Today’s podcast topic is about taming the savage beast….teenagers. And also, probably young adults can be included in this discussion. We say that tongue in cheek because 12-18/19 year olds so often get a bad rap. I don’t think there’s any other segment of the population that we feel free to pile on like teenagers, and that’s not quite fair.
One of the cardinal rules in psychology is that CHANGE = STRESS. (even good change). Here’s something youth ministers and middle/high school teachers know: if you put a 12 year old next to an 18 yr old, you’re not even looking at the same species. That is SO MUCH CHANGE in a 6-7 year span. It’s incredibly stressful, both for the kid living through it and the parents watching it happen. And siblings, too!
It can literally be as stark as one day to the next, your sweet, snuggly pre-teen who laughs at your jokes and would love for you to ride bikes with him wakes up one morning and is mono-syllabic and annoyed by everything you do. That’s hard for parents to react calmly to—and it’s a knee-jerk gut reaction to take it really personally.
Author & clinical psychologist, Lisa Damour, has a great book out that caught my attention: The Emotional Lives of Teenagers.
Her material is super helpful and years of clinical experience with teenagers and we’re drawing from her expertise for this episode.
WHAT’S HAPPENING? Psychologists have always marked the onset of adolescence at age 11 (puberty is underway, not always visibly). There’s evidence now that by the 2000’s, 18% of white girls, 31% of Hispanic girls and 43% of Black girls had started onset of puberty by age EIGHT (8). So that’s 3rd grade onset, and around 5th grade for first period. So that’s a lot earlier than parents might expect—we might be shocked by it.
It changes the brain. It changes the balance of power in the brain. It’s natural and inevitable. This separation and individuation needs to happen. And actually doesn’t have anything to do with you as parent. If you can flag your emotions and reactions and step back with an awareness that this is actually a physiological change rather than something personal directed at you…if you can do that as a parent 20% of the time during these years, you’re doing great.
OUR REACTIONS
It can be very painful for parents. Also, this can be a really isolating time for parents & I don’t think we expect that necessarily. We go from sweet preschool playdates where we’re discussing our kids’ toilet training (personal issues) to a time when everything to them is so very personal and felt very acutely. It can be dicey to talk about it or seek advice from friends/family about some of the things our tweens/teens are struggling with. (1) We certainly don’t want to violate their privacy. Sometimes it’s hard enough to get them to open up and talk to us in the first place and if someone’s MOM tells one of their friends (even in a cautionary or compassionate way), then our child’s window gets slammed shut. (2) It’s hard to know what friends you can really trust with vault-confidentiality with some of these issues. So we end up not talking about it at all and the “how are your kids” question is answered with superficial answers about grades, sports, or summer jobs rather than broken friendships, troubles with screens, or deeper/darker issues.
It’s our job to love our kids, but it’s not our kids’ job to love us. Scripture tells us they are required to HONOR us. They are not here for our gratification. They don’t exist for our happiness. There’s no quid pro quo contract there—that may have been what YOU thought was in the equation… There’s a lot of joy and gratification in parenting, to be sure, but once our kids hit adolescence and that separation thing starts happening, you’d better have something in place that’s going to fill your tank other than THEM. You NEED that before your child hits adolescence! (remember, this is as early as 9….)
Marriage, new skill or career idea, outside friendships/plans, etc. If you don’t, their lack of time spent with you and lack of thought for you is going to add to your emotional/mental distress. Their focus at this age is to become independent and to spend as much time as possible with their friends.
CONCERN FOR OUR TEENS
We know that the past few years (pandemic) has done a number on teenagers in particular. Remember, their focus is supposed to be independence and friends and all of that was stripped away for a significant fraction of the time they get to be teenagers. They suffered.
Damour says that our conversations around mental health are twofold: (1) it’s great that there’s more awareness and attention, but (2) we’ve INCORRECTLY started equating mental health with feeling good/calm/relaxed/happy. That’s not a good definition of mental health! “If you’re not happy, there’s something wrong with you” is not TRUE.
Just because you have a rotten day or have distress, doesn’t mean you have a mental health concern. Not everything is a trauma. Distress is how we grow & learn! (We’ve talked before about the dangers of being over-accommodating and actually creating anxiety and fragile kids.)
Damour says the kids she works with who’ve been allowed to have painful/stressful experiences and moved through them (without them being rescued or having it fixed), those kids are the most profoundly changed and matured. Say they cheated on a test and they FACE consequences at school & at home. Their subsequent behavior is all about never having to feel that again. It makes them think about the kind of person they want to be.
Knowing they can find their way thru and function, makes them mature & confident. Kids who feel like they can only proceed if they’re in circumstances where they’ll be comfortable or have a guaranteed positive outcome—they are restricted to very very narrow paths in life (b/c what in life goes that way?!).
It’s really important for parents to give consequences and have guard rails in place. This is a scary time when the stakes are actually high in our kids’ lives. They can (and DO) derail in some hard ways. …. Our job is to decipher when to step in and when to allow things to unfold without intervention. This can be a tough call and there’s no one-size fits all call here. Realize: there is NOTHING you can do to guarantee your teenager’s safety. THIS IS TERRIFYING as a parent.
But FEAR is a TERRIBLE place to parent from. (We say this knowing there are these unrelenting terrible headlines we see…statistics, incidents, media influence, etc…. ) Parent fear feeds into fear in our kids.
Damour says: the best thing we can do for our kids is to be a STEADY PRESENCE. They have BIG, ACUTE emotions and look to us for our reactions. If we have the same reactions, their angst is confirmed. (similar to how we react to toddlers). Don’t react at their level or above. If you’ve never had an adolescent before, you don’t know most of their distress is pretty par for the course. In their eyes, the bombed test or rocky friendship is LIFE.
They need WARMTH & STRUCTURE. They need to feel you love & like them and there’s predictability to their life. Sometimes they float something neutrally to check your response. (Sarah’s mom lets her boyfriend stay overnight…. You: REALLY??! Then they come back with “I know, isn’t that weird?”) They are experts at detecting honesty. They respect it & have high standards.
EMOTIONAL REGULATION IN TEENAGERS
Of course there’s a whole range, but generally you have either an adolescent who kind of explodes and has great highs and lows & is very expressive, OR you have a quiet kind who may isolate or not talk at all.
It’s healthiest to have a bit of both. Emotional regulation is helped by both. You don’t necessarily NEED to express EVERY feeling or annoyance, etc., but you do probably need to do SOME. HOW that gets done varies from kid to kid. Maybe they like to go for a run or sink into a good book. Maybe it’s a long shower or listening to music in their room. Or maybe it’s talking with friends. Music—can work both to express or change emotions.
You don’t really want ALL expression where their emotions are running the show and calling the shots for the whole family. If they’re totally shut down and bottled up, you need to look for ways for expression. We should be watching for the extremes.
The thing parents SHOULD do is have parameters around HOW emotions get expressed. If a kid comes home aggravated by something and lays waste to her brother and the rest of the family, that is not OK. Let things cool off for a minute and then address it. It’s ok to be aggravated & maybe justified – so you can acknowledge that part—but not ok to throw things or damage relationships. Our job is trying to help them express their emotions in ways that don’t do harm or have a cost to themselves or others. (Btw, if WE can’t do this very well ourselves, guess what?)…
***For the most part, their holding capacity for all this is pretty short! They will have breezed by the issue after an hour while you’re still stewing and fuming.
WHEN TO WORRY & some TALKING STRATEGIES
–substances. This is an effective way to tame emotions but not healthy.
–chronic distraction (hours & hours of video games). SO emotionally avoidant. Some distraction ok, but not if it costs them in other areas. This is the measure to watch for.
–Generally, girls collapse in on themselves under lots of distress where boys act out.
Low Hanging Fruit: what are they eating, how are they sleeping, are they moving their bodies. Often, Damour says, she focuses first on sleep before anything else. It’s the glue in a crisis. Parents can work on this at home before or in addition to going to a counselor.
–some kids won’t want to talk when parents want to, but they might do it at night (when your energy is low) or they might text. Give room for this.
–have you (the parent) messed up? (landmines: shared info, dismissed, “told you so” answers, “when I was your age…”)…. Apologize and repair if you need to.
Don’t compare them. Susan’s son is…; your brother doesn’t…….
Tell me more. That’s not like you…what do you make of that? (Talk to the mature side rather than the risky/emotional side)
REMEMBER: all things considered, this is short-lived.
REMEMBER: Single most powerful force for adolescent mental health is strong relationships with adults, so you have to meet them where they are. They need to know you’re SAFE. They need to know you’re STEADY.
Social Media: algorithm driven. They get more of what they search for/like with the aim of getting them to not look away. Teenagers are vulnerable to NORMS. They’re hyper attuned to belonging and fitting in. When they THINK something is a NORM it can be very influential. Example: a little time on their hands, so they search fitness or healthy eating, etc…. algorithm picks that up and floods feed, then you see behavior changes that can lead to wholesale eating disorders. (which is what actually happened during pandemic, when they were isolated and not seeing that it WASN’T norm).
(Damour mentions an older sister alerting parents that brother had gone down a white supremacist rabbit hole and no one was aware of it…it seemed “ordinary” for him.)
It’s very very hard for parents to track and monitor all the things. **NUMBER ONE REC is DELAYING.**. More and more celebrities, tech parents, and others are now starting to unite and come together to delay SM until after high school altogether. Just a phone with calling/text—don’t have to hand over the smart phone with all the apps all at once. Watch the Kate Winslett movie I Am Ruth (HBO Max). Or the Social Dilemma. With your kids.
Especially true for younger teens (12-14) trying to find their place. Get them busy with other things/groups where they can find/relate to friends and other adults (coach, teacher, mentor). Set parameters.
—Worth saying here: if you’re not a parent or not a parent of a teen/adolescent, you can help the greater good here. You can be one of those really interested/steady voices in a teenager’s life. Be the great aunt or uncle, the interested neighbor, the coach or teacher. You can speak into their lives maybe more than parents can in a lot of cases.