The Rich Roll Podcast - Lisa Damour, PhD On Parenting Teens Under Pressure

Episode Date: April 30, 2019

Today’s expedition takes us into the beautifully mysterious world of parenting, with a specific lens on navigating the perplexing vicissitudes of the teenage girl — one of the most beguiling and opaque creatures I've encountered in my 52 years. I have been a parent and step-parent for two decades. Along the way, I successfully helped raise two young boys. Sure, I made many mistakes. But I also did a few things right. Today they are both amazing young men. And yet somehow that experience failed to adequately prepare me for the rather unique challenges I face guiding a teenage daughter towards adulthood — a joy that has at times brought me to my knees. To elevate my parenting game, I began searching for greater insight into the idiosyncratic psyche of the female adolescent. That quest continuously referred me to one notable expert: Lisa Damour, PhD. A teen whisperer par excellence, Lisa is a Yale educated psychotherapist with a doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the University of Michigan who specializes in education and child development. But she is best known for her two New York Times bestselling books — Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood*; and her newest release, Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls*. The parent of two teenage girls herself, Lisa writes the monthly Adolescence column for the New York Times. In addition to her private consulting and psychotherapy practice, she is a regular contributor to CBS News, speaks internationally, is a Senior Advisor to the Schubert Center for Child Studies at Case Western Reserve University, and serves as the Executive Director of Laurel School’s Center for Research on Girls. This is all a long way of saying that when it comes to adolescents and teens, Lisa knows her shit. Today's conversation deconstructs the particular emotional overload and unique social pressures young people face – everything from sex and drugs to body image, grades, navigating social media and everything in between. By better understanding the nature of these dynamics, and how they specifically impact our young ones, we glean insight into how to optimally parent through them. In addition, we discuss the recent astronomical rise in stress and anxiety in young girls — what accounts for it, and what it means. We also cover the common mistakes many parents (myself included) often make. We delve deep into the importance of open communication and how to foster it. Finally, Lisa imparts a myriad of strategies to optimally pilot the healthy developmental transitions that specifically girls (but also boys) undergo as they mature into grownups so that we, as parents, can help cultivate self-esteem and self-efficacy in the next generation under our charge. If you are a parent of young humans trying to make the right moves — or just want to better understand how young people think and why they behave as they do — then this episode is appointment listening. Lisa’s books have been instrumental in improving how I parent my daughters, so this is a meeting of great personal significance I have been hotly awaiting for some time. They don’t call her the teen whisperer for nothing. Enjoy! Rich

If you are warm with your kids and if you have structure, the rest will sort itself out. It's what you do. You can say all sorts of stuff. If that doesn't line up with how you're actually functioning in your relationships and how you're actually conducting yourself in life, first of all, kids will just call you a big fat hypocrite, which they'll do that anyway. But also, it comes down to what you choose in your behavior, what kids will most pay attention to.

I would just say to parents, you know, if you can be warm, if you can have rules and consistently reinforce them and be predictable in your reaction to things, things will be all right. That's Lisa DeMoore, this week on The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Greetings, Earthlings. My name is Rich Roll. I'm your host, and this is the podcast where I go deep with people that inspire me personally and leading experts across a wide spectrum of disciplines that span everything from diet and nutrition to fitness, spirituality, athletics, entertainment,

and everything in between. Today's expedition takes us into the mysterious, confusing, and often opaque world of parenting with a specific focus on one of the world's most exotic, mystifying, perplexing, baffling, what else? Unfathomable creatures on planet Earth, the teenage girl. What's your experience with teenage girls? Not that much. I mean, I have a niece, but she's now, I think she's 19. So she's almost out of it. Well, I got to say, this is of particular acute interest to me personally as the parent of one such peculiar being and another one who is on the precipice. And as somebody who's helped raise two boys who are now 23 and 24, I really thought that I had much of this parenting thing figured out.

But nothing could prepare me for the disorienting experience of navigating the unpredictable vicissitudes of a 15-year-old female. It's a journey that has at at times, brought me to my knees, I must admit, but which has also been one of my greatest joys and teachers. In any event, our cipher for this exploration is the great Lisa DeMoore, a teen whisperer par excellence. Lisa is a Yale-educated psychotherapist with a doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Michigan who really specializes in education and child development. She is best known for her two New York Times bestselling books, Untangled, Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood,

and her newest release, Under Pressure, confronting the epidemic of stress and anxiety in girls. The parent of two teenage girls herself, Lisa writes the monthly adolescence column for the New York Times, serves as a regular contributor to CBS News, maintains a private psychotherapy practice, consults and speaks internationally, is a senior advisor to the Schubert Center for Child Studies at Case Western Reserve University, and serves as the executive director of Laurel School's Center for Research on Girls. And this is all a long way of saying that when it comes to adolescent and teenage girls, and boys, I should add, she really knows her stuff. So if like me, you are a parent of young

humans trying to make the right moves or just want to better understand how young people think and why they behave as they do, then this episode is appointment listening. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care.

Especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do.

And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment.

And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem, a problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com, has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by

insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself. I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey.

When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. We did it. Thank you. I love my sponsors. Thanks, DK. They make the show possible, right? And I appreciate everybody's support. And I should add that given that most of you are listening to this on the run and are likely to forget all the special discount codes and URLs, you can find all of our sponsors and codes in alphabetical order on my website. Just go to richroll.com, click on Resources tab on the top menu, and then the Sponsors submenu tab, and it's all right there. Okay. Lisa DeMoore. Again, as a parent, and maybe you can relate to this, there have been countless, countless occasions where something happens and I'm just at a loss as to what the right compassionate, loving, understanding, appropriate response is. And I am so far from perfect at this, despite having been a parent and a stepfather for basically two decades.

And Lisa's books have really been instrumental for me. This is a meeting I've been hotly awaiting for some time, and I got to say, she really nails it. In specific terms, we focus on the particular emotional overload and social pressures that young people face, sex, drugs, popularity, social media, how to better understand the nature of these dynamics and how to effectively parent through them. We talk about what accounts for the crazy recent rise in anxiety and stress in young girls and how to help ameliorate it. The common mistakes that many parents, myself included, often make. We talk about the importance of open communication and how to foster it. Basically, just strategies for navigating the healthy developmental transitions that specifically

girls, but also boys, undergo as they mature into grownups so that we, as parents, can optimally guide this next generation towards everything from self-efficacy, self-esteem, and essentially just becoming competent, healthy humans. Lisa gets girls. They don't call her the teen whisperer for nothing, you guys. So without further ado, I give you Lisa Damore. All right, Lisa, nice to meet you. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for doing this. Really excited nice to meet you. Thanks for having me. Thanks for doing this. Really excited to talk to you. I think of you as part of this trifecta that includes KJ, Del Antonio, Jess Leahy, and yourself as three women who are doing really important work around parenting. three women who are doing really important work around parenting. And you're really in the sweet spot of what currently interests me the most as a parent of an adolescent girl, a 15-year-old daughter, and an 11-year-old daughter. And I'm going to have to resist the urge to try to make this all about me and my parenting issues out of respect for my daughter and her privacy. But I may lapse into that at times. But really excited to talk to you about this very important and interesting and dramatic period in young girls' lives that I'm currently in the

midst of experiencing at the moment. And I think the best way to maybe kick into it, I'd like to hear your thoughts on how we as a culture and maybe as parents think about this period of adolescence in girls' lives. I feel like, and I know you've addressed this in your book, that we've sort of pathologized this. You know, oh, be careful. You know, when your daughter turns 13 or 14 or 15, everything changes. And it's, you know, she's going to become a quote-unquote monster and, you know, just get ready. Okay.

I am in complete agreement. So three years ago, I published a book called Untangled, Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood. And the first line of that book is, we need a new way to talk about teenage girls because the way we do it now isn't fair to girls or helpful to their parents. And I go on to describe exactly what you just described. You know, that people say like, oh, you know, because I have two daughters. People see me with them and they say, oh, I'm so glad I have boys. Or when people will learn what I do professionally, that I take care of teenagers for a living. Teenage girls in particular, they'll say, oh, there should be medals for that.

They're the worst. So there is all of this sort of bad press around adolescent girls. I think teenagers in general, I think girls and boys each get their own bad rap. I think it's general, I think girls and boys each get their own bad rap. I think it's specific to gender. And it is so unhelpful and so unnecessary. And I do feel like my main aim in my professional work is to try to help people understand the normal vicissitudes of adolescence. And in Untangled, my previous commercial book, I do walk through all of these expectable transitions.

And I end every chapter with a section called When to Worry, because so much of normal development is challenging that I wanted parents to know that there actually is a line you can cross, but most of what you see is difficult but normal. And with response to that book, the thing that so many people have said to me that has meant the world to me is they say, it feels like you're in our house. It feels like you've had a bug on us, which I hear them as saying, we thought we were the only ones. It's such a breath of fresh air to hear this is normal development and that this is a pattern

that people are living with. What is it that's specific to girls that makes it different from raising boys at this age? So I think 80% of what I say about girls probably also applies to boys. And I hear that repeatedly from readers of both books. They'll say, you know, I bought it for my daughter and 80% applied to my son. And certainly my work on the structure of adolescence, the transitions I laid out in Untangled, boys go through the same exact transitions. There are unique pressures facing girls. And that's why I do home in on them in my book-length work. I think that there are cultural expectations that girls are held to that boys don't have to worry about quite so much. I know boys worry about their appearance. I don't think they do it at nearly the level that girls are asked by the culture to worry about it.

Girls more than boys, the research tells us, they worry about what adults think. They're very concerned about disappointing adults. This adds a whole other layer of pressure in their lives at school and at home. Under Pressure, my new book, chapter four is about girls among boys. And the sexual dynamics between girls and boys are not something adults want to look at all that closely. And they're not that great. And I think there's a lot of work that we need to be doing on behalf of kids, but I think for both boys actually and girls. But I also think first we have to, you know. Well, how are we, I mean, yeah, you've broken the book up into kind of sections like girls at home, girls at school, girls with boys, girls in the culture. What is it, you know, since you raised that, this issue now, girls with boys, maybe we can just talk about that right now. I mean, what is it that we're misunderstanding as parents about this or maybe afraid to talk about?

So I think there's a few pieces. I talk about this in this chapter, you know, that the amount of harassment girls are dealing with by middle school is pretty stunning. And it's casual and it's just part of the school day for a lot of girls uh it's supported by research documenting this kind of harassment but it's you know guys calling them sluts and whores and then if they push back the guys will be like oh i was just kidding you know you're making a big deal of it um there was an extraordinary study by done by the american association of university women um called hostile hallways and it documented eighth grade, half of girls had dealt with, you know, boys drawing penises on their notebooks, boys threatening spread rumors about them,

boys talking about their boobs to them, boys, you know, saying all of this stuff is sort of, I think for a lot of girls, just seen as part of what you have to deal with in the course of a school day. What I worry, and this is the piece where I feel like there's a lot of work to be done I'm not sure I'm the one who's going to do this work but I think the work needs to be done what I worry is that if you're a sixth grade boy the shortest route to social power may be acting like a jerk either through homophobic behavior or basically chauvinistic behavior. And sixth grade boys and sixth grade girls, they are really just figuring it out as they go.

They are not who they're going to be. But I do worry that it would be easy enough for a sixth grade boy to strike upon realizing that if he calls that kid a fag or if he calls that girl a slut, all of this power flows his way. And the power is because now kids are scared of him. And once you're a sixth or a seventh grader that people are scared of, people actually want to be close to you because they don't want to be a potential target. So I worry that there's this juncture much earlier in development than we're usually looking at that can set guys on a path that they should not be on, they don't want to be on. I'd

like to think they don't want to be on. And that also means that girls are putting up with all sorts of nonsense that should not be part of their day. And that's the part where I feel like adults have, when we're talking about the Me Too movement, where I think we're talking about it way later than is relevant to my work. Right. That doesn't start to impact culture until a generation later. It's interesting because that was my sort of thinking while you were talking was how has this, if it has at all, changed in the wake of the Weinstein scandal and the Me Too movement and the conversations that we're having around toxic masculinity. And in my experience, you know, at a very, very much at arm's length is that I'm seeing boys doing that stuff and it doesn't seem to be changing.

It's totally divorced from what's happening at the adult level. There was an interesting report last week in, I think it was in Bethesda. there was a boy who was sort of the ringleader at a high school and then several other boys who had created a ranking system for girls' looks. I went to school in Bethesda. Yeah. You know of these things. And this came out and the school did not, as far as the girls involved were concerned, discipline him adequately. And I think 40 girls showed up in the principal's office and just, you know, were absolutely incensed about it. That's new.

That is new. So that, to answer your question, I think that that piece feels to me like— The behavior might not have changed, but the reaction and the response to that behavior is changing. And that was exciting to see. And they forced the hand of the administration. It became a much bigger deal. There was much more sort of a reckoning around what had occurred. So I do feel like, okay, that's great. We're getting the trickle down into high school in this one story.

I think sixth grade is ground zero. And I think that's the place where grownups are pretty comfortable going with the idea that we don't need to think about it so young. And if we're going to talk about it, let's talk about it. A lot of kids this age are looking at porn. And Dan Savage, who is just- I love Dan Savage. I love Dan Savage. What he says, he says porn hates women. And I think that certainly what kids are accessing, they're not looking at erotica, you know, they're not looking at soft focus, you know, romantic stuff. I think

Dan's right. You know, I think it's, and that is thoroughly supported in the research literature, you know, the way academic psychologists say it is, you know, it coalesces around themes of degradation and violence. This is sex ed for a lot of kids. Yeah. It's really supplanted how we used to teach young people about these things. And it's become their roadmap and their guidebook for what sexual interaction should look like. And if we want to talk about pathology, I mean, that's a massive pathology. It is. And it does feel like, to me, one of those things where the grown-ups are pretty glad to be like, la, la, la, la, la, you know, and just to not confront what it means that 11 and 12-year-olds who are, of course, curious about sex, right? I mean, like, that's not the problem. It's that when they're curious about sex, they're going to Pornhub.com and seeing stuff there that blows adults out of the water to look at.

Are girls doing the same? seeing stuff there that blows adults out of the water to look at. Are girls doing the same? So it's interesting. When we look at the research, we see, I think it's something like by the end of high school, 70% of girls have seen porn. What becomes interesting as you drill down, and I don't have the numbers exactly, is whether they're initiating the looking at the porn or whether, as often happens, they're riding the bus and some kid pulls it up on their phone and goes,

hey, look at this, and sort of sticks it in their face. So I think they're seeing it. Girls are curious about sex too. So I'm sure some of them are seeing it and pursuing it. And I have a 15-year-old daughter and I, like you, I'm cautious about talking about her, but this I can share because it's what I said to her. When she was in seventh grade, she started with the, I'd like a phone, I'd like a phone. And we went on a walk around the block and I said, here's my number one concern. Not that you're going to be unkind, not that you're going to use this to distract yourself or get in the way of your sleep. My number one concern is this is a likely vehicle by which you will ultimately be exposed to pornography. And I want to say a few words to you before that happens.

And so what'd you say? So what I said is, I think it's going to really freak you out. I think it's going to really freak you out. And I want you to bear in mind that the sex that you see in a commercial environment, that you see in a commercial environment, people are paid for sex. They're being paid to have sex on camera. I said to her, I believe it's fundamentally exploitive. That is not loving romantic sex. I want to reassure you what you're seeing on porn that is not really have a lot in common with the love life I've ever had. And I said to her, I think a lot of it's going to strike you as violent and weird. And that's actually not what sex needs to be about. It's not what it's about for me. And when the day comes that you see porn, I didn't say if,

when the day comes that you see porn one way or another, I'm here to answer any questions you've got because you're going to have a lot of questions. Yeah. And what happens when that young girl is in the midst of her first or an early sexual encounter with a boy who has been looking at porn for a long time and is taking all of his cues from basically what he's seen in those videos? Well, here's what the data say. The data say that porn scripts are in fact shaping sexual scripts. They have to be. They are. And a lot of it, it's interesting, has been the change in the rates of anal sex. You know, that that has now, you know, we've been tracking i sort of feel like you know what people's sexual lives like i'm not going to legislate adult sexual lives um when we look at the data a lot of women don't enjoy anal sex you know and and so um yet a lot of guys because of the porn scripts that are so prominent are under the impression

that this is a sort of a standard right part of the menu. Right. What are we going to do about that? I think the grownups need to take their fingers out of their ears and take their hands off their eyes and have more honest conversations with their kids. It's interesting because, again, I'm really very kind of relaxed and liberal about a lot of stuff, but I do think it's interesting that we have no regulation on this. It's also funny to me, I've been, vaping's bad. Like,

I'm no fan of vaping. And I know grownups are really on the ceiling about vaping. I am less on the ceiling about vaping than I think a lot of grownups are. And I can come back. He's elaborate. I will come back to that. But it was interesting because I was I in my community I'm aware of like this panel on vaping and this panel on you know and I'm like we should have this much on porn like we should have you know there should be this much well I think we're afraid yeah you know it's just it's too freaky to talk about it's something that you know we don't feel comfortable talking about out in the open and that just foments the pathology of it.

I think that's right. And so we're like, all right, kids, you guys go over there and deal with that. We're just going to look the other way. But the vaping thing is tricky because it can be so clandestine. It's so easy to hide it, and it's so difficult to detect it, And it's so enticing for people at that age. It's pretty sexy, right? I mean, it's really a pretty good way to do something your parents really don't want you to do, right? Which is a lot of what getting to be a teenager is about. Okay, so vaping's not good. And I want to be clear that I'm not a fan of vaping.

My number one concern is obviously that kids are getting addicted to nicotine. So now they're getting themselves caught on a substance that they, you know, where this is not an addiction that goes away easily. The jury is out on questions of, you know, the long impact of microparticles or, you know, vaporized formaldehyde. But, you know, what I say to kids and what I've written is like, why risk it? Right? Like why risk it? The reason I am a little more, I'm not as on the ceiling about vaping, I think, as other adults is I am mindful of how it is received by teenagers when adults seem to be equally terrified of everything. So when I talk with teenagers- It's too high in the pecking order.

It's a little high. So when I talk with teenagers, and I spend a lot of time talking with teenagers about the various hazards out there, I will say to them, and I'll use my hand, I'll say like, okay, so heroin's up here, and I will extend my arm above my head to its fullest length, right? And cocaine is right there. And, you know, any other drug that you, someone's given you, you have no idea what it is, like it's up there. And marijuana is up here. And I'll tell you, you know, it's lower than these in terms of, and I'm thinking sheerly in terms of biological risk hazards, right? Like I say to them, the law is super complicated and immaterial. You're not going to get caught. It's really about the physical hazards. And then I'll say, and cigarette smoking, you know, is here, you know, sort of at a mid-range. Vaping, everything we know biologically

is below cigarette smoking in terms of its real risks, right? And, you know, obviously kids today are not smoking a ton of cigarettes, so we don't have reasons to be holding lots of panels about that. But then I say to them, you don't want to be messing with any of this stuff, right? All of these are psychoactive. All of these are biological. All of these will have a negative impact on your body. None of these, you know, I'll say to them, like, get crazy haircuts, like, wear, you know, tacky nails, like, do something, don't do something that has a potential for lasting consequences. These all do. And what I find, that seems to sit right with teenagers. But when we talk about vaping with the same energy and anxiety that we talk about the heroin epidemic, I think then to teenagers, they feel like, teenagers know it's not equally dangerous.

And then I think we become pretty dismissible in those moments. Yeah. I mean, certainly there's a difference between opioids and nicotine vaping or marijuana for that matter. But, you know, here in California, there's such a mainstreaming of marijuana. Like it's almost perceived as like part of your wellness equation now with CBD and all these sorts of things. And we've had a real huge cultural shift in how we perceive that, that alarms me to some extent as somebody who's in long time in recovery, first of all, and, you know, carries that genetic, you know, predisposition that's passed down. But I think the way young people perceive it is different than

when I was of that age where it's like, it's just no big deal. And their brains are still developing. And certainly, you could speak to that issue more eloquently than I could. But to kind of look at it like it's nothing isn't the solution either. No, no no and actually so you know the issue for me with marijuana is the neurological impact right and and what we know is that at least till age 24 25 there's a real neurological impact of marijuana because of the developing brain and there's some extraordinary research that came out of dunedin i don't know if i'm pronouncing it correctly, I think in Australia, where these

researchers started measuring an entire cohort, everybody born in a single year. And they did this about 40 years ago. And they just kept measuring this group over and over and over again every year. And they have the data on the kids who started using pot really heavily in high school. And they were taking IQ data all the time. And what they found was that kids who were using a lot, so not like the occasional every once in a while experiment, but kids who were using a lot, my recollection is they lost about 10 IQ points. And even when they stopped using, the IQ points did not return.

They didn't bounce back. Yeah, it was just done. Right. And so when I talk with teenagers about marijuana, I say, like, here are the data. This will cost you some of your intelligence. It also, in the day-to-day, and kids have observed this in their peers, it makes kids fuzzy whether or not they're high in that moment. There is a bit of a hangover that lasts. And so I say to them, like, look, you're really talking about

changing your trajectory here, right? You really, if you get yourself involved with this, it could have real meaning. So I'm in Ohio. I live in Ohio where marijuana is not legal. And yet, interestingly, kids feel like it is. Like, that's the other thing that's striking to me is that, and I sometimes will find myself a really thoughtful 18-year-old and just sort of check. I'll say like, what about marijuana? Like, what about the fact that it's illegal? And they'll say like, well, but it's like basically legal. Right, it's not.

Because everybody's information diet is not localized. Yeah. So I'm like, but you know, it's not here. They're like, but it basically is. And I'm like, no, but really it's not. But I've been interested how even these really thoughtful kids, they do, they take it at the national level. So what I say to the kids I take care of in Ohio, I'm like, look, if it is your lifelong dream to smoke pot, like if you feel like you have to do this before you die, the only really safe way to consider doing this is you go to a place where it is legal.

You get it through a legal channel and you do it after age 25. And then you could try it. And then I say, you're still impaired. I mean, it's not like you're ready to go do something that requires any good judgment. But I do try to make the point, there are real health consequences that have nothing to do with where the law sets the age. I mean, the law doesn't make sense if we're looking at it from a health perspective. There's a large gap between what's actually going on in this demographic and how, you know, what parents think is going on and how media portrays what's going on. Like, here's an example.

I took my daughter to go see that movie Eighth Grade. And I thought, oh, we're going to have this great experience. We're going to have, you know, she's going to see her own interior and exterior life reflected on the big screen in this honest way. And she hated the movie. She's like, yeah, I kind of get it, but this is such a dishonest portrayal of what it's actually like. She felt like it was completely whitewashed. She said, nobody's doing drugs, nobody's looking at porn, nobody's vaping, nobody's listening to hip hop. Like all of the things that are part of her daily experience were completely eradicated from that depiction. And I think there's an honesty in that actress's portrayal of that story. Like I think there's a

lot of truth in that movie, but my point is that she didn't see her own experience reflected in that movie. She likes to, she's seen movies like Kids, you know, which is super intense. Pretty, yeah. It's tough to watch. We went and saw Mid-90s. That's like her favorite movie because she felt like there's an authenticity and like an unabashed honesty about how kids, you know, think about their lives at that period of time. And she did see her experience reflected in those movies because they're grittier and darker and all that.

But I guess the point I'm making is I think there's more complexity and darkness and nuance than we as parents or the culture would like to accept or embrace. And how do you think about that or respond to that? In general, I agree. I mean, I think that we sort of pick and choose what we want to engage with about adolescence experience. And I think it's easy for us to look away from some things. What's interesting, there's two ways to think about this when we just think about it from a research-based perspective.

One is the data are consistently showing this is the best-behaved generation of teenagers on record. Really? Yeah. They do fewer drugs than their parents did. By the safety measures we do, things like using contraception, wearing seatbelts, wearing helmets, drinking. They actually binge drink less than previous generations have.

Yeah, I think that's true. So by a great number of safety and risk-taking metrics, this is a very conservative generation. They have much less sex. They have sex later, all of these things. generation, they have much less sex. They have sex later, you know, all of these things. And one of the hypotheses is actually that digital technology has taken up a lot of the space, right? So kids used to get together and have sex. Now they stay home and sexed, you know? So that's taken that up. And there was one piece I read in the Times a while back where some of the hypothesis about kids doing fewer drugs was around, well, they're, you know, they're hooked

on their phones, you know? So, and part of me around, well, they're hooked on their phones. And part of me thought, well, you know. That's the primary addiction. Yeah. I'm like, would I trade that? I'm not sure I'm not okay with that. So the first thing I think I always want to get out there on the table is, as a group, they're actually good kids. And as a group, they're definitely better behaved than we were generationally.

good kids, right? And as a group, they're definitely better behaved than we were generationally. The other thing, though, that comes into it, and this is, I think, maybe your surprise, the kids who are in the fast lane, everybody knows who they are and what they're doing, right? They get a lot of press in adolescent social circles. in adolescent social circles. And we do studies where we look at kids' assumptions of who's doing what and how much of it. So if we ask kids, how many kids are smoking, they call it weed. How many kids are smoking weed? Their estimates are much, much higher than the reality.

Because the kids who are smoking weed are talking about it. Everybody knows who they are. Same thing with sex. Same thing even one of the things I talk about in Under Pressure is the hookup scene, right? So it turns out the data actually don't support the hype of the hookup scene. What is the hype? So the hype is that college is one big orgy, right? And if you're going to do college right,

you're going to be having sex with strangers pretty often, right? And if you're going to do college right, you're going to be having sex with strangers pretty often, right? That's not to say that doesn't happen, but in terms of, again, estimates and kids, presumptions of how many kids are doing this versus how many kids are actually doing it, there are these big, big gaps. So in no way to diminish that your daughter's experience, like these things are around me. You know, these things are in my existence and that's no small thing, right? To be mindful of kids, you know, that kid's smoking weed, that kid's having sex. I mean, like they're well aware of these things. My favorite way for adults to engage that is to think out loud with their kids about what percentage of their overall class are we talking here? Because often it's a much, it's a fairly small percentage of kids who are

thoroughly in the fast lane. Right. But they're the ones that everyone's watching on Snapchat. Yeah. Right. Yeah. They're getting the attention. They are. There's some really lovely, I'm not going to remember the name of the group that does this, which bothers me. There is a group in maybe Freedom from Chemical Dependency, and their work with adolescents around drug and alcohol use is actually to show them the base rates in their own school. I think they do surveys. I hope I'm getting this right. This may not be accurate. Where they do surveys, and they actually then present to the kids, you know what? Only 20% of the kids in your school have ever tried pot.

And for a lot of kids, this is a revelation. And the aim in that group, if that's the right group, is to actually help them appreciate that you're probably in the majority if you're not using. Right. Because kids can feel marginal when so much press is going to the kids who are. What is the reality of, well, first of all, like, what is hookup culture? You know, like, maybe we should define that and how boys and girls are interacting in this way, or girls and girls or boys and boys, in a way that maybe is different from the generation that preceded it. So here are the data.

It is true that this generation is more likely than their parents' generation to have intercourse with someone who's a friend. It's not part of a romantic relationship. I guess they they would call like friends with benefits or something kind of casual. That is the one place in the data where we see this generation's patterns maybe being, I don't know what the term is, you know, like more liberal than their parents were. Compared to though the past generation, they are having less sex, they are having fewer partners, they're having sex later. So, you know, the, you know, spring breaker movies would have you believe that, like, we're in some new age of, you know, you know, sexual bacchanal. The data don't support that.

That's interesting. Yeah, I wouldn't have thought that. I know. And so what's interesting then, and the reason I make a point of talking about it and under pressure is since that's the story, I have had girls come see me and say, I don't really think I'm ready for college. I just can't see myself participating in what sounds like the landscape there. And I feel like I'm doing all of this work of saying, that's actually not the landscape.

Like, you can find real relationships, right? You do not have to assume that if you're going to have a love life, it's going to be this, you know, drive-by situation. And again, to try to normalize that this is one corner of what's going on, but it's not the whole story. Right. And what about during the high school years? So most of the data I'm aware of are looking at more at college.

Same though, high schoolers are having sex later and having fewer partners than previous generations. And again, they're just often not with each other while they're communicating. Yeah. I mean, we had to go to someone's house. Yeah. Right? To hang out.

Well, what I've noticed with, what's interesting is I have two older boys that are 24 and 23 now, and they're very analog. Like, they don't, they're really not, I mean, they have Instagram accounts they barely ever post. Like, they live very, you know, IRL lives. But my daughters are very different. And one of the things I've noticed that they do, it's interesting how a technology will come online and then you see a younger generation adopt it and use it in ways that you would never have imagined or anticipated. So, they both use FaceTime. They FaceTime with their friends, not to, like, have a short call, but they just leave it on. Just to be together. They'll be FaceTime. They FaceTime with their friends, not to like have a short call, but they just leave it on. Just to be together.

They'll be in there. Yeah, like they're basically with their, even when they're in their bedroom, they'll, like for hours. And they're not even talking to each other. They're just sort of in this communal virtual space with each other while they're doing other things. They do the homework. Yeah, and I'm like, I would have never imagined that. And I see that over and over and over again. So yeah, they're together, but they're not.

They are. And they're together a lot, right? I mean, there were times eventually we were just cut off, right? Like our moms said, like, get off the phone, right? And then you had 10 to 12 hours at least where you were just separated from your friends just because you had to be. They're together a lot. And there's a beautiful quote from Dana Boyd, who's an academic who studies kids and technology

and does it in a really thoughtful way. And her quote is, you know, they're not addicted to the technology, they're addicted to each other. You know, and I think that that really that really, they just want to be together. They want to be together all the time. That's very kind of reassuring to me. Uh-huh, uh-huh, yeah. Like there's actually nothing wrong with that.

That's a yearning for connection. The thing I say all the time to parents is if we had the technology our kids had, we would have used it as they use it. Of course. Right? I mean, like we would have killed for it, really. And when parents sort of seem to be hesitant to accept that, then I'll say next,

do you remember the feeling on your ear when you had had the phone on it for so long that it hurt? You know, and you were talking to somebody, and you would say, hold on, wait, I have to switch sides. You know what I mean? And that was us. You know, we did what we could with what we had. What we had was very lame compared to what they have.

Well, I feel like we have to make – we can't just put all of technology in one bucket and then just say it's this one thing. addictive toolbox or receivership for your attention that can be productive and enriching or can be very destructive. So if you're spending time creating, like trying to make a really cool photograph or edit a video, then you're in a creative mode. Or if you're on FaceTime with your friends and you're having an exchange with that person, then you're involved in connection. But then there's just the addictive, mindless scrolling through Facebook or Instagram story. Not Facebook. Kids don't use Facebook. Instagram stories or Snapchat where you're just consuming other people's lives.

where you're just consuming other people's lives. And I think there's a real kind of darkness built into that in terms of how myself included, I lump myself in this, how it makes us feel about ourselves in comparison to others. And the impact of that on a young developing mind where your social status and how you kind of fit into this web at school and outside of school is like life or death for young people. Yeah. And with you, I do think it's actually helpful. I've been a practicing psychologist for more than 20 years. And so I started practicing when this did not have any part in family life. And then I've watched the arc of it.

And one thing that is easier now than it was before is that the parents are pretty fluent themselves with how they get caught up with technology, with Facebook and Twitter and looking at stuff. And I do too. I do too. And I'm mindful of how it comes into my life. do too. I do too. And I'm mindful of how it comes into my life. And so there was a juncture, I would say about maybe 15 years ago, where kids had MySpace and parents had no idea what any of this was and had never interacted with it at all. So that was actually in some ways more difficult because the kids were so far ahead of the grownups. So grownups are a little closer than they used to be. There's sort of the topic of attention and how it gets hijacked, right? And then there's a topic of what you're looking at. Here's a way to think about it. We have always

in schools done things like media literacy, right? Like, look at this magazine. What is that model? You know, how much has that been altered and all of that? Okay, kids are not looking at magazines anymore, right? Definitely not. The lesson, is basically the same, right? Like everything's a message, everything's selling you something, everything is crafted in a particular way. And so what we can do right is we can just think like, okay, well, this is the media, right? They're creating it, but this is essentially media that they're looking at now. And we want them to be as literate about it as possible, right? So there's great work done by a woman named Jill Walsh, who's an academic who looks at talking with kids

about what they see on social media. And her guidance is to have them, if they're scrolling on their Instagram, to say to them, how many pictures do you think she took to choose that one? And tell me about that pose. Like, what's that for? What's that about?

So not judging, but getting them to take a critical eye and not consume it wholesale. The analogy I use in Under Pressure is that everything you see on social media that people post, it's like a furniture showroom. And our own lives are actually like lived in homes. And we know our own lives. We're only seeing the furniture showroom, but we can't help but compare them, right? And of course, of course, the furniture showroom is always going to look better because it's not lived in. And we need to say that to kids all the time. That doesn't mean it fully buffers the impact, but we need to get that filter in there if we can. are in there if we can. Yeah. So rather than shaming them or telling them to put it down or to stop doing whatever they're doing, to just, in a dispassionate, neutral way,

educate as best as we can about the ramifications of it. I mean, that's essentially what you're saying. I think so, yeah. And just ask a lot of questions, right? Or like, oh, that girl, she's really bright, right? That's not part of the story she's telling with that picture, you know? I mean, to really just keep that conversation going as much as we can without annoying them too much, you know, so that they don't want to have it at all. Are there studies that look at how this is impacting young minds versus adult minds? So, the truth is we just don't have the data, right? I mean, so to do those kinds of studies, in some ways, is basically impossible, right?

Because we would have to do, like, case control and random assignment and all of that. And it's important to know that because there are some pretty scary headlines, right? There are headlines out there about, you know, smartphones doing all this damage to kids. We don't really have the data to be able to say anything like that conclusively. I will say that if there's anything I think parents should be worrying about, I would actually just put sleep at the top of the list, at the absolute top of the list. This is a very boring, very simple explanation

for kids being stressed and fragile and anxious. But sleep is the glue that holds human beings together. And our kids get way less sleep than they need. And social media is a big piece of that. So I would worry about sleep. I would worry about the capacity to focus, right? We don't, we know that you really, the capacity to focus is a muscle that you build. I think, and I've got suggestions I can make about how we help kids learn to set technology aside when it is time to do focused work. And I would worry about the capacity to have one-on-one conversations, to be with people and present and not distracted by technology. The rest, I think, it's here to stay. Yeah.

You know? Well, I don't think that we fully appreciate the power and the impact that this is having on all of us, not just kids. I mean, never in the history of humanity have we had such a powerful device that is so perfectly attuned to magnetize our attention in the most addictive way. And, you know, we can sort of slough it off or just say, well, this is the way it is now. But like, if you really step back and look at it, it's incredibly powerful. And there's just no way that there aren't, you know, unbelievably impactful downstream impacts from this. I think we'll find that. I do think we'll find that. I think we're just beginning to kind of appreciate it. And hopefully we're going to learn more. I do think we'll find that. I think we're just beginning to kind of appreciate it.

And hopefully we're going to learn more. I mean, there's interesting people doing a lot of compelling work around the addictive nature of these things and the data mining and all of that, of course. But I think we still have a lot to learn. I think I'm with you all the way. I feel like this thing got so far out ahead of us and took us all over. And we're just now starting to look. Cal Newport is doing some interesting work on digital minimalism. He is. He was just sitting there two weeks ago or something like that.

So I think there's smart people coming through, and there's probably a piece about this in the Times every day about ways to manage one's focus. But I do think, I'm not one really, I don't want parents parenting from a position of fear. Like, I really think it goes over better to say, look, it's not that I'm against technology. It's that I'm for sleep. I'm for your capacity to focus. I'm for your ability to sit here with me and have a conversation without picking up your phone. So I'm going to fiercely protect those because those are what I'm on the side of. And that's going to mean you can't have the technology around all the time. Yeah. And that's a tricky conversation to have when you're

used to having that technology in your hand at all times to create a healthy boundary around it to protect that sleep. I mean, this is something we've gone through. And the focus piece, I think, something we've gone through. And the focus piece, I think, is even trickier because young minds have grown up with these devices and they're used to being stimulated from five different vectors at the same time. And I just notice how young people do their homework. They've got a laptop with a television show on, they've got Snapchat open, they're playing music, and they've got a notebook out that they're writing on. And all of these things are happening at the same time. And I'm like, I don't know how you can focus on anything. Like, no, this is how we do it now. And so, myself as a parent, I'm in the position of trying to lay down the law and say, no,

you have to do it the way that I did it and the way that I think it should be done? Or do I say, well, we'll see how this goes when your grades come and then we'll adjust? I think they both could work. I want you to know cognitive science has your back because there's no such thing as multitasking effectively. Humans only have so much bandwidth. Anything you do that distracts you is chewing up bandwidth. There's no extra bandwidth. So if I'm reading and I'm listening to music, some of that bandwidth is being taken up by the music. So the easiest thing, right? This is not encouraging for people with older kids, is to get way out in front of it, right? To have

homework habits be established with your first grader. Like this is something you do in the dining room. You don't wait until they're 15. No, to start it. And actually, and one of my friends did this great thing when she had kids. So she lives in Pennsylvania in a two-story home and the bedrooms are on the second floor. And her rule was, you know, no phone ever.

They don't go upstairs. No technology ever goes to the second floor of the house ever. And we have a rule, actually, I'm a really flexible parent, but I have a no technology in any bedroom ever in the 24 hour day rule. So I think it's easier if parents get out in front of it. But if you haven't, if you haven't, one thing that parents can do that's sort of a a maybe a compromise between what you're suggesting is to ask for an experiment to ask for an experiment say like can we do a week where you do it with all your stuff away and see how it feels and see how it goes and see if it goes faster wait how would that go over you're gonna pry that thing out of my hand when

you know it's cold and dead. You know what I mean? It's tough. It becomes very emotionally heightened. Yeah. So maybe that's when you wait for the grades to come in, right? And then you say, what you're doing isn't working. We've got to try something else.

I think most parents are in the position of dealing with it once it's a problem. It takes a lot of mindfulness and intention to have addressed that at a very early age. My hat's off to those parents. I think the common situation is like, well, this thing is spiraling out of control, like, you know, and then we feel like we're doing damage control. And we're in these very emotional conversations that then, you know then become something else altogether. They do. So here's what's encouraging to me. I'm watching smart kids figure this out.

And I've heard from teenagers, a lot of them have strategies involving technology for getting their work done without technology disrupting it. So they tell me about things like they have their phone on a timer of 25-minute intervals, and it's near them, and they're watching it tick down. And once the 25-minute interval has passed, they let themselves check for five minutes, and then they go back to work. I think this is brilliant, right? I mean, 25 minutes is long enough to focus. They probably do need a break. focus they probably do need a break um i talk about it in under pressure um a bunch of teenage girls over finals um at a girl's school actually in la um gave each other permission to change each other's passwords on all of the social media that they found alluring so that they could not access their own social media and then um fixed it for each other after finals so they could have access.

That's cool. And that's smart. That also involves a lot of trust. Yeah. Yeah. But they made this pact, and they did that. And so one of the conversations—so I consult two days a week at a girls' school in Shaker Heights. And so what I have started to do when I want teenagers to change their behavior is I will have a whole group of teenagers and I'll say, who has strategies for getting their homework done without being distracted by it?

And suddenly, four girls in the room will start talking. Well, I do this, I do this, I do this. That I find to be a vastly more effective thing than me rolling in with you guys. Because it's self-generated and they have an ownership of it. It's relevant to them. It's coming from someone who's doing the same homework they're doing. And also, the problem that is just true and irreducible when we roll up to try to talk to kids about technology is they're like, you don't get it. You know, you don't get what it means to me.

And I think that is 100% true. And I think it's very hard for us to take guidance on something when we feel like the person trying to offer advice doesn't actually get our experience. And so if I can get teenagers talking to each other about strategies, that for me feels like the most ideal intervention. Right, because it's not coming top down from the parents. Nope. And they also know who's getting what grades in that room. Yeah.

They all know everything about each other completely in a way that we didn't. So it's interesting to have the girl that they all know is killing it pipe up and say, this is my strategy for managing technology. Right, right, right. So I think, and I do the same around sleep, right? Because teenagers are supposed to get nine hours of sleep a night, which very few do. And I've done the same thing. I'll get a big enough group where I'll say, okay, who here is getting roughly eight or

nine hours a night? And usually there's a couple. And then I will say, tell us how you make it happen, right, and get them talking. That I have found to be less controlled and less satisfying than me rolling in with, you know, and all my rules. And I think probably more useful to the teenagers I'm caring for. Yeah. useful to the teenagers I'm caring for. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about the teenage girl friend matrix versus how kind of boys navigate their social circles. Like,

my sense is that girls have much more intense, intimate friendships. Boys tend to have lots of friends but it's very casual um and you know within the teenage girl universe it's all about like this network of friends is like everything i mean like i said life or death earlier i mean it really is like the the most important thing like the status in the group who's doing what how everybody is interacting and there's a there's a a beautiful intimacy to it um but it is so it's delicate and it's very um supercharged yeah yeah um wow like where to begin yeah so okay so he teased this yeah tease this apart a little bit um well let me just put on the table there's no biological reason for boys and girls to behave differently in their relational lives what we see is what's socialized um and and so i mean there are all the difference you just

describe you know they they do arrive but it's not that um boys are somehow built differently than girls it's just um there's some really nice work done by a woman named niobi way about you know the various barriers and also times when boys do have really deep intimate relationships with each other but um there's other work uh michael thompson has done some of it where it's just not seen as like cool for guys to be intimate in their friendships and so then they are socialized away from it um girls here's what we know about girls versus boys in terms of how they relate um girls when they are distressed this this is important um are much more likely just to discuss the fact that they are distressed, this is important, are much more likely to discuss the fact that they are distressed. So if somebody hurts their feelings, they're likely to find a friend and discuss this at length.

Boys, when they are hurt, are more likely to distract themselves, to go home, hop on a video game or go out, shoot hoops or something, but to just try to let it die down through distraction. And is that a socialized response as well? Yeah, I think that's thoroughly socialized. But the upshot is that we start to see exactly what you're describing, which is boys become a little bit more, you know, each man's his own island, and he kind of bumps up against other guys, you know, based on what they're doing together, whereas girls are having these, you know, powerful conversations about being injured by so-and-so, or, you know, something's bothering me, I'm going to find a friend and talk. And this is what we then couch as, quote-unquote, you know, something's bothering me. I'm going to find a friend and talk. And this is what we then couch as quote-unquote drama.

Drama. Right, right. So that looks like a lot of drama. But so it's not that the boys are not in pain. It's not that boys are not mean to other boys. It's that the response when the meanness occurs is very different. Then another gendered finding shows up, which is that girls more than boys, again, this is socialized, are likely to experience vicarious stress. So if my friend is upset, now I'm also upset because she's upset. Boys more than girls, again, socialized, don't have quite the same transfer. Like, I'm sorry, you're upset. Good luck with that.

So the impact of this, this is where you start to see these really gendered patterns in terms of how drama plays out. So let's imagine a single mean event occurs to a boy and to a girl. To the boy, he may be in quite a bit of pain and go home and play video games until the feeling dies down. Then we never hear of it again. This isn't great for him, right? It means he suffers in silence. It means he doesn't get the support he deserves. But it does kind of go quiet.

A girl has a mean event occur. She tells three friends because she's very upset. And now her friends are upset on her behalf. So they're going to tell other people. So this thing could go on for like three weeks, right? And they're going to talk to the person who perpetrated this. They've got to make it right. So when we look at the data on this.

Which creates a cascading yeah right okay so just you know so so it's interesting and this is actually how girls get their reputation for being meaner is that when when there is meanness among girls you know it's basically spilled all over an entire you know social circle statistically boys are meaner you know which isn't good but in terms of um physical, rumor spreading, name calling, all of that, boys way outpace girls. There's some data suggesting that girls use relational violence more, exclusion, you know, that kind of thing. But there's also data showing, oh, no, boys do that too, right? So it's more, you know, that pound for pound, a single mean event has a very different sort of set of repercussions for girls than boys.

They both probably should take a page out of the other's book. You know, we don't want boys to just be trying to stomach pain, right? We want them to reach out and talk to somebody. And for girls, sometimes we do need to say, I think you need to let this one drop. You know, I think continuing to discuss this may not actually help make it better at this point. So we see those distinctions. What you were asking about reminded me of something I've always observed. So I have this private practice I've had for a very long time, and it means I get to see rare events

occur more than once. And one pattern that I think doesn't happen that often, but I've gotten to see rare events occur more than once. And one pattern that I think doesn't happen that often, but I've gotten to see it over my time, is when a high school girl and boy end up in a really powerful romance, which happens. It happens where maybe they're juniors or seniors. That's not completely antiquated. No, it's not. It's not. It still happens. And then it's time to go to college, which stinks, right? Because there's really no good outcome because they wouldn't have broken up, but staying together is not so good. And so they decide to uncouple. They decide they're not going to be together. And what I watch is that the girl has all these girlfriends that she can go to for support, you know, about the end of this relationship and losing what it means. And the boy keeps coming back to the old girlfriend to try to get the support he needs because he does not have an emotional support network of guys. And that I often think, I'm always hearing about this from the girl's

perspective, so I'm not quite sure that what I'm hearing is the whole story by any measure. But I often get the sense that for him, it was the first really intimate relationship. Whereas she has him and also four girlfriends she talks to like that. She's well-versed in relationships at that point. And then she's like, why is he coming back to me if he doesn't have anyone else that he can process this with? He doesn't have anyone that he's done that with. And I always am just aching for those boys. When I'm hearing the girl's side and she's like, oh, he keeps calling and I don't know what to do because we said we're not going to be together. And I'm thinking like, oh, that poor guy.

I don't know that he has a network of intimacies that he can fall back on. And I think it all opened up with her. I think that that was when he really had his first. And what happens to that boy if he can't find a healthy, you know, external party with whom to process this? Like if it just continues to be internalized. What I usually see is that he kind of blows it up, right? That he goes and makes out with her good friend,

you know, or something like that. It takes a very distracting turn. And usually not a good one. But that he acts out in a way. And this is sort of a pattern we've observed for a long time. That when girls are in distress, they're more likely to collapse in on themselves. That's the higher rates of anxiety and depression. And when boys are in distress, they're more likely to collapse in on themselves, thus the higher rates of anxiety and depression. And when boys are in distress, they're more likely to act out, get themselves in trouble somehow.

It seems like a lot of the issues that we spent a lot of time talking about with respect to the socialization of teenage girls could be addressed by creating a healthier way for young adolescent boys to communicate, right? Like, this would ameliorate a lot of the problems that then spill into the girls' community. So I think about this a lot, right? You know, I think about, so you use the term toxic masculinity, right? And I know there's such a thing. I'm cautious. I can't imagine that's a term that feels good for guys to hear. I'm mindful of that. And as a psychologist, I'm always on the side of not trying to trigger defenses, not trying to get people's backup. So I've been thinking a

lot about the sixth and seventh grade boys who are probably having a lot of the same thoughts and feelings as every 6th and 7th grade boy, but will do none of the stuff that isn't healthy. We in no way engage in what we call toxic masculinity. They're good guys and they got crushes, but they don't call people names. I've gotten really interested in those guys. I'm like, what's working for them? What's the story then? Because again, the three guys who are acting like jerks in the class, they get a lot of attention and they got a lot of power. But I think there's, I don't know boys like I know girls, but I was talking about this with a good friend of

mine, a guy who has three brothers, two brothers. And I was saying, you know, I think all, I imagine all sixth and seventh grade boys are like, if they're heterosexual, they're like thinking about sex a lot and thinking about, you know, but they're not all acting, you know, so inappropriately. And he said, oh yeah, he said my brother was in trouble one time when he was in the seventh grade. He was in trouble with my dad about maybe not paying enough attention at school or being serious enough at school. And he said my brother in seventh grade said to my dad, I know, but it's hard because I'm like, I'm thinking about boobs all the time, you know? And I thought, okay, but I don't think this was a kid who was doing any of that stuff. So I'm actually a little,

my mind is going these days to the question and i don't know that i'm equipped to answer it of what's working for the guys who maybe do have real friendships with other guys in the seventh grade and who don't talk about women in that way and aren't playing smear the queer you know uh at recess and wouldn't do any of those things like what's their story? Because I think that's most guys. Yeah. And I think what happens is, I'd probably consider myself one of those guys. When you're talking, I'm thinking, what was my experience in sixth or seventh grade? I mean, in seventh grade, I was bullied. I was quiet. I internalized, you know, whatever trauma I was experiencing.

And I just was like an island unto myself. And I think it stunted my emotional development. But there weren't a lot of healthy emotional outlets for processing those tricky, you know, thoughts and experiences that you're having at that time. Yeah. Yeah. you know, thoughts and experiences that you're having at that time. Yeah, yeah. I just wish we were paying more attention to the kids who are getting it right.

Because something's working. But you mentioned being, you know, on the receiving end of that stuff, right? So then there's work to be done there for the kids who aren't doing it, but are, you know, are having to deal with it, you know? And I bet you could probably divide a class, right, to kids who are perpetrating that stuff, perpetrating, kids who are on the receiving end of that stuff, kids who are, have no part in it. And what you'll also find is there's a fourth group, which is kids who are both bullies and victims, you know, that that also, that's a category always. Bullies and victims, meaning they're on both sides of that. Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah.

Well, that's the kind of classic abuse cycle, is it not? I think that that's what we tend to see. But at the same time, you know, seventh graders are goofy. Like, they're just goofy. It's the worst. Seventh grade is the worst. It's a bad year. It's a bad year.

Let's just get that out of the table. It's not a bad year. Yeah. It's a bad year. Let's just get that out of the table. It's not a good year. And I said in Untangled, like, you know, I just, we cannot find a cure for the seventh grade. Like, we just, you know, we just, we're still thinking about it all the time. have no reason in their history to be mean, accidentally discover how much power meanness gives them and get drunk on it as seventh graders. So I do think sometimes kids are bringing to school repertoires that are lived at home, right? Where they see how you can talk to people and they think that's an okay way to talk to people at school. I think that sometimes happens. I've also seen it just kind of dawn on a seventh grade girl that like, wow, if I say something mean about her, everybody wants

to hang out with me, you know? And that in that cognitive incapacity to reflect very much on all of it, she just goes with it, you know? And, you know, usually by ninth or 10th grade, they've got enough perspective that they're like, whoa, I probably shouldn't treat that person that way. But seventh grade is just exciting. There's a New Yorker cartoon I saw a million years ago. And it's these two guys walking up Capitol Hill holding briefcases. And one says to the other, how do I know I have power if I don't abuse it? And for me, I'm like, that's seventh grade.

That is the cartoon of seventh grade. Yeah. Played out in the halls of government. Yes. Yes. Well, let's bring it back to the home. I'm interested in how we as parents can develop better strategies around how to communicate with the young people in our lives to, you know, hopefully set our kids on a better trajectory or help them, you know, correct whatever, you know, ill-begotten path they found themselves on. Like, this is just a constant, you know, source of learning for me of,

you know, missteps and self-corrections and trying to get it right. And of course, you know, often not getting it right. Well, I would say that a lot of my writing is about the invariable and inevitable friction that is just part of raising kids. And I think I've really committed myself to writing about it because I feel like it doesn't get talked about enough, right? So I write a monthly piece for the New York Times, and I've done pieces titled, Know Your Teenager Doesn't Hate You, It's Just Summer, right? And why teenagers are allergic to their parents, right? And why teenage girls roll their eyes, you know? And I really enjoy trying to illuminate all that's going on developmentally that feels extremely personal to the parent, but it's not about the parent.

It's not, yeah. It's this developmental path. This is like, sorry to entertain, but like, this is Julie's constant thing with me. Because I will personalize it. And she's like a Jedi at being neutral and like just dissipating whatever tension there is by, you know, making a joke or whatever. And she's like, you've got to like, it's not about you. It is not about you. You're along for the ride.

But this is not about you. You're along for the ride, but this is not about you. But the reason I think I found myself in this space is I worry that there can be this sense that one gets from reading about parenting that if you just do it this way or if you just say this magic set of words, then your child will do as you ask and be charming company and admire you. And like, and I feel like, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's a huge mess. And you're doing the best you can and she's doing the best she can. And, you know, occasionally there'll be like wildly delightful moments of parenting and the rest is life. But then, so in that mess, here's what I, here's what the data tell us. Like if you, If you want it to come out well in the end, which we all want it to come out well in the end, the big picture stuff, and we've been studying parenting and outcomes for 80 years, and you throw all the studies in a hopper, right? And you get them to drop out the major findings. if you are warm with your kids and if you have structure, the rest will sort itself out.

So there has to be a sense of, I like you, I want to be with you, I enjoy your company, I think you're neat, right, if you can get that in place. And then if you can have rules that matter, that are understood to be important for family life, are understood to be part of how we do business in this home, and enforce those and be a predictable parent. I actually, I think we talk about being consistent a lot in parenting. I would not use that word. I would say you need to be predictable in how you do things.

Because you can be predictable and pretty weird, and your kid can completely work with it because they know. Versus if you are unpredictable, that actually really hamstrings kids. Or if you sporadically enforce a barrier, a boundary. Yeah. That really does kids in. And that's actually where, you know, the stories of like parental alcoholism really, you know, when we drill down on what, you know, at the granular level, why that made life so hard is like they never knew what they were getting, right? Yeah. Whereas my own mom had, I had no curfew as an adolescent. You know, she was like, no, you'll come home when you come home, right?

But if I left a sink, a spoon in the sink, you know, a nuclear reaction. So, like, there was no, like, logic, right, to the relative, right? But it was not. But I knew the deal, right? So you just don't leave a spoon in the sink and, you know, if you can be warm, if you can have rules and consistently reinforce them and be predictable in your reaction to things, things will be all right. through Untangled and Under Pressure to really detail what the girl's side of it, right? Sort of the back, like what's happening inside of her. I would say it largely is to help parents not take the whole thing so personally, you know, that parents feel like their teenage daughter broke up with them, you know, and they feel like she's doing their adolescence to them, you know?

Yeah. And that is a very narcissistic, it's natural, but it's very narcissistic because it's coming from this place of the parent wanting the parent's emotional needs met through the child, which is unfair to the kid and just not healthy, right? It's definitely not healthy. The problem is up until about age nine, they're good for that. Right. So you acclimate to that. Yes. You know, like your eight-year-old thinks you're awesome and funny and wants to come to the grocery store with you and likes to cuddle, you know? So I think there's a lot of joy in that and I want there to be a lot

of joy in that. I think that I'm always sort of have these sweet conversations. Like I'll give a talk to a group of parents and some mom will come up to me and she'll say, you know, my daughter's 11 and I think we're going to be okay. You know, she says this. Right. She says this. And I know exactly what she's thinking. She's thinking like she's not going to turn on me like those, you know, badly behaved girls I see at the mall, you know. And I go, yeah, you know, I'm like, it's okay.

You know, it's okay. And I just think, you know, I try to write anywhere I can just about, you know, no, at 11 they will close their bedroom door and it will have nothing to do with you. This is about their need to start to establish their autonomy. In the utterly bizarre scenario where they have to become independent while living at home. Right. Right. Right. One of the things I did with Mathis, our 15-year-old, over the years when she was younger,

is to joke about this impending change. Like I would say, see how great we're getting along? And it's always going to be like this, right? So you're not going to be one of those people who at 13, 14 is going to slam the door in my face. We're going to remember this moment right now, right? She would laugh. And we laugh about it now because, you know, she does what 15-year-old girls do.

And I was like, remember when we had that conversation about, you know, and we can laugh. Like it dissipates the tension of all of it. But to get back to something you said a moment ago, which is this idea of if I just say the right thing and, you know, there's a control mechanism at play there that is highly dysfunctional. And it's about trying to make that child conform to your worldview of what you think they should do and be. And that's not good, right? It's not. And it's also not developmental. So what I mean is the thing I'm so grateful for in my training is that I was really trained as a developmental psychologist.

He basically said, okay, at zero to 12 months, here's what's cognitively happening for the kid. And I can do that for every year. So sometimes people will call me on the phone or start talking to me, and they'll be like, my daughter, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'll say, the first pause, I'll say, well, how old is she? I can't process data about kids without knowing the exact developmental box they're in. And so 13-year-olds are in this extremely unique developmental box where their brains are wildly dysregulated, where they're very gawky. They're very easily overtaken by emotion as a function of neurological development.

They are caught in this moment where their emotion centers have been upgraded, but their perspective-maintaining centers have not been upgraded. And so if they become upset, the whole system crashes. So if they become upset, the whole system, you know, crashes. And what my work feels like my main aim is so that parents know the developmental box they're in. So when their 13-year-old walks in the door and they say one word and the kid loses it or, you know, has some sort of meltdown, they can actually have the developmental perspective of, oh, okay, they're having a meltdown because neurologically they can't. It's not that this is about something about me. And then to try to offer some strategies for getting through that moment. So I would say what I aim, hopefully, is that I think the work that psychologists can do is the more we can just give parents a perspective that is neutral, developmental.

You know, 12-year-olds are like this, 13-year-olds are like this, 14-year-olds are like that. You know, and it doesn't always map perfectly onto your own kids' ages. Then parents can adjust. But kids are a moving target, right? adjust. But kids are a moving target, right? And unless you have a good memory for your own adolescence or good access to developmental information, it's very easy to take them at face value, but that's not really appropriate. But the more you can do that, then you can sort of uncouple from the emotional trigger and depersonalize it, right? We all have our buttons and, you know, our kids know where those buttons are and they know how to push them. And, you know, it's taken

a lot of work on my part, a lot of meditation and mindfulness work and work that I do in recovery to just be able to have the capacity, the facility to pause when agitated and not just react and get emotional about something, but just, you know, take a beat, take a moment and try to, you know, cogitate the neutral, you know, best next thing to say or do. I think that's awesome, right? That's one reaction. I also, I want parents to know, like, it's okay to get mad at your kids, you know, not in a mean, nasty way. But I think, you know, if you don't always have the wherewithal to not react, I think another way to look at those moments is to think, you know, no one's going to ever think our kids are as cute as we think they are, right? And I think there's a lot to be said for learning

at home that, you know, if you're a jerk, people aren't going to like it, you know, and they're going to get angry sometimes, or they're not going to want to be with you. And so, you know, in my own parenting, I remember when I had toddlers, I had two daughters, I would get mad. Eventually, toddlers make you really mad, right? And I learned to say to my daughters, you know what, I'm actually getting mad, right? Like, I'm asking you repeatedly to do this thing, and I know I'm being patient, but I want you to know I'm getting mad,

and I'm going to start to be mad if this goes on. And then if they continued to be annoying, then when I got mad, I felt like you had fair of warning right like so it wasn't out of the blue um so i think there's a place for anger in family life um if a kid has really been incredibly provocative and the parent is predictable right and they know it's coming i also think there's a lot of value in apologizing to kids when we screw up right so? So say we blow it, right? And they didn't have it coming. To me, there's a lot of power and there's a lot of beautiful research on this about rupture and repair, right?

There's a lot that happens in a relationship when a parent comes back to a teenager and says, you know what? I overreacted and I owe you an apology and I am sorry. and I owe you an apology and I am sorry. There's a real growth that happens when parents can do that. What parents can't do is they can't keep doing it repeatedly. That's where it can fall apart. But I'm definitely sort of the brand of psychologist who feels like, let me give you five options for how to react to a kid because it's going to depend on so many contextual factors. So sometimes you may be

able to be reserved. Sometimes you might just get mad and they shouldn't be surprised because they always know that's going to get you going. And sometimes they didn't have a comment and you're going to apologize, you know, but they all are available. And in the course of the millions of interactions we're going to have, we're going to need them all. Yeah. And those millions of interactions, you know, there's a scientific way of kind of approaching that. And then there's a very kind of intuition-based, you know, artistic way of approaching it. It's like this dance, right? And you have this beautiful analogy of the swimming pool that I think kind of encapsulates that. Can you kind of elaborate on that? Sure, sure. So this is an untangled, and it grew out of my observation that teenagers work to become independent. That's their job.

The piece that seems to really get parents is that they don't become just slightly more independent each day. They don't just become a little bit further and more autonomous each day. That a typical pattern is that you haven't heard from your teenager for three days, right? Or she's barely acknowledged your existence and then something goes wrong, right? And she's very, very upset. And so then she comes seeking the parent, right? And it may be that she's needing physical comfort or just wants to talk and wants to share things. It is not unusual in these moments where there is actually a physical, like they're draping themselves on you or like cuddling near. Okay, so the girl may be upset.

I know, the parent's thrilled, right? The parent's like, ah, you know, and like loving it, absolutely loving it. And then she's gone again, right? And so in observing this happening in families, the metaphor I came up with, and it's slightly belabored, but it does work really well, is that the girl is like a swimmer, and the water is the world, and the parents are the wall that hold the whole thing together. They're the pool. And swimmers want to be out in the water, right? I mean, they want to be out in the pool, and they want to be with other swimmers.

They want to be gaining strength. And I keep thinking about this metaphor. You know, when you're in the middle of the pool, you're not thinking about the edge of the pool. And I keep thinking about this metaphor. You know, when you're in the middle of the pool, you're not thinking about the edge of the pool. Like, that's the furthest from your mind, right? But then they get dunked or they get exhausted or something. And they have that feeling, you know, I think all of us maybe can remember this from swimming lessons where they're like, I'm drowning, I'm drowning, right? So they come scrambling for the wall, which is the parent. And they cling to the parent to get their breath back. Okay, so the parent is loving it. I think that usually what happens for teenagers is they do

have that swimming pool lesson experience where they're like, oh wait, nevermind, I'm fine. You know? And so then- Goodbye. Goodbye. But I think actually it becomes a pretty abrupt goodbye because they're like, I'm fine. And oh my God, I'm in my mother's bed, right? Like this is so awkward. So they shove off, right? They push off in a pretty abrupt way. So they may say, and I love this about teenage girls, even my own, like that margin of like mean but not punishable commentary, you know, that they make. So they may say like, wait, did you wear that today?

Like ow? You know, or something like that. Like it's very- Just with like a razor razor blade precision yes yes and so the parents repeated experiences i have no idea where you are oh my god you're letting me cuddle you you just kicked me in the stomach right and it's sort of on repeat and so um what i wrote that up for is not because i'm like and so here's the magic solution to prevent this because you actually cannot prevent this and I actually don't want you to prevent this. Though I don't think

your kid should be rude. You know, if they say something really rude, you can say like, that's rude. You know, we don't talk like that. What I wanted was for parents, and this is exactly what we're talking about, to know this, this gore, like this is what's happening. This is not meant as a, as a personal rejection. Your daughter can breathe again. Now she's on to her next thing. And so my aim in offering parents this metaphor was so that they would savor when they did get to have those moments. And I got this wonderful letter. I get letters, which is really fun for readers, handwritten. And it's like, they're sometimes typed, you know, it's like a really fun thing. And I had this mom write me a

while back and she said, you know, I bought Untangled for my daughter, but of course, 80% applied to my son. And she said, I want you to know boys do that swimming pool thing too. And what she described, she said, I have a 17 year old son and every once in a while, he'll come in the den where my husband and I watch television, and he will lay his head in my lap and ask me to rub his back, right? And she said, and then he'll stand up and leave without a word. And she said that, and I said, what am I doing? Exactly, how could I blow this? And she said, and then I read your book, and I realized what was happening. And she said, so now when he comes and he lays his head in my lap, she said, I savor it. And she said, and my husband looks over at me and he mouths the words swimming pool to her.

And she said, and I just, I know it may last 90 seconds and I'm just going to enjoy it. And I know that when he stands up to leave, it's because he feels okay again, not because he doesn't want to be with me. And that's your job. Yeah. To help that person feel okay. You're the safe harbor. And the pool doesn't exist without the wall, but it's not about the wall. Yeah.

That's super interesting. Yeah, I loved that one. Yeah. And I think it speaks to this need that we all have as parents to let go of, you know, we romanticize these moments in the past and we have this urge for it to go back to that way. And the more we can kind of let go of that and just understand that that's not what this is about. This is about, you know, trying to prepare them for the world. It is. And I do, I have thought a lot. That's not what this is about. This is about trying to prepare them for the world. It is. And I have thought a lot. I joke with my own 15-year-old daughter about the idea of them becoming independent and autonomous while still thoroughly dependent.

I joke with her sometimes. I call it the impossible project. And I remember one day she decided she really liked Beyonce at around age 13. And okay, well, I've liked Beyonce for a really long time. This will be our bonding thing. Well, no, no, no, because I couldn't like Beyonce anymore because she liked Beyonce. And I remember we were in the kitchen and we had music playing and it was like a Beyonce song and I was bopping to it. And she's like, mom, mom.

You know, she wanted me to stop. song and I was bopping to it and she's like mom mom you know she wanted me to stop and then in the next second she's like oh can you open the cheese you know so it was just like you can't do this it's not cool right and then also can you please take care of me in this way like childish right and I just I just and I said oh this is the impossible project like I sort of joked with her about it but I do think like let's take a minute and realize, we are saying, I want you to become a full-grown, independent person while you live under my roof, by my rules, and I drive you places and tell you what I don't feel comfortable with you wearing. How's that going to be a smooth thing? And. You know? And I guess that the reason I like to articulate that is I'm so much on the side of saying, like, this is situational, right?

This isn't that your kid's screwing it up or you're screwing it up. It's that the design of this is going to create a lot of friction. And that's all right. What's the best strategy for navigating the kind of emotional shutdown that occurs? You know, the typical, like, how was your day? Fine. What happened? Nothing, you know, like while the phone, you know, scrolling the phone and you're like, well, I've just been relegated to, you know, transportation for this individual, you know, and there's that sense of like, all the intimacy, you know, that

we had is gone. And now I don't even feel like I can, no matter what I do, I can't connect with this person. And there's kind of a despair that overtakes the parent in that predicament. Okay, so there's like 14 answers to that question. Okay, so the first is that, let us think for a minute about what school is. Let us think for a minute about what school is. Okay, so school is you take 20 to 30 kids and you put them in a room and you basically have them have a 45-minute meeting. And when that meeting's over, they go down the hall with the same 20 to 30 kids, have another meeting. And they do this all day, every day for nine consecutive months.

Okay, so no grown-up could make it through that. And kids are pretty gracious about it and they get through it. And they don't punch people very often, and they sort of manage the day. But school, even wonderful schools, it's a very exhausting thing. And so I think a lot about that dynamic when the kid comes home and the parent's like, how was school? And the kid's like, really? Like, you want me to recount like this? So I think that that can be some of what's happening. I also think there's often a dynamic where we think about connecting in terms of how we have in mind

to connect, right? So the adult approach to this is like, I'm going to ask you questions and you're going to answer those questions, right? That's our agenda, right? Kids are like, ah, that's not my agenda. What is interesting to me is that often later in the evening or close to bedtime, teenagers will often put forward a topic or raise something, and parents don't always pick it up, right? So we're like, hey, I'm ready to connect, you know, and then we want to connect. And then a kid will later say something like say something like, something really weird happened in study hall. And the parents will be like, do-do-do-do, checking my email. And so I think it's actually pretty rare that there's a kid who's not making those overtures.

I think that often parents feel like, no, I tried to talk to you earlier. Right, that moment has passed. That moment has passed. Now I'm busy. Now I'm busy. And the kid is actually putting topics on the table that are not being brought up, picked up by the parent either because the parent is distracted or, I mean, human. Like, I don't feel critical about this, but they're distracted. Or the topic, like, they don't even know how to engage it.

Like, it's kind of a weird one, you know, or the teenager wants to show them the YouTube video they're interested in. Like, there's stuff like that. Or my daughters like to watch Vine compilations. Like, I find these so weird. Like, I can't. But that's what they want to do with me. And they want me to look at them with them. And I really try to not.

You're like, why is this funny? Why is this funny? Like, I really, like, I cannot figure out Vine compilations. But then here's the other thing I want to say about this. In the vein of, like like what connecting means to teenagers. So again, like I've practiced long enough that I've had a couple of rare things that I've gotten to see a few times. And so I consult two days a week at the school, which means the girls know me well, and I'm sort of a piece of furniture for them, which I love. And so it's happened a few

times where girls will find me spontaneous and be like, Dr. DeMorti, you have a minute? And I'll say, yeah. And they'll come in and their complaint is that their parents are not home enough. And invariably, the girl talking to me is some ridiculously put together junior who could basically be a CEO of a company at this point, you know, just one of those kids. And they'll complain their parents are out a lot or really preoccupied with another sibling who's maybe having a hard time. And the complaint is earnest and genuine. But even as the girl's sharing it with me, I'll think, if they were home, I'm pretty sure you would not acknowledge their presence. But here the girl is saying that she misses them. And so that caused me to write a piece a while back called, What Do

Teenagers Want, colon, Potted Plant Parents, right? They actually don't want us to ask so much with the questions. They don't really care what we did today, usually, but they want us there leading boring middle-age lives and available should we be needed, which I know can sound very, you know, kind of narcissistic on behalf of teenagers. But I don't think we should give short shrift to the idea that our physical presence and our availability for them is really important, even if they are not outwardly acknowledging it. not outwardly acknowledging it. And the best metaphor developmentally for this is actually when we look at videos of toddlers, when we bring them into labs and how they explore environments and we're looking at attachment questions. Securely attached toddlers will start in their parent's lap and there'll be all these alluring toys around. And then they'll descend from the

parent's lap and play with the toy. And then they'll come back and sit with the parent for a minute and then explore further and then come back and just touch the parent's knee without looking at the parent and then explore further. And so I think that's happening again, you know, with this sort of second individuation of adolescence where in order for her to go out in the world safely, there has to be the sense of like, my base is here and I care where you are. I'm just not going to talk to you that much. I don't want you to ask me too many questions. So if you're home and available, that's more connection than you realize, even if it's not what you had in mind. Yeah. It's super interesting. It's sort of like, you know, the I-beams that hold up,

you know, the ceiling of the house or the roof of the house. We don't pay a lot of attention to it, but we need it to be there. Yeah. And we're glad that it's there. Yeah. But we're not going to romanticize it. No. Or create a lot of dialogue around it.

But just, yeah, that sense that, that like just knowing stability. Yeah. And that, and it's sufficiently valuable that teenagers will come find me to complain about its absence. Mm-hmm. And so – Whereas the parent would think, well, what do they care? Like, they don't – you know, when I'm around, they don't talk to me, so what's the big deal? Yeah.

So I really – it's a great gift to give your kid if you can just sort of be agenda-less with them. And that actually, for me, feels like the most important point, which is most adults when they're interacting with teenagers have an agenda. And their teachers do, their coaches do, their college counselors do. Like, you know, there's something to try to make happen. And so often when we as parents are with our kids, like we're advancing an agenda. Like, so tell me about your day, right? Or, you know, and we can tell them to go do stuff and they got to go do stuff. Right. Or, you know, we can tell them to go do stuff and they got to go do stuff.

I'm interested in parents seeing the creation of agenda-less times as a critical form of connecting with their kid. Yeah, that's very reassuring and cool. I'm just thinking about the parent out there who does only have a limited amount of time with their kid, like the dad who works all day and then he's home. And, you know, there's only two hours before the kid goes to sleep and the dad wants to make sure that the homework's done. And so it becomes agenda-driven only because there isn't enough time or bandwidth for those moments of just letting all of that go and being. Yeah. So worth trying to protect. Yeah, yeah. There's also ways, though, even that dad, I know a great- Or mom.

Or mom, right? It's not unusual. I've heard, I've got two fantastic examples. One is of a dad where he and his daughter both enjoy pictures of the ocean, you know, and the ocean. So he'll just send her, he'll text her photos he comes across of the ocean, right? You know, and that- Just little things throughout the day. Yeah. So we're connected and I'm thinking, but there's no like, she doesn't have to respond or anything like that. Another dad, I love this, his college-aged daughter watches The Bachelor. So he started watching it so they'd have a topic to share. And that's her agenda.

It is cute and it works. And he said, so first we'll start the phone call and be like, did you see what happened? And then invariably she'll tell him something that he was hoping to find out about her life in college. But I'm really interested

in that kind of creativity where the parent is trying to get with the kids agenda as a form of connecting yeah yeah those little things that don't take up a lot of time but indicate like hey i'm thinking about you yeah and i i know what you like and i'm gonna try to like it too or i'm gonna be curious about it my youngest daughter she just loves animals and nature so you know i, I do the same thing. I send her little texts of little animal videos on Instagram or stuff like that when I see something cute. I think that matters.

I think that matters. And it's her agenda. So let's shift gears to most of what we've been talking about is stuff that you covered in Untangled and in the writing that you do for the New York Times and stuff like that. But the subject and the focus of the new book is really pressure and anxiety, specifically with respect to adolescent girls and this kind of epidemic that we're now seeing around the pressure that they're weathering. So maybe flesh that out a little bit. Sure. So two things inspired me to write this book. One, how much people are now talking about stress and anxiety. You know, I feel like I have not had a conversation in the last 10 years around an adolescent where at least one of those words wasn't present, if not at the center of the conversation. The other is that there is a grand canyon between how the

popular culture talks about stress and anxiety and how psychologists understand stress and anxiety, and it's causing part of the problem. So the first chapter in Under Pressure articulates the clinical and research-based understanding of stress and anxiety, which is largely that psychologists are pretty okay with these. That stress is a normal function. It occurs any time there's growth. It occurs any time we operate at the edge of our abilities. School is supposed to be stressful is a whole section of the book. Good things are stressful.

You know, having a baby come into your house for the first time is like wildly stressful thing. Stress also happens around bad things. Stress that is not overwhelming actually causes durability. It actually makes people able to weather new difficult things. I think about this a lot. able to weather new difficult things. I think about this a lot. I'm 48, and I think a real benefit of being 48 is stuff doesn't get to me like it used to get to me. What constitutes a crisis? It's got to be pretty bad right now. And that's as a function of having lived, right? So there is such a thing as chronic stress and such a thing as traumatic stress, and we don't

like those. But so long as people are able to recover from periods of stress, largely it makes people grow. Same deal on anxiety. It is a normal and healthy and protective function. It is an evolutionarily installed system to alert us to threats. We get anxious if we're driving and someone near us is swerving. We get anxious if we're procrastinating and we need to get going on our work. It's an alarm system that does keep us on track and keep us safe. It can break. It can go off all the time for no reason. It can go off way out of proportion, a kid having a panic attack about a quiz. But I feel very strongly about wanting to get that message out

there because with the wholesale pathologizing of stress and anxiety, seeing it all as harmful and bad, we are running into the problem where kids are now stressed about being stressed and anxious about being anxious, which is not necessary. That'sacerbating it in this vicious circle. Absolutely. And I do, you know, I think a lot like, how did this gulf emerge, right, between psychology's really relative comfort with stress and anxiety? Like, we largely see them as healthy and protective. And the culture's view. And I have started to think, like, I think the wellness industry may have a hand in this, right? I mean, I think that there's money caught up in selling the idea that you're supposed to feel calm and relaxed all the time. And I feel, you know, there's a whole industry now built up around this idea.

And then I think, and I can start to sound a little weirdly conspiracy theory about this, but I then think, okay, so then say I've bought this idea, right, that I'm supposed to feel calm and relaxed most of the time. And then I get up and I have any regular day, right? Now I'm going to think, well, now I need a solution to the fact that I feel stressed. I don't feel like that yoga girl on Instagram who looks all blissed out while she's the CEO of three companies. Right, exactly. So now they'll sell you a solution to not feeling that way, right? So I mean, this is like my outer limits of like weird thinking about this. But sometimes I think like, I feel like I almost want to rent like those planes with banners behind them, you know, and fly them over major American cities.

And my banners would say something like, like, hey, everybody, like, you're not supposed to feel all that great that often, you know, like, occasionally, everybody, you're not supposed to feel all that great that often. Occasionally, yes, but not all day, every day. Well, that reminds me a lot of the work that Susan David has done, who's been on the show, around emotional agility and just being resilient. And it's not about avoiding stressors. It's about learning how to navigate them and process them. And you have this, you analogize it to weightlifting. I mean, as an athlete, it's sort of like you welcome stress into your life.

Stress is the only way that you get better at anything. Yes. And it expands your capacity to do more work. You get stronger emotionally, mentally, and also physically. So these are things that we need in order to grow. So it's not about removing them from the equation, but I'm wondering whether there's this statistic that we've seen an increase, something like 55% in the stress and anxiety among adolescent girls with no relative increase among adolescent boys. So is this a social

perception? Is it that vicious cycle of feeling bad about being stressed and creating more stress? Is there something new and unique and different that's happening with adolescent girls now that's culturally created that is chronic and malignant in a way that we have to address it in new ways. So I think it's probably like D all of the above, right? So I do think for everyone culturally, the misunderstandings about stress and anxiety are making things worse. And I do feel like I'm on this mission to try to clarify the professional understanding. Okay, but then you do see these jumps for girls that we're not seeing for boys. And I think

there's stuff going on, right? And this is really what the rest of Under Pressure is about. So chapter one is like, here's how stress and anxiety really work. And then chapters two through six really sort of go through the layers. And some of the layers that I think are unique for girls are the intensity of their social interactions, right? I mean, we do see, you know, kind of back to our earlier conversation, though boys may suffer in more silence, they also tend to feel better faster, right? Things die down quicker, whereas girls' strategies for managing social stuff can lead to kind of an exacerbation. So I talk in- The tale.

Yes. We're still on this? Still, really? So I talk in under pressure about helping girls manage conflict much more effectively than usual, and also giving them permission to not engage in a conflict, to just let something drop, which we don't do. I talk in under pressure about the amount of harassment they're dealing with, right? I think that's a very real factor. And I think that may be worse, right? I mean, I think that may be worse.

Again, porn may be part of that story. I talk about girls at school. The landscape for girls at school is such that they are crushing it. Girls are incredibly good students. They are, by some statistics, like 70% of high school valedictorians are going to be girls. They are doing extremely well. The boys are not doing as well as they should be. But girls are putting tremendous pressure on themselves academically. And I think that's part of why we're seeing these rising rates of stress and anxiety. In a way that's different in the generation that preceded them? I do think what's happened is school has changed in a generation.

So what I can say with confidence is I feel like largely high school has come, colleges come to high school and high school has come to middle school. So what we're seeing now is that for very ambitious high school students, they're taking an average of eight APs, if not 13. When we were in high school, that wasn't even an option. You combine a highly conscientious student who girls also engage in very inefficient study strategies and we let them. They recode their notes in color code and all of this, which usually is unnecessary. You combine something like that with eight APs and you're going to get chronic stress. You can't avoid it. And then I do worry about the culture and its impact on girls. The expectations about being

attractive and being agreeable. And so I think there's a special set of pressures. Yeah, everything is heightened. Everything's heightened. Boys suffer. Boys suffer in ways that I don't know nearly so well as I know the story about girls, but I do think there are real factors that bring stress and anxiety up disproportionately for girls.

Let's talk about the language piece. Oh, yeah. It is interesting and anxiety up disproportionately for girls. Let's talk about the language piece. Oh, yeah. It is interesting and somewhat counterintuitive also some of the things you write about with respect to how girls talk about themselves and what the culture thinks about how that should shift or change depending upon your perspective. So in terms of like girl's speech and and our policing of it okay so this is really like i loved writing this up so one thing that you will see in the culture around trying to help empower girls is guidance to them about how they should speak right Right? And it's not unusual to see articles telling girls not to apologize so much and not to use hedges, which is any linguistic form where you kind of soften what comes next, like,

oh, would you mind? Or I'm so sorry. Or just or like or things like that. And the rationale for this guidance is that, and I'll quote Naomi Wolf, who wrote a piece along these lines, you know, that girls are undermining their own power, you know, that they need to use their strong female voice in order to sort of achieve a more equal place in the society. Which, you know, it makes, it sounds good. It sounds good. Like, you know, this is a very plausible argument.

But then along comes this academic feminist linguist named Deborah Cameron, whose work I'm really interested in. And she's at Oxford. She's not someone who is known well in the popular culture in the same way Naomi Wolf is. And wrote actually a very sharp retort to Naomi Wolf about Naomi's piece around saying, like, girls shouldn't use vocal fry that, you know, sound like the Kardashian, you know. And they shouldn't use uptalk, the rising inflection at the end of a sentence. And here's what Deborah Cameron says back. She says, okay, first of all, if you look at the data, there is no such thing as girl's speech. When we look at it statistically, girls and boys and men and women speak, they use the same patterns. It is true often though that people hear it more if it comes from the stereotyped group.

So there are studies that look at where linguists record speech and then play it back. And if it's a girl, you'll hear her say like a lot more, even if she says it at the exact same rate as a boy. And then Deborah Cameron does point out, there's a tiny juncture, girls drive language change. Adolescent girls drive language change. So there's, when language is changing, which is always changing, there's sometimes a moment where girls are using a speech form that people aren't using, everybody else isn't using, and then we all adopt it. So we all start to use it. They're the leaders? They're the leaders, yeah.

How is that? That's interesting. They're just at the vanguard of language change. They're the most innovative. You know, like, I mean, and one of the best things about being with teenagers is, like, I get all the new slang, right? So I don't know if this has come to California, but extra, have you heard this? I don't know. Oh, it's the best, you know.

Blake knows. So it's the best. It's the best. It's basically like they'd be fine, they just need to take it down a notch. So they'll be like, oh my God, so-and-so is being so extra about this, right? It's brilliant. It's absolutely brilliant, right? So this is the kind of innovation that girls give us. But for the most part, there's no such thing as female speech yeah okay so then if you just kind of keep um following this out then the next question is okay but even if girls even if say there were such a thing that you know that men are bold and direct and women need to be that way too we want to be careful about that um and here's a here's a great story this is not under pressure. I had this conversation after I'd written it, but it just captured it so well. So a friend of mine, Kevin, is a federal prosecutor. So he is in charge of a large group of young lawyers whose job it is to ask him questions all day. And he and I were talking about this. And he said, you know, the male lawyers will come to my office and just ask their question.

And my female lawyers will come and say, do you have a minute? Right. And he was reflecting on this and he was thinking, you know, the men should do what the women are doing. Right. It's actually not appropriate for them to just, it's like the women are more appropriate. So rather than thinking about it in terms of the women or the girls needing to change their behavior pattern, their speech patterns, the men are the ones who really actually should. In this context, yeah. But then he also said the guys are getting more of their questions answered.

So it's working for the guys, right? Yeah, it's both, really. I mean, because if the culture doesn't change to compel men to change that tick, then women should adopt the Naomi Wolf approach. Well, let's think, though. So here's where it gets interesting again. Maybe they should. We do not want to promise to teenage girls that it will work for them the way it works for the guys, right? We also have tons of data showing that if a girl were to do the equivalent, like just start with her question, the culture sees that differently than when the guy does it. The guy is being bold, direct,

assertive. She's being pushy, annoying, and brash. So what I say to teenage girls, I say, I'm not saying don't. I'm not saying don't get angry, don't be direct, don't be assertive, don't be bold. I'm not going to promise you it's going to work for you the way it's going to work for a guy. So if you do it, like you should be ready to rumble. Like you may need to, right? And I worry that often in the, you know, be bold and direct and use your strong female voice, the implicit message is because this will be successful for you, right? We actually don't have the data suggesting that. We have the opposite. Okay, but here's where Debra Cameron brings it home. She's like, you know what, Naomi, instead of going after how girls speak, and Debra Cameron says, like, you're doing the work of the

patriarchy for it. Why don't we go after the structures that go after how girls speak? And this is actually a well-worn pattern that we sometimes go after a group by going after how they talk, right? That I'm criticizing their language. And the best example, and I didn't include this in Under Pressure because I feel like you need to hear it to have it really make sense, is so that vocal fry, like the, oh my God, you know, that everybody hates, hates, hates, hates when girls do it. Okay, so this is also conventional among upper crust British males. So if you think about Hugh Grant, it is the exact, exact same speech form.

That's so funny. Right? But it's such a good example. It's not about the speech. It's about the speaker, right? So a woman does, oh my God, and we think she sounds like such a dang bat and we can't stand it. And then Hugh Grant does his, oh my, my, ha, ha, ha. Right.

And it's so charming. It's so charming. And so I basically like I make a mess of all of this, right? And I just ask us to revisit it. And where I land is, hey, everybody needs a verbal toolbox. Everybody needs a really elaborate repertoire for communication because what is more complicated than communication, right? Even nonverbal communication is an incredibly complicated thing. So what I say to girls is like, you should all have your hammer, right? If you're in a bar

and someone touches your butt, like you should be, you know, ready to really put them in their place. And then you should all have your tweezer where you say, do you have a minute? Like, I have a question for you, right? And what I say to them is, your job is to get the job done and to have a wide enough communication repertoire to make it happen. And my favorite way to show them how shrewd and tactical they already are is to say, you know how you ask your parents for something that you know they don't want to give you. And they'll like smile, right? Yeah. I mean, they're like jujitsu black girls with that.

Yes. And often it involves a lot of the speech patterns we criticize. We're like, dad, I'm so sorry to bother you. But right. Okay. This is not a girl being weak. This is a girl being an absolute ninja in this moment. And so I'm just really interested in crediting girls for how nuanced and sophisticated they are with language. And then, of course, there are girls who abuse like and who abuse I'm sorry. And then I think with them, we say, what's it about? What purpose is it serving for you? What else could serve that purpose? Yeah. I mean, that's the only kind of pushback that was going on in my mind. From a psychological perspective, the words that are consistently coming out of your mouth are a reflection of your interior life and how you feel about yourself. deferential and, you know, as if you're, you know, apologizing for taking up space, your words are going to reflect that mental, you know, disposition. And that's what really

needs to be addressed. We need to look into it. But I would say, let's be curious, not critical. Right. Let's ask her, you know, you say, I'm sorry a lot, like, talk to me about it. And I have yet to meet a girl over age 14 who can't give you a really interesting answer to that kind of question. They can reflect on it. And it becomes habits or tics, which they can change. When we're thinking about and talking about the stress and anxiety on young people, specifically girls, what are your thoughts on this college admissions scandal? Because, and the reason I'm asking is that, you know, I'm interested in how much of this stress and anxiety is being created by the parents. So, if we hold on to the idea that there's 25 schools that we really want our kids to go to,

we're going to make it bad. And there's just no getting around it. The statistics on getting your kids into those 25 schools, you know, are so dramatically different than they used to be. You know, when kids say to me, you know, however competent, however incredible they are, you know, when they say, like, I'm looking at Harvard and Yale and Princeton, I'm like, great, and buy a lottery ticket and, like, come tell me how it goes, you know. We can make it way, way, way better if we just say, oh, my gosh, there's literally thousands of amazing American colleges, you know, and a great fit for our kid is out there. I mean, that would change everything.

Yeah. And it's different now than it was 20 years ago. Yeah. It's totally different. But it's not a crisis that it's very hard to get into these places because there's so many excellent places. And one of the things I talk about in Under Pressure is we have no data. The data do not tell us that professional or economic success contribute to well-being in adulthood. Everybody assumes it does. That's not actually what matters.

And I think that's often what drives the sense of, like, you have to go to Harvard. The data say if you want adult well-being, you cultivate good relationships, you do work that you find meaningful, and you feel that you're skilled at that work, which you actually don't have to go to college for. So I think we could reframe it if we wanted to. So I think we could reframe it if we wanted to. We're in this cultural moment now where we're so worried about creating these kinds of stresses and anxieties that we're seeing that we've perpetrated this kind of snowflake culture where everybody gets a medal and we don't want anyone to feel bad. And perhaps there's a good intention behind that.

And one of those intentions very well may be to ameliorate this stress and anxiety so that we're not seeing it metastasizing young people, but we're seeing the opposite result, right? Yeah. How do you think about all of this? What I think is we want Goldilocks stress, right? Not too big, not too little, but just right. And you're not going to get it every day. But for sure, we do not want to prevent stress in children.

We want them to have the inoculating function of having something go wrong, becoming quite upset about it, getting empathy, and then figuring out how they're going to recover. That will build their capacity to weather difficulty. Well, the recovery piece is the key, right? Like in the same sense of an athlete, you need to repair yourself in between your workouts. You need to recover. You can't be in a state of persistent chronic stress. And I think that above and beyond anything is why we're seeing these increased rates, right?

Well, so the truth is, right, school for some kids is so difficult. When there's too many APs and it's just never ending. It's going to be chronic stress. And then during the summer, they've got to do something that looks amazing on a college application essay or whatever. So then we get into questions of chronic stress. But for the most part, the workout metaphor, the weightlifting metaphor is ideal because it is. It's like you do something difficult, you then repair and regrow and are stronger than you were. I do think the other thing I love about the weightlifting and exercise metaphor is that sometimes people get stuck because stress and anxiety don't feel good.

And so then there's a sense, well, then it can't be good for you. Well, no, I mean, exercising- And we're supposed to feel good all the time. Yeah. And also exercising at your limit doesn't feel good, right? And people can remember that piece. And then, yeah, we don't want to kind of keep going with this idea that you're supposed to feel so good all the time. What are some of the big mistakes that you see parents making time and time again, where you're just like, oh my Lord, if they just knew, if they just did it like this, things would be so much smoother. It's funny. I don't, I'm really cautious about criticizing parents because I love them and I

think they're working so hard. One thing I have- It's not about criticizing. No, no. But here's something I'm a little curious about. Here's something I'm really curious about. We have not I'm really curious about. We have not reckoned with what it means that parents have real-time updates on their kids' moods due to texting. Like, I think this is a bigger hazard than we have reckoned with. Kids are often, through the day, texting their parent about this upset or this disappointment or this annoyance, and parents are responding through the day with, you know, with feedback or support or suggestions or, you know, worse, picking up the

phone and calling the school, you know, my kid's in the bathroom upset, go get her. You know, that that's not an unusual thing in the life of a school anymore. And so I would probably put at the top of the list that we have slipped into a place as a function of digital technology where much longer and later into development, kids are using their parents for emotional reassurance and sometimes like fixing than we have ever before. And I know this can't be right. I know this can't be right. And I talk in Under Pressure about a mom who came up with a genius solution because she was getting texts all day from her 14-year-old. And of course, the mom's day was ruined because she was upset. And then the girl was usually rejecting her suggestions anyway. So the mom got her daughter a notebook, a beautiful notebook, and said, I want you to write in the notebook everything you want to text me during the day.

And then at night, if you want to show it to me, I'd love to see it. And so often, the girl had no interest. The girl used it. The girl did it. But she had no interest in showing her mom what was in there because it was over. Rearview mirror. She didn't care anymore. her mom what was in there because it was over like you know rearview mirror like she didn't care anymore and I thought it was such a beautiful um half step you know saying like I want to I care

and I'm interested I don't want to know in real time you know so I I would just ask parents to not go lightly into that space of being an emotional touch with their kid all day. Yeah. How much information is too much? Where is that demarcation line, the DMZ, between being involved in your adolescence life in a healthy way versus like, well, you don't need to know everything that they're doing, that there is something healthy about them, you know, having their own private.

I actually am pretty fierce advocate for adolescence privacy. And, you know, one's had to become one in a digital age, right? I mean, you and I had a lot of privacy just because our parents had no way, you know, to know either physically where we were or what we were curious about. I got on my bike to see a dinner. Yeah. Yeah. And we had whole worlds to ourselves.

They didn't know how we spoke to our friends. They didn't know a lot about our social networks unless we chose to share. So I think the other thing that I'm curious about is what it means. I mean, we are the first generation of parents who's had this volume of information available to us on our kids. My general rule on this is you got to know your kid in terms of how much you're going to know, right? So if you have a kid who's super impulsive and getting themselves into trouble all over town, I would keep that kid on it very shortly. You shouldn't have a lot of information about them. If you have a pretty steady, predictable, level-headed kid, I would say unless there's smoke, I would not assume anything's on fire. I would cut them a wide berth.

One thing I'm finding myself saying a lot to parents is that, I mean, I've been a practicing clinician for 25 years. I can honestly say I've never seen a full-blown crisis arrive in 24 hours, you know, that usually there's a run-up to something going wrong, right? And I would take off the table, you know, like if your kid is attacked or something like, you know, that, but when parents, I sometimes worry that parents have this sense maybe caused by the media of like, you have to track all the data all the time because there might be a piece of information in there that's going to illuminate for you some terrible problem you would never otherwise know. I feel like if your kids having dinner with you on a pretty regular basis and you're around and you're sort of present in their lives, it's pretty hard

for them to get very, very far out of course without you being aware something's amiss. We're all a reflection of the experiences that we've had. And we're kind of set up to project those onto the people that we love. And my sense is that parents are quite adept at projecting their neuroses onto their kids and perpetuating whatever cycle of dysfunction, you know, created their own personal trauma and then recreating it in those relationships. How can we help parents develop a little more self-awareness around that to prevent those? That's a great question. I mean, what you're talking about is probably largely an unconscious process, right?

So something that's hard to be self-aware of. And I've seen it lots in my time where a parent will come in first to see me, which I don't often do. And maybe it's because the kid doesn't really want therapy. And they'll describe this kid who just sounds like a total hell raiser. They just described this kid to like, it feels out of control and I have no idea what's going on. And then the kid comes in and it's like this really mild kid. She's like, I don't know what I did. And I do get the sense that there's some ancient history playing there. Maybe the parent themselves was sort of a wild teenager or had a sibling who was secretly, you know, kind of up to no good. So I guess I would say there's a lot, I think it's good to be thoughtful about one's own adolescence,

right? And one's own, what did and didn't feel like it worked well, right? And to try to be careful, you know, to not have one's own potholes dictate, you know, how you're driving now. I will also say this is where it's really nice if there's more than one grown-up involved in raising a teenager, right? To have, you know, a couple people, you know, and they can be divorced or married, you know, two moms, two dads, doesn't matter. I would say that a lot of good parenting happens when one parent says to the other, you know what, this is too hot to talk. This is too loaded for me. I need you to take the front line on this.

Well, that does require a decent amount of self-awareness. Yeah. To know this is an area where I'm going to do the wrong thing. Yeah. I have too much baggage in this territory. I think that's a real gift. And then the other thing, and I talk about this actually back in Untangled, like it's okay for you to be neurotic.

You've got to own it, right? So I think it's okay for parents to say, you know what, look, if it's going to be about drugs and alcohol, like you know my history. I don't handle that well. Like that goes to your mom, right? Or, you know, like me and money, like well like that goes to your mom right or you know like me and money like i'm still working out my own neurotic stuff like i know that i do not always respond to you in ways that are rational about that so for the parent to say i call it crazy

spots in untangled like to own you know like yeah i've got my own neurotic landscape and i know it well and i'm also you know late 40s and probably not changing, but I'm not going to make this about you. I know it's mine. Yeah. One thing that's been helpful to me is to understand that how I react or respond in a given situation is essentially how I'm modeling behavior for that child, right? So if I get angry, I'm modeling anger as a response to a given set of parameters rather than problem solving or how to reduce anxiety around something that's anxiety producing or whatever. And just having that minute, that little moment of like, okay, what's the best sort of behavior that I can model for my child in this kind of scenario? Well, I think that really says it, right? It's what you do, right?

You can say all sorts of stuff. If that doesn't line up with how you're actually functioning in your relationships and how you're actually conducting yourself in life, first of all, kids will just call you a big fat hypocrite, you know, which they'll do that anyway. But also it's really, it comes down to what you choose in your behavior is what kids will most pay attention to. I got to let you go. You got to go beyond the Hallmark Channel. Yeah. Thank you. This has been wonderful. Thank you so much. You're doing amazing work. It's been very helpful to me and my family, and it's really powerful.

And I think there's so much confusion specifically around how to best raise adolescent girls and the way in which you're demystifying it and providing really helpful, practical, tactical solutions for addressing the common scenarios that we all face is really great. So thank you. I appreciate that. You are a champion of girls.

You are the girl whisperer, the girl guru. Well, I just hope to be their advocate. Yeah, and that's the thing at its core that I want to leave people with is this. You're a clinician, but you're not looking at this clinically. Like you really are a champion of these girls. And I would just end it by saying, my 15-year-old daughter, she's hella challenging at times.

She's full of energy, but she is amazing. She is like a dynamo and has so many incredible qualities. And I feel like I'm just here to like nudge and try to just channel it in the right way, but I don't want to put that fire out. I want that fire to burn bright. And the sense that I get from you and your work is that like, you love these girls and you want people to see how amazing they are. And rather than perceive this period of time as monstrous or difficult or challenging, to take all the pejorative language, you know, strip away the pejorative language and just let's like, how can we champion what's amazing about this? And really direct, you know, these amazing girls, soon to be women, into the best direction so that they can be the leaders that we all want and need them to be.

Amen. Yeah, thanks. Thank you so much. The book is Under Pressure, Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls. And the book before that was Untangled. Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood. Awesome. Thanks so much.

Come back and talk to me again sometime. I would love to. Are you working on another book? Probably somewhere deep in the recesses of my mind. You have to recover Are you working on another book? Probably somewhere deep in the recesses of my mind. You have to recover now before taking on the stress and anxiety of another book. I'm still thinking. Yeah, good. Thank you. All right. And the best way for people to reach you is your website? They can find everything is drlisadamour.com, D-R-L-I-S-A-D-A-M-O-U-R.com. It's all there. Cool. Check it out. Thank you so much. Peace.

LisaDemore.com. It's all there. Cool. Check it out. Thank you so much. Peace. She's amazing, right? I got so much out of that.

I hope you guys did too. I look forward to future conversations with Lisa. And please let her know what you thought of this conversation by hitting her up directly on Twitter, at L. Demore, D-A-M-O-U-R, and lisa.damour on Instagram. You can also check out the show notes to expand your experience of this conversation beyond the earbuds at richroll.com. Click on podcast page, find the latest podcast episode, and it's all right there. If you are struggling with your diet, if you are truly, honestly, finally committed to mastering your plate once and for all, but feel like, I don't really know what to do. I don't really like cookbooks.

I'm not that skilled in the kitchen. I don't have that much time. I don't know how to budget for this. I cannot tell you how much I recommend our Plant Power Meal Planner. I really do think that this is the solution you've been waiting for. It's an amazing product. We work very hard to create and it solves this very basic essential problem

that I think so many of us face. How to make nutritious eating convenient and delicious and affordable. To learn more and to sign up, go to meals.richroll.com and there you will find access to thousands of delicious and easy to prepare-prepare

plant-based recipes that we totally customize based on your personal needs. We have unlimited grocery lists. We have grocery delivery in most metropolitan areas. And we have an incredible team of nutrition experts at the ready for customer service to answer all of your questions, no matter how basic or silly. And you get all of this for just $1.90 a week when you sign up for a year. Incredibly affordable. It's a game changer, you guys. For the price of a cup of coffee, you can literally change your relationship with food. So to learn more and to sign up, go to meals.richroll.com or click on Meal Planner on the top menu on my website. If you would like to support the work we do here on the podcast, there are a couple simple,

easy ways to do it. Just tell your friends about it at your next dinner party, at your family meal, when you're at Starbucks, whatever. Take a screen grab of the episode you're listening to and share it on your favorite social media platform. Hit that subscribe button on Apple Podcasts, on YouTube, on Spotify, on Google Podcasts, on Overcast, on Player FM, wherever you listen to this podcast, essentially. They're on so many platforms these days. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts, letting us know what you thought of the show.

And you can support us on Patreon at richroll.com forward slash donate. I want to thank everybody who helped put on this show today. I definitely do not do this alone. This is a team effort, and I have an amazing team. Jason Camiolo for your amazing audio engineering production, show notes, interstitial music, jack of all trades behind the scenes. Margo Lubin and Blake Curtis for filming the podcast and editing it for YouTube and all the clips that we share on social media. Jessica Miranda, she's the wizard behind all the beautiful graphics that we share

with respect to each episode. DK for Advertiser Relationships. Thank you, DK. And theme music, as always, by Annalemma. Oh, and we got Allie Rogers, who's filming us behind the scenes today. We're going to start doing some more vlogs, which I'm pretty excited about.

In any event, thanks for the love, you guys. See you back here shortly, very soon, with the return of the mighty Colin O'Brady. Until then, peace. Plants. Namaste. Thank you.