Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Andy Earle: 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 Janice Fraser talking about how to make good decisions as a family.

So often when we're debating with our teenagers about what they should be able to do, what they shouldn't be able to do, Big decisions about the future of our teenager's life.

How can we get through those kinds of family discussions in a way that makes everybody feel heard and that ultimately leads to a decision that everybody can live with?

We are here with Janice Fraser, the author of Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama.

Janice has coached teams and delivered workshops around the world. She helps people make better decisions as a group.

And she's here today to talk to us about how we can apply some decision making frameworks in our families to get to where we all want to go faster and more easily.

Janice, welcome to the Talking to Teens podcast.

Janice Fraser: Thank you so much for having me. I am super excited about this podcast.

Andy Earle: Oh my gosh. Thank you. Yeah. I'm pretty amped as well.

I've just finished reading your book Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama and pretty excited to talk about. You have all kinds of decision making frameworks in here. Yeah. That are really cool. And you have great examples about how they can be used in families to get everyone's ideas out there and go through a collaborative decision making process together, which is really, I think really cool.

Janice Fraser: Thank you so much. And yes, we use this stuff at home all the time, like we have for years and years used it at home. It helps that my husband is my coauthor and was the cofounder of a startup that we did 10- 15 years ago. And so my son, who happens to currently be 21. For most of his life, we were working together using these collaboration methods.

For us, blue tape and sticky notes around the house. We just, the kitchen wall was where we would make big, important decisions. And there's just so much about working with teenagers that really lends itself to some of these methods.

What did I hear about working with teenagers when I was a new mom of a teenager? They need to be heard. They can sometimes be reticent to say things out loud. I know that some of their ideas are stupid, so I don't want to hear all of them.

One section of the book is about facilitation methods, and it's: here's a prompt. Write 10 post it notes. Everybody writes the same number of post it notes. Then you self edit. You cut them in half. Because I don't want to listen to every dumb idea that comes in your head.

But also I want there to be equal participation around the table. So, our daughter is significantly older than our son. She came to us as a young adult. We didn't have her through her teenage years. So we have this age difference between the Millennial daughter and the Gen Z son and 2 parents. And everyone wants to have their say.

And so how can you equalize participation, make sure everyone understands each other. So we organize first for understanding. And then we can talk about do you believe this thing that you now understand? But at least we've all heard each other.

We've all had a say, right? So that's where it all starts. And then the methods grew from there.

Andy Earle: There's so many interesting ideas in the book. One of the big divides that you draw is between outcomes and output.

And and it's really got me thinking a lot about in my business and personal life. So often, we find ourselves just doing something. Or, Hey, we need to do this. And then if we want to do that, then we need to do this. But first we need to do this and that, and walking ourselves backward a few steps, really focus on what are we trying to achieve here?

What are we trying to accomplish? I love this and you talk in the book about how this distinction can really play out in family decisions as well, like figuring out where to go for vacation or what restaurant to go to, or all kinds of things.

Janice Fraser: My son is neurodiverse. Super smart guy, like really bright. But not academically standard. Seventh, eighth grade was a really tough time for him. It was hard to figure out what kind of high school should he go to? He was in public school. He was not very successful at public school. So we moved him to a private project- based school, but then he didn't have the standard training to go to a standard high school because his schooling had been different.

When I think about outcome, versus output, versus activity, the relationship here is: what is the result that we want to get for his education? You apply it to something really big, like, how do I prepare my kid to have the life he deserves? That's really hard, especially when you have a neurodiverse kid who doesn't fit the standard mold.

And we all knew, because of his big brain, We knew that he needed to go to college and I had the idea that he probably needed to go to a liberal arts college and he probably was going to study philosophy. And he was like, no way, mom, you're totally wrong. It turns out that's exactly what he's done.

But so you have this kid who's not getting the best grades. And yet, he needs to go to this super thinky, selective college. I have four years to get this kid ready to go from here to there.

That's the outcome based thinking. I know he needs to be prepared that if he chooses to go to college, that he's prepared for the kind of college that we think probably he's going to be well suited to. And then you're like, oh, crud, how do I do that? And suddenly you can look at the high school challenge, like which high school to choose, from a different lens.

So instead of fighting about you need to get good grades, it's you need to be prepared to be successful. And so that means that we can start looking in some different directions for how to achieve that. And so actually he skipped his last year of high school. He never graduated.

He just skipped it and went straight to an early college. We found this like random program that is totally unlike any other program that accepts high school kids. So they just skip junior and senior year. And it was perfect. It was a great solution.

It's not the right solution for most people, but it was the right solution for him. So when you start focusing on outcomes rather than outputs, output would be the grade.

Andy Earle: We need a tutor. And then we need more hours. And then probably practice tests so we can get that score up.

Janice Fraser: You're like tightening the noose around this kid's neck. It just it was like all the bad metaphors and for a while we tried that and it clearly was not having the outcome that we wanted.

And so then the, it's like the activity, and the outputs are different. And what we wanted was for him to be learning and gaining skills that would allow him to be successful. And, did we succeed? Yeah, I think so. He's very happy.

And he's, at a college, he lives in Berlin. Now he goes to a college in Berlin. He decided himself, he's I want to go to this particular school in Berlin that has exact program that I want. And he's so happy. And he's like doing really well, so he hasn't graduated yet, he probably will.

And if he doesn't, I'm sure it'll be for a good reason. And he's on his own.

Andy Earle: So grades would be outputs.

Janice Fraser: Grades are outputs.

Andy Earle: And test scores would be outputs.

Janice Fraser: Yep, that's right. And and the activity is like, are you engaged in learning? And so those activities and the outputs are important indicators, but they're subordinated to the goal.

So it's not that we don't care about grades. It's not that we don't care about, buckling down and doing your work and having good, healthy discipline. But it's not the point. The point is to be prepared to have an extraordinary adult life.

That's what we want. We want, the comprehensive result of: prepared for the life that you deserve.

Andy Earle: When we focus on the end goal, then it frees us up to see all sorts of different paths that we could be taking to get there instead of feeling focused on the traditional path or the one that we're already on or the most obvious one.

And we can start to see so many more possibilities.

Janice Fraser: So me as a student, I loved doing worksheets. I loved worksheets. I loved the completeness of it. It gave me a sense of a pat on the back. But I also needed to focus on the why. Like why are those worksheets important? Actually the worksheets were important to me because I needed to be a self starter because of my family situation.

And and I needed that sense of accomplishment. Sometimes it's hard to figure out what is an outcome versus what is an output. And the outcome is always the answer to why is that output necessary? Why is that output important? There's a famous book called Start with Why.

And I just like, yeah, why? Why do I care about that thing? What will be different if I do that thing the way that I imagined doing it?

Andy Earle: Why do you want to get good grades or why do you want to get into a certain college? What's beneath that?

To have some kind of successful life where you feel fulfilled and like you're doing something meaningful. This hopefully be the path to get you there, but maybe there's other paths. Once we dig down into that, then we start to be able to look at other possibilities.

Janice Fraser: So on page 11 is my favorite quote from the book, and it's about how we don't believe in work life balance. We believe in, it's all just life. And we want it to be a life. Filled with confidence, security, love, and meaning. We'd all be better if we all had confidence and if we all had some security and if we all are surrounded with love. And if the effort that we do gives us meaning, that's a pretty good situation.

So all of the tools and techniques and ideas are about helping individuals. And groups of people live a life filled with confidence, security, love, and meaning. Because if you do that, then we can change the things that are wrong in the world. We can have more impact. And so that's what we want for our kids.

That's what we want for you. What we want for ourselves.

Andy Earle: Sometimes it's hard to really even know what outcome we want. You have a whole section of the book on how sometimes we're not even really being honest with ourselves. How do we recognize that or understand that?

And how does that fit into all this, that we've been talking about?

Janice Fraser: We do on purpose and accidentally lie to ourselves in all sorts of ways. And in part, our brains are wired that way, and it's purposeful. So I'll be fully transparent. I'm a trauma survivor.

I had a very challenging, very early life. So I'm a CPTSD and developmental trauma survivor. So one of the ways that we lie to ourselves is that we develop these coping mechanisms to deal with very difficult situations and, whether that's, there was a fire in Northern California and your whole town burned down, which has happened recently, right?

Or if it's like me, you come from a very complicated beginning, adolescents who have to deal with, another school shooting, you have to learn to, shelter in place, like all of these things are traumatizing. As parents of adolescents, as educators of adolescents, we're dealing with a much more complicated situation than the 1980s when I was a teenager. And so finding various ways to reveal to ourselves the things that are non obvious so that we can be radically candid with ourselves so that we can then develop coping strategies, that's what increases our confidence in moving through the world.

Whether it's from psychology, or from business literature, or from cognitive psychology with, implicit bias and cognitive biases, these are all different ways that we are not addressing what's really happening and what's really at play.

And, I've lived a really nice life with this one motto and it's: figure out what's true and make that a good thing. So as someone who comes from a very complicated background, figuring out what was true is not always pleasant. Sometimes figuring what out what's true is coming out of denial and it hurts a lot.

But once you do that, you have so much more capacity to create something good out of what you have.

That was all pretty vague.

I really believe in radical acceptance of the true thing gives you power. It gives you power to build a new story. It gives you power to have an influence over what's happening.

Andy Earle: One of the biggest lies often that we tell ourselves and others is: I'm fine. With parents and teenagers, especially. Hey, how's it going? How was school? How's practice? Yeah, it's fine. Yeah. I'm okay. I'm fine. And how do we get through that? I experienced this a lot myself. I'm not so good about communicating this kind of stuff in my own personal relationships. And, I find myself saying, ah, yeah, I don't know.

Yeah, I'm fine. A lot. It's not necessarily that your teenager is trying to be evasive or hide things from you. They honestly maybe don't really know or they haven't checked in with themselves. And so how do we open up some of those conversations? And I love this tool that you have in your book.

It's a life pie.

Janice Fraser: Yes. It's my favorite.

Andy Earle: I think this is a great tool to do together. And then you can really compare notes and then you can start to ask follow up questions. It's so much better than just saying, How you doing, or how you feeling, or how did it go?

Because we can actually then start to see, okay I see this piece is really colored in a lot less than this one and what's going on there. And what does that mean to you? And I love if we could talk a little bit about how that works.

Janice Fraser: So I've been working with the life pie for 25 years now. I used to do a life pie exercise every single day when I was going through some really difficult times. And, 1st of all, let's describe the life pie. It's basically, you make a pie chart and you draw a circle and you divide it into 8 wedges and each wedge is labeled with something different.

And, it's financial security, and intellectual fulfillment, and emotional wellbeing, and physical wellbeing. So you have these eight pieces that together make up for me it's like my whole life. So my whole life can be described in these eight wedges of pie and you could do different wedges, but whatever, these are mine.

Andy Earle: I think you had really good ones in here. Maybe for a teenager, it's slightly different. Like financial is more about how they're feeling with studies.

Janice Fraser: I would love to see what would a good life pie look like for someone who's not yet at that adult level of operation.

But the idea is that you create your eight wedges that represent a whole life. And then you just take, I use a highlighter and I fill in from the middle outward. I fill in the wedges of pie, like it was a coloring book. And the amount is how good is it? Like, how full am I?

I think about it like fullness. What I find is I'm always surprised by what's comes out even after this long, because I always try and think my way out of problems or situations, but really what I need to do is something that fulfills for me spiritually. I need to make art.

I need to go for a walk outside in the woods. I need to hang out with the redwood trees. And I never think of that. And so part of what happens is that I'm surprised by where I have deficits. You're like, oh, that really needs some nurturing right now.

Here's another way that I would use it: in challenging situations, I would say what is a small thing I could do to care for myself in this way?

Sometimes what I need to do is pick up my laundry, and put it in a laundry basket. And sometimes what I need to do is something really mundane, but that actually gives me, more nourishment than it seems like it should. So the laundry is a good one for me because I, as a CPTSD survivor, I have had chronic depression.

Depression is a symptom of CPTSD. When I'm depressed, I now know after years of doing this life pie thing, that the number one thing that I can do to improve my state of mental health is do my laundry. Who would think that something so small and mundane everyone's write in your journal talk to a friend It's no, you know what I need to do I need to do a small teeny tiny thing that cares for my physical space because that's the place that I let it go first. Being a parent of a teenager you're waiting around in the wings for your kid to open up just a little bit.

And then you listen. That's it. It's a different kind of parenting than early childhood, obviously. And so that idea of the teenager going oh, I'm fine, and not really having the tools to express what's really going on with them. I think the Life Pie is a great example of a tool where you can you do it and I do it, I'm modeling for you that as a parent, I too have good and bad.

And we compare life pies and we just have a little conversation about what do you see? What I see is like this and this, and it's still an awkward conversation because nobody likes to open up to their mom. That's not true. Some people do. My kids didn't.

Andy Earle: Weirdos.

Janice Fraser: I never open up to my mom.

But like having just a little bit of conversation can go a really long way. And then as a parent, what you always want to do is like, how can I help you make it better? Whatever needs to be made better. What's one small thing you could do? It's just a teeny tiny comment. What's one small thing you could do to care for yourself in that way.

You're teaching them how to prompt themselves to care for themselves. I find it to be so helpful and useful.

Andy Earle: I love that. Yeah. I think it's just such a great framework. And could just lead to such great conversations. I really would encourage people to check it out.

You're not a big fan of plans. It seems like a lot of this book is about planning. But when you value planning above outcomes, it's easy to conflate effort with achievement. Having done work or check things off the list isn't the same as creating value through your actions.

Janice Fraser: This goes back to our school conversation, right? You can do all the work in the class that you were assigned and you can get a decent grade and you can still feel completely unprepared for knowing what you want to do with your life. Knowing how to be a functional, effective adult.

So the, it's not that I don't like plans. It's that so many things disrupt our plans, right? I could make a plan for my son's education. You're going to go to this school and that school. But the reality is that school zoning changes in the city that I live in. We discover that my son has a different way of approaching intelligence. New information is constantly unfolding. And then we're living in an era of COVID, or wildfires in California, or Donald Trump's presidency. You just never know when they're going to outlaw something new in Florida. We're dealing in a world where the surprises are End Boss level, right? I really feel like there's one End Boss level challenge after another.

No one could have predicted how many kids would come out as trans in the last five years. And we can talk a lot about why that is now and not before. But our world is changing and it's dynamic. And that means that the requirements of us as people who support adolescents we need to be able to flex. So if I were to make a plan and stick to the plan and value the plan above the result, I would get it all wrong. I have a better chance of getting things right if I focus on why is that plan necessary? Why do we choose those things? What is the outcome we're going for? Then we can just release the pressure to let the plan be flexible.

Andy Earle: Is this plan still serving us? We can keep reevaluating and say, are we still achieving what we hoped we would?

And if not, we can pivot to something else.

Janice Fraser: So I think about it like sailing a boat . If I want to get from San Francisco where I live over to Berkeley, I have to go under the Bay Bridge. If I come out under the Bay Bridge and there's some crazy wind, I'm going to need to tack in one direction or another. I'm going to need to change the way my sails are pointing. I still want to get to Berkeley. But then if suddenly a huge container ship, which also can appear, is suddenly in front of me, I'm gonna have to go around that huge container ship. So that's how I think about the relationship between plans and outcomes.

I want to get to Berkeley. That's my outcome. Means it has to flex my plan a little bit to get there based on what's true at the moment.

Andy Earle: Well, there is so much more to dive into in here. Amazing frameworks and examples and powerful stuff.

So I hope that people will go check out a copy of the book, which is called farther, faster. And far less drama. Janice, thank you so much for coming on the show today and talking with us about all this.

Janice Fraser: Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed it.

Andy Earle: It's been an absolute pleasure. And I think really packed with really lots of valuable insights and and it really got me thinking in a new way.

So hopefully it will for parents as well. Where can we send people to maybe follow you to find out about updates from you or what you might be working on next?

Janice Fraser: So janicefraser. com j a n i c e f r a s e r. com is my website and janiceleefraser on Instagram.

Andy Earle: We're here with Janice Fraser talking about a better way to make family decisions. And we're not done yet. Here's what's coming up in the second half of the show.

Janice Fraser: So then you can say, you have five minutes. Give me your greatest sales pitch for the option you want. And then whoever has the authority to make the call can make the call. Some decisions take really too long and some decisions are made way too fast. And what we need are to there are 2 questions. Does this move us toward the important outcome? Will we make progress in the right direction if we do this? And can everyone live with it?

There's enough hard stuff coming at us all the time. I just want to lower the volume on the drama. I want to make more progress and I want it to be easier.

So people make decisions when, among other things, they agree to stop talking. People stop talking when they feel understood.

Not when you actually understand them, but when they perceive that they have been understood. And I think that's a big unlock in families. That's a big that's a important component in families. When you perceive that you have been understood.

Andy Earle: Want to hear the full interview? Sign up for a subscription today. It's completely affordable and your membership supports the work we do here at Talking to Teens.

You can now subscribe directly through Apple podcasts.

Thanks for listening. And we'll see you next time.