Your Teenager’s Really Big Feelings w/ Dr. Lisa Damour

Why are you? In my mind, I want to be the person who has cancer and doesn't run a marathon, Like do I have to work that hard? No, it's the best excuse not to run a marathon. Welcome to go ask Alli. I'm Alli Wentworth. We are dealing right now with a national mental health crisis for teenagers. That's just a fact. I work with such organizations as the Childmine Institute, and suicide rates have skyrocketed, emotional states have plummeted.

Teens are suffering right now, and I think they're suffering for so many reasons for the climate crisis, political unrest, global pandemics reoccurring. Not to mention their own stuff that teenagers deal with just by being teenagers. So I think it's important for us as a collective to understand how teenagers work, how they think, and how to scaffold them

in a very difficult time. You might recognize our guests today, Doctor Lisa Damour, join me during the height of the pandemic in the first season of Goask Galley to talk about teens under pressure. So as a reminder, Doctor Damour co hosts the Ask Lisa podcast, writes about adolescents for The New York Times, appears as a regular contributor to CBS News. Is recognized as a thought leader by the

American Psychological Association, and works in collaboration with Unisuff. She's the author of two New York Times bestsellers and her brand new book out this week, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, Raising Connected, Capable and Compassionate Adolescence. I'm so glad she's here. Just a quick heads up that we talk about the current adolescent mental health crisis at the beginning of the episode.

Suicide and suicidal ideation are part of that. If you'd like to avoid that part of the conversation, please get ahead to the five minute point now. Hello, hi Aley, you are the perfect guest for me today because not only did I read your book, but I have a seventeen year old who before Christmas came home and said, somebody in my peripheral social circle jumped off a building

in New York. And then this morning I got a text from her and she said, another person in her peripheral social circle who's at boarding school, killed themselves today. And one of the questions I've been asking some of my close female friends lately is did we not notice it as much when we were younger because of the Internet. Now are we much more aware of this? Or are we in a mental health crisis right now with our

teens and people are actually taking their own lives? Okay, so we're just gonna hit the ground running, right, Welcome to go. Ask Allie. Absolutely, and I'm so glad, No, I really am so suffering is not new, and I think you are right that in the past there were probably a significant percentage of suicides that no one ever knew were suicides, that it was not talked about as much,

that it was cloaked much more. And there has absolutely been an important and helpful move away from not talking about suicide when it happens, and really trying to be more and obviously in the name of trying to help people who are suffering know that they can should get help. We are also side by side without seeing an uptick in suicides. And the problem with the suicide data it takes a very long time actually for suicide data to be delivered, so we were seeing an uptick before the pandemic.

There's a whole lot of questions about the impact of the pandemic on adolescent suicidality that are largely unanswered. And so I think then to answer your third question about like, are we in a mental health crisis, that for sure yes, yes, that for sure yes, And I want to actually just

unpack a couple sides of that crisis. So one element is that the pandemic was horrible for everyone, and horrible for teens in a very specific way, in a very universally specific way for teenagers, which was, you know, teenagers have two jobs. One is to become increasingly independent and the other is to spend as much time as possible with your friends. And the pandemic hamstrong both of those jobs. So it doesn't matter who you were as a teenager,

very few teenagers enjoyed the pandemic. Many of them suffered greatly through it, and then of course some suffered enormously through it for any variety of reasons. So that has contributed to a very worrisome rise in adolescent mental health concerns, no question. I mean so much so that the Surgeon General put out a special report on it, which isn't

something that typically happens. One of the things that I think as we talk about crisis, one of the things that we also want to address is we don't really have the workforce to care for all of these teens having all sorts of significant mental health problems. Treating teenagers is actually highly specialized work, is actually pretty rare work, not that many of us do it, and so we have this sort of double whammy of this huge uptick

in adolescent distress. And it's not like, I mean, even people with tremendous resources, much less, people who do not have access to tremendous resources are having a very hard time finding care for their kids. And so it's bad enough to the teenagers suffering, but it's made much worse by the fact that getting good care for your kid is actually very, very hard and so then parents are sort of left looking at their kid thinking, my kid is really having a hard time. I'm on a waiting list.

I can't get them in, And so I don't use the word crisis lightly. I actually tend to be on the side of offering reassurance. But we have ended up in this real kind of the crosshairs of increased out of lescent distress and then not enough clinicians to treat them. And the reality is, not only is it specialized work, it takes a long time to get good at it, Like I mean, to get trained teach to take care

of teenagers takes a long time. So it's not like we can suddenly, like magically increase the percentage of clinicians who take good care of teenagers. You know that that takes a decade to make happen, or twenty years to make happen. So that's where we're finding ourselves. And it's really scary, the flip of it. Just so that we

don't feel like we're lost in the Miyer here. Part of why I wrote this book is that I know from nearly thirty years of treating teenagers that the adults in their immediate environment can do so much to support and protect adolescent mental health. And I have to tell you, Ali, we are not going to find our way out of this mental health crisis for teenagers by suddenly getting more teenagers into more therapy for all the reasons I just mentioned.

We're going to find our way out of this by improving the quality of the relationships between teenagers and the adults in their immediate environment. And that's why I wrote this book, which by the way, is crucial, I think, because they're in the home with these adults and these people, and there's no handbook for it, certainly not for parents, but there's much needed understanding. And my favorite word with teenagers is scaffolding. That needs to be done. And so,

first of all, thank you for writing this book. And let's get into a few of the things that you talk about, because they're they're all incredibly important things. One of them you write about, emotion is the enemy of reason. Well, so I write about that is actually one of three

myths that circulates about emotion. And one of the things that inspired me to write the book was an awareness of how much misunderstanding there is about distress in general, and adolescent distress in particular, and we have found ourselves as a culture I think, terrified of teenagers being upset, which I understand how we got there. It's not a great position to parent from, because if you know a teenager, you know they get upset, like yes, on a regular basis,

if not several times. It's very emotional. Yep. I mean, the jokes are endless about you know how horrible teenagers are so yep and so and so. Then that doesn't help us if we're scared of how intensely emotional they are. So one of the myths that I tackle right out of the gate is that emotion does not often undermine reasoning, Emotion usually supports reasoning, and that we don't have to be scared of our kids emotions in terms of thinking

like it's going to make them make terrible decisions. What I offer in the book is a metaphor I learned from a colleague of my name, Terry, another psychologist, who says, you know, here's how we should think about emotions. Each of us has a personal board of directors, and emotions get one seat on our board of directors. Would you allow me to read this because I have it? Book

barked I would love it, okay. So, according to Terry, when it comes to decision making, we ought to view our emotions as occupying one seat on our personal board of directors. Other spots in the board might be held by ethical considerations, our personal ambitions, our obligations to others, financial or logistical constraints, and so on. Ideally, these board members will work together to help us make careful, informed

choices about how we conduct our lives. In this metaphor, emotions have a vote, though it's rarely a deciding one, and they definitely don't share the board. Yep, And I think that I want really in writing this book, Alley, my goal is like, let's bring negative emotions back into the fold. They have a place in our lives. They are unavoidable, They're happening whether we want them to or not.

And really figure out how they serve us, how they actually often promote good thinking, how they often promote maturation and adolescence. To really move us out of like kind of being crouched in a defensive posture of like please don't let my kids get upset, I want us to think about where does negative emotions fit into the lives

of our teenagers and actually ourselves. And then my goal in the book is to give parents like just tons and tons of strategies to help their kids when their kids are having negative emotions, but not to help parents prevent or quickly dispel negative emotions. Right, And you talk also about teenagers trusting their gut, because it's actually something I've used in my parenting with my kids, because I never wanted to instill the idea that you don't know

anything you're a teenager. You listen to me, you know, I know, I know. In fact, my children have great instincts. They can figure out if something's dangerous or unsafe or etc. Etc. And so I love that you talk about it in the book, But tell me more about teenagers trusting their gut. Well, so that's you know, bringing this board member in, listening to what this board member has to say, paying attention to it, and like you say, really empowering adolescents like

tune into yourself. You've got good instincts, pay attention to those instincts, and we can count on those almost all the time with teenagers. Okay, but here's the limit. And for every myth I offer, I also offer it except for when it's true. Okay. So here is the one thing that is unique about teenagers. Their judgment is compromised far more than child judgment or an adults judgment under situations that are really loaded socially and emotionally, so like

a party. And so one of the other things that I unpack in that section is that you need to think in advance with your kid about the decisions are going to make in charged situations. So if your kid has headed out to a party and you're like, all right, you're going to the party, I'd really rather you not drink, your kid at five o'clock may be like, I am definitely not going to drink. That is definitely my plan,

and they are telling you the truth. That same wonderful young teenager may get to the party and like the kid they have a crush on his drinking, and the kid they have, you know, they want to hang out with his drinking and they may very well join in. So what we want to do is make a distinction between what we call cold cognition conditions, which is like the light of day and in your kitchen and talking to a grown up under not charged emotional moments, and

hot cognition conditions, which is at the party. And the bottom line is, if you really want reasoning to look good in teenagers under those really loaded circumstances, they usually need to go in with a plan. And I would say, and I wonder what if you would back me up on this, that when it comes to teenagers, the social life is kind of the overriding thing that sort of controls a lot of their emotions. Because I feel with my teenage girls, either they have social anxiety or they

are consumed with being popular. You know, it all sort of stems around the umbrella of socialization. Are you finding that with teenagers? Yeah? The way I would say it is if a kid doesn't have friends or their social life isn't going well, everything else is going to come second to that. Even if what they've got one really good buddy, that's often enough for kids. Until that's in place,

they can't really focus on anything else. And a kid who doesn't have friends or is in constant social dilemma or drama, that's a situation that needs to be addressed just because it will take up all their bandwidth and it will be absolutely running the show. And talk to me about you talk about difficult emotions are bad for teens. So there's a lot of difficult emotions that teta. Okay.

So that's the second myth, Yes, And the reason I put it in in that way is that I started to detect something in my clinical work and my conversations with parents that I thought, is this really there? But it really was there, which is I started to hear from parents a sense that painful emotions would damage their kid, that if their kid was deeply distressed, that would somehow do lasting harm to their child. You know, certainly a lot of what teenagers do can look like that, even

though it is actually not doing damage. So, you know, I think about, you know, those moments like when our daughters are thirteen, right, thirteen is so powerful, right, And I have been with you know, my kid, you know, other people's kids when their thirteen year old is like totally beside themselves, like sobbing, like bent over, doubled, you know, curled in a fetal position on the floor, often over things that you know, a week later you're like, I

don't even remember what it was, and the kid doesn't remember what it was. But in the moment, it is harrowing. It is terrifying to the kid, and if you love that kid, it is terrifying to you. And so I get it. My parents think like, this can't happen, that cannot be good for my kid. That must be harming

my kid to be at that level of distress. And what I want everyone to know is, for the most part, teenagers are actually built to handle a very high level of distress, even curled on the fetal position, in a fetal position on the kitchen floor level of distress for most kids most of the time, and that adults don't need to be worried that that's going to harm or damage their kid. Most kids have ways to get themselves

through it, take the benefit of our comfort. Psychological defenses can kick in a healthy way to actually help to bring it down a few notches. But it's very scary if you, as a parent, think my kid can't get there because they will be permanently harmed. Now there is a line, and so here's the It's not true until it is right. So it's not true that emotions harm kids until they do. And the line that we cross

is under conditions of trauma. So trauma does damage, and trauma is when people face an emotional experience that is so overwhelming that it blows their coping out of the water, that it's shattering to them. Trauma is rare comparatively, but it occurs. And so what I detail in that section is, you know, most of the time, even when your kid is super upset, you don't need to be worried as a parent. It's not fun to watch, it's very painful, but you don't need to be worried about lasting damage

up to the line of trauma. If psychologists could get rid of all trauma in the world everywhere, we would in a minute. And so that's what parents need to be paying attention to. And I think that the distinction I'm always pushing on is is your kid very uncomfortable

or are they in a situation that is unmanageable? And we as parents are most useful to our kids when we are making that distinction and can recognize my kid is super comfortable, but it is not unmanageable, and then letting that unfold with our loving support as opposed to jumping in and trying to prevent any distress. Well, the biggest thing I see with parents is they want to fix it in the moment they want to make it okay.

I will call that mother and I will ask or why you weren't invited, or you know, all the many parenting fails. I particularly see that with fathers. They just want to fix it and make it okay immediately. And the other thing I've noticed with adults is they internalize it.

Now that could be because there's something in their past that it provokes, but they internalize whatever their teenagers going through and it starts to affect them emotionally, which I have in my twenty years now of being a parent, I have learned to not internalize it because I can't be going through it vicariously while my teenagers going through it. But it's a very hard thing to separate, it is.

And there's that old saying, you know, you're only as happy as your least happy child, and I think that's a saying for a reason. You know that we love our kids, and when they're in distress, we're in distress too, And so I think what you're laying out though, that it's better if we can maintain a little distance. I think it's true. And let me give you some reasons

for that. Number one, just for our own ability to get through our day and do our jobs and all the things we mean to do, like we need to be able to function. Also, at least as important to that, though, is our kids need to see that we are not as flipped out about it as they are. You know, say I'm fifteen and say something really ruined my day, and I come home and I'm like, oh my gosh,

you're not going to believe what's happening. And I describe what's happening, and my parent meets me right, there is as upset is is grabbing for the phone. Everything you describe the experience for the teenager is, oh my gosh, I came home thinking I had a fifteen year old sized problem and it turns out I have a fifty two year old sized problem. Like that's scary. Yeah. So what I would say is, sometimes i'm parenting we are faking it. And by faking it, I mean we're faking

common right that we're actually pretty stirred up inside. But I will say, do what you can to try to be a steady presence for your child, so you're not diminishing their distress, you're not minimizing it. You're not telling them to just pull it together. Try to be a steady presence, either all the way to the core or at least on the outside, so that your kid doesn't have that added layer of thinking. This is even worse than I thought, because my mom, who has seen it all,

is freaking out. This must be really bad. Right, There's a lot more to come after the short break, and we're back in your opinion, our adolescents fragile emotionally. I mean, you seem to think they're pretty resilient. I do. And that's the third myth, right, that emotional is fragile, right, And I think that that's so hard as a parent of a teenager, because they are so up and down, and their ups are so high and their downs are so low, that it's very easy to look and think

like that person does not seem psychologically stable at all. Right, And what we want to make the distinction between is emotional and fragile. These are two different things. Most teenagers

are just really emotional, that's how they're built. Some teenagers are fragile, and we should worry that a kid is fragile if they are coping with emotions in ways that are just destructive, if they have experienced trauma, which is a shattering experience if they are isolated and alone and unable to process their feelings in any way that is useful. There is fragility in the world of adolescent emotion, but it's rare, and most kids just have really big feelings

that kind of rock the whole house. Sometimes I wonder, now, like in our culture, are we throwing too many drugs and sort of faux coping things at our kids. I find that kids that are just hormonal or dealing with, you know, teenage angst, suddenly everybody's on antidepressants or ADHD medicate, Like, have you found that that our culture is quick to medicate what could be just emotional teenage stuff. What we know is that we sort of over medicate and we

under medicate. That there are kids who are getting more medication than they need, and their kids who really deserve good psychiatric treatment and are not getting access to it.

One of the things I lay out in the framework of the book is a concern that we as a culture have become pretty terrified of negative emotions, and I think, you know, I lay out sort of my reasoning for why I think we got there, One being that we do have access now to a very wide range of medications that are supposed to and often do help with mood. And I do not think this is the only reason. And I will say I'll be the first to say that medications can and do save lives, and we could

not actually work clinically without them. But I when I look at the numbers in terms of how quickly they rose for the use of psychiatric medications, especially when prozac became available and was vastly more safe than anything before it, I do worry that contributed to a sense of your distress. We can make it go away. And the other place where I really point the finger is actually the wellness industry.

I worry that the wellness industry has, either deliberately or not, but somehow shared with our culture of the message that there is some zen out there that you can get to and stay at, and if you just have all the right practices or products or oils or apps or whatever, that they can actually keep you from feeling distress. And

that is not true. The impact on adolescence, though, is that I now take care of teenagers who feel like they're failing a wellness when they're actually just having a really bad week, and that's not helping them that I'm guessing, particularly with girls, because girls are so there's body image, there's and then of course, you know, we could do eighteen hours on technology, so then they're seeing on Instagram that if you're having a eucalyptus bath, you're going to

be okay. It's interesting. I haven't thought about the wellness industry, So let me go to gender, because there is a difference between female and male adolescents and what they deal with individually, you know. So what's interesting to write about gender these days because the way kids talk and think about gender is very different from how our generation talks

and thinks about gender. And you know, there's a part of me that's like, does it even make sense, you know, to sort of lay out these gender differences we see in terms of the experience and expression of emotion. But the fact of the matter is that we do continue to have patterns along which we socialize boys and girls in terms of their experience and expression of emotion. We

continue to have rules for the expression of emotion. Boys, especially police the heck out of each other about what they are and are not allowed to express, and these very much impact the lives of kids, regardless of how they dinner gender identify right, that they are still swimming in a soup where girls and women are allowed to feel vulnerable and anxious and boys and men are allowed to feel tough and you know, tough and angry, right, And that shapes our world and shapes how we parent,

and we need to be mindful of it. I will say my favorite Like, sometimes psychology findings just like amuse me tremendously, and there was one that I just I was like, I was like, I love this. I also loved that someone thought to ask. So one of the findings I came across I didn't know that until I was researching the book is that when they're younger, boys express more anger, but an adolescence, actually girls express more

anger than boys do. But there's one form of anger where girls are always ahead of boys, and it's in their expression of disdain. As the mother or two daughters, I was like, that's amazing, right, as a mother of two daughters. Yes, that's interesting. Yeah. And then you know you talked too about not only gender bias, but race gender bias as well, because we in the past, certainly when I was growing up any book on parenting or adolescence was very very generalized. You know, it was just

like all adolescens this adolescence that, But it's not true. Absolutely. So one of the things I spent time on in the book is the adultification of black adolescence that we, yes we meaning largely white audiences, white viewers, White people tend to view Black adolescence is older than they are, and then there ends up being this particular gender breakdown

about what that means. So what we see from study after study is that we tend to view black boys as being somehow more dangerous or more aggressive, less endowed with childlike innocence, less deserving of protection, and we tend to view black girls as being more sexual or sexualized. And this has, you know, an extraordinarily sort of specific form of racism that unfolds and has extraordinary impact on

black teenagers. Yeah. Well, it's interesting because I have a friend who's married to a black man and has biracial kids, and she says, how I parent my black sons is very different from my white friends and their sons. She said, there, you know, racism is so prevalent, but I have to teach him other things that a white parent doesn't have to.

I have to teach my sons when a cop pulls you over, you keep your hands on the steering wheel, or people will cross the street at night, and these are all the things, And she says, I have to educate my boys that way. I'm not doing them any service by pretending that is not a glaring part of

our culture. Absolutely, And I spent time in the book researching and then writing about what parents of black teenagers called the talk, which is what you're describing right, the conversation where they have, you know, say, looky, you may be doing something totally ordinary and benign. Your life may be on the line if the wrong person season gets

the wrong idea about it. And the chances of that happening because of the color of your skin are actually accelerated and high, and you need to do everything in your power to stay safe. And I felt so humbled and aware of how I cannot really fathom what it is like to be on either side of a conversation with a young often these are young teenagers about this year.

You know, potentially lethal outcomes of walking down the street with your friends, and how do how do black girls, black adolescents push up against this bias that we have. I mean, there are role models, you know, there are great women like Michelle Obama that you know, are a lot more prevalent in our culture. Yeah, I feel like it's really on white people. Yeah. I feel like the solution is a white person's job. Yeah, I mean, I

really do. And and it was interesting, Alie. I was working on the discussion guides, you know, I write discussion guides to go with the books, and you know, I just if you're a black family, you know, did this feel like you did justice to your experience? And if you're a white family, what are you doing about this? Yeah? So I'm hoping that it flusters wonderful, wonderful discussion about whose job it is to address racism? Right? Risk seeking? That is the biggest I think one of the biggest

issues with adolescence. You know, one of the fears with teenagers is and this kind of goes with trusting their gut, is that they have no they have this invincibility that they're going to make bad decisions, that they're going to be in harm's way all the time. So teenagers, much more than kids or adults, are drawn to novelty and excitement.

It's just how their brains are made. They're just they're looking for something kind of new and fun, and unfortunately, new and fun can be something like skateboarding, which would be on you know, a great version of new and fun, or it can be something like a drug or you know, driving really fast. You know. So is this about boundaries. It's about understanding boundaries. It's about being realistic about how

teenagers are built. And I also think though, it's about giving them ways to satisfy that drive towards novelty and excitement. Kids do need opportunity to do things that are novel and exciting and maybe a little bit thrilling and maybe even feel as much as the parent can stomach like a little bit dangerous, like you know, like skateboarding or like you know, getting into a sports it feel like

they've got some kind of thrilled to them. But we also really want to be realistic that we want to do what we can to supervise the scary stuff, and that supervision matters. That when we look across societies and cultures, what we see is that teenage brains are changing in the exact same ways across all cultures, But you don't

see giant shifts in accident rates in every culture. In cultures that are more constrained, that have more supervision, where the norms are different, teenagers don't have the same kind of frightening outcomes that we sometimes hear about in the US. So how we supervise kids, the expectations we set matters. But more than anything, I think how we talk with kids about risk is something that we want to be very,

very mindful of. And my general advice, and I can spend this in forty directions, but here's the general advice. Say to your kid, don't worry about getting caught, like the chances of us catching you are actually pretty low. Worry about getting hurt, right that you really want the emphasis to be on whether or not they are safe, not whether or not they're going to get away with it.

And I think sometimes adults unwittingly get the conversation going in the like don't let me catch you, you know, direction, to which she is like bango, check, yeah, I won't let you catch me exactly. So really, safety goes everywhere your kid goes. And so even in raising my own adolescence,

you know, when they would come home. When I remember my eighth grade daughter when she was like, she's now in college, but when she came home, she's like, yeah, you know, some kids are starting to smoke some weed. And I would say, oh, man, that makes me so worried for them from the neurological standpoint, right like, because yeah, that's going to go with them everywhere they go, caught

or not caught, like they have that problem. And I think the more that we can just always center our concern on safety, not getting busted right, making us look bad as parents, you know, any of those things. It's funny because I sort of fell into this way of dealing with it with my own daughters, which was I told them stories about myself, you know, and I said, oh, I was. It was I was at boarding school and I needed attention, and I, you know, the older, mean girls.

I was trying to impress them. And so I took a dare and I hitchhiked on the Massachusetts Turnpike in my nightgown. And you know, my daughters were horrified. They're like, oh my god, that must have been so scary. And I said, you know, it wasn't scary at the time because I felt like, just had this idea nothing bad would happened to me and I could just do whatever I want. And I was my drive to prove to these girls that I was cool was much stronger than the part of my brain that said this is really

stupid and unsafe. And so I would tell them these cautionary tales and they were they were like the parents going, that is so dangerous, you know, even smoking cigarettes. They're like, I can't believe you smoke cigarettes. That's so stupid, mom, why would you? And so I sort of discovered a way in and by the way, there's a plethora of things. I didn'ts it, but we got a lot to work with you. Yeah. So, because I didn't want to be the parent that was like, don't you do this, don't

you do this? I decided to go Listen, I did it, And boy am I lucky that I'm standing. Yeah. Well, and that's the thing, because you're not saying, boy am I lucky? Nobody caught me like, boy, I'm lucky at and get hurt, right, and that like, as long as the center is on safety, the conversation is neutral and it's not about you know, whether or not a grownup knows you're doing it, which you know, what I find is the less mature kids are like, I don't know,

can we get away with it? You know? And that's not how you want your kid reasoning. I mean, again, these are my kids, and it worked for them. But I never gave them a curfew. And I said, because I felt like I was immediately saying I don't trust you, you better be back here by midnight because I don't trust you and you're gonna do something wrong. And I said, look, I'm not going to give you a curfew. You instinctually should know when a good time to leave whatever you're

doing is. You should also feel what the right time is where you're not in danger. We live in New York City, so you know, leaving at two o'clock in the morning, it's probably not the safest time to look for a cab or take the subway. So and again, these were risks for me as a parent because I didn't know how they were going to play out. But I wanted to approach parenting with the idea that we were kind of all in it together and that I

initially trust them with everything. I think the instinct behind that is so good because what you're basically saying is when I'm not with you, you're in charge of your safety. Like there's nothing I can do from where I sit to keep you safe. You're You're the one. And that's what we want teenagers to think when they're out and about is I'm in charge of my own safety, Like I have to make choices that are going to keep myself safe. Yeah, and it's time for a short break.

Welcome back to go. Ask Alli, I wonder how teenagers feel, you know. I know parents that track their teenagers, you know, on their phones. They know where they are at all time. I mean, do teenagers feel safe knowing that their parents are tracking them or is that just another thing that they're trying to pull one over. Well, I'll tell you on the top of tracking, I think it's one of the most polarizing and olive parenting right their parents who

were like, why would you ever do that? And their parents who were like, why would you not do that? And they are strong in their views. It really is. It's really powerful. So from the safety perspective, it's a mixed picture. Right. So the times when I have seen it work well in families is when the kid is okay with it and on board with it, because if kids don't want to be tracked, they can just like turn off their phones, re leave their phones somewhere, or

you know. I mean, like, yeah, there's lots of ways kids get around it. But I have seen kids use it when they are like, come get me, and they just send their parents their location or the parent can just look up the location very quickly, and so it can be part of a partnership of safety with the parent.

I've actually cared for kids where the kid actually had a significant medical concern, either a very significant allergy or type one diabetes or something like that, and tracking was a key part of making sure that kid was safe because if the kid wasn't responding. What I worry about with tracking, and this gets back to where we were talking, is it muddies the question of who keeps that kids safe when that kid is not with you, And I worry that it somehow might suggest to the kid, no,

I got you tracked, I'm watching you. That doesn't make the kids safe. But you're at home, the kid is wherever they are. When the kid is not with you, they are in charge of their safety. And if your kid cannot manage their safety when they're not with you. They probably shouldn't be out and about going to unsafe places, Like I think that we want to keep it there. It feels like you have a baby monitor, but the baby's twenty blocks away with the curtain string around its neck.

What are you doing twenty blocks away? Yeah? It seems a fool's errand yeah, yeah, but I sympathize with both sides. I really do. And I'll tell you one thing I've learned Alie is a lot of kids track their parents. You know, a lot of kids actually want to know where their folks are. And so in the families that I've talked to, the parents like, well, at track her, but she tracks us Like they want to know where their parents at work, at home, coming home soon. So

it's it plays a very fascinating dynamic and family life. Yeah, I don't. We don't get tracked. We get a lot of texts where are you are you home? What are you doing? Are you going out to dinner? Yeah, so there's there's at least an interest in where we are or what we were doing. Um, you talk about sleep, and so I feel like hormones are a big part of what's going on without a lescence. But I also think sleep is. And one of the arguments I used to have with my husband was our eldest daughter needed

a lot of sleep. She needed sleep because her brain was tired, because she's anxious, because she needed to socially recharge. Whereas my husband was like, Okay, it's been eight hour, it's like time to get up, go for a walk, do your homework. That the so tell my listeners your feelings about sleep. So, first of all, teenagers on average need nine hours of sleep at night. Good. I won that argument. You want you're right, You're right the whole time.

Here's a deal on sleep. It can feel so boring to bring it up, and it can feel so unfriend to make an issue of sleep when we talk about emotions, but it is the clue that wolds human beings together. And then one of those studies I quickly described in the book is like and it's a very easy study to do. They know, they took a bunch of teenagers, they let them sleep a whole bunch, and then they had their parents raped their mood in the subsequent days.

They took a bunch of teenagers, they let them sleep six hours a night, and they had their parents raped their moods in the subsequent days, and of course the kids who had not slept, they were snarky, they were unhappy, they were held together with scotch tape. They were falling apart. We know this. So if your kid is really it's funny. In my family, my husband called it ropey, meaning like at the end of their rope, you'd be like, oh man,

she's really ropey. Put her a bit. If your kid is really ropey, your first question should be how much sleep are you getting? And if it's not nearly enough, start there and I will tell you clinically, Ali, I actually cannot evaluate somebody in my practice until I know they're getting enough sleep, because sleep deprivation looks like cayang ziete, it looks like depression, it looks like, you know, all

sorts of things. And so I really will make sleep a priority from a sheer like diagnostic standpoint, like that's the only way I can figure out what's going on. So sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, bleep. It's the place to start. If your kid is having a hard time, and if they're not sleeping, you need to look into it because there are maybe a problem. Yeah, and it's interesting. I was talking about it with a clinical colleague the other day about you know, the importance of sleep and and

she made an excellent point. She was saying, you know, it's interesting, like you'll take someone into your practice, you'll discover they're not sleeping, and you'll make sleep, you know, a priority. And some people they realize it's important and

they're able to suddenly make it happen. Some people actually can't make it happen, and then that becomes the focus of the clinical work, like what is getting in the way of you being able to fall asleep or to do the things during the day that are necessary to allow sleep. So it's really a question of how much support is needed to sleep happen. And some kids may just need a nudge and some kids may need it

a full on, you know, serious program. Yeah, but the bottom line is sleep's got to happen before anything else is going to happen. Yeah, I mean, sleep is as vital as food and oxygen. Absolutely opening up. So the biggest issue I think parents have with adolescence is they don't open up to me. I can't talk to them all this information in Lisa's book is amazing. But I can't get my kid to talk to me. I call

it the fines. Everything's fine, fine, fine, What is the best approach to get your teenager to talk about anything? About anything? So for kids who don't talk because other parents will be like, oh my god, my kid tells me everything's overwhelming, I'm you know, but I really do feel like there's a couple of camps here. Yes, there is, and there really is the like I can't get an answer. I have one of both. Yeah, it's fascinating. Here's the

rule ali to meet them on their terms. You got to be willing to talk when they want to talk. And one of the things I talk about in this book, which I discovered quite by accident and have since discovered to be entirely universal almost to families facing teenagers, they want to talk when we're in bed. Ye, your kids do this. Yeah, but like you know, like you might ask all the best questions at dinner and they shake you off, shake you off, Fine, fine, fine, Okay, you're

finally in bed. You're finally shutting it down. This happens in my home too, And suddenly like there your kid is and you're like why now, And then they are talking and talking and talking, and in my own home, my husband's like, go to sleep, and I'm like, sh it's our moment. So one of the things I unpack in the book is like, why do they do this? Yeah, And the reason they do this is that teenagers at their marrow want to be autonomous. They don't want to

be working on our timeline and our agenda. Like that is the nature of being an adolescent is you're driving towards independence. And this these late night visits allow them to satisfy both the wish to be on their own agenda and their wish to connect deeply with us. And in the late night visits, they decide if there's going to be a visit and what time it's going to start. They decide what the agenda will be. Because here's what I have also learned universally, we do not bring up

new topics at that time of night. We do not ask a lot of questions at that time and night. We just let them talk. Right. Actually, had to kids say to me, Oh, it's way better to talk to my parents at night because they like, don't ask so many questions. And I'm like because they're trying to shut it down. Why they're not asking questions exactly. And then when they want the meeting to end, they just walk out or they say, all right, I'm gonna let you guys go to sleep. It lets them be in charge

of the dynamic. And so what I would say to parents of teenagers is you're going to lose some sleep raising an adolescent one way or another. If they want to talk at night within reasonable limits, adapt yourself to that, or go to bed earlier. Don't expect that they're going to want to talk when we want to talk. That's just not how they're built. So adapt to their agenda as much as you can. You know, I get it, like I don't like I want to go to sleep, but I also feel like they're not in your house

that long. Yeah, the time will come when you can go to bed whenever you want. No one's going to walk in. Yep, they are trying to connect with you. Take the invitation a little sleep here. If you knew how many times somebody walked into our room when we were literally the lids are falling and I hear I'm anxious, and I'm like, okay, all right, let me, sit up, buff the pillow. What's going on? What are you anxious about? Ye? So I think that's great advice. I think your whole

book is great advice. I've asked you a million questions about how to deal with her out of lessons, So now it's your time, Lisa. You get to ask me a question about anything. Okay. I thought about this and thought about this. Okay, okay, good. I'm going to give you three. You can choose one. Oh that's not much, I thought, Oh my god, nobody's ever done that before. Thank you. Okay. So I'm a psychologist, so I ask questions for a living right, and often very ones that

are meant to be quite evocative. So I'm going to ask you one that's in the psychology camp, and it is what's your earliest memory? Another one is what's a point in your parenting or a moment in your parenting that you're really proud of? Like you know how we have those moments as parents were were like I really crush that. What's one of those? And then if you're like I don't want to talk about deep psychological things,

here's another thing I think about a lot. If you could only eat one kind of cuisine for the rest of your life, like Japanese or Mexican or Mediterranean? Like what would you choose? Okay, I'm gonna answer all three, Lisa. First, is the earliest memory I have is my parents were divorced when I was one, and my early memories are sort of feeling a little alone and abandoned is sort of a strong word for it. So my earliest memories are when we had a dog, and so I connected

to the dog. The dog was like, now I understand what a an emotional support animal is because I kind of used it as a toddler. And I remember once I must have been four years old, and my dog got hit by a baseball bat and he was fine, but I put him in my bed and put the covers over him and everything, and I slept on the floor like a dog, and I just while I always remember that like it, I was literally curled up like

a dog on the floor. So that kind of informed sort of how I view humanity and animals in general. But I also felt so bad that my dog had been hurt that I had to give him my bit parenting pride. I have to say, there's been a few and there's been more parenting fails, but say, in my fiftieth birthday, my now twenty year old wrote a five page letter to me. First of all, the fact that a letter was even written, that she took the time

to do that, and it is the kindest. It's one of those letters where not only should she get me, but she thanked me for things that I never thought had sunk in. And she talked about how I was as a person and as a mother, and it was so overwhelming and so confirming. And I framed it and it's in my bathroom, so I read it every day. I just it was to me. I went, Okay, I may have done this, that and the other, but you know, this letter is confirmation that I'm not a complete scrow up.

So that was that was it was literally written out and presented to me. Yeah, that was very nice. And the cuisine, I have to say, I love Japanese food. I just love it. Yeah, I do. That's where I usually landed. Yeah, because you know the raw fish thing, if that got old. I love tempora, I love Japanese salads,

I love seaweed. So I think I could live with Japanese food for the rest of my life doesn't mean I wouldn't crave a cheeseburger down again, but if I had to really commit to a cuisine, that would be it. There you go, Yeah, Okay, I love it. Thank you. That was fabulous. Thank you. So recently, I just finished the first season of the ABC show called The Parent Test, which I pushed back on a lot because I think there isn't just one parenting style, you know, It's really

up to so many things. It's up to the environment, the kids. But it did evoke a lot of conversation, which I think is important as parents to have the conversations, and this book will definitely do that. So thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me and for all you do for families. If you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please text or dial nine eight eight on your phone for the Suicide in Crisis Lifeline. Thank you for listening to go ask Alli.

And thank you to Lisa Damore who has written this book, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, which is truly a new handbook on raising connected, capable, and compassionate adolescents. And one of the big things I pulled out of it was that we have to allow our teenagers to trust their own instincts. And there are so many other great tidbits in it. Oh, I'm excited for everybody to read this book. Check out doctor Damour's podcast Ask Lisa and find her

on Instagram at Lisa dot de more. Her new book, As I Said, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers Raising Connected, Capable and Compassionate Adolescent is out this week. And if you want more information on what you've heard on this episode and links to her other books, check out our show notes. Be sure to subscribe, rate and a review. Go ask Alli and follow me on social media on

Instagram at the Real Alli Wentworth. And Now, if you'd like to ask me a question or suggest a guest or a topic to dig into, I'd love to hear from you, and there's a bunch of ways you can do it. You can call or text me at three two three three six four six three five six, or you can email a voice memo right from your phone to Go ask Alli podcast at gmail dot com. And if you leave a question, you just might hear it. I'm go ask Alli. Go Ask Gali is a production

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