62% of teenagers wish adults would do this when they’re upset | Lisa Damour

0:00 The more that we can recognize that teenagers have a really hard job. They have to become independent while living with us. They have to get ready to leave home and live on their own. At the exact same moment, we still know what they last ate and what socks they're wearing. So, they do this by accomplishing a psychological distance in advance of accomplishing a physical distance. The more that we can stand back and admire that this is a pretty brilliant and elegant solution rather than feeling like they've broken up with us or pushed us away, the more that we can continue to make ourselves available for when they do want to connect. I'm Dr. Lisa Damour. I'm a clinical psychologist. I'm an author and I'm the co-host of Ask Lisa, the psychology of raising tween and teens podcast. Thank you for watching Big Think.

0:47 If you'd like to support our work, we encourage you to join our members community. As a member, you'll receive our quarterly print magazine, a beautifully designed collection of the ideas and interviews that matter most. Bigthink is for curious people who want to take deep dives into big ideas. To support the media you want to see in the world, go to bigthink.com/membership. And now back to the interview. The psychology of teenagers. So, I've been a clinical psychologist for more than 30 years, and most of that time has focused on caring for teenagers and the people around teenagers. My research and my work tends to look at what gets in the way of kids thriving, what adults can do to help kids thrive. And what I've learned along the way is so much of what is true for young people is also true for people of all ages. So, adolescence is an extraordinary time of life. And when it begins and when it ends is sort of up for debate. I tend to think about it like 10 to 20 is sort of the big action for being an adolescent and it is a transformational time of life. If you put a 10-year-old next to a 20-year-old, right, you're talking about two different creatures alto together, right? They're so different. whereas, you know, I'm 55, me at 45, not that different from who I am now, right? A lot goes down in that time. It's a time of life when young people figure out what they value in themselves and the kind of value they want to contribute to the world. And it can set people up for really rich and thriving adulthoods or it can be a time where people lose their way for a little while. The beautiful thing about teenagers is that they get back on track pretty quickly. But sometimes it happens that somebody goes off course in adolescence and spends a long time going down a road they didn't want to be on. One of my favorite things with teenagers is to talk with them about how they cope when they've had a rough day. And I'll tell you, they're often better at it than adults are. And by better, I mean they're more creative. So I'll ask questions. I'll say, "You've had a horrible day. Let's picture you go home, you have two hours to help yourself feel better. What are you most likely to do?" The number one response that I get from teenagers, and I get this in conversation with them, and I get this in a Gallup poll that I did with them, is that they listen to music. teenagers, almost all of them have playlists that they've curated and they curate these playlists that are mood matching music. And the best part is they often have really great names for these playlists, like their gr playlist or their sad and peaceful playlist and they go and they listen to music that matches the negative mood they're having.

3:25 And you would think that this would make them feel worse, but actually teenagers know and the science shows that it actually helps them feel better. that if a teenager is angry and they go listen to their gr playlist, they feel the emotion more intensely and then they move through it more quickly and they feel better faster. Same with being sad. So, I love this about teenagers, right, that they have this really precise and portable and autonomous and actually quick solution for dealing with uncomfortable emotions. And a lot of them use it. They also turn to things like playing or playing with their friends when they're upset. Especially boys will turn to video games when they're upset. And this is often a much more social activity than we give boys credit for. They are having a good time. They may be distracting themselves from something they can't really fix.

4:11 They're enjoying the company of their friends. There's often a lot of playful banter. So, they're great at this. But I really mean it when I say the teenager is creative. One of the answers I got one time is I had a teenage girl say, "You know what? when I've had a really rough day, I go I get a piece of paper, I rip it up into a bunch of pieces, and then I tape it back together like a puzzle. I was like, fantastic, right? Does no harm, brings relief. It's your thing. It works for you. So, what I would say is, as much as we worry about how teenagers are handling their emotions, I think adults also want to step back and admire that often the kid who comes home has a good cry. Crying is actually a very adaptive way to manage emotions. it brings relief, does no harm, and then cuddles the dog on the floor for a while is actually the picture of mental health. So, music is a really interesting category in terms of how people, but especially teenagers, manage their emotions because it can be both expressing and taming. So, if a teenager is sad and puts on her sad and peaceful playlist, it becomes a proxy form of expression. It's cathartic. It helps them to get that feeling out. Now, what's really common is that teenagers will often also have a happy playlist. one kid called it his yayya playlist. And after a period of getting the feeling out, they'll switch over to the mood lifting playlist and they'll use it to counter the unwanted mood. Now, they do this in all of these sophisticated ways. Some kids go straight for the yayya playlist. But the point being that teenagers have figured out how to use music to shift their mood in all sorts of ways and to do so quickly. When we think about where teenagers stand today, we actually have to hold two realities at once. On the one hand, today's teenagers have been through a lot. They have gone through a global pandemic. They are dealing with concerns about gun violence. They are dealing with concerns about the climate and where it's headed.

6:06 They are dealing with achievement pressures like we never saw when we were teenagers and they are working hard to manage this. As a result, we are seeing higher rates of anxiety and depression in teens than we've seen in the past and we need to pay attention to those. At the same time, most teenagers are thriving and we need to pay attention to that, too. In fact, we are raising the best behaved generation of teenagers on record. They are doing fewer drugs than previous generations. They wear their seat belts. They wear their helmets. They are delaying sexual intimacy.

6:40 They are having fewer partners. We want to pay attention to the fact that they are achieving more than we ever did as adolescence. They are behaving better than we ever did as adolescence. And side by side with that, there are a lot of kids who are suffering and deserve extra support. Knowing this about teenagers, I used a Gallup poll of mine to try to tell a fuller story. So, I asked teenagers, "What did you feel a lot of yesterday?" And I gave them a whole range of emotions to consider. So, 45% of them said, "I felt a lot of stress." And 38% of them said, "I felt really anxious." And 23% said, "I felt sad." On top of that, 94% of them said they felt happy on the previous day as well.

7:24 You add those numbers up, it gets to way more than 100. Kids are feeling lots of things and often lots of different kinds of emotions on the very same day. So, it matters that kids are telling us they're anxious. It matters that kids are telling us that they are sad. And it also matters that we don't take an overall negative view of adolescence and miss the fact that 94% of them are telling us that yesterday they also felt happy. So, we do see some differences when we look at gender and teenagers and how they're fairing. But before I get into any gender differences, let me say this. Every time we look at gender differences, we always find that people of different genders are more alike than they are different. And part of why that's true is that we're always talking about overlapping bell curves, right? So if you think about bell curves, the differences in the mean, the height of the curve, but those means can be pretty close together and still find a difference.

8:18 And what that means if we think about something like anxiety is that girls may be more anxious than boys on anxiety. But there are a lot of boys who are more anxious than the average girl and a lot of girls who are less anxious than the average boy. So we do see these gender findings, but you always want to take them with a grain of salt. Okay, having said that, let me talk about the gender differences we see. So one thing we know as psychologists is that when girls are distressed, they have been socialized to collapse in on themselves. They're more likely to become anxious. They're more likely to become depressed. Boys, on the other hand, have been socialized that when they are in distress, they act out. They're more likely to get themselves in trouble. They're more likely to be hard on other people. So, when we do surveys that only ask about things like sadness and depression, girls are going to look like they're struggling and like they're struggling a lot more than boys. When we expand those surveys and ask questions about things like anger or irritability, we're going to hear a lot more boys telling us they have those feelings. And the most important thing we need to do as adults is to recognize that kid's upset. He's not being naughty. He's not being a bad kid. He's a kid in distress and he is showing that distress in the ways that our culture gives boys permission to be distressed. This is something we need to be really careful about when we're talking about anyone and I think especially teenagers. We need to make sure we're asking the right questions. So, if we walk up to the question of are teenagers suffering and we only ask about anxiety and depression, we're going to find out more about what's happening for girls because we're not asking the right question that's going to pick up distress in boys. I think we may run into a similar problem with things like loneliness. There may very well be a situation where boys are more lonely than girls, but we also might not be asking the right question. So, for example, if we're asking how much do you talk to your friends? How much do you share with your friends? We're going to get a lot of information that suggests that girls are way better at this and thus less lonely. But what we know is that companionship for a lot of boys isn't about talking, isn't about sharing. It's about doing things together, being on a team together, playing a game together, you know, doing a hobby together. So, when we're talking about distress or we're talking about loneliness, we want to be really careful that we're not asking questions that are going to tip the information one way or another, but miss what's really happening. So, one of the hardest conversations happening between teenagers and adults right now has to do with technology, mostly phones. And this is a really tricky one because this has come to us like a title wave. We are all trying to figure out what to do with it. And one of the things I observe all the time is how quick some adults can be to say like teens in their phones. All right, I don't love when we're doing this. And I'll tell you why. Number one, I am 100% sure that if I had had these technologies when I was a teenager, I would be using them exactly as our teenagers do. And the reason I know this is I remember how excited I got about call waiting. So I think the first thing we should do as adults is to recognize if we had had access to these phones and these technologies, we probably would have used them just as our kids are using them. And in fact, many of us actually are using our phones and our technologies the way our kids are. So we want to try to set aside that very negative stereotype and also to recognize again how easily we negatively stereotype teens.

11:37 Teenagers need us to help us navigate all of this. This is tremendously complex. Teenagers are being confronted by technologies that are wildly sophisticated and have a lot of information on those teenagers and are putting in front of them things that are totally irresistible. We are much better equipped to help young people manage this if we take a stance not of you and your phone, but hey kid, you and me, let's look at these technologies. Let's look at where they're coming from, what they're about, and make sure that if you're using them, you're doing so in a way that is good for you. So, because phones are new and because phones absolutely are a big piece of what's happening with teenagers, it can be very easy to focus on them as the main, if not sole cause of this rising rates of psychological distress that we're seeing in teenagers. We want to pay attention to digital technology. We want to pay attention to what it means for young people and their health and their thriving, but we don't want it to dominate the whole picture.

12:40 When I think about youth mental health and what affects it, I tend to think in like a pie chart. And what we know from the research is social media and digital technology is definitely a slice of that pie, but there's a lot of other things in that pie, too. So, another big slice is actually how much sleep teens are getting. Today's teens sleep way less than previous generations, and sleep and mental health are best friends. Okay, sleep and social media are connected, of course, especially if kids are up at night on their phones, which is not my favorite.

13:10 But there are other things in the pie chart as well. So there are things like poverty and discrimination. There's worries about gun violence. There's achievement pressures. There's concerns about the climate. And also kids tell us they worry a lot about things like political polarization. There's things like family mental health, childhood trauma. And then there's also peer concerns, bullying, worries about friendship. All of that makes up the pie. And as the adults around teenagers, we want to pay attention to the big picture and not always get stuck on looking at one slice of the pie. So, I love teenagers and what I love about them is that they are vivid, right? Everything that's going on with them is intense and big. Even if to adults it doesn't seem like that big a deal, everything's a big deal to them. And that's what I love. What's hard about being a teenager is that there is so much change in a very short period of time.

14:05 And as we know, change equals stress. So all of that change that a young person is going through is stressful for them and it's also stressful for the people around them. I think that the fact that having a teenager is stressful has over many generations led to a whole lot of negative stereotyping about teenagers. And what's interesting is the stereotype changes, right? So you think back to like American graffiti 1950s, like they are so naughty, they're up to no good, right? And then we think about things like The Who and Baba O'Reilly and Teenage Wasteland, you know, being the main theme of that song. So the idea of teenagers as burnouts in some sort of way today, our negative stereotype about teenagers is that they're fragile or maybe even damaged, right? And they have been through a lot. But we need to be mindful that we often cast a negative lens around adolescence. And maybe some of that has to do with how we think about being a teenager ourselves, especially if it wasn't that great of an experience. I think some of that has to do with the fact that teenagers can often look at adults in a way that's pretty a scance. They can judge us. They can be skeptical. They're the first to catch our hypocrisies. And I think some of that has to do with, as much as I love them, I'll be the first to say, teenagers can be stressful to race. So, one of the best parts of my job is I get to ask teenagers like, "How can adults really be most helpful to you?" And what they tell me over and over again, both in my clinical practice and through surveys I conduct, is that more than anything, they just want us to listen, right?

15:32 When they've had a hard day, when they're upset about something, they just want to be able to share it and have us just take it in. Okay, what is behind this? Most of the time, I think a lot of us find that when we've gone through something hard, if we could just tell somebody, then we can lay it down and move on. And I think that's true for teenagers, too. It's also true for teenagers that they feel everything really intensely and they sometimes worry like, "Is something wrong with me that I'm so upset about this thing?" So, if our kid can come home and be like, "Oh my gosh, listen to what happened at school today?" And they can tell us and we go, "Oh yeah, that stinks." Okay, two things are happening at once. First, they're getting empathy. They're getting to lay it down and move on. They're also getting our reassurance like you're having a reaction that makes sense. There's nothing wrong with you. You're good to go. So just listening is so much more powerful than I think adults often recognize. And because we think just listening isn't enough, we often leap in with advice. Okay, if you have done this with a teenager, you know, most of the time it doesn't go all that well, right? They give you their problem and instead of just saying, "Oh man, that stinks." You say, "Well, did you try?" And invariably the kid's like, "You don't get it. You don't understand." Very rarely is the kid like, "I'm awfully glad you made that suggestion.

16:47 I hadn't thought of that myself. So, what I know from both talking with kids in my practice and actually being a mom myself and conducting surveys on teenagers and I ask teenagers, "What do you want adults to do when you're upset?" 62% of them said, "I just want you to listen." After that, 56%, I just want some space and only 28% said they wanted advice. Now, let's come back to that space response. Here's what I usually hear from adults. My kid came home. They were clearly upset and they went in their room. How do I get them to open up? And the parent or the caregiver in that moment feels like something's gone wrong. If we recognize that kids are actually asking for space as a way to deal with upset feelings, we can appreciate the kid is saying, "I want to try to fix this for myself. I want to see if I can get myself to feeling better all by myself." And we need to recognize this is what we want. We want our kids to develop autonomy and capacity around dealing with uncomfortable emotions. And so often if they've had a hard day at school, they have held it together so well at school and they get home and maybe getting to their room if they've got a room to themselves is finally the time and the place that they can carry on with their own healthy coping, their own autonomous healthy coping, and do all the things that actually get them ready to be able to thrive on their own. So one of the hardest things about raising teenagers is that there's an overnight shift. It feels like it's an overnight shift. That has to do with how our kids regard us. And the metaphor I like to use for this is that when they're younger, we're like jelly beans. They want as much of us as they could have. And then as they move into adolescence, and adolescence begins around 10 or 11, we're a little bit more like Brussels sprouts.

18:45 Like they know that we're good for them, but they don't want to eat an endless supply. So what does this look like in your home? What it looks like is maybe when your child is 9 or 10 or even 11, if they're upset, they want a hug, right? They want you to care for them. They want your warmth and your comfort. And then as they move into the Brussels sprout phase, they come home and they know that your advice may be good, but they don't really want it. They want to figure out how to manage this themselves. I know this both from raising kids, caring for kids, and again, I also know it from my survey data. When I ask kids, "What helps you feel better?" or what do you want your parent to do to help you feel better? Younger tween were twice as likely as older teens to say that they wanted a hug. All right, so say your teenagers had a terrible day and they come home and they're talking about it. I want you to think in terms of expressing and taming. If they're talking, they're already on the right path. Talking about what's making them upset is how most people get themselves to feeling better. Your job is to listen. If listening isn't enough, offer empathy. Listen and say, "Of course you're upset." Anyone in your shoes would be. You can validate what they're feeling. And I will tell you, most of the time, teenagers feel better if we just listen, empathize, and validate. Now, if your kid's still upset, you're going to switch gears and you're going to go towards taming so that they don't end up ruminating. So, you might say, "What would help you feel better?" or frankly my favorite line in all of parenting. Is there anything I can do that won't make this worse? Being present, being available, but not leaping in to try to solve the problem is almost always what teenagers are really looking for. So, when I was working on my book, Untangled, I had to figure out how to organize all of the things that teenagers are going through.

20:33 So, I came up with seven transitions that turn kids into adults. And the seven transitions are the chapter titles for the book. So here they are. Parting with childhood, joining a new pack, harnessing emotions, contending with adult authority, planning for the future, entering the romantic world, caring for themselves. And as I was working on the book, my editor kept saying, "Are these happening in an order, or are they happening all at once?" And I kept saying to her, "Yes, yes." So, they do roughly map on to what's happening developmentally, like parting with childhood, fifth or sixth grade. Joining a new pack, sixth or seventh grade. Harnessing emotions, seventh or eighth grade. Contending with adult authority, 8th, nth grade, planning for the future, 9th, 10th grade. Entering the romantic world can show up anywhere. It can even show up in grad school. And then learning to care for oneself is what we want to make sure kids can do before they leave home. So, it's helpful, I find, to think of what can look like the chaos of adolescence and realize teenagers have all these jobs that they are trying to work their way through. And again, that's a lot of work, which means that's a lot of stress. And our job as the loving adults around them is to not take any of it personally and to try to help them on their way.

21:53 So my work in caring for teenagers also extends importantly to caring for the adults who are doing the work of raising teenagers because it's not that easy. We adore our kids. We are aware that when they become adolescence there's all these new risks on the horizon for them and we don't have the same closeness with them that we may have enjoyed when they were younger. So this is a pretty scary combination. They have more things they can get into trouble with, more things that can go wrong, and they don't want our guidance like they used to. I think the thing that I want adults to know as they are with and around teenagers is that none of this is personal. I think so often when it derails is that the adult takes it personally, that the kid doesn't want the help in the same way. The more that we can recognize that teenagers have a really hard job. They have to become independent while living with us. They have to get ready to leave home and live on their own at the exact same moment we still know what they last ate and what socks they're wearing. So they do this by accomplishing a psychological distance in advance of accomplishing a physical distance. The more that we can stand back and admire that this is a pretty brilliant and elegant solution rather than feeling like they've broken up with us or pushed us away, the more that we can continue to make ourselves available for when they do want to connect. And what I hear from teenagers all the time is that they do care very deeply about the adults in their lives. They want guidance. They want connection. The thing that we have to adjust to as adults is that they usually want it on their terms and their timing. So I have a colleague who also cares for teenagers and he said to me one day, "We get way too much credit for our work with teenagers. They get better so much faster than people of any other age." And this is true.

23:41 In the vividness of adolescence is also this tremendous plasticity, this tremendous capacity to change routes. I have cared for teenagers who were cutting school, not getting along with their friends, not getting along with their family, and then suddenly attached themselves to something, decided they wanted to move to New York, and decided that the path to do that involved going to school and getting along better with everybody. And within three months, I was looking at a totally different kid. So what I want adults to know as they support teenagers and care for teenagers is that even when teenagers seem to be struggling or even when teenagers are really offputting, they are amendable to change. If you want to make this change happen, here's what you need to do. You need to recognize that all teenagers have two sides. They have the side that might want to cut class or be impulsive or be snarky. And all teenagers have a side that is broad-minded, philosophical, forward-looking. And more than anything in the whole world, teenagers want to be taken seriously. So even if teenagers are showing you the side that is annoying or impulsive or misbehaved, if you can speak to the second side, if you can say to them, "Hey, this isn't like you," or, "Hey, I know you want to have a lot of options at the end of high school."

25:01 What I have learned is that the side you talk to is the side that shows up for the conversation. So as the adults around teenagers, whether they're your teenagers or somebody else's teenagers, take teenagers seriously. Speak to the mature, growthoriented side of the teenager and you're going to see the very best of that kid and you're going to see them move quickly in the right direction. Okay, let's think about what it really means to be a teenager. You are changing. Everyone around you is changing. Your body is changing. you are setting yourself up for your adult life and you're usually living with your folks who may or may not have expectations of you that you have for yourself. Okay, it's a lot. Against this backdrop, we also have to recognize that there's a lot of shade for teenagers that adults will say things all the time like teenagers sometimes like right in front of them. Now, think about it for a minute. If we were like women, right?

25:55 That is totally socially unacceptable. And yet, it's considered okay to do that with and around teenagers. Teenagers need us. Teenagers belong to all of us. It is critically important that we have their backs and that they know we are really there for them. So, what's the takeaway? The takeaway is stress is normal if uncomfortable. Uncomfortable feelings are helpful if unwanted. And development is hard. Being a person who's growing and changing is inherently stressful. Being around people who are growing and changing, unthinking teenagers, is inherently stressful. The fact that it's stressful doesn't mean that anybody's doing anything wrong. It's just the nature of being a person.

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