Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Joani: Hi, Andy.

Andy: Hey, thank you so much for being here. I'm really excited.

Joani: I can't wait to talk with you today.

Andy: Okay. So as I was reading your book, I found myself like, "Oh, I got to write that down. Oh, that's great. That is brilliant."

Joani: That makes me so happy.

Andy: Where did you come up with a lot of this stuff, and then what inspired you to write it down and all that?

Joani: So I'm going to be turning 66 on December 7th. So I've been doing this in various forms for many years, starting off as a regular, I've a social work degree, but I was just a regular therapist in schools and I had a private practice, but adolescents was always my favorite age group to deal with them, and I had other, I would see couples from now, now, but kids were really my thing. And I worked in a school. Then I started teaching. Some of the people in my class were middle life people changing careers and they had teenagers. And so when I was teaching human development and when I'd get to the adolescent piece, they would say to me, "Joani, this is helping me so much in my life. You should go out and teach this to parents."

Joani: And it just never occurred to me to do that. So actually, my students, my graduate students, gave me this idea. So one of the courses I taught was adolescent psychology. So I just decided to do adolescent psychology, the parent version. And I started by going to public libraries and doing it for free. And that was about 10 years ago, I started that. And then so I just started this whole model, and then I gradually added more talks. So I have a bunch of these talks. And after I started doing the adolescent psychology one, I decided to start a blog. And then I want to say a couple years into that, I don't know, people kept saying to me, "Your blog should be a book. Your blog should be a book."

Joani: So I really, knowing nothing about publishing, literally took the blog and made it into a book. And I had also self published, another book called, I Get It, Three Magic words for Parents of Teenagers. What I love about it is that I have a short attention span, and I didn't want to write it for someone to have to sit and read through a whole book. It was important to me that people, and I do parent coaching and I coach the same way. It's not therapy. It's not counseling. Parents come to me and say, "I'm having trouble with my, I just found a vape pen." I've had this one, and it's a big one.

Joani: Recently, I had a parent who was talking about how angry her daughter was and they were having a really hostile kind of relationship, and both parents were there. And I said, "Oh, can I see a picture of your daughter?" And I could tell that she had a little bit of a weight problem. And I just said," Oh, she seems like maybe she has a little weight problem," and then she said, "Oh my God, she's five feet tall. She has the hugest breasts. She's so uncomfortable in her body. All she wears is sweatshirts. Kids make fun of her. She used to love sports. Now she can't do sports anymore because she's embarrassed about running." And so they're painting this picture and I'm like, "No, your poor kid. No wonder she's angry all the time." I said, "She's got these huge boobs that are getting in her way." It was the first time in my career I said, "If you have any money, get her breast reduction." That's my best suggestion to you.

Joani: And they were like, "Oh my God, we would never have," it just would not have occurred to them. And they immediately, Christmas vacation, she's getting, she broke down in tears. It was like they got her. And that's what my whole philosophy is about. When your kids feel understood, then they don't need to act out. They don't need to get angry. Anger is fine. Anger is a good thing, but it's more about when you get why they're showing you that behavior, if you can just take a second and not just react to an attitude, to a lie, to avoidance behavior, not doing homework or not getting your college applications in, rather than seeing it as laziness or whatever, just say, "Well, what else might be going on?"

Joani: This girl's dealing with huge amounts of stress. She can't even articulate what they are, but she's angry. And so that freed the parents up then to not react and get into a power struggle with her every time. They can say, "Oh, I get you're having a bad day. I'll give you some time." And so I can do that in session. I don't need 15 sessions.

Andy: I love that. And I think then that's one of the big things that I talk about with parents a lot is like, you can't just launch into something. You have to start with that empathy and making them feel you understand them, and it's not that hard. My brother right now, he just started working at a suicide hotline. So he's been doing the training for months and learning all these techniques and stuff. And he's like, Yo man, it's really improving my relationships so much in my life." And I'm like, "Well, what, what?" And it's just simple stuff like asking them about what's wrong and then saying, "That must be so hard for you." And just figuring out the emotion behind what they're saying and reflecting it back to them, and just some simple statement that just shows that, "I get it, and I understand, and that sounds really, really hard."

Joani: Well, I just have an experience with my student. This semester I'm teaching freshmen Intro to Psych, and it's just chapter after chapter. It's a survey class. I try to make it as interesting as I can, but the textbook is pretty deep to get through, and so I was giving the midterm and a student who is very assertive in class has a number of times complained about the work, even though it's just reading the book and doing some papers. It's not that much. And the night before the midterm, I got a text from her, and I'm giving you what I thought the affect was because I could tell from her, and she literally said, "I want to give you some feedback about your teaching methods."

Joani: And she launched into, "How do you expect us to study for this midterm?" And, "This is too much work." And I got the text, and for the first minute I was like, "You little..." I was like, "Well, this is college. Welcome to the world." There was a part of me that just wanted to write back and say, "Well, you've had half a semester to do the reading and you can take notes in class. There's really not much more I can do about it." And so I got that out of my system. And then I texted her back, "I get you're feeling really overwhelmed. This is a lot of material and I can see that it feels hard for you to plow through it, but I know you take good notes and I'm sure you'll be okay." The text I got back was, "Oh, okay, thanks." That was it. Over. Done.

Joani: And now you can translate that incident to any situation with a parent and teenager where the parent would probably go into, "Well, that's just the way it is," and they would feel attacked. Understandably, I felt attacked. And my first instinct was to get defensive. And I think for parents, that's the first instinct because who they are as a parent is how they identify themselves, and if they aren't doing a good job, they take that very personally. So I was happy for myself that I practiced what I preach, but I also gave me empathy for parents to know how easy it is to just want to go for that visceral reaction rather than taking the breath and trying to say, "Okay, what's really going on here?" And once you do that, you really can de-escalate the situation.

Andy: It's like that classic Abe Lincoln story where he writes the letter and then puts it away for 24 hours before he decides if he's going to send it or not. And it's nice to happen over text messages, but of course it's more difficult if the student is in your face saying, "You're a terrible professor," or whatever, but that is so cool and really effective. And I wonder if you, sometimes you've got to be working with parents where they're getting triggered by their teenager like that. In the moment like that, when that happens and you feel that start to happen, what do you tell parents?

Joani: I actually have a strategy that I call Four Ways Of Fighting, and there's four of the typical kinds of fights you would get into with your teens, and the one you're talking about is The Saying No fight. And so what happens a lot is kids tell their parents, "I'm doing this, I'm buying this. I'm going here." It's because they feel this new sense of power, so they don't feel like they have to ask permission so much anymore.

Joani: It's like, "So and so and so and so are going here, and this is where," and their parents were like, "I don't think so." So there's the strategy when you are feeling in control. Oftentimes, parents are feeling out of control. They've had a bad day. What I say to parents is, "You have a life and you bring that life to the table when your kid brings his life into the room. You might be taking care of an elderly parent, and you've got other kids who have special needs, or your work is incredibly stressful. And so maybe you get hooked into that fight. Now, here's what you can say when you're both in it, you can say, We're both out of control now. We need to take a break."

Joani: So I tell parents, "You share the ownership." It's not just your kid. It's not like, "Just get out of my face. I'm not talking to you when you're yelling at me," and that happens a lot, where parents will then try to put the stops on it by pushing the kid out. And that can sometimes get into a physical altercation because kids are very motivated to stand their ground. At this point, they're not going to back down. Kids are not motivated to stop a fight ever. So it has to be the parent. So the line is, "We're both out of control right now. We need to take a break." And then I say, "Go away. Don't tell your kid to go anywhere. The only person you are in control of in that moment is you. Go take your dog for a walk." Go do a laundry, but don't go in the next room.

Joani: Don't walk into the family room if you've just had this fight in the kitchen, because they'll follow you. Kids are very motivated. They will follow you, and I call them the chasers. They'll just chase you into another room, so you need to give yourself time to quiet yourself and to give them time to quiet themselves. I do this joking thing, but parents have used it and it works where sometimes kids will not respect any boundary and parents have not been great about setting limits. So the kids, especially if there's something they really want, they will follow, if parents have gone into the bedroom and closed the door, for example, kids will just go right in.

Joani: So I say, "Parents, look at them right in the eye and say, honey, in this tone of voice, I'm about to take a shower and I'll be getting naked, and if you want to hang out with me and talk while I'm naked, yeah, we can talk." So that's the end of that conversation. So that's what you use in desperate and desperate situations. Then you go back to your kid, and now you've had a chance to calm down and they've had a chance to calm down, and then what I tell parents is, "Don't start in with your agenda first. Don't say, honey, this is what I've been trying to say." I say, "Don't do that."

Joani: You walk in and say, "Tell me what you'd like me to hear." You give them the opportunity to speak first, and then maybe there's something you can work with now. Maybe they've been texting with their friends and everyone's like, "Oh, my parents won't let me do this either," and they've gone back to the table and they've come up with a new plan that maybe parents can work with, and then the parent might be saying, "You know what? I think we can work with this," or it's a no, or it's a no, but now the parent is in a better position use what I call, I Get It moments. My book is peppered with them and the other book was called, I Get It, is to say, "I get you're frustrated right now. This is not the answer you wanted. You're pissed at me."

Joani: And a little shrug of the shoulders, which is the weight of parents put the period on the end of the sentence so that they don't just keep going and going and going because oftentimes parents will just over explain over, and kids are not listening. They stopped at no. As soon as they have said, no they're done, but if a parent is calm at this point, they can now have empathy. Of course you're frustrated. I say to parents, "What do you think your kid's going to say? When you say, No, you can't do it, they're going to go, Oh, good parenting call. Thanks for keeping me safe."

Andy: "Thanks, mom."

Joani: I said, "No, they're going to be mad." And I think this generation has a very low tolerance for anger. They're frightened by their kids' anger. They have a hard time saying no, because they're frightened by the anger, especially with things like social networking. Rather than setting limits on time, on number of apps on which apps their kids are on, they say, "Oh my God, if I ever tried to do that, my kids would kill me." And it's like, "No, they would yell. Right. And they would get mad," but they have a very low tolerance for their kids' anger. They're scared of it, and I don't know that any other generation has had that I've seen that, because I have a long trajectory of seeing, what parents are like over these years.

Joani: And I think that that social networking has taxed parents in a way that they have never been challenged before, really been challenged. And I think they feel powerless so much of the time now, and I'm not sure that any other generation of parents felt so powerless in the relationship, and there is so much that kids can do and have power from that their parents really have nothing unless they, whatever. For me, it's time and opportunity. That's really the only limit. You're going to give your kid a phone. They're going to be some things that you say no to your kid about that you're in control of, but social networking still allows them to do many things that you'll never find out. Snapchat allows them, any secret app that allows parents to not see what's on their kid's phone, that takes them out of the equation. I think it's scary. I think parents are more scared than I've ever seen.

Andy: It's a lot of control that has been given up, I think, that you used to be able to control information, what they're seeing, when they're getting it, who they're talking to, because they would have to use the phone.

Joani: That's right. You could listen in, or you didn't know what they were doing. When they left the house, they didn't have a phone. So whatever they left with is what they left with.

Andy: Unless they somehow made a different plan ahead of time-

Joani: Which all kids do. All kids do.

Andy: But now you can just walk out the door and say, "Okay, mom, I'm going here," and then text your friends and say, "Actually, I'm going here."

Joani: Which is normal. There's totally the normal range of those kinds of behaviors. I just think the things that kids see as options now, because they can. We were all sneaky, but we couldn't go to great lengths to really hide that much from our parents, and there's a lot of opportunities to be able to do that now, and that's a scary equation.