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.

When our teens are struggling with something, we want to help them put it in perspective, figure out some strategies that they'll be able to apply to help them get through it.

But oftentimes, when we offer them this type of advice, when they're in the middle of something difficult, it doesn't quite resonate.

The problem is that these types of strategies are logical, rational, analytical, left brain type of thinking, but when your teenager is emotional about something, their right brain is overwhelmed with

thoughts, worries, feelings, sensations.

We need to connect first with their right brain, then we can move things over to the left brain.

And the way we do this is by making them feel seen.

Meet Dr. Chinwe Williams
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Andy Earle: Our guest today is Dr. Chinwe Williams.

She is a counselor, an educator, an author, a speaker, and we're diving today into one of her books, which is called Seen.

Chinwe, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I'm so excited to have you here.

Chinwé Williams: Thanks for having me, Andy.

Andy Earle: Wow. You are prolific here. You've got two books already. You've got Another one coming out this spring. I've been reading through a book of yours called Seen, which is really about all kinds of communication. It talks a lot about families, parenting, getting conversations going with your kids, which is so much of what we talk about here on the podcast.

So I'm so excited to see you doing this work and to have you here. Can you talk about how you got into this or where these ideas come from?

Chinwe's Journey into School Counseling
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Chinwé Williams: I started my professional career working at a high school, but I didn't intend to work at a high school, but I did intend to be a mental health therapist.

I was in graduate school studying human behavior, psychology, why people do the things that they do. Psychological change strategies. And then I saw that there was an announcement for a school counseling position. My training was preparing me to maybe work at a hospital, open up a practice, work maybe as a consultant.

And I was actually interested in doing some corporate wellness webinars. But then the school position opened up and I thought to myself, summers off? I'm in! So I applied to be a school counselor got the position and I was 22 years old.

So I was 3 years older than the oldest high school senior. Yes. We had a older high school senior and that's where I started my career. I always tell people I was deeply insecure walking into a school building, pretending like I knew what I was doing, because you don't show up and try to help teenagers, with a whole lot of pride and confidence, right?

You have to go with some humility and I had plenty of that. I was scared to death. And very insecure. But 1 of the things that I learned and by the way, to this day, and I've had a lot of jobs since then. That is still the most rewarding position I ever had. It was challenging. Young people at that time we're dealing with a lot. I felt like, am I the person to help them being so young? But 1 of the things that I learned. Straight away, and I'll never forget this. And I even had a mentor say this to me.

The Importance of Being Seen
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Chinwé Williams: Kids don't care what you know, until they know that you care. That was powerful for me.

And I don't think my mentor made it up. I think that had been around, but I had never heard that before. So that really gave me permission to sort of let go of the pretenses that I knew exactly what I was doing. I had literally just graduated from my master's program. I had to let go of the pretense that I'm going to lecture or tell them how to live their lives or pretend to understand what they were going through, even though I was so young and not far removed. We worked with kids from all backgrounds, and family formations. I had to learn who they were. So that's where I got communications 101, from my work with young people. And something else, Andy, that's coming to mind right now that I learned from my experience there.

Is that every student needs at least 1 person. And I actually would say. At least 3 people, right? At this point in my career, 3 people, but at that time, they needed just 1 person who really knew who they were past the academic accomplishments, any sports accolades, kids just want to be seen and heard and known and I think it's important to have different people, not just biologically related.

Adults or individuals. But coaches. I was a step team coach. Sometimes I would hang out in the cafeteria. Oftentimes I would go to Friday night football games. I would go to a lot of the basketball games and I just wanted my students to know that I cared about their lives, right? Outside of just what was happening academically.

Connecting with Kids: Real-Life Stories
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Andy Earle: There's some great stories in your book from your time doing that work. There's one in particular that was really impactful to me where you talk about your first year on the job, showing up and seeing two girls who went through some challenges and responded differently to it.

What was impactful about that?

Chinwé Williams: Yeah, and this happened quite a bit, where I would meet with 2 students who had the exact same experience. For example, not making the team. Played varsity the year before. And then not making the varsity team the following year.

That was upsetting, right? But then what I notice is that 1 student, it wasn't just upsetting. It was devastating. It was discouraging. And the other student was very disappointed and maybe even devastated in the moment, but develop this resolve to keep going, to keep practicing. It was quite a different story. And I had several examples of that. One of the things that we talk about in the book is connecting with kids, seeing kids, making sure that they feel heard and understood. Not that you're just listening with two ears, but to really understand what their experience is.

Dan Siegel, who's a neuroscientist talks about understanding a young person's internal experience. So those types of interactions with students who experienced pretty much the same disappointment or setback. But responded in very different and unique ways that led me to lean in and be more curious about what was happening within their internal experience.

Sometimes it's old scripts playing in their heads about what they can do, what they can't do, who they are, who they aren't. That's why in the book, we talk about the importance of speaking life. Some of it is just messages from society about what success looks like, or what does it mean when you fail. And sometimes significant life events such as trauma can impact the way a young person sees themselves, the opportunities they have and how they seize those opportunities. We talk about different ways to help kids feel seen.

And one of the last tools that we talk about is to help them to develop grit and the story that you're referencing really speaks to that. And that's what I learned to do is to help young people to understand that hard work pays off and the more effort, the more persistent you are in working toward a goal.

It will pay off. It may not pay off right away and you may still experience a setback, but you can learn from that experience. Carol Dweck talks about the growth mindset. Of just knowing that you can learn from mistakes and perceived failures and keep moving forward.

Andy Earle: I love a lot of these ideas that you talk about in the book.

Speaking Life into Teenagers
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Andy Earle: You mentioned one called Speaking Life. This was a powerful idea from the book. What does that mean? And how do you speak life into someone?

Chinwé Williams: Yeah, that's funny, Andy, that you should mention that. In writing a book, there's an evolution to book writing. A lot of things are left on the cutting room floor, so to speak.

And that's 1 that we just kept coming back to, my co author and I. And it was my idea to include this particular tool because, by the way, let me go back a little bit and provide some context. I was a former school counselor who went on to get my doctorate, where I was teaching graduate students.

Some of my graduate students were working in schools and agencies, so I would talk to them about communicating and connecting with their teenagers. So I pulled from my school experience, my teaching experience, and also I still see adolescents in the therapy room, right? So, as we were writing this book and digging into the research, noticing that there was high anxiety, high despair, we asked the question, what do parents and caregivers need to know to best respond to their kids and their teenagers?

And I went straight to my teenagers. I went back into my history, but also I went to the teenagers in my life that I know, I counsel. What is it that adults do? Maybe inadvertently or unintentionally to maybe make you not feel seen, right? You don't feel seen.

You don't feel heard, so it's not necessarily an adult is harming their mental health, but the teenager doesn't feel supported. What are those things that we do? And I put myself in that category because I'm not perfect. Have I ever done, you know, my own kids, right? And then I asked, what is it that an adult, a coach, a mentor, a grandparent, anybody that's in your life, what is it that they can do to lift you up and to help you to feel seen? So that's how we came up with our tools. One of the tools that we were wrestling with was Speak Life and we hesitated because we were like, are people going to go straight to the toxic positivity?

Speaking life is really calling out a child's gifts, a child's talents, what they're good at, if faith or spirituality is a part of your life, sharing with them the promises of God, whatever your faith may be, your higher power, what you know to be true.

Reminding your child of what's inside of them and what they're capable of. But then people on the team would say, well, we know that sometimes parents will do that. Maybe share a scripture verse or say, attaboy or attagirl. Is that what we're talking about?

And do we really want parents to walk away with the idea that this is what you're supposed to do and your child is going to be okay? And the answer is no, but. It was important. It came up over and over again in my research in my clinical work in conversations I've had with my own kids, the kids that I mentor. Every child wants to know that there is someone in their life, an adult in their life, thinking that they're awesome. I love my kids. I love my teen. But demonstrating it through action. Seeing our kids means letting them know that we are noticing when they're struggling, but we also are noticing that they are amazing and capable.

So, Andy, from a neuroscientific perspective, we have about 60 to 80, 000. Thoughts per day, depending on the researcher you are sourcing. But here's the thing: about 80 percent of those thoughts are repetitive and negative.

So that is why speaking life had to be a part of this conversation. And that's why I'm so thrilled you asked me about this because when you have a child, a teenager specifically with high anxiety or experiencing a tough life event going through despair. When they are experiencing those things, the way that they think about themselves is distorted.

The way that they see situations, the way that they see people, even people who love them is distorted. And so 80 percent is negative and our young people right now, they're experiencing a barrage of really negative messages about who they are from media, from social media, from the way that adults are treating each other during election season.

What's happening in the schools with gun violence, it's a scary time. And so they do need us to affirm them. They do need us to let them know that we care about them. Yes. But we also see that they are capable and they're able to withstand some of the negative messages and also experiences.

A growth mindset is the belief that you can improve your situation. You can improve your life. You can improve your abilities through effort and learning and persistence. We can be specific in the way that we speak to our kids. You can do this, right?

I have a 13 year old and a 9 year old. Right now, my 9 year old is dealing with a math class that's really, actually, he loves math. He was on the math team, but every now and again, there's a problem that challenges him and then he'll say to me, like, this is hard,or. And then will throw his pencil.

And his dad will want to intervene. And I'm like, no, I got this. Pick up the pencil gently and put it back in his hand. And I say, I know this is hard. And guess what? When you are working really hard, your brain is growing, right? Dendrites, and he actually knows what they are now. Dendrites are forming.

So through hard work and effort, you'll be able to get through this challenge. That is what a growth mindset is and being able to speak to your kids about that and affirm them using positive messages, even ones that are based in science or neuroscience is really good for them.

Andy Earle: And I love that because that's so important to push through and persevere during those moments. Sometimes we need that little help or boost from someone, especially a parent to. take us by the hand and say, Hey, you can do this.

You've got this. You're amazing. And when you set your mind to something, you can do it. Once we push through and realize, Hey, I did it. That wasn't so bad. That creates that feedback loop where it further builds our confidence and our ability to persevere against something else next time.

Chinwé Williams: And sometimes you need that other voice, right? You need someone else to say that they believe in you during those moments that you aren't believing in yourself. So, again, this isn't toxic positivity. This isn't pretending something's great when it's not. This is about speaking to your child's characteristics.

To their grit. Calling it out, not just privately, because we tend to do that sometimes as parents, but publicly, if you have a teenager who is playing, I don't know, lacrosse and it's the last quarter, and there's only a couple of minutes left in the game and the score is not looking great at all.

I mean, things are going in the wrong direction. And all of a sudden, you notice your teen walk over to the bench and rally the rest of the, team and say, hey, let's just finish strong. Whatever the score says, we got this. Let's just remember that we got this, right.

And so whatever happens on the field, that doesn't even matter. But you notice that. What would it be like to say to your teenager as you're getting their equipment together, walking over to the car. Hey, I noticed when everybody was looking really discouraged and defeated by the score you walked over and I'm not sure exactly what you said, but it seemed to provide an uplift or even if it didn't I appreciated your leadership.

Those are the things we want to encourage parents, coaches, and grandparents to do. Be specific. I didn't know I was good at the things I was good at until someone else pointed it out. I just thought I was fumbling my way through until someone said, you're a really good listener, or you're a really good communicator, or you broke that down in a way that I can understand.

So that's what speak life is really about.

Common Parental Pitfalls
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Andy Earle: You mentioned something I wanted to come back to because you're talking about how, as parents, sometimes without meaning to, we're maybe responding in ways that aren't that helpful or make things worse when our children are struggling with something or having emotions they're having a hard time dealing with.

In the book, you talk about three different responses that we sometimes make as parents, shaming, labeling, and dismissing, and how these can sometimes make a situation worse without realizing it when we're trying to help. Can you walk through that a little bit? How does that look? Why do we do these things?

And how did that sometimes play out?

Chinwé Williams: We do them because we're triggered. We're uncomfortable. Right? We either lose it or we place our fears on our teenagers because we're fearful of life's outcomes and the challenges that they may face. And that's something that we really want to be careful about.

Doing a lot of research on resilience. It's something that's coming up in my conversations with teachers. I consult with educators. I consult with ministry leaders around youth mental health and the folks that I'm working with are seeing that kids have a lack of emotional resilience.

And so we look into the data and we're seeing that some parents are helicoptering, right? They're swooping in and removing any challenge that a child may face. Or we have some parents saying, Hey, just get it done. I don't care about your feelings.

Right. And what we're learning about this younger generation is that can be invalidating. And when you suppress your emotions, they don't just go away, right? They show up in the most inopportune time. So we want to understand where the parent is coming from.

And that's why I do a lot of work with parents themselves, because they have their own stories, their own journeys, their own childhood life experiences. There's a reason why parents are responding in the way that they're responding. If they don't have awareness of where those responses are coming from, that's when they unintentionally do harm.

But I'm a fan of parents and I know how hard it is. But what we are seeing with young people is that they want to be seen and the biggest way that we, as adults fail to see them is when we ignore dismiss or disregard those. Behaviors that we don't understand.

So we squash it. We stamp it down or we swoop in because we're uncomfortable and then we just do it for them, right? It's like fine. I'll just do it for you. That's not okay. That's actually part of the rise in anxiety is that type of overprotective parenting, but also dismissive parenting.

We live in a world where the focus is on outcomes. The focus is on the behavior. But for young people, it's best to understand what are those emotions that are driving those big behaviors, whether it's anger, frustration, what looks like defiance, so feelings can be tricky. I always tell the young people that I counsel, we don't want our feelings to drive the bus.

We don't want our feelings to drive our behaviors, but we do want to be aware of our feelings. And as adults, we want our teenagers. We want to teach our teenagers how to be aware of our feelings. So we use right brain, left brain, modeling, and an understanding of what's happening when a child is struggling.

They are right brain activated, but what we tend to do as adults is use logic when a child is going through high emotional arousal and that just doesn't work. Never in the history of the world has anybody calm down just because they were told to calm down. They need to feel, seen and supported. So what if we as adults and parents understood? Our children are teenagers through the lens of what was happening in their brains.

In the book, we break it down. Feelings should be acknowledged. All feelings shouldn't be acted upon. But we can help our kids with those big feelings by using right brain language, not logical data driven facts and figures.

It's not going to work with a lot of kids. Invalidating statements. When we see our kids having a hard time, we want to teach them a different perspective, but sometimes in that process, we say things that could be more hurtful than helpful. With something like anxiety, it can feel like quicksand.

Right. And the more you try to diffuse a situation with your teen that has a lot of anxiety, the deeper they sink. So again, calm down is not going to work. Don't worry about it. It's not going to work. It's only going to up their worries and their anxiety. So what we want to do instead is to help them to feel safe by validating their experience.

I can tell you're having a hard time. Tell me more about that. What's going on for you internally? When we constantly invalidate their experience, it actually breaks the trust in the relationship and it diminishes the communication.

Andy Earle: You made some great points in there. It really struck me. When you were talking about just being there, hearing them being with them in this moment. There's a chapter in your book on that too. Just really the impact that it can have not saying anything at all, but just being there. I thought that was really powerful.

I hope that people will read the whole book to dive deeper into this stuff because you go through all these topics and more really get into the science of how these things work, some great specific stories and strategies and examples for how you can apply a lot of these ideas in your own life, in your own parenting.

Final Thoughts and Resources
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Andy Earle: I highly encourage people to pick up a copy of Seen.

Chinwé Williams: Thank you so much. We do think it's a great resource for parents, for educators, for leaders. We've gotten really good feedback since it was Released in 2021.

Andy Earle: Chinwe, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all this with us.

Can you talk about where people can go to find out more about the work you're doing or follow updates from you?

Chinwé Williams: Yes, absolutely. Dr Chinwe's work professionally can be found on Dr Chinwe Williams dot com, which is my professional website. And you could also access my clinical website there, my private practice website if you're in the Georgia area.

If you are on social media, my preferred platform is Instagram. And you can find me at Dr. Chinwe Williams, DR. Chinwe Williams. There I post a lot of mental health tips, especially for parents and educators working with young people. I also post family activities and the way I do self care because I want to encourage parents and leaders to focus on their wellness needs.

Andy Earle: Wow. Amazing. I encourage people to go engage further and check it out.

We're here today with Chinwe Williams talking about how to make your teenager feel seen, and we're not done yet. Here's a look at what's coming up in the second half of the show.

Chinwé Williams: And then here's three really powerful words.

Tell me more. When you can get a teenager to feel seen, safe, and understood. They're going to share, they're going to want to share, you're inviting them to share. How we think, and the nature of our thoughts can significantly impact our mood.

And behavior. When we're going through hard and heavy things, our brain automatically generates negative thoughts and those thoughts feel true. But I want you to remember that thoughts are not facts. You don't have to be mentally ill to go to counseling. Counseling, especially school counseling, was built on education. Teaching skills. Use very few words, do more listening than talking. Let them know that you hear them, several deep breaths, and just remember that you don't even have to say a whole lot.

Just you being a compassionate, loving presence is huge.

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 sign up directly on Apple Podcasts. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.