PODCAST: How to Deal with Disrespectful & Developing Adolescents with Dr. Lisa Damour
Our podcast is usually business focused, but we know there are a lot of moms listening who could use help in the parenting department right now. So we called in clinical psychologist Dr. Lisa Damour to share her incredible insight and advice on how we as parents can navigate our relationships with our tweens and teens and try to make sense of it all. Tune in for Lisa’s tangible tips and some much-needed reassurance that what you’re going through is totally normal. This is an interview you don’t want to miss!
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Lisa talks about children, tweens and adolescents in a way that makes sense for parents.
Our children are our everything and we’re only as happy as our unhappiest child. If you have an unhappy child, it’s really hard to carry on because it consumes you. So laying the groundwork and having this conversation with Lisa is something that we think will help so many women, and the more women we can help - especially in this really hard time - is so important.
People are often looking for advice and ways to help change or shape their children’s behaviour, but we want to know what are some of the missteps we’re making as parents that can cause conflictual feelings or breakdowns in our relationships with our tweens and teens (who we don’t really understand).
Lisa explains the top conflicts that she’s hearing about right now.
The first one has to do with kids and their motivation to do school. Everywhere she goes (and she goes a lot of places virtually now), kids are over it. They have absolutely no motivation for school. It’s not fun, they don’t get any of the perks anymore and they’re tired and sluggish and they complain a lot. So for parents wanting to flip that script, Lisa suggests helping them come up with strategies for doing stuff they don’t want to do. Because any functioning adult woman has a lot of strategies to make us do the things we don’t feel like doing (like bribing ourselves!). Take the shame away from their lack of motivation and up the praise. Even if they’re barely functioning, they’re functioning, so let them know you’re proud of them.
In terms of holding your child accountable for their schooling if they seem to be resisting, Lisa says that for any school-aged child, go with what the teacher feels is working or not working. So if you’re worried your kid is dropping balls and messing up, email the teacher and ask if there is anything you need to know or any way you need to be involved. It is normal and expected for kids to struggle to get their homework in all the time and our teachers have fabulous repertoires for helping kids along. Lisa says you’re doing your due diligence if you let the teacher know you care and you’re ready to step in if they want you to. Much more often than one would ever expect, when Lisa asked kids what they wanted her to tell their parents, they would write her anonymous notes saying they wanted their parents to let them deal with the consequences of their behaviour rather than swoop in and intervene.
Nat heard that one thing teenage girls wish for is more and better communication with their parents, which is the opposite of what it seems like they want. And Lisa believes that this in fact true based on what she has learned through her clinical work. Lisa says teenage girls want our presence and our company, they don’t want us to roll up on them with our agenda. They want our quiet presence and they want to introduce topics and for us to take interest in them. We have to be open to the fact that our idea of connecting and kids’ idea of connecting isn’t always the same thing.
Tweens and teens seem to get so irritated by everything around them and we wanted to know if there was a way to distinguish between disrespect vs. it being developmental. Lisa reassures us that they’ll get through it. It’s good to understand the reason for their behaviour but then you also have to parent through it. The reasoning is that they want to be separate from us, but everything we do falls into one of two categories: we do things that are like their vision of how they want to be (so if we have something in common, it’s a huge problem) or we do things that are different from how they envision themselves. So everything we do falls into two forbidden categories, meaning that they won’t like ANYTHING we do. Luckily, as they get older, they start to become separate in their own right and then they can share things with you and also know they are separate from you.
When dealing with tweens and teens through the ugly phase, one way to parent it effectively is to let them know there are three options for how they can interact with you: they can be friendly, they can be polite or they can tell you they need some space. But they cannot treat you like a punching bag, and the one way to lay the groundwork for that is to be respectful of them.
When asked if we should punish our kids for their salty behaviour or just walk away, Lisa says sometimes you can just straight up ignore it but the challenge is to not hold a grudge. She also offers suggestions for what we can say to them - like we don’t speak that way or I’m going to pretend I did not hear that. We can also ask them to re-set or begin again or try over. There is some balance between showing our kids how the world actually works and being more forgiving and allowing real re-sets so that they can keep trying until they get it right.
Change equals stress. Anytime you go through change, it causes stress. So when a child goes from being a 12-year-old to a 17-year-old, that’s five years of life in which they are changing rapidly, and it’s going to be stressful no matter what you do as a parent.
It’s so important to plants seeds in your children as they grow even if you don’t see the fruits of your labour pay off until years later.
Lisa explains that a kid who is seeking out conflict with their parent would be better off being in conflict with themselves and suggests how we can bring this to their attention in a calm moment.
She assures us that normal development is bumpy and messy and ragged. There is no way to do it without going through it.
Emotionality peaks in teenagers at around thirteen (the girls are on the early side of that and the boys are on the later side). It’s driven by puberty and boys lag a couple years behind girls, so in terms of heightened emotion intensity, boys get there a little later than girls and they’re often not as good at verbalizing what they’re thinking and feeling. They’re often more angry and quicker to impulse and act out. We don’t socialize them to bring as much language to it, which causes us all to suffer. When girls are upset they’re more likely to discuss it, and when boys are upset they’re more likely to distract themselves, and there are positives and negatives to both.
If you sense that something more may be going on with your tween or teen and they don’t want to talk about it, Lisa says that you may not be able to get it out of them based on one of these four reasons explained to her by a group of girls: they either already know what you’re going to say, they think it’s just too complicated for you to understand, they think you’ll blab their secret to someone else because it doesn’t seem like a big deal to you, they’re 90% over the thing that made them upset and re-hashing it with you won’t make them feel better. But you can still be comforting without knowing their situation and that’s often really well-received by kids when we trust that they can handle it without our intervention.
Anxiety is such a new phenomenon for our generation of parenting because when we were growing up, we just had to suck it up. So how do we help our tweens and teens manage their anxiety and how do we understand the difference between what is pathological anxiety and what is healthy anxiety? Healthy anxiety corresponds to a threat and actually helps keep you safe and is good for you. Unhealthy anxiety is when you’re anxious but nothing is wrong (or it’s within the range of what you should be able to handle in life) or it’s when your anxiety is way out of proportion to what’s wrong.
There are two things you can do when your child says they’ve got anxiety: you can ask them to tell you more about the situation and help them use different words for how they’re feeling about it (apprehensive, nervous, worried, excited, etc.) or if they’ve asked to get out of something because it’s causing them anxiety, you can explain to them that avoidance actually feeds anxiety. They can slowly inch their way towards something they fear, but they can’t run from it.
As for tips to get through the "Sunday Scaries,” Lisa recommends taking a pass at it on Saturday and prepare for it in advance.
MORE ABOUT LISA DAMOUR:
Lisa Damour is a mom of two daughters and a clinical psychologist who works largely on kids and adolescents and focuses much of her work on girls. Lisa has written two New York Times bestsellers, Untangled and Under Pressure, and writes the monthly adolescents column in the New York Times. She also just launched her new podcast, Ask Lisa: The Psychology of Parenting!
Subscribe to Lisa’s Podcast here and follow along on Instagram.
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Read Lisa’s column here.
And find out more over on her website drlisadamour.com.
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