Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Andy: I read the book, How to be a Happier Parent and really had fun with it. A lot of parenting books are so focused on the kid and it's very-

KJ: Not.

Andy: Well. Yeah. I mean, it's like, well, "Hey, shouldn't you be having a good time throughout this whole thing?" Like if this isn't fun for you, which is what I hear from so many parents that they got one kid who just always ruins it all the time and it's just not fun anymore. Or that homework has become such a intense situation that it's just not even fun anymore. And it's like, they don't even want to go home and confront it. And that to me is so sad.

KJ: I think that's more common than not. I really do. And I think a fair number of people even resist the idea that it shouldn't be that way.

Andy: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We see it as like our duty kind of. As parents, it's a tough through and we're supposed to be-

KJ: One must suffer to produce good children or something.

Andy: Yeah. There's this kind of martyr archetype that we ascribe to a little bit as the good parent or something like that.

KJ: Probably it comes more from the maternal side, but as we get more gender equality in parenting and we absolutely are, unfortunately we're just sharing that piece as opposed to sharing the piece that's more, you are a wonderful part of my whole life.

Andy: It does seem like it's really linked to the kind of nurturing mother archetype though as far as the parents go. This kind of martyr aspect of that you should just be so giving, giving, giving, and not think of yourself at all.

KJ: Well, and if you don't do it that way, then you're doing it wrong. Or if you don't do it that way and the child does not go to Harvard and become the president of the United States, then clearly you could have done more.

Andy: Okay. So talk to me about, this was a phase of your life when you wrote this book, How to be a Happier Parent. Talk to us about what propelled you into that whole endeavor.

KJ: It goes back so far. So I was a parenting journalist for a decade. I started at Slate. I wrote in a variety of posts. I wrote for parents. And then I moved on to the New York times where I wrote and edited the Motherload column for five years. And it was this ironic situation where I was writing about the thing that also made it hard for me to do my job. So my job was to write about all the people doing the thing that also was stressing me out. And I would be editing a piece about happy sports parents while frantically driving a kid to a sport or yelling at another one because... The ironies were deep. Right? But we were, when I started down that road, I have four kids within four years of each other. At the time that I started writing they were like four, four, six, and eight or something like that.

KJ: And we were just in this phase of life where everything... I mean, you just woke up in the morning and you put your skates on and you just started to go. And at night you just imploded onto the couch and we would feebly argue with each other about whose day sucked more. And it didn't feel like there was anything we could do about it. They had to be driven to all these places. Where we live there's no school bus and they went to different schools. And they need to do something after school, if they don't, you're going to, "What am I going to do?" It was just this really frantic time full of emptying the dishwasher and drying off small plastic cups. And I just kept thinking, "Man, I don't feel like this is what I signed up for."

Andy: Right.

KJ: So I was looking for a way to make it more fun. And that was actually my first book. And I'm writing for the time so I have this, this opportunity. I can write a book. And my first thought about a book was, this should be fun. And I started making a list of things that would be fun. And then I just looked at that list and I thought, "I don't want to do fun things. I don't want to do any more things. I do enough things. I just want the things we're already doing not to be so stressful."

Andy: Just so yeah.

KJ: I started to focus on that instead, because yeah, believe me, a list of more fun things is the last thing a parent of four-

Andy: You got enough going on at that point.

KJ: Almost certainly. If there's anyone out there who's like, "I don't know. I feel like my afternoons are pretty empty with these four children." Well, keep them that way. There's a lot of joy to be found in emptiness.

Andy: There's a couple of things that I really like in here. One of them in the chapter where you're talking about chores, you said you guys have tried just about everything. Star charts, reward chips that could be cashed in at the mom's store, fines for failure to perform, bonuses for stellar performance, offering their allowance in the form of a single dollars in a cup and taking a dollar out every time a chore wasn't done docking allowances for compliance about shorts, countless other strategies that I have forgotten. Here's what I learned through my own experience and interviews with other parents. Any of those things can work. So why didn't they for us? Because we didn't stick with them.

KJ: Yep.

Andy: So, what did you figure out that finally worked?

KJ: I hate this so much because it is still true. The secret to getting your kids to do chores is to make your kids do chores. There is no secret. You can pay them, you can bribe them, you can give chips, you can put stars on. It doesn't matter. People who get their kids to do chores are people who expect their kids to do chores, who don't accept excuses for not doing chores, who put being a helpful member of the family as a high priority as it should be. And just that's the way they live their lives. And that is so hard. Because the truth is that it is indeed easier that you do it yourself. Absolutely. 100%.

KJ: I mean, there are times when you're like, "Yeah, sorry, I can't be in three places at once. Teenager who drives a car." So you get to go pick up your sibling and that happened. That's a different kind of thing. Now, when it comes to like the towel on the floor of the bathroom, or emptying the dishwasher, or feeding the animals, yes, it's easier to do it yourself than it is to nag the child into doing it. I just hate that. I want there to be a magic bullet. But there is not. So we, I mean, as a family, we still struggle with this. And our kids will tell you, yeah. We should do our chores. We're really bad about that. They'll say. Like they get bonus points for knowing that it's terrible, that we have to nag them.

KJ: And I still have these conversations in the car with my younger daughter, "Please get a kitten. I'll feed it every day and I'll feed all the animals." And I'm just like, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is not my first kitten Rodeo, my we had two cats and two dogs and two mini ponies and nine chickens. And getting you people to feed them is like..."

Andy: Yeah. Right.

KJ: No kitten.

Andy: Yeah. You think in your mind like, "Oh, it would be good because it would teach them responsibility." But you don't realize that it would be a vehicle for you to teach them responsibility.

KJ: That is exactly right.

Andy: There is a lot of work involved in that whole situation.

KJ: There really is. And that is one of those places where you just have to remember that, what you want now is not what you will want later. So, you want kids who know that if they drink something out of a cup, they're going to take it and put it in the dishwasher. And that means that you're going to spend six to 12 years making them do that every single time. Pretty much. I mean, once in a while, but the problem with that once in a while, I'm just going to grab the cup and put it in the dishwasher for you, keep track people, keep track. Because suddenly you realize, "Wait a minute, I did this an hour ago, and two hours ago." Yeah. We really, because it's easier because it avoids conflict, we really, it's so easy to slip down the road of just getting the thing done.

Andy: Yeah. And once you do it once, then it's easy to do it again. You talk about a scientific study that you conducted, that it takes, I think, about five of constantly nagging a child to remove their dishes from the table before they will actually begin to do it on their

KJ: No, this was a very unscientific study conducted entirely in my kitchen on a subject set of four. And now coming at it from a few years later, I will add that there is, to some degree, there's some personality stuff in here. I have four kids. One of them will put her dish in the dishwasher every time, every time. Really, if there's a dish on the table, it's not hers. Another one, she doesn't know where the dishwasher is. I don't think she could locate it. And they have their... They are barely a year apart. They have received, other than the differences in siblings, essentially the same degree of nagging parenting. It's just one of them is a harder to get through to than the other apparently. And we're still trying.

Andy: So you write in here that sibling battles fall into four different categories, jealousy, property rights, space occupation, and pure devil tree. Can you talk about what those are and how those work, what you should do about them?

KJ: So I'm going to check off the four. We've got pure devil tree. This is mine, this is my space and jealousy. Right? All right. So really they're all jealousy. I mean, it's hard to share your parents. It just inherently... It inherently is, and it's hard to have other people in your space constantly even if you're used to it. And there's just some degree of friction that is, it's constant. And in our house it was, when I was writing the book between two children in particular, it was constant and it was horrific and it was painful. And I will say, it's been a couple of years now, and it's not like that anymore. So hallelujah turned out that we were not in King Lear territory as I really deeply believed that we were.

KJ: So the time to start teaching your kids how to resolve their own sibling differences is, well, is now. If your kids are small-

Andy: Was definitely.

KJ: Well, yeah. If your kids are small, then that's better. But if they're not, they're not. So if you've got little kids, you really probably do need to be in there regularly talking to them about, "Well, let's, let's look at what's happening here." So it's easier to have a couple of maybe black letter rules that you just fall back on. So for us with stuff, if it's your thing, it's your thing. That can be a little hard because some things belong to everyone and then it's a different negotiation, but we have this policy that even if it was your tee shirt and you outgrew it six years ago, if you don't want your sister to have it, okay, it's your tee shirt. I mean, if it's a pair of skis and it's going to cost me 300, that would be different, that didn't come up for us.

KJ: But even if there's no reason for you to want that McDonald's happy meal from... No. Toy from five years ago that we just found under the car seat, but it's yours and we can, for some reason, all remember that it's yours, then it's still yours and that is fine. And then space gets to be really challenging. My kids all, when I wrote the book, I had four kids in two rooms. During the writing of the book, I think we split the girls up so that now we have no guest room anymore and we have... Because we had to, because they were going to kill each other. And it is-

Andy: You do write about, they're kind of like butting heads in the book. Yeah.

KJ: Yeah. So the space stuff is kind of really can be super challenging because you'll get kids who have a different feeling about space. Who can feel alone just because they have headphones on or just because they're reading a book and they're focused. And then you have kids that just need the whole room. And sometimes you have to look for those little weirdnesses and make rules that don't seem, or make accommodations that don't seem fair. Fair. Fair is an evil word. Fair is a very difficult word.

BoldAndy: I think it's interesting that you point out you have these rules about stuff that's really specific in your house and then seem like a theme in the book, because then later on you also had rules about dinner time, you had the five dinner time rules.

KJ: I can probably recite the dinner time rules.

Andy: You got to know those. You got those down at this point. Yeah?

KJ: Well, the dinner time rules, they sort of evolve. And yeah, I did four... I mean, I have four kids and right now I'm a full time writer but at the time of writing the book I had a full time job. I needed black letter laws. I needed to just say, "Okay, fine. You can watch TV on the weekend, but there's no TV on the weekdays. Because I can't have a 20 minute conversation with you every time you want to watch TV because that's every five minutes. That is not going to make me happy." Yeah. So that's why we would have these sort of, just policies. It's easier to have a policy. Then you can make exceptions to the policy if you want to.

KJ: All right. Dinner time. Yeah. So I'm the primary cook in the family. I like to cook. I like to cook a lot. I don't like people to insult what I have cooked. So we had these rules. I may not come up with all five, but broadly speaking, and these are so ingrained that they still remain but we certainly don't ever have to use them anymore.

Andy: Right. Yeah, call them.

KJ: Broadly speaking, you have to accept everything on your plate but you don't have to eat or taste any of it. There will be no pressure to eat something that you do not wish to eat, but we may tell you that we think it's good. And that's actually usually siblings, "No, it's actually really good. It looks mushy." But you are not allowed to say negative things about the food. You are not allowed to say yuck. You are not allowed to say, eer. You're certainly not allowed to say that looks gross.

KJ: If you say any of those things, you will leave the table and there will be no further dinners, no dessert, no... And that you only have to do that to a kid really once, especially when they're little, they didn't like that. And so we had a no food after dinner rule, but we would also make sure, this is a little chaotic because I didn't remember them all in order, but we would also make sure, at every meal, I just made sure to serve something that everybody could conceivably eat. So, if you don't like meatloaf, there's bread and butter. If you don't like whatever it is we're serving, there's rice. If you don't like meatballs, I didn't put the meatballs on the pasta until you sat down.

KJ: And by and large it's worked. They're all pretty good eaters. They all eat most things. The day that my oldest looked at me and said, "Well, I don't really have to love it to eat it." I was like, "Yes, that is the point. "I am not only going to serve you things that you love, I am sorry. I don't even serve me only things that I love. Because that would mean I never, ever, ever ate anything except like

Andy: I only eat ice cream. Yeah.

KJ: Yeah. That would be a poor choice for me. I mean, we talk about healthy eating. We talk about what we're mixing up. We talk about process. We had a lot account because food is really important part of our lives and we have a garden and the kids cook with me all the time. That's big in our particular house, but I really feel like the first one makes a big difference to their willingness to try and explore things. And the second one makes a huge difference to me. Because if you look at my food and you tell me that it looks gross, somebody might throw things and it might be me.

Andy: Yep. I always think if you can get kids to do things without feeling like it's because you're pressuring them to do it, but just because they wanted to explore it themselves, it's always better. So not making them feel like they're being forced to eat certain foods or that they have to, but just that, it's there and it's an option, and you're not going to be judged either way, I think it's really powerful.