New View EDU Episode 59: Schools and the Emotional Lives of Teenagers

Available May 7, 2024

Find New View EDU on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and many other podcast apps.

Now more than ever, schools are focused on supporting student mental health. With teen anxiety and depression rates rising, there’s a clear need to design environments that help foster adolescent well-being. But are well-being programs working as intended? What are we getting right—and getting wrong—about the emotional lives of teenagers? Lisa Damour has the answers.

Lisa DamourDamour joins host Tim Fish for an in-depth, practical discussion of adolescent mental health and development. She draws on her expertise and the research she’s conducted for her books Untangled, Under Pressure, and The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, as well as her wealth of experience consulting with schools and organizations that center on child development, Lisa explains what she looks for in school environments that truly support emotional health and wellness for teens.

Challenging the notion of “wellness” as a loaded term in society, Lisa instead suggests schools think of creating “equilibrium” programming—that is, shifting the focus from possibly misguided notions of well-being to helping teens learn to stay balanced and grounded despite the many challenges of daily life. Lisa notes that many adults have the idea that a mentally healthy teen is a teen who isn’t upset, stressed, or unhappy. But in her view, that’s all wrong; a mentally healthy teen, she says, is a teen who can feel upset, stressed, or unhappy, and respond to those feelings with coping skills that are adaptive and effective. 

Parents and schools must work together on a shared agreement of what natural stressors and challenges look like and how a healthy teen responds. Lisa encourages adults to approach teen stress with the question, “Is it uncomfortable, or is it unmanageable?” Too often, she says, parents believe that a teen who’s uncomfortable is going to suffer damage to their mental health, when the opposite is in fact likely to be true: A teen who learns to adapt to an uncomfortable situation and grows through it will gain resilience and coping mechanisms that are essential to growth. But if schools and parents aren’t working from the same set of expectations about what’s an appropriate level of struggle, unnecessary tensions may arise.

Noting that “school gets the best of them, and you get the rest of them,” Lisa cautions parents of teens to understand that how their child acts at home may be vastly different from what teachers observe in the classroom. She describes a child who is doing well in school and is valued by their teachers, but who exhibits moody, cranky, or even mildly defiant behavior at home as “the picture of perfect development.” Lisa encourages adults to understand that as teens go through stages of separation and individuation, they’ll gradually come back to more consistent behavior at home and school. In the meantime, the goal is for parents and schools to work toward helping students grow into “grownups” rather than just adults—people who have the emotional skills, responsibility, and accountability to live healthy lives.

Lisa sums up her advice for people who work with teens in concrete, simple steps: Like kids. Be honest. Provide a steady presence. Don’t try to be too cool. Don’t take yourself too seriously. And don’t miss out on enjoying teens as “the most interesting people on the planet,” she says. Our job is not to force them to grow up, but rather to help them manage the challenges and negative emotions that naturally come with the process of growing up. 

Key Questions

Some of the key questions Tim and Lisa explore in this episode include:

  • What is the goal of a well-being program in a school? Is it to create an environment free of stress, sadness, or anxiety?
  • What are schools getting right about teen mental health, and what can they do better?
  • What is the role of productive struggle in building teen mental health and well-being? How can parents and schools work together to provide the right level of struggle or challenge?
  • What is separation individuation, and why is it so important for adults to understand? How does it show up in teens at school and at home?

Episode Highlights

  • “Schools are working against this broad cultural discourse that holds at the center the idea that discomfort is bad. And so as long as we're not challenging that idea, we're going to be dealing with a lot of one-on-one conversations trying to convince people that this is really all OK. So I would have schools get out on their front foot about reframing this appropriately … school is supposed to be stressful, and we are built to help your kid handle that.” (13:39)
  • “There are a lot of people who age without actually working themselves through the maturity that is required for a healthy adulthood, right? Who aren't thinking about risk in very smart ways. They're thinking about whether they're going to get caught, not whether they're going to get hurt or hurt somebody else. They are not taking responsibility for their actions. They don't actually have a particularly good work ethic, right? So you can age into adulthood, but not really be as mature as you should be.” (31:09)
  • “When I have seen adults really harm their relationship with a kid, and usually this is parent-child, but it can happen in a school, it's when the teenager says, you know what, you assigned this to us last week, or you said you were going to pick me up and you forgot, and the adult denies or defends, right? When the adult flexes, we have all the authority, we will flex our authority if we want to. If the teenager is right and the adult is wrong and the adult doesn't own it, that relationship has hit a really rough patch.” (37:02)

Resource List

Full Transcript

  • Read the full transcript here.

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About Our Guest

Lisa Damour is the author of three New York Times best sellers: Untangled, Under Pressure, and The Emotional Lives of Teenagers. She co-hosts the Ask Lisa podcast, works in collaboration with UNICEF, and is recognized as a thought leader by the American Psychological Association. Damour is a regular contributor to The New York Times and CBS News and is the creator of Untangling 10to20, a digital library of premium content to support teens and those who care for them.

Damour serves as a senior advisor to the Schubert Center for Child Studies at Case Western Reserve University and has written numerous academic papers, chapters, and books related to education and child development. She maintains a clinical practice and also speaks to schools, professional organizations, and corporate groups around the world on the topics of child and adolescent development, family mental health, and adult well-being.

Damour graduated with honors from Yale University and worked for the Yale Child Study Center before earning her doctorate in clinical psychology at the University of Michigan. She has been a fellow at Yale’s Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy and the University of Michigan’s Power Foundation. She and her husband are the proud parents of two daughters.