Change Your Brain Every Day - The Teenage Brain - How to Train Teens in Building the Right Boundaries

Episode Date: January 13, 2017

This is our first milestone for this podcast, and believe it or not, we've just reached our 50th episode.  So from all of us here at the Amen Clinic, thank you for your continued support and the wonderful feedback and reviews that you've left on iTunes.  Now to celebrate this milestone, we're joined by Dr. John Townsend, a prolific, New York Times bestselling author of almost 30 books.  Today's topic is all about the teenage brain. It's a topic that's near and dear to us because we too have a teenager who is so special in our life.  The problem is, in many families, these teens don't get the attention they need to prepare themselves for the future, to be the next leaders. They are left vulnerable to negative influences.  If you're in that same boat, be sure to listen, as Dr John Townsend shares with us his expertise in helping parents raise up teens with the right boundaries. 

Hi, I'm Donnie Osmond, and welcome to The Brain Warrior's Way, hosted by my friends Daniel and Tana Amon. Now, in this podcast, you're going to learn that the war for your health is one between your ears. That's right. If you're ready to be sharper and have better memory, mood, energy, and focus, well then stay with us. Here are Daniel and Tana Amon.

Welcome back. We're here with our good friend, Dr. John Townsend, author of 30 books, including Boundaries and The Entitlement Cure. Today, we're going to talk about teenagers. One of my favorite topics. The teenage brain and how boundaries relates. I know, John, you have two kids, so you are a veteran of raising teenagers. So we have four. We've got one at home still. She is 13. She's pretty amazing. But this is something near and dear to our hearts. So, yes. So why did you write Boundaries for Teens? Well, mainly just because everything I was hearing through the radio program that I do and the conferences, people were saying, they're a different animal. The rules are different.

You know, my nine-year-old and my 14-year-old, I'm sorry, you've got to make something more specific. And I started thinking, you know, that's right. That's what we know about developing the brain, is that the brain is very different than you. Also, the rules are different. So I thought, let me write something for those parents who are in that sort of phase of, who are you? You used to come up and, you know, snuggle and want to do your homework, and you were so curious about everything, and now you're just blowing us off.

And how do I have a happy family? So I wrote a book to basically for parents to have a different kind of a game set so the child becomes happy and responsible parents become happy too that's awesome so I have a question for you to get started so our 13 year old it's kind of a funny story she somehow she has learned to identify herself as that good girl which thrills me to no end but but i actually don't know how that happened because she her friends at school are sort of the fast crowd they call her mom and um so she has become this good girl and she's sort of become as

a result a challenge okay for some of the boys if that makes sense and challenge yeah challenge because she is um that one that's sort of unattainable. She's not... So they kind of target her because she's not a fast girl. Because she's not. And so where they're kind of kissing and whatever with the other girls, she's not. And she's made her identity being the good girl.

And it's interesting to me how this has sort of transpired. And so one of the boys is very popular, started texting her and Snapchatting her and whatever they do. And she always shows me everything. We're very open. And so he sent one fairly inappropriate text. And, of course, I got rather upset. And it said, one of them said, do you want to H you, which means hook up. And I made a fairly

inappropriate comment that she should have made back. She goes, mom, moms don't teach their daughters that I'm like, Oh yeah, they do. So she goes, I can't believe you just said that. You're a very protected mother. Oh, absolutely. And claws have got to come out sometimes with these. Oh, I was so irritated. She's 13. Right. So anyways, so later I asked her, I said, so I said, so what are you going to do? She said, I didn't respond. And so then, but because she didn't respond, he kept it up. So she finally ends up saying, I said, what did you say? She said, I said, no. I said, that's it. She goes, yeah, I said no. And I said, well, why didn't you say anything else? She goes, because if I had said anything else, I invited him to actually have a conversation with me and I didn't want to have a conversation.

And I'm thinking to myself, who are you? Like, where did you come from? How did this child actually get this identity? How did she learn how to draw boundaries like that? How did she even know that that would open up a door? You know, and I honestly. Well, it's not really as much of a mystery as you're putting on. So Chloe was really hard when she was young. Independent, strong-willed, butt-heads. She was like 15 at 8. And when Tana read Love and Logic, which was a really good book on parenting.

I mean, it's just, it's masterful. Right. And we've been talking to her about what her goals are. What do you want in your life? And does your behavior get what you want? And because we have not given her everything, but she has very clear goals for herself that this bozo didn't fit with the goals that she has for herself. Exactly. But my question to John is for her to know that just saying no, I thought that was pretty high level thinking.

That was a boundary issue. She didn't say anything else because she didn't want to invite a conversation. My question to you is I thought that was pretty awesome and I'm not even sure how she came up with that. But that seems like a great boundary for a team. Well, it's an awesome boundary for anybody. And I'm just curious what you would say about that because I don't remember teaching her that. Let me start. To me, there's no mystery here, guys. You guys are awesome parents. And as we

know, teens become functional, loving, responsible teens when parents do three things. One, they teach them, you know, responsible behaviors, your words. We do our little lecture. They roll their eyes, but we're supposed to lecture them. Two, you model it. You know, you guys are a very responsible person. You're very loving and generous and fun people, but you're also responsible. So she saw it.

And thirdly, she experienced it because I'm sure in her early years when she was so headstrong, we had her in time out a million times. You had to take away fun stuff. So she experienced it. You model it and you talk. Now, with that as a foundation, what we found out about human development, to your question, Tana, like I never said that to her, is that people are highly creative and they put ideas together based on a good foundation. So she probably came up with that for herself because she had the foundational blocks. And she studied relationships. You guys are relational people. And probably part of her went, if I say no, Sam, to the hooking up and here's why, then Sam's going to get encouraged because some attention is better than no attention. I'm going to starve Sam out. And I'm going to say, no, that's going to get encouraged because some attention is better than no attention, I'm going to starve Sam out.

And I'm going to say, no, that's going to starve him. He'll go to one of the fast girls because she's easier to help with than it. And she was right about it. She put that together because she had so much insight into her behavior. Interesting. So let's talk about some of the common challenges parents have with teens in your experience? What are the top four or five? Well, in the book, I've got 23, unfortunately. They're complex. Yeah. Yeah. Disrespect and disrespectful terms as well as words, school problems, acting out problems,

impulse problems, breaking house rules, chronic problems, defiance problems, passive aggressive, in runs problems where they're sneaky, all the way to alcohol and drug problems. And what I got it down to, no matter what the problem is, I have four solutions for it.

The book is based around these four teenage solutions. Should I just lay those out guys? Yeah. First off is love. And this is not in a random order. You have to convey to the child all the time that I love you, even if they say you're being, you know, don't hug me in public or whatever. It doesn't matter. I love you because no child can tolerate consequences and boundaries unless they know their love because they're experiencing persecution, it's hatred, and you don't love me. So you've got to be a very verbally and behaviorally loving parent. Number two is the truth. And the truth is, hey, the Avins have house rules.

There's things that we allow and don't allow. We do allow fun and great vacations, and we allow great times and social things and sports and all that. We don't allow these words and these behaviors. So the truth is what the house rules are. I have some parents put the house rules in the top 15 things that we will and won't tolerate on the refrigerator. There's no question about refrigerator. We do that. We do that. Number one is love. Number two is truth.

Number three is freedom. And this is the one that gets parents a little bit scary. Like you also have the freedom to disobey things. We can't tell our parent, our kids, well, you know, here's the rules and I'm going to make you obey the rules because we can't make anybody. I mean, if somebody is three years old and a run out traffic, sure you go rescue the kid, but you know, I can't really stop you from disrespect. I can't stop you from, you know, taking in your grades and that sort of thing. So you're free. But if you tolerate that,

the fourth one is reality. Based on what you do with our rules, you're free to blow them off. If you blow off, here's going to be the reality. We're going to take away things you love. We're going to have things you hate. We're going to take away your social situation. We're going to take away privilege. We're going to take away media, digital stuff. That's why I love all the digital stuff because now you can take something away from the kids because they're addicted to it. It's nice.

You can give them the addiction and you pull it away. They behave. But always go with those big four. I love you. Now here's the house rules. You're free to stop doing these if you don't want I love you. Now here's the house rules. You're free to stop doing this if you don't want to do it. But here's the reality. And follow through, follow through, follow through. I love that.

Couldn't agree more. Consequences are huge. Real life consequences is what we try and do. And the key is you've got to find out what matters to them. If your kid's a loner, then don't say you'll be in your room. Right, exactly. And if your kid's like really social, you take away say it will be in your room. Right, exactly. And if your kid is like really social, you take away the social thing, they're in misery,

that's good. So maybe the loner needs to have a part taken away or something. I don't know what you'd say to this because one thing that we hear people say a lot is, I have no control. I've heard this one a lot. I have no control. My kid is 16 years old and he's way bigger than me and there's nothing I can do. And as a person who is fairly intense, I always laugh at that when I sit back and I think, really? There's nothing you can do? Do you do his laundry? Do you do the grocery shopping? Do you buy his clothes? Do you, you know, whatever. There's a lot of things you can do. Parents are thinking about discipline as opposed to the real life things that they do for these children. I don't know what you have to say about that.

I totally agree. There's some things you can do to take away the money, take away all the stuff in the room, take away the digital media, take away Verizon. You've got a lot of control. I agree. I like. So a long time ago, I wrote a book called New Skills for Frazzled Parents. And it actually goes beautifully with what you're talking about.

But the first part, just as you said, it's love. For me, it's bonding. That I actually will never let someone tell me something bad about myself. And there's plenty to say, unless I trust them. So if there's no bond, you have no influence in me. And so the first thing with effective parenting is bonding, which is listening. So not talking over them, do what we do as therapists, active listening and time, actual physical time. And

that's what people don't do these days because they're so busy. And, you know, as opposed to when you and I were growing up, almost all families now are two-parent working families. So everybody's running as fast as can be. And the level of bonding is not what it used to be. That is one thing that we've done really well with Chloe. In fact, we have rituals and that's one thing. I know everybody has to figure out what their ritual is because everyone has different schedules. So for us, it's our morning time before school. We get up extra early.

We make breakfast together. We have our little hot water with lemon and ginger we do together. And then we leave actually a half an hour early, and we go for a drive on the coast before we go to school. And that's our talking time. So it's just rituals are important with your kids. And when I wrote another book called Healing the Hardware of the Soul, there's a chapter in it on how to make your child a Republican, Democrat, or anything you want. And it's all about if you're bonded with your child, they will pick your values. If you are not bonded, they are likely to pick

the opposite values just to irritate you. And I was not bonded to my dad. I am now, but he worked all the time. And in 1972, when he told me, he said, if you vote for McGovern, the country will go to hell. And I voted for McGovern and the country went to hell, but it had nothing to do with my vote. But it was his guy. But if you want your child to pick your values, you have to connect with him or her. Otherwise, they pick the opposite. So I'm guessing that when we're saying bonding, that's what you would fit into your love category. Yeah. It's like they always say that they don't care how much you know

until they know how much you love them. Right. Okay. It's the active listening. And the way I phrase it is you've got to enter their world. Instead of like, you know, while all your friends have tattoos, tell them I have a tattoo. I'll sit over there your friend has.

Oh, American flag or whatever. And I try to enter that world, at least understand it without judging. I said, you know, don't lecture them right now. Be interested. Interest goes a long way. Exactly. This is so important. Boundaries for teenagers. Dr. John Townsend, thank you so much, my friend, for being with us. That was great. Thanks for listening to today's show, The Brain Warrior's Way. Why don't you head over to brainwarriorswaypodcast.com. That's brainwarriorswaypodcast.com, where Daniel and Tana have a gift for you just for subscribing to the show.

And when you post your review on iTunes, you'll be entered into a drawing where you can win a VIP visit to one of the Amen clinics. I'm Donnie Osmond, and I invite you to step up your brain game by joining us in the next episode.