Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Andy: We're here today with Dr. Lisa Damour talking about what parents can do when teenagers get emotional. Dr. Damour has been recognized as a thought leader by the American Psychological Association. She co-hosts the Ask Lisa podcast, writes about adolescents for the New York Times, appears as a regular contributor to CBS News, works in collaboration with UNICEF and maintains her own clinical practice. She is the author of two New York Times bestselling books, Untangled and Under Pressure, and her latest book is The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents. In today's episode, we are going to talk about hot versus cold cognition and how parents can leverage cold cognition to help teens make better decisions when hot cognition kicks in. We'll see why boys can be so nasty to girls starting in sixth grade. We'll dive into the topic of separation-individuation, a word that sounds technical, but actually explains a lot about the relationship between parents and teenagers.

We're also going to cover a simple exercise that Dr. Damour has discovered or listening really effectively when our teenagers are venting about their day. We will see why teenagers are so likely to start important conversations with us when we're in bed, what's going on with listening to emotional music, why we need to let teens express their emotions before we give them advice and a strategy we can use to get themselves advise so that we don't even have to. All of that and much more is coming up on the show today. Dr. Damour, thank you so much for being here.

Dr. Lisa Damour: Thank you for having me. I love being back with you.

Andy: Oh, yes, this is exciting. When people ask me, what are some of your favorite episodes, our previous conversation is always one that I mentioned, so I don't know, something just always really sticks with me about that. So really excited to have you back on the show again talking about your new book, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers.

Dr. Lisa Damour: Well, I am so glad this book has finally made it into the world. I've been working on it for a while and I hope it's useful. I hope parents and the adults who surround teenagers find it to be of help.

Andy: So talk to me a little about where it came from or why did you feel like it was so important to now write a book, especially since your first two books kind of more focused on girls, problems that girls are going through, anxiety and now really this book is just a lot more about teenagers in general, but really specifically focused on their emotions that they're going through during the teenage years and how we can facilitate helping them through those.

Dr. Lisa Damour: So I've always cared for boys in my practice and my writing for the Times in my own podcast, the Ask Lisa podcast has always included boys in what we consider, but you're right, my book length work has been focused on girls. And really Andy, it was the pandemic, right? There are concerns about teenagers just escalated as they should, and so I really felt like it was time to pivot to all teenagers everywhere and try to be of use. So that was one reason that I wrote this book. It was very much inspired by how much teenagers suffered in the pandemic, but my goal is to go far beyond the pandemic with this book because hopefully it's largely in our rear-view mirror.

But then the other thing that really inspired me to write the book is that I've been feeling for a while that the way we talk about mental health as a culture is not actually very accurate or very helpful for families. And what I mean by that is that an equation is emerged that... Or a view is emerged that equates being mentally healthy with feeling good or feeling calmer, relaxed or happy. And that is actually not how psychologists have ever conceptualized mental health. So this book really aims to advance a more accurate, and I think probably way more reassuring definition of what we're looking for in terms of mental health than anybody, especially a teenager, which is that it's having feelings that make sense in the moment-

Andy: That are appropriate. Yes.

Dr. Lisa Damour: Appropriate to what's happening, even if they're very upsetting feelings. And then handling those well, handling those in a way that brings relief and does no harm. So there's like the two things together. Teenagers were suffering a lot and we weren't talking about mental health in a very accurate way.

Andy: I love that and you keep kind of coming back to that, the definition throughout the book and really it's something that I think really sticks with me from reading the book is just that idea of always checking back with yourself on, okay, is this emotion, does it make sense in this situation? And then is my teenager handling it in ways that are productive or healthy?

Dr. Lisa Damour: Sounds simple, hard in real life.

Andy: That's all I got to do. Okay. Episode over. Thank you for-

Dr. Lisa Damour: It's so scary to be a parrot right now and the headlines are so concerning about teenagers and I think it's very hard with these headlines to know what any one of them means for your particular kid. And so what I also really hope to give parents was a way to evaluate their kids' mental health and really to tell them what to be on the lookout for when to be concerned and when we want to be concerned. I mean, we're always concerned if our kid's in pain, but when we want to really consider the possibility that intervention is necessary is if a teenager's mood gets to a concerning place and stays there, right?

We expect to see moods go up and down in teenagers, but we don't expect to stay down. Or if a teenager is handling emotions in a way that is problematic, that may bring relief, but come at a cost, right? They're smoking a lot of marijuana, they're tearing at the fabric of relationships, they're being hard on themselves, that's when we want to step in and worry. But the presence of distress in a teenager is not in and of itself grounds for concern. It can even be evidence of mental health.

Andy: But then, so a caveat to that is that some things you point out in the book are that is sometimes, especially as this period of brain development is really happening, 12, 13, 14 years old, there is actually normal to have some emotions that maybe don't seem to make sense in the situation or kind of really alarming thoughts or kind of losing control of emotions in different ways. So how do we reconcile that?

Dr. Lisa Damour: That's a great observation. It's funny to write a book and then have people notice things. So I guess what I would say is my aim in teaching parents about those normal aspects of adolescent development that 13 year olds are going to have extremely exaggerated emotions at times, that 14 and 15 year olds will sometimes have existential crises that come out of nowhere. I think we can still tuck it under the idea that these make sense because we have developmental explanations for why these occur, right? If your 13-year-old is having a meltdown over not being able to find the right pants, it can seem like it doesn't make sense, but if there's 13, we know that neurologically things can get pretty amplified for them. So I think that was my goal.

In some ways what somebody has said to me is like, "Oh, the book is like what to expect when you're expecting a teenager." And I'm like, there's so much disruption that we actually see as typical, normative. And so if parents can know that their 13-year-olds are going to have very powerful reactions, what I hope is that parents can feel less frightened when it occurs.

Andy: Yeah. And it seems like that is something that happens to you a lot, at least from what you're writing about in the book where parents are asking you, "Hey, I have this thing going on in our household and is this normal? Should I be concerned?" And a lot of times you couldn't reassure them that. Well, actually pretty normal and here's how you might deal with it or put some coping strategies into place.

Dr. Lisa Damour: Yup. That's the goal, right? I mean, for a lot of families, this is their first teenager or their first post-pandemic teenager. And I think the nice thing, I've been practicing for almost 30 years, so I've seen a lot of teenagers. So I think the aim of a book like this is to help parents put things in broad context, offer reassurance, and I think the best way to offer reassurance is actually to tell people when to worry, right? That to really say, "I'll tell you what the line is." And I think when you know the line, you can actually then feel more at ease if you know you're not over that line.

Andy: You talk in the book about hot versus cold cognition and I thought that was really interesting and you have some strategies for helping teenagers when they're in a more common rational state to sort of think through or put strategies into place when the hot cognition kicks in. What does that mean or how does that look?

Dr. Lisa Damour: So you can almost quite literally say the teenagers are of two minds. So there's their cold reasoning, which is basically their good rational, thoughtful reasoning. And this is the reasoning they do when they're not in socially and emotionally charged situations. It's as good as any adult reasoning. And then there's what we call hot reasoning, which is they're less rational reasoning, less probably safe reasoning. And that is what they do when they're in socially and emotionally charged situations.

So what this looks like on a Friday night is at 5:00 PM, you say to your kid in your kitchen, "Look, I know you're going to this party. I think you and I both know there's going to be drinking at this party. I don't want you to drink." And at 5:00 PM in the cold light of day, right? Your teenager really means it when they're like, "Yeah, I'm not going to drink. I got a game tomorrow", or "I hear you" or "It's not going to happen." And the kids telling the God's honest truth. I mean, I think we have to acknowledge that, that same kid at 10:00 gets to the party and now they're into hot cognition conditions. It is socially loaded, it is emotionally charged. And turns out the person they have a crush on is at the party and then it turns out the person they have a crush on said, "Go on, why don't you have one beer?" And that same kid's like, "Okay."

Andy: You know what, great.

Dr. Lisa Damour: And it's not that they're lying, it's that they're now in a new condition that undermines their reasoning. This is terrifying of course to parents, right? So we can have the conversation and it means nothing is, I think it's the worry, but what we want to remember is that you have to plan for hot cognition conditions when you are in cold cognition conditions. So the rest of the 5:00 conversation is where the parent says, "Look, okay, great. We're in agreement." Now, say you get to the party and the kid you like is there and the kid you is asking a drink, what's the plan? And really talking that through because that's just the reality. And this will not perfectly guarantee any teen's safety, but what it will do is it means that they are not on the fly trying to figure out how to handle that situation, which is what we want to avoid whenever we can.

Andy: Yeah, I resonate with that myself, getting at this sometimes cognition state, so not doing things that I planned I was going to do or thought I was going to do or... Yeah, it seemed like, yeah, all for sure. So I think that's so helpful to take a time to really think through what strategies will you actually use when this gets hard. I think a lot of times, even as adults, it's like things seem like a good idea when you're just kind of thinking about it. In the abstract, it's like, yeah, being sober, that seems totally... That's what I should do. But yeah, you're just getting into the moment is really different. Something that really stood out to me in the book is you say that when it comes to managing emotional distress, boys are more likely to turn to distraction and girls are more likely to turn to discussion. What do you mean by that?

Dr. Lisa Damour: So this is what we find in the research and of course big broad research findings will never apply perfectly to any one kid, but when we look in those kind of broad stroke ways, we see this, and this is a pretty good distillation of how we socialize boys versus girls to manage emotion that when boys are in distress, we have all this evidence that parents will try to talk them out of it, tell them to shake it off, tell them to go think about something else. So they learn to use distraction as a strategy for getting feelings under control. Not a terrible strategy, but we don't want to use one strategy all the time. Whereas girls are socialized to talk about feelings and to use an elaborate vocabulary for feelings. And so when girls are distressed, they're much more likely to talk about what they're experiencing.

And the thing that happens, Andy, that's so interesting is that kids end up hanging out in same sex groups and actually amplifying patterns for each other. So a boy who may be inclined to distract about emotions gets with a bunch of other boys, and when they're upset, they all distract about emotion, and it sort of entrenches this approach. And similarly with girls where a girl who may be inclined to discuss her feelings may find a very talented and ready audience for that in other girls who are also have been socialized to talk about feelings. So what can be small gender differences that are created in the culture or small gender differences that maybe slightly worked out at home can quickly amplify once kids get out into the world.

Andy: And you point out also that the kids are much more likely to hang out in same sex groups as they get into middle school and stuff, which tends to further just channel them into those echo chambers a little bit or something. What I thought was interesting is how you then draw the parallel from that to internalizing versus externalizing disorders in boys and girls.

Dr. Lisa Damour: Yeah. So there's a whole chapter on gender and emotion in this book, which was fun and important to write, especially because my work has focused on girls so much. I really wanted to lay out what we know about gender in general, and there are some kind of cardinal rules in psychology, things that we just know to be consistently pretty true and pretty good explanations for behavior. And one of the rules that we have long observed and we see these data repeated over and over is that girls in distress tend to collapse in on themselves. Boys in distress tend to act out. So girls who are distressed are more likely to show up with depression and anxiety and boys who are distressed are more likely to get themselves in trouble or take it out on other people. And so what we want to appreciate is it's all distress, right? That a boy who was getting himself in trouble is very much suffering, but that we have sort of gendered patterns of how distress gets channeled.

Andy: Yeah. And it makes just a lot of things that I witnessed in my own adolescence seem to make so much more sense where it's like for boys feeling like, well, I can't really talk about this or open up about what I'm feeling. And so I think it's why we're just so likely to see just doing stupid things and what can I do to just distract myself? That's kind of exciting, that will get my mind off what I'm... The suffering that I'm going through. And there's not that many options around as a teenager. So yeah.

Dr. Lisa Damour: There's not, right? And then another option is we think about ways in which you can make emotions die down. So one is distraction, another is smoking a lot of marijuana, that will do the job. And so we really need to recognize that what we often see is a substance problem is a substance problem, but what is often underneath it is a wish to not feel emotional pain and kind of a lack of a repertoire for handling it in a better way.

Andy: You also talk about meanness between boys and girls, and especially hitting the tween phase and starting to see these differences emerge in onset of puberty where girls are more precocious and hitting a lot of these milestones earlier and leaving boys kind of trailing behind, which then leads to, as we're talking about these externalizing kind of behaviors to lash out in mean ways and kind of bully girls. And I wonder what you think we can do as parents of boys or girls to address that.

Dr. Lisa Damour: So this was a really interesting section of the book because this is something I started to observe, which is... Well, we've known for a long time that sexual harassment starts by sixth or seventh grade, which is much earlier than people tend to recognize. And we've also known for a long time that in sixth and seventh grade because of the timing of puberty, girls are roughly two years ahead of boys on the timing of puberty. A lot of sixth and seventh grade girls are going to be well underway with puberty before boys are. And this has pretty significant implications in a lot of ways. So number one is there are neurological benefits that come with being in puberty that your mind gets upgraded. You can think in more sophisticated ways. So we've known for a long time that girls as a group, of course this does not apply to every kid everywhere, but girls as a group are outmatching boys in the classroom.

They're able to think in more sophisticated ways. They're able to apply themselves in very... And we see it in their grades. I mean, we have tons of data showing this to be true. On top of that, your average sixth or seventh grade girl is likely to be taller, stronger, and faster than... So when I was working on this book, I was talking to this... I think he was a seventh grade boy, he's like, "Okay. In the whole wide world, there's nothing worse than getting beat by a girl." And I was like, "Okay." And they're consolidating a sense of masculinity. And so I'm picturing the seventh grade, all right, so the boys are getting beat at recess by these girls and then they turn around and they go back to class and they're getting beat in class by these girls. And I think I could have just really summarized the section, just calling it like it's really hard to be a sixth grade boy, right?

You're trying to figure out what it means to be a man if boys are trying to figure that out, at the exact moment that the girls are getting you coming and going because of just this accident of biology. And I'll tell you, Andy, I was like, I think this is why sexual harassment starts because it doesn't feel good for boys, like all of it, not all boys are going to handle that well. And if you want to take girl down a few pegs, all you got to do is comment on our body or say something lewd, which of course is made that much easier by the fact that the girls are further along in puberty. And well, I'll tell you, I was like, how has nobody connected these dots before? And so I don't know if you noticed the note for that in the back of the book, it goes on for two pages.

I'm like, I couldn't find anyone else saying this before me. Maybe somebody else did. Please tell me if you... Here's all my data, here are the numbers I'm looking at. But I think the bottom line is that we need to think very seriously about the self-esteem of sixth and seventh grade boys because it's hard to feel good about yourself as a sixth and seventh grade boy, unless you happen to have gotten early side of puberty, which some boys do. We have to think about how can they be helped to feel good about themselves so they do not go after the girls because then that's really bad for the girls. I mean, it has all of these downstream effects.

Andy: Yeah, totally. I can add, just think of how much of trash talk among young boys is based on, "You throw like a girl, you run like a girl, you're a sissy." And so then it's like, well, then we hit sixth grade and all of a sudden it's like, well, wait a minute, the girls run faster than me. They throw farther than me.

Dr. Lisa Damour: Yeah. No, it's just sort of remarkable. If you followed a sixth grade boy through the day, he is potentially subject to a great number of humiliations that we do not want him to take personally and we want him to have ways to feel good about himself.

Andy: But also, yeah, you don't want a sense of self-esteem to be based on what being better than girls at things anyways. So it's like-

Dr. Lisa Damour: You really don't. You really don't.

Andy: Don't worry, in a couple years you'll get them again, but I don't know.

Dr. Lisa Damour: But you don't want that. They do need to have something to feel good about. So they need to be doing or they need to be cultivating a skill. They need something they can control because they can't control the onset of puberty, and bluntly they will feel better. I mean, I think some boys will feel better at the expense of girls, which isn't my favorite, but they'll feel better because they're just not getting kind of beat out everywhere they go and unable to do anything about it. What's nice is usually by ninth grade there's a more evenness in terms of skillset. I mean, not that this is something that should be a grounds for feeling better, by ninth grade the boys are not getting physically outmatched by the girls in the same way. So to the degree that a young man's self-esteem is hinging on that, he'll feel better, right? How I feel about that is a completely different issue.

Andy: It's no problem. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Damour: Yeah. In terms of being awful to girls, I would really rather not the boys be awful to girls.

Andy: What is separation-individuation?

Dr. Lisa Damour: That is our highly technical term for why your 13-year-old can't stand how you chew is what that is.

Andy: Uh-huh.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
So it's funny. So I have two daughters, I have two teenage daughters and there are points in my own parenting where I'm like, "Oh, my goodness", the theoretical language we have for this does not do justice to what this-

Andy: Yeah, that doesn't sound that bad. Separation-individuation. Okay. Yeah, sure.

Dr. Lisa Damour: Yeah. And so separation-individuation is when teenagers need to sort of separate from us, their parents and develop a sense of being an individual. And the language I use in the book is like sort of build their own brand, right? Separate from us. They build their own brand. And this is a tricky process because they're still very meshed in family life. So what this means is as they're trying to figure out what their new brand identity is going to be, anything that we do that does not fit with their vision of their emerging brand is annoying to them because we're still somehow reflect on them. So I think here about my friend who's getting ready to go to her son's eighth grade orientation and he's like, "Oh, my God, you can't wear that." And so she's like, "Go in my closet, figure out what I'm wearing." Because-

Andy: You tell me what do you want me to wear?

Dr. Lisa Damour: "What do you want me to wear?" Because this point, they were still so entwined that whatever his mom was wearing felt like it looked bad for him, and it didn't fit with his being of himself. But then the flip of it is as they're trying to become more individual and build their own brand. Anything that we do that overlaps with their vision of their emerging self is also annoying. So I remember how this happened in my own house. I have liked Beyonce for a really long time and I was in the kitchen, I had Beyonce on, I was sort of bopping as I was cooking. And my 13-year-old daughter who had suddenly discovered and realized she liked Beyonce, came in and she was like, "Mom, stop."

Andy: "It's my song."

Dr. Lisa Damour: The sum total of this is anything we do that is like their emerging sense of themselves is annoying. Anything that we do that is unlike their emerging sense of themselves is annoying. Everything we do is annoying to them. And it just happens that way for a while until they figure out their brands and then they figure out their brands and then they're like, "You're a quirky brand and that's your problem, not my problem."

Andy: Yeah. Yeah. Once they kind of really feel like they've individuated, then it's like, "Well, hey, yeah, my mom's weird." Or, "Yeah, yeah, we both like Beyonce. Awesome." But like-

Dr. Lisa Damour: What I didn't put in the book and something that's been clear to me, there's always like you handed the manuscript and then it comes out a year later, so your thinking continues... But there's points in development where kids get very anxious about their brands, like if you're on college tours or something. And so I think that kind of feeling easily antagonized by their parents' traits, I think it can recur at points in development when kids are very anxious about how they're being perceived new settings or things like that. So I think it hits its height at 13 and then usually dissipates, but I think it pops up at various times.

Andy: So is there anything we can do when we're in that phase of everything we do is annoying or... Well, we're kind of stuck both ways. It's like a no win situation. Okay.

Dr. Lisa Damour: No win situation. I mean, yeah. So there's things you can do. Number one, it's not as personal as it feels, right? You can just set your clock by it. And I think, again, what to expect when you're expecting a teenager, your 13-year-old will find you're blinking to be intolerable, right? I think it's irrational, but we know why it's happening and that makes it easier to bear. The other is you can lay down some rules for interaction because you can't be a jerk to you all the time. It's bad for them, it's bad for you. So you can say things like, "Look, I may be annoying you to high heaven right now, but there's three ways we can be together. You can be nice to me, you can be merely polite to me or you can tell me you need some space. But those are the options."

Andy: And this isn't one of those options what's happening right now, so.

Dr. Lisa Damour: If you can't act like-

Andy: You want to try again, yeah.

Dr. Lisa Damour: Figure out which of those other options, and if you need just some space, I'll give you your space. But you can't just sit here and be hard on me all the time.

Andy: I love that. I always love options. It's so much better than stop or no, you can't do that. Well, here's a buffet of things that could work. That's not one of them.

Dr. Lisa Damour: Yup. Choose your favorite.

Andy: You've got a great tip in the book about imagining that you are a reporter or an editor listening to a reporter reading a story and you're trying to come up with a perfect headline. Okay. I love that. Can you walk me through that and when would that be useful?

Dr. Lisa Damour: Sure. A lot of this is just stuff that I have found I need to do as a parent to do the things I mean to do as a parent. Okay. So this is for when your kid is telling you a whole bunch of things they're upset about or telling you something that they're very upset about. And I don't think I'm alone in having the reaction of a parent where I kind of get an idea about what I might suggest and then I'm just waiting for my kid to pause so I can jump in with my idea.

Andy: Hey, here's what you do. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Damour: I think that's a very natural reaction. And it's funny, I was talking about this with my 12-year-old the other day and she said, "I can tell from the look on your face when you've gotten the idea and when you're now waiting for me to stop." I mean, this is the thing, like they've got us dead to write.

Andy: Busted.

Dr. Lisa Damour: Yeah. So you don't want to do that. You really want to try to listen. So I have to think like a game for myself about how am I going to do this or like a strategy? Like I need a way to do it. So the strategy I came up with is I pretend my kids are reporter and I'm an editor and they're reading me the article of their distress. And my job is, when they come to the end of the article to produce its headline, to say the words that summarize it, distill it, add nothing, but just here's the top line of what you've said. It is super hard to do. Okay? So this will go one of three ways. Every once in a while you'll get it. And I tell the one story in the book of when I really nailed it, which was when my older daughter was a sophomore when the pandemic hit in high school.

And by about mid-April she saw the writing on the wall of how bad this was going to be and how long... Or none of us knew how long, but just like what was really involved. She just like was so upset. She was so upset. And I would say she came home from school, but she didn't go to school. She came out of the dining room where she was doing school and she had a rant and she was like, "Holy Molly. They took away lunch, they took away activities, they took away clubs, they took away dances, they took away plays, they took away everything that's fun. And they left us lectures and APs and tests." And she's like, "They took away all the good stuff of school and just left us school. So that was her article, just this long detailing of the tremendous horribleness of this. And I said, "It's like school is all vegetables, no dessert now, right?"

Yes. Okay. So every once in a while and it's very rare, but that was my rare moment. And usually kids are like, "That's all I wanted. I just wanted to feel fully heard." And if you can headline, you've heard... And other times, and I think this is much more likely, you won't quite get it, but you'll be close and you offer it tentatively. So you're like, "You mean like this?" And you can be like, "No, but like this." Right? So you've already on the process of trying to understand what they're truly saying. Sometimes you'll have nothing, but your kid will know you are actually paying attention. They can tell when we are.

Andy: It's not really the headline that was so important. It's the process of trying to figure it out that gives you something to work on while you're kind of really listening carefully to what they're saying. So yeah, I love that.

Dr. Lisa Damour: I think that it's very good for me to write now that I've been deep into the work of parenting teenagers myself, because I hope I've always had a lot of empathy for parents and I think that I hope that's informed my work. What I would say also informs this book is like I really get how hard this is when your kid's complaining a lot or upset or you're very tired yourself or something from your own adolescence is being stirred up. I've been a psychologist for 26 years, but I think my ability to put on the ground the realities of what it means to parent teenagers is not surprisingly improved by parenting teenagers.

Andy: Why might a teenager start a difficult conversation with you while you're in bed?

Dr. Lisa Damour: Oh, this was my favorite discovery in writing this book, and I stumbled into this. So I have learned and now confirmed since the book has out, that it is extremely common in homes with teenagers, for parents to ask all the right questions all through dinner and get nothing, crickets, absolutely crickets. And then when they're in bed and about to try to go to sleep, there's a teenager chatterbox of all times telling them all. When I say this, I've since sort of started bringing this up when I'm giving talks and in an audience of 300, everybody goes, "Oh", like it's a wildly universal phenomenon. So the best thing about being a psychologist is that functionally we're like anthropologist. Our job is to be like, why does this happen? What is this about? And so what's very clear to me, I think this is my theory, but I feel pretty good about it, is this allows teenagers to actually satisfy competing masters in their lives.

So on the one hand, teenagers want to be autonomous. That is the main organizing force for most teenagers. They want to be independent and increasingly so. And so when we're like, "Hey, tell me about school." We're basically calling them to a meeting, setting the time of the meeting and setting the agenda for the meeting. As the teenagers are like, "Nope, not on your terms." But they also really want to connect with their parents, like teenagers really do. And so showing up, when we're trying to shut it down, lets them do both because they are calling, they are setting the agenda for the meeting. And here's what teenagers have told me, and this cracks me up so much. They're like, "Oh, my parents ask many fewer questions and do not bring up new topics at that time." And then if they want the meeting to end, they can be like, "All right guys, I'll let you sleep." And out they go. And so for me-

Andy: You're not going to chase them, you're in bed. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Damour: So I'm like, okay, this is brilliant, absolutely brilliant on their part. And so what we need to do is recognize we have to work with their terms of engagement. They are teenagers and we have terms of engagement. And so it may even getting in bed a little earlier if we want to get more sleep. And if your kid's not a nighttime talker, there are other places where they introduce the terms, like you're in the car, but you're really close to home. So it's going to be a short conversation or they'll do it by text, but they won't do it in person. And I think that it's so interesting to me, parents are often like, "How do I get my kid to talk?" And my answer most of the time is, I think your kid is often trying to talk or kid teenagers are often trying to talk and we miss it. And so I think that's how you try to do it, is to be receptive to what they bring.

Andy: So easy to just be like, "Ah, just not right now." I had all this time earlier and I was trying to get... And just you wouldn't say anything. And what now you want to talk when I'm in the middle of whatever. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Damour: All the time. And not that I don't do that myself as a parent, I'm like, "Really now?"

Andy: What is the deal with listening to emotional music? You talk about this, you have this whole study about angry music, listening to angry music. Is that normal or is that going to make teenagers more agitated to be listening to really angry music? Or is that therapeutic or what's the science behind that?

Dr. Lisa Damour: So I've been aware for a while that music plays a pretty powerful role in what we call emotion regulation, kids' ability to manage feelings well. And so it was very fun in this book to take a deep dive into how it shows up. And one of the things I lay out in the book is that there's really two categories of activity that kids use to manage feelings. Sometimes they're expressing feelings and sometimes they're working to bring the feelings back down to size. And so interestingly, music shows up in both of these categories. So on the expression side, when teenagers are trying to get feelings out, it's very common for teenagers to listen to mood matching music around negative moods, right? Sad music when they're sad, angry music when they're angry. And I love this, but some scientists were like, "Okay, but does it make them sad or angrier?" And actually study this and discovered is it doesn't, it actually speeds their way through the mood and helps them feel better faster.

It actually catalyzes the expression so that they can get through and past it. So that's on the expression side. I also, in the chapter on bringing things down to size, I talk a little bit about how teenagers will sometimes deliberately listen to mood countering music, sooth and emotion. So if they're sad, they'll deliberately put on their hyper happy playlist and that will help them get out of their sad mood. And so for me, I just love the way in which teenagers are so intuitive about what they're going to need. And sometimes they're like, I need to feel this feeling deeply and they'll put on music that will help them do it.

And then it's sometimes right after that they're like, now I need to stop feeling this feeling, so I'm going to put on music that's going to help quiet that emotion. And for me, really the best thing adults can do when we're trying to figure out how to help teenagers with their feelings is to firsthand just stand back and admire all of the really clever and adaptive strategies teenagers are already using to do it, as opposed to thinking that the best and only solution is they talk with us about how they're feeling and then we help them feel better. I think that could be an underlying assumption that we want to not necessarily attach ourselves to.

Andy: Yeah, we don't want to be become a crutch to them anyways.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah. They do a good job of managing emotions and we don't want to underestimate or diminish that.

Andy: Yeah. You really talk a lot about the importance of emotional expression in the book and how really that a lot of times when teenagers are expressing emotions to us, we have the instincts to try to... It's just give them advice on how they can fix the problem or change the thing or point out ways, "Well actually, no, this is great because you're going to be doing all this other great stuff", and try to just make flip the switch from pissed off to happy all of a sudden or something like that. And you make a really strong case I think that we need to really just give them space to express the emotion, and I wonder how we can do that or how we can get better at that. Or if we're not going to try to make them feel better or help them brainstorm solutions, what do we do?

Dr. Lisa Damour: So I think the first thing we do is we work on ourselves, right? And I think that a question we want to be asking ourselves a lot when our kid is expressing distress, is my kid dealing with something that's uncomfortable or something that's unmanageable? And most of the time in the day in, day out of family life, it's going to be things that are very uncomfortable for your kids, but they can actually manage. And I think that having asked that and assessed that and come to that conclusion actually sets us up well because then our job is to actually help our kid manage being uncomfortable and help them find their way towards feeling better. We want kids to have the ability to tolerate distress, but that doesn't mean that they sit there in pain. What we want is for them to be able to figure out what it's going to take to feel better and how they can make that happen or how they can ask for our help in making that happen.

So I think that's where we want to start is a tolerance for our kids' discomfort so that it can become a grounds for them figuring out how to feel better and increasingly doing that independently so they can actually do things, like move out eventually. If we assess the situation as unmanageable and there are unmanageable situations, then game on. We're getting that kid a clinician, we're making phone calls, we're stepping in. That's a really important thing to do as a parent. But I think when we are not bringing our A-game as parents is when we are equating, "My kids' uncomfortable, it's my job to help manage this." Or "I've got to get in there until this go away."

Andy: Yeah. When we're able to really just allow the teen to express emotions however they're expressing them, does there come a time when after they've been expressed, then now can we kind of help them solve the problem?

Dr. Lisa Damour: When do we give advice?

Andy: Yeah, then so we're patient and we're empathetic and we come up with the perfect headline for their article and we're like, "Oh, wow. I really see that sounds so hard. I understand you're feeling like this." Now, can we go when we're going to help them solve it?

Dr. Lisa Damour: Well, I think first of all, I just think we have to be pretty humble about how good our solutions are. A lot of what teenagers bring home is super complex or involves variables that we really cannot perceive or... And so when we're offering advice, I think a lot teenager are like, "Yeah, you don't really get it."

Andy: "It's not going to work, mom." Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It's not going to work. So I think the first thing is very rarely are we like, "You know what? I have a brilliant idea and you haven't thought of it and it's going to work." I think that what we need to understand is that most of the time when kids are coming forward with what feels to them a problem, most of what they need and want is just for us to listen and empathize and validate and sort of vote a confidence like, "I trust that you're going to figure this out, but this does sound very hard." Or I will say overwhelmingly what they not want, but we are older and we do have some knowledge and we do want to share it with our kids. And so if that moment arrives, I think the right thing to do if you want to have an even shot of them being at all receptive to our wisdom is to say, "Do you want some help trying to think this through?" Or "I have an idea, are you interested?"

And the way I would think about this is if your teenagers are just telling you what they're upset about and you're like, "Well, you know what you should do?" It's like barging in. You say, "I have a couple thoughts. Are you interested?" You're knocking on the door. Like "May I", right? So if they're like, "Actually, yes." Okay. Now, they've opened the door, you may go ahead on in, right? I mean, you're welcome. The chances of them treating you like a welcome guest are going to go way, way up. If your kid's like, "No, I do not want your ideas. I really don't." Like because they really meant that is okay. That is okay. It's not what the parent wants to hear, but it's okay. And here's why it's okay. You've communicated to the kid, I don't think you're helpless. "I get that this is not pleasant. I don't think you're helpless. If you change your mind and want to hear what's on my mind, I'll tell you later." But they now know that you have a sense that there's maybe something they can do something about and that's valuable in itself.

Andy: I really love one strategy that you mentioned in the book, which is simply asking them what would they tell a friend who was going through exactly the same thing? And yeah, I think it's just so savvy because a lot of the times, the things that you are going to tell, or advice that you're going to lay on them is probably stuff that they could have thought of themself, especially if you can help them just even a little bit of what we're talking about at the very beginning with the hot cognition and the cold cognition, if they're really emotional about something, maybe sort of by helping them kind of just get a little psychological distance and sort of imagine themselves talking to somebody else, they can sort of cool down a little bit, drop back into that cold cognition mode just a little bit more and be able to say, "Yeah, well, I guess I would tell them whatever it is."

Dr. Lisa Damour: I think that's a really great way to think about it. I haven't thought about it in that way, but I agree with you, right? You're sort of shifting the part of the brain that's running the show. And I also think there's something really psychologically powerful about saying the words oneself, that I could say to a teenager, "Listen, in a week, you're not going to care about this." But if a teenager says, "Well, what I would tell my friend is that in a week she's not going to care about this." That act of it being in their voice and in their words and in their mouths, I think is really powerful. And there's another place in the book where that comes up about if you get into a fight or an impasse with a teenager, that it can be really useful to say, "All right, I'm going to try to say the situation from your perspective." You can say that to your teenager and you do your best to do it.

And then you say, "Okay, now you say the situation from my perspective." And again, it's that embodying the viewpoint, right? Embodying the content. Sort of the teenager says, "Well, look, I get it. Maybe you're upset that there's stuff on my floor, because it seems like I don't care about the things that you've bought me", is very different from the parents saying, "Listen, this is why I'm upset. When the stuff's on your floor, it seems like you don't care about the things I've bought you." That naturally will inspire a defensive response in a teenager, but if they're the ones voicing it, you just did a really beautiful end runaround those defenses. So I think that's a strategy that has real legs.

Andy: I love that. And that taking turns' aspect of you putting yourself into their perspective first. And it goes back to a lot of the stuff you've been talking about with really having to listen to them and understand what they're saying and what you're saying with the headline thing is maybe let's say it's not really what I feel or that's not why I'm so mad about this and that leads to a conversation too.

Dr. Lisa Damour: Just getting clarity, but having it be about trying to understand as opposed to trying to change how they feel.

Andy: Amazing. Dr. Damour, thank you so very much for coming on the podcast today. It's been an absolute pleasure to read through your book and to speak with you.

Dr. Lisa Damour: Thank you for having me. It was a lovely conversation. I really appreciate it.

Andy: I cannot recommend enough that people pick up a copy of The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents. I know you have a podcast as well, and a lot, you do so much stuff. You are super active on all kinds of media platforms. Where should we send people to stay up on what you're doing and what you're working on next?

Dr. Lisa Damour: Oh, thank you. Okay. Well, the one-stop shop is my website, which is drlisadamour.com. But I have a podcast, Ask Lisa, the Psychology of Parenting. You can find it there. And then I do a fair bit of writing for New York Times and other places. And yeah, those are... And then I put out stuff on Instagram, on Facebook on the regular basis.

Andy: Check it out. Highly encouraged. Awesome. Cool.

Dr. Lisa Damour: Thank you so much.

Andy: Amazing. Yes, it's an absolute pleasure always. And best of luck with the new book, and I'm sure it will be a huge hit.

Dr. Lisa Damour: I hope it's useful. All right. Take care.