Adolescence Isn’t What We Think: The Real Reason Your Teen Isn’t Listening to You, Why They Push Back, and More w/ New York Times Journalist Matt Richtel

32:01Well, they're listening to this nonsense word, Puedes Schwalt, and other nonsense words spoken by different groups of people. One group is the child's mother, and the other group are strangers in a woman's voice. and the reason they use a nonsense word is so that it can be clear that the adolescent or the child isn't tuning into something they've heard before from their parent and what it what they show when they neuro image the brain is that as you move from child to adolescent okay so you're hearing you with me you're hearing this nonsense word spoken by your mother or a stranger over time during after puberty, you start to, your brain lights up at the sound of the stranger's voice.

32:52Because it's novel. It's novel. And let's play this out with me. Why else would that be? Because you need to know how to survive in the world filled with people you don't know yet and make sense of what's going around you, on around you. So when you're - So you're more vigilant when it's a stranger saying the word. You're, you're more, literally more attuned to a voice not belonging to your parent or mother. We didn't do fathers in this experience. We never do, do we? Colin. But. Wales. But I think that's really, that makes sense. It's, it's, it's a, it's how you stay alive. It's how you stay alive.

33:37Now let me play it out a little further. First, imagine yourself in your own home with your kids and they're not really listening to you and they're listening to something around you i can easily imagine you can easily imagine it's it's so it's never happened to me yeah yeah first of all think about this there is one or two parents or a handful of parents that whose voices are known there are like six billion people that at that moment are more compelling to the brain of the adolescent than their parent. Now, that doesn't mean their parent doesn't have some voice still, but it is for their survival that they understand what's going on around them.

34:21So this is an idea, what I'm about to say next, I would really like people to take home. It's not personal. Yeah. That's the big daddy-o idea of this. And there's another reason I will connect this to why that's so important in the context of the information thing. When you take it personally, you start to shove more information down their throat. So I know it's hard. And I'm not suggesting you let your kid be rude to you. Because I can imagine people saying, well, does that mean I'm supposed to ignore obnoxious behavior? I think there's a distinction between correcting and taking personally. I totally agree with you.

35:09And also taking personally ends up pulling you further away. It pulls you further away, but in the construct of this, what it does, and, sorry, not, I mean, You can say but. You can say but. No, I say and. Okay. Because, can we start over? Yeah. The whole thing. Just script. But I, I. Here's the here's the I'm a psychologist and I oh, I'm like, oh, I just said always, which we're not we are not supposed to do. I can't believe you did that. And I said, but and I started weeping. So. So the and in this is when you take it personally, it prompts you to react with more information. Right. Thus overloading.

35:50Right. Thus contributing to that. But the reason I distinguish correcting behavior in that point is going back to the thing I said about entitlement. that information processing organism that is your kid needs to understand the rules or they at least have to have the rules reinforced to them. Like, hey, it's not okay to talk to me that way. But that's a pretty simple, direct point. That's not, don't you love me? Right. Here are the 400 things I've done for you. Why are you like, I will not be disrespected or whatever. Because the reason, yes, because they're not disrespecting you out of that. They're disrespecting you to try to understand all the other voices they then have to pay attention to.

36:36And your voice is safe, hopefully. Hopefully it is. And so there is, I mean, if this helps take it less personally or even be flattered by it, is that there doesn't have to be a vigilance. If there does, it would be so something's amiss. Yeah. And that gives you the latitude to be strong, but it also requires of you to be strong. Yeah. At the beginning of this book, I'd say to parents, it's a little glib, but love, lead, and let go. It's great though. Unconditional love is how you create the safety. Lead is how you let them know what's really vital so they survive. And let go is it ain't about you.

37:25what they do on the baseball field is not you what they do on the stage is not you how they do in the classroom is not you keep them alive let them feel safe and tell them the firm rules that will let them excel and survive in a fast-changing world how we grow up the end so say more okay look if if we in the year 1800 we lived till we were 40 right and there effectively was no period of adolescence. You were a child, you had puberty, you worked, you had a baby, and then you died. Yeah. Now, lucky us, life expectancy is quite a bit doubled. Doubled, extraordinary. And even though there've been some dropbacks due to probably fentanyl and COVID, on the whole, it's been a mercurial rise over time.

38:15But that means we have to make a living at the same time our adolescents have to make a living. And this is a punchline of the book we haven't gotten to yet. So now let me add what it might mean subconsciously. If your kid says, we're all moving to TikTok. Right. And you know, not only is that, it's not like Elvis Presley because Elvis Presley sort of threatened you because you thought this was the good kind of music and it's all subjective. But this is an economic platform. Right. that you have to move to. And if you don't move to it, these people coming up have the energy and a plum and motivation to move faster than you're ready to move.

38:59So that is, I mean, just, just the thought of it is a little bit mind blowing. That is. And I'm going to, I'm going to take it one step further, which is that the new generation has an economic incentive to diversify things outside the power structure that exists. And they're not doing it consciously. They're doing it to survive, but they're matriculating as a peer group into new ideas. and they have to because it's like we own the company. They are the new management. And right now, so they are by definition designed to carve out new ground for their own survival. I can actually give you some genetic, some deep genetics to back that up.

39:51But just for the moment, if you take me at my word, it stands to reason. They've got to diversify a little bit because we've already got that ground covered. Right. now with us living longer we are in direct competition with the people we have raised in theory to well take on the world next yes now where that is so okay so let's say because we're the all consciously like we're we're on the same team yes and And because I struggle with this messaging for young people all the time, which is like, we don't know what's going to be needed. We don't know what jobs are going to be available. We don't know what you need to learn.

40:38And like, I really like some of the classical things that I feel like were a really big part of who I am today. But look, these things aren't mutually exclusive. You're right. And you're very good at balancing that. but let me ask you this. I won't. I struggle in conversations. I feel a little bit more balanced when it comes to technology and social media. I think you said this, the intuitive stuff is like, of course, sticking your face in a screen for 10 hours a day is just not a great idea, but also you can use it as a tool and blah, blah, blah. We don't want to oversimplify. I think those are, those are all reasonable AI.

41:25Look, let me, let me go back a step. Okay. When I said that there's a known and an unknown, a lot of the known is really wise. It's been home over centuries and you can that could be hygiene it could be like in the simplest way don't get hit by a truck right like but it could also be it also be shakespeare like a couple of lines well i'm gonna say that my daughter and i like listening the beatles together later this week before this airs we will get our new puppy who we've named sergeant pepper so so she's 14 we could have named the dog Taylor Swift. Right. But I mentioned that it's, it's, it's, I'm not, I'm not trying to be inauthentic cause it is, but it's, it's a good example where some things that are known, maybe it's the Beatles, maybe it's how to drive safely.

42:27Maybe it's the value of democracy, whatever it is, but these are honed ideas over time and they're not just going to go away. So even though new things are coming up and there are new ways of combining information that only the next generation will see and have the energy to do, they're not going to throw out the playbook because the playbook works. Right. The Beatles aren't going anywhere. Does that make you feel better? No, that really does make me feel better. Like there are certain paradigms that just make sense and work. Yes. And I can explain why that is. Please. Look after, So you have this period of like great plasticity as an adolescent where you're picking up all kinds of things.

43:09Yeah. But toward the end of that, there's a pruning that happens inside the brain. And when that pruning happens inside the brain, certain pathways get laid down. They're not inexorably laid down, but certain things, it's a kind of a use it or lose it period of time. What I would argue is maybe the single most important thing you could teach your kids of anything is curiosity. Yeah. Because in a fast-changing world, you would like to have the kind of wiring that can learn new things. Will you ever be able to do it at that level and with the incentive structure that happens during that period? I don't think we know the answer to that.

43:53But exercising that muscle so that you're able to be curious. I mean, I owe everything I have to what I think is like, I mean, I have curiosity to the point of pathology. Yeah. I mean, that's essentially, well, I don't really mean to the point of pathology for you, but obviously you've built a career and maybe relationships, I'm assuming, on this curiosity. the other thing it's allowed is it's allowed me to to think to to think about what a changing world sorry it's allowed me to think about how to adapt to a changing world for instance i've learned about these coping mechanisms i came from a generation where we drank a lot of beer right you didn't splash your face with ice water we did not i mean the numbers were terrible yeah And I still have plenty of friends for whom that is a coping mechanism.

44:54And it was wired into them that this works. Now, admittedly, that also has a disease component or a genetic component. But what I'm getting at is that to the extent you remain curious, it avails you over your lifetime of adapting to a whole bunch of new things rather than feeling that intense known and unknown conflict that is a perpetual state of adolescence. Earlier, I mentioned that I think some of the challenges we have in society are a result of people in hardened places trying very hard to reconcile the known and the unknown, but without a lot of curiosity or ability to adapt. And that creates this anger.

45:35It creates this displacement. It creates a lot of the challenges we see. And I'm not, I am not, I am decidedly not partisan on this. It's, it's, I'm not making a political statement, but you can see once you get the framework in your head. how this can cause people to displace into all kinds of things. And then everything becomes a version of road rage if you don't find a way to resolve. I love that. And actually, I think even if we can ourselves lean into curiosity with, just to tie it all together, what's happening in adolescence, that just takes away so much of the personalizing and fighting and wanting to will our young people to become who we expect them to be.

46:22Amen. We'll see them as a reflection of us, which now you can see that by evolutionary biology, that's not supposed to be the case. No. And I think we know, I think we just know how that just doesn't end well. It doesn't end well. And now for a quick break. This episode is brought to you in part by Saks Fifth Avenue. All right. There's no question it's shopping season. We're talking about spending money. We're talking about being careful about not spending too much money, but also be really targeted. So Saks.com is definitely worth it because there's so much for everyone, especially if you are thinking about new outfits, new jewelry, new decor, they've got everything.

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51:06So that's humans at iristore.com. So you can support our show and your hair all at the same time. And another thing we have a tendency to do, I think with the pendulum swinging back a little bit, but we have really been pathologizing this information overload and we've done it to help young people in many cases fit into structures. yes no i want you to say this no it's just this is reminding me that i want you to talk about rumination oh so so okay but finish what you were saying which will lead to it we've been pathologizing this information overload pathologizing it there's a lot to reconcile when you think about the none and known and the unknown in a fast changing world it can be overwhelming a lot it can present as all kinds of things it's people are predisposed at different levels to anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, go down the list.

52:01Those things are very real. I'm not suggesting they're all solved through this construct by any stretch. But I do think that some of the presentations that we see are outgross of this overload, too much processing, too much to make sense of with us adding into the problem. This is where rumination comes in. And I've tended to think, I may withdraw this in future generations, but I've thought of the book, but I've tended to call this generation, generation rumination. And the reason I've done that is that over the last two to three decades, we've seen a lot of change in where exploration happens from the outside to the inside.

52:45It used to be that there were lots more, there weren't lots more, but there were skin knees and broken bones. And that's what emergency rooms saw. Increasingly, they tend to see emotional challenges or disorders. Disorder is not the right word. What's the right word? Well, I mean, some of it. Some of it is. Some of it is. But I think in general, we're seeing emergency rooms are serving as mental health crisis locations. Yes. And part of that, we can have. Locations. Let me say that again. Come on in today. But I, you know, coming in, I work with pediatricians all the time. they're managing mental health way more than physical way more than this led us to think for a long time that the the cell phone was to blame i i don't i i don't think that's entirely accurate as i've described here today that amplifies the challenges but i don't think that's the exclusively the reason but but i tend to think of this as generation rumination because when you become overloaded in the way we're describing and when you don't have coping mechanisms.

53:51One of the things young people do is they will ruminate. Everyone in ninth grade hates me. Here's one I've gotten. You've never made anything good for dinner ever. Yeah. I mean. And. And. Because connection is such a huge conversation, like being connected, having a close relationship with your kids. Yes. And I'm, it's so important, but I think it's misunderstood and co-rumination happens regularly now. Oh man. As like a source of connection. Yes. And it is a source of connection, but then you get like, now you're, you're getting deeper into rumination. And what you're doing in that case is going back to the road rage analogy.

54:35You're taking a moment of really emotional explosion that needs to be let go of, putting a name to it that is not correct and then reinforcing that name over and over again. Yeah. And that is where the pathologizing can happen too. It's like, oh, I have this disease. Again, people have these. Of course. Of course. And some of it is a product of the environment we live in. For instance, if you want a kid to learn in a school environment, some kids' brains aren't ready for that. and there's a diagnosis that goes along with it, but that might not have happened when people ran around in fields. That's a product of brain and environment.

55:24Our expectation of every brain being able to be in one kind of environment. Yes. But I think it's important for us to think about if it's generation rumination and that it's also like for parents because we've kind of pathologized even parenting. Yes. That. Wait, what do you mean by that? I said yes. You're like, I totally agree. No, no, I want to be a good listener. I'm not sure what I mean about it, but it feels, I just said it, but it feels like my field is like, like if you go to social media and my feed or for you page or whatever that is, has more things that are in my area. It's like five things you can say that will make your kid codependent or five mistakes you make to raise a narcissist or I don't know all these things where I'm like parents are now fed panic that like their parenting itself is just like in its own pathology they're there the the way we're approaching our kids which there's some kernel of truth to it like i'd like to add to earlier i said there's a couple things to tell your kids curiosity yeah the other one and it relates very strongly to what you're saying is if i was gonna if i was gonna have young people walk away with two things it'd be curiosity and the sense that everything will be okay oh yes and that's not at all the message that anybody's getting right and and i I tend to think of parents as the original form of social media at the dinner table.

57:05They are putting that fear into their kids and they're adding their, their, their screaming at Tik TOK and the news, but they're channeling. That's it. They are the original Instagram. I'm so glad you said that because one of the things that I was noticing as we're talking about, when we talk about things like social media, and it's not like, I don't think either of us are like social media is the greatest thing in the world. Not saying it. It's so just, it's just this, the pendulum is just very extreme right now. But I think the panic, I'm not sure what's worse, the panic or the thing that we're, and this isn't just about social media.

57:46It's just whatever we're talking about at the dinner table. I just am in violent agreement with you that there's a possibility that that amplifies all the stuff. I think the panic is a version of the road rage and it's a version of struggling to deal with the ambiguity of reconciling the known and unknown in a fast changing world. And one of the ways we deal with that is by declaring things. Because then it feels like soothing. Right. We have said this is the answer. Yeah. Living with ambiguity is very hard. It's another reason adolescents are, we find, very threatening. That could be your fourth skill.

58:25let's do it. How many living with ambiguity, living with ambiguity, curiosity, living with ambiguity, I forget the rest of Wales. No, you had really good points. Things will be okay. Listen, I wrote the book. I can't remember anything. I'm sure you turned it in long ago. Curiosity. They're going to be okay. They're going to be okay. Coping mechanisms. And I think living with ambiguity. We need an afterword. Will you write the afterword? I'll write the afterword because that is why I'm, when I'm miserable, I assure you, it's because I am not liking the ambiguity. I do want to say, lest we be, lest people walk away thinking social media good, that I write extensively about this in the book.

59:15While the research is unclear, yes, you are correct. as I think you quoted the New Yorker or something earlier where I'd said sitting in front of a computer 10 hours a day is not a good idea. I did quote the wonderful article about you in the New Yorker. Go on. But what I do want to point out is sitting in front of a screen all day, what we do know is it displaces things we know are healthy. Thank you. Actually say it. I think everybody needs to hear it. This is really important. They may be, young people may be delving off in a different direction, but they're under the heading of things we need to teach them.

59:54Exercise, in-person interaction, sleep, sleep, maybe more than anything else. But again, when we're pointing fingers, the New York Times just did a story where the state of Florida tried to enforce schools. Banning cell phones? No, letting kids sleep in. and it fell apart. And so owing to a bunch of structural reasons, kids are getting up at 530 and six and we're blaming the cell phone. I'm not saying the cell phone, the cell phone should be out of the room, should not be in the bedroom. We have a charging station in our hallway, which sometimes we get the kids to plug their devices into. I'm I'm aggressive about it I so yeah but I that is one thing I'm strict about but to the point it's not a fight in our house I don't know that I would I'm not saying other people that you have to like figure out for your own household but for me it's very important phones out of the room I just think it's like to your earlier point I haven't lived that you haven't lived it I I again, I will reinforce, despite the fact we haven't lived it, we know that certain things work for healthy development.

1:01:17So even if you want to say this, even if you want to say, maybe someday we'll learn that using cell phones 24 hours a day is the, yeah. I mean, there used to be, there was a Woody Allen movie years and years ago. I think it was sleep or something where he woke up and he's like, and now they've discovered that steak and wine is great for you. Like maybe, maybe we'll discover that. But in the meantime, we suspect otherwise. And we know that when you exercise, when you sleep full stop, when you eat well, when you interact with other people, you are developing in a way that we understand permits, allows, encourages thriving and survival in the modern world.

1:02:00And if you have a developing brain, it's more sensitive to all of these things. And so I think all that, and you have a chapter in your book about this, is like, when we're looking at phones, what is it taking away? It's taking away sleep and exercise and in-person interactions. And wait, what's the fourth thing? Memory? I don't remember. I wasn't listening. We've been here like an hour. I know. We should wrap up. Okay. I do think this is a really important book. And I do think people are terrified of adolescence right now in particular. and I get it, but I love things are going to be okay. And it's hard to believe that with the voices out there.

1:02:44Why is it hard to believe that? Well, it's not hard for me to believe that. I actually do believe that. But my grandmother once said to me, can it, Mary Sunshine? She was so annoyed with me for being too positive. And we also have your grandmother here today. Yeah. So my grandfather had died. and we were like sitting around and I said something like, you know, he was so awesome. And like, he would have really been so happy that he lived such a great life. And look how my grandkids, I don't know. I was just saying like, how great. And she was so annoyed. And she said, can it marry sunshine? And it was because I was 18 and she had lost her husband.

1:03:30And I was like, I'm sad that he died, but he lived this really long, amazing life. And it was a moment that she taught me that I then learned in graduate school. Turns out she was right. It's like, that's not the time to be like on the bright side, but that's quite different than just landing on things are going to be. And it's an example where you were working out how to express what would ultimately be an optimistic part of your personality, but learning to recognize when it worked and when it didn't work. And that's, that is part of this adolescence thing. You have grains of individuality that will show up and they will surface at conceivably the wrong times in adolescence because you don't know yet what the rules of the road are for larger society.

1:04:23How can you? Like, if the world's changing and your parents tell you these are the rules, you have to test it out or you're going to die. You're going to socially die. You're going to economically die. You're going to physically. I don't mean it that starkly. Yeah. But in that instance, that is a perfect moment of adolescence where, you know, you're in the nickname of your podcast, Mary Sunshine. Please stop it. It was Can It, Mary Sunshine. Can It, Mary Sunshine. Thank you.