Change Your Brain Every Day - Parenting: How Much Information Should You Share with Your Teenager?

Episode Date: February 26, 2019

As much as parents may dread having those important conversations with their children, such as that one about birds and bees, these talks play a crucial role not only in their development, but in the family dynamic as well. In this episode of The Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen continue their discussion on parenting and teens by answering some of the tough questions.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to Brainmd.com. Welcome back. We are in teen week, both sitting here completely traumatized by our own teenage years. And we stopped the last podcast with this one question. How much should you share about your own reality as an adolescent? But before we get that, you have a review you're going to read.

This is from Nutrition Tactics to Supercharge Your Brain. This is by I.N. Health Coach from the US. And it says, as you say, what I am doing, is this going to help my brain or is it going to hurt my brain? I am so protective of my brain and how to care for it. I'm learning from you every day, from your podcast books and recipes. You are game changing for my life and my family and friends around me. I am a graduate of the Institute of Integrative Nutrition and the gut health course. I am, and I am passionate to help and change the lives of the people I love and those around me. So from the bottom of my heart, thank you. Thank you so much for that.

I know. We're getting like 50,000 downloads every week. We are so grateful to all of you. Thanks for sharing. And, you know, we try to bring you topics that matter in your life. Last week we did mom week. This week we're doing teen week. So what do you think about sharing? So I'm going to start with a question that someone asked us, okay? Because I think that I'm going to give you my opinion, but we all have different opinions. I'm not sure there's a rule on this. I mean,

you as a child psychiatrist probably know that better than I do. Here's a question from one of our listeners. What's the matter with asking my teenager a simple question I'd like to know? Why is she so unwelcoming when I do? So I have a theory and you're going to have a scientific theory. This is just my mom theory. It might be because they think you don't understand. That's my guess. Because I actually, most of my friends actually think I overshare with my daughter. Now I've made it age appropriate. I've not overshared my teenage years when she was 10. Okay. I didn't do that. But at each stage, when I know that she's struggling with something, number one, we have a rule in our house. And we just had this discussion last night with her again. We want to hear all of

your thoughts. Everything is safe for you to discuss, but then you actually actually have to make it safe. Right? So one of the things we do at the dinner table, her friends have actually kind of freaked out when they come over dinner table, her friends have actually kind of freaked out when they come over for dinner, um, because they're like, your family's so weird because we talk about everything. And the way we get them to talk or her to talk is by us sharing. So I share with my daughter things about my teenage years in my childhood, but I've done it at each stage that she's at. Now I may not go into detail. It depends on the situation. It really depends on the topic and the situation. I may not go into explicit detail depending on what it is, but I share the struggle. I share

the challenges. I share the successes. I share all of that, but I'm very clear with her. I'm like, I'm sharing this because a wise man learns from his own mistakes. A wiser man learns from someone else's, right? I'm not saying that I was smart. You are smarter than I am in a lot of ways. So, but that's my way of handling it. And because of that, she's incredibly open with us because I've made it safe. Which is what you want them to do. Because, you know, if you are like this person, what's the matter with asking my teenager a simple question? I'd like to know why is she so unwelcoming when I do, whenever I read that, I begin the quality of their relationship is poor. And often it's because mom is not a good listener because her mother was not a good listener.

And if she's talking over the teenager, then the teenager is not going to share. The teenager is just going to be in fight mode. Right. If you are not sure someone's safe, that someone is not being harsh or critical or demeaning, then, I mean, what do they say in karate, right? You're always assessing the situation. And is this safe? Right.

Or is it dangerous? Right. And because who can hurt you more than anybody? It's your wife or your husband or your parents. And so my first thought is the quality of their relationship is not good because they've not perhaps spent enough time together and there's not been enough listening. Because when there's enough listening, if you ask a simple question and the person feels like you're really interested in the answer and not expecting the answer that you want, that you demand, then they're going to give you a bad attitude. Right. So I want to say, because you also share, and I don't know what you're going to give you a bad attitude. Right. So I want to say, because you also share,

and I don't know what you're going to say your philosophy is, but you share a lot to the point that my daughter, between the two of us, she walks out with her hands over her head. Stop, stop. So she's like, and we don't even share like stuff that's like bad. She just, she's like, no, no one needs to hear this from their parents. And so, but here's an interesting point. You asked me in the last episode if my mom was a good listener. she wasn't always a good listener, but here's what she did do. She always

like possibly overshared. So she over shares, but what that did is she would even come in my room. Um, she, she, one thing she did do was remember what it was like to be a teenager. She was really good at that. And so she would come in my room at times when I really wasn't even thinking about talking to her about something. She'd anticipate the next step. She anticipated what I was going through. She'd come in. And so she would, I'd be 15 and she'd come in and she'd want to have like a serious,

like sex talk. And she'd want to talk about birth control. And I'm not even there. I'm not, I'm not even there yet. But, but her point was she was going to talk about birth control and i'm not even there i'm not i'm not even there yet but but her point was she was going to anticipate it so she didn't listen she didn't even ask she jumped in and and i'm like get out get out of my room i'm yelling at her to get out of my room i don't want to hear it because it's like freaking me out but but what she was doing the right thing right listen to me this wasn't to get at. I'm mad at her, sort of.

Sort of mad at her for like freaking me out and like trying to like talk to me about birth control when I'm like I'm not even there yet. But here's what it did. It opened a door. Right. And I think when kids are 12, you should be talking to them about sex and drugs. Well, she did that. But now she was serious about it. I actually, did I tell you this?

1987, the very first video I ever created was called An Intimate Parent-Child Talk. It was about how to talk to your kids about sex and drugs. Neither of my parents did. When I talked to my mother about sex, she'd just get horrified and turn green, even though she has seven children. So I know she knew something about it. But, you know, there was no information coming there. Certainly not from my dad because he wasn't home.

And so kids then learn bad information or erroneous information. And I think sharing, I love what you said, age appropriate. So you're not sharing vivid details with seven-year-olds. But as they get older, talking about how it works, some of your experiences. Some of my mistakes. And what you would do differently. Right. It's important. That's how they learn.

And so if you just lie to them like you were the perfect parent, you were the perfect teen, and they know, well, there's no way that was possible. Or they think, well, then she's never going to understand what I'm going through. Right. So. And so remembering what it was like appropriately sharing, but also sharing the lessons, not at a time when they can't hear you. And that's why you do things with kids, with children and teenagers.

So I take a lot of, you know, when I do therapy with a teenager, we often go for a long walk. Right. Why? Drives are great. Because if we're just sitting across from each other in my office, it's not a natural situation. Right. And so, and parents, they get so mad because they think I'm paying all this money for the child to go play cards with Dr. A. Right.

And we just use the cards as a distraction. Yep. So that. So we go for drives. And when I take Chloe for a drive, she not only opens up. If I take her and her friends for a drive, I know everything going on at school. It's the craziest thing. They just suddenly.

And I'm like, I literally turned around to one of her friends one time. I'm like, do you talk to your mom about this? She's like, no, no way. And I'm like, well, it's the weirdest thing. They just open up. But I want to just reiterate sometimes because that question that we started with, sometimes kids will act mad at you or be mad at you for bringing something up that's embarrassing to them. They will. But do it in an appropriate time that doesn't embarrass them. But right. But even though my mom, even though I was like, I don't want to talk to you about this,

go away. Like this isn't like, like this is freaking me out that you came in my room talking to me about birth control and I'm not even like ready to like have that talk yet. I freaked out at her in the moment,

but it planted a seed with me that, oh, it's safe to talk to my mom when I am ready. That's what it did. And she knew that somehow my mom just knew that, okay, well I did my, I, it's like a hit and run. I'm going to plant that information. I'm going to take off. Cause like now she knows, I know, and she knows that she can talk to me. And they're more likely to listen to you if you listen to them. Right. Another question we have is what impact does a parent's mental illness have on a child? Oh, that's hard. And it's a lot. Yeah. Because my uncle, who was a priest, then turned therapist, said something I really liked. He said, children are like violins. They play the stress of their parents

with their behavior. That's interesting. And it's so important. And you know how I got most of my adult patients is they'd bring me their kids. And during the evaluation, pretty quickly, I got smart enough to go, oh, as I evaluate the children, let me evaluate mom and dad too. Because, you know, if I treat a child and I send them home to a mom who has ADD, they can't concentrate, or a dad who's bipolar, who's completely unpredictable, that's not going to be good for the child. So, you know, here at Amen Clinics, we're family psychiatrists for the most part. But having a mom that's depressed or a dad that's angry or inattentive or psychotic. My son-in-law grew up in a family with a mother that had paranoid schizophrenia. That really does a number on your own development, your own sanity. And gratefully, he sort of worked through that therapy for a long time. But it's so important for you to take care of your own mental health so that the children don't feel responsible.

Yeah. No, it's part of why I did two years of therapy when Chloe was little. It's when I realized that I was beginning to repeat, even though I wasn't repeating the same pattern from my childhood, I actually had become, I'd actually become very defensive about the childhood and my childhood pattern and the chaos in my house. But even that defensiveness was in its own way a problem. And I just realized that I was developing habits that I'm like, I don't want to be this kind of mom. And that's why I went to two years of therapy. I really didn't want to like pass on those same habits.

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