Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Andy: This is something that you've been doing for a really long time. How did all of this start and how did you get interested in this and get into this?

Beverly: Sure. Well I'm a psychologist by training, and while I was still a graduate student back in the late 70s I have the opportunity in 1980 to teach a course called Group Exploration of Racism. I was just doing it not because that was my career goal, but I was working on my dissertation and someone asked me if I had capacity to do this class, and I needed a little extra money, and so I said, "Sure, I'll do it." It's as simple as that. But when I had that teaching experience, when I taught it the very first time what really impressed me at the time I was teaching at the University of California in Santa Barbara, and what impressed me was my students' response to the class, which was, "Wow, I learned so much. Why didn't we talk about these issues when I was in high school? Why did I have to wait until I was a college senior to understand how racism works in our society?"

Beverly: So I got such great feedback actually from my students, most of whom were white, that I thought I'll do it again. And I ended up doing it over and over and over again teaching the course many times so much so that I shifted my career focus from becoming a therapist, working as a therapist, and becoming a college professor teaching about the psychology of racism. So I've been doing that … When my book, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria and Other Conversations about Race was first published was 1997, so by that time I'd been teaching this course about 16 or 17 years and had learned quite a lot about the questions that people have.

Andy: Right.

Beverly: About racism and how it operates in our society, not only why are the black kids sitting together but also how do you talk to young children and also what can I do to make a difference? And so I organized the book back then to have really three parts. I call it what, so what, and now what. What is racism, how does it operate, how do we understand the systemic nature of it. So what does that matter in terms of how we think about ourselves as individuals and members of racial groups and how we think about other people. And now what, now what can we do about it.

Beverly: I wrote that book in 1997, and it turned out to be a very popular book. People found it helpful, which was great. But fast forward to 2017, 20 years later meanwhile I had gone on to be a college professor and then an administrator and eventually the president of Spelman College, and I retired from being president in 2015. And I thought now that I have some free time maybe I will update this book. I will update the book because having worked in higher education all those years I realized that the people who were born in 1997 and 20 years old in 2017 had had a very different life experience than the students I had been teaching back in 1980. So I wanted the book to really reflect the experiences of a 21st century population.

Andy: What did you see as the main thing that needed to be updated like we were you going to keep those same three pieces to the book and just update the examples or did you see a fundamental shift take place that needed to be addressed, do you think, in the new version?

Beverly: Well there were four things. I like to say there were four things that were really significantly different and are reflected in the book. And I call them the four Ps because they all begin with P. The first P has to do with population. The population in the United States has changed significantly since I was working on it at first. Must more diverse today than it was even in the late 90s. So I wanted the content to reflect the changing nature of our demographics. That was one thing, so changing population. To just say a word about that for your audience I like to say I'm not that old, but I was born in 1954. In 1954 the U.S. population was 90% white, 10% everybody else. So that is often a surprise to people because we live in a society today where it's more like 60% white or 65% white and two thirds white and everybody else. And that's a big shift because when we say 90% white it wasn't 10% black people. It was 10% blacks, Latinos, everybody else.

Andy: Everybody else.

Beverly: Everybody else. So that is a big shift if you think about what the population is today in 2020. So that was one P. The second P was politics. When I wrote my book in the late 90s when it was published in 1997 Bill Clinton was the president of the United States. He in his presidency in the same year, 1997, launched what he called the President's Initiative on Race. And he said in a speech that he thought it was very important for the United States, the population of the U.S., for all of us to talk about the legacy of racism in our society. And in 1997 he said, "I think this is a good time to have that conversation because we are not at war and the economy is good. We're at peace and feeling prosperous, and when things are good that's when you can really take on tough conversations." He made that speech in 1997. That commission worked for about a year, but many people didn't hear about the work of that commission because it was overshadowed by his impeachment trial and the scandal with Monica Lewinsky.

Beverly: But if we go to the next president, in 2000 George W Bush was elected, and he in his first year in the fall of 2001, September 11, 2001 we were attacked and all of a sudden we weren't a nation at peace. And during his tenure too the 2008 collapse of the economy meant we weren't experiencing prosperity either. And that had an impact on the kind of conversations people might have been willing to have. Then in 2008 Barack Obama was elected, first African American president of course. And when he was elected many people said, "We don't need to talk about it. It's fixed."

Andy: Okay, great. Solved that issue.

Beverly: Of course we know that that was a premature conclusion, and in fact there were a lot of incidents that occurred during his leadership over that eight years, the Charleston shooting in the church, the rise of white supremacist activity really started in response to his election. And then 2016 Donald Trump was elected, and we know from his campaign that racial divisiveness was part of his rhetoric from the very beginning when he started talking about Mexicans and castigating populations of all kinds. So since his election we've seen as documented by the Southern Poverty Law Center and other organizations a real rise in racial harassment and hate crimes. And of course we know right at this moment that we are talking there are protests all over the nation taking place in response to the police violence and murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. So just the shift in political leadership was something that I wanted to reflect on and the impact that it had.

Beverly: And then the third P was polarization. I think most people would agree that we are living in a time when there's more sense of polarization between and among us than in previous years for sure. And then the last P is psychology. And that is to say that there are psychological researchers who study the things that I write about who have published important articles and introduced us to important ideas that weren't being talked about in 1997 but that I wanted to be sure to include in 2017.

Andy: Something that I found real interesting in this book was this idea that when a trait represents a person being a member of a dominant or advantaged social group it kind of becomes invisible to us or we fail to notice it sometimes. And so you talk about in this book how part of what you do with students is ask them to complete the sentence I am blank. What do their responses reveal about the way that they view themselves and their racial identity?

Beverly: Sure. Let me just start by saying that we all have multiple dimensions of our identity, and if you ask someone to describe themselves quickly, just the first 10 things you think of to say about yourself you're going to say all kinds of things. You might say, "I'm tall, I'm short, I'm intelligent, I'm happy, I'm 18." It could be any number of things that you would say about yourself, but what we think of first tends to be those characteristics that are most salient to us. Maybe they're the things that people most often comment about or notice about us. So if you ask a diverse group of young people to fill in the blank, I am fill in the blank.

Beverly: Give them 60 seconds to do it. Write as many different adjectives or descriptors as you can what's really interesting is that those people who have a dimension of their identity that makes them stand out in some way will usually mention it. For example if it's a predominantly white group of students, but some of the students are kids of color the kids of color are probably going to mention their race or ethnicity, but the white students don't mention whiteness. They don't mention being white. If someone is in a group of Christians but is a Muslim or a Jew that Jewish person or that Muslim person is going to likely mention their religious identity but mainline Protestants may not even mention it.

Beverly: I noticed in my classes when I was teaching in co-ed institutions, I worked for many years in women's colleges but when I taught in a co-ed institution the women would often mention being female, but the men didn't always mention their male identity. The dominant identity, the identity that gives you social status or privilege in our society tends to go unnoticed. Here's an example that your audience might identify with, I can describe myself in a lot of different ways. I probably wouldn't mention being able-bodied. I don't have any physical concerns. But if I were in a wheelchair I probably would mention wheelchair-bound as an example. I don't mention myself as a breather of oxygen, but if I for some reason couldn't breathe my oxygen you can bet I'd be talking about it.

Andy: Yeah, right.

Beverly: So the idea that that part of our identity that goes unmentioned, unnoticed, uncommented on by other people is likely to be unmentioned, unnoticed, uncommented on by us as well. We're not thinking a lot about it.

Andy: And it makes sense too because the whole point of our identify is that it's what identifies us or makes us unique in some way, so we just focus in on those aspects of ourself that we feel like separate us out or make us look different in others eyes.

Beverly: What's important about that though is that it's not just what we think, it's the feedback we've gotten from other people. So I sometimes use the example of one of my sons who is very tall. He was a tall baby and a tall toddler, and now he's a 6'4" adult. And if you had talked to him when he was seven and you asked him ... I would overhear conversations like this all the time. Someone would say, "How old are you?" He'd say, "I'm seven." And then they would get ready to say, "Oh, you're tall for your age."

Andy: You are a tall kid, yeah.

Beverly: Right exactly. And people would say it so much that he would say, "I know, don't say it. I'm tall for my age."

Andy: Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. ** Beverly:** So it's the feedback that people are giving you. Our identities are formed not sitting in a room alone but in dialog with other people and interactions with other people, and the feedback they give us helps to shape how we think about ourselves.

Andy: It only takes really a few people saying that probably. Really we pick up on stuff like that really, really fast. That's social feedback that we use to then inform our own identity. But also I thought what was so interesting about that story because I also had marked that one with David was just the idea of the change and the fact that when he's seven people are mentioning his height. His race isn't really even factored in or whatever to their first impression of him. But then once he reaches adolescence then I guess it suddenly is. To me that was a theme of the book or an insight from this book is that shift that happens. So I guess why is that or where does that come from or what's going on?

Beverly: Well two things happen. One of the things is that teenagers are changing how they think because their brains are developing.

Andy: Sure.

Beverly: That's just a neurological reality. When we're born our brains are still developing. And they get to their sort of adult state in our teenage years. And as the brain develops you are able to think more abstractly so questions like who am I, what does this mean, how am I viewed in the world those are questions that teenagers, adolescents are thinking about in part because their brain is allowing them to think in those ways. But the other part of it is that the social signals are different. So the social signal you get when you're a cute black kid at the age of seven is different than the social signal you get when you're a tall 17-year-old and people are perceiving you as perhaps dangerous or a threat because they're viewing you through the lens of stereotypes.

Andy: Yeah. Coming back to the question, the eponymous question of the book, why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria, so is that part of the answer then?

Beverly: That is part of the answer. That is part of the answer because of course nobody asks that question in a segregated school. So if you're at a school where all the kids are black no one's asking why are they sitting together. So this is a question that gets asked in racially mixed settings. And in those racially mixed settings as kids enter adolescence they are starting to have experiences or encounters with racism in the environment. They're starting to get feedback, maybe from teachers, maybe from peers, maybe from the school resource officer or the police officer in the building. As they're getting that feedback they are becoming increasingly aware that their racial group membership matters to other people. And they're starting to think about how does it matter to me, how do I feel about it, how do I think about it. And as they're doing that it's a natural thing to want to connect with other kids who are asking the same questions, thinking about the same things, with whom you have that in common even if the school is a place where there's not hostility.

Beverly: And of course if there is hostility you can see how people would band together as a self protective element. But even in a school where that's not the case the kids of color are going to be having different experiences. The experience of watching or seeing on the internet the video or George Floyd's murder is going to hit you differently if you can imagine yourself as George Floyd as opposed to someone who just feels back about the mistreatment of another person.

Andy: So you think that kind of thing is really important to reflect on with people of your own race as well as in situations with mixed race?

Beverly: I certainly think dialogue across groups is important, but sometimes there are times when you want to talk to someone who really understands what your experience is and you don't have to explain it.

Andy: Yeah, start from square one and explain the entire thing to them they just know, and you just can empathize and they get it. On page 158 you're talking about a program in school, it was a voluntary desegregation program that led to actually improved academic performance and social relationships among students by actually separating the black students for one period every day, which seems at first to not make sense like how would actually separating the students make it better, but I guess that kind of comes back to what you were just talking about.

Beverly: Yeah, so in this particular program this took place in the Greater Boston area, and there were kids who lived in the city of Boston who were being bused into a suburban majority white community. And of course the purpose, it was a voluntary program, their parents put them on that bus to go to that school because they thought they would have access to a high quality education. But there were also social stressors associated with being in an environment and a community where you don't live but where people might be perceiving you through a stereotype lens where you're still dealing with the realities of racism in the world as a young teen of color. And being able to talk to other kids with the support of concerned and caring adults, because the kids weren't just off by themselves. They were in conversation with advisors who were able to help support them.

Beverly: It was a stress reducer, you might say. By having that time to just be able to talk candidly without worrying about what other people were perceiving or thinking kind of freed up their cognitive capacity to be able to focus in a better way on their school work the rest of the day.

Andy: But isn't it better to just not talk about race and just assume everybody knows what's going on and just not really focus on it?

Beverly: Well the trouble with not talking about it is when you've got a problem, and we do have a problem, if you have a problem and can't talk about it you can't fix it. So we all have to be better at being able to have these conversations so we can really work toward real change.

Andy: You talk about a father in here, and there's this little scenario where he's telling you about when he picked his daughter up from school and asked her to point out her new friend, and she's trying to point out her new friend from this group of girls on the playground, and it's the one black girl in the group, but she doesn't mention anything about race. She's talking about what the girl's wearing and the backpack that she has and all these other things. And the dad is telling you about this, and he's really proud because his daughter is colorblind. Then you say I wondered if rather than a sign of color blindness it was a sign that she had learned not to be so impolite as to mention someone's race.

Beverly: Yeah, the idea a lot of particularly white families have this idea that their children should be colorblind. And I think what they really mean is that they don't want their kids to be racist or they don't want their kids to be discriminatory. And of course I want that too. But to say you don't see somebody else's racial group membership or you don't see their identity is to erase a significant part of their experience. So the daughter who might have been thinking it was impolite to say, "Oh, it was the black girl," is perhaps internalizing an idea that there's something wrong with being a black girl and that that message that it's so unpleasant that we shouldn't even mention it is problematic. She should say, "Oh, I've got Susie, the black girl," is the easiest way to point out if she's the only one. That's the quickest identifier, but also it's like saying the one with the red hair. It doesn't have to be a loaded thing and certainly not.

Andy: It's a really obvious physical distinguishing characteristic. It doesn't have to be so loaded. But it also just like that attitude it strikes me that just picturing because you kind of paint this little scenario and you can kind of picture the scene of the girl describing it to the dad, and just subtly he was proud of her for not mentioning it, so she was then in that moment rewarded with is pride and just reinforced for that behavior or not talking about it. I thought it was really interesting reading it because it was just one of those subtle ways in which this culture of silence is just perpetuated and it's taught from parent to child without trying at all because he was thinking he was doing the right thing or helping.

Andy: This is an interesting idea that we've heard from a couple other people on this Podcast. I'm getting really interested in just the education system and how there's such a lack of models of anything in education of what we teach kids other than white men. So we had talked about this book on the Podcast recently with Janice Kaplan called The Genius of Women that was all about how there's just this dearth of role models of really, really smart women. And you were talking here a lot about how this dearth of African American history and literature at the high school level and how a lot of black students get to college and they're like, "Wow, all this exists." So I guess I wonder what parents can do or what we should be thinking about in terms of how we can be raising more literate and culturally intelligent teenagers.

Beverly: Well certainly parents can speak up about it at their child's school. They can ask questions about the curriculum. They can say, "I am looking at what my kid's bringing home and I'm not seeing a diverse representation." There's a story, true story about a recent social studies book published and widely distributed across the country. It was being used in Texas but Texas book orders often influence because it's such a big state what is being used in other states as well. And in this particular textbook they had a unit on immigration, and they referenced slavery as an example of immigration which the Africans were immigrant labor. Not quite. So there was a young man in this class using this textbook took a screenshot of this particular passage, sent it to his mother, and she was beside herself with the inaccuracy of how this was being communicated and really took it socially viral on social media, and eventually the textbook publisher had to acknowledge the editorial error and issue a correction in the online version of the textbook. But that's an example of parents paying attention and then speaking up about it. So certainly we can educate ourselves and then ask our schools to be responsive in that way.

Andy: That's cool and just inspiring I guess that you have power, and you don't have to just say this is the way it is.

Andy: What is wise criticism, and why was it important in a study that you mention in the book and what could we learn about it?

Beverly: Yeah. So this grows out of the research of a social psychologist whose name is Claude, and Claude Steele was the first social psychologist to write about something he refers to as stereotype threat. Stereotype threat is the idea that if you know there are stereotypes about your group you may want to behave in ways that will work to … You don't want to fulfill the stereotype. So in this particular case his work was about the stereotypes about black students being less capable academically. And let's imagine you are a black student at a predominantly white college or university or high school. It doesn't have to be college age, but in this particular case it was a study done at a college. And you are worried that people have these stereotypes about you and people like you.

Beverly: I want to talk about the stereotype threat, and then I'm going to answer your question about this particular study, the wise criticism. But Claude Steele did this work where what he found was that when students are worried that other people are going to perceive their capabilities as less than they might get nervous. And in some ways the stereotype threat is the anxiety, the performance anxiety that you can have when you're trying to do your best, but you are concerned that people are not going to see it or recognize your talent.

Andy: Yeah, you view yourself as an ambassador of your entire race almost. There's even studies on women as well in different disciplines like when any characteristic is made salient that has some stereotype behind it we then try to prove that no, we can do it just as good as the other people can.

Beverly: And one of the things that happens is sometimes in your effort to prove it you try too hard and you make mistakes because you're anxious and nervous, and it inhibits your performance. So one of the things that knowing about this research some researchers decided to try to figure out how to reduce stereotype threat. If you could lower the anxiety you would see a different level of performance. So they created an experiment where they asked a group of students, white students and black students at Stanford, which is obviously a very elite institution and nobody goes to Stanford unless they're really a good student. So you've got this group of talented students, white students and black students at Stanford, and they're all asked to write an essay. And the essay was supposed to be about a favorite professor. And they were told that the essay was going to be perhaps published in a publication celebrating the excellent professors, so it needed to be really a well written essay. So it's clear that we have a high standard. It's going to have to be really good to be accepted.

Beverly: But everybody wrote their essays. And then they turned their essays in to the professor, and they were turned in with a photograph. And the reason they had to turn it in with a photograph was to let the writer know that the professor was going to know their race or ethnicity. So they turn in their essays, and the raters, the people who are grading the essays right comments, and everybody gets criticized. Here's your essay. It's not good enough. Here's what you need to fix. And what they wanted to see was how many of the students would revise and resubmit their essay. Well, they found that more white students revised and resubmitted the essay than the black students did in this typical criticism version.

Beverly: The same experiment was done except in this case the criticism was not here's what's wrong with your essay. The criticism came in a form which we might call … I call it a criticism sandwich or buffered criticism. And what I mean by that is you say something nice at the beginning. I really liked the opening of your essay. Here's what's wrong with it. And now let me say something nice at the end. So the criticism is sort of inserted in the middle, buffered. And in the buffered criticism version more white students revised and resubmitted the essay than the black students did, but in this case more black students revised and resubmitted than in the first version.

Andy: Okay.

Beverly: But in the last version, the wise criticism version, the feedback came in a particular way, and it started by the person giving the feedback saying, "I want to remind you that these essays need to be really good because they're being considered for publication." So I am reminding you that there's a high standard. And now I'm saying, "But I believe you can meet that standard. Therefore, I'm going to give you very detailed criticism about your essay, and I hope you'll put that criticism to use and resubmit because I think your essay has potential." So when the feedback came in that way more black students revised and resubmitted the essay than even the white students did. And what was important about that was in the earlier version a student might think he's just criticizing my essay because he's biased against me. Maybe you don't trust the source of the criticism.

Beverly: But in the last version when the professor says, "I have a high standard, but I believe you can meet it, and I'm giving you all this criticism because I want you to be able to meet my high standard," then it sounds like not you're picking on me but you're investing in me. You're investing your time and effort to make sure that I am doing my best. And that is like, "Whoa, somebody is really appreciating me. Let me try harder for that person." That's wise criticism.

Andy: I just think that's so impactful, and I could see that working for just about anything, that exact little format of reminding people that this is not easy what you're trying to do here, and I wouldn't be taking the time to give you this feedback if I just thought there was no chance. I'm going to tell you this because I really think you've got something, and you've got a shot. And because of that I'm going to really take some time here and give you some really quality feedback. I don't know. I just thought that one was such a cool tidbit, and I think if someone told me that I would listen, and I would probably take their feedback. So the wise criticism is I think something to learn.

Beverly: What it really says if we were just going to summarize it quickly the key messages are this is important, you can do it, I'm not giving up on you. That's the key message that really encourages students, particularly those students who don't get those messages very often, to really lean in and give it their best effort. And it's a message that any educator could give. But sometimes they d