Improving teen mental health with Lisa Damour (transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

[00:00:00] Lisa Damour: For me, adolescence feels like when my life went from being in black and white to being in color. And so I think that's part of why I like caring for teenagers and working with them. For me, it is such a rich and full and pivotal time of life and, and, and one that I really enjoyed.

[00:00:20] Adam Grant: Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to ReThinking, my podcast on the science of what makes us tick with the TED Audio Collective. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

My guest today is clinical psychologist Dr. Lisa Damour. She's my favorite expert on teenagers, from understanding their mental health to figuring out how to parent them. Which of course includes sage advice on emotion regulation, friend drama, sleep, and yep, social media. 

[00:00:55] Lisa Damour: It's not an all or nothing. Like all of parenting, it is a gradual, gonna give you a little room, see how you handle it. 

[00:01:03] Adam Grant: Lisa consulted on the Pixar film Inside Out 2. She's the author of the New York Times bestselling books Untangled, Under Pressure, and The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, and she co-hosts the podcast Ask Lisa. So today I am bringing her on this podcast to chat all about the colorful world of adolescence and how we can make it better.

Hey Lisa, I'm hoping that you're gonna untangle all of us in this conversation. 

[00:01:31] Lisa Damour: I'll do my darnedest. . 

[00:01:34] Adam Grant: Good. Well, Lisa, welcome to ReThinking. 

[00:01:37] Lisa Damour: Thank you for having me. I'm really glad to be here. . 

[00:01:39] Adam Grant: Uh, I, I have a lot of questions for you about teenagers as a parent of two teenagers and soon to be three, but I'm curious about how you got interested in this phase of life.

[00:01:52] Lisa Damour: Well, there's probably a couple reasons. One is personally, my adolescence was a really wonderful time in my life. My family had had a lot of disruption, I am an only child, I stayed pretty close to home because there was just so much going on, and then suddenly when I became a teenager and I worked as a bus girl and bought myself a $900 Volkswagen Rabbit, I got, had a car.

I suddenly had autonomy and freedom, and I had wonderful friends. 

[00:02:20] Adam Grant: That is starkly different from what a lot of teenagers are experiencing right now. 

[00:02:26] Lisa Damour: That is true. That is true, except I will say, as much as we do have an adolescent mental health crisis and we wanna take it very seriously and unpack where it came from and what we're gonna do about it, one thing that I got to do in 2024 was conduct a Gallup poll and ask teenagers about a whole bunch of things. I had a panel of 10 to 18 year olds, and one of the things I asked them about is, what mood did you feel a lot of yesterday? And the data were 23% said sadness, 39% said anxiety, 45% said stress, 91% said enjoyment, and 94% said happiness. I think those are important data because what they tell me is teenagers have ups and they have downs as they always have.

They have a lot of ups, and I think the tension we sit in now is the ongoing need to take very good care of teenagers and take seriously the causes and consequences of the adolescent mental health crisis. And also recognize that the media can get trapped in certain narratives around any number of topics, but around teenagers.

This one is a lot about their suffering and distress, which is real. But that doesn't mean it's the whole story. 

[00:03:43] Adam Grant: I think that when, when we talk about the, the adolescent or teen mental health crisis, a lot of people have questions about, have things really gotten worse or have we just de-stigmatized admitting our struggles?

What do you think is actually going on there? 

[00:04:01] Lisa Damour: I think we do have a true crisis, but I think the causes of it are not the ones that are maybe as headline grabbing as the reality of it. Prior to the pandemic, anxiety and depression was rising in teenagers and we were controlling for the kinds of questions that you raised.

You know, is it just that it's less stigmatized? Is it that there's misunderstanding, even really good studies that we're working hard to control for those possibilities, we're finding rising rates of depression and anxiety. Okay. Then along comes the pandemic. Horrible and especially horrible for teenagers, right?

Teenagers have two jobs, which is to become increasingly independent and hang out with your friends as absolutely much as possible, and the pandemic hamstrung both of those. So things got worse for many teenagers. The other force at work in the adolescent mental health crisis that gets no coverage is that prior to the pandemic, we did not have the workforce to care for teenagers.

Caring for teenagers is highly specialized. Not a lot of us do it. Not everybody loves teenagers. Not everybody loves their own adolescents and wants to become a clinician. It's not like you can then magically like produce a hundred thousand new clinicians to meet the need. And so as I work on the policy side and the philanthropic side advising people who are thinking about this, my efforts are often around building workforce of clinicians who care for teenagers, more clinicians of color who care for teenagers, because we'll always need people who are good at caring for teenagers. We didn't have it before the pandemic and we still don't have it. 

[00:05:34] Adam Grant: I wanna talk about how you think about mental health and how you help parents and, and teens think about their mental health, because your definition, I think, is more compelling than any I've ever heard.

[00:05:44] Lisa Damour: Ooh, that means a lot coming from you. Okay, so my definition is very old. I'm basically translating the science that has existed for a long time. It just doesn't match a lot of what the discourse is now. The discourse now wrongly suggests that being mentally healthy is about feeling good, that you know you're mentally healthy if you feel at ease or calm or relaxed, or your kid feels that way.

The way I have been defining it, and this is again just distilling what we know as a field, is that it's about two things. It's about having feelings that fit what is happening, even if those are uncomfortable and unwanted feelings. And then really where the rubber hits the road is managing those feelings well, managing them in a way that brings relief and does no harm, versus managing them in a way that brings relief, but comes with a cost associated.

[00:06:33] Adam Grant: The first part really struck a chord with me. The idea of having feelings that fit the context. Because it normalizes unpleasant emotions as opposed to creating this unrealistic expectation that I should be happy all the time. 

[00:06:46] Lisa Damour: Absolutely. One of the most fun things I've ever gotten to do is I spent the last four years working on Inside Out 2, and part of why I was so honored to get to work with them is that's their message, right?

Riley now has nine emotions, one is a pleasant emotion, Joy alone. The other eight are treated as natural and also helpful to Riley. And that's how we regard emotion. It is data. It helps us understand what to avoid, what to not do again. You know, how to not violate social codes. So not only are uncomfortable emotions normal, they're actually valuable, protective, useful to us. And that's a place, back to the headlines, where the popular discourse has gone off the rails. Because as we see ongoing headlines about adolescent mental health crisis, too often psychological distress is equated with having a mental health concern. And that couldn't be farther from how we think about it as psychologists.

[00:07:46] Adam Grant: You mentioned your work on Inside Out 2 I, I think that if I were gonna write an Inside Out 3, the thing that's always bothered me about the positioning of emotions in both of the films is that they just, they happen, and they're completely outside of the control of , like of the, the protagonist, right? And I'm like, this is, this is great when it comes to recognizing feelings. But when it comes to regulating them, like why is the kid in the passenger seat as opposed to the driver's seat? And why is she not actually in dialogue with her emotions and telling them that some of them are not welcome right now and others are not being, you know, being handled okay? What does it look like to teach, like, the regulation part of emotional intelligence through a film? . 

[00:08:36] Lisa Damour: So I think you're right. I mean, I think that they are trying to establish many things at once, including uncomfortable emotions are friendly and also in their world color coded, you know, which is hugely valuable in terms of helping kids develop a language for talking about them. That's good all to itself. I think that the film actually does start to do, especially this most recent one, some of what you're looking for. One quite remarkable thing that happens in the film is that Riley has a panic attack, full blown. It's like really spectacular to see. It's incredibly beautifully depicted and aptly so, and it's subtle, but she actually uses the grounding techniques that we recommend as clinicians to get herself through and out of the panic attack, and they depict it on the big screen.

And then the movie ends with Anxiety being given a comfy chair and a mug of tea, and in dialogue with Joy. And Anxiety is spouting off all of these wild concerns and Joy's like, that's not gonna happen right now, and we don't need to worry about that. So she's doing what you're suggesting. And then there is a place where Anxiety goes, oh, we have that Spanish test tomorrow.

And Joy says, you're right. You're absolutely right. And this is why I love this movie so much. They really show both sides of anxiety, that it gets out of control and needs to be modulated. Which Joy is the stand in for Riley to do that. And that it's valuable, and when it is identifying meaningful threats, we wanna pay attention to it.

[00:10:01] Adam Grant: Yeah. I, I thought that was so elegantly done, and I agree with you. I think the part that was left hanging for me is, the emotions are in dialogue with each other. 

[00:10:10] Lisa Damour: Mm-hmm . 

[00:10:10] Adam Grant: Riley is not in charge of her emotions. 

[00:10:12] Lisa Damour: No. 

[00:10:13] Adam Grant: She's a victim of them.

[00:10:14] Lisa Damour: She's along for the ride.

[00:10:14] Adam Grant: For the most part. And like, that is I think how a lot of teenagers experience their emotions.

But I also think part of teaching emotion regulation skills is , is doing the cognitive reappraisal of like, why am I feeling this emotion? Is it appropriate for the context? Is there a different way that I could look at it? Is there a different action I could take that would potentially change how I feel?

[00:10:39] Lisa Damour: One of the ways we as psychologists think about coping with emotion, and this is how I organize it in The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, which is the most recent book I wrote, is that sometimes kids are coping with emotions by expressing them. Actually kids and people of all ages. And sometimes they're coping by taming their emotions.

Importantly, we see these as equally valuable. The culture right now is super into expressing, but we are all for taming. So cognitive reappraisal is in the category of like getting it back in the box. Right? Not actually ruminating, spending a lot of time on it. Other things kids do in the taming category, kids will just comfort themselves until they feel better.

They'll go find the family pet. And one girl said to me, I force cuddle my cat until I feel better. Right? Like, okay, that's fantastic. I mean, maybe not.

[00:11:24] Adam Grant: Poor cat. 

[00:11:25] Lisa Damour: Poor cat, but unbalanced does, you know, brings relief and does no harm. Expression can work, right? Talking about feelings can work. So long as it doesn't turn into rumination.

In my survey, that one I mentioned, I got to ask kids, you know, how do you help yourself feel better when you're upset? The number one response was listening to music. Kids go to music, and we've got lab studies that actually support what they're doing. All teenagers have playlists. Many of them have playlists with feelings, names attached.

One of my favorite ones was a kid who had a sad and peaceful playlist. A sad kid will go listen to their sad playlist. We have lab studies showing it has a cathartic, catalytic quality, so it's expression, but it's them getting on a playlist and it works. 

[00:12:08] Adam Grant: As you comment on what's popular in the culture right now, expression.

A lot of people think that if you don't express, that means that you're suppressing. 

[00:12:16] Lisa Damour: That's right. 

[00:12:17] Adam Grant: That's just wrong. 

[00:12:17] Lisa Damour: You're just right about that. And they are wrong, yes. 

[00:12:20] Adam Grant: Very wrong. . Like not all emotions need to be expressed. 

[00:12:23] Lisa Damour: No. 

[00:12:23] Adam Grant: No, some can be reframed and others just the best thing to do is to distract. 

[00:12:28] Lisa Damour: Distraction, especially if there's nothing you can do.

The way we think about it as clinicians is expression works until it doesn't. And so if talking about feelings and thinking about the problem does bring relief, fantastic. But if it turns the corner into rumination, the best analogy for it is kind of gross, but really helpful, which is basically picking at an emotional wound. That the more you work at it, the worse it feels, it doesn't heal up. Then more expression is not a good idea. You know, hit the gym, go watch a compelling movie until the feeling dies down a little bit, come back to it, see if it looks the same, is often a better way to do it. 

[00:13:03] Adam Grant: I think that you're one of the only people who has said anything useful on sleep.

Talk to me about sleep for mental health versus sleep for success in school. 

[00:13:13] Lisa Damour: Oof. I hate this answer. I hate what I'm gonna tell you. Let's just start with the fact that sleep is the glue that holds human beings together, and in all of the questions about what accounts for the adolescent mental health crisis or rising rates of mental health concern in teenagers, I think the least controversial and also the least sexy so it gets no headlines, is teenagers sleep much less than they used to. Decreasing hours of sleep is like ridiculously correlated with worsening mental health problems. There's nothing about this that we're like, really? Wow. I mean like that is just completely obvious.

I think one of the places to start is people think teenagers need much less sleep than they do. So the biological requirement for high schoolers is nine hours a night. So sleep is a problem. Sleep is a problem for a lot of teenagers, and what we see is optimal mental health happens somewhere between eight and three quarter and nine hours of sleep a night. Optimal grades happen closer to seven and a half hours a night, so this isn't great. This isn't great, and so we have to find solutions to this. 

[00:14:16] Adam Grant: Okay, so you're the expert. 

[00:14:18] Lisa Damour: Okay. 

[00:14:19] Adam Grant: How do we solve it? 

[00:14:20] Lisa Damour: I think there are a lot of kids, not across the board. This is a problem of privilege, I would say for sure, who are going to college over prepared. Who are doing more work in high school than they need to do for college success, and that work in high school is being driven by the college process and admission questions, not how much mastery do you need to thrive in college.

There are many, many kids in this country who could have a much better high school experience if they weren't trained entirely on a very, very narrow band of schools. So that's one place to start. 

[00:14:52] Adam Grant: You've also made a case, and I think the, the evidence could not be more overwhelming on this, that we need to delay school start times.

[00:14:59] Lisa Damour: Well, that is a wonderful thing we can do. And again, this is data-driven. We have seen this in schools where they're pulling it off and it often requires legislation at the state level, that when schools delay start times, teenagers get more sleep and mental health improves. 

[00:15:18] Adam Grant: This seems like such a no brainer, because if you start the school day later, you're also ending it later, which tracks with the more traditional nine to five workday and allows parents to not have that two hour gap between three o'clock at the end of school and, and five o'clock when, when they might be free.

Um, why are we not there yet? 

[00:15:36] Lisa Damour: Sports. I'm in Ohio. I will tell you that's where this goes to die. Question of sports and athletics and after school. I mean, I, I think this is ridiculous. I don't like this, but to answer your question, that's where this falls apart. 

[00:15:52] Adam Grant: But that, I mean, that's, that's an easy , that's such an easily solvable problem.

We put our, we just put our activities in the last, you know, hour and a half block of the day. And if you're not doing a sport, you're doing another activity and you're still at school until five. 

[00:16:05] Lisa Damour: Adam, you know this, right? We do it this way because we've always done it this way is very powerful for people.

[00:16:12] Adam Grant: That drives me crazy. Especially when you see, like you see the data on standardized tests. 

[00:16:18] Lisa Damour: Yes. 

[00:16:18] Adam Grant: If kids could take the SAT and the ACT a couple hours later, like even that is a dramatic improvement in their performance. 

[00:16:26] Lisa Damour: The way you change these things is you get the headlines to be about what really moves the needle. And you work with the media. I work with the media. I am amazed by sometimes how hard it is to bring in a new narrative, especially if it's not as gripping as the narrative that exists. And like, sleep is not sexy . And I think that, you know, there's so many things that people are much more likely to click on, and I think that that unfortunately, you know, comes at the expense of kids.

[00:16:56] Adam Grant: Watching what, what Jon Haidt has been doing, getting middle schools to be phone free and making the case that, I think in part helped Australia ban social media for under 16. Like this is the next movement. We start the school day later. We also eliminate daylight savings time. 

[00:17:11] Lisa Damour: A hundred percent. 

[00:17:12] Adam Grant: Like this is, this all goes hand in hand.

Better for sleep, better for for mental health, better for avoiding errors and accidents. 

[00:17:21] Lisa Damour: Yes. 

[00:17:22] Adam Grant: Not, not complicated. Okay. Speaking of phones, you also have, I think, an interesting and nuanced take on phones and teens. My read of the evidence is there isn't really a need for, for 11 and 12 year olds to have smart phones, and the costs seem to outweigh any benefits that might exist.

Less practical when we get to teenagers. So what are you recommending? 

[00:17:48] Lisa Damour: So the tension we're sitting with, and we can do this as parents, is that kids need to be connected to their peers. And that is really true during adolescence. I mean, it is vitally true for teenagers and tweens. And digital technologies come with risks, so we're working with these two things side by side. As much as it is daunting to try to parent in a digital world, especially for those of us, I'm 54, right?

I didn't have this growing up. It's very hard to parent through something you did not have. The good news is, we have done teenagers and risk for decades. And what we know about teenagers and risk, around all the other risks that teenagers are navigating, whether it's drinking, driving, drugs, sex. I mean, all of that also applies around digital technologies. And the, the way I like to think about it is the guardrail for managing risks with teenagers: one, rules that make sense to the kids themselves. And two, your good working relationship with that kid. Think about drinking, right? So I think saying to kids, we don't want you drinking at parties because there are too many variables at parties and things can go sideways and go very, very badly. And that's our rationale.

And so we're asking you not to drink. We have data showing that works. That reduces how often kids are gonna drink. And recognizing they are impulsive and good kids make mistakes and saying, but if you find yourself in a jam, call us. We will never make you sorry that you have asked for our help. Okay?

Those are, that's how we handle risk with teenagers. Okay? So if we take that back to digital technologies, what we want are rules that make sense to kids. We can say we get it, you need to be connected to your friends. We're gonna start with texting alone. And when friends are suddenly on texting, I think it actually can work to give a kid either a flip phone, which no teenager worth their salt will accept, or a very dumbed down smartphone, which is what I did as a parent.

[00:19:40] Adam Grant: That's us too. 

[00:19:40] Lisa Damour: Great. I mean, it works. It's not that hard. I mean, you take it to the Apple store, they configure it just right. So we gave our kids old smartphones that had no browser, no apps for social media, no ability to add apps without our permission and the understanding it never went into their bedroom ever, ever, ever, ever, ever. They start on texting. Okay, here's what we do in all of parenting. You see how it goes. If your kid texts like a 40-year-old librarian, which plenty of kids do, great, and they can stay connected to their friends, you probably don't have to monitor that much. If your kid gets involved in the meanest text thread ever, right outta the gate? Okay, they are definitely not ready for social media and they're probably not ready for texting, right? So we do things in stages, and then what I said to my kids, people can take this for what it's worth, I said, you're on texting for as long as that will do the job to keep you meaningfully connected to your peers.

I trust the day will come. When you say to me it's all on Snap. I am hoping you are 15 or 16 before we are having that conversation. I will have had all this runway to see how you handle texting. How much I can trust you. Texting to me is like JV social media, and then we'll have the Snap conversation based on how you've handled it up till now. You're teaching me about what you can handle. I am learning along the way. I have, as a clinician, made different recommendations to different kids in the same family , right? Like that kid, you don't need to monitor that much. That kid, no digital technology for that kid for a while. That's how I like to think about it, because there are risks with social media, there's no question.

It is incredibly absorbing, hard to pull away, and there is so much garbage that kids are gonna encounter. So you want 'em older. Does that fit with how you think about it? What do you think? 

[00:21:18] Adam Grant: Yeah, it's very wise. We were the holdout parents that said, we're not even doing a phone. We don't think this is necessary.

And then starting high school, realized our oldest is the only kid in her class without a phone, so she gets it. She's been texting, right, by computer before that. But I think, you know, pretty quickly everything's on Snap and, and she wants to use it. And we say, okay, we'll start with five minutes a day, and your phone's never allowed in your room at night.

So very aligned. 

[00:21:44] Lisa Damour: There is so much conversation about social media and the ways in which kids are spending a ton of time on there. Kids will be the first to agree to that and say that that's true. I am hearing about more and more teenagers, and it's not just older teenagers, who are themselves putting screen time controls on. And I think that's brilliant because the algorithms are too powerful, right?

It's like a 15-year-old versus all of Silicon Valley. So screen time controls hopefully let them get the upsides of being connected digitally without the downsides of lost time. 

[00:22:13] Adam Grant: I wanna talk about relationships because I read something from you that stopped me in my tracks and made me rethink one of my core assumptions, which is I thought that the most important relationships for teen mental health are friendships.

And you say, maybe not. 

[00:22:31] Lisa Damour: No. The data give us a pretty strong sense that the single most powerful force for adolescent mental health is strong relationships with caring adults. 

[00:22:42] Adam Grant: This flies in the face of all the like, parents don't matter, kids pay attention to their peers, research. Why? With a lot of other outcomes, peer effects swamp parenting effects.

Why is this one different? 

[00:22:56] Lisa Damour: Well, so, picture the kid who does not have any strong relationships with caring adults. They're not connected at home. They don't connect to any teachers. They don't have a coach they can go to. They're not part of activities where they feel like there's an adult who is on their side.

As soon as you start picturing that teenager, that's a kid in trouble. Healthy teenagers are meaningfully connected to adults. Now, it's great if it's their family, but even if it's not their family, and sometimes that's not the case. There are a lot of kids, you know, who are saved by a teacher, people who they work with closely.

That's how I think about it. Not what is the magic of the adults who are connected? What is the magic thing they're doing? It's like picture the kid who doesn't have that, that is not a kid who's doing okay. 

[00:23:44] Adam Grant: Maybe one of the worst inventions in American history is the nuclear family. 

[00:23:49] Lisa Damour: Hmm. 

[00:23:50] Adam Grant: I think about other periods in history, but also many other cultures around the world where kids are raised by a village of extended family, of friends, of neighbors, and here in the US we're basically rolling the dice with one or two parental figures and just let's hope for the best, as opposed to let's make sure that you're part of a network of 12 or or 14 adults where the odds are much higher that one of them is gonna be trustworthy and caring and not abusive and supportive. What do you make of that? 

[00:24:22] Lisa Damour: I think I like the nuclear family.

I haven't thought about it a lot, but I, what I will say is teenagers belong to everybody and one of the things that is as natural as anything that unfolds in adolescence is that kids start to loosen their ties at home a little bit, tell their folks less and less, and start talking to their teachers more. Start talking to their coaches more. Bosses, mentors, aunts, uncles. So I sort of feel like it doesn't matter if it's not your kid. You are responsible for all the teenagers in your community and having meaningful relationships with them. I've often thought when I was doing my clinical work, I'm basically saying the exact same thing the family is saying to the kid, but I'm not the parent. And so somehow it has traction that the parent's not getting.

While the pandemic was still going on, I ended up in a conversation with the superintendent of Chicago Public Schools, and he said something that I thought was so spot on about how much mental health crisis there was coming out of the pandemic.

And he said, it's not just that the kids were stuck at home, it's that they lost their relationships with their teachers. The hall monitor who is talking with them about the game every day. All of those, um, adult relationships that surround kids and become so vital for teenagers, many kids actually stayed decently connected to their peers for that through the pandemic, but they lost the adults.

[00:25:40] Adam Grant: So what do we do about that now that the pandemic is behind us? 

[00:25:44] Lisa Damour: I just want people to realize, like teenagers like adults, they want to be connected to us. They don't always love our agendas . They don't always love our million questions, but they fundamentally are interested in adults who are interested in them.

And I, and I don't think it helps us to have the inaccurate stereotype that teenagers don't care about adults, don't like them, don't want anything to do with them. That's not true. I think what is hard is that teenagers act like teenagers. And there is behavior that is entirely typical to adolescence and has always been part of adolescence that adults are put off by and take personally.

And so that ruptures what could be a good relationship. And so I feel like most of my work is organized around what to expect when you're expecting a teenager. And, and to help adults understand that this teenage behavior, right, in, in your finger quotes, is not their kid being naughty, their kid trying to stick it to them.

It's adolescence unfolding. There's a lot of jobs to be done. Those jobs pull adults in and push adults away in strange ways, but it's not personal and your kid really needs your connection. 

[00:26:51] Adam Grant: The first time we met, you said something that really stuck with me on this point, which is, it's not necessarily a bad thing if your kid gets rave reviews at school and is a bit of a nightmare at home.

Talk to me about that. 

[00:27:05] Lisa Damour: Okay. Well, it's bad for you. It's not so fun as a parent, but it cracks me up how often the case is like I'll hear from parents, they'll go to conferences and the teacher's like, we would have 20 of him! And you're like, my kid? Right? Okay. Let's think about what it means to do a school day.

I honestly don't know that any of us can make it past third period as adults, right? I mean, you are in there with a whole bunch of kids you did not choose. Adults you did not choose. Shuttling from topic to topic that, until very late in high school, you did not choose. I think we would find it tedious and annoying, even under really wonderful school conditions.

And so the way I think about it, is that over the course of the school day, kids are being amazing. They're having people and things and events grate on them all day. I don't think they're being oversensitive. I think it actually is a very demanding scenario with a lot of people and a lot of big feelings 'cause they're all teenagers. And our kids quietly navigate it without, for the most part, punching anybody or throwing themselves on the floor. And they absorb it all and they, I think about it as almost like emotional garbage they collect over the day and they just jam it in their pocket. And then they come home and we're like, how was school?

And they're like, roar! And it all comes out. Okay. This is very tiring at 5:00 PM, this is not my favorite part of the day, but it's a working system. Schools get the best of our kids, and if what helps them hold it together and be civil under, I would say extremely challenging conditions that are repeated every single day, is that they come home and they just complain a lot or are kind of grumpy?

They can't mistreat anybody in the house, but that's kind of this working. 

[00:28:52] Adam Grant: That's I think, reassuring for a lot of parents. 

[00:28:56] Lisa Damour: I have two kids. I have a daughter who's 21 and I have a daughter who's 14, and I can spend my whole professional day saying to parents, okay, when your kids wanna talk about feelings, this is fantastic.

You know, you wanna be a steady presence, you wanna really be there for it. If I've had a very long day and I'm very tired and I just like wrap something up and I'm headed, and I know there's a new, Great British Baking Show and I'm on my way to watch it. If I get intercepted by a kid who wants to talk about her feelings, if I'm really honest, I'm not like, this is great.

I'm usually like, really? Like, now? The theory of being a receptive, empathic, steady presence is really easy to espouse. I think at the end of the day, I mean it's seven or eight or nine o'clock at night when we are worn down. And then the kid who has held it together all day, gorgeously, finally kind of comes unglued because they're just so frustrated about that last math problem.

[00:29:50] Adam Grant: And I guess if, if they've been collecting emotional garbage, then sometimes we're the landfill. . 

[00:29:55] Lisa Damour: In fact, we are the landfill, right? I mean, I think if you actually think about it as garbage, right? Like this is just stuff the kid needs to unload. You don't need to say, why did you bring this garbage home? Or Why didn't you mention to the teacher that you really don't wanna be in that group or whatever.

That we just collect it and that we don't rummage around in it. We tie it off and we get rid of it. If your kid feels better after dumping the details of the day, it worked. It worked. You don't have to fix it. They are just trying to get rid of it. 

[00:30:20] Adam Grant: It, it seems like a common challenge for a lot of teens is they don't have a group where they belong anymore or they, they lost their best friend.

What guidance do you have for, for them and for us as parents in those moments? 

[00:30:36] Lisa Damour: I will just go ahead and say I'm not a huge fan of friendship groups. Um, they don't work very well and I don't think this is 'cause kids are somehow different or, um, bad. I think it's because you cannot get a collection of people together who like one another equally once you're hitting more than two or three people, right? You can't do this at any age and you sure as heck can't do it in the seventh grade. We have a pretty solid evidence base that the least stressed and thus happiest kids have one or two good friends. And so the job for adults is, if that's your kid, let 'em know.

Like, you gotta figure it out. You got it cracked. Leave it just like it is. And if your kid is in a large friendship group with a lot of drama, which is basically to be assumed, you can just say, look, it's not your fault. It's too many kids trying to hang out with each other. Are there a couple people in here that you could actually really enjoy?

And over time have that be really where your energy goes. 

[00:31:31] Adam Grant: You are full of reassuring news. You only need one or two good friends. 

[00:31:35] Lisa Damour: You really do. 

[00:31:35] Adam Grant: As a teenager. And also, like, joy is the dominant emotion that teens are reporting? 

[00:31:40] Lisa Damour: Yes, yes. I'm the anti headline . I mean, I really. 

[00:31:44] Adam Grant: And it's not a bad thing if kids lose it at home. Wow. 

[00:31:47] Lisa Damour: Yeah. No, the, I, we're in better shape than we feel we are. I'm not Pollyanna, you know that. And I'm not just trying to be counter-cultural. We get the teenagers we deserve. The way we talk about teenagers matters. They are listening. That's why I was so excited to do this Gallup poll and ask a fuller panel of questions.

'Cause if you only ask teenagers how miserable do you feel, they will tell you how miserable they feel. If you ask about all of the emotions, we get a much more comprehensive and reassuring picture. Now, does this mean teenagers are all doing great? Absolutely not. We have kids who are in a dark and low place and stay there.

We have kids who are harming themselves. We have kids who are engaged in substances. We have all of these things. But the critical thing is if we talk about all teenagers as though they are suffering or vulnerable or fragile, we actually deplete the resources for the kids who need it.

[00:32:46] Adam Grant: It is time for a lightning round. What is the worst advice you hear given to parents about their kids? 

[00:32:55] Lisa Damour: It's really hard for me when I hear people walk up to parents with 8, 9, 10 year olds and be like, enjoy this time, because wait till they're teenagers. That makes me bananas. Teenagers are wonderful. Also the kid hears it, right? Teenagers are wonderful. They are spicy and fun. The thing that is key, and this is why it's bad advice, teenagers can smell at a thousand yards who likes them. And so if you decide you don't like teenagers, it's actually not gonna go very well with a teenager. 

[00:33:26] Adam Grant: What's your favorite tip that we haven't covered yet on how to be a better parent to teens?

[00:33:32] Lisa Damour: Take good care of yourself. Being a parent to a teenager is a workout. You never know who's coming out of that room sometimes. And what I want for parents is to be a steady presence. It is really hard to be a steady presence if you feel absolutely like you're held together with Scotch tape. So take good care of yourself so that you can be what your kid needs you to be.

[00:33:55] Adam Grant: You've just released a new anniversary edition of your book Untangled. What's something you rethought in revising it? 

[00:34:02] Lisa Damour: When I went through it, most of it holds up. Teenagers are teenagers are teenagers. I have rethought how we talk with girls and young women around the presentation of their bodies because that has changed a lot in the culture.

I had to add vaping, algorithmic social media, legalized cannabis. There are things that have changed for teenagers, and I actually added some stuff on the social landscape because that has changed. 

[00:34:29] Adam Grant: What did you learn from a, a body image perspective and then also social landscape? 

[00:34:35] Lisa Damour: When I first wrote Untangled, it was widely understood that girls' bodies were objectified and that was all bad.

And when girls wore body conscious clothes or revealing clothes, that was them being objectified by the culture and needed to be prevented. Now, what's happened in the time since I wrote that book is that girls have come back and said, this is how I exercise my power. And if you have a problem with how I look, that's in the eyes of the beholder.

That's not my problem. This is very different from how we used to talk and think about this. And so in rewriting that section, it was really trying to rewrite how we engage these conversations with girls and young women and how we do it in a way that recognizes that they see it quite differently than we have traditionally seen it.

And again, the goal is to stay in good working relationship with them. Socially, I added a section about the tremendous anxiety kids feel when they're not part of a group and all that unfolds as a result of that anxiety. Desperately trying to become part of a group that's not welcoming them, turning away other options in the name of having set their sights on a particular group and only wanting that group, and really tried to offer guidance about how to talk with kids about when what they want socially isn't happening.

How to talk with them about that, not probably being as personal as it feels, and in doing so, helping them open up some other options. 'Cause kids need friends. 

[00:36:05] Adam Grant: Do you have a, a hot take on teenage life, an unpopular opinion that you're eager to defend? 

[00:36:13] Lisa Damour: They're better than we were. We know this in the data.

They're actually the best behaved teenagers. On record as a generation, they drink less, they have less sex. They actually don't use drugs more than we do. They don't smoke cigarettes, they do vape. They wear seat belts. The data are on my side on this one. It's just, it's just not the impression people are given.

[00:36:33] Adam Grant: And what's the question you have for me? 

[00:36:35] Lisa Damour: As the father of teenagers, what's the hardest thing for you? 

[00:36:40] Adam Grant: For me, the biggest challenge with teenagers is, like, wanting to provide the right level of support. And I feel like it's a tightrope walk, because give too much and you become a snowplow parent where you're clearing the path for them instead of preparing them for the path.

Give too little and they might really struggle unnecessarily and miss out on the support or guidance that they needed. And I, I find, like in hindsight, it's really clear what the, the right call was, but in the moment sometimes I, I don't know. 

[00:37:16] Lisa Damour: I love that answer. I love that answer. I mean, it just, it tells me is like, you're so in it.

You're so... 

[00:37:21] Adam Grant: Are you gonna help me with it? Like, help me out of it! I don't wanna be in it. 

[00:37:24] Lisa Damour: Wanna help you out? Okay. I'll, I'll help you. My favorite, favorite thing is when a kid turns around 14 years old and suddenly gets abstraction. Which is the ability to see things from lots of different perspectives.

The beautiful opening that becomes available with a kid that age is you can actually go to them and say, I am not sure what to do. I worry that if I intervene, I'm actually robbing you of an opportunity to grow and learn. I worry that if you don't intervene, you and I are both gonna regret it. You're gonna feel like, I'm gonna feel like something more should have been done.

What do you think? You'll come outta that conversation feeling much better about what to do next. 

[00:38:01] Adam Grant: I've been encouraging parents for years to do something that I stumbled onto by mistake, which was, like, asking our kids for advice as a way to show them that they could actually, you know, have the knowledge and the confidence to tackle some of their own problems.

And , they, they have more of that now than they did when they were younger. So why not seek it more often? 

[00:38:23] Lisa Damour: Absolutely. And the thing about teenagers is if you are asking an earnest, if you are being honest, like, I don't know what to do. They are at their absolute best. When an adult is transparent and clear and honestly vulnerable, teenagers rise to that and are extraordinary. When we treat them like they're not equal partners when we treat them like they don't know what they're doing,

they also can live down to expectations. So it's how we approach them that can actually pull the best out of them. 

[00:38:53] Adam Grant: I think my takeaway is you're telling me to be Jerry McGuire and just go to our daughters and say, help me help you . 

[00:39:00] Lisa Damour: Help me help you. All my work, Adam, is based on me going to teenagers and being like, explain this to me. Explain that to me. And since they can tell I really have no agenda and I'm just trying to ask, I get so much good stuff and then I just write it up and share it. 

[00:39:15] Adam Grant: If you're involved in Inside Out 3, if it happens, what emotion are you most excited to introduce? 

[00:39:23] Lisa Damour: Hmm. We could do love. That'd be fun. Right? Maybe a romantic life could come on board. I think that'd be good. I wonder about regret or guilt. Those are powerful. So we'll see. We'll see. 

[00:39:36] Adam Grant: Thanks. Look forward to it. It's so great to have a chance to do this one-on-one help me become a better parent session. 

[00:39:44] Lisa Damour: Well, I am honored to be with you . I am honored to be with you.

[00:39:52] Adam Grant: One of Lisa's most important messages is that teenagers live in a complex world. We should expect them to have complex emotions, and then instead of dictating how they should react, seek their guidance on how to best help them regulate what they're feeling.

ReThinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is part of the TED Audio Collective, and this episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard. Our producers are Hannah Kingsley Ma and Aja Simpson. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hans Dale Sue and Allison Layton Brown.

Our team includes Eliza Smith, Jacob Winnick, Samaya Adams, Roxanne Hai Lash, Banban Cheng, Julia Dickerson, and Whitney Pennington Rogers.

The calming voice you have, Lisa. 

[00:40:45] Lisa Damour: It's how I talk. 

[00:40:46] Adam Grant: Is that natural or did you learn that at Michigan? 

[00:40:48] Lisa Damour: It's how I've always talked. Wouldn't it be funny though, Adam, like we could do a TV show where there's a clinician who gives really good advice, but in such a grating voice that it's like impossible to actually integrate. 

[00:41:01] Adam Grant: Versus, versus the therapist who says nonsense in a really compelling way.