Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Introduction to Talking to Teens
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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.

The Importance of Interest and Curiosity
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Andy Earle: We're talking today about how to instill interest and curiosity in our teenagers and the central role that interest plays in developing self esteem.

Research suggests that interest and enjoyment are the two key positive feelings that motivate our teens and equip them with a sense of purpose.

But so often, situations that our teenagers find themselves in actually squash these feelings.

We all need to get better at helping our teenagers turn negative feelings into a feeling of interest and curiosity.

And today, we're looking at some research based strategies for exactly how to do that.

Meet Paul C. Hollinger
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Andy Earle: Our guest today is Paul C. Hollinger. He is a professor of psychiatry.

And the author of multiple books, including, Affects, Cognition, and Language as Foundations of Human Development.

Paul, welcome to the Talking to Teens podcast.

Paul Holinger: Thank you for having me and all the people that do this kind of work. I'm thrilled with what you're doing. It's absolutely terrific.

Andy Earle: Thank you. Likewise. I think we have some fascinating discussion today.

I've been reading through your book on Affects, Cognition, and Language as Foundations of Human Development. Pretty interesting research that you cover in this book and I'm really interested to dive into it. So, talk to me a little about that. Where did that come from? How did you get into doing this work and why affects cognition and language? Why was that the topic you wanted to write about?

Paul Holinger: Yeah, we'll get into that. This triad seems to cover the waterfront. Do you want to get into physical punishment in particular? Because that's where the triad really comes out.

So maybe that's a decent place to start.

Andy Earle: Seems interesting. I am curious.

Paul Holinger: It's fascinating.

Understanding Affect in Teenagers
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Andy Earle: For our listeners who maybe just need to start at square one, what is affect and how does it work?

Paul Holinger: Our feelings. There's a long history to the term affect in psychoanalysis. My training is psychiatry and psychoanalysis. There's a very interesting flow of how to understand feelings. A fellow named Sylvan Tompkins comes along in the 1980s and 90s and really helps us to understand it.

The kinds of things that cause us to be angry, interested, joyful, fearful, and what triggers it and what are the differences. As I started playing around with this, over time, there seemed to be a triad that we'll talk about feelings, and some cognition, thinking and reality processing, and then language. How do you put it into words? That's where things come out when you work with children.

But first is the feelings. So we're all born with certain feelings, certain responses to stimuli, and then cognition can set in.

We can think about things. And here's where the punishment part comes in. Finally, how do we put it into words? And that's the crucial part. Can we put it into words? That's what therapy is all about. Putting these things into words.

The Impact of Physical Punishment
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Paul Holinger: So, with punishment, it's really quite something.

Let's define it. The use of physical force to cause a child bodily pain. Spanking, shaking, paddling, squeezing, washing a child's mouth out with soap, beating, kicking, burning, all aspects of physical punishment. One wonders, what are they associated with? Here's where the research comes in, and it's very exciting.

What are they associated with? More antisocial behavior, more impulsiveness, and less self control associated with physical punishment. Worse parent child relationships, more risky sexual behaviors as a teenager, more juvenile delinquency, more crime perpetrated as an adult, lower national average mental ability, less probability of graduation from college, high probability of depression, more violence against marital, cohabitating, and dating partners, more violence against non family persons, more physical abuse of children, more drug abuse, more sexual coercion, and physically forced sex.

So those are all the things that it's correlated with physical punishment.

Andy Earle: But it's so interesting because you think the more extremely you discipline kids, the more obedient, the more well behaved, the more they're going to follow the rules and go along with authority.

And so it's interesting or almost counterintuitive that more physical punishment leads to all of these antisocial behaviors that you're talking about here.

Paul Holinger: Yeah, you think that. It turns out not to be so. We're going to talk about that a little bit.

Andy Earle: A lot of what you're talking about in the book with affect and really helping your child understand the affect and verbalize what they're feeling.

Exploring Negative and Positive Affects
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Andy Earle: I thought it was interesting how you go through the different types of affect and there's positive and negative, but there's a lot more negative ones than positive.

What are those and what do we have to know about them?

Paul Holinger: Let's talk about that a little bit, because you're absolutely right. There are more negative than positive.

And we have pictures in the books of the facial expressions.

Interest is probably our most important. Or I tend to think of it as curiosity.

It's similar, but different. They work on a scale, so interest to excitement, for instance. And then enjoyment and joy, and then surprise to startle. Interest to excitement and enjoyment are really the two positive affects. Now, why do we have only two and the rest, the other seven, are negatives?

Well, because it's more important for us to express the negative if we're going to survive than the positive. In other words, if something's wrong, they're going to be attended to if they get angry, if they get distressed, if they get fearful, if they get ashamed and express those.

So, if you take a baby, for instance, they're going to get attention if they're screaming. If they're in pain. So that's probably why we've evolved along the lines of having more negative than positive affects. But the positive affects are huge in terms of what we need to do.

And we so often forget that.

Andy Earle: And in a lot of ways, we're telling kids not to feel that or not to express that affect. They're mad about something, or something's making them feel frustrated. We're saying, "Hey, don't take that tone with me."

"Hey, we don't talk like that in this household." Instead of exploring what they're feeling, like you talk about using interest actually to dig into the other feelings or kind of coming at the negative affect through the lens of interest.

Paul Holinger: But that's what the whole point is. The negative affect, you know, upset, mad, whatever. Let's try to understand what's going on. What triggered that? What was the disappointment all about? Why are you mad at me? It's okay to talk about it. Except then is where you get the punishment.

You know, if the child is out of control or mad or talks back, that's when the slap in the face or a slap in the butt or something like, instead of just, "what you said, let's, let's explore it. What's behind that? There's a trigger behind that, when it morphs into rage.

Or what are you so ashamed about? It's an open window that we tend to ignore, and that's where the talking and the cognition comes in. If you're scared of something, don't be a scaredy cat, but what is it that you're scared of?

Is it the animal? Is it the noise? Is it the smell? What's causing that?

Madame Curie said, "Life isn't to be feared, it's to be understood." When fear comes along, rather than heading in the other direction and increasing the fear, the gist is, how can we get interested in it?

How can we understand it? And then we're back to just what you said, to be able to talk about it and put it into words and figure it out. And that's what's behind physical punishment, or that's the answer to it. Instead of doing physical punishment, try being curious about it as a parent. Especially with teenagers, because they're to a point where you'll get a lot of affect, a lot of disappointment, a lot of hurt, a lot of rage, a lot of shame. But it can be talked about.

Now, as they start to develop, there's less of that between parents, but if you've got a savvy parent or some savvy friends, they can do that and try to get the person talking. If you shut it down prior to that with physical punishment, for instance, or just what you said, "don't talk to me that way," that's when you lose a chance to figure out what the stimulus is and what's going on and help the kids understand themselves.

Andy Earle: Something I found really interesting. You talk about maintaining motivation after working on a big project.

Motivation and Interest in Education
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Andy Earle: This idea that we have these two positive states of affect, interest and enjoyment, that needs to sustain us through a project if we're gonna if we're gonna finish the whole thing.

You write that the interest involved may be the content of the project or it might be in positive outcomes accompanying completion, such as a degree, a pay raise, or an honor. But if the interest is not sufficient it may be difficult to overcome the negative affects of distress, fear, anger, and shame.

Paul Holinger: Take one's thesis, for instance. If you're really interested in it, that'll last you for a long time, and maybe for the whole thing. But sometimes it gets boring or dull. You can't quite get it or whatever. And that's when this degree comes in and different motivation for those kinds of things.

Andy Earle: If you have a kid who's not finding the motivation to be finishing projects or not working that hard on their schoolwork, studying, or essays, then there's a lack of finding that interest in what they're working on. Somehow the negative effect is outweighing the positive.

Paul Holinger: You're going to really get me ranting about our educational system.

There's so many required classes. You got to take this language. You got to have a year of geometry, right? As opposed to kids really interested in art or linguistic or psychology.

At 12 or 13 or 14 years old I read Freud's book, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. It's about slips of the tongue. It's about the unconscious.

It's about all of that. He tells you what's going on and what the dynamics are. And I thought, Oh my God, I'm here. I'm home. I can start to understand what's going on internally, not just in myself, but in other people.

The high school had no psychology courses at the time. Now that was back in the 60s. I think it's different now. And went to college, And five or six required courses in the first year. English, history, language. And I had to wait till the second semester of freshman year to get in to do a psychology course. And that happens to kids all the time. Early on kids who are artistically inclined, do we really need a year of geometry? Or two years of a foreign language?

Why not follow what the kids are interested in and excited about? It may change, over time, but that's okay. You're following what they're interested and excited about. That's what we're after. So anyway, that's my rant.

The Prevalence of Physical Punishment
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Paul Holinger: So back to physical punishment a little bit. I think you'll get a kick out of this. Just while we stick to physical punishment for a moment. George Holden. He set up this study with reports from most of these studies are self reports.

He had the subject say, how many times did you yell at your child? How many times did you spank your child? what were they doing? Were they horsing around and you needed to get them ready for dinner?

He did a study and found the same kind of thing that we were talking about, that there's a lot of physical punishment. What he also did with another group was to put tape recorders on their arms, with their permission, to track them.

I think it was during the hours of noon to six. What he did was to compare the self reports with the actual. And he found that there were five times more actual episodes than there were self reports. So when we're talking about physical punishment of kids.

How prevalent it is or isn't? It's probably a lot worse than we think. As we try to stop certain behaviors with physical punishment. That to me was one of the most creative and stunning pieces of research that I'd ever heard of.

It concerns one because 50 or 60 percent at least in this country of the parents still do hit their kids. We just read a whole list of things that can happen as opposed to getting curious, talking with them, beginning to help them learn to understand themselves and what certain behaviors are and that kind of thing.

I love that. And then you get it in school. The whole question of physical punishment school. we'll get into that a little bit later because there are still 15 states in the United States that allow physical punishment in schools. And the rest do not.

Only 5 states in the United States prohibit physical punishment in all schools, including private schools. So in all the other states, private schools are fair game.

Legal and Emotional Implications
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Paul Holinger: Think about this legally for a moment. You're in a state that allows physical punishment. They used to use these big paddles.

One of the social work organizations years ago did a terrific study of the number of kids that ended up in the emergency room from being hit with these paddles. It was stunning, the numbers. Say you've got a kid that's acting up and it's okay, principal office, get out the panel, whack, whack, all right.

And that's okay because it's permitted in the school. Take that same scenario, about five yards outside the school, on the sidewalk or something. The paddle is now a lethal weapon. And the action is assault and battery. So that's okay in the school, not outside of the school, legally. We're missing something here, in terms of our legal situation and the way we think about trying to control behavior.

So we're back to what you brought up at the beginning. Why not try to ask them what they're upset about, talk with them, and get their feelings about it, and help them put their feelings into words and find out what went wrong that morning that they went to school, that they had a fight with their little brothers, or that they didn't make the basketball team, instead of just assuming.

It's interesting when you see these cases. I think we may have written about that in the book, but when you see these horrible cases of shootings what the folks focus on is just the behaviors rather than, was this kid in trouble before? What was going on?

Did he or she get treatment? Why was he that mad? Was he psychotic? Drugged, or not? Could you see this coming if you took time to listen and figure it out or get them into treatment? So that's where the triad and the feelings come in.

The key to all this as you implied before, is what are the feelings. Trying to understand the feelings. So, back to the triad. That's the easy answer. Understand the feelings, just as you said, you know, what's interest and excitement or enjoyment or fear or shame or anger, and why, and what's behind it?

Now, with pre verbal kids, you can't do that much, but you can get a sense of what they're upset about, and you can start putting it into words for them. Oh, you're hungry and you really want something to eat and I didn't give you the part of the cookie that you wanted and you're screaming at me and I'm sorry, but, you know, too close to dinner, whatever.

So you can do even do with pre verbal kids. What's the second one? Cognition. Cognition is trying to figure out what the reality is and what is going on inside. What they're thinking about, how they're putting the feelings into words. Reality processing.

Now, all of these things, interestingly enough, this triad, and verbalization, have liabilities. It's not magic. With what's going on inside in terms of affects, we know that people can feel things or be taught to feel something else, not understand what they're feeling, repress their feelings, or project their feelings.

"So and so's mad at me, they don't like me." Well, maybe it's coming from inside of you that you don't like them. That's projecting the anger onto somebody else. It's not that I don't like them, they don't like me. All of these things have liabilities, same with reality processing.

That's an easy one in terms of, well, what's the classic example in law school? You've got a professor up there. Teaching the class and suddenly somebody comes flying in from the outside, takes his papers, and runs off the stage with them. Give the class a chance to write down what happened and you'll get 100 different versions of it.

So reality processing is an important issue and it's very difficult. Your reality is quite different from mine in certain situations because of our upbringing. And with words. Words can be wonderful and explanatory but it can also be very confusing and mean. Just ask my wife and myself what her words mean to me and what mine mean to her, or maybe even the same words.

Maybe quite different. So, in this triad, there's a lot of information. But you've got to be aware that there's liability and that's what makes it particularly interesting.

Andy Earle: You have a fascinating example in the book of how some of these things come together.

It's a story about a friend of yours, Carol. She was 18 years old, she's barefoot and she's mowing the lawn. And her dad comes out screaming and yelling at her. "Carol, stop, stop, stop! Put your shoes on." And he's really, really angry. And that was a traumatic experience for her.

Something that she still remembers and really impacted her because it made her feel so bad. But really at the heart of all this is just that he cares about her. He wants her to be safe. He doesn't want her to hurt herself. So he gets so worked up about it, which then makes her feel bad. Like she let him down. Like she's doing something wrong. Mad that she's getting yelled at when she's just trying to help out. All these emotions that stir up to the point where now, however many decades later, she still remembers that as this impactful experience. But really underneath all of it is just caring about her and wanting her to be safe. But sometimes we lose that.

Paul Holinger: He couldn't step back and say, "Oh, my God, she may cut herself." Fear often leads to anger. It's one of the common responses to anger. Try to morph fear into, not anger, but rather interest and curiosity.

Things are not to be feared, they're to be curious about. It can help an awful lot in terms of overcoming things. So, he was scared and he couldn't step back and say, "Oh my gosh, she's going to get hurt. And I want to go over and try to make sure that's okay."

And what she got was this barrage of rage that she remembered years later.

Concluding Thoughts and Resources
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Andy Earle: Paul, thank you so much for coming on the show today and speaking with us about this fascinating research and sharing these stories and ideas. It's been really interesting and helpful.

Paul Holinger: I really appreciate what you're doing. Your program and conveying this to the outside world is wonderful.

Thank you, Andy. Appreciate it very much.

Andy Earle: The book is called Affects, Cognition, and Language as Foundations of Human Development. I encourage people to check it out, and also curious where we can send people to find out anything else about what you're up to or working on.

Paul Holinger: What do we have?

We've got a website, Parent and Child Resources, and also What Babies Say Before They Can Talk, the other book from some time ago, which deals with younger kids, and does a lot of what we're talking about in terms of affects. Because a lot of this is pre verbal too, in terms of what's going on and folks that can understand what the signals are and then respond. Kudos to you for doing all this.

It's great.

Andy Earle: Wow. Likewise. Yeah, you're doing some great work over there. So great to connect with you. We're here today with Paul C. Hollinger, talking about how parents accidentally destroy our teenagers interest and curiosity, and we're not done yet. Here's a look at what's coming up in the second half of the show.

Paul Holinger: Don't squash their interests. Because then you'll get rage and an incomplete child and adult, which is a problem. Boredom needs to be taken seriously, and can be addressed either by talking to the person, or anticipating, as we do with kids all the time.

So she took a paper towel and said, "Look at this. Look at how the milk crawls up the little tendrils of the paper towel. Isn't that interesting?" Little girl turned out to be a world famous scientist.

So, focus on the interest. Try to be a little bit careful, before you jump immediately to the fear and the rage and the anger.

Andy Earle: So often our initial response is we're frustrated. We're mad. We're at the end of our rope.

But taking that second to just calm down, center yourself, and look for a way to engage interest and curiosity instead of something negative. 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 sign up directly on Apple Podcasts.

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