Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Andy Earle
Hey, it's Andy from talking to teens, it would mean the world to us. If you could leave us a five star review, reviews on Apple and Spotify help other parents find the show. And that helps us keep the lights on. Thanks for being a listener.

And here's the show. You're listening to talking to teens, where we speak with leading experts from a variety of disciplines about the art and science of parenting teenagers. I'm your host, Andy Earle.

We're here today with Susan Rogers talking about music, about what the music that your teenager likes, says about them, and about how you can use music in your family to connect more deeply with your kids, and to share with them about who you are. And what's important to you. Susan is a cognitive neuroscientist and an award winning professor at Berklee College of Music, as well as a multi platinum record producer, and is one of the most successful female record producers of all time, as well as the author of the book. This is what it sounds like what the music you love says about you, we're going to be speaking with Susan today about what's going on in your teenager's brain, when they listen to music and how you can use their music to understand them a little more deeply.

We're really excited to get into all that and a whole lot more. Susan, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Susan Rogers
Thank you so much, Andy. I'm really happy to be here. I love teenagers love music. So it'll be fun to talk about the two together. Music is something I have been involved with professionally as a record maker for over two decades. And I have made I've had great success. I've made a lot of hit records with a lot of very successful artists. So I know about music from that angle. But then I left the music business and I earned my PhD in studying music perception and cognitions. Right now I'm working on music and neuroscience course for Berklee Online and, and researching and writing about the neuroscience of what's actually happening. Upstairs here, when we're savoring a musical treat is just delightful and fun to explore. This is something that I learned through eight years of college for undergrad and for grad school, learning from some really smart people. But my world was totally rocked by learning the many ways in which listening to music can release some dopamine and give us a feel good treat. Music Works like food and recreational drugs and sex and things like that, and that it feels good. It feels good to consume. Music happens at the conservatory phase, if a piece of music is playing in the room and no one's there to hear it, can you really call it music, it becomes music. When a brain recognizes it as such, and becomes good music. When you scan listening for treats. That's how I like to think of it. And you're listening for the elements on this particular record that please you. And it might be the rhythm, that's the dimension, it might be the lyrics, it might be the melody, it might be. The sound design itself. Sound is a special form of touch. Or it might be the aesthetic dimensions of the like the style of it. Or it might be authenticity, you recognize that that singer is singing his heart out. And maybe that really gets Yeah, or it might be just something like this. This is a record that represents the kind of visual fantasy that I enjoy. And since your mind into that mind wandering realm that you personally like when you daydream, all of that to say music listening is so intensely personal. So personal and private, private, we experience it alone up here in our heads, when we're really into a record. This can be shown in brain studies.

We need to be really careful about that when we criticize someone else's musical tastes, especially a young person's musical tastes because music listening is so private and individualized. So when we bond to a record, it means that something about that record speaks to us and it represents us on some level. So when you're criticizing someone's taste in music in a way you're criticizing it out aspect of their private psyche, and there's no reason to do that. There's no reason to because taste is is is something that is arbitrary. And as you said a moment ago, one person ceiling is another person's floor with someone regards us Sublime is going to be heard differently than that exact same record that might be regarded by a person as a yeah, this, this doesn't do it for me. So all the music that we that we hear in our responses to music are caused by all the music we've ever heard in our life, and also social belongingness and self congruence. A sense of, yeah, this artist gets me sorry, gets me I would like this artist would like me, I like this artist, it couldn't be more individualized. So I strongly encourage parents to do something that I start off the book by describing which is having a record pull. The record pull is something we would do in the recording studio, that's where you sit around, you take turns playing a record that you love for one another. And the idea is, you want to show them what music sounds like to you. So you might say, I love this record, because and of course you might say it reminds me of this person or that person. But if you can say the words are just pure poetry to me, or this, this lyric helped me solve to solve a problem when I didn't know what to think about something. Or the feeling that drive the assertion or the aggression on this record, made me feel powerful, or this music feels soothing and tender to me, or it expresses the love I have for someone. If you can describe how a record sounds you record that you love, you're giving someone a glimpse into your psyche, why wouldn't it be a great thing to have a family record poll and take turns playing the music you love for one another? It's just a journey of self discovery and a journey of other discovery.

Andy Earle
Yeah, it's such it's there's something really intimate about that. And it's kind of a, just a deeper way to get to know each other. I love that.

Susan Rogers
Exactly. And it can surprise you. People can play something for you that you might have never thought they would like there was an article that came out in the New York Times years ago. This is in the era of iPods. And the writer said, or the title of the article was no me. No, my iPod, he had bought a used iPod from a co worker, his coworker, Ken and Ken forgot to delete all his songs. So the guy who wrote the article, he's got this iPod, it's got all the songs on it. And you listen to the the songs. And he said, I feel like I know can better. And I like what I know, I just discovered something about can listening to his iPod, we can discover something about each other, if we're open minded and not judgmental about their musical tastes, recognize that their taste is a reflection of who they are of things that are important to them personally.

Andy Earle
You talk in the book about authenticity. I think that's something that is just on so many teenagers minds on one of the central ideas of adolescence really, and it's interesting. It's kind of one of the first topics you dive into in the book. And the first record that you kind of talk with talk about is really an interesting one, with a fascinating story behind it, which I went to listen to actually, it's the story of this family. And these and these teenage girls are this album with their father, dot Betty and Helen, why did you include this and why is this the first album that you can talk about?

Susan Rogers
Betty, Helen and Dorothy Wigan were three teenage girls who lived with their family in a remote part of New Hampshire in the 1960s. And their father was a mill worker. I didn't make a lot of money. But dad, dad's mom, the girl's grandmother was a bit of an Oracle. And she predicted a couple of things that came true for for Mr. wickedness, she predicted that he would marry a woman with strawberry blonde hair, and that he would have sons and nearly all of that happened. And Grandma also predicted that the Wiggins daughters would form a pop band this is the 1960s and that their music would ring out across the land. So dad believed that he needed to guide the Hand of Fate so he needed to make this happen. The girls hadn't expressed any particular interest in music, other than listening to the radio, but he got the most of musical instruments. And he actually took them out of school made them stay at home and stay in their room and practice writing and playing their instruments. Now, they lived in a remote part of New Hampshire and in the United States in the 1960s remote areas would not have always received good radio reception so the girls would have had somewhat limited experience in listening to good music anyway. They they hacked away at their or instruments, and Dad finally took them down to a recording studio in Boston to record their first film their collection of 12 songs. As soon as the engineers heard them play the engineers were just rolling on the control room floor, hysterical with laughter because this music is awful. It doesn't conform to any rules of music. It's the instruments about are out of tune. They play out of time, it's dissonant. The reason that it is known and loved by music industry professionals is because the music of these girls they call their band The shags represents pure, unadulterated intentionality. It represents what happens when people are trying to express themselves with musical gestures because they have no technique, no training, that music can't come from the neck up. It's not coming from a place of knowledge. It's coming from a place of desire and intentionality, this shags are to music. What a little toddlers finger painting is to art no technique whatsoever. But what that child is trying to do is they're trying to represent their life. And it's usually mom and dad, maybe the dog and maybe the house. So why those things why those things. It's the child thing. My world looks like this musically, the shags are complete innocence, and they are expressing themselves in a way that they believe you need to express yourself. When we listen to the shags we recognize unadulterated desire in performance. When we listen to professional performers on stage or in the recording studio. We're listening for that desire. If you're simply playing from the neck up from a place of training, music theoretic knowledge is not going to sound nearly as good as if you're playing from the neck down from the heart, from the belly button from the groin, playing from the tips of your toes as the shags do. That's why I put it in there in the book, right from the get go to illustrate. We're not talking about how to make or appreciate perfect music. We're talking about what music sounds like to you. That's

Andy Earle
really fun listening to actually and it Yeah, it's strangely beautiful. And just, I highly recommend people check out the album and reading what you wrote about it. Just you know, the backstory and everything. Yeah, it makes it just really, really worthwhile.

Susan Rogers
There's a purity to their lyric writing.

Andy Earle
Absolutely. Yeah.

Susan Rogers
Is has it has a kind of an Emily Dickinson quality to it because it's simple and pure. But the song I chose I'm so happy when you're near. I'm so happy with your new year. I'm so sad when you're away now that you're here. I'm happy every day simple. But some of the greatest greatest lyricists Brian Wilson comes to mind Paul McCartney is another write lyrics that are distilled into that pure form. So there's a beauty there

Andy Earle
something else that's that's really interesting you got me thinking about is what images play in your mind when you listen to music? And kind of Yeah, something I hadn't really even thought about before it paid much attention to but you actually conducted some research on this, if I'm not mistaken yourself and kind of surveyed people about what they're what they're seeing in their mind's eye when they're listening to music. What? So? So what is it what what how, what do people kind of picture and what does that say about us?

Susan Rogers
It was interesting. So I was invited to write this book by a co author, okay, oh guy he knows next to nothing about music, but he's very smart in other ways. He's also a PhD. So we were talking early in the process. Somehow the topic came up what you see in your mind's eye, what you fantasize about, when you listen to your favorite records, I naively assumed that everyone saw the same thing that I see, which is the performers. I've been ever since I was a little kid. When I listened to my favorite music, my go to visualization is my treat is imagining that I'm in the studio with them or that I'm seeing them onstage. I'm watching them perform. That's a treat to me. I savor that and I choose records to listen to, so I can have my treat. Well, it turns out Ogee was completely the opposite. And he said, Oh, I don't like picturing people at all. When I listen to music. I said you don't. He said no, no, it really ruins it for me. He said, I like picturing abstract shapes and colors and other words sci fi world where there's no people and we're both looking at each other or both thing and that's really weird. So I went looking for empirical data on what people visualize and didn't find much out there. So again, I conducted a comprehensive survey we collected data from roughly 70 100 music listeners in the United States across all 50 states, and asked what do you see in your mind's eye when you're listening to your favorite music, the vast majority of people 25%, which isn't that big of a majority, but it was the biggest of this sample. They see autobiographical memories. They choose records to recall people or events or places times in their lives that make them happy. So of course, their musical taste is going to tend to run toward things they liked when they were perhaps very young,

Andy Earle
right? Yeah, not new music. And it's music that you have previous experiences with it, you can kind of link back to and it takes you back to that moment. Yes.

Susan Rogers
And some people this surprised me nearly 20% They like to make up a story based on the lyrics only it was less than 10%, I think of people see the performance, many people visualize themselves performing. And there were an awful lot of people who visualize abstract shapes and colors and don't want to see people when they listen to music. So of course, they're more likely to enjoy instrumental music or electronic music, so they can get their treat the fantasy that they prefer, yeah,

Andy Earle
some music really makes you bring brings to mind the musicians who are playing it, because you can kind of hear their fingers sliding on the guitar strings or whatever, they're kind of breathing into the microphone or something. Whereas other music feels a lot more kind of removed from the actual performers cleansed, or something of all those Yes.

Susan Rogers
And it's a distinction that we also see in visual arts. So in music, you can listen to a record, this is my preference that's played by real people on real instruments so that you can visualize it. You've seen those instruments before the drums and the guitar and the horns. But you can also listen to an abstract record that features entirely computer generated sounds, you've never seen anything that makes that sound. And that is what OKI prefers, because it sends him into those flights of fancy that aren't connected to reality. Likewise, with paintings, sometimes we like realistic representations. And sometimes we like the more abstract paintings,

Andy Earle
but you kind of suggest that we sort of have a preference for one, one or the other. And that maybe it's not the same as our preferences for visual maybe in visual art. We prefer more abstract things, but musically we prefer more realistic.

Susan Rogers
Yeah, this is one of the wonderful things about individual taste, and everything in art and food and romantic partners, things that you choose to engage with certainly not perfect. That's why when you criticize your child's music tastes well okay, maybe it's valid maybe to your mind, it doesn't have the melody or the harmony or the sophistication or the elements that you value. But to someone else, it's perfect. It's got those, it's got what they need to have a certain response. So personally, I love abstract art. Because I love where my brain goes, I love running my eyes over the gestures and the colors, and imagining what it feels like to have a brain that thinks like that. But it's the opposite of my taste in music. I want to hear or imagine, shall we say, real people, the different kinds of treat. And this activates different regions of the brain, which we activate and massage. When we choose this pizza topping over that pizza topping. You go to a clothing store, and you go along a rack of clothes. And it's no no, no, no, no, no, no until you see something. You go. Yeah, no, that didn't work. So what makes that one thing better or worse than another shirt or sweater? It just happens to light up regions of your brain that make you say, Yeah, this is functional. This could work for me. This works for me. That's what we're doing when we choose. Choose our art and our food and our fashion things where we have a lot of choice.

Andy Earle
Really interesting to talk about is kind of this change, change that happened with digital audio. How that really kind of I guess it maybe led to led to a lot more abstract music.

Susan Rogers
There was a revolution in recording technology. It happened 25 years ago, and of the 90s. It affected record makers like me greatly. Great. So we transitioned from the analog tape era of making records to streaming to digital record when that happened the way music could be shared among listeners was really quite different. So in my day, new music would come out and you'd have babysitting money or you'd have birthday money. You'd have a little bit of money. And you might be able to buy one of those Christmas or your birthday, maybe you get a couple of albums, you can get a few things, but you couldn't have everything, you just have a few things, your friend down the street would have some other records. And then you'd go and go to each other's houses, and you'd listen to music because they had some of it and you had some of it, and you put it together, and you can hear what's going on. But in the era of streaming, everybody's got everything. And I can be talking with students at Berkeley about an artist or a record, and they just pull it up on their phones, and they have it so that was a big revolution. The other revolution is that with so much more to choose from we now it's no it's not possible anymore to know everything that's out there. And your your music library becomes more and more individualistic 40 years ago, kids, oh, we're into kind of the same music because that's what was popular, I'd say maybe 50 years ago, might be more accurate. 60 years ago, for sure. That's what was popular. But today, the individualization of music taste is more crucial than ever before. Kids in in school can be the curators of their own private music collection that might not might have little or no overlap with the music of other people. It was a huge revolution in how we make music, how we sell music, and how we consume music

Andy Earle
that's really interesting to just think about how all of these things, and it's such a feedback loop, but then chains changes, what what music gets made. If we're consuming it in different ways, then it's then it's going to get made in different ways. And artists are going to kind of respond to that and start kind of creating different and this kind of this constant interplay between how it's being consumed. And maybe, yeah,

Susan Rogers
yeah, we were in the golden era of songwriting of melody writing in the Tin Pan Alley days in the 40s, and 50s. But in the 60s, protest, music started to come along and lyrics, folk singers, people like Bob Dylan started to become more and more important. So lyrics kind of took a more prominent role. We weren't just doing love songs anymore, the 60s and the 70s in the 70s FM radio came along. So now we didn't have to listen to these top 40 singles, you could dial in FM radio, and you could listen to the more fringe stuff, and you get a broader sense of what's possible out there. But then came hip hop, late 70s and early 80s. And what they chose to focus on was the rhythm. And now we're dancing differently. Now we're not doing the twist anymore, though. Watusi? We're dancing in a way is supported by these new styles of music of rap and hip hop dancing. And the rhythm elements in our music reflect the culture and how people flirt. And if you're going to flirt with someone on the dance floor, you want to move your body in a certain way. And that changes with the culture. The generations today don't do the same dancers that their parents did. Why would they there'd be something wrong with them. If they did that, they come up with their own. So through the 80s and 90s. It was all hip hop and rap. And today, we're seeing new styles. Fortunately for all of us, we're seeing a greater influence of world music. So we're seeing some groups from other parts of the world, working their way into our music. It's important for for kids today to have their own musical language, their own lingua franca for what music is it we're

Andy Earle
here today with Susan Rogers talking about music, and what music your teenager likes, says about them and how you can use music to connect more deeply as a family. And we're not done yet. Here's a look at what's coming up. In the second half of the show.

Susan Rogers
When we listen to the music we love, it activates our default network. A default network is an interconnected network of nuclei that are responsible for forming our sense of self self awareness, self image, self consciousness, when we listen to music, we don't like we don't activate the network. In fact, there's a circuit in the brain that says do that and keep away from me and cuts itself off from the network. You're saying not me. But when you listen to music that you love, it actually do go into your own head and you activate the default network. And the listening becomes a private, inner experience that is connected to your sense of self. So it becomes the music of you. I would suggest to parents that they keep a few things in mind. One is that it might not be the lyrics that they're listening to. There's a high likelihood that it's not because when we process music, lyrics are pretty much processed in the speech regions of the brain and melody and harmony and other musical aspects are processed in a different hemisphere. When people say Oh, I never listened to the words believe them because as that is, it's quite possible. Another aspect that to keep in mind is just because you relate to a certain style of music doesn't mean that that's going to pop up and be prominent in your own personal cohesive sense of self. The teenage brain is not done, there are certain areas of the brain that are connected with our sense of self that are still under construction researchers brought adults and teenagers into the lab and they had them in the FMRI. They asked them two simple questions. One, what do you think about yourself? They see the brain activity in response to that. Second question, what do you think other people think of you blah, blah, blah, there's brain activity. What was so startling was in the adults, those two questions activate regions of the brain that have minimal overlap in teenagers. Those two questions lay on top of each other pretty dramatically. What it means of course, is that what that saying is what you think other kids think of you. That's what you think of yourself.

Andy Earle
Want to hear the full episode, head over to talking to teens.com/register? For a free trial of our premium podcast, you get exclusive access to loads of great content with no obligation and your membership supports the work we do here at talking to teens get started today with a free trial over at talking to teens.com/registered Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.