kid just gets downright abusive, 'You're a mess,' blah, blah. This mother, perfectly, whatever, upper middle class well-educated woman driving through a little suburban town, rolls down her window, sticks her head out the window." And forgive my French, but I'm going to say it the way it's said. "Sticks her head out the window and screams as loud as she can, 'My son is a fucking monster.'" This what Ed Shapiro tells us. He says, "In the backseat, there's silence, beep, and then in a little quiet voice, the son leans forward and says, 'Well, you are not exactly mother of the year are you?'" And Shapiro gave that as his opening story of what normal families with adolescents look like. It's a mess, do your best. If you do lose it, make repair, be accountable, say you're sorry, and learn from it and move on.

But man, unbroken harmony, I don't know what family you grew up in, but that ain't the way that the rest of us grew up. You do your best, but it's a mess and it's supposed to be. Relax, you're in it for the long game, be a human being, let your kid be a human being and just be accountable to each other and you're going to be fine here. Here's another thing that Tronick taught, you know with psychotherapy right now it's all about attunement. We worship the attuned parent. Okay, it turns out, look, this is one of the world's leading experts, Tronick and his team came up with the exact formula of how much attunement a parent needs to give a child in order to produce a healthy child. What's the proportion of attunement versus losing your shit and misattunement? How much attunement does a child need in order to be healthy? You ready? What do you think the proportion is?

Andy: How much? No idea. 50/50.

Terry: Yeah. 30%, attunement, 70%, misattunement, and that's good enough.

Andy: That'll do.

Terry: I want your listeners to take that in, breathe and be reassured and be relaxed. We don't have to provide our kids a perfect little hot house experience, we just have to do our best, be human, love them up and be accountable. That's the important part, make repair.

Andy: Yeah. Yeah. Keep showing up.

Terry: And allow them to make repair. And it's important on the other end as well. If you're disciplining your kid, if your kid's being a brat and, "Go take a timeout," or whatever, if you're going to upgrade them for not being an upstanding citizen in the family, you must always give them an avenue of rehabilitation. Always give them a way to come back home, don't discipline them and reprimand them, and that's that. It's discipline, reprimand, and "Here's what you can do to make it right again."