DEEP DIVE: Lisa Damour on the Emotional Lives of Teenagers

0:00We're leaving today and entering a world of Mickey Mouse waving, princess meeting and greeting, lightsaber clashing, the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror dropping, Banshee flying, Space Mountain launching, galaxy rewinding, what's the whole deck with galaxy rewinding, fireworks igniting, world of other worlds for whatever you love. Infinite worlds await at the most magical place on earth. Walt Disney World Resort. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Fresh Takes from What Fresh Hell? Laughing in the Face of Motherhood. This is Amy. And this week, we are thrilled to welcome back Dr. Lisa DeMoor. She's a psychologist who co-hosts the Ask Lisa podcast and writes about adolescence for the New York Times in addition to her clinical practice.

0:48She's the author of two New York Times bestsellers, Untangled, Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood, and Under pressure confronting the epidemic of stress and anxiety in girls. Lisa's latest book is called The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents. She and her husband have two daughters and live in Shaker Heights, Ohio. Welcome, Dr. Lisa. Thank you. I am delighted to be back with you. Thank you so much. This is a dog-eared copy of The Emotional Lives of Teenagers that I have on my desk because I have three. Actually, I have a 20-year-old, so I have a little teenager plus.

1:25But I'm soaking in it, as I like to say. And you start with such a thunderbolt of realization, at least for me, which is for teenagers, powerful emotions are a feature, not a bug. Can you tell us how you came to that understanding? Well, it's one of those things, and I'll say this is true in a lot of this book, where I'm actually just laying out really well-established science, I think, in some ways trying to bring us back to a baseline understanding of adolescence that is pre-pandemic, though informed by the pandemic, but really trying to level set again, because I think one of the experiences so many of us had through the pandemic was that we didn't know what was normal, what was not normal.

2:05Post-pandemic, we don't know what's typical, what's not typical. And so one thing we have always known about teenagers is that they feel emotions more intensely than children do and than adults do. And this is largely a function of a neurological renovation project at work in their brain where their emotion centers get upgraded, become faster and more powerful before their perspective maintaining systems get upgraded. And so there is a juncture during adolescence, we refer to it sometimes as having a gawky brain, where their emotion systems are really, really on steroids, especially when they get stirred up.

2:45You know, if something gets them activated, their emotions can come on very, very powerfully. and they are not always able to bring that back under control as quickly as they would like to. So I can think of just a recent example. I won't give too many identifying details, but a teenager of mine at our dining room table joking around about something we've joked around about a hundred times, like how silly a given song is. But this song, all of a sudden, my teenager was in tears. How could you do that? And I could tell like, this is about something that I don't even vaguely understand, but the volcano of upset that I just wasn't expecting came out of nowhere.

3:21And then you say that the whole point of this book, I think, is that you say that our reaction as parents is too often like, oh, no, oh, no, oh, no, they're upset. What do I do? How can I make them not upset anymore? And that's not where we should be coming from. Not helpful, but totally understandable. And especially in the face of emotions that seem very strange, very irrational, very out of proportion. And I just want to like just put a pin in something right here or just like make a note, it also often freaks out the kid, right? The kid who is sitting there is like, I don't know why I am crying.

3:52You know, part of me is obviously weeping and another part of me is like, what is this about, right? So, I think part of how we stay connected to our teenagers is to really appreciate that it can feel very unsettling and strange to us. And we're not the only ones who are sometimes having that reaction to their very powerful emotions. But it does raise a question of what should we do when we're faced with their powerful emotions. And what I'll say is going to sound really easy and is enormously difficult, but it's good to start with a simple instruction. To the degree that we can, we want to try to be a steady presence.

4:29So what we want to try to do is continue to stay there, be alert and available and invested, but not join them in the fullness of the moment. And the reason for that, there's a lot of reasons, but here's a really good reason. They're watching us and reading our reactions to get a sense of how serious the situation is. They don't always know and their minds are not always able to give them a clean read, you know, that it's hard in adolescence. Things can feel intense in ways that later don't make sense to the same teenager. And so if our kid comes home and is like, I blew this test. And we're like, what?

5:10Right? Their experience is like, I thought I had a 15 year old size problem. And apparently I have a 52 year old size problem. Like this is worse than I even realized. Right, right. So the goal of being a steady presence is actually to use our reaction to serve as like a containing function, right? To help bring things down to size. And what's quite remarkable is so much of that goes down wordlessly. So much of that goes down just in terms of how we hold ourselves in the face of a very upset teenager. And so that's why I like to start with that idea of like, first, be a steady presence. Like, it doesn't matter what you say if that isn't something that you're able to do in the moment.

5:52But we don't need to be afraid of their unhappiness or feel like it's something that we need to fix. Right. This is the idea that I kept coming back to as I was reading the book. Like, right. But it's OK that they are crying about the mean text or whatever it is. That's OK. It is OK. So one reason to be a steady presence is that we don't actually exacerbate the situation by making the kid think, holy moly, it's worse than I even realized. It's worse than I thought. Right. Another reason to be a steady presence is exactly what you're describing. like we are showing them we're not scared of your intense emotionality, right?

6:27And they need to see that, that we see intense emotionality. Like you say, it's a feature, not a bug. It comes with being a teenager. I am not scared of this and I can stand by and offer support as you find your way through it. And a lot of the book is how we support kids to regulate emotions, bring them back under control. But you're gesturing something that I think is so important that runs through the book so much that I don't even know that I say it as explicitly as I could have, which is, it is important for our kids to feel discomfort and to learn how to manage discomfort. And I think, especially, I mean, so much of us were really rocked by the pandemic.

7:10I think that it's very hard sometimes for parents to look at a kid who's in pain and not want to step in, stop it, make it intervene or make whoever made it happen, you know, fix it. And what we always want to be going to is a question in our minds of, is my kid facing something that is uncomfortable? Or is my kid facing something that is unmanageable? Almost always, it's just going to be uncomfortable. And then if the parent can say, yeah, my kid is uncomfortable, or you can even ask a kid, is this uncomfortable or is this unmanageable? And most of the time they'd be like, no, I'm just super uncomfortable, right?

7:43I don't like it, but I can manage it. Then what I would say to the parent is, okay, and this is going to seem strange. Good. Your kid is now uncomfortable. You are in connection with your kid. And what they are going to start to learn is that they can withstand discomfort. They can find ways to bring that discomfort down to size, either by talking about it or finding something that helps them feel better or problem solving or finding a distraction. Literally almost half the book is the strategies for getting through discomfort. And what I would say is that this book is both a defense of distress, right?

8:17Kids are going to have it. Parents don't need to be so scared. And it's also, I would say, this is a very strange thing to say, almost a celebration of distress in teenagers. And here's what I mean. When teenagers feel distress, they often learn, they often grow, and we get to stand by as they develop independent management of painful feelings. And when kids have independent management of painful feelings, they can do things like move out and go to college. Yes. So there's something in it for them to learn that they can tolerate distress. Whereas if kids feel like they cannot tolerate distress, or their parents cannot tolerate them being in distress.

8:59Yes, yes. The net effect of that is their lives get very, very narrow. Because if you can't tolerate distress, then you can't put yourself in a situation where you don't know how it's going to go. And if you can't tolerate distress, then you can't take this class. It's going to be super hard and you're just going to have to find your way through it. And if you can't tolerate distress, you can't just move to a new city and just see how it goes. So what I think runs under and through the whole book is this idea of kids will be in distress. That's a done deal. No one needs to sweat that. What we want to do is build their tolerance for distress using their strategies and ours in combination so that they can feel unafraid of emotion and able to go out into the world and do their thing.

9:43Amazing. We're talking to Dr. Lisa DeMoor. She's the author of the new book, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, and we'll be right back. Hellions, if you're like me, you have a phone that is full of some adorable pictures of your family, but also pictures of recipe that past you thought they were going to make someday and pictures of your parking spot so you can find your car. You want just your good photos, but who has the time to organize that? Journey Print. It designs a beautiful and organized photo album for you in minutes. Journey's smart algorithm organizes photos automatically by date. Then you drag and drop for quick and easy editing, and you can choose from lots of customizable themes to tell the story of your vacation, your year, or your kids' accomplishments.

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13:26So Dr. Lisa, I wanted to talk about the pandemic for a second. I think, you know, largely few, that was weird. It's in the rear view mirror. I just saw a panel of teenagers yesterday be asked how the pandemic was affecting their ability to socialize. And it was funny because this was in 2023. And they were sort of like, it was last year. They've moved on. And yet, we're seeing there are statistics, they were real, there was a mental health crisis that for teenagers that increased during the pandemic that became scary and unavoidable. But you say that it also teaches us that we have to change how we talk about adolescent mental health.

14:01So explain that. So there's a lot in what you just said. First of all, I think for a lot of kids, they're like, yeah, it's over, whatever, I'm fine. And I think that's true. I think for a lot of kids, that's really true. And I think there's things that I know really can make that true. One is a lot of kids, but certainly not every kid had a lot of support and buffering through the pandemic that made a huge difference where people around them did a great job of getting them through a very hard time. And that means that people around them had the resources, whether internal or external to do a great job.

14:32And so I think there are kids and I would count my kids among them where, you know, they got lucky. We are set up in a way that we could protect them and get them through. And so for kids in that situation, you do see a lot of good outcomes. And then of course, the flip of it is there are a lot of kids who were just horribly exposed in a million ways, and they are very much still feeling the effects of the pandemic. The other thing that you're also observing, right? Like I've always said teenage years are like dog years, like a year for them is like seven years in our lives. And so they're like, wait, what?

15:03You're talking about 2021? Why would we even go there? And so I think that there's something very true and very adolescently wonderful about that. Okay. But then the question of this mental health crisis and what we make of it. So of course, suffering surged in the pandemic. Of course it did. And what that means is that some kids who were fragile before became actually quite a bit more distressed and were really into a new level of difficulty. And some kids who weren't in trouble before or weren't fragile before became fragile. So we just not surprisingly saw a whole lot more kids that we were worried about.

15:38That was one side of the crisis. The other side of the crisis, which is ongoing, is it is basically impossible to quickly scale up mental health care for kids, especially teenagers. Caring for teenagers is highly specialized work. Very few of us do it. To get good at it, I've been doing this for like literally almost 30 years. And I mean, it just it takes a really long time to develop skills caring for teenagers. And so we had a combined effect of a huge upsurge in need and the same already overtaxed population of clinicians that we've ever had. And so an inability to get care for those kids. So the two together is how I understand how we ended up in a crisis for some kids.

16:19Okay. What we're looking at now is parents who are surrounded by scary headlines. And I read the paper, you read the paper, and I read it. And I think almost every day, this is really scary to be the parent of a teenager right now, or to be even a teenager right now and see headline after headline about adolescent middle health crisis, concerns about adolescent suicidality. I mean, these are all very, very prominent in our lives. And one of the things that inspired me to write this book is that so few of the headlines make any meaningful distinction between adolescent distress and adolescent mental health concern.

16:59That's so often in the headlines, those are rolled up as one. Kids are in distress. And then it moves on to scary statistics. So my goal in working out this book was to help parents know like, no, distress with teenagers, like that's a Wednesday. Like you're going to see that all the time. Here's how you know when to worry, right? And then so much of my work has often had a when to worry component because I feel like that's how you can actually really reassure people is to say like all this that you're seeing that is typical, even though it's very disruptive and painful. Here's the line to when to worry.

17:30So the when to worries that I really lay out in the book, one is if your kid is coping in ways that bring harm, right? So they're coping with emotions, which is helping bring the feeling down to size, but they're doing it by smoking a lot of weed or being really awful to people or taking it out on themselves or engaging in compulsive behaviors. So we want to see coping, but we don't want to see costly coping. So that's one time to worry. Another time to worry is when the emotions are calling all the shots, where a kid is so anxious that the kid's not going to school, or a kid is so low that you basically are looking at a depression that is leveling that kid's ability to develop.

18:05So we don't want coping that comes with a price tag, and we don't want emotions running the show. And if you're not seeing those two things, you're probably looking at a kid having a rough day or even an up and down day, which is often what teenagers are having. And that's something as a parent to be aware of, to support, but not to panic about. I really hope. It's so interesting, like in writing this book, like what I want is for parents to feel like they can serve as a containing function. And part of how I can try to do that is to give them very clear parameters to say, if you're seeing this and you're seeing this and you're seeing this, this is typical development.

18:40And here's 14 ways to respond. And I think that's what I hope the book can provide is a bit of backing to parents as they serve in that role. And then one other thing I'll say that is probably the other main reason I wrote this book, we're not going to get out of this adolescent mental health crisis by providing more therapy to more kids for the reasons I said, like it's pragmatically impossible. We get out of an adolescent mental health crisis by improving the connection between teenagers and the adults right around them. And that's what this book is designed to do. Teenagers thrive in the context of relationships.

19:11They thrive in the context of relationships with adults who, as they say, get it. And so my goal is to try to have adults get it in the way that is most useful to teenagers. Can we talk for a moment about separation individuation, which is one of those things like, oh, I know what that is. Didn't know that was the name for it. But it's, you know, it's the moment where your teenager can't stand how you chew, right? And then it's developmentally appropriate. It's part of what they're supposed to be doing, even if it's, but that you are supposed to be their container while they can barely tolerate you.

19:43Like how does a parent hold both of those things in her head? So that is a section of the book, why your teen can't stand how you joke. And it's probably the best subheading I have in the whole book. And I will tell you, this is one of those things where you get all your training as a psychologist. It's all very dry. It's all very theoretical. And then you actually start having your own kids and you're like, oh my gosh, Like, this is what they were talking about. So that was my experience with the theory of separation individuation, which is, you know, a time in development where kids are like, I need to go figure out my own identity.

20:18Right. And that usually hits like kind of smack on on 13. Like it's a very like in some ways very like you can almost clock it right at age 13. And, you know, there's this enormous body of very dry theory describing it. It does not do justice to what it looks like in your kitchen. Okay, so what it looks like in your kitchen, and the way I wrote this up is like, it's helpful to think about your kid trying to develop their own brand, right? You know, that's what individuation is like, I need to come up with my own brand. So what that means is, if there's an element of your brand, which is still very coextensive with their brand, right, because they're still kids, and they still feel embedded in the family.

20:55If there's a part of what you're doing that doesn't fit with their sense of their emerging brand, it is very annoying to them. So, right, it might be your dumpy outfit. It might be your goofy dance moves. It might be, you know, any variety of things. But they're no longer cool. And you not being cool in this way is reflecting badly on my brand. So I need you to do things, to stop doing things that don't fit with my brand. Okay, but then here's where it really gets ugly. If there's anything you do that does fit with them, their sense of emerging brand, this is also a problem because they are trying to differentiate their brand.

21:26So you may have always loved Beyonce. Like you may have loved Beyonce for years, but if you're standing in the kitchen bopping to Beyonce and your kid has decided that Beyonce is now in her brand, she would be like, mom, what are you doing? Right, right. You're ruining it for her by liking Beyonce. Yeah. And so the sum total of this is if you do anything that does not fit with your kid's sense of their emerging brand, it is annoying to them. If you do anything that does fit with your kid's sense of their emerging brand, it is annoying to them. everything you do is annoying to them. And that's 13.

22:04And that is typical development. Okay. So your question about like, how do we serve as a containing function? We don't take it personally. And I think that's the key, right? Because it feels so personal. You can't use your turn signal without your kid having a reaction to it, right? It feels really awful, actually. And so the way that we serve as a containing function is we go, oh, here we are. This is happening in the homes of 13-year-olds everywhere. And then what I recommend is you can lay down some parameters. You can say, look, here's how you can interact with me. You can be friendly. That's my favorite.

22:36You can be polite, or you can tell me it needs some space. But those are the options. And what's really cool is usually around 14 or 15 is kids get into high school and they get into their activities and their interests. Their brand consolidates. They don't feel like they need to defend it so fiercely. Your brand becomes your problem, and they become much more tolerant of our dumpy outfits or our quirky habits. So it's short-lived and easier to get through if you don't make it a personal thing. We're talking to Dr. Lisa D 'Amour, author of The Emotional Lives of Teenagers. We'll be right back.

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