Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Introduction to Talking to Teens
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Andy Earle: You are 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 are talking today about providing the right kind of parenting presence.

Teens need a certain kind of presence from us as parents in order for them to do their best, to feel secure, confident, motivated, and regulated.

The best kind of presence we can provide is a sense of confidence that we know they can do it, and a feeling of calm that not a lot of things phase us too much.

Meet the Experts: William Stixrud and Ned Johnson
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Andy Earle: Today's guests, William Stixrud and Ned Johnson, are back on the show to talk about their new book, the Seven Principles for Raising a Self-Driven Child.

Bill is a clinical neuropsychologist, and Ned is the founder of Prep Matters, the two of them are the bestselling authors of numerous books.

Ned and Bill, welcome back once again to the Talking to Teens podcast. Thank you so much for coming back on the show.

Ned Johnson: Well, like you, we love talking about teens who love talking to teens and talking with people who like talking to teens.

This is the right crew.

Bill Stixrud: What Ned said.

The Importance of Parenting Presence
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Andy Earle: So you have, multiple books now under your belt, and you're talking to groups of parents about a lot of these ideas on motivation and the relationship with your child. And you talk a lot about shifting into this consultant role with kids.

There's so much that I love about your work and really excited that you have this new book, which is a workbook format. There's all these exercises and fill in the blank things to really get you thinking throughout. What was the thinking behind this?

Why was this workbook seeming like the next thing that was needed?

The Concept Behind the Workbook
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Ned Johnson: When we were lecturing a lot in the DC area there was this woman who kept showing up, talk after talk. Hey, it's great to see you again. But I gotta ask. You keep coming back, and it's sort of the same talk every time.

The same advice. The same jokes. And she said, well, when I listen to Bill and Ned, I feel, this makes so much sense. It feels safe to trust my kid, not to worry about them all the time, support rather than push. And then I'll go home and he's done something stupid and I'll get all stressed out again. And I just keep coming back because it helps me think more clearly. And so what we observed is we're a little bit of, almost a calm button for her.

We're all homeostatic, right? We hear a great interview with Andy. We read an article, we hear something from a neighbor, and then we fall back into doing the same things we did before. So with the idea that it takes practice to make things your practice, even the best of ideas, we intended this workbook to be fewer words, more activities, more active, to help make it easier for people to put these things into their own lives with their kids.

Bill Stixrud: Yeah.

Unconditional Love and Control
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Bill Stixrud: And Andy, I'll add that Ned and I are convinced that the two most important things that young people can get from their family is the deep felt sense they're loved unconditionally, and a strong sense of control over their own lives. That, particularly for adolescents, is one of the major drives. And the process of giving kids more control over their lives is stressful for parents because it lowers our own sense of control. So part of it is how to make it less stressful, because it's hard. If you have to sit in your hands and zip your lips, it's, it's emotionally, it, it is challenging.

And a lot of parents say, it makes so much sense, but my parents say I'm spoiling my kid. Or, you're putting the kid in charge. Or, who's in charge here? Or that kind of thing.

That's not the way I was raised. So there's a lot of opportunities for people to work through stuff about their own childhood in terms of how they were parented, how they would've liked their parents to respond in certain situations. The sense of control is so enormously important, for mental health and for the development of that internal motivation and drive.

Injecting Joy into Family Life
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Andy Earle: Something you talk about in the book is how we can inject more joy into our families, which I love. But you also point out that there is a question often for parents of teenagers because, during adolescence, teens often go through phases where they don't want to hang out with their parents much.

So how can we create some fun family times and some joyful memories together if they don't even wanna spend time with you?

Ned Johnson: Before Bill jumps in, I think I should note that, if you feel like you have enough joy or you don't need more joy, don't read the book.

We should put a label on there. Too much joy might result.

Bill Stixrud: Yeah.

Ned Johnson: I'm not being helpful, Bill.

Bill Stixrud: I'll just say, I did a consultation with a kid almost 40 years ago, Andy. And he was 21 years old and had a really hard time in high school. He had some drug use and trouble holding a job.

And I asked him, I said, is there something your parents could have done when you were a teenager that would've made this better? He said, I think it would've helped if they're happy to see me sometimes. Because he was screwing up so much they always felt they had to be disapproving. We suggest your highest goal is just enjoying your kid. When you enjoy your kid, your kid experiences himself or herself as a joy producing organism, as opposed to a frustration or anxiety or anger producing organism. The idea is to find ways that you connect.

It doesn't have to be a big deal. And we talk about family rituals. Our family, it was a Friday night movie. My kids are in their late thirties and early forties. Just last night we were laughing about this time that my wife went to Blockbuster, picked out this movie that was terrible.

And she forgot seven years later, brought the same movie home. We just laughed hysterically about it all these years later. For many kids it's just going to their games. Saying, I just had so much fun watching you do this.

Using Humor to Connect with Teens
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Bill Stixrud: Ned, do you use humor a lot with your kids?

Ned Johnson: Oh, yeah. I mean, it's hard to be stressed and happy at the same time. It's such a good way to create reconnection. My daughter who's now 20 wasn't easy always to live with, in part because the things that were hard for her made her a little prickly.

Nobody could press my buttons like she could. But to be honest, no one pressed her buttons the way I did. We love each other enormously, but we'd get in squabbles and someone would be crossed at the other. And invariably when she was sort of worked up, I couldn't always go and talk to her because it was a little too much emotionally.

But she would pick up her phone if I would text her. So what I did was text her just the worst dad puns, terrible knock, knock jokes. Eventually, she'd be like, what? And it would break her down a little. Then I'd say, I'm really sorry. I know I made you mad, and I'm sorry. Then I'd follow up with another bad knock, knock joke. And every meme you can come up with.

When I was a kid, my family and I domesticated a feral cat. Now these are cats who, they've been outdoors for years. You have to imagine that cat wants to come in out of the cold, wants to be petted, wants to have proper food, doesn't wanna be afraid of everything all the time.

But if you reach for them, they'll run away. So you put the food just outside the door and then you put food there just inside the door. Then you put in the middle of the kitchen and you never ever reach for them. You put it at your feet and at some point they come and they kind of rub up against your leg, and then you put your finger out.

You don't touch 'em, you put your finger near them, and if they decide to come and rub their head on your finger, now you've made progress. And some kids are really easy and some kids really aren't. And it's hard as a parent, if you've got a kid who's hard in the way that my daughter, Katie is. And she needs love in her way just as much, probably more so than kids for whom life is easy.

And it's hard for anyone who's listening, you're a loving parent and all you wanna do is throw your arms around your kid. But that may not be, even though that's what you feel they need. That may not be the terms that they need right now.

So there's a bunch of fun exercises. What makes your kid let her guard down or his guard down? Is this when you're driving back from a activity, and it's dark, and a little less intense because you're not making eye contact? Is it right before they go to bed where their guards are down 'cause they're exhausted from the day?

It is when you're playing video games and say, hey, I got a question for you. And it's parallel play. You take note of it because at least for me, I always tended to fall into the trap of doing with my kids what I would want people to do for me. And sometimes that worked great.

And sometimes it was like, oh, insert face palm. So, I had to learn what are they telling me with their behavior of what's not working? And how do I adjust?

Bill Stixrud: Simply just enjoying being with your kid. Finding ways, even for a brief period, just to let them feel, I like being with you. I like the person you are. Teenagers often act like, get outta my life to their parents.

But they want a relationship with their parents. They want their parents in their life.

Ned Johnson: There are a lot of people who are doing a wonderful job of trashing social media, but one of the really good upsides of social media is it will give you exactly what you want.

If you find things that are funny, it'll give you a constant drip feed of this. My kids were both in high school and one or the other say, Hey, can I show you this thing on TikTok? And then my daughter said, well, let me show you this one.

And they went back and forth, like competitive humor, from all the things they had saved. With this goal of who can get mom to shoot her water out her nose first kind of thing. And it was hilarious. It's also worth noting one of the researchers we love, Sonya Lupien, who talks about emergency stress relief.

And one of the four forms of emergency stress relief is laughing. Especially when you laugh with other people, it's fantastic for bonding. We should have some healthy limits around our social media use, but if you're having a hard time connecting with your kid, literally just, what's the funniest thing you've seen on TikTok right now, is a really good opening to laugh together and find joy together. And not much heavy lifting. Social media'll do that for you, for what it's worth.

Healthy vs. Toxic Expectations
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Andy Earle: You talk in the book also about expectations. And of course we know that loading kids with too many expectations can lead to all kinds of anxiety and things like this. But you also point out the link between expectations and confidence. What do you mean by that?

Bill Stixrud: When we were working on our second book, I tested this 17-year-old girl who was brilliant. She had like a verbal score, the 99.9 percentile, and really brilliant girl who had ADHD and anxiety. And she always felt that she was disappointing other people. Not living up to their expectations. Not living up to her own expectations.

And it just seemed that the expectations were so toxic. And so I just started doing some research on, on what do we know about parental expectations? What we know is they're really powerful in terms of academic achievement. There's a high correlation. But it turns out that the most powerful expectations aren't, you need to get that B up to an A.

It's not that I demand that you do, I insist that you do or there'll be consequences. It's this kind of gentle, I'm confident that you can. That expression of confidence in a kid that, if this is important to you and you work hard, I'm pretty sure you can do that. As opposed to you need to do this.

It's just so much healthier. We contrast healthy versus toxic expectations in the new book. And the, I insist you do is toxic. In part because it's coercive and it implies I only approve of you, if you work hard, or do this, which is a bad message to get. It doesn't work the way you want.

In terms of confidence, what we talk about is wanting kids to develop healthy expectations for themselves. And one of the exercises we suggest, Andy, is that help kids think through all the things in their life that they've ever done well, that they've got good feedback about, that they felt good about, they felt successful at, and make a list of them.

Let's let your brain know. Let's really remind your brain all the things that you're capable of doing, to create that sense of confidence and positive expectation.

Ned Johnson: There's an exercise in there aimed at helping parents who have kids who are in overdrive about expectations that have really fallen into the perfectionistic mode.

And it's hard because it may take folks a while to realize that they've got a perfectionistic kid, because at first you're dazzled by the A's and the goals and the musical performances. Who doesn't love to see kids doing well?

The hard part though, is that perfectionism isn't rooted in, "I'm so excited to..." but, "I'm fearful that if I don't..." There's sort of internalized toxic expectations that anything less than perfect means I'm a failure, people aren't gonna like me, mom and dad aren't gonna approve of me. And because it's rooted in fear, you can't talk people out of those thinking, but you can talk with them to find ways to shift their own thinking.

So there's this exercise about excellence seekers versus perfectionists. It's a way for parents to talk with their kids about these things, not at their kids about these. Because we can't solve that for kids. But when we have these conversations, it can help shift their thinking.

What expectations do we as parents have for our kids? You prioritize their academic achievement and their wealth and their prestige. It's important to me that my child always does their best. Right? But my child is really intelligent, athletic, talented. It feels like a waste of their talent and lost opportunity. And so it's a way for us to reflect on when we pause and we step away from, the peer groups school groups and our friends.

If we really stop and say, what do I want my kid to experience in life? What do I want them to have? If I really could say what they do and how they develop, what are the things that I would want for them rather than of them? Then you do it with your kids and ask them what they think they hear?

The disconnect is often striking.

So parents will say, I want Matthew to be a good person. I want him to be kind to other people. I want him to figure out what matters to him and build a successful life. I want him to be financially successful enough so he doesn't have to worry all the time about money. But I really want him to do work that is fulfilling to him and meaningful to other people.

I want him to have great friends. I hope that he has a family because he's so great with kids. But oftentimes you give this to kids, it's like, well. They want me to get into good college. They want me to get good grades and make sure they get good grades. So I get into good college.

Even if parents haven't said that, it's out there in the ether. And you can say, oh, wow. And then you have this interesting conversation. What do you see the message that you're picking up? Can I try to level set a little bit of what's important to me?

Clearly I've not communicated these things clearly enough because you've heard something different than what I've been trying to say. And then you're off down the road and you start talking about shared values, because it's so injurious to our relationship, and therefore injurious to children, if they feel that we approve of them when they check some boxes of very narrow performance-based metrics of grades and test scores and college admissions.

And what we really want them to want for their lives are the same things we want for our lives. Of feeling like we're contributing the world and we have great friendships and on and on it goes. So yeah, we hope that one helps. You wanna be on the same page with your kid as much as you can.

Bill Stixrud: So oftentimes the high expectations is based on the belief that if the kids aren't pushed all the time, they won't maximize their potential. We see so many people who are incredibly successful professionally, financially, who are miserable. Our angle is we want people to create a life that they're happy with.

That's what fulfilling your potential means: creating a life that you're happy with. Our role as parents is to help our kids figure out who they wanna be, and how to get there.

Ned Johnson: If my brain is a young person, is filled with other people's expectations, it's hard for me to figure out the life that I want.

It leaves less space for me to figure out, what life do I wanna build? In our second book, there's a conversation where I'm talking with this young woman who was in her senior year of high school going into the college admissions process. I asked her, what do you like most to do in the world?

And she looked at me, said, I really have no idea. I spend all of my time and energy trying to meet the expectations of other people. I really don't know. That's not a head space we'd want any young person to go off to college with. And obviously everyone doesn't have a perfectly planned plan, but to have no idea of what you want? It's hard to put hard work into achieving the things that you are meaningful to if you have no idea what's meaningful to you.

So we think we can start that process a whole lot earlier and really think about school as, not four years of getting into college, but really a process of young people leaving the household and developing themselves.

Helping Teens Find Their Passion
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Andy Earle: You talk about how to help teens find that life that is gonna excite them and feel aligned and authentic. And you have this list of questions that I found really interesting. Things like, what you might think you do better than a lot of other people. Or things that make you feel alive.

Friends that really make you feel comfortable. Times when you feel like you're contributing, or finding a sense of purpose, or a reason for being. How do you have those conversations or get kids talking about those deeper issues of what really matters to them, how they find that life that really lights them up.

Bill Stixrud: I'm a neuropsychologist and I test kids for a living. I tested a kid who was being seen by a therapist. And I was talking to his therapist, who treats only adolescents, and he said, teenagers love to be asked the question: if there's a reason that you're on this planet, what might that be?

And it got me thinking about ways of talking with kids about what they really value.

We talk about this research where you have kids before they take a test to reflect on their highest values.

And when they write a little paragraph about the things that are really important to them, their anxiety goes down, and they do better when they're tested. So, kids respond to questions about, what do you value?

What's important to you? What might be something that you are really good at that other people can't do? What might be a role that you could play here in making this a better planet? Kids respond very well to those kind of questions.

They like them. They like thinking about it. In part 'cause so much of what they do is just drudgery. One of our colleagues is an educator who's focused on promoting student directed learning in schools.

He, has educators shadow high school students for a whole day. They go through classes, lunch, PE, all this stuff. One principal shadowed a student for the whole day and he came back to his office and said, there's two words to describe this experience: it sucks.

So often young people, they're just jumping through their hoops. The majority of high school kids say their predominant feelings when they're in school are tired, stressed, and bored. When we actually give them something that's meaningful to think about...

what's important to you? What are you good at? What can you do better than most people? What do you have to offer? That lights them up in my experience.

Ned Johnson: And I would add one thing to that, thinking about your earlier question, Andy, about a kid who doesn't really want to engage in this process.

Who doesn't wanna talk to you about that. That will happen for a lot of folks. A couple tips from What Do You Say is using language of simply, Hey, I noticed that... Rather than, oh, I see you're so good at such and such. Hold back on the mustard.

I noticed that you seem to figure those things out quicker than most people. For things about values, you look like you really enjoyed fixing that thing. Kids who are really mechanical. Is that something that matters to you?

You can get into that. For a kid who comes home totally spun up about something the school did, or in politics where they're really mad, say something like, this looks like something you really care deeply about. And see what happens.

And to just say that I notice what matters to you. You have strong feelings about this, which must mean you have some passion. I see that it really bothers you when people are dishonest, or unethical, or whatever it is that they're mad about.

Instead of trying to soothe those hard feelings, you're leaning into, I can see that this is a value that really matters to you. That's kind of cool.

Bill Stixrud: And to your point, Ned, about not talking kids out of things. I tested a 15-year-old last week, another kid who's just completely brilliant. And he's suicidal. He's extremely depressed. He's in an intensive outpatient psychotherapy program on a lot of medication. And I just tested him and he's brilliant. At the end of my interview, I said, tell me about your strengths. And strengths could be things that you're good at, or just nice things about you as a person. He said, honestly, I don't think I have any. He's incredible. He's got million strengths. But all I said is that, if you could, would you like to see that differently? Would you like to see somebody has more to offer.

He says, well, I, I worry if I acknowledge that I have strengths. That I'm being arrogant.

I said, I can see how you say that. When I talk with kids, I say, for whatever it's worth. So I said, for whatever it's worth, another way to look at it is that a pretty healthy emotion to experience when you're realizing, I have these gifts, is gratitude.

It's not arrogance. It doesn't make you better than other people, but it means that you have something important to contribute. I find that if I just say, whatever it's worth, I'm not gonna try to take that away from you. That's the way you see it. I see it differently and I'd love to explain to you how I see it.

They always want to hear it. They don't want to be miserable.

Andy Earle: I love that with teenagers finding ways to offer them other perspectives or offer them different ways they might think about something in a way that doesn't feel like you're directly confronting them.

You're just giving them another perspective.

Conclusion and Resources
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Andy Earle: I think you have put together such a great resource for parents, and I highly encourage people to grab a copy of The Seven Principles for Raising a Self-driven Child.

Ned Johnson: Thank you so much, Andy.

Andy Earle: Bill and Ned, always a massive pleasure to have you on the show.

Can you mention quickly where people could learn more about what you're doing, get involved with, or follow updates on what's coming down the pipeline?

Ned Johnson: Well, the first thing, of course is we encourage people to buy the book because we want to help parents who wanna help their kids. That's the first place to start.

We suggest your local bookstore, or if you don't have a good local bookstore, that Bezos guy, but he probably doesn't need the shekels as much as your local bookstore. Start there. Our website is the self-driven child, or if you're short on time busy, parents are self-driven child, that'll get you the same place.

We have a newsletter there and you can follow things that are going along. And all the usual social media places. We love talking to kids. Most of all, we love talking to parents. We love talking to folks like you, Andy, who are helping parents talk to their kids. We're around and if there are ways we can help you or your school, we'd love to do it.

We never get tired of talking to this stuff and we never get tired of talking with you, Andy.

Andy Earle: Always a pleasure. Well, congrats on the new book and thanks again for all the great work you're doing for parents. It's really inspiring.

We're here with William Stixrud and Ned Johnson talking about how to provide the right kind of presence for your teens. And we're not done yet. Here's a look at what's coming up in the second half of the show.

Bill Stixrud: The idea of just find your passion is terrible advice. But it turns out that most of us are good at things that we like doing. We like doing the things we're good at.

Ned Johnson: Low intrinsic motivation is a trans diagnostic facet of psychiatric symptomology. It's gonna show up in anxiety, in depression, in schizophrenia, in substance use disorders, in eating disorders... it's a really big F-ing deal.

Bill Stixrud: It is all about the future. Because, if kids are really struggling, no matter what's going on, if I had a crystal ball and I could say, I know your kid, by the time he's 22, he's gonna be incredible. You wouldn't worry.

Ned Johnson: We can be joyful. We can have ice cream, we can have a whale of a good time.

You can love your life even if it's gonna be a terrible grade.

Bill Stixrud: The reporter asked the 17-year-old boy, so what does meditation do? He said, it calms the mind and it calms the mom. Almost half parents in the country say that, I'm so stressed, I can hardly function.

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