Speaking of Psychology - Anxiety and Teen Girls (SOP80)

Episode Date: May 8, 2019

Anxiety among teens and young adults is rising, and studies have shown that it has skyrocketed in girls. One study found that the number of girls who often felt nervous, worried or fearful jumped by 55 percent over a five-year period. What factors are behind rising stress and anxiety in girls and what can we do about it? Our guest is Dr. Lisa Damour, a clinical psychologist and executive director of Laurel School’s Center for Research on Girls. She has a new book out called "Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls." APA is currently seeking proposals for APA 2020 sessions, learn more at http://convention.apa.org/proposals Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hello, and welcome to Speaking of Cyclone. a bi-weekly podcast from the American Psychological Association. I'm your host, Caitlin Luna. Before we start, I want to remind you that if you have any comments, questions, or ideas for us, please email me at K-Luna at APA.org. That's K-L-U-N-A-A-A-D-R. Now on to the conversation. Anxiety among teens and young adults is rising, and studies have shown that it is

skyrocketed in girls. One study found that the number of girls who often felt nervous, worried, or fearful jumped by 55% over a five-year period. What factors are behind rising stress and anxiety in girls, and what can we do about it? Our guest for this episode is Dr. Lisa DeMore, a clinical psychologist and executive director of Laurel School's Center for Research on Girls. She has a new book out now called Under Pressure, Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety and Girls.

Dr. DeMore also writes a monthly column about adolescence for the New York Times. Welcome, Dr. DeMore. Thanks so much for having me. We're delighted to have you with us. In your book, you get right to the point in the introduction when you write, something has changed. Anxiety has always been a part of life growing up, but in recent years, it seems to have spun out of control. What are you seeing in your practice and in your work with the school and as the mother of two daughters?

So it's interesting. What I have noticed, I would say, kind of around the last 10 years, is that the general population talks about anxiety a lot more, talks about stress a lot more and talks about both as if they were always into everywhere pathological, that there was no healthy form. Whereas we, of course, as psychologists know that anxiety and stress are normal and healthy functions that can reach, you know, pathological levels, but they really are sort of a part of daily life. And so that sort of change in kind of the popular discourse really caught my ear. A lot of, you know, girls sort of showing up in my practice or coming to see me at the school

where I consult two days a week and popping down in my chair in front of me and saying, I have anxiety and talking about it as if it were a life sentence and something that they were stuck with indefinitely where, you know, I always have to sort of be careful about how I respond because part of me wants to say, well, of course you have anxiety. You're awake. You got out of bed. And so I do feel like one of the things that has changed is that there is a misunderstanding. And we are taking care of a population of adults and young people, and my focus is especially on girls who are anxious about being anxious.

and my suspicion is that has helped to push the rates up a little bit because if you're going to feel anxiety in the course of a normal day, which you really are, and then you also feel anxious about being anxious, that cannot, you know, that can't be a good thing. I think there are other factors at play besides the sort of misunderstanding or the disconnect between our sort of clinical and academic understanding of anxiety and the popular culture's understanding of anxiety. and the popular culture's understanding of anxiety. I think for girls in particular, over time, we have just gradually added more and more to their plates, but we've taken nothing off their plates. Girls are incredibly good students. They are really outpacing boys academically.

At this point, one statistic is that they are 70% of high school valedictorians. Wow. They're accomplishing things that, you know, In some ways, there's never been a better time to be a girl. You know, there's so many opportunities, so much access for them. And yet, you know, they still worry about how they look. They're still told by the culture to worry about how they look. We still have expectations that girls will be agreeable and polite.

Go to their brother's soccer games, if that's sort of the family program. And I think about, you know, there's boys are doing less well in school than they should, but there are a lot of boys who are doing quite well in school, and they're working very hard. And I just know they're not spending as much time as the girls are worrying about if they look good enough. You know, so I think that that's a factor among others. So I think there's that, there's the speeding up of the culture, thanks to technology. I've started to think about it in terms of how much content everybody absorbs in a day now.

adults and young people, and that, you know, with sort of 24-hour constant access to basically the whole world and its news updates, we're taking in a lot of information. And I think, you know, I know there are psychologists really trying to sort out how much can we take in in a day and still, you know, be operating at healthy levels. So, you know, you spoke a lot about how culture plays a role and the pressures that girls are facing. Can you talk a little bit more about what girls face with their friends, with members of the opposite sex? And, you know, as they're trying to achieve, what sort of messages are they telling themselves? So, you know, it's interesting. If we think about the culture and friends and, you know, gendered relationships, you know, how girls interact with boys. there are stresses sort of built into this. And in my work, and certainly in this book under pressure,

you know, I try to address these stresses from a few sides. You know, one is to say, look, stress is going to happen, anxiety is going to happen. These are normal healthy functions. And even when they cross over a line into unhealthy, we're really good at treating them. You know, and this is true. Like there's, you know, I would say that probably a lot of psychologists would agree that if we look at the DSM-5 in terms of the, you know, the diagnoses that we feel like we've really got a pretty good handle on, I bet, you know, anxiety would be very high on that list and even stress disorders where, you know, we're getting better and better at managing those, and we actually have more difficulty treating other things.

But then also within the book, what I aim to do, and when I'm thinking about young people, is to then take seriously the stresses they do face and make sure. that adults are responding in the most useful ways possible to those stresses. So you mentioned with friends, you know, I think that one of the, one of the things that adults have sort of been slow to appreciate is that conflict is going to happen among young people. Conflict happens among people, you know, all the time. It just is, again, like waking up, you know, if you're going to be in a room with someone for a while and both people are conscious, you know, eventually there will probably be a conflict. Right. And then if you take 30 people and you put them in a room and you make them be

together all day every day and you do that for nine months, you know, there's going to be conflict and that's school. And so I think we have not done yet enough to help people become very adept at managing conflict. I spent two days a week consulting in a school and I visit a lot of schools. And I think in a really well-meaning way, you know, our efforts around conflict often come down to us saying, you know, hey, we want you guys to get along. And if you're not going to get along, we want you to respect each other, which isn't a lot to go on. And so one of the things I worked to unpack in my writing, you know, is how do we teach kids to do conflict well? And how do we teach them, you know, what are the unhealthy forms of conflict and what are some healthy forms?

And how do we provide really meaningful guidance on it? And I think the reason that adults have largely not done this is that adults are usually not so great at dealing with conflict. And so then it's hard for us to teach kids what the things that we're not really fluent in ourselves. So I think that those are some of the social stressors, which is that kids are having and girls are having expectable conflicts, but they don't really have a repertoire for managing them. Yeah, and it is very challenging. It's obviously some people are conflict avoidant, some people seek it out. And so as adults, like you said, How are we going to lead by example if we struggle with it ourselves? I mean, you see it play out in the adult world all the time.

Absolutely. And I actually picked up along the way this fabulous set of metaphors from some teachers to teach conflict. And it works really well. So when I talk with young people, I say, look, there's three unhealthy forms of conflict. There's being a bulldozer, you know, running people over. There's being a doormat, which is just letting yourself get run over. And there's being a dormant with spikes, which is far in a way the most common form for both adults. and kids, which is basically passive-aggressive behaviors, you know, using guilt as a weapon or playing

the part of a victim or involving third parties in what should be like really a one-on-one discussion. And then I talk with them about how the healthiest form of conflict is to be a pillar, you know, to stand up for yourself while being respectful of other people. And these, you know, young people latch on to these metaphors really quickly. It makes me mean. sense to them, and it gives them a framework for thinking about how they may be inclined to react, because most people start by reacting in one of the unhealthy forms, and how they truly want to act if they decide to take up a conflict. That's really wonderful metaphor for how to approach conflict. I really like that. I think I might keep that in my back pocket for another time.

It works. It works. Yeah, it's a really wonderful way to describe it. So, you know, is a way to just keep yourself to hold yourself to a high standard and also understand that you, have the right to stand up for yourself. You do. And the other thing, though, I will also add is you also have the right to do nothing. I, especially with the time I spend with kids, I've become aware that adults tend to encourage kids to take up every conflict. Oh, she hurt your feelings.

You need to say something to her. You know, oh, you know, he left you out of something. You need to let him know you were hurt. And I think sometimes that makes a lot of sense. but I think in truth, no adult, no functioning adult, is engaging every annoyance in the day. That we are all day long making very tactical decisions about, you know, conscious or not, about, you know, how much do I care about this relationship that I need to repair that problem with a person? How likely do I think it is that if I bring up this conflict with someone, they're going to handle it well?

And if I pillar it, are they going to pillar back? You know, all of those things. Am I better off just sort of maintaining a polite distance from this person? And so I also think as we help kids learn to navigate conflict, we have to put right on the table next to pilloring the possibility of what I call emotional Aikido, right? And I've heard other therapists call it this too, where in Aikido, this form of martial arts, if someone comes at you, the first thing you do is you just step out of the way.

You just sort of let them go right on past. And a lot of drama does die. from lack of attentional oxygen. And I think sometimes in our well-meaning way, when we're saying to kids, you need to let her know she hurt your feelings, we may actually be fueling something that didn't really, was never going to be resolved

and that the girl didn't even care that much about the relationship to want to try to work on it. Right. That's a really great pathways to resolving conflict. So do anxiety, and stress and girls need to be treated differently than it would be in boys? Probably not. You know, and I think that one of the rules that we know as psychologists is that fundamentally, boys and girls are more alike, men and women are more alike than they are different. And we do see

high rates of anxiety and girls. You know, this is a long established finding, you know, because the other thing we know is that when girls are in distress, they tend to internalize. When boys are in distress, they tend to externalize. But if I'm sitting with an anxious client, my bag of tricks is pretty much the same for boys and girls. I think that what I'm of interest, you know, a particular interest to me and what I'm writing about is that probably the causes of the stress and anxiety are not totally the same for boys and girls. That they are each, you know, there's certainly a great degree of overlap, but there are also some very unique stressors to. being a boy in our culture and being a girl in our culture.

So those groups need to be addressed appropriately. But you said how you treat it would be basically the same. I mean tailored to each person, but similar. I think that's right. And I think, again, you know, anxiety is kind of like smoke. You know, there's fire underneath it. And so, you know, we're good at treating the smoke. We're good at helping people manage their emotional reaction.

to things that make them feel very, very anxious. And I think our tools for treating anxiety are established and they work well and we're good at it. I'm interested in the fires. So whether it's the pressures on girls about how they look or the ways in which girls, I think, sometimes are over-exerting themselves at school and nobody stops them. you know, some various are gender-specific sources of anxiety. And I'm interested in what we can do as a culture to address those before they become a problem for girls, you know, or to give girls strategies for managing the strains that come

with being female in this culture so that they are not trying to navigate those alone. Absolutely. And your book is full of advice for parents of teen girls. And so what are the biggest takeaways parents need to know? Well, I think one thing that I find very reassuring is that how parents react to stress and anxiety goes a long way to dictating what happens next. And for me, I think the best metaphor, the best moment in parenting, the time when parents really tend to get this right is when you're parenting a toddler who scrapes her knee or his knee. You know, there's a very distinct pattern of what occurs. You know, the toddler falls down, scrapes their knee, and then they look at their knee, and then they look at the parent's face. And what is going on on the parent's face is really going to shape the rest of the, you know, the rest of the interaction.

If the parent is stricken and panicking, that is usually pretty scary to the kid and they sort of fall apart. If the parent, even if they are feeling stricken and panicking on the inside, if the parent sort of can maintain their composure and say, oh, ouch, you know, let's go get you inside and get you cleaned up. Usually the kid's like, okay, you know, and sort of takes it from there. And so my aim in writing under pressure was both to try to do a little bit of a public service announcement about anxiety and stress being normal and healthy and manageable when they're not. And then also to articulate all sorts of things that adults can do to help make things better. And so one really key one is for adults to manage their own stress and anxiety. sufficiently, that when they are faced with a young person who's feeling very, very stressed or very, very anxious, they can summon what abounds to a containing response, you know,

not dismissive, not invalidating, not minimizing, but a sort of a confidence that, yeah, wow, you know, your knee looks kind of bloody. Yes, that does seem like a very big test. I'm here to help you through it. You're going to get through it. We'll figure this out. You'll figure this out. Those kinds of reactions make a very big difference for parents.

We've talked a few times already about the importance of leading by example. So what are some of other ways parents can lead by example for their teens in terms of whether it's watching their time on their cell phones or in front of a screen or if it's about going to sleep earlier? How can parents do that a little bit better? Well, I'm so glad you brought up sleep and technology because I think, you know, if you, you know, if you said, like, what are, like, what's really making kids fragile these days? I think one of the lowest hanging fruits, one of the simplest explanations is they just get nowhere near as much sleep as they need. You know, and I think there's also a lot of misunderstanding about how much sleep kids need. Most parents will say, I think they need about eight hours. That's not actually true. Elementary school

kids need around 11 hours on average. Middle school kids need about 10 hours on average, and then high schoolers need nine, you know, which is much more than most get. Absolutely, yeah. Right. And, you know, we've studied sleep up, down and sideways, and we know that it is, you know, the summary headline is it's the glue that holds human beings together. And so one thing parents can do is to model really good habits around sleep and especially around technology and sleep. So easy fixes or simple fixes. They may not always be easy to implement are things from as severe As, you know, one of my friends, I love this, has a rule in her house that no technology goes to the second floor of the home ever. And that's where the bedrooms are in their house. Other people I know have a rule that no technology ever crosses the threshold of a bedroom at any point in the 24-hour day. You know, that just that is not allowed. Other families, you know, sometimes there are teenagers who do a really good job of studying in their room with their technology.

So I think for those families, a really good rule. rule is that's fine, but the second, you know, by a certain point in the night, it has to come out, you know, that it can't stay in the room overnight. So things like that, especially when they're laid down early. I think sometimes it's hard to walk these back if bad habits have been established. Right. Yeah, absolutely. But it's, you know, it's not that hard to convince, you know, a nine-year-old that they cannot take technology into their bedroom. And so I think once that's established, and also when parents model it. And it's funny because I know, and this may be in places where the quarters are very, very close, or kids need to be very, very carefully supervised. I know some families

make a rule where the parents charge all the technology in their room overnight. You know, they get a power strip and they charge it in their bedroom. And I think this is a great strategy if you really need to know that your kid isn't sneaking out of their room to get a little extra time. But I would say, gosh, if you can actually model that it doesn't go in a bedroom, that would be my first choice. And that it really is divorced from resting and sleeping and that part of our lives that we do not do nearly enough to protect. And you really want to touch on what you said in a recent CBS this morning interview where you did talk about screen time. And in that interview you talked about, and I thought this was a really beautiful way to put it, about that limiting screen time is not a, about deprivation, it's about preserving what's important, whether that's family time, hobbies,

sleep, whatever it is. It's about protecting those things and not necessarily about depriving and taking away technology from yourself as a parent or for the teen. That's right. You know, it's interesting. You know, there's a lot of interest in what the data are going to say about how technology shapes childhood or, you know, alters the adolescent brain. And I mean, we're psychologists. We know these studies are going to take a long time to come in. They're going to be pretty murky in their findings. You know, it's very hard to do good longitudinal research that is going to pinpoint. It takes a lot of time. So I sort of feel like, well, while we wait for the data to come in, let's go with what we know. And what we know is that there are essential elements of life that are critical to healthy development in children.

So getting enough sleep, hugely important part of healthy development. Having one-on-one, or not even one-on-one, face-to-face contact, learning social skills through practicing social skills, through reading social cues, for learning how to do that, hugely important. You know, meals where people are talking, you know, uninterrupted time with people who love you. Physical exercise, you know, physical activity is important. And then this, we could talk about a great length, but I'll just sum it up, studying without unnecessary interruption. Right? We know everything we need to know about human attention and what it means to disrupt it and how much time is lost, even if you're interrupting yourself, you know, what interruptions do to concentration, what they do to accuracy, what they do to speed of work. So we know all of these things. So I think it's most useful when parents say to their, you know, to young people, look, I'm not against technology. I am for sleep. I am for, you know, face-to-face conversations. I am for you getting your homework done in a focused, concentrated, way. I am for you, you know, being up and about moving your body. So why don't we make sure all of

those things are happening as much as they need to be happening? And then we'll look at the time that's left. And some of that certainly can go to technology. And obviously social media plays a big role in this. And in that same interview, you were asked about what's causing teen depression, anxiety, and suicide rates. And again, I thought your answer was really very interesting and wonderful. You said, simple answers are appealing, but they're probably not accurate. So we need to take a broad look at the issue. Can you elaborate on that a little bit more? Yeah.

I mean, I think this is where psychologists can sometimes become so frustrated with the media because they want sound bites and pithy, you know, pithy little bits. And so, you know, it's so often, you know, you see things where it's like, it's the phones. You know, the reason it's important, it's the phones, right? And it's so easy for people to sort of bang that drum. But it's not really clear. it's the phones, right? I mean, we don't really have the data to show that. And I'm not going to say that, you know, the dawn of digital technology is a minor thing. I mean, it is a game changer

for everybody. But it can feel to me a little dismissive, a little diminishing, not really recognizing the complexity of young people and the complexity of the environments they live in. And, you know, the APA has done fabulous surveys on, you know, what's causing stress for young people. in that recent report that you put out about stress in America. And young people worry about lots of things. They worry about school shootings. They worry about climate change. They worry about immigration and deportation, you know,

that they are nuanced, smart, paying attention, tuned in. And I think sometimes, you know, to boil it down to one thing, it just isn't fair and cannot be accurate. Yeah, there has to be more at play in what that's going on. Yeah, people are complicated. And that's why we're psychologists, because we like that about them. And so we have to sort of do the work of communicating that complexity in a way that does appeal to a broad audience that is used to pithy soundbites that are rarely accurate. I want to touch on something you mentioned earlier when you were talking about the teens being over.

So can you talk about the importance of allowing for free time, unstructured time? You hear that a lot for young children, but how important is that for teenagers? Well, I love this question because there's a lot of ways to slice it. The first way we want to think about it is from the standpoint of stress. And, you know, just as psychologists, you know, we find anxiety. It's a helpful warning system that alerts you when things are amiss. You know, stress is a healthy and normal function. It's a sign that you are stretching, that you're working at the edge of your capacity.

It's not inherently problematic. It's got an inoculating function. We know that. But stress is only healthy if there's an opportunity for recovery. Chronic stress is not something that we're a fan of. So kids need downtime, and especially by high school, given how demanding high school is for a lot of students these days. I mean, they're very ambitious. and they do a lot, you know, if they're given the opportunity.

We do need to think about the importance of a chance to recover. And when I look at, you know, our most ambitious, most hard-driving students, you know, right now the average number of APs being taken by kids who are applying to Ivy League level schools, they're taking eight APs in high school, which is a really huge amount. And, you know, it goes up to as much as 13 APs in high school. And the problem with this is not that the world. work is too hard or there's too much work. They can do the work. They are bright enough. They are capable enough. They have the work ethic to do the work. They can't do the work in the time they have

available to do it unless they never rest. And that's actually where the problem rests. So it's important for there to be downtime. What's interesting to me, though, is that what constitutes downtime is highly idiosyncratic. You know, how you relax is not going to be how I relax. And so I'm also really fascinated by the wide variety of ways in which kids recover. So some kids really need to go home and watch TV for a little while or listen to music or, you know, cuddle with their dog or, you know, go for a run. You know, there's any variety of things. Other kids recover at the time. sports practice. They have a really busy intense day and then they go out and they play basketball and they get it all out and they hit their homework feeling renewed. And so it may look on paper like

that's a very tightly scheduled kid. She works hard at school all day. She runs right to basketball practice and then she hits her homework. That may work for her so long as there's recovery in those activities. Other kids, they're going to need to be away from people. They're going to need some downtime. And so the question of whether or not a kid is over-scheduled, I think, is very individual to the child and how quickly they recover and what for them constitutes recovery. So maybe it's helping the teen, your child, identify what makes them feel energized and where they feel depleted. Because I think that could be difficult sometimes. If you think, I enjoy basketball or I enjoy, you you know, debate club or whatever, but, you know, they might still feel drained after and need to have

some quiet time. They might, right? And I think that's where, you know, we watch them and get to know what works for them and they observe themselves and get to know what works. And, you know, I think mindfulness is, you know, phenomenal and so useful and so scalable, you know, to a broad population. But mindfulness is not going to be a way to reset for everybody. You know, not everybody's going to, you know, not everybody's it's not going to float everybody's boat. And so we have to, as much as, you know, there's all this fantastic new mindfulness programming coming into schools, we also need to be careful that, you know, if a young person has a system that works really well for them, you know, I think of an example of a girl told me that when she was very, very upset, what she felt helped her most was to rip up a

piece of paper into lots of little bits and then tape it back together like a puzzle. It was just so funny and so particular. But I thought, man, you know, you don't need a mindful in this practice, like, you have what works for you. You know, why should we rest that away from you and, you know, impose upon you what we think will work? Yeah, absolutely. It's like, you know, whatever works for the individual person. I wonder how this all plays into this concept that we hear often about helicopter parenting and how that affects teens, because research is shown that children with parents who are overly involved in their lives tend to have more anxiety and less satisfaction with life. So, you know, it can be, well, it can be helpful for a parent to help their teen navigate

life. Is it also helpful for the teen to find their own way and sort of figure out what works for them? Absolutely. You know, and I'm just thinking about this, you know, how do we think about it at a fairly granular level? And, and one of the things I think that often happens at home with young people is, you know, that a young person will get very upset. You know, something will have gone wrong. They'll have had a fight with a friend or they bombed a test. And they become very upset, which of course is, you know, as a parent, that's very upsetting for you too. And there can be this rush to try to address the problem quickly, right, on the part of the parent. And there can almost be, I think, sort of a communication of a sense of like your emotional upset is like a fire that we've got to put out,

right? Or else it's just going to get out of control and I need to make it stop right now. And the effect of the parent rushing in is that feelings remain pretty scary, I think, for young people, the sense of, you know, I'm upset. Now we've got a real crisis. And also a sense that, you know, the way that crises get solved is that somebody comes in and helps you a whole bunch. You know, they call the parent of the other kid. They, you know, hire a tutor. And what I'm interested in instead, you know, from parents who can be more restrained, right, which is not to say just letting kids hang out high and dry. But for parents who can say, you know, I can see you're very, very upset, you know, do you want some tea? You know, would it help if we just hung out together here for a little while or do you want some time alone? When parents hold back a little and don't step in in a helicopter, what young people get to discover is that emotions are very rarely like fires.

They're much more like waves, you know, that they rise and they crest and then they flow away. And, you know, one of the things I remember learning in my training is, you know, with a hard feeling, the only way out is through, right? You just have it. And when we create time and space for young people to discover this about how emotions work, you know, two things happen that are really important. First of all, emotions become much less frightening because you're like, oh, yeah, no, I'm having a big one. You know, let me ride it out and then I'll feel better after a good cry, right? Like, that's such a great thing for young people to learn. The other thing they learn is, it's basically an autonomous system, right? They don't need anybody else for it. And it's, I mean, it's really nice if a living person wants to sort of be there with you and be patient and quiet while you're having your moment. But what a gift, right, to model this total comfort with distress, which then helps young people feel more at ease with distress when it does occur. So at the most sort of granular level, we can rob young people of a chance to disdress. discover that humans are built in a way that we actually are pretty self-correcting or self-writing.

And then we can, of course, take that up many, many levels, you know, to if there's a problem with a teacher, you know, the parent intervening, if there's a problem with an application, the parent intervening, you know, never sort of learning how to self-correct or that in some cases there's sort of an automatic self-correction that will occur. So how can parents and families help teens embrace stress and realize the difference between unhealthy stress and healthy stress. Well, so the first thing we've got to do is even articulate that there is healthy stress and teach young people that. And I think one of the easiest way to do that is to, one of the easiest ways is to talk about stress in the same way we talk about weight lifting,

right, that if you want to build muscle, you have to lift weights that are heavy enough to be uncomfortable. And what happens is that when you lift weights, eventually your muscles adapt. You know, they gain strength. And what was difficult becomes easier, at which point, you know, we move you up to heavier weights. So school stress, which is a lot of stress, you know, the kids manage, is just like that. You know, when you get new material, when you get to a new grade, when you take a new hard class, at first, it's very, very stressful. It's new. It's heavier. It's harder than your used to, if you stick with it, you will soon adapt. Your capacities will expand. And you gain strength, intellectual strength, that you get to keep. And as soon as you've got it, we're going to give you

harder work. So we can help teenagers embrace stress by acknowledging that there is such a thing as healthy stress. And though it is not pleasant, we can say, but here's the benefit, this is how you get a lot smarter. This is how you really build your intellectual capacities. And then, in terms of unhealthy stress, that's where we need to focus on recovery. Because like I said, the stress of school is doable if there's an opportunity for recovery. And so helping teenagers really know how they recover, how they like to recover, doing that, moving right to it, doing it efficiently, creating space for it can make a big difference. A few times during our conversation, we've talked about the need for parents to deal with their own anxiety. but I imagine, you know, for parents who have read your book or are listening right now,

they might feel alarmed by these statistics and quite worried. So what advice you have to keep, for parents to keep calm so then they can then help their teen? I think parents should feel very reassured by how much power they have here, that if parents can be calm, we know from research it makes a tremendous difference in terms of the likelihood of their child. becoming unusually anxious. So the statistics are worrisome, but the news is good. There's a huge amount we can do. And, you know, then we can do it at a lot of levels over time. You know, we can help young people manage their friendships with one another. We can help them manage the romantic landscape, which is really, really anxiety-provoking for them, you know, by talking about,

you know, gendered relationships in the healthiest possible ways. We can give them strategies for managing at school and also for girls in particular, think with them about what the culture asks and equip them to be shielded a bit from some of the really unfair expectations that our culture does hold for girls and young women. So there's much, much we can do. And I really think parents should feel, you know, kind of delighted that this one is much more in their hands than they may have otherwise felt was true. Absolutely. And overall, what do you think are the most pressing challenges facing young people today, boys and girls? We ask a lot of young people today. They are, I mean, accomplishing things academically in high school that, you know,

very unlike what their own parents were accomplishing. They are flooded with infant. information, they have constant access to one another, which is sometimes fun, but I think is often very tiring. I think those are all very big challenges. I think another thing I worry about is we don't talk very well about young people, that when you look at how young people are described in the media, you know, it tends to sort of fall into these kind of negative stereotypes of, you know, they're kind of naughty or they're doing the wrong thing or they're not, you know, doing what the adults want them to do. And, you know, we have the data that we are raising the best behaved generation of teenagers on record. You know, they do fewer drugs. They are delaying sex.

They, if they are having sex, they're using contraception. They drink less. You know, and there's some little blips here and there in the data, but, you know, in the broad strokes, these are really good kids. And so I actually think we should add to the stresses that teenagers face is that people don't really give them credit for how much they're accomplishing, how thoughtful they are. And we're often instead focusing on behaviors that relative to previous generations, this is a really, really good group of kids. Yeah, I think that's really fascinating. If we do give teens enough credit, you know, to obviously they need people to guide them in their lives to make good decisions, but, you know, the theme that's come up in our conversation is the fact that a lot of times

teens can figure things out on their own or should least be given the chance to do that. And that, you know, according to those, you know, recent stats from the CDC, teens are using drugs less, drinking alcohol less, having sex less often with fewer partners. So, you said, we are raising a good generation of young people, but at the same time, We're also looking to all, you know, looking at all the things that aren't going well or the people who feel anxiety or depression or feelings of hopelessness. Yeah, do you have any more thoughts on that? I think kids live up to expectations and kids live down to them. And so we never want to gloss over real problems.

And there are, you know, worrisome increases in the suicide numbers. And we need to take those very, very seriously. But I do worry how it feels to be a young person who is so plugged into the media when so often the message is that you're broken or you're not doing it right. And I wonder if there can be within that a danger of a self-fulfilling prophecy, you know, a sense that, you know, emotions can so readily be out of control. And in fact, most young people manage their emotions really very well. So I think we have to both be vigilant and take very seriously trends that, you know, are moving in the wrong direction. And at the same time, I think, you know, we know so much in psychology about how to take care of people who are suffering that I would love to think that we get our voice in there to say, yeah, you know, there are things we can do though and there's ways to prevent feeling unduly anxious. and if you do suffer with depression, we can really treat that.

And to continue to advocate for all of the ways in which human beings are resilient and can be helped to be resilient, that it doesn't have to be such a dark story. I want to touch on your column a little bit for The New York Times. I mean, what are the topics that seem to get the best reception from readers? You know, it's such a funny thing. Sometimes it's a really timely topic. I wrote a piece called Parenting the Fortnite Addict. And that piece just got a ton of traction because Fortnite just came up, swallowed a whole bunch of kids before parents even knew what had happened.

And, you know, what was so fun about that particular column, and this is my favorite part about getting to write this column, is that I got to actually unpack all of our psychological research about how video games work in terms of, you know, basically an intermittent reinforcement schedule and various other things, you know, and describe that to a general audience. But then sometimes it's the columns about really timeless issues. So other columns that I've written that have gotten a lot of traction, basically people are just desperate for any help with their teenagers. People want to connect to their teenagers. They like their teenagers. And even when their teenagers is great, that doesn't always mean their teenagers being great at home with them.

So, you know, in some ways it's easy to get traction with columns on teenagers. But others, you know, take up questions. Like I wrote one about why teenagers, become allergic to their parents, you know, and just that moment, you know, and often sort of 13 is the height of it where like nothing the parent does is okay. And, you know, that one, you know, just got a tremendous response. And I recently wrote one about how to give advice to a teenager. It was around the holiday time. And I think the headline was, you know, how to wrap a gift, how to wrap advice as a gift your teenager might open. Right. Because I think this is sort of one of those

kind of perennial problems that parents have. You know, they've got all these really, really, you know, you know, terrific things they want to share with their teenager and they cannot seem to do it in any way that gets a satisfying response or even a response. So, you know, I really try to sort of move around in what I read about, both from the, you know, immediate concern things. So obviously I've written a fair bit about stress and anxiety to the sort of universals of family life that are difficult, but normal. and just to try to really use, you know, the training I got to make it available to a broad audience. You know, I think that that's a real thing that, you know, I'm always so grateful to see

psychologist writing for, you know, general audiences because, you know, we know a lot and it's not always well described by the media and we can do a good job of it. You know, I want to talk a little bit more about Fortnite briefly. It's taken the world by storm and, you know, parents seem to be struggling to keep their kids away from the game because it is a very social game. You can be on it on your phone, on a good game console, on a computer. It's really everywhere. But how can parents manage their kids gaming overall? You know, I would probably say in the same way, you know, I would start with the same advice I gave around managing technology in general. You know, first, draw lines around. what you're trying to protect. And we have these things and, you know, and doing those things, you know, sleeping, studying, being with the family, getting physical activity, you know, those will keep a kid pretty busy

if we protect them at the levels they deserve to be protected at. And so start there, you know, so you might even, you know, just to paraphrase again, like you might say, it's not that I'm against gaming, it's that I'm for sleep, you know, so the sleep's a non-negotiable. And then I think, you know, from there it becomes very specific to family. You know, where they set limits on it. And I've seen families do a whole bunch of different things from, you know, it's only on the weekends or it's a limited amount of time per day or, you know, you have to self-regulate. And if you can't, I will.

You know, I think there's a lot of different ways for parents to manage it. But we do want to see that kids have variety in their lives. You know, it's just not healthy to just do one thing all the time. And, you know, certainly there are kids who really get lost. lost in gaming. And, and, and, you know, that's a moment where the parent needs to find a way to insist on some variety in terms of how their time is spent. So all is not lost. No, no, no, no, no. Some of the articles I was reading, it seems like the pew parents are just kind of thrown up their hands or just at their width's end. I don't know what it was, but I think

it's like it's important that you said just to all is not lost. There are still boundaries that can be set and, you know, maybe phrasing it in a, is it not a deprivation, but what you're gaining from limiting screen time? Absolutely. There are things that have to happen and gaming is not one of them. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Dr. DeMore. I really appreciate your time. Thank you for having me.

Great to be part of your show. If you've been a longtime listener or are new to our podcast, please consider giving us a rating at iTunes. And if you have time, write a review. We really appreciate it. Also, as I mentioned at the top of the show, we'd love to hear from you directly. So if you have any questions, comments, or ideas to share, please email me at K-Luna at APA.org. That's K-L-U-N-A-A-A-P-A-D-Rog.

Speaking of Psychology is part of the APA podcast network, which includes the podcast, APA Journal's dialogue about new psychological research and progress notes about the practice of psychology. You can find all our podcasts on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also go to our website, speakingofpsychology.org, to listen to more episodes. I'm Caitlin Luna with the American Psychological Association.