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 talking today about how to handle gifted and exceptional teenagers.

Because we all want to raise a teen who's brilliant, but studies show that when a child has really high abilities in one area, they also tend to be a little behind in other areas.

Juggling these different realities and equipping your child to thrive as they get escalated to situations that might be more advanced than they're ready to handle, it's a tough challenge and it requires a lot of parenting prowess.

Our guest today is Dr. Matt Zakreski. He is a clinical psychologist who specializes in working with neurodivergent children and teens. And he's the author of the new book, The neurodivergent playbook.

Dr. Matt, welcome to the Talking to Teens podcast. Thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Matthew Zakreski: Anytime I can wade into the world that is working with teens I always want to do so. Cause it's like, let's add some good to the universe there.

Andy Earle: Really excited to have you. I think we got a great topic today. You have written a book called The Neurodivergent Playbook. I'm super interested to hear how that came about and what inspired you to write that.

Matthew Zakreski: So I think like a lot of people in my line of work, what I do is personal and professional. I was identified as a gifted kid in 2nd grade and then sped through elementary and middle school. And then I got to high school and the wheels fell off. Because it turns out I was so smart that no one had ever noticed I had ADHD. So I wasn't just a gifted kid. I was what we call a twice exceptional kid, when you're gifted plus another learning difference. And when you have really bright kids, a lot of times they can float by until life becomes harder than they are smart. And all of a sudden you realize, wait a second, there's a real problem here.

And then while their neurotypical peers were developing coping strategies, like learning how to study, asking for help, figuring out where the library was, the really bright kids never had to learn how to do those things or learn them a lot less.

So now, it's analogous to being sucked out by a rip current into the ocean and thinking, I know how to swim, right? Because you've always been able to stand on the sand. So now you're deep in the water in a current, and you're not entirely sure if you know how to swim. So a big part of what I do is. Educating parents and teens about neurodivergence and say if you're different in these ways, there's actually a word for it.

There's a term for it. And that term has created a community. As I say to all my teens it is always better to know that you're a zebra, not a weird horse, right? Because high school is so much about finding your people. If you're a zebra trying to squeeze into all the other horses, you're actually much better off with the other zebras.

But we have to give kids permission to learn that about themselves so they can find their people.

Andy Earle: I think that's so interesting. And I really resonate with what you're saying. You write about that in the book, this phenomenon of getting to maybe being in seventh, eighth, ninth grade or something, and starting to really realize, wow I've been just skating by and not having to study or really work hard at all at school.

And now all of a sudden that's not working anymore or things are starting to catch up with me and I have to change strategies or learn a new way to figure this out. I thought it was really interesting seeing that's not a unique experience.

Matthew Zakreski: And that's a big part of what I do is just trying to get the word out there really trying to educate people because the more people know. This is a whole other area in which we can learn about ourselves and increase that understanding. Because when we increase that understanding, everybody does better.

And, 1 of the funny things about being a clinical psychologist, right? Is that. I tell my fans all the time, my job is to make myself irrelevant. My job is to create a world in which you don't need me anymore. And you could produce podcast episodes forever. There's no upper limit to how many podcasts I can listen to, because I want to listen to you all the time, buddy.

Your voice is in my ear a lot as I do my walks around the neighborhood. But I don't want somebody still seeing me in 10 years.

Andy Earle: You talk a lot in the book about social emotional learning or SEL. And I wonder to what extent that needs to be taught or do all kids just figure that out for themselves?

Matthew Zakreski: And that's the, having them figure out for themselves is actually a big part of why I do so much SEL work. There's still this idea that kids will just learn how to be social by being around other kids. To an extent that's true. We're social animals. We watch each other.

We learn from each other. But you also think about how your typical tween or teen speaks to each other. Is that necessarily what we want our kids to be learning, right? We want to have it grounded in good practice that they can put their own spin on as a developing person, right?

So to me, the idea here is let's universalize basic interpersonal skills and then give kids free reign. To put their own spins on it to become independent, autonomous humans, because teens particularly crave that autonomy, right? They want to be as independent as appropriate as they can be. And that's why they have their own fashion and their own music and their own slang.

And by the time it gets to us, adult people we're like, Oh, yeah, guys, that's lit. And they look at us like, Oh, please stop. Or get out of here with that. So if that is anchored in a solid place, then we're helping our teens build what we call pro social skills.

Because what a lot of people end up doing is either too selfless or too selfish. Too selfless is I only care about what you need, Andy. I'm very nice. And if you like, give me 10 dollars, I'm like, okay, Andy, here's 10 dollars. And I'm like, you're going to pay me back. You're like, don't worry about it. I'm like, oh, that seems reasonable.

It is easier to give you 10 than it is to hold you accountable for those 10. So then that niceness can become flipped to the other side, where kids become cruel or mean. They become too self ish. I'm not going to give you ten dollars. In fact, I'm going to punch you in the face. And so the idea is being pro social takes your needs and my needs into account.

So I'll lend you 10 dollars, but you got to promise to pay me back by Friday. And if you don't, you got to pay me 20 dollars on Monday. My needs and your needs both matter, that's being pro social.

Andy Earle: I thought that was really interesting discussion in the book, because I think often we think of pro social as being nice, as doing the nice thing to help people out or something. But it's really not the same thing.

Matthew Zakreski: And there are times where being nice is the pro social response, right? The trick is, especially with all the peer pressure that teens are under, helping them understand that being nice is not always the best thing to do. Because say, if you're at a party, And the person who drove you to that party's had six shots and a beer and says, no, I'm good to drive home.

Like, the nice thing to say is, okay. I don't want to cause trouble. The pro social thing to do is I'm going to take your keys or I'm going to drive us home, or I'm going to call my mom so I can get right home. A lot of my teens are now starting their first semester of college.

We get a lot of those calls and texts like, okay, Doctor Matt at this party and I'm like yep. Time to practice being pro social. If we're going to serve our kids best, we have to hope for the best, but plan for the worst.

And I think living in both of those worlds is the reality of raising teens.

Andy Earle: You write in the book that it may seem paradoxical, but connecting with others starts with connecting with yourself. What do you mean by that? And how do we help our teens to do that?

Matthew Zakreski: So one of the things that teens in particular crave is authenticity, right? I think people ask me like, how are you so good doing therapy with teens?

It's I don't have access to some special therapy nobody else has. What I do is I lead with my authentic self. I can tell a teen I know what it's like to be smarter than your teacher because I was, and I remember that. And they're like, yeah, you really do. Part of being authentic is being really real with people.

And sometimes that realness means yeah, you screwed up. You know you shouldn't have snuck out. You did. And now you got to deal with the consequences, right? And it's also not that your life is over. This is, you tested a boundary. You got zapped. It happens.

Let's move on. Part of being authentic, though, is there's this pressure to fit in. There's this pressure to go along to get along. Everybody else is listening to Taylor Swift, but you really want to listen to Melissa Etheridge. There is no reason you can't listen to Melissa Etheridge.

The question is, how do you balance that with all the Swifties out there? And there's nothing wrong with Taylor Swift. It's just the question of how do you balance your authentic self versus the self of you that needs to get along, because both things are real. I think helping kids identify who they are and what their authentic selves are enables them to recalibrate their values, their hierarchy of needs.

Like, what is most important to you in a relationship? It isn't drinking my face off on a Thursday, right? If that's not really what you want to do, if that's what you've been doing, because that's where the people are, that's cool. But if you're happiest, just going for a long hike in the mountains by yourself, that's what you want to do.

Yeah, that's not super cool on TikTok, but it is the thing you want to do. You can find people who share those values and interests, and you're going to create a much more meaningful community there than you would necessarily, drinking in somebody's basement. It's funny, we moved to this town in northern New Jersey and last Friday, we took my kids and my in laws, we went to the high school football game. I was unique in high school because I was a varsity athlete and a theater arts kid.

I couldn't play in the marching band because fall was the same season as soccer and I was a soccer player. So I was tangentially a marching band kid. Every so often I filled in on the drums if somebody was sick. But I got to live in both of those worlds. Which is really cool and sharing that with my kids being like, that's the marching band. That's the color guard. Those are the cheerleaders. That's the football team. You can do all of those things or none of those things. Once you spend time around teens, you start to see them not as this sort of monolith. But it's oh, they're the little groupings within the group, right?

You could see all the band kids sitting together being like, yeah, go marching band, right? And you could see the other athletes and you could see the cool kids. And that's fine. We can't change that there's a stratification. But we want to empower our kids to say the best version of you lives at the stratus that is most aligned with who you are.

And that is a courageous step to take as a parent and especially as a teen.

Andy Earle: Wow. I love that. You talk in the book about something really interesting which is in terms of kids who are really gifted in one area. In order to be doing really well in one you're not going to be ahead of the game across the board. I thought that was interesting to think about it that way. I wonder what that means for parents or teenagers who have a kid who's really ahead of the game in one aspect of their life.

Matthew Zakreski: It's a phenomenal question. And it really takes sort of two tracks.

There's the internal and the external, right? So the internal is, I am the only 15 year old in this college particle physics class. So I am very smart and thus very special. And I know that if I just think harder, I'll solve the problem. And that skill set may not apply to all things within academics.

You may not be able to just think your way through art or English. And certainly with less concrete things like socializing, a lot of my bright kids will say to me, Dr. Matt, I am really freaking smart. And I know a lot of things. Why is it I don't know what to say to make everybody laugh?

And it's this very nebulous concept. It's hard to do and reputation factors into it. Avogadro's constant is always going to be Avogadro's constant. What makes Sally laugh on Monday may not make Sally laugh on Tuesday, and we need to figure out why, and if we can't figure out why, it's still true.

The external part is that if you have a kid who is very advanced in some areas, you may need to follow them to where those areas take them. If you have a daughter who is a Broadway talented level actress. You may need to take her into the adult theater near you, not the community theater, not the children's theater.

And that means your daughter is going to be exposed to a different peer group. It is not uncommon to have a very advanced 15 year old hanging out with the 19, 20, 25, 28 year olds who are in this professional company. We can run from that or we can prepare our kids for that.

I was a very advanced cartoonist in addition to being, a very smart kid. And I got to go to a dinner at the National Cartoonist Guild in New York City when I was 16. I was the youngest person in that room probably by 30 years.

And the other youngest people in the room were Trey Parker and Matt Stone who were sitting at a table. This was the height of South Park too. But it was pre-social media. I didn't have a selfie. I didn't even have a cell phone.

I think I had a pager still. But no one believed me. I was like, I have no way of proving this. How many 16 year olds are going to a formal dinner in Manhattan? Not too many. So my parents could have hidden me from that. Or they could say, here's how you handle a formal dinner.

Start with the outside fork and move in, right? Things you still remember at 41 that you learned when you're 16. You may need to follow those threads, because if your kid has a different brain, it's going to take them different places. If there are things that make our kids eyes light up and make them passionate we're never going to be wrong following those things, because that's where our kids are going to develop the most important skills and find the people that are going to reflect the best part of them.

Andy Earle: Wow. That's inspiring. I like that. And it's really by definition, by pushing them into those passions, they're also going to be getting over their head in so many different ways and leaning into that and figuring out how you can best prepare them for that is that b alance that we have to walk

Matthew Zakreski: It's funny you perfectly queued up this idea that is one of the most unspoken things about parenting, especially parenting teens, is how much we have to let our kids fail.

And how hard that is. And let our kids struggle. That's hard for us as parents because we love our kids and we don't want them to hurt. I was doing a therapy session last week and one of my kids, he's like, I'm going to ask this really popular girl to homecoming.

And I'm like, okay, third day of school. Let's take a breath. He's like, well, no, I have three classes with her. We talk all the time. It's going to be great. I was like, and she's an alpha a list, popular girl. And you're like solidly a B minus. You're a gentleman's B minus. And I was like, dude, she might say yes.

She also might say no. And you got to just prepare yourself. His mom's like, well, couldn't you talk him out of it? I'm like, it's not my place to talk him out of it. And I think because of the grace of, I don't know, the grace of God or the teen spirits or whatever it was, she was sick that day. So we dodged a bullet.

But he may do it and if he does, we'll pick up the pieces, right? Because we can't live in a world where nothing happens to our kids. Because if nothing happens to our kids, then nothing will ever happen to them, right? We grow through the things that challenge us. If it doesn't challenge us, it doesn't change us.

The trick as parents is knowing where the 3rd rail is. Where's the cliff, right? Because you can drive off road for a while before you drive off a cliff. And that's the art of parenting teens is, okay, I know this family this kid's going to hang out with. They might have alcohol around.

My kid might have a beer or 2 and that is an appropriate risk. Perhaps. But if your kid wants to walk home along a highway having had a couple of beers, I'm just gonna go pick you up, right? And both of those things can be true. And you'll notice I'm talking a lot about drinking, and if we keep talking a little bit and end up talking about sex and dating because those are the bugaboos for parents.

I don't want my kid drinking. I don't want my kid smoking. I don't want my kid having sex. Guess what teens are gonna do, right? I always ask parents, when you were 16, what was driving every thought in your brain? They were like, Oh man, there was this girl. I'm like, we all undergo this magic spell and forget what it was like to be 16 when we have 16 year olds.

I'm young enough and I'm like, I remember what it was like sitting in my friend's basement on a Friday night being like, Yeah, someday girls are gonna talk to us. We were not sure what we're gonna do when that happens, but it'll be great.

You don't have to like it. You have to understand it. If we can accept it, we're not spending a lot of energy fighting off a reality that is only draining us from fighting an impossible fight.

Andy Earle: I love that story about the kid who wants to ask out the popular girl in his class. There's so much going on there and it's so juicy. It's one of those things where who knows what's going to happen when you ask this one girl out, but ask out 20 girls and one of them's going to say yes. Also, like what we were talking about with failure or having something maybe going wrong, I can see someone who is later in life looking back and it's like, yeah, this one time there was this event that really changed my life.

I'll never forget. I asked this girl out and she just totally shut me down and it made me realize I needed to elevate my social skills so much more. You can totally see that going so many different ways. Or also getting discouraged and being like, I guess I'm not cool. I guess people don't like me. And from one event that could go well, could not go well, but regardless of whether it goes well or doesn't go well. It's how it's going to affect the kid and what they're going to take away from that and how they're going to incorporate that into their narrative of their life. And I wonder, what do you do to prepare that kid for the possibility that it could go well, but it also couldn't go well.

And if it does, then how do you not let that be discouraging to you or interpret that as a hit to your ego or something like that.

Matthew Zakreski: And it's going to be a hit to your ego. That's the reality, right? One of the things I like to do when I talk about the power of big feelings is I'll say to a room, usually full of grownups, all right, everybody think of the worst date you've ever been on, go.

It's like something bad smelling in the room. All of a sudden everyone's like, Oh, God. And it's amazing how you can go right there. Now, almost all of us reacted that way. And the key thing here is that we're all still here now. That objectively sucked for many reasons, right? We don't have to go through. You're here right now, which means you survived it. If you've ever failed a test, if you've ever gotten a traffic ticket, if you've ever gotten fired from a job, if you've ever had your heart broken, if you've ever broken a bone, these are parts of the cavalcade of challenges that life gives us.

One of the best sentences I've ever heard from a parent happened organically in family therapy. She said, I don't want bad things to happen to you, but I know it's not in my power to keep them from happening to you.

You don't have to go through it alone. If you can say that authentically as a parent and back it up with your actions, then your teen will see you as an ally. And that is perhaps the biggest gift you can give them as they navigate a very tumultuous time of their life.

Andy Earle: That's powerful.

Dr. Matt. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. It's been really great speaking with you and I appreciate your time.

Matthew Zakreski: This was a phenomenal conversation. We covered a lot and I hope that people take something positive from it and feel a little bit more empowered to be there for their teen.

Andy Earle: There is so much great stuff in your book. It's called The Neurodivergent Playbook: How Neurodivergent People Can Crack the Code of a World Not Built for Us. I highly encourage people to check it out. There is all kinds of research, examples, and helpful stories that you share in the book that are really applicable to parents of all kinds of teens, but especially parents with teens who have any kind of neurodivergence.

Can you talk about where people can go to find out more about you, about what you're up to, or maybe follow updates from you?

Matthew Zakreski: Yeah. So I have two primary online presences. If therapy for you or your teen is the right answer, then the name of my practice is the Neurodiversity Collective.

That's where we provide therapy. If you think what I'm talking about would be helpful for your organization or school, or if you run a conference with lots of people attending, then you just want the speaker version of me, which is drmattzakreski. com. I'm very Googleable. I have a very Googleable name because it's unique. So yeah, look us up. Me and my team can help you. We would love to do that.

Andy Earle: We're here today with Dr. Matt Zakreski talking about how to handle gifted and exceptional teenagers, and we're not done yet. Here's a look at what's coming up in the second half of the show.

Matthew Zakreski: This example is what I like to call emotional hand grenades. Kids pull off the pin. They chuck the emotional hand grenade and we all scatter. And the kid gets to escape.

We all do replacement language. It just hits a lot harder when it's a teen because their words are big and their actions are big and it can come out of nowhere. Because how foundational to being a teen is being like, I am a unique person and no one will ever get me or understand me. It is often better to just sit there and listen than it is to try and share an anecdote because it just sets us up for those okay boomer moments.

Because if I've got a big AP Euro test tomorrow, and there's a Avenged Sevenfold concert tonight, tomorrow me can deal with this. Tonight me wants to go see Avenged Sevenfold, right? Kids try to pull us into these zero sum scenarios like, I win or you lose. You can both win, right?

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