Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Richard: Well, it's an honor to be here and, first, I remember being a teenager painfully well. Also, my wife and I have raised two adult kids at this point through the teen years, which I also remember painfully well. So there's this saying in medicine actually that good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment, and I've had a lot of experience, so there might be something in it that could be of use to others.

Andy: I love that. Yeah, I've read three of your books now and really seem to kind of merge like Eastern philosophy with modern psychology, neuroscience in a really cool way. So I'm really excited to see how that would apply to the family setting.

Richard: Great.

Andy: This one I just finished this morning, Making Great Relationships: Simple Practices For Solving Conflicts, Building Connection and Fostering Love.

You're already written a handful of books, but you felt that there was still a need for a book, specifically dedicated to great relationships. What did you think was kind of unique or missing in the conversation that was needed to write this book?

Richard: There's millions of books about relationships. Almost none of them tell you what to actually do or say or think that will solve a relationship problem. So based on my own background as a longtime couple's counselor, family therapist, child therapist, husband for almost 41 years now raising two kids, lots of business consulting, too, I wanted to offer to people in really short chapters, 50 super short chapters, each one's three to five pages long pretty much essentially, okay, what can you do? What do you actually do?

I've been a therapist for a really long time and it's made me, I think, nicer, but it's also made me blunter. And the truth is, for many people they don't know what to do or they do know what to do, but they can't get themselves to do it. So that's what this book's about. What can you actually do?

A lot of people as a result with your teenagers or with their partner or with their boss or coworkers or neighbor, they feel stuck. They're like, "It's okay. Maybe it's not horrible." But perhaps they're just dealing with some kind of ongoing low-grade background conflict with a kid or a feeling that they're losing connection or losing traction. They're no longer able to influence their teenager. Or there are other relationships in their life that they just feel unsatisfying or there's a problem in them. They feel stuck.

What's really striking is to realize we have the power. We have the power to make them better. Basically what that book's about, Making Great Relationships, it's about using your power to literally make your relationships better every day with what you think and say.

Andy: I love that every chapter has a How section that kind of really, it's not just like, "Hey, here's some ideas and see what you can do with it." There's practical kind of, how do you put this into practice in your life?

One of the earlier chapters that really stuck out to me was number four, which is about feeling cared about. Yeah, it seems like so important, and I wonder what your book is really from the perspective of how we can feel more cared about. I wonder how we as parents can make sure that we're providing an environment where our children feel cared about or where our teenagers specifically feel cared about and if there's anything we can do that would facilitate that.

Richard: Oh, yeah. The way the book is structured is the way that I think it's important to approach things in general, which is you start by befriending yourself. So that chapter four out of 50 is in the part that's about befriending yourself because that's foundational.

It's on that foundation then that our cup gets filled up from the inside out and then we have more to give to others, including in situations in which people can start to feel like parents can, like you're running on empty, or you're dealing with a partner, maybe adolescents who are frankly annoying or something, or they're kind of wounding because they are so self-absorbed, something is happening there. So you got to fill yourself up so that you can be patient and build up inner shock absorbers in a sense of feeling cared about, let's say yourself, because sometimes there's not much coming your way from the outside in.

But part two of the book is very much about, I call it warming the heart, how you deliberately can cultivate compassion, kindness, seeing a being behind the eyes in ways that research shows actually change neural structure and function by deliberately cultivating those things.

I'll tell you a couple of things that I think are really important with adolescence, and I wish I did more of it honestly when our kids were young and I've tried to learn from that experience. I think there's even a chapter. It's called See the Being Behind the Eyes. It's so easy to get reactive to teenagers who are being disdainful or cold, dismissive, and we live in a culture that normalizes adolescents being kind of pissy toward their parents. It's like, "Well, they're all pissy." You look at TV shows, the kids are just pissy. I hope that's a technical term and not too R-rated for this PG podcast, but-

Andy: It is the technical term, yeah.

Richard: They're kind of nasty and it's normalized. Okay, so there you are on the receiving end of that and maybe you feel let down by your partner who is not backing you in terms of your authority. So you're holding the bag as having to hold the line with the kids because maybe you act like Disneyland Dad or something like that. What do you do?

Well, continuing to recognize that behind that angry face or behind that kind of cool distance or whatever it might be, behind the eye roll that's coming your way, "Mom" is a precious vulnerable being. So important to hold onto that sentence, precious, vulnerable being.

You could still exercise authority. My theory of parenting is large pasture, real fences, including with adolescence, but a large pasture. But you could still see the being behind the eyes.

The other suggestion that again has really helped me, and I wish I had kept it in mind, is to take the long view. So many things happen when kids are teenagers that change the course of their relationship with their parents for the next 40 years.

Think about ourselves. We're adults. My parents did stuff, said stuff that pissed me off for 30 years and it wasn't a be all and end all. I wasn't abused. It wasn't horrible. But even that, really landed. I know the look of my father's face the last time he spanked me as I was maybe 12 or 13 or something like, ugh, give thought to the long view, to what are the real stakes over the long haul and preserving your relationship with the kid.

Maybe the last thing I'll just say is being really careful about anger. Anger's normal, it's a normal emotion, but if you think about what's the one emotion that's most likely to create a lasting breach or issue with a teenager, it's when we speak or act from anger.

It's one thing to experience it and to be mindful of it and to process it and maybe talk about it with your co-parent or with friends, et cetera. But to come from anger at your kids can be very consequential. That's something to be super careful about.

Andy: I love that and it ties right in when you talk about compassion in the book, there's a chapter 14, which is on having compassion, and I love that what you talk about in here is recognizing the suffering in others. I think it's so easy to get focused on our own suffering, say, "Oh my gosh, I'm under so much pressure at work and then I come home and my kids are treating me like a doormat" and focusing on how hurtful that is for ourselves.

But what you point out that I love is if we can turn that also and look at the suffering that they're going through. I wonder what kind of any suggestions you might have on just how we can kind of reframe that or how we can start to see that a little bit better.

Richard: Yeah, I'm really glad you foregrounded that and by suffering, it's a very broad term. So again, let's think about a teenager today. Here you are. What's your objective situation as a teenager? It's completely abnormal. It's completely abnormal. First of all, you think about hunter-gatherer bands in which human beings lived for 97% of the time we walked the earth in groups of 40 or so people, who live together mostly their whole lives in which everybody had a very important role and could see directly the results of actions for better or worse.

Same with even quite recently. My dad grew up in a ranch in North Dakota, born in 1918, no longer with us, bless his memory and in that world, he had an important role as a teenager. It was so important, actually, that he only went to school two quarters out of three over the school year because he had to come home for the harvest in the springtime, for example. But that was the real world. He eventually got a PhD in zoology and became a college professor and all the rest of that. So he kept with it, but the point being that he could see directly.

But now what do we do with teenagers? We sequester them in these sort of strange places, schools and malls. We ask them to study all kinds of things that they know they'll never use or remember a year later, let alone two days later. We make them do that. We drive them toward kind of paths of training that extend years and years into the future while asking them to deny the immediate pleasures of sex, drugs and rock and roll so that they can end up having a life like their bored, stressed-out and unhappy parents.

Andy: Yeah, don't you want to be like me, right?

Richard: Yeah. It's a crazy-maker in a lot of ways. I mean, the work of a kid in our culture is not herding goats, in most cases, but it is about going to school and there's a place for that and so forth.

But it's tough. It's challenging. It's really challenging. Group pressure, social media, it's intense. The suicide rate among teenagers is real. Teenage depression is really real. There's a lot of meanness, a lot of mean girls, mean boys, a lot of cyber bullying. If you don't have a perfect body, you can just feel horrible. I've known people who maybe arguably are carrying 10 to 15 extra pounds. And then I know the story of young woman in college just basically said to her parents, "What do you think it's like to be the second fattest girl in the cafeteria?" And this was not a fat person, but just the fixation of the standards. It's tough. So it's really important to be able to look past the surface, which might be annoying or dismissive or disdainful toward you as a parent.

Behind that surface is someone who's probably not that happy, probably maybe not depressed, maybe not mental illness, but not that happy, and to look beneath. That's the point of my long rant. Thanks for putting up with it. To look beneath the surface of the, "I'm fine. I'm fine. Going to my room now. Leave me alone." You know what I mean? To look beneath that surface with your empathy and your imagination. What could be going on under the surface? And that's where compassion comes in.

Even if you can't do anything about it, maybe the kid pushes away your compassion because they don't want to be revealed with you, they don't want to disclose or be intimate emotionally with you, but you can still rest in a kindness, a lovingness, a compassion. That's your superpower as a parent, that you will walk through a burning building for your kid and to just live in the knowing of that and to have a kind of family environment in which there's an openness to talking in real ways about what's going on.

Andy: Okay. I love that because, and you talk about good intentions in the book and kind of recognizing the good intentions in others, but a lot of times as parents of teenagers we're on the other end of that where we have good intentions and we're trying to help them out, and then in response, they slam the door on us and they say, "Leave me alone." So it's almost like I'm just trying to help you out and protect you from some of the hard things that I went through when I was a teenager and warn you about some things, but it gets kind of interpreted in the wrong way.

I wonder what we can do when we're on the other side of that when we feel like, hey, we have good intentions and we're just trying our best to kind of be helpful or offer some advice or support or anything like that, and it's kind of being turned against us or not received in that way.

Richard: Yeah. A couple suggestions, and these are generalizations, so everybody has to apply them to themselves.

First of all, to recognize that biologically adolescents increases egocentrism. It's normal for adolescents to be self-absorbed, to be really pretty clueless or indifferent to all the crud and suffering that their parents are dealing with, and to be ungrateful, ungenerous. That's really quite normal. There's some wonderful exceptions to that. You know the kid who's sweet as the day is long, very generous, very kind, very supportive.

Part of it is cultural. Western culture, American culture has thoroughly enabled a kind of self-centeredness and normalized a self-centeredness in kids, particularly in many parts of the country, including affluent urban areas in which I live on the West Coast. It's not good. But if you normalize it doesn't mean thinking it's good, but if you just realize you know it's not personal. Your kid is self-absorbed and could kind of care less about you.

Maybe if you were hit by a bus or dealing with cancer, they might give you a little bit of attention, but their self-absorption, which I found so offensive when our kids were young, I belatedly, I began to realize it wasn't about me. It's so easy to take it personally. I was trying not to take it personally.

It doesn't mean giving up our moral stand as a parent, that we're a stand for treating other people like they matter, whether it's your peers at school or the people you're living with who fought through burning buildings or nearly the equivalent to take good care of you for the first 14, 15, 16, 19 years of your life, let's say. We can be a stand for that, but still we can accept and not take it so personally when teenagers are incredibly self-absorbed.

Andy: Yeah, this is one of my favorite chapters in the book is on taking it less personally and talk on page 110 about intentions. I think that's a large part of what we get wrong is, and I hear parents so often saying, "Oh, my teen is manipulative and controlling and argumentative." All of these things are us like projecting intentions onto them that, "Well, they're manipulating me, their intention is to get me to do X, Y, and Z and to control me."

Maybe that's true, but also just maybe it's not really even about us. That making it about us that, "Oh, they're doing this to me" when really they've got a lot going on themselves, and maybe they're just dealing with their own stuff and it's not so much about us. I wonder how we can sort of free ourselves from that, or any ways to kind of check ourselves and take a step back and just make it less about ourselves.

Richard: I'm so glad you put that up because we tend... psychologically, these are called attributions. What are the states of mind, including the intentions that we attribute to others, we project onto others, as you put it, and very often we're just bit players in our kids' lives. They're so self-absorbed, they're just so thinking about that weird comment that some boy made two rows over in geometry class, and they're caught up in that. Or they're caught up with social media in the back and forth, or texting their friends or waking up at 1:00 in the morning to text their friends about stuff. That's the world they're living in. We're just kind of floating around the edges.

So a lot of what they do is maybe clueless, and maybe there's a place for setting some standards and trying to arrange routines in your home and ways of living together, for example, insisting on we have dinner together. We don't just take our food to our separate rooms. We do as a family, we listen to each other, we treat each other like we matter. That's our culture here, modeled by the parents, even if they're not living together, but how the parents are. You could be a stand for those things. But we don't have to attribute negative intent to our kids so much and be very careful about that.

I find another thing that's so powerful, and most parents don't do it, is they're not vulnerable with dignity. They tend to, I did, they lecture their kids, they scold their kids, they give their kids advice. Or maybe they inform their kids about things, or maybe they just mention in passing, like I had a really stressful day, but they're not very authentic about it. They're not very revealed.

I think it's important to be careful about not spilling your guts and trying to put your kids in the role of pseudo therapists to you. Especially, for example, if you're a divorced family, you don't want to make your teenager your co-parent, careful with that, but to just be real, just in simple terms and there's a formula. It's in the book From Non-violent Communication, which essentially follows the format of when X happens, I feel Y because I need Z and you can just imagine a way of being vulnerable with dignity or dignified vulnerability.

You're not being a mess. You're still the parent, you're still the adult, you're keeping your mom hat on, your dad hat on. You're keeping your grownup hat on while being able to say, for example, "When you walk in and I'm just eager to say hi and to connect when you come home after school and I say, 'Hi, how you doing' and you ignore me entirely, walk past me, don't make eye contact, and don't take your earbuds out and walk directly to your room." When that happens, just describe it very accurately, matter-of-factly, not with a lot of tone. "When you do that and you're like, so you give me that attitude and..." No, like a neutral description, but accurate.

When that happens, no blame, just factually, "I feel" that's the second part, "I feel, I feel sad. I feel hurt," like, "Oh, I like you and just wanted like 10 seconds of contact, really. But when that happens, I just kind of feel bad, and maybe that bad feeling is a little turbocharged by my own childhood in which I was left out a lot and kind of felt unseen. And the run of the letter, I'm not laying that on you, Sally or Bobby or somebody," whatever your kid's name is. "I'm just saying that's what it's like to be me when that happens."

"Because deep down, I need just ordinary human contact. Not more, but not less. Just ordinary human contact. I need to feel like I kind of exist for you. I know you have a billion things going, I just kind of need 10 seconds here and half a minute there where I feel like, 'Oh, I exist for you and I matter.' You'll do what you do, but I just wanted to tell you how it is for me." Boom. That's vulnerable. Yeah, that's dignified vulnerability, vulnerable dignity, and how rare that is and I sure wish I did more of that when our kids were teens.