Midlife Parents Managing the Teenage Buffet of “Big Feelings”…Real Tools!

Lisa Damour  0:03  

Most of how kids learn to navigate the world is by learning to navigate difficulty. And we as parents need to make a distinction between experiences that are uncomfortable for our kids and experiences that are unmanageable for our kids, if we are stepping in and preventing uncomfortable situations or solving them before they arise or solving them for the kid, here is the net effect. The net effect is our kid ends up with very little freedom, and very little autonomy. And the reason for that is, if I am a kid who feels like I cannot handle discomfort, or I need to know everything's going to be okay, before I take it on, what is available to me becomes extremely narrow, I can't do a lot of things, I can't go a lot of places, I can't try stuff this unfamiliar. And my world gets smaller and smaller and smaller. Whereas if, as parents, we can think, okay, it's uncomfortable, not unmanageable. So my job is actually to help my kid build distress tolerance, right, do this thing and actually build coping and build the ability to withstand it. And I have two entire chapters on how to help your kid build with distress tolerance. The gift you give your kid is freedom.

Sarah Milken  1:19  

Hey, peeps, welcome to the flexible neurotic podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Sarah Milken. Yeah, you heard that right. I'm a real PhD doctor. Long, long ago, like last fucking year. I was sitting in the midlife funk wondering, was this it for me? That day, I realized I needed to get off my ass and start my midlife remix. I dusted off my PhD wipe the menopause, sweat off my forehead, grabbed my golden shovel and started digging deep to all my midlife bitches. It's not just love coffee and hormones that get you through your midlife remix. It's action steps. Let's do this. Hi, good peeps. This is the next episode of The flexible neurotic Podcast. I'm Dr. Sarah Milken, the flexible neurotic. Today I have a guest who you will want as your new BFF on speed dial if you have teenagers or you know any. She's a mom of two teen girls, 12 and 19. So she's living at herself. She's recognized as a thought leader by the American Psychological Association. She co hosts the ask Lisa podcast where she dives into all things teenager and psychology and parenting. She writes about adolescents for the New York Times. In her column. She appears as a regular contributor to CBS News and works in collaboration with UNICEF. She's the author of two New York Times bestsellers untangled, guiding teenage girls through seven transitions into adulthood and underpressure confronting the epidemic of stress and anxiety and girls, and the soon to be published the emotional lives of teenagers raising connected, capable and compassionate adolescents. This is the book we're gonna dive into today. She maintains a clinical practice and also speaks to schools and professional organizations and corporate groups around the world. On the topics of child and adolescent development, family, mental health and adult well being. She has her finger on the pulse with all the research and how the research translates into real life into her own practice consulting with schools and their students. She's on the ground. Her name is Dr. Lisa demore. Hi, Lisa. I'm so happy to have you here.

Lisa Damour  3:43  

Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here.

Sarah Milken  3:46  

Oh my gosh, we have so many questions so much to talk about. We're gonna dive in. The intention of this episode is to dive deep with Dr. Lisa and find out why teens act the way they do the workings of their inner worlds and some advice that we can all use on how we can coexist with our teenagers while enduring our own midlife psychological hormonal and physical mayhem as midlife women, right Lisa Yelder you least if you don't mind my I am 52

Lisa Damour  4:16  

So I am right in there with all of the parents of teenagers I am. Ah, you get my way through menopause while also getting kids into college and to have a middle schooler.

Sarah Milken  4:28  

Oh my god, so you know it you know you're laying on the ground. You're in it. You're living it in your house in your practice. You're like teenager crazy dumb. Oh my God. You must be a very special soul. Oh, that's very kind. Yes, because I can barely handle my own two and I have two really good ones.

Lisa Damour  4:46  

I love teenagers and I mostly I wake up every day thinking I can't believe this is my job. I can't believe I get to do this.

Sarah Milken  4:53  

Now that is amazing. In your new book, The emotional lives of teenagers that I was lucky enough to get a galley copy of to prep for this chat, it took me back to grad school as a real nerd diving in, like writing notes in the margins highlighting the whole thing. You talk about how how how powerful emotions are in our personal growth as being adult and being teenagers. And that being having emotions is a feature, not a bug. And this has always been true. But lately in the past decade, there's been this sort of dramatic shift where no one is supposed to feel anything. No one's supposed to be upset. Everyone's supposed to be happy and calm all the time. Tell me what's going on?

Lisa Damour  5:41  

Well, I can't know for sure. But I will say, and I'm sure you saw this. Also, in your work, it feels like this was underway before the pandemic, that one of the questions I raised in the book is whether the wellness industry doesn't have a heavy hand in this kind of marketing, the idea of selling the idea that there is some emotional Zen out there, and you can get there and your kids can get there, and then you can stay there. And I think that that may have set up an unrealistic and actually hugely unhelpful understanding of where emotion fits into our lives, and especially where negative emotions fit into our lives. And so I think that we were underway with this idea that you know, you know, you're mentally healthy, if you feel good, and so you got to try to feel good or not get upset. And then along came the pandemic, and it just rocked our world, you know, really everybody felt horrible for months and months, and months at a time. And I'll tell you, I feel like the aftermath of the pandemic has been an almost heightened sense of, okay, now, let's have nothing disrupt us like, now, when we get jostled, it feels so much worse, because our worlds were rocked. Let's not get jostled at all. And so one of the things I did in this book, is it the first chapter is about myths about emotion, because there's a lot of circulating myths about emotion. And I cover three big ones. One is emotion does not necessarily undermine reasoning, it usually informs our thinking. Another is that it's not bad for your kids to have negative feelings, right, which, that one just to rest on for a minute. I am wonderous, and not at how worried parents are that their kid being upset, is harmful to their child, that that just the act of being upset is harmful. And so I want to reassure parents. No, no, no, in fact, it's often gross giving and useful, even though it's really uncomfortable for your kid and really uncomfortable for you. And then the third myth I tackle is that if a person's very emotional, and especially teenagers who are very emotional, that means that they're fragile, which it usually doesn't. So what I tried in this book, if I if I had one thing I would say that I'm trying to do in the book, I'm trying to bring negative emotions back into the fold, you know that they are welcome. First of all, they're arriving whether we want them or not. But to treat them as not something we need to be scared of as parents, not something we need to actually work to try to prevent or quickly banish, but to understand where all emotions and wildly especially the negative ones, where they fit into our lives where they fit into our kids maturation, and to have a good set of strategies for handling them. So we don't have to be scared when they come along.

Sarah Milken  8:16  

Oh my god, we have to unpack that. There's like 17,000 Good boys in there. And I'm like, Oh, my God, I live that my whole life. I think what's also interesting is that, you know, when I was growing up, and I failed the test or bombed a quiz, I couldn't text my mom. Like we had payphones. And so I think this immediate and 24 hour, access has really changed the way we process information like I would have to sit with that all day, get through my day, go to the rest of my classes, chit chat with my friends or go cry in the library or do whatever I needed to do. Otherwise, I was in the courtyard like putting money in the payphone, trying to call my mom, which never really worked. So I think it's interesting how much social media has created this. I don't know. It's almost like my husband's like, I don't know what he calls it. But it's sort of like, why are you so available all the time? You know, why are the kids texting you about things that are happening throughout the day that would normally be talked about at dinner time? And he has a really good point. Not everything needs to be solved at that very second, what are your thoughts on that?

Lisa Damour  9:32  

Well, I agree completely. And I think about this a lot, you know that growing up as teenagers, we probably always had that. Like I want my mom feeling or I want my dad feeling but we couldn't act on it. And there's nothing wrong with wanting your parent. But one of the things I want to say just to frame my answer and this is a big piece of what I'm trying to work on in this book is kids talking with us or kids talking with us about what has made them upset is once solution to helping them manage upset feelings. It is one of many, many, many possible solutions. And it's often not the best option. And that idea that getting your kid to tell you what's wrong, and then you try to help them with it should be put on equal footing with 20 other options for helping kids feel better, and some may be better. That idea also has sort of disappeared from the culture I what I am taking care of parents all the time, and I am what I'm hearing all the time is like, the solution is my kid is upset. My kid tells me what's wrong, I help my kid with what's wrong. And I don't think I thought about it until you just said it part of what has really fueled that. The primacy of that as a solution is our kids can call us all the time, and then we answer and so. So when you were giving that example of like what we had to do in high school, you actually rattled off all sorts of other things at work, like going to a class and getting distracted. And just taking your mind off for a while going to the library and crying for a little bit. Not a bad solution. Crying is a form of expression that brings relief, talking to your friends about it, finding a way to like crack up about it. Like there's all of these other, I'm going to call them regulatory strategies, right? That's the whole book is about helping kids regulate emotion. But they get shoved to the back by a kids interest in discussing it with the parent. And also our belief as parents like, Oh, this must be the best solution. And so it's one of many it has its place. But we don't want it to become the default for our kids are for us when it's time to regulate an emotion.

Sarah Milken  11:33  

The funniest part is half the time, they don't even want to hear what we have to say. Like you write about this in the book. It's like It's like texting and dumping or texting and ghosting, like, my kid will be like, Oh, my God, such and such happened or I got eight out of 10 on my quiz. And then I'm like, oh, okay, like, how do you feel about that? And then I don't hear from them for the rest of the day. And I'm like, Okay, you just made me feel like shit. You have me worried about you. Your dad has no idea what's happening is totally living his own life. And now you've infiltrated my nervous system, and you're not responding.

Lisa Damour  12:09  

It's true. And this is an age old tactic of being a teenager, the defense we you know, we call it the defensive externalization, which is I have an uncomfortable feeling. And the way I'm managing it has been making you have the uncomfortable feeling. And this works great for teenagers not as comfortable for the parents, though it does help teenagers get through what are big and bumpy days, because being a teenager is just a hard thing. What it used to be, though, is you couldn't externalize till you saw your parents, like running and be like, I failed my test don't want to talk about it. And now I mean, it's like, it's incredible how beautifully designed texting is for a dumping and uncomfortable experience. But I think part of what I want to underscore is usually, the kid who has dumped that on the parent, I think almost like cell phones are almost like trash chutes, you know, they've thrown it down the chute, you've got the trash they want, they don't want the trash back. What we need to reassure ourselves as parents is, we now feel terrible, like you described, that's probably an indication that AAA feels much better. And so whatever else we could think, Okay, I'm doing a service. My day disrupted so they you can get on the rest of your day.

Sarah Milken  13:18  

What's really funny is I actually told my kids, I was like, don't text me unless you have read receipts on. Because if you're infiltrating my day, and I need to tell you something, or I feel like I have something to say I want to know you read it, you may not need to write like, you know, an entire manifesto responding to me, but I want to know, you read it. So at least we've agreed to those terms of like, you dumped your shit on me. I responded, and I know you read it, and they're like, Oh, my God, mom. But no, given,

Lisa Damour  13:51  

let me unpack that, because it's absolutely beautiful. So one of the tensions that comes to mind, as you describe this is, on the one hand, teenagers get to be teenagers, right? It is super hard to be a teenager, they have feelings, you know, coming out of every pore, those feelings are supercharged by the nature of their neurological development. You know, whatever it takes, help them maintain a sense of equilibrium. Like, we got to be on board for that. That's the one side of it. The other side is we actually do want to raise teenagers who are thinking about the impact of their behavior on others, and who are emotionally savvy and who have the capacity to take a beat and think if I send this text to my mom or my dad, what is the ramification for them? They're not always going to think about this. But what I love is, from your description, in a not hot moment, right? Sort of a separate moment, you're like, alright, this has got to be the arrangement, like it cannot just be a straight on top. Like I need to know that you've read my response or could read my response. So you're doing that education and I feel like you found this beautiful compromise to the tension like you're allowed to dump but you also need to be thinking about have, you know the fact that there has to be some level of a two way street to this, you can't just ruin my day.

Sarah Milken  15:05  

Totally. Because my husband's like at work, his his days not getting ruined. And I'm sitting here, like this porous sponge, collecting all of these emotions and feelings. What's funny is my son is 18. He's on the older side of being a senior. So now he's smart enough where he doesn't even dumb shit anymore, because he thinks like, Okay, if I say something, that showing that I'm upset, I'm opening Pandora's box with her, and she's gonna go fucking crazy. And I'm gonna get 96 texts. So I'll just wait till later, my daughter is 16. She hasn't gotten married. She just wants a pump and dump alone. I

Lisa Damour  15:42  

mean, it's pretty funny.

Unknown Speaker  15:44  

Just save that.

Lisa Damour  15:45  

But you know, at the end of the book, you know, there's a section where I talk about me being the one who was about to use my texting to dump on my kids, oh, my God,

Sarah Milken  15:55  

you know, what's funny, I read that. And I was actually going to text my daughter about like, a doctor's appointment or something that would normally annoy her. And I was like, I'm not gonna send that text, we can

Lisa Damour  16:06  

wait, we can wait. And so I think, you know, it's interesting. The it was fun to construct the book, because what I did in the in the organization of it is I actually saved for the very, very end the piece about parents managing their own emotions, which, you know, our listeners know, is actually a major part of helping adolescents manage their emotions. And what I talked about, and I know you're in the college process with one of your kids, it was when I was in the college process with my older daughter. And I had this question that felt like on fire, super important about her applications. And she was at work, she had a great retail job. And it was, in some ways her escape from the college process to go to her job. And I was about to text her with this pretty loaded question about where things stood with a particular aspect of her process. And like, I don't know how it happened, but I managed to stop myself, like I managed to think, okay, like, what's this going to feel like for her, she's standing at her job, she can't do anything about this, was she going to try to write me back, she's going to be taking care of customers. And so as much as we can notice that teenagers sometimes do this to us, we have to own the we do it right back to them, we get an anxiety, we get nervous about something, we get worried about something. We pick up our text, we fire it off, we feel

Sarah Milken  17:23  

totally,

Lisa Damour  17:24  

totally. So this isn't just a teenager thing with the easy ability to be oh my god, what's

Sarah Milken  17:29  

really funny, though, so I made the doctor's appointment for her. And because she told me she was free. But I know she doesn't like to get blood tests. So I was like, I'll just tell her about that later. So then yesterday, she goes, Why didn't you tell me about the doctor's appointment on Wednesday, like, I arranged to like go to Pilates with blah, blah, or whatever. And I'm like, okay, but I was saving myself. Because you're mean sometimes. And I didn't want and she goes, but I need advance notice. And I go, Yeah, but I need to protect myself too. Because I didn't want to be yelled at about the blood test. But I was very honest about no.

Lisa Damour  18:04  

But I can like, this is the beauty of teenagers, right? The beauty of teenagers is that once they get past 14, they have the cognitive capacity to have that conversation where we're gonna talk about my anxiety about how you were going to react to what I needed to tell you. And they can do that they can stand back from themselves, they can stand back from the situation and observe it from lots of sides. You know, I think about like the ages of adolescence, and which ones are so hard. And I talk a lot in the book about 13. And I don't say this in the book, as directly as I'm going to say here. I think 13 For girls, and probably more 14 for boys is so hard, it is uniquely hard. And there's a lot going on. But one element of it is that usually 13 year olds are still pretty concrete, right? They they use concrete operations, as we say. So they cannot do what you were asking your daughter to do. They cannot stand back from themselves consider their place in something spin a situation around, look at it from lots of sides. They really do even highly intelligent, it's, it has nothing to do with how bright they are. They are just not cognitively able to look at things from lots of sides. And so what I hear from parents with 13 year olds, is they get into these really painful impasses where the kids like I need to go to a new school and the parent is like no, no, no, no, no, because like nope, that's the decision I have made it. There's no looking at those from other directions. And so what you're describing is you maximizing the neurological firepower that is suddenly on board once you have a 16 year old, and it's really cool.

Sarah Milken  19:44  

No, my kids are actually like many adults, because I think maybe it's me maybe it's my background. I don't know, but I just expect a lot of them. It's like you expect a lot of me and I expect a lot of you and I don't mean expectations like grades or anything like that. up, but it's like, I give a lot of my day, a lot of my time to getting prescriptions and rereading college things and making sure this happens, like, you have to do your part to, like, this is a team, like I don't work for you, you know, I'm not an Uber driver, I have my own life too. And like you need to think like when you make this was before driving, they both had driver's license. But I would say to my daughter, like, you're making a plan with someone during rush hour who lives on the other side of town? How would you think that impacts me, that's an hour drive each way, that's two hours out of my day. Like, you need to think about that before you make those plants. But

Lisa Damour  20:41  

you didn't like, yell at her. But I think sometimes in those moments that I get it when parents do feel that way, they aren't able to stand back from it enough to say, here's the situation in which we live put us family

Sarah Milken  20:54  

or my six paragraph texts come in. And I use that as one of the strategies in your book that sometimes you can't have the you know, face to face conversation, that drama discussion yesterday with my daughter about the doctor's appointment, and not enough notice. And her Pilates and blah, blah, blah. That was all via text, which works. And then he started getting really like kind of snarky with me. And I was like, I'm done now. So when you're wanting to like comment with me with like, a different attitude, we can like, read talk about this, but I'm like done being like, killed. He's Oh, and she stopped. And then a few minutes later, she texted me about something else. And that leads me to another point that you make in your book is you will two points you say don't take it personally and don't hold a grudge. And that's really hard. It's

Lisa Damour  21:41  

really hard. It's really hard. Okay, so yeah, so that is very much under the heading of, you know, the nature of teenagers is they can be really unpleasant. And then the next minute, they're like, leaning into us in the sweetest of ways. And it can be hard, because you're like, Ah, I'm still upset about what happened five minutes ago. And I'm not saying everywhere and always but I think often what we need to realize is that teenagers do in fact, move from mode to mode pretty quickly. And what happened five minutes ago to them may feel like ancient history. And we can miss out on some really good times with our kids if we're still sore about something. But the other thing I hear in what you're describing there of that interaction with your daughter, the limit, you said, You did something that I couldn't agree with more, I'm just saying like, you know what, we're not doing this, you're not talking to me this way. And one of the things I've observed, and I feel like I've observed it more in recent decades, is teenagers asking to be excused for behavior or parents excusing kids behavior, because there's a big feeling behind it. Like I said, that horrible thing because I was mad. And that that somehow, I think in some situations people the kid feels with the parent feels, well, if you were angry, then we can't touch what you did, right like that. I'm not going to question your feeling. And what I would say and what you did in that interaction is, there's the feeling, and there's how it's expressed. So all feelings are welcome, right? We can't get around, you know, feelings are going to happen. How they get expressed, though, needs to be managed. So your kid can be super mad at you, but they cannot trash you. Your kid can say I'm really angry, or I'm not in a position to talk right now. Because I'm so mad at you. That's completely acceptable. But you can't trash people. You can't hit people. There's all sorts of things you can't do. But I've noticed, and I don't know if you've seen this to where, you know, Oh, I did that. It was because of my anxiety. And there can be the sense of like, so it's off limits to question the behavioral, I

Sarah Milken  23:33  

had three tests tomorrow, and blah, blah. And I'm like, Okay, well, I have a lot of shit going on too. And I'm not yelling down your throat, and I'm not going to hold it against you. But I just want you to know that there is a boundary like, yeah, we might be tight, but I'm not your friend.

Lisa Damour  23:49  

And you can be deeply upset. The issue is not the emotion. The issue is how it's being expressed. Like I'm not taking issue with I'm sure you're very upset about or worried about these upcoming tests. Like that's to be understood how you express that we need to talk that through

Sarah Milken  24:04  

totally, I mean, that's like the story of my life. And I told you, my son, he's 18. So he's like, I'm not touching that show with the 10. He's like, I'm just gonna let the Read Receipt handle it. He's smart enough for that. Okay, so you talk about this example, in the book about, there's a soccer trial coming up and the mom every night is saying to the kid, you got to go work out you have to get conditioned if you want to make the team blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and the dad and comes to you and it's like, my wife's driving my son insane. What are the options here? It's like, we know we don't want we're not as parents, we're not going to be able to handle the emotions of that the kids going to have about not making the team. He's not going to be able to handle it. So you say there's kind of like three options at handling that situation.

Lisa Damour  24:58  

So I'll unfold them all but if you'd like to Just to like, frame it up a little, this is the problem with being middle aged and experienced, we can see stuff coming down the pike. Oh, right.

Sarah Milken  25:07  

You have like a magic fucking ball and you're like, Dude, I

Lisa Damour  25:10  

know, I know, this is gonna be really bad, right? So in that situation, the family, you know, the kid is not getting serious about getting ready for tryouts. And the parents know, this kid really wants to be on the team, and they are holding this, you know, tension of like, he's not getting ready, and he's not doing and he's gonna hit it if he gets cut. And so they're trying to get out in front of it so that he doesn't have the bad outcome. And the reason they didn't want him to have the bad outcome is largely because they love him, but also because they don't want to deal with his big upset feelings when he does have the bad outcome. Because who would want to do that? Right? That's not fun in our homes. And so they're leaning on him leaning on him leaning on. So what I offered by way of guidance, I was like, okay, you've got some options, you know, one is you can keep leaning on this kid and see if that changes things. But one of the things I say a lot in my clinical practice is, what you're doing isn't working. So I don't know that doing more of what you're doing is going to work. Another option is you could just say one more thing, and leave it at that, you could just say, Look, you and I both know, you want to be on this team, you and I both know that showing up for tryouts, you know, in peak condition is going to help you get there. We love you, we want you to have what you want. But we're gonna, we're gonna leave it to you to sort this out. Right? So just, you know, kind of saying Your fight is your last bit on that and then really stepping out. The other is just to let it go. And see if the kid figures it out. Right? See if a kid gets to try how many of us

Sarah Milken  26:37  

really do that least it's so hard, because what it means is that we have actual consequences.

Lisa Damour  26:44  

Absolutely. And the the reality, and this is why I wrote this book is when your kids facing natural consequences. So are you. And the neighbors

Sarah Milken  26:56  

want my daughter to yell at me about the blood test, know exactly what's gonna happen. So of course,

Lisa Damour  27:01  

we're going to try to prevent it. But I think then the thing that in that third, you know, it kind of goes with the second and the third is the kid blows it right? Let's say the kid blows it, like, he just does not get it together to prepare himself for tryouts. And he ends up cut from the team, and he comes home superduper upset, then what the parent needs to be prepared to do is one be very kind and present and validating right not say I told you so or whatever, that doesn't help kids in that moment. And then the other is to maintain an eye, I almost feel like I wish this were like a banner that I could, you know, like put on billboards. And you know, which is our job is to try to maintain a steady presence, right? If we get as upset as our kids are getting, or if we get more upset than our kids are getting, even if we feel that way inside, right, which we may very well, it's actually quite frightening to them. Because think about this kid, let's say he's a 10th grader. And he's 15. So for him getting cut from the team is devastating. But it feels like a 15 year old size problem. If he comes home, and we the parents are as devastated or on the ceiling or beside ourselves about it. To him, he's thinking, oh my gosh, I thought this was like a 15 year old size problem. You mean this is a 52 year old size problem, it actually gets scarier. So the delicate line, we need to walk as parents when our kids are very upset, is to both make ourselves available lovingly, attentively. empathically steady presence, while also not getting there with them, because that doesn't help them either. And if we are very upset, we need to find a way to talk to a friend or a partner or someone else so that we can do the job of serving as a containing function for our kid.

Sarah Milken  28:48  

I also think that making something a 52 year old problem is sort of going in what we were talking about before when you have that kind of midlife experience, like you know the kids aren't going to die from not making the team but and you might be thinking, okay, he didn't make the team, which means he's not going to be able to write that he was on the soccer team for his college application. So he's not going to look like a well rounded kid. And then maybe he doesn't get into the college of his dreams. I mean, it's like this whole domino thing that we kind of play out in our heads. I mean, there might be a nugget of truth in some of it, but most of the time, not.

Lisa Damour  29:26  

Most of the time not. And you know, the thing I so feel for parents and we are very much in this soup ourselves as parents is it doesn't feel like kids have the same kind of margins for error that we used to write. And it's not that it doesn't feel it actually isn't the case that kids have the same kind of margins for error where you could sort of course correct and be like, Oh, actually, I'm not a soccer player. I'm gonna go join the theatre group. And, of course the kid can and should go find some new enterprise write some new exciting thing. But I think especially for families where the kids are engaged in a very competitive application process there doesn't feel like there's room for course corrections or changing, you know, interest midstream, like you kind of have to be really specialized and really good. And I think that that can like you say it creates this whole added pressure. Alright, so how do we, where's the where's the release, release? Release valve? Where's the pressure valve? You know, the college processes behind a huge amount of very amped up anxiety and stress in high school families. And the solution to that not everyone likes, but there is a solution, which is if we say, Okay, what if we stop thinking about the same 20 colleges that everybody talks about? What if we just let go of the idea that our good has to go to I mean, 20, may even be a larger number than people really do circulate in terms of the colleges they focus on? What if we open ourselves to the possibility that a kid won't be a viable applicant for one of those 20 applicant colleges. And in fact, even if they aren't, they still may not get into one of those 20 colleges. And then we start to look at the 1000s of other extraordinary institutions that are in this country. And it's hard, I think, sometimes for people to make that shift. But that actually is the solution to the very, very, very ramped up college anxiety situation, is to say, there are so many cool places where kids get incredible educations, and go on to be incredible people beyond the 20.

Sarah Milken  31:28  

I 100%. agree with you. And I have that conversation with my kids all the time. But it's also really easy for me to say that my husband and myself because we both went to Ivy League schools, so my son's smart responses, it's really easy for you to say that look where you and dad went. It's different now. It's harder. It's this and I agree with him. It's true. It is much harder than it used to be. I don't think I would have gone to college.

Lisa Damour  31:58  

So interestingly, my husband and I both went to Ivy League schools. And so one of the things I said to my daughter, I went to you and I was like, Okay, number one, I would never get it today. Like let me be clear, ever. And then I said to her, you're way better than I ever was. If you want to apply, feel free to apply, but go down the street, buy yourself a lottery ticket while you're at it, and hauled away. Okay. Then the other thing I said, and I think teenagers need to hear these two things. Another thing I said is, you know, getting into one of these schools isn't a ticket. I know people from my class couple are in jail for embezzling couple are dead from substance misuse. I mean that there's no magic living in their parents basement. There's nothing about these institutions that makes your life good because you went to that institution. The most useful thing though, that I have found, and I kind of stumbled on this by accident. It's one of those things like I say tons of stuff to teenagers that I'm sometimes I'm surprised. I'm like, oh, that seems to have landed, I didn't think that would matter to you so much. So one of the things that they don't know is that after about age 25, or 26, no one knows where you went to college. And

Sarah Milken  33:05  

my dad says, My dad goes, I'm a dentist, I went to Brooklyn College and Temple University and no one's ever out. He knows

Lisa Damour  33:13  

no one knows. And I remember being in graduate school and having a dear friend Katherine, she wasn't in my program, because we would have come into the program together, she was in another program. And she was like, I was with her all the time. And one day, I thought, I have no idea where Katherine went to college, because it doesn't matter anymore. Like it's completely disappeared. And so if you say to high schoolers, especially high school seniors, I promise you, once you get to 25, or 26, this goes away unless you are bringing it up. That is stunning information to them. Because from where they sit. The view is where I get into college is somehow like tattooed somewhere on me and people will know forever. And so it's either a point of pride or a point of shame, or somewhere in between. And that piece of information, which adults can readily confirm like that, you can start naming your very dear friends and you have no idea where they went to college is a great gift to teenagers.

Sarah Milken  34:06  

I know. But I think sometimes they don't actually believe it until they live it or until they see it. Or there's kids who go to these top colleges and hate them. And we hear about those two, because they went to colleges that you know that book, excellent sheep. It's like you have this dream of going to the school of going to the school and you get there and you're kind of like wait, this is what I gave up my entire high school experience for this is not what I signed up for. So I think the whole thing is fascinating. And I also think it kind of leads into this whole other area that I enjoyed in your book that was talking about the differences between pain, emotional discomfort and trauma. Because I feel like everything is deemed traumatic at this point. Will you tell us like really what is trauma? Add it like when do we have to get help for our kids?

Lisa Damour  35:04  

So you can get help for your kid short of trauma. But I think it is really useful. And I get pretty wonky, you know, at this point in the book where I get very technical about how psychologists talk about what trauma is. So, you're right, like this is very much a word that gets widely applied in ways that psychologists, you know, that we don't feel is accurate. And that's fine. Like, I'm not gonna police people's language, they can you know, it's a word in the world. But when psychologists say trauma, what we mean is that a person went through an experience that outmatched their coping ability. So we can't actually and this is how technical again, in the book, we can actually say that any particular event is traumatic, because it's not the event itself, it's the impact on the individual. So the example I give in the book is like, say, two boys go for go for a hike and get lost in the woods. And they're lost overnight, it could easily happen that one of those boys comes back very upset, like it was awful, and the other boy comes back traumatized. So it's not like it's okay. You know, it's not like, there's trauma or nothing, the kid who is very upset, for some reason or another, and we have lots of ideas about why people have various abilities to cope with difficulty, he got upset, but he was able to cope with it, he was able to soothe himself enough or he was able to distract himself enough, or he was able to comfort himself enough that he got through it without feeling shattered by the experience. Whereas the kid who comes back traumatized something was, you know, the nature of his endowment or something about him, or the experience, maybe mapping on to past experience, he felt shattered by it. And the analogy I use in the book is, it's a difference between a surge of water that tests a dam that holds right so the first kids coping held that water at bay versus a surge of water that tests the dam and the dam bursts. And so what we want to be mindful of, is situations we don't like for our kids to be distressed. But actually, our kids can handle usually quite a bit of distress and learn to cope with it and even grow through that. But we don't like trauma. And the reason that comes up in the book is that I am really trying to make the case that most of the time, it does not harm your kid to be distressed. The exception being if that distress is happening at such a scale, that it causes trauma. And trauma does harm people, it makes neurological changes, it can have lasting effects. It also is something people can come back from right we know that we are great at treating it, we understand it much better than we used to. But there is a critical distinction between upsetting and traumatic in terms of its impact on the individual and how anxious we as parents need to be about our kids experiencing distress. I think it's

Sarah Milken  37:48  

amazingly important to really see that difference because like as a mom, like when I would get those letters from sleepaway camp, right, or I'd have like my call that's once every two weeks or whatever, I would be like at a level 10. As soon as I heard something negative and my husband's like, what's wrong with you? He said the kid was mean, he didn't say the kid was like terrorizing him. But I think as a parent, it's very hard to turn off that all red flag button or all the emergency button, especially I think, as a mom, because you hear somebody's being mean to your kid or your kid doesn't feel comfortable. And your immediate response is, let me save them.

Lisa Damour  38:31  

Yeah, absolutely. We're wired for that. Right? We're wired to protect our kids. And there's value in that, if there's real danger of foot. The challenge. And the difficulty, and I'm hearing this from educators everywhere, is that most of how kids learn to navigate the world is by learning to navigate difficulty. And we as parents need to make the distinction between experiences that are uncomfortable for our kids and experiences that are unmanageable for our kids, if we are stepping in and preventing uncomfortable situations, or solving them before they arise or solving them for the kid, here is the net effect. The net effect is our kid ends up with very little freedom, and very little autonomy. And the reason for that is if I am a kid who feels like I cannot handle discomfort, or I need to know everything's going to be okay before I take it on. What is available to me becomes extremely narrow, I can't do a lot of things. I can't go a lot of places, I can't try stuff that's unfamiliar. And my world gets smaller and smaller and smaller. Whereas if as parents we can think okay, it's uncomfortable, not unmanageable. So my job is actually to help my kid build distress tolerance, right, do this thing and actually build coping and build the ability to withstand it and I have two entire chapters on how to help your kid build with distress tolerance. The gift you give your kid is freedom that They're like, I'm gonna go to this place I've never been before and it might be lousy. And I'm just gonna take that chance because I can tolerate lousy, right? Like that's, that's really the gift we want to give our kids. So I say that by way of saying, when we're trying to get our kids out of uncomfortable situations, it's a loving gesture, it is a well meaning gesture. And what I just want to help, like kind of just spin out a few more steps is, it's a well meaning gesture with unintended consequences. And so what's the other well meaning gesture that we could use in that moment instead? And that is really, can my kid handle it? Or can my kid handle it with my help? And if they can, then my well meaning gesture is to confer the capacity for tolerance, tolerating distress, which comes with a great deal of freedom down the line.

Sarah Milken  40:45  

I couldn't agree more. I mean, I know like speaking of like my daughter this summer, when she was away in New York for the summer program, you know, there were a couple of days where she was like, Oh, like this, or oh, that and like, she was really upset. Yeah. And I said to her look, nothing is forever. If you tell me that you have to come home, that you're just gonna die there. I will buy you a ticket tomorrow, I will get you home. And as soon as I said that, I know, it sounds like I'm rescuing her. But as soon as I said that, because I know her so well, that if you give her that sort of emotional freedom and security all at the same time, that she's gonna rise to the occasion, and not be the kid who flew home, and she never came home. But sometimes knowing that someone's there to help you, and you have this secure place at home, and you just feel accounted for, I think

Lisa Damour  41:45  

is so often the case with teenagers, and you did this so well. And your interaction with her is they both need to be taken very seriously in the moment. And they also need somebody to push pause on it. And so saying to her, I can get you a ticket for tomorrow. If that's something like Let's talk tomorrow, and if you need a ticket, I'll get you a ticket. I will tell you for most of the my work with teenagers, 24 hours, like they don't remember what it was that they were upset about. And so it's that moment, or you don't say, oh, tomorrow, you won't even think about this. You say okay, I hear how upset you are. Let's talk tomorrow and see where you're at. And if tomorrow you are here, we will I'm willing to act. For most kids say that threads the needle perfectly. You're both taking me seriously. And you're not actually sleeping in a rescuing me yet.

Sarah Milken  42:28  

Totally. And I feel I feel like for some reason that has worked with both my kids, my husband, I have to say, I don't know if this is just a male female thing. He doesn't have the capacity for that. Not that he's not smart enough. He's brilliant, and he's gonna hate me for saying this. But he's more like, fucking deal with it. And I'm like, okay, but no, I'm a female. And I know what it feels like to not feel heard and just want someone to give you even if that virtual hug. So I'm the mom who's like, I'll give you a hug. I'll tell you, I hear you. I'll tell you that. I'll buy you a plane flight tomorrow. And I find that that usually shuts it down pretty quickly. But he's like, compartmentalize or like, what's the problem? We're gonna move through this, let's go, you know, it's just kind of funny. I remember,

Lisa Damour  43:16  

I don't remember what the topic was, it was something that it was around the college process. And the four of us were sitting at dinner, and I think it was it was my college aged daughter, but she's an applicant expressed some just real frustration and anxiety and distress about the process, which you know, is kind of a constant for the whole of it. And my husband, sweetest, wonderful, brilliant guy, he's like, you'll be fine.

Sarah Milken  43:38  

That's my husband's favorite phrase. I'm like, fuck does that mean, and that has no relevance here.

Lisa Damour  43:45  

So my daughter, who usually I try not to practice in the house, she just looks at me. And I say to my husband, hold my beer. I'm like, Oh, honey, I know it. I know. You know, and I just, and it's like, it was just hilarious, right? It was just very, you know, kind of, you know, in our roles. But it was it was very funny moment of just seeing, like, you know, we all react in our

Sarah Milken  44:09  

ways, totally. And it reminds you of the part in the book where you talk about how we should always take open invitations to talk to teenagers. And I'm the queen of that, like, I could like, be running on a treadmill. And my son calls to talk to me about something and he very rarely will like call me initiate a call, like the treadmill stopped and my husband's like, why did you interrupt your workout? I'm like, because he needed to talk to me. And it's not about spoiling him. But it's about that. There are certain moments when there is an opening and an invitation to talk or like you talk about like my daughter will come into our room at 11 o'clock at night and have diarrhea of the mouth and he's telling us every single thing that's ever happened in the course of her life, and my husband rolls over and goes to sleep and my eyelids are like with two toothpicks. I'm like trying to hold the mop. And he's like, mirror. And can we talk about that tomorrow? And I'm like kicking him like, No, we're talking about this right now, obviously, there are limits. Yes. It's not that often. It's not that often. But here's here's what I will tell you that I feel really just incredibly grateful for. So I'm someone who like has a to do list loves getting it done moves through things, I

Lisa Damour  45:20  

love things highly organized, I love my space, just so. And I started practicing before I had kids. And I really my practice was caring for teenagers and their families. And so even before I had my first child, I was hearing from families like, oh my gosh, this goes so fast. Like I can't believe she's already, you know, a senior, I can't believe how quickly it went. And for me, personally, as a parent, this was a huge gift. Because here I am, then I become a mom, myself. And there's all of the intrusions and frustrations and bluntly annoyances of being a parent, right? Their shoes are everywhere. They want baseball

Sarah Milken  45:59  

pants dirty,

Lisa Damour  46:01  

right? Like all of what they are exactly. You know, and then they want to talk when like, you don't want to talk, and then you know, you're hungry, but they're hungry, too. So you feed them. Firstly, I mean, there's all of these things that are just taxing, right? They're just taxing to us as parents. And I will tell you, I know myself, if I had not been doing the work of having parents say to me, this goes so fast, this goes so fast. If I just been in another job, we're just never came up, I would have been very controlling about this, I would have been like, why are your shoes here, you gotta move your shoes, don't put your shoes there. And I'll let you know that I would have been really, really rigid. And for me, my refrain has always been, this is really a short term, opportunity slash problem, right? That my kid wants to talk to me when I'm busy that my kid wants to leave their shoes. And for the shoes thing, I'm like, that's gonna solve itself, right? I mean, it's not like they're everywhere, but they're, we're not where I want them. And like, that's gonna solve itself. And I would rather not be the nagging parent about that, and just enjoy them knowing that that's going to solve itself. And so I think, you know, especially when we're so worried about teenagers, and especially in the wake of the pandemic, when teenagers have had such a number dawn on them. And here we are trying to think about what can we do? What can we do? What can we do? Okay, well, what's good for teenagers is actually strong relationships with adults, you know, ideally, their parents, but adults somewhere, and where did those strong relationships come from being ready to interact on their terms. And so, now more than ever, I think we need to weigh the fact that it is often frustrating for us, it's often inconvenient for us, we may be very tired against the fact that, like you say, if your kid doesn't often want to talk, and that's when he wants to talk. And you really are saying that your commitment is to try to support your kid and support their psychological health over time, making ourselves available is a pretty short term thing to have to do for a huge long term benefit outcome.

Sarah Milken  47:54  

I agree. And I tell my husband that all the time, but he, my husband just does it differently. Like he likes to have, like the time in the jacuzzi with my son where nobody has a phone, and they you know, talk about sports. And then my son starts weaving in, you know, personal things. So they just have like, a different way of doing it. Mine is just a little bit more like you say in your book, like, I get in there traffic patterns. You know, it's like, there's no way they're avoiding me. You know, they know, they're like, Oh, my God, she's gonna be there. But I also think that brings up another point in your book that you talk about how we think as teenagers that they don't want us there. We think as teenagers that, you know, we're annoying to them and all of those things. But you say that, like the research does show that teenagers do want our presence, they may not want to be talking to us, but they do want our presence. And they do want boundaries. And they don't want to just be left to their own devices, even with all they're having. And hi. Yeah,

Lisa Damour  48:58  

so I'll tell you how I started to like be clued into this. And this is I think, the benefit of taking care of many, many teenagers over many, many years. Because then what happens is something that seems like very strange and unexpected that a teenager says, then if three years later, a different teenager says it and then another four years of like, okay, there's something to this, like it's rare, but there's it's a pattern. And the pattern that emerged in my clinical work is that I would be caring for a teenager who, for all intents and purposes was incredibly self sufficient, you know, just very, very capable, very, very mature, very able, and the teenager would complain to me that his or her parents weren't around enough like that their parents were actually kind of you know, absent or otherwise preoccupied often, you know, there was an issue or just didn't feel like the teenager one of their companies, so they were out doing their own thing. And initially, I was just sort of surprised by the complaint like thinking like really like you think teenagers would love it if you have them on devices. But then the other thing and I was sad would do this, you know, kind of share their concern like their wish that their parent was around more I would find myself think think, okay, but I'm like 100% sure that if they are around, you're ignoring them. Right that you are not actually making it a time of high interaction. And it really became clear to me like, they want our study presence I refer to I wrote a piece of art referred to it as potted plant parenting like, you there, they want to know where you are. They want your persons, here's what they don't want. They don't want your agenda. And I think that that's something that is so true for teenagers is it so often when they're interacting with adults, whether it's a teacher or a coach, or a counselor or whatever, they're dealing with the adults agenda, the adult comes into that with an agenda and the teenager because they're teenagers kind of has to bend to the adults agenda. And then they walk in the door and we're like, how are you doing on your homework? What is going on? Tell me about this. Tell me. Like, now you got your agenda. So I think we talked about study presents, when a kid is upset. I would also say agenda list presents, like the gifts we can give our kids, you know, study presents and agenda.

Sarah Milken  51:01  

Oh, my kids are like, can you guys leave the fucking house? Like their friends are like your parents are always home. And it's not like I'm watching them. I just it's like, we just happen to be home bodies. And we're gonna be here. So you could walk around us, you can pick a different space, you know, do all the things. But the beauty of that is that we get to spend a lot of time picking the friends brains. Yeah. Because the friends are more open to talk to, to other people's parents than their own. Like people saw me like, Oh, my God, Jake is so chatty. I'm like, really? You know what I mean? I'm like, wow, he hasn't spoken to me in two weeks. Okay. But it's just funny how when you're in other people's houses, you get you get, like a different sense of the kit. You know, because you're not gonna say to someone else's Mom, can you not ask me those annoying questions?

Lisa Damour  51:52  

Right? No, it's um, I gotta tell you. It's nothing makes me happier though. My kids friends come over, because like, I'm obsessed with teenagers anyway. And then Oh, my God, like, you know, like,

Sarah Milken  52:03  

Oh, my friends know that. They're like getting into in depth kitchen conversation. Oh, so you might find that

Lisa Damour  52:10  

my kids are like, Oh, run right upstairs.

Sarah Milken  52:13  

My kids leave the room and leave me with their friends. And they're like, come find me when you're done. Like, I can't deal with that. But I love I love it. And like you said, it's such a limited timeframe that like, I'm soaking it up, like minute by minute. I'm like, Oh, my God senior year. Okay, wait, I want to get to something before I forget, because it is one of the main premises of your book, and we sort of touched on it. But you talk about this idea. Like school is stressful for most kids in some capacity, whether it's socially, academically, all the things, and but there are good aspects of stress, like stress makes the world move. So why is stress good for our kids? And what kind of stress Yeah,

Lisa Damour  53:00  

so just to widen the lens for a minute, just as we you know, where we started, like, whereas we as a culture got became very uneasy with negative emotions. I would say even before that, we became very uneasy with stress, you know, that stress, got a bad reputation, people came to talk about it, like you want to avoid stress, it's bad for you the term toxic stress, you know, which and there is such a thing as toxic stress, but not all stress is toxic, right. But it they sort of became acquainted. And, you know, and I know that like from the psychology side, we're like, oh, no, like stress, like, that's not how we see it, right. And there are a couple of things that we've always known as long as we've studied stress. So one is, you cannot get around, that stress is going to happen under any condition where there is change. You know, the people listening to us, our parents, right? We all remember what it was like the first time you became a parent, it's like the most stressful thing in the world, when a child comes into your home for the first time. It's fun to eat, it's wonderful. It's a great thing. It's hugely stressful, because it's so much change. And with change comes the demand for adaptation and adaptation is stressful. So the first thing we know about stress is like it's a done deal. Like don't spend your days trying to figure out how to get away from stress. Like, that's not gonna work. Because

Sarah Milken  54:15  

everyone's like, if you're stressed, it leads to inflammation and this and that. I'm like, I know. But I have two teenagers, I'm trying to do this podcast, that's not realistic like being are there moments when you can have breaks in these sort of Zen relief spots? Yes, of course. But life in itself is stressful, you're in traffic, you're going to the market, somebody bumps into you. I mean,

Lisa Damour  54:39  

you can't get around it. And most of the time, it's actually growth given. So, you know, having kids right has built out your capacity, my capacity in ways that just it wasn't available to us before. Now we can handle a whole lot of things that we probably couldn't have handled before. And the metaphor that actually works extremely well. Is to wait weightlifting, that when you want to gain muscle, you go to the gym, you pick up weights that are literally stressful, like they actually feel bad. That's how you know you're lifting the right amount

Sarah Milken  55:08  

of weight to failure. And you're like collapsing, yeah.

Lisa Damour  55:11  

And hopefully not injuring yourself, but like, you go out of your way to work at the limit that is going to cause you to require adaptation, right? Like you're doing that. Now, that's one part of weight training. The other part of weight training is resting and recovering. So those muscles can actually consolidate all of that strength. So, yes, we have kids, yes, we have podcasts, yes, we have very busy lives, that can at times be quite stressful. That is not a problem. It's only a problem if we don't have a capacity to rest and recover. So when stress does become toxic, you know, this, I'm just gonna articulate this, there's only two conditions where psychologists see Stress is toxic. One is chronic stress, which is the stress without the recovery, just nonstop stress. And the other, which we've talked about is trauma, where stress is at such a scale, that it outmatches coping, everything short of trauma, and chronic stress is life, and often growth giving life. And what's beautiful, is when we tweak our understanding of stress and help our kids tweak their understanding of stress, you actually are less stressed by stressful experiences. Because if you have a big test, and you're feeling really stressed about it, and you believe that stress is bad for you, then you become stressed about the fact that you're stressed. Whereas if you have a big test, and you're feeling really stressed about it, and you understand that you are gaining capacity by going through this stressful experience, is still stressful, but it actually has a less a reduced physiological impact, because you're like, This is hard. And it has a payoff in the same way that lifting a heavyweight is hard. And yet we are pretty impassive are comfortable even in the face of it, because we know why we're doing it and that it has a payoff.

Sarah Milken  57:00  

But what if you study your ass off for that test and you fail?

Lisa Damour  57:03  

That stinks, right? So that happens, and then you may be very upset. And if you're a teenager, you may have a very hard time maintaining a sense of perspective about it. And then what we're going to watch, okay, first off, if you study really hard for a test, and you fail, and you're very upset, that is enormously painful for you and painful for anyone who loves you. It is also evidence of your mental health. And what I mean by that is mental health is not that you feel good is that your feelings make sense, given the context you're in. So if you feel the test you started really hard for and you're upset. Check that box, you're having the right reaction, where we want to put our attention is what happens next? How does the kid cope with that distress? So do they cope by crying a little and feeling some relief or going for a run and feeling some relief or going in the room and playing their angry playlist and then feeling some relief? All of these are wonderful ways of coping that do not have a price tag attached to them? Or do they cope by smoking a bunch of weed or being a real jerk to that teacher, or, you know, bothering all their friends to see who else failed and making them feel bad, you know, like all of these things, which are also coping, but come with a price tag. So the job for us as adults in this is not to think, oh my gosh, my kids distressed Oh, no. Right? Your kid's going to be distressed. You cannot get around this. The job for us as adults is okay. My kids are distressed. How's the coping going? Are we going down the adaptive does no harm are we going down the gives them relief but does do harm road. That's the distinction we want to pay attention to not the presence or absence of a kid being upset.

Sarah Milken  58:48  

One of the things that you just touched on, which I think is one of the big takeaways of your book, at least for me was does this feeling make sense for what happened? And if it does make sense, it's typically not going to be a life or death situation. It's like, yes, this makes sense. I can file that in the this is par for the course I get dumped by my girlfriend or my boyfriend, I'm upset. That feeling makes sense.

Lisa Damour  59:18  

Absolutely. And I think it really it goes again, under the heading of distress is an important part of being a human being. And if you get dumped by someone, and you feel nothing, and you were into that relationship, and that was important to you, something's wrong, right? You're supposed to be in pain. And we don't love for our kids to be in pain. Like of course we hate for our kids to be in pain. But it's through those experiences so long as it doesn't reach, you know, the level of trauma that they then you know, discover who their real friends are or they you know, figure out how to like Sue themselves in ways they didn't know they could that they realize it can actually withstand quite a bit more than they thought they could. That there is growth in the context of distress. And in fact, I would even argue, that's when we grow. Like when everything's awesome. We're not growing a whole lot. And I like for things to be awesome. But if we're really on the side of maturation and development, our kids are gonna have to go through some things.

Sarah Milken  1:00:15  

It makes me think of like, okay, that person peaked in high school did not what I mean, is like, I have a friend, for example, and she has a son who went to school with all these kids for all these years, and then went on to the next school. And those same friends sort of kind of decided to move on with other friendships. My friend's kid, he had never had that experience before. He'd always been part of this pack, and never been on the outside of the pack. So being on the outside of the pack, starting in like ninth grade was like, Whoa, I've never had this experience before, where when she was talking to me about it, I was like, Oh, my God, my son, like, had so many of those experiences in elementary school. So then when he went on to middle school, he knew that like when something shitty happened, or a friend was rude, or whatever, like he wasn't going to die. And it doesn't make it better. It's just that experience of having experienced before and been okay. Yep. Yep, Tim, in middle school, when he went to a new school and didn't 100% and feel like he was like, fully included all the time. He's like, Okay, I go to school, I have these few friends, I go home, and I'm okay. And you know, you know, cut to six months later, he has a million friends and is happy and blah, blah, blah. But that doesn't mean he doesn't have shitty days, or a friend didn't betray Him or my daughter or whoever. But they've had those experiences before. So what you're saying also is like, if you've never had those experiences, like being dumped, or whatever, and you're dumped in college for the first time, that's like, Whoa,

Lisa Damour  1:01:55  

yeah, that I mean, it's, you're gonna have to learn this somewhere along the way, right? That you can go through something really painful and come out the other side of it. And we don't want to keep our kids feeling like they can manage very painful and intense experiences, and especially when there's so much we can do to support them through it without trying to prevent the distress.

Sarah Milken  1:02:15  

What about stress and perfectionism with girls? I mean, oh, my God, I mean, I have one. I am one. So I know what it feels like to be that over study, or to be the kid who could write the test, you know, because I've studied so much. So what do you say to those parents with those girls? who are studying and re studying and writing the paper and editing? Like, it just? It seems like it doesn't stop?

Lisa Damour  1:02:47  

Yeah. So this is something actually I spent quite a bit of time on this in a book I wrote that published in 2019, called under pressure, that stress and anxiety and girls, and, you know, the importance of helping girls start to be tactical about school and to make broad gender generalizations. Boys, as a group tend to be more efficient at school, you know, they will do what needs to be done and not much more, which makes their parents bananas, but it's also actually pretty good for them, especially on

Sarah Milken  1:03:14  

is like a master of like, path of least resistance. Yeah, my shit does not stress about it.

Lisa Damour  1:03:22  

Yeah, and it doesn't have to be polished to a high shine, you know, except for occasionally it does. And then you do it that, whereas girls, as a group, are inefficient, that they overwork, they do more than needs to be done, and they're anxious about doing any less. So one approach is to just talk with him about tactics in this book, the way I walked up to this question actually had to do with a broader metaphor that I introduce, about how we should think and talk about school with kids. And the metaphor I introduce is that we need to remember the school is like a buffet, where kids are required to eat everything. And it really like it's such a simple metaphor that like I think really neutralizes a lot of very painful stuff. Because we make kids feel bad if they don't like a particular subject, we make kids feel bad if they don't want to do particular work. Yet, you and I, like I only eat my favorite subject anymore. I haven't touched certain things for decades and talk

Sarah Milken  1:04:19  

to shitty people that you don't want to talk to. To do it

Lisa Damour  1:04:23  

all the kids had to do it all. And so I spend most of that section using that metaphor to talk about kids where motivation is low, right? Where they're struggling to stay motivated, and how this metaphor can actually neutralize those conversations about the fact that like, Yeah, well, they don't love broccoli, they don't love whatever it is, but like, they still gotta eat some because they're a sophomore, right, and the ways in which it can help. But I also do think that you can extend that metaphor to kids who are compulsively feeling like the best students eat at all and eat as much as can be consumed. And that this is somehow gratifying. And the problem is, it often is gratifying to you know, there are two Teachers who are like, you know, my stuff is the best. And the more you eat of it, the happier I am. And kids pick that up. And it's not all teachers by any means. But there's certainly some. And so one of the ways that we can actually talk about it with kids who are overdoing it, is to say, you know, listen, if you love math, and you want as many helpings of that as you can get, like, go for it, like, you know, knock yourself out. But if you know, social studies isn't your favorite, why don't you consume as much as you have to, to get the mastery or the grade you want or both. But don't overdo it. Like, you're you don't have to clean your plate in every class. And really giving kids permission to think about where their appetite is, where their tastes, or where their leanings are also, recognizing those will change over time, you know, that they shouldn't cut things out. But it's a way to say, you know, you don't have to like it all. You certainly don't have to pretend to like it all. Because I think sometimes we ask that have kids, and you actually don't even have to eat at all. If you don't like at all. Just eat as much as you have to. And leave it at that.

Sarah Milken  1:06:04  

And what about there's an example in the book, you talk about this dad who's like, Dr. Lee, sigh have this hard driving Junior, she's going at the schoolwork all the time, and two to three days a week. She's having kind of a, quote, mental breakdown, and she's hysterical. And he asks you, is she depressed? And you're and you say, Okay, these are the questions you have to ask yourself. Number one, is she sleeping and eating normally? Number two, does she still enjoy watching her favorite TV shows and hanging out with her friends? Three, is there a legitimate reason for her being in tears? She got a bad grade, or she did six hours of homework? Is she irritable? Because you say that a more common symptom and depression for teens is irritability more than it is for adults. And then what does he say to you? And how do you respond?

Lisa Damour  1:06:58  

His answers are very reassuring, you know, when she's upset, there's a reason, right? And then one of the ways we make a distinction between like sadness, and depression isn't sadness, you're sad about something and depression, you're sad about everything, right. And so you know, it's very much tied to actual things that have occurred in the moment. It is not interfering with your ability to sleep or eat, you know, it's not changing it. There's no loss of pleasure and other things. You know, one of the things we worry about in depression is when a person reports that they not only does everything don't feel bad, the things that they used to do, they felt good, though even those don't feel good, right? That that is a very, you know, for me a very big red flag and one of the diagnostic criteria for depression. We look for other things, and I didn't do the full rundown, but concentration and you know, whether there's aspects at all your responses were largely assuring. And what I said to him is, like, you know, like, being a teenager, comes with like, really intense ups and downs. Like that's actually the nature of adolescent emotionality is that they're all over the map. And well, I want to see as a sign of typical and healthy development is the kids all over the map. But I don't like to see is a kid is down and stays down. Right? That that's very concerning, or is irritable and stays really irritable. And he also it was so sweet. I such a vivid memory, this conversation, when I said, is she irritable, you know, because that's really a cardinal symptom.

Sarah Milken  1:08:14  

Why did she not irritable?

Lisa Damour  1:08:16  

No, he said, he said he was so sweet. He's off. And and he said, No more irritable than I remember being as a teenager. And I just I was like, I just thought it was such a loving, and also fair in a response. But I think what is scary, and this came up in this in this vignette that I shared, that she would occasionally say, and teenagers do this, things are really scared, like, I don't want to be here anymore, you know, things like that. And teenagers do that. And especially with our, you know, very heightened awareness of suicide among adolescents, when they do stuff like that. It's never been comfortable, but it's, I think, scarier now than it ever was. And so I said to him, you can ask, right, and you should ask. So if your kid says, I don't want to be here anymore, you know, something, or even more direct, like I could kill myself or whatever. Parents should just say, Okay, I heard what you said, Now, is this something you're really thinking about? Or are you letting me know how upset you are? And most times teenagers will say, Oh, no, I'm not thinking about hurting myself really, or taking my life? I'm just super upset. Okay, then you go have that conversation about. And I give more detailed language in the book about how to really chase this conversation down. And what I want to say here is, parents worry that if they asked about it, they're going to make it more true. And what I want people to know from the research, and we have good research on this, asking a teenager who was not suicidal if they are thinking about harming themselves or to ending their lives, does not make them more likely to do so. Asking the teenager who is thinking about suicide actually comes to them as a great relief. If you have reason to be worried about this, and I want to come back to that. You can ask and the reason I say if you have reason is sometimes it's hard to know And there's so many headlines that have parents very, very scared that I did have one teenage girl share with me. And I just I felt so I felt for both her and her mom so deeply in this interaction, where she said, Gosh, you know, if I tell my mom anything I'm upset about at the end of the conversation, she says, You're not gonna kill yourself, are you? And I thought, Oh, I feel for the kid because kids like no, I mean, I was just trying to tell you about my day. But I also feel for the parent because like, with the headlines making adolescent suicide feel so you know, prevalent and frightening, I get it, I get it. So the way to do it, if you're like, I'm not sure. I don't want to be the parent who's like, seems to be bringing it up in this way that makes no sense. The way to consider doing it is to say to your kid, if your kid scares you, right, either just their mood is really rocky or something. Just you've got this worry on your mind. Go ahead and say something like, Okay, this may seem super out of the blue, and I hope you don't mind me asking. But I just something about the way you're talking something about the ways that I just need to ask like, are you thinking about hurting yourself or ending your life? And make room for the kid to be like, no, what, where's it coming from? And honor that that may seem like a very strange or unexpected question. But you can ask, you can ask.

Sarah Milken  1:11:13  

I mean, but is the kid most of the time? I mean, going to say yes, if it is, in fact the case.

Lisa Damour  1:11:20  

So here's what I can say. Either the kid will say, No, no, no, no, like a truly reassuring like, oh, no, no, you know, I'm fine. Like, and they will mean it and the parent will know it, and there'll be no reason to worry. Sometimes it'll be like, I don't know. I don't know. Right? And leave it in this kind of a place. At which point you say, Okay, great. We're calling your pediatrician. Or we're going to the ER, like, we don't do the, you know, we'll just see how see you Oh, wait, we're not gonna wait and see. Sometimes kids will say, yeah, no, I am thinking about it. It was point again, you are going to your pediatrician, you're calling or going to the ER, is there a version of the story? And this is the hardest thing to talk about? Where a kid entirely hides this? Yeah, that happens. It's exceedingly rare. But it happened. And what I want parents to know, though, is that when kids are suicidal, overwhelmingly, that occurs in the context of feeling very depressed, or having a substance problem, or having another psychiatric concern. I don't want parents to feel like this is just this alarming. The blue out of the blue all the time, like that is very, very, very rare and scary for parents, and I really empathize with that.

Sarah Milken  1:12:34  

No, I appreciate that. And I do think that because of the headlines and stress and college and this and the pressure, sometimes you wonder like, is everything okay, here? Yeah. You're just a regular parent having regular problems? Yes, I feel it. Now in terms of kind of segwaying into another topic. Before we wrap up, I want to talk about teens in self esteem, because you talk about in your book, how so many of us are focused on kids doing well in school and getting good grades and all of these things. And you talk about how teenagers need to create or find environments that are outside of school that really help sort of develop those feelings of self esteem of like, Yes, I matter. I make sense. I'm relevant. They do.

Lisa Damour  1:13:29  

And I, I'll tell you where I came to this in my clinical work, even though I don't this isn't in the book, but just in terms of like the backstory of how I can do appreciate the importance of non school, non college stuff as being important to kids for self esteem. I took care of overtime, several extremely high functioning, it was teenage girls, extremely high functioning, and they were crushing it by every measure in high school and then going to you know, the one of the 20 colleges and crushing it in one of the 20 colleges. And I had the honor I mean, I've practiced in the same community for 23 years. So I've gotten to watch, you know, cared for people over very long arcs of development. I've had the honor a few different occasions of watching those young women come back, get jobs that are very much of interest to them, or do things that no one saw coming whip office into shape that people were really It was chaotic before they got there. And it was only when they did something that was of their own making. Only when they did something that was not doing an extremely good job of following the lines laid out for them. That I saw self esteem consolidated in them that real pride, but you know, on paper, like they should have had self esteem for days. But it was only when it was of their own invention, that it really belonged to them that it really seemed to shore up a sense of self esteem. So I do think about and then I've watched this in younger parts of development, where like, yeah, it feels good for kids to get an A on the thing they were told to get an A but they were still doing what was told. And so I'm always interested if we really want kids to have self esteem, I'm interested in them doing stuff that they care about, and is off their own invention or for their own interests, and that they can take a tremendous pride in, in its own right. So I'll give you a couple examples. So what I loved this girl was like a fabulous violinist and played with, you know, like local youth orchestra was incredibly talented. But her real pride came from figuring out how to play pop songs on her violin on her own time. Right, or kids who do like incredible service work. And like, it may or may not end up on their college application. But like, they take huge personal pleasure in it, and they chose it and it's of something they care about, or kids who have like quirky hobbies, you know, we're like, really into origami. And really, yeah, Gaby, or ukulele, or like these things, really like, they just develop the skill and it belongs to them. And that's something I think we want to look for opportunities. If it's all for the college application. It actually, I think it actually undercuts the kid's ability to take joy and pleasure in it.

Sarah Milken  1:16:08  

It's interesting that we're talking about this because like, I don't cook at all, I hate it. There's nothing more in the world that I hate. I'm terrible at and I've no interest in it. I've my daughter took up cooking during the pandemic. And that's become like her thing. She's cooking for the family. She's done that and it's not something that anyone else in this house does. It's like her own identity. She has her own little like Instagram that goes with it. And that brings her so much like sense of self worth and her friends come over. And sometimes instead of going out to dinner, she's like making sound.

Lisa Damour  1:16:46  

I've got goosebumps, no, this is that what a perfect example. Right? And it's comes from within Yeah, if

Sarah Milken  1:16:51  

I told her to take a cookie, and she would have been like, what? What are you talking about? No, yeah,

Lisa Damour  1:16:58  

I love that example.

Sarah Milken  1:17:00  

What happens to the parent who's like, Lisa, but my kids not doing that on their own? They're just scrolling tick tock. Should I be like presenting ideas? Should I have them be dabbling in things? Like, where do you like, where do you draw that line of where the kid generates it on their own? Yeah,

Lisa Damour  1:17:21  

I mean, that's the thing. You can't make them. Right. And that's one of the hard things about being a parent. But the other thing is true. And you know, this teenagers change fast right? And sparks get, you know, sparks turn into flames with them very, very fast. I guess what I would say is you could shouldn't be spending so much time online, that they're not doing other stuff. And I believe very strongly, it's good for kids to be busy and busy with lots of things, partly because it just makes it harder for them to be on Tik Tok all day, and some tick tock is fine, but all day is not so fine. I think of course where that hits the limit is the overscheduled kid. But I will say there's a lot of room between the kid who doesn't have nearly enough going on to keep themselves busy and the kid who is over scheduled and you want your kid in that space.

Sarah Milken  1:18:01  

Okay, let's talk about quickly separation and individuation. I mean, that's like a five hour episode, but quickly. I mean, you basically talk about how your kids looking for a rebrand. They're not just Sarah's daughter, they're Marin, they're J they're blah blah, blah. And so it's like I have my midlife self with my midlife remix and my midlife rebrand. I'm not a stay at home mom as much anymore. I'm doing a podcast too. And then my daughter is like, and I'm not just your daughter, I meet you. And so you have these, like two things going on at the same time. Can we live in the same house?

Lisa Damour  1:18:39  

It's really hard. This is I would say one of the other reasons 13 is so hard is I think it hits really hard around age 13. So here's the here's the lowdown. So the technical terminology we use is separation individuation. But what I call this section of the book is why your team can't stand how you chew. Because I think that's what it really feels like at all

Sarah Milken  1:18:58  

cashew. I can't breathe. No, you're on my spoon when I'm soup.

Lisa Damour  1:19:04  

Yep. So if we think about it from the separations either trying to become their own person. So what they feel is anything we do that is like the version of who they want themselves to be right. This is a separation side. So in my own home, I have always liked Beyonce. I've long liked Beyonce. And when my older daughter was 13, I was in the kitchen bopping to Beyonce. And she comes in and she's like, Mom, stop, right? Because Beyonce was now hers. And we could not be separate and share Beyonce. So that was something that was like how she saw herself and it was no longer on the table for me. And then because they are not separate enough yet because we are very much you know, kind of entwined when our younger. Anything we do that is not like how they see themselves, like whether it's what we're wearing, or you know, how we how we breathe, or you know, like, or you know, or chuckle or, you know, our jazzy dance moves is so painful to them because it does not fit with their version of themselves at some urging. So here's the long and short of it. Anything we do that is like how they see themselves becoming is annoying to them. Anything that we do that is unlike how they see themselves becoming is annoying to them. The sum total of this is everything we do is annoying. But it goes away. And this is what's so cool. Is it by fleet 14 1516 kids start to get a sense of an identity, a consolidated brand as I talk about it in the book, and then they feel distinct enough that they're like, Okay, whatever your problems with your brand, or those are your problems with your brand, they do not reflect on my friend,

Sarah Milken  1:20:35  

she's her favorite thing to say is that's a huge problem. Beautiful. I'm like, All right, okay, okay,

Lisa Damour  1:20:41  

right. No, you problem, we're still taking up too much to sharing too much.

Sarah Milken  1:20:46  

Why have you gotten the same nail color as me the past two times? Are you with me? I'm like, I'm totally obsessed with you. Like, I'm gonna hide my nail color next time. And I'm like, Okay, you do that. But it's interesting with her because we're really tight. And you know, she's like, sort of obsessed with me in one hand. And then on the other hand, she's like, you're chewing makes me cringe. So it's this always, but like, I'm gonna be 48 And my mom still bugs me.

Lisa Damour  1:21:15  

Yep. Yep. No, I think I think that the separation individuation goes on forever. It's like forever. Yeah, like this too close. And yet, you know, it can't be different enough. Yeah.

Sarah Milken  1:21:23  

It's like, I'm like, Oh, my God, Mom, don't ask me that. That's so weird. Like, okay, wait, I have this little list here. So I could talk to you for 15 more hours. But there were like, a bunch of other things that came out in your book that I feel like I want to rapid fire on you. And I want you to kind of like comment on each one. I know that each one could go on for paragraphs, but I just feel like I can't leave this podcast having not addressed them. Okay, because I'm OCD. Okay, here we go. Number one, teenagers like novelty, except that and try to go through backup plans with them for when things could go wrong.

Lisa Damour  1:22:02  

So teenagers are more risky in their behavior than kids are adults. And what we don't want them to be doing is getting into a risky situation and then trying to figure it out on the fly. So to the degree that you can say, Okay, you are going to that party, I guess you're going to the party. If things go sideways at the party, what's the plan to the degree you can make that plan before they're in the situation better than them trying to figure it out in the heat of the moment.

Sarah Milken  1:22:24  

Love it to teenagers pretend that they don't want you to have high standards and expectations but they do.

Lisa Damour  1:22:30  

Teenagers live up to expectations and they live down to them too. And so when we treat our teenagers as the wise, philosophical, thoughtful, careful and mature young people they are or can be, they tend to meet us there.

Sarah Milken  1:22:46  

Number three teens do want your attention and presence, although they may not show it to you and they just want you to be invisible.

Lisa Damour  1:22:54  

Yep, they like knowing where we are. And one of the analogies is when we look at toddlers who are exploring the world, often they will come back and touch the parents knee without even looking at the parent before going off and exploring again, I think teenagers feel more safe reaching out into the world that they know that the safe base is at home.

Sarah Milken  1:23:14  

That was sort of going back to me going I'll buy you a plane ticket tomorrow. If you want to come home. Sometimes you just need that like extra nudge. We talked about this before, don't hold a grudge. If they make a snarky remark or you have hurt feelings. It's usually not personal

Lisa Damour  1:23:29  

yet, but you can say hey, I don't talk to you that way. You can talk to me that way. Try again.

Sarah Milken  1:23:33  

Okay, number five, it's a lot less personal than you think it

Lisa Damour  1:23:37  

is. It is adolescence, Adolescence is something they are going through it is not something they are doing to you.

Sarah Milken  1:23:42  

Is that what people say about us mid lifers and menopause are

Lisa Damour  1:23:45  

right? I'm going through it. I'm not doing it to you. Feels like I'm doing it to you. But it's actually something I'm trying

Sarah Milken  1:23:51  

to find out. Okay, six be okay. When they text and dump something and sort of feel like you got ghosted. I failed a test and then you respond to them. I'm so sorry. And then you don't get a response. Yep, usually means they feel better. Perfect seven. Sometimes they just want to hear that must really suck, not a monologue on how to fix their problems.

Lisa Damour  1:24:13  

Let me put it another way, they almost never want a monologue on how to fix their problems. Almost always what kids are looking for is curiosity and empathy. And so when I am very tired, and it's the end of the day, and one of my kids is complaining, I think I say to them, tell me more about what's going on. And then I usually say oh, man, that stinks. And usually they got everything they needed. And that's all I needed to do.

Sarah Milken  1:24:34  

So good. But when my husband does that, to me, I like get pissed. But that's when he tries to give you advice. Yeah, well, it's both. It's like sometimes I want the advice and sometimes I just want him to listen, but he never picks the right one. He's supposed to be a mind reader

Lisa Damour  1:24:49  

and what's wrong with him?

Sarah Milken  1:24:52  

Okay, empathy goes a long way with teens.

Lisa Damour  1:24:55  

Yep. Just saying, Oh, I'm so sorry. That happened. It also makes it clear like I'm not scared of that upset for you. Listen, you don't need to be scared

Sarah Milken  1:25:01  

of it either. That makes it a 15 year old problem and not a 50 year keeps it at a 15 year old problem. Love that. If they're having a shit day, let them distract themselves with bad TV or take it upon yourself to order their favorite takeout and help distract them.

Lisa Damour  1:25:16  

Distractions go further than we think. Obviously, within limits, but sometimes if you're struggling with something taking your mind off of it is a bit of a solution. comforts go really far for teens, they feel everything more intensely. So nice stuff feels that much nicer for them. So getting their favorite takeout goes further that for them than it does for us and can be a solution to a bad day.

Sarah Milken  1:25:37  

Love it 10 If you can't have the face to face chat about the important topics, zoom in the car when you're not looking at each other or text.

Lisa Damour  1:25:46  

Absolutely kids do not like being in the hot seat. And that's those are two strategies for keeping them out of your

Sarah Milken  1:25:51  

teens are watching you. So do what you say. Yeah, the

Lisa Damour  1:25:56  

huge part of how we teach healthy emotion regulation is that we actually model it in our own lives. So instead of saying like, Oh my god, I had the worst day ever, where's the beer? We say I had the worst day ever. Let's go for a walk.

Sarah Milken  1:26:06  

I also think it's interesting because like, sometimes, you know, if my daughter is having like girl issues or whatever, I'll say like, oh my god, so and so had this birthday party, and she didn't invite me. And I tried to explain that, like even adults have stuff too. It's not like you graduate from being a kid and then being an adult is perfect. Exactly. Take an interest in your teens turmoil while giving them time and space. I'm not really good at the time and space. I'm working on that.

Lisa Damour  1:26:35  

Yeah, I think it goes back to the heading of like, if we react very abruptly and aggressively, it's scary to them, it makes it seem like it must be a very, very bad situation.

Sarah Milken  1:26:44  

Okay, teenage narcissism. Narcissism is normal.

Lisa Damour  1:26:48  

I don't use the term narcissism in the book, but they're definitely like a little preoccupied with themselves. That is the nature of adolescence and it is normal.

Sarah Milken  1:26:55  

Okay, is that the same for midlife women to maybe? Instead of asking what they think of the new math teacher, ask, What's the word on the street about the new math teacher? I love that one.

Lisa Damour  1:27:07  

Some kids do better with displacement. And that again, we can fall under, don't put them on the hot seat. So instead of what do you think, like, what are kids saying?

Sarah Milken  1:27:14  

I love it. If your teen wants to talk about the same thing over and over again, like, maybe they're afraid they're gonna die, or something bad's gonna happen. You give this example that you give a specific hour of the day where that's allotted to talk about talking about that issue.

Lisa Damour  1:27:30  

That's one strategy, if a kid is really stuck in a mental rut, is actually trying to put some parameters around how much they can talk or think about it. And the reason for that is, it can bend into what we call rumination, where you're thinking and talking about something in a way that becomes the equivalent of picking a wound, and it doesn't make it better.

Sarah Milken  1:27:48  

And I feel like girls and rumination station is like, yeah, no, we did rumination. Listening to music and playing sports, you say is a huge release for them. Yep.

Lisa Damour  1:27:59  

It's part of how kids regulate emotions. And again, back to what we said, like talking about feelings is one option. They have a lot of other strategies they use to help their feelings be

Sarah Milken  1:28:08  

manageable. Parents make mistakes.

Lisa Damour  1:28:11  

We do and we should apologize when we do.

Sarah Milken  1:28:13  

Just because teens are emotional doesn't mean they're fragile.

Lisa Damour  1:28:17  

They are built to withstand far more distress than we give them credit for. And it's great for them and helps them Gosh,

Sarah Milken  1:28:21  

talk to your teens about porn or someone else well,

Lisa Damour  1:28:26  

or they won't talk about it with anybody. We just said we have new data. I mean, that by 13, most kids have seen porn by 17. Three quarters of teens have seen porn, they don't raise it with adults, we need to have conversations with them. And I give you language in the book for how to have those conversations.

Sarah Milken  1:28:41  

Yeah, we're gonna save that one for another episode. Because I've already been down that road. 10,000 times my kids are like, Okay, can you not talk about that anymore? We've already discussed that. I'm like, okay, as long as you've got that clear, you talk about trying to keep technology out of the bedroom, like in the evening. How successful are you that with older kids,

Lisa Damour  1:29:01  

it's a lot easier if you've started when they're young. And it's a lot easier if you make it a house rule. So if you don't have tech in your bedroom, and it is understood from the minute your kid gets tech that this is not something that goes in bedrooms, it's a lot easier to enforce and rule worth having. Oh,

Sarah Milken  1:29:14  

my gosh, I've missed that boat completely. Okay, you say as adults, we need to show our own coping skills. We can't just talk about it. We have to do it. We kind of touched on that one before.

Lisa Damour  1:29:25  

Yeah, yep. No, I think you know, it's, don't talk about it be about it. It's my favorite saying from a chocolate wrapper.

Sarah Milken  1:29:33  

That's a good one. And it is a funny thing that I heard you say in another podcast was when your daughter told you that you needed to be a grown ass woman. Yes. That really cracked me up because my daughter says certain things like that to me.

Lisa Damour  1:29:51  

No, she she said you need to be a grown ass woman. I was having a as we say my family a crap attack over something small. And she was like Mom You are a grown ass woman. You can handle this. It was great.

Sarah Milken  1:30:03  

Oh, that's so good. I just love that. Okay, so as we wrap up if listeners want to find you Where can they find you?

Lisa Damour  1:30:12  

So my website is Dr. Lisa demore.com Dr. Li sa da mo u r.com. My podcast is ask Lisa the psychology of parenting my co host, Rena Ninan, and I answer questions from parents every week. And then I'm at Instagram, at at Lisa dot demore muscle on Twitter and Facebook, but my website can get you everywhere.

Sarah Milken  1:30:33  

Oh my gosh, you guys have to get all of these books. They're so good. They're sort of just like parental Bibles. Oh, I appreciate oh my god, like thank you so much. Thank

Lisa Damour  1:30:42  

you so much. It was an honor to be with you.

Sarah Milken  1:30:45  

I want everyone to take one small step of deepening our connections with our teens and for midlife women to take a deep breath who are raising teenagers. I want to thank Lisa for highlighting the tools and strategies and the research on how we can raise more connected, capable and compassionate adolescents. Thank you Dr. Lisa demore for saying yes. And becoming a new friend of the flexible neurotic podcast. Thank you for having me. It's great to be with you. Hey, peeps, it's me again. I listen to this episode with clinical psychologist, author and podcaster Dr. Lisa demore. So I could summarize the golden nuggets for you to have actionable items to start using today. I know that when I listened to a long episode on like, oh my god, I love that. But then I can even fuck you remember the specifics? This is why come back and do a golden nugget summary. In this episode we discuss the inner workings in a teenager's world. Lisa teaches us healthy practices we can start doing today to strengthen our teenagers mental health and our relationships with them. The funniest thing is that it's a Sunday night and I actually have teen son and 10 of his friends downstairs screaming and yelling watching something. And I'm sure Chipotle is going to ring the doorbell with Postmates delivery very soon, so hopefully, that won't happen. If it does, I'll probably edit it out. Golden Nugget number one helping your teens regulate their emotions. Lisa explains that it is important for teenagers to have different ways of dealing with sadness, stress and frustration. She talks about how most parents think that the best way for their teenagers to do this is by the teenager talking to the parent and the parent helping them form a solution to their problem. Yes, this can be beneficial in some instances, but it should not be considered your teenagers go to method. Lisa's reasoning based on research for this is because as parents, we shouldn't be the default for our teenagers when it's time for them to regulate an emotion. Some other ways teenagers can cope with a problem is by listening to music journaling, reading and talking to their friends either for comfort or as a temporary distraction. Lisa explains a temporary distractions work well. Of course, we're going to be there for teenagers in time of need, but they also have to create a sense of independence as well. Lisa also mentions that in today's world, it can be difficult to do this with parents being more available, and teenagers access to texting. This 24/7 availability can be strenuous on the parent, since we have our own problems in lives you attend to throughout the day, believe me I talked to Lisa about it myself. I'm like teen daughter Stop telling me what happened at school, blah, blah, blah. Of course I want to know but sometimes I'm like I'm recording a podcast. I can't deal with this right now. Lisa explains that it is important to set texting boundaries between you and your teenager because most things can wait until the end of the day. And this goes both way peeps. Healthy Communication is a two way street. Believe me I talked to Lisa about this too. During the episode sometimes I want to unload something on teen daughter or teen son just so that I don't forget. But then I'm like wait a second Am I just like unloading a whole new problem onto them that they don't even have to be thinking about right now. Golden Nugget number two teens growth through quote big feelings. Lisa reminds us that there's always going to be some form of distress that teenagers deal with and it's inevitable in any situation involving change. And in the teenage years, there's a lot of change. Stress is what helps teens reach maturity and development. It can also show the effect a certain situation may have on your teenager. For example, if your teenager gets dumped by boyfriend girlfriend and they feel distress and then it shows that the relation kinship really did have a lasting effect on them. And that's a positive thing for a parent to know that their teenager had a quality relationship if they do not feel distress, and it shows that they were not fully into the relationship, and it wasn't of that much importance. Of course, we don't want our teenagers to be in pain, but it's through these life experiences that they discover who they are, who their real friends are and what their passions are and a true sense of grit. We can't shield our teenagers from distress. It's just not possible. These are the experiences that create life lessons. Golden Nugget number three, teens are their own type of beast. Teenagers are their own type of animal and can be a hormonal mass. Hey, sometimes so are we menopausal midlife are moms I mean, having teenagers and being midlife, menopausal Peri menopausal is definitely a hormone still. So it's important to not take things too personally or hold a grudge against your teenagers. If there's an argument or your teenager just had that attitude problem and the moment that try not to drag it out that feeling that it gives you just a just try to drown it out for a while. Teenagers can go from mood to move very quickly. And it can be very unpleasant one minute and super sweet. The next you guys, it's not personal Lisa's as. So if you and your teenager had an argument, it might be ancient history to them five minutes later, even though you're pissed, they aren't holding on to it. So why should you? Oh my god, I can give you 20 reasons why me but anyway, we can miss out on some really good times with our kids, if we're still mad at them about something that happened a week ago, a way to ease this is by teaching your teenager to say something like I'm mad at you and can't talk right now, instead of them saying something that is really going to personally hurt your feelings. Even in bad conversations or what we think are bad conversations, we can create healthier communications with our teenagers, Golden Nugget number for teens and self esteem. As parents so many of us are focused on our kids excelling academically and socially in school. And if they're doing these things, and we assume that they're gaining a very high sense of self esteem from it, and maybe they are. But Lisa reminds us that is important for teenagers to create or find environments that are outside of school that really helped develop those feelings of self esteem. And Lisa's practice, she found that when teenagers did something that was of their own making, not following the lines that were laid out for them by parents, that they gained a sense of pride and self esteem that was higher than that of just excelling in school. Of course it is important for teenagers to do well in school, but it's also important to them to find things to be great at outside of academics things that they're passionate about joining an outside of school club, or starting a hobby. And I even talked about in the episode I actually see this in my own teenage daughter Marin. Yes, she's very good in school academically, but when the pandemic hit, she started learning or actually teaching herself how to cook and even made her own Instagram page to sort of show it off. I see you're filled with such pride and I know it isn't the same thing as like getting an A on a test, but it's partaking something that is of their own invention. Their own interest grows with this self esteem. The gold is dripping off these nuggets, rabbit use it there are three things you can do. First, subscribe to the podcast. Second, share it with some midlife friends. And third right in Apple review. writing reviews is kind of annoying and it's an extra step but guess what? It really helps the podcast grow. You think your little review will matter but it does if you want to show and everyone said my clap doesn't matter. Then there will be no clapping. You all matter DM me know I always respond. Oh and of course follow my instagram at the flexible neurotic da love you talk soon