Clinical psychologist, parenting expert and New York Times best-selling author Dr. Lisa Damour joins us to explore the emotional lives of teenagers – what’s typical, when to worry and how adults and systems can better support adolescents today. Listen to Dr. Damour’s Ask Lisa podcast for more insights.
Featuring:
Lisa Damour, PhD, clinical psychologist, parenting expert and NY Times best-selling author
Host/Producer: Carol Vassar
Announcer:
Welcome to Well Beyond Medicine, the world’s top-ranked children’s health podcast produced by Nemours Children’s Health. Subscribe on any platform, at NemoursWellBeyond.org, or find us on YouTube.
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
Each week, we’ll be joined by innovators and experts from around the world, exploring anything and everything related to the 85% of child health impacts that occur outside the doctor’s office.
I’m your host, Carol Vassar. And now that you are here, let’s go.
Music:
Let’s go well beyond medicine.
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
So I am fangirling today, everybody, because our guest is a New York Times bestselling author, not once, not twice, but three times. Her name is Dr. Lisa Damour. She is the author of the following books: Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers Under Pressure. And as I was saying to her before we started recording, I said, “I wish you were around 20 years ago when my kids were teens because you are just the calm voice in the storm that is the teenage years.” So welcome to our podcast, Dr. Damour.
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
I am honored to be here. Thank you for having me.
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
So you’ve spent a lot of your career studying the emotional lives of adolescents and children. How do you define adolescence today?
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
Yeah, so interestingly, that has not changed. Well, certainly the beginnings. We have always, as psychologists marked the onset of adolescence around age 11, which is much earlier than people expect, they think teenager, you’ve got till 13, you don’t. You have until puberty is underway with either obviously or internally. It’s underway neurologically sometimes before you can see the body changes, that’s usually right around 11.
The thing that has changed more in recent years is where the back end is. Some people put it around 24, 25 in terms of the completion of the neurological changes that are happening in adolescence, the finishing of the frontal lobe. I like to sort of call it 10 to 20 is sort of where I put it. I think that’s what families can expect. And I’ll say I don’t love it when, and the reason I put it closer to 20 as opposed to 24, I don’t love it when people say, “They don’t have functioning frontal lobes till 24.”
Okay, well, that’s not actually true. Look at the AP papers that high school seniors are writing and tell me that kid doesn’t have a functioning frontal lobe. What it is that the frontal lobe, the breaks, the neurological quieting system, is more easily knocked offline until about 24, 25. But when a 14-year-old is calm, when a 15-year-old is calm and they’re not agitated in a way that can knock that off line, they can outreason adults, they’re perfectly capable. So I think 10 to 20 is how I tend to cast it because that’s when the disruption usually begins, and that’s usually when the disruption tends to quiet down.
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
So, a little bit earlier than one might expect, a little bit later for its end than one might expect.
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
Exactly.
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
Let’s talk about what adults miss. What do we misunderstand about how young people are experiencing emotions in this adolescent period?
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
I will say, let me give you the answer I would’ve given you 10 years ago and then let me layer over what I’m going to add today.
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
Sure.
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
So 10 years ago when I turned Untangled into my editor, the reason I wrote it is that we know as psychologists there is a typical and expectable bumpy path through adolescence that is normal development though challenging, and the aim of Untangled was to lay that out for adults so that they felt like they knew basically what to expect when you’re expecting a teenager. And even though that book centers on girls, 80% of it applies to every single teenager everywhere. And I’ve heard that ever since it was first published. And I actually issued a redone version of the book this year because it continues to sell at a very fast rate. And so I thought, “Well, enough has changed in 10 years that we need a quick update.” So it’s fresh and ready and out there now.
So the answer 10 years ago was that people don’t expect there to be so much disruption in adolescence and don’t know what to make of it. And my goal in Untangled was to say, “Look, this is all the stuff kids are working their way through, parting with childhood, finding new friends, getting a handle on all of the intense emotions that come with being a teenager, just the fact that the emotions are supercharged, contending with adult authority, planning for the future, entering the romantic world, caring for themselves.” This is the chapter titles of the book and the seven transitions. And so the goal then, and it’s still important, is to reframe all of this disruption as typical and expectable, predictable, and that there’s ways adults can interact better and worse with it.
What has changed in the time I’ve been doing this work, I mean, I’ve been doing it for 30 years, but in public for 10, is that the entire culture’s understanding of emotion has become basically confused. And the basic definition of this is we have come to a place where people are pretty freaked out about any uncomfortable emotion, that we are equating psychological discomfort with a psychological problem, and that is not true. It is natural to have anxieties and fears and worries and guilt, and that is all part of what it means to be human. But we’ve come to a place where people feel like, well, if you feel anxious, that means you’re not mentally healthy, or if you feel stress, that means you’re not mentally healthy, and that’s not true.
Mental health is about having feelings that fit what’s happening and then managing them well. And it’s really in the management where we see health or pathology. And so then you bring that misunderstanding that is culture-wide to teenagers, and you have a 13-year-old who walks through the house and has meltdowns like 13-year-olds have always had, but now you have an adult who is looking at that thinking, “Oh my gosh, social media broke my kid.” As opposed to, “Hey, 13-year-olds have had meltdowns forever, and there’s an explanation and there’s a way to handle this that actually works really well for you and that kid.” So it’s changed in the time I’ve done the work.
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
Angst is the price of admission, as you have said.
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
Absolutely. I mean…and another way to think about why with teenagers is that change equals stress. We know that that’s how we think about everything as psychologists. Well, who’s changing more than a teenager? You put an 11-year-old next to an 18-year-old-
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
A huge change.
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
… that’s a lot of change, so it’s just stressful. And that doesn’t mean the kid’s getting it wrong or the adult’s getting it wrong, it just means the kid is growing really fast.
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
As we talk about the idea of mental health in our society, it’s not, and I think you’ve said this, it’s not about feeling good all the time, is it?
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
No.
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
It’s about handling those distressful or stressful situations. If the parents aren’t quite sure how to do it, how can they help the kids do it?
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
Not all that well. I mean, kids watch by modeling. But that framing gets us somewhere, which is, look, the distress is a done deal. You’re going to get upset. Your kid’s going to get upset. Nobody needs to be frankly anxious about that. What matters is what happens next. And so we as adults want to lean into healthy coping, talking to our friends, going for a run, watching a TV show that lets us settle down for a little while, and we want to model that for our kids, and then we want to support our kids in healthy coping. So your kid has a terrible day at school. Well, there’s better and worse ways to handle that. If they want to come home and cuddle the dog until they feel better, that’s a great way to handle it. If they want to never look at their homework, that’s not a great way to handle it. That’s where the rubber hits the road: functioning is not the presence or absence of distress, it’s the choices that we make upon becoming distress that point us towards health or pathology.
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
You culled out that ten-year period, the last decade or so. Two things have happened that pop into my head, and one is the emergence of social media as a cultural force. I want to get to that a little bit later. I want to talk more broadly, though, about the pandemic and how deeply that disrupted every aspect of teenagehood, from school to friendships to milestones for the kids who were teens at that time and the kids who were teens now who were emerging teens and were maybe eight or nine when it started. Talk about the pandemic’s effect on teen development.
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
Sure. Well then, let me throw one more factor in there: the emergence of a wellness industry. Wellness did not use to be a thing, and it has become a massive multi-billion-dollar industry in the same time period. So that is another force at work here.
So the pandemic was so hard on teenagers, teenagers, two jobs to become as independent as possible, and to spend as much time with your friends as possible, and the pandemic just capped them on those things. And so we’ve seen kids where they did miss some developmental milestones and they did miss frankly the atmospheric pressure of being around their peers and at school with their teachers and then learning how you’re supposed to do school and how you’re supposed to be a member of a community from just the day-in-day-out practice of being at school and being a member of one’s community.
And so I would say by now, most kids have recovered. Most of it, kids have fallen back onto the normal developmental trajectories; that said, a lot of kids missed a lot of school and didn’t go back. We are continuing to see incredibly high absentee rates even now, and that is wildly concerning. So we saw that, we were also seeing kids who don’t go as far away to college as they used to. This is a national trend. Kids are staying closer to home. I think, though, in terms of zooming out, broader impact, that rocked us all, right?
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
Oh, absolutely.
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
It rocked us all. And I don’t know that anyone has ever really integrated it. You wake up one day and you’re living one life, and then I think everybody’s experiences within 24 hours, they’re living a totally different life for more than a year. I mean, a really, really severe change. Unfortunately, that fell on the fertile ground of people already thinking, “I’m supposed to feel good. The wellness industry has told me that there’s some emotional zen out there, and if I just can get there, I’ll be great.”
Then the pandemic comes along, everybody feels incredibly lousy, as they should, and then there is this sense of, “But I’m not supposed to feel this way.” Well, actually, you are. It’s miserable, but it’s a sign of health when under crisis, you’re feeling a lot of distress. That’s the right reaction. Again, it comes down to coping, whether it’s healthy or not, in terms of the outcome. But I think that all of these forces came together, the wellness industry telling us we’re supposed to feel good, a pandemic making us feel really awful, and everybody suddenly feeling like garden-variety distress is somehow not an okay thing.
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
A lot of people said that social media kept us connected, but I would argue differently. What are your thoughts?
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
Social media is quite the can of worms. I think it’s interesting, one of the reasons I issued an updated version of Untangled is that social media was around 10 years ago when I wrote the first version of the book, first edition, algorithms were not.
And when we talk about social media, what we need to be talking about actually are the algorithms and what we need to be talking about are the fact, is the fact that it’s all about money, it’s all about money and the more time that we spend looking at our devices, the more money the companies who are driving those platforms make and we have no evidence that they will put the well-being of the user ahead of their bottom line. Whether that user is an adult or an adolescent, we have no evidence that they’re going to go out of their way to protect the well-being of the people who are using it if it’s going to cost them money. And that’s a problem. That is a problem that it’s unregulated because we cannot, given the evidence we have so far, we count on the companies who create these products to think about the health of the user.
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
What’s a parent to do? The screens are everywhere.
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
So first of all, I wouldn’t freak out too much, to be honest. I think that it’s gotten a lot of traction as a risk factor for teenagers. When we actually look at the data cold and hard…if you did a pie chart of all of the things that affect adolescent mental health, social media is a comparatively small slice of the pie. There are other things that are much bigger, mostly things families control, like life at home, the relationships with their kids, their own emotional health, and their care of their children; those are the major factors in adolescent mental health. So the first thing I would say is, keep it in perspective. It’s a factor, but actually the things… One thing we know is the most powerful force for teenage mental health is strong relationships with caring adults. So don’t I think derail on it.
I think the reality is we want to get there slowly with kids, and I think we want to wait until we trust their judgment before putting an algorithm in front of them because the algorithm does not have their best interests in mind. And I think you can say to kids, “Look, just like you don’t go see R-rated movies when you’re 12. We’re not going to put you in front of an algorithm that’s going to show you all sorts of garbage until you’re a bit older and have some good judgment, and we trust that you can bring to us anything that’s concerning.” I think 14 is a good minimum age for being in front of algorithmic content because 14-year-olds are pretty good and skeptical, but you’ve got to know your kid.
I think the biggest miscommunication around this has been conflating phones and social media, that often those are talked about as one and the same, but they’re not. I have two children. I have a daughter who’s almost 22 and a daughter who’s almost 15. They have had phones since they were in the seventh and sixth grade, respectively, without social media because I want to be able to text them, they want to be able to text me, and they want to be able to text their friends. You can give kids all of the utility and benefits of a phone without simultaneously giving them social media. And I think it’s really important in the conversation about this to remind people of that. And also browsers, a lot of what’s bad for kids shows up when they’re looking at porn on their phone. So I think everybody’s over here talking about the dangers of social media, but giving kids phones with a browser that they really don’t need and where they’re going to find a lot of toxic content that they really don’t need to be seeing, especially at very young ages.
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
I can hear a child, a young teenager, saying, “But mom, everybody else has it.” And my response, and I think the appropriate response is, “You’re not everybody else. You’re my child.”
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
Exactly. Or you can say, “Look, you can text with your friends. I’m all for you being in touch with your friends.” Texting is great JV social media. It doesn’t mean you’re cut off from your friends. I said to both of my kids, “I want you to try to stay connected to your friends by texting alone. If the day comes when all the plans are being made on Snap, we’ll have that conversation, but I’m hoping you’re 15 by the time we’re having that conversation.”
And as long as you give kids ways to be connected with one another, and you can have a good rationale for while you’re waiting on expanding that into social technologies that have algorithms driving them, kids can actually work with you on that. And I think so often the discourse is set up as, it’s the adults trying to stand between kids and all this stuff on their phones.
It is so much more productive to have it be, “Look, kiddo, it’s you and me versus these algorithms. These algorithms are dangerous, and they will take you places you don’t want to go. They will flood your feed with content that is not healthy for you. So I keep my phone over here, and I don’t take it in my bedroom so that the algorithm doesn’t get the better of me. We’re going to hold off until you’re a bit older, you’re going to have all sorts of time limits, not because you don’t have willpower, not because you’re not a fantastic kid, but because this algorithm has so much data on all of us that we are almost at its mercy. So let’s not set this up in a way that you spend time in a way that is not healthy for you.”
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
And that actually hearkens back to something you said earlier, the parents’ greatest gift to a teenager is that steady presence, is that relationship. It’s you and me against the world. What does that look like in practice? You just gave us a great example, but especially when emotions are running high, because teenagers, emotions are going to run high.
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
No, it’s true. Okay, so I think the biggest headline on this, what it looks like is the adult’s job is to try to be a steady presence through all of it, or at least fake being a steady presence. So the kid comes in the house and they failed the test and they’re super upset, it’s not that helpful if the adult hits the ceiling. It’s more helpful if the adult says, “Yeah, you’re super upset. I’m here for you. What’s going to help you feel better? You’ll figure this out. I can help you figure this out. I know you want to make it right, that’s why you’re upset.” That’s what it looks like. It’s not that things don’t go wrong; it’s that when they go wrong, we can try to be a steady presence in the moment. Our kid can feel that we are useful and on their team and on their side, we’re shoulder to shoulder with them as they navigate things.
And even when we have to say no, when a kid is like, “What would you do if I tried weed?” Because they ask questions like that, just say, “Listen, I can’t stop you,” because actually we cannot not actually stop them. But just say, “I don’t want you to, and here is why. Everything we know from the science is that weed and the developing brain are not a good mix. You have one brain for the rest of your life. I want you to take really good care of it. You’ll get to a point where you can make your own choices on this; you actually can already make your own choices. But in terms of your safety and your long-term trajectory, I am on the side of you taking really good care of yourself, and that means not engaging with weed, certainly not now.” So again, we’re on the same tea,m and I’m telling you, I don’t want you to do something.
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
What if the child says, “But mom, I know you used it when you were a teenager.” They’re going to come back with the arguments that they have at hand.
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
That is an interesting thing, right? Well, and sometimes they do know that, sometimes they do know that. And I think, and I actually wrote a piece for the New York Times titled, What to Say When Your Teenager Says, ‘Did you smoke weed?” I mean, they are curious. So if they say, “Mom, I know you used it.” There’s a lot of answers. One is, “Yeah, and I got really lucky that nothing went wrong. And I care for your safety more than anything in the world, and this is a safety and health issue, so I don’t let you do it.” Two, and this is true, it wasn’t a good idea then and the weed was 1/7 as potent as it is right now. We are in a completely new ball game here. I was just reading an academic piece about today’s marijuana, and it was basically saying, “We have no models. We have no understanding. This stuff is so much more intense and powerful than anything we’ve seen before.” But the research we don’t really have new research that reflects how dangerous this stuff is. So that’s a reason.
I think another… You’ve got to know your kid, and you can be like, “Yeah, grandpa and grandma, they’re great, but they were not paying attention. Lucky you, I am on your case, you are not going to be smoking weed.”
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
Oh, the ’70s were a different time.
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
They were. Yes, they were.
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
Yes.
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
We’ve over-corrected, but yes.
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
So let’s talk about when it’s time to bring in professional help, because that emotional dysregulation is a normal factor within the teen years, but how do you know as a parent, a grandparent, an educator, another adult in the teen’s life, what are the signs that say, “I need a little extra help some professional outside help with development here?”
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
Absolutely. Okay, so in my book Untangled, I mentioned the seven tasks that we talked through, at every chapter there’s a section that ends with when to worry, because there’s so much disruption that’s normative that it’s hard to know when to worry. I’m going to sum it up, all the when to worries, I’m going to sum it up in two ways.
One time to worry is if coping is destructive. So as soon as we’re upset, we just start coping. That is the most human thing to do. Sometimes we cope by going for a run. Sometimes people cope by getting high. Sometimes we cope by reaching out to a friend. Sometimes we cope by taking it out on people. If your teenager is chronically turning to unhealthy coping, they’re getting relief, but it’s costing somebody or costing them; that is the time to get help. So if coping is persistently unhealthy, then it’s time to be worried. Substances, mistreating others, taking it out on themselves. I mean, cutting is coping. It’s not healthy coping, but it’s coping, so that’s a really good example.
The other thing to watch for, and this is unique to kids and adolescents in terms of how we define pathology, and this comes from Anna Freud, who was Sigmund Freud’s daughter and who worked out child and adolescent theory very beautifully. You’re looking for an interference with progressive development. So the job of a child and a teenager is to grow and to grow on multiple fronts at once. And Anna Freud articulated what she called developmental lines for younger kids, the things that younger kids are getting good at, managing their bodies, managing their emotions, learning how to make friends, learning how to start to do school. In Untangled, I tried to articulate developmental lines for adolescents, finding friends, harnessing emotions, contending with authority, planning for the future, that’s what… The chapters are the developmental lines of adolescence.
You want to see a kid moving forward on those. If a kid stops or goes backwards for a while, it’s time to be concerned. Now, do all kids march perfectly forward on all lines at once? No, no, no. You see kids who are great at school, but they have a little trouble socially; that’s very common. But if a kid is stopped or falling backwards and falling badly behind their peers on any developmental line, social, emotional, academic, self-care, it’s time to be concerned.
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
If we look at this from a global perspective, are there global truths about adolescence? Is what you’re saying, what you just said, true across all cultures, across the entirety of the world? Are there commonalities when we think about teens, how they feel and grow, regardless of where they live?
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
That’s a great question. So I had the honor of working with UNICEF, which is really one of my favorites, and I can’t believe I get to do it. And one of the things I did with them is they do actually parent education around the world, and they do parent education on teenagers around the world, and we use the Untangled framework to start to sketch out parent education for families in Vietnam, families in the Middle East. I mean, it’s a really interesting thing.
Much of it holds up, not all of it does; the American version of teenagers contending with adult authority is not the Asian version of teenagers contending with adult authority. Different cultures have different understandings about how much kids are supposed to push back on the adults, how much kids are supposed to seen as normative or healthy for them to want to push boundaries and do things the adults don’t want them to do. The same with romantic stuff. In the US, we like or expect teenagers to start dating and being interested in romance, but not all cultures see that as something that you do as a teenager.
So there are limitations on the universality of the way we talk about American teenagers in terms of how it applies to kids everywhere. And at the same time, I would say that there are things I laid out on Untangled that are absolutely universal. You need to find friends. You need to be able to manage your big feelings. You need to take really good care of yourself. You need to have a plan for what’s coming next after high school and what you want to do with your life…that there are a lot of things that go down in adolescence that are, I think, truly universal.
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
So some universalities, but some cultural perspectives that might be different, but teens are teens.
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
Yeah, teens are teens.
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
I can’t let you get away without asking about Inside Out 2. You were a consultant on this movie. You worked with Pixar, which dives into adolescent emotions. What was that experience like?
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
Every bit as fun as you might imagine. Here’s what happened: I still kind of pinch myself about this. I got a call in May of 2020 that they wanted to talk. I got on a Zoom with Kelsey Mann, the director, and Meg LeFauve, one of the writers, and they’re sitting there holding Untangled and Under Pressure, so Untangled about adolescent girls and Under Pressure about stress and anxiety in adolescent girls. And they’re like, “We found your work, we want to talk.”
And we started talking. It went on for years. I went out to Pixar a couple of times. I looked at drafts of the film. I worked with, oh my gosh, the most wonderful colleague in the world, Dacher Keltner, who is at Berkeley. He consulted on the first one and the second, and Dacher and I became very close friends through this. And he and I, they’d show us drafts and we’d get on the Zoom and go through the drafts and make suggestions and raise questions. My husband and I got to go to the Hollywood premiere…
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
Oh, wow…
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
And it was a blast. It was a total blast.
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
Did they get it right?
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
Oh, boy, did they. They were so, so earnest about making sure it was accurate. And the it, okay, what’s the it that they got right? First of all, and this ties in with where we started, they treat uncomfortable emotions as natural and helpful. Riley has nine emotions now, only one is pleasant, that is Joy. Everybody else is uncomfortable, they are all seen as essential, part of the team, there to help her, there to guide her. This is how we think about it as psychologists; no one in the culture besides Pixar and psychologists are seeing it this way, but we’re right. So that’s hugely important.
The other thing they got really right is that Anxiety has healthy and unhealthy sides, and Anxiety is a new main character. And there’s times in the film where she’s useful, where she’s trying to keep Riley from doing something dumb, and there are times when she spins out of control, and that’s when we consider it an anxiety disorder. But she’s not always pathological, and she’s kept on the team at the end; she’s seen as a valued member of her mental life.
There was a point… It’s always a risk when you agree to help with these things because you’re like, I’m going to be associated with this thing that may or may not end up reflecting what I believe or what we know. And I almost never want to work with anyone else again because they did such a beautiful job. So this is how specific it got. There is a scene in the film where I think it’s Anxiety who takes all of the original emotions and puts them in a jar and closes the lid to sort of get rid of them. And Fear, who is a wonderful character, says, “Oh my gosh, we’re re…” Well, in the film now, it says, “Suppressed emotions.” And it’s Tony Hale who voices Fear, and I just adore him.
And they showed me the clip, they showed us the clip, and in the original clip, it was repressed emotions. And I said, “Okay, this is a really technical point, repression is generally associated with traumatic events and motivated forgetting of traumatic events, suppression is usually the term we use for just pushing a feeling aside for other reasons. It’s not trauma-associated.” I said, “But you’re not going to get dinged on this by anybody but the most sort of theoretically trained, probably mostly very old psychoanalysts.” They fixed it. They had him come back in and reread the line.
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
Wow.
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
I know. So when you ask if they got it right, it was down to that level of specificity that they made those changes.
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
That’s amazing, and it’s also a tribute to Pixar and to the team that they wanted to get it scientifically and theoretically correct.
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
Yes. I mean, that level of distinction.
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
The devil’s in the details, right?
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
Yep, yep. They got it so right.
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
I want to also mention, you have a fabulous podcast now in its fifth season. Is it the fifth-
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
Sixth season.
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
The sixth season.
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
The sixth season. Yeah…
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
It’s called Ask Dr. Lisa?
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
It’s Ask Lisa-
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
Ask Lisa.
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
… The Psychology of Raising Tweens and Teens. And I do it with a fabulous co-host, Reena Ninan, who’s a journalist by training. And every week we take a letter from a parent and we unpack it, answer it, and it’s a way that we can cover the wide range of stuff that goes on with kids, from stuff as garden-variety as in, my kid got it iced out of her lunch table to, I’m terrified about Fentanyl, which you should be. We cover it all. And the episodes are half an hour, so people can really digest them in the course of a normal day. And it’s our way to try to help as many families as absolutely possible.
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
Highly recommend. Is there one question that stands out as being either difficult or more interesting to answer than any other over the six seasons you’ve done?
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
Well, it’s funny. We got a question about pornography, and I was like, “Reena, we’ve got to answer this.” She’s like, “But really?” I’m like, “Oh my gosh, this is something that families struggle with so much, but don’t want to talk with their neighbors about.”
So we did an episode early on about pornography, it is one of our most listened to episodes that parents, their kids stumble onto porn or they go seek it out, and it really freaks parents out and they’re not sure what to do, and it’s so nice to be able to give them a playbook and there’s no shame, right?
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
Absolutely.
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
They can look for the episode, and they don’t have to tell anybody what happened, and they can help their family.
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
And it comes from a trusted source, two trusted sources. So we’ll make sure we put a link in our show notes to your podcast.
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
Thank you so much.
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
Before you go, real quick, how can parents stay connected? Is there one thing, two things I can do as a grandmother, as a parent, as an educator, to stay connected in a way that’s really meaningful and authentic to help my relationship with my teens or the teens in my life?
Lisa Damour, PhD, NY Times best-selling author:
I will tell you, the number one thing that teenagers love is when adults offer their agenda-less presence when we are around, but not trying to make something happen, not trying to get information out of them or get them to do something. When we’re like, “Let’s go for a walk with a dog.” Or, “Do you want to go see this movie?” Or, “Let’s go buy shoes.” And you’re just together.
And usually, if a kid’s going to open up, they will often open up then. And I think if we ca,n then when they open up, just listen. Not jump in with advice unless they’re asking for it, just listen and validate and empathize. And also, if they don’t open up, not to see that as somehow it didn’t work. I hear from kids all the time that their favorite, favorite time with their family, like their caregivers or their parents, is when their mom or dad will let them choose the music in the car and just drive and listen to what the kid is interested in and be curious about it. That to kids is profoundly connected, and it’s agenda-less and it’s present, and we need to make sure that our script for connection allows for that too.
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
Dr. Lisa Damour is a clinical psychologist, parenting expert, podcaster and New York Times bestselling author.
Music:
Well Beyond Medicine.
Carol Vassar, host/producer:
And this fan girl thanks Dr. Damour for sharing her time and expertise. Find a link to her podcast, Ask Lisa, in the show notes for this episode of the Well Beyond Medicine podcast. And as always, thank you for listening.
From handling your teens to maternal child health, to policy that changes and even improves children’s health, and so much more, we’re talking about it with the experts on the Well Beyond Medicine Podcast. Head over to our website, nemourswellbeyond.org, to find previous podcast episodes. New episodes, by the way, come out every Monday, but you don’t have to remember that. Just subscribe to the podcast at nemourswellbeyond.org or on your favorite podcast app. You can listen via your favorite smart speaker or listen and watch on the Nemours YouTube channel, too. Ideas for podcast episodes are always welcome; email [email protected]. That’s [email protected].
I’m grateful as always to our podcast production team, which this week includes Cheryl Munn, Susan Masucci, Lauren Teta, and Alex Wall. Video production by Britt Moore, audio production by yours truly. Join us next time as we talk with the President of the Commonwealth Fund, Dr. Joseph Betancourt. I’m Carol Vassar, until then, remember, we can change children’s health for good well beyond medicine.
