Read the full transcript of Episode 59 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which features Lisa Damour, renowned clinical psychologist and bestselling author of Untangled, Under Pressure, and The Emotional Lives of Teenagers. She joins host Tim Fish for an in-depth, practical discussion of adolescent mental health and development.
Tim Fish: You know, this season we have been exploring ideas around excellence, deep student engagement, well-being, joy and innovation. We’ve been on a quest to design the schools our students need now. Well, today we are going to continue our journey with a deep dive into the emotional lives of teenagers and what we can do, as adults, to support them.
To help us along the path, I am excited to welcome Dr. Lisa Damour: into the New View studio. Lisa Damour: is a clinical psychologist and 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.
Dr. Damour is a regular contributor to The New York Times and CBS News, and the creator of Untangling 10to20, a digital library of premium content to support teens and those who care for them. I am so excited to take an opportunity today to take a deep dive into these people, these teenagers, we all know and love so well. Let’s get it started with Dr. Damour.
Lisa, welcome to New View EDU.
Lisa Damour: Tim, thank you for having me. I'm delighted to be here.
Tim Fish: Thank you so much for taking some time. So Lisa, let's start off with a look into the lives of teenagers. Even though we all went through this stage of development, I think as adults, we sometimes forget what it's actually like to be a teenager, and especially in the world today.
What should we all remember about this miraculous, incredibly creative period of our lives?
Lisa Damour: Ah, I'm so glad we're starting there. OK, so I love teenagers. I have always loved teenagers. And you know, not all adults love teenagers.
Tim Fish: Not all, when I talk to people about how I teach middle school, sometimes they're like, how can you do that?
Lisa Damour: Exactly. And you say, I love it. And if you don't love it, don't teach middle school. Right. I think that there's, you know, people have lots of job choices, but I love teenagers. And what I can tell you is there is a baseline dynamism to adolescence, right? That there is so much change happening in a very short period of time. And my first commercial book, Untangled, really was about that.
I lay out the seven tasks of adolescent development. The book centers on girls. In truth, 80% of it applies to kids of all genders. And here are the tasks, and these are the timeless tasks, and then we're going to get to the timely piece. So the tasks of being a teenager: parting with childhood, joining a new pack, harnessing emotions, contending with adult authority, planning for the future, entering the romantic world, and learning to care for oneself.
So those are the seven chapters of Untangled, and that is a big job list. And this all goes down somewhere between the ages of around 10 and 20, and that's a huge amount that needs to be accomplished in a short space.
Tim Fish: That's a huge amount. And you've got pre-algebra, history, English, sports, you know, chores at home, and everything else going on in their lives.
Lisa Damour: Exactly. And those seven tasks, I will say, Tim, I'm 53, you know, those were the same for me and you, right? I mean, those have been around forever. OK, now we get to the historical moment in which we find ourselves. And one way to sum it up, I mean, there's so much one could say, but one way to sum it up for today's teenagers is they're dealing with a huge amount of input demand, and a huge amount of output demand.
So they are flooded with information all day, every day, about the world, about crises, around headlines, and also about what every single kid they know is doing right now. And we are asking them to deliver at levels that are different from any generation before us. I know what I did to get into college. I saw what my college age kid did to get into college. This was checkers and chess. I mean, really different world in terms of what we're asking of kids.
Tim Fish: One of the things that really hit me about your book was this notion that, you know, we're not trying to design environments that are free from stress, sadness, or anxiety. That the goal is not to help put kids in a bubble and have them transfer through adolescence without ever experiencing those things, right?
But in fact, you talk about what the definition of kind of well-being is, a sort of mental health. And I would, can you guys click in on that a little bit? Because I'm telling you, for me, that was one of those times when I just stopped and I was like, oh, huge moment.
Lisa Damour: Well, thank you. What I will say is the cultural understanding of what constitutes mental health has drifted very far afield from how we understand it on the academic and clinical side. And as you know, all of this comes home to roost in schools. So out in the culture, the widely held view, maybe thank you wellness industry, who knows, is that you know you're mentally healthy and you know your kid’s mentally healthy if they feel good or calm or relaxed or at ease.
OK, those are all nice things. Those are all fleeting things on a good day. Those are not mental health. Mental health is about two things, and this is how I define it in my work. One, having feelings that fit what's going on, matching the circumstances around you. Your best friend's moving away, you should be upset. You have a giant test coming you haven't studied, it's good for you to be a little bit anxious, right? We expect negative emotions that correspond to the world.
And then two, and this is where the rubber hits the road, handling those feelings well, handling those feelings in a way that brings relief and does no harm. Talking to people, going for a run. I had a teenager the other day tell me, I go home and I force cuddle my cat, right? I mean, like, that's fine, that's fine. The only time we get concerned as psychologists is if kids are managing those negative emotions in a way that is costly. They're using substances, they're being terrible to people, they're being terrible to themselves.
That's grounds for psychological concern. But a kid who's upset about upsetting things and then managing it in a way that is fundamentally adaptive, that's the picture of health. And that's the thread that's lost right now in the cultural discourse.
Tim Fish: Yeah, so when you're thinking about, as a school, when you're thinking about designing a well-being program, right? I've talked with so many schools in my work at NAIS that are on this journey to think about that and think about, you know, putting well-being at the center of the sort of designed experience.
And I've often wondered, OK, if we're going to do that, if we're going to put a premium on well-being, what's that look like? Is it a ninth grade course called well-being? Right? Where we have a book we read, a text we read on well-being, right? Or what does that designed experience really look like for us as we think about creating the context for well-being?
Lisa Damour: Oof, OK. So let's start with what we call it. And I know a lot of schools have already named this and you know, you can stick with the name, but you gotta make sure that people understand what it is you're trying to deliver. I worry, Tim, sometimes, that when we call things wellness or well-being programs, kids and families take that in as “we'll know this is working when I'm no longer upset.”
Tim Fish: Yes. Yes.
Lisa Damour: And that can really back a school into a corner. It can do that with a school's employees, right? I mean, that people are working with this frame that somewhere out there there is a Zen place and eventually I'm going to get there. If I were the queen of the universe, I would probably call them equilibrium programs, which is not nearly so attractive a title.
Tim Fish: I like it, I actually like it, equilibrium programs.
Lisa Damour: But that's how equilibrium, which is: things are going to happen that knock us off balance. That is a done deal. The question is, do you have practices that help you maintain a sense of equilibrium? And this is where the wellness practices come right back in. A yoga class can help with this. Meditation can help with this. All sorts of things can help with this.
But if we see wellness not as an end goal or a destination, but as a set of practices that can help us maintain equilibrium in the face of the realities of being a human being right now, much less being a ninth grader, then I think these programs can be successful. But it requires a lot of education of the families, the students, and often the staff and faculty about what well-being is. It is not about feeling good. It's about having the resources to manage the inevitable stresses that life throws our way.
Tim Fish: This gets at exactly one of the things that we've been also really talking about, is this idea of sort of the role of productive struggle in the learning process, right? That there are times when you need, anything I have ever learned deeply, I have struggled at some points to get there. The smoke has been coming out of my ears as I've been deeply involved in learning about the thing, right? Now there's also been this area where I care about what I'm learning about, and that I have some agency over that.
And so these things that every teenager is going to experience, and I know as a parent, it's hard when your son or daughter is experiencing sadness, anxiety, stress. Those are things that are hard to see. You want to fix it. And I think as teachers, we want to relieve that in young people when we see it. But the goal, it's to help them adapt and to navigate through it in the appropriate way, right?
And so at the end of the book, one of things I love is you talk about these sort of small little tactics you might have that you could talk to your son or daughter or student, things you could ask, a question, a way you might help that individual who might be, and I think you called it almost the spiraling, right? That you could help them sort of get unstuck in their own thinking. Can you help just with a few of those simple strategies that maybe I could use, or if I'm working with a young person who seems to be stuck?
Lisa Damour: Sure. So let's actually, let's back it up and think through the framing. We want to frame things well in our interactions. And then invariably there's still going to be things that—there's still work to be done. So my second commercial book was titled Under Pressure, and it was about the epidemic of stress and anxiety. And to your point, Tim, I actually have a section called School is Supposed to be Stressful in that book.
Tim Fish: Oh my gosh. Yeah.
Lisa Damour: And the point that I make there, and I use this metaphor all the time when talking with kids, is that school is like strength training. And we all accept that if you go to the gym and you're trying to gain muscle, you have to lift weights that are literally stressful. It is actually uncomfortable. And if it's not uncomfortable, you're doing it wrong. And we accept that as the condition that allows for growth over time. This translates perfectly to what school is.
If it is easy, you are not learning. It is only in the productive struggle that growth happens. And so I think the first thing we can and should do is orient kids and families to those realities. Because right now, and this is just back to what we were talking about, the language has shifted so much. It used to be that schools would hear from families, this class is stressing my kid, it's a problem. Now they're hearing, this class is hurting my kid's mental health, because they're aware that the kid is stressed.
So there's a lot of framing work that I think schools can do to try to push this conversation in the right direction, of school is supposed to be stressful, you know, as long as your kid can adapt to the conditions, that's actually evidence of their perfect mental health, right? There's a lot we can do on that end. OK, invariably, whatever fantastic framing a school does, when your kid gets upset, it all goes out the window and you're calling and you're, you know, having a hard time or you yourself are the adult with a kid who's having a hard time.
Tim Fish: Yes.
Lisa Damour: So to keep this perspective, to try to keep this sense that we are all built to tolerate distress, and actually, a degree of discomfort is necessary for learning, the kinds of things that we can say that help kids maintain perspective are to say things like, of course this is challenging. If you already knew it, you wouldn't be taking the class.
For 20 years, I consulted to Laurel School, this fabulous school here in the suburbs of Cleveland where I live. And we had this wonderful, wonderful faculty member, Megan Weisskopf, who used to say to students, it's hard because it's hard. And I just thought that was so, so smart, so brilliant.
Tim Fish: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I love that.
Lisa Damour: But again, when I say it all comes home to roost in schools, 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 both have schools get out on their front foot about reframing this appropriately. Mental health is not about feeling good and school is supposed to be stressful, and we are built to help your kid handle that. And then also come equipped with a whole lot of strategies for in the moment, for the parent and the student, when we come up against the fact that, oh, actually this is hard and this is uncomfortable and it doesn't feel good.
Tim Fish: It also makes me think that we can also do things to ensure that the struggle is the appropriate struggle. Like it would be very easy for me to go, yeah, like I'm going to have you do all this arbitrary, pointless homework and it's supposed to be hard. And that's why, that's, struggle’s good. So it feels to me like we need to be conscious of the fact that struggle is necessary, and we can design so that that struggle is the best struggle. It's framed in the right way. We scaffold our way to it in an appropriate way, right? That we do accommodate for students’ individual differences if necessary, right? That that idea that it just, it’s supposed to be. We have to be careful with it, I think, in some ways. Right?
Lisa Damour: We do. And when kids or families come forward with concerns about what's being asked of the student, I think one of the most elegant phrases, and I've been offering this to all of my friends in education as we're thinking through these problems, I think one of the most elegant phrases is for the adult to say back, the school person to say back, OK, is this situation uncomfortable or is it unmanageable?
Because sometimes for some kids, a situation's unmanageable, and we've missed that. And I think it's actually better to be the person who lays that possibility on the table, rather than having an angry kid or an angry family insist upon it. So saying, is it unmanageable? If it is, I mean, maybe it's more work than is fair, or that kid has an undiagnosed learning disorder, or who knows what's happening, but it's not the right ask of that kid, then adjustments can be made.
Most of the time, it's uncomfortable. And what I love about this construction, which is something I kind of like thought of as I was doing my own work, is you're not offering comfortable as an option. Is it unmanageable or uncomfortable? And what you're basically saying is, we can work with uncomfortable. In fact, that's what school is all about.
Tim Fish: That's what school is. Yeah.
Lisa Damour: Exactly. But that's a very economic way of getting into that conversation. And again, framing it the way we want it framed, which is, of course it's uncomfortable. Your kid's learning, that's part of the process.
Tim Fish: Well, you know, the other thing is this idea that you talk about in the book, that there's these sort of stages that kids go through as part of adolescence that are just necessary. And they're part of constructing me as an individual, right? There's one part where you talk about, I think it's separation individuation, right? Can you introduce our listeners a little bit to that concept, but also to other concepts that we will experience as we continue to work with young people?
Lisa Damour: So again, you can tell I really like broad framings, before we get down to the nitty gritty. So the broad framing here is that development is a bumpy road. It has always been a bumpy road. Everyone in a school knows this. Unfortunately, we are also up against a parenting industry out there. A lot of self-declared experts telling parents that if you just do this ninja move or that ninja move, parenting can be fun and easy. OK, that is total baloney. There's no version of this where it is fun and easy.
Tim Fish: There is no version. Yes, there is—We both are parents. There is no version.
Lisa Damour: Exactly. Doesn't work like that. So the reality is that in addition to helping families understand what mental health is, it's also increasingly the work of schools to help families understand the realities of normal development and the expectable bumps along the way. And so that's, I would say, if you looked at the body of my work, that's what my work is, is basically to say, welcome to adolescence. Here's what comes as part of the process, and here's how you can handle it really well to keep a good relationship with your kid and keep things moving forward. So one of those bumps is a section, I describe it in my book, I think I call it, When Your Teen Hates How You Chew.
Tim Fish: Yes, my, I went through a period. That's why I loved it, because my teenager did hate the way I chew and I'm like, where did this come from?
Lisa Damour: So here's how I describe it in my book, right? So I say, we call this separation individuation, but this is what it looks like. Your kid is trying to build their own brand, their own sense of who they are. And this usually does happen around 13, 14, and they go through a period where anything you do that is like the brand they see themselves moving toward is annoying to them, because you're stepping on their brand.
So the way this looked in my house, and this kid's now in college, but when she was 13, my older daughter discovered Beyonce, and loved Beyonce, of course. And of course, I have also liked Beyonce for a long time. So one time when she was 13, I have music on in the kitchen. I'm in the kitchen, bopping to Beyonce, and she comes in and she's like, Mom! Stop! It was like the worst thing I could do. What are you doing? Beyonce's mine!
OK, so there's that issue. Then, because they're still 13 and still very close to us and nestled in the bosom of family life, anything that we do that is unlike their view of their emerging self is also antagonizing to them. So I think here of my wonderful work colleague who, when it was time to go to her son's eighth grade orientation, she just laid out all the possible outfits and let him choose what she was going to wear, because if it wasn't cool enough, that was going to be a problem because he's a sweet eighth grade boy.
OK, so here's the sum total of this, Tim. Anything that we do that is like how our teenagers see themselves becoming rubs them the wrong way. Anything that we do that is unlike how they see themselves becoming rubs them the wrong way. Everything we do is annoying.
Tim Fish: You cannot win. There will be a period where you cannot win.
Lisa Damour: You cannot win. There's no winning. And this is so important for a couple of reasons. One, it makes it a lot easier to take when you understand the backend mechanics of it. The other is, and this was actually, I think it was the second piece I ever wrote for the New York Times. This was like literally 10 years ago, is that if we don't warn parents about what's going to happen, they often come in pointing fingers. Did you guys mess this up? Did my kid mess this up? Did her friendship group mess this up? Like, why is my kid acting like this?
Whereas if we can get out in front of it and say you can set your watch by the fact that at 13 your kid’s going to start rolling their eyes a lot, it helps everybody be on the same team, which is the kids and forward development. The nice thing is that usually, usually, and I watched this happen with my own kids, once kids get into high school and they start to sort of figure out the things they do that are really unlike what the parents themselves have ever done, right—they're playing baseball, they're taking Latin, their brand consolidates and then they're like, your brand's your problem. Like, you guys are fine. Like I can hang out with you guys because I have an established brand now.
So it teams and it usually teams quite naturally. But I would say that all of my work is like what to expect when you're expecting a teenager.
Tim Fish: Do teachers experience that differently often with young people? Because I know as a, I often would hear that notion of like, my child is exhibiting this stuff at home. I'm like, what is going on? I can't even eat in the same room as her. And yet, at school they're like, oh my gosh she's awesome, she's great, she's fabulous! I'm like what? Like do we have the same child that we're talking about?
Lisa Damour: What you're describing is like for me the picture of perfect development, right? The kid who at home is working very hard to figure out who they are and what they're about and making their parents bananas often as part of the process. But at school, is doing exactly what we want teenagers to do, which is loosening their ties to their family and strengthening their ties to the rest of the world, right? And so they are getting along with adults at school, especially the adults who respect them, see how interesting they are, want to play, right?
I mean, I think that's also very fun. And you were a middle school person, right? Like you gotta want to play with them and also be ready to be blown away by their insights, right? The adults who can do that do incredibly well with teenagers. And I do think it is reassuring. Again, we can say this to families. If this is going perfectly, your kid is going to come home, complain a lot, be very frustrating to live with at times, and critical of you at a very high level. And we're going to get, you know, we're going to have a great time with your kid all day.
I actually, this is so corny, I almost hate repeating it, but it came out spontaneously. I was giving a talk in Toronto and I was like, I was talking to families. I said, listen, school gets the best of them, you get the rest of them. And I think we need to talk about that, because that is how it works, and we're not always having that conversation with families.
Tim Fish: Exactly. You know, let's jump in also and talk a little bit about tech a little bit more. Because as we talked about, this is a whole different thing. This was not there. And I know there are schools out there that are thinking about this idea of phones in particular. Do we allow them? Do we allow them during the day? Must they be out? Can you have them in the hallway? You even talk in the book about this notion of the advantage, sometimes, of a little bit of distraction, a little bit of that watching YouTube for 10 minutes kind of thing. So I'm curious, do you have any thoughts for how schools might navigate the phones/no phones thing, particularly day schools, as they're trying to get through this?
Lisa Damour: It's so tricky. I know it's an incredibly challenging thing. I do think we have come to a place where there is a groundswell of commitment to trying to get this a little bit, put some guardrails around it. And of course, where the guardrails would really be wonderful would be on the actual side of the people who are creating the apps. I mean, I think that that's what we're up against is that this has been unleashed on us and our kids.
Tim Fish: Absolutely.
Lisa Damour: And the people who could regulate it are not regulating it. And so then it lands again in the lap of families and schools. And so I think to make that workable, the more schools are working with parameters that are also being used by other schools in their community or in the NAIS network, I think the better. Because there is, of course, a lot of pushback from kids and families about trying to put rules around access to phones.
But I think we are coming to a place where we're like, Congress is not doing anything about this. You know, Facebook's not doing anything about this or Meta's not doing anything about this. It's going to come down to the adults around kids having to put down some rules. Now, I trust schools and their wisdom far more than my own to sort of think through what's this process and how do you do this in a systematic way that gets as many people on board as possible.
I do think something that schools can do that is really useful, and I'm back to the parent education piece, because that is where I've always sat when it sits with schools, is get out in front of the younger kids and their families and how phones get to those kids. Because usually by adolescence, when I come into the picture, like the horse has been out of the barn for a really long time and getting it back is hard. So I've been actually partnering with Sesame Street Workshop to do some content for them, because they, I'm like, that's the audience I want to talk to right now about this.
Because what's really cool, Tim, is that, you know, when your fourth or fifth or sixth grader, you know, it depends on where you are in the world. Sometimes even third grader says, I want a phone. You have tons of leverage as a parent, right? That kid will agree to anything to get it. And, you know, third grade's very, very young. Fifth or sixth becomes, you know, I liked having a sixth grader who had a phone that I could text, right? So I mean, I think we have to acknowledge that.
So if we can educate parents at that point to say, if you want to give your kid a phone, our advice is, it only texts. You know, some people are arguing for flip phones. I gave my kid an iPhone that had no browser, no apps, and she couldn't download any without our permission. So it's functionally a dumb phone, but it plays music and takes pictures, right? Which she loves.
So I set that up with my kid when she wanted a phone in the sixth grade, and I wanted her to have a phone. And I think we need to acknowledge that more, that adults have their own interest in this. And it was no problem at that point to just say to her, you will not have any apps until you cannot maintain your friendships without them. And this thing never crosses the threshold of your bedroom, nor does any other technology. You say that to the kid who's asking for the phone, they are like, Deal, lady, you got it, right? Like they will agree to all of it.
And so then that sort of slow systematic process, which I've laid out in some writing for Sesame Street Workshop, you know, if you can then push to where they're 15 or 16 before they're using social media apps to be connected to their friends, but they've used texting up till then, and you can see how they're doing with texting. For me, texting is like JV social media, right? If a kid has a terrible handle on texting, do not give that kid social media, right? I mean, I think we can, so I think that idea, like in schools who do this all the time, there's stages and ages and you do it systematically. Schools could offer that to families.
Tim Fish: That's so true. It's that notion, I think you're right, about designing those stages and helping your child make progress on it. Because if you just get this thing full on, forget about it. And I think often parents aren't aware of the ways you can actually dumb down technology like an iPhone to really restrict it. Apple's put stuff into it now that you can use. There's all kinds of ways to really get in on that.
You know, I know that one of the things you talk about is the work you're doing with Sesame Street. And I know that that's been an area that you've been doing a lot of work recently. This notion about creating content that adults can use as, as needs arise, right? In their lives, right?
Lisa Damour: Yes, yes.
Tim Fish: So things, actual things they can put their hands on to help them navigate some of these stages. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Lisa Damour: Oh, Tim, I appreciate that. So, you know, first of all, let me just say, I never meant to be a public psychologist. Like this was not in my, this was not my career plan. No, I was going to teach, I was going to practice. That was going to be my life. Cut to now. And here's how I think all the time. Parents need help all day, every day. And they're going to want it at different lengths in different forms. Some are going to want to listen. Some are going to want to read. Some are going to want to watch.
So I have really put my back into creating a universe of content that meets people where they are, with what they need, right when they need it. So I put out a lot on social media. I think it's a great delivery device. It's where parents already are. So very short things. I have a podcast called Ask Lisa, the Psychology of Parenting, where I actually take requests sometimes from school heads, like, please do a podcast on this topic. And then they send it out to their families.
And I also now have longer form or higher end premium content in a new service called Untangling 10 to 20. If people go to my website, all of it is there, and it's all searchable by category, and the Untangling 10 to 20 content comes up right alongside the free content, and people can see what it is that they're looking for. And interestingly, Tim, I have schools who are actually buying 10 to 20 for all of their counselors.
Some schools are buying it for their faculty and some schools are buying it for their families with this idea in mind of, you know, when we bring in a speaker, all the wrong parents come, right? All the parents you want there don't come. All the parents who are there probably don't need to be there. And yet we get these hot calls from families where they're like, this is happening right now, right here. And so I wanted to create a library of content where a school could say, go to this page of this website to get a long-form answer to the question you're bringing, because you're not alone in this.
Tim Fish: You're not alone in it. And you know, it starts making me think about, as a parent, as a teacher, as an administrator in a school, what are we really trying to do, right? As I've said to you before, our purpose for this podcast has been to help schools think about designing the schools we need for the future.
I often talk to independent schools about like, what's at the heart of what you do? What's your thing? And people say, you know, we're trying to, you know, create curious, engaged, contributing members of society, people that are giving back, people that are making the world a better place, et cetera. And one of the things I loved in your book, as you talk about this, and I think what these resources are going to help us do, is they're going to help us develop grownups, as opposed to just adults. And that was another part of the book where I was like, yes, I love the way you frame the difference between grownups and adults.
Can you take us through this a little bit? Because I think it's, it's got so much wisdom for our schools.
Lisa Damour: Sure. So, you know, it's really actually, I think I touch on it in The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, but I will say I think it's very much the thinking I was working out in Untangled, where, you know, 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. And so Tim, just thinking about that question you're posing of like, what are we doing in schools? Like, what's the goal here? I'm always going to walk up to this as a psychologist, and I'm always going to walk up to this thinking through the lens of development. And...We don't know where the world is headed, right? I mean, like with AI, right? Stuff is changing so fast. It's like making our head spin. So the idea of preparing kids for what's ahead, I think is very, very challenging.
But here's what we do know, that the single most powerful force for mental health in kids and teenagers is strong relationships with caring adults. Like full stop, we know that. So when I think about what we're doing in schools, we're trying to build strong relationships with these kids and trying to help their families maintain strong relationships with them. I feel like if you've got that under control, the rest will sort itself out.
Development is its own machine. Kids are moving forward. You know, when kids are thriving, you just get out of their way. But thriving means that they have really good working relationships with loving adults. Some kids, if they're lucky, have that at school and home. One thing that independent schools are unusually well equipped to do is when it's not so great at home, I have watched independent schools do the most spectacular job of surrounding kids with caring adults and getting them through that really hard time. But if you ask me, like, what is our number one purpose, you know, this is just my view on it, that would be it. Strong relationships, caring adults.
Tim Fish: That's it. Strong relationships. You know, I think back to my middle school teaching days and I think about this idea of the kids I had with me. And I'm wondering, and I don't know if you'll be able to come up with this or not, but I wonder about, as a middle school or ninth grade teacher or 10th grade teacher of these sort of right in the smack dab middle of adolescence, as a teacher, what are three things I should start doing or keep doing, and three things I should probably stop doing?
Lisa Damour: OK. So, things to do. First of all, you should like kids. I think schools should hire people who like kids.
Tim Fish: OK, so if you're showing up in the morning, you're like, I don't like kids.
Lisa Damour: Then you probably shouldn't don't do this. There's lots of jobs for you. There's lots of other jobs.
Tim Fish: Then get, then leave. It's time to go. It's time to go somewhere else. All right, great.
Lisa Damour: So let's just start with liking kids, right? And because here is the thing, and especially around teenagers, like they can smell at a thousand yards who likes them and who does not. And so, If you wake up in the morning and you're like, I like kids, you're already off to a great start with teenagers because they will detect this and you'll be on a good path.
I think another thing in terms of do’s with teenagers and maintaining strong relationships, be honest. Teenagers can detect who doesn't like them and they can detect dissembling. They are always dealing with adults who come in with some angle or adults who are saying something and there's something behind it. Teenagers know this.
So I have, I adore teenagers. I make good relationships with them. And I think often it's because I play my cards face up. I will say to them, listen, I'm not going to have you guess what I'm thinking. I'm going to tell you exactly what I want you guys to do if you're at a party and somebody brings out weed. Like, I'm just going to tell you my thoughts on this. And they, if they disagree, that's fine. They would so much rather have you just lay it out face up than play a guessing game or hint at one thing and then turn out surprise, we've come for your phones, right? I mean, like, who knows what it is.
So like kids, be honest. And then I would say, when they are upset, and this is the natural feature of being a teenager is that you're going to get upset, and you're going to actually get very upset because of what's happening neurologically. My guidance to adults can be summed up in two words, which is, try to be a steady presence. So, right? Kid’s having a big feeling, rather than being like, well, what happened? Or here's some advice, or how'd you get yourself in this jam or whatever, like trying to fix it. The more an adult can just be like, I am so sorry, or that stinks, or of course you're upset.
Actually, Tim, on my website, I have all these free downloadable bookmarks and one is called how to manage a meltdown. And it's basically a nine step guide, you don't usually use all nine steps, to just being a steady presence when a kid is upset. So those are the three dos.
OK. This is a tough question. OK. Here's the don'ts. Here's the don'ts. Don't be too cool. Teenagers don't like it when adults try to be too cool. They really don't like it. And they will take a transparent, honest adult who appreciates them, over some hip person trying to use their lingo any day, any day.
Tim Fish: Well good, because I can guarantee you I am not cool.
Lisa Damour: Don't be too cool. And so, I think that that's really important because, and I think the view of adolescence is look, I'm surrounded by people who are pushing up against boundaries and wiggling in spaces that make me uncomfortable. I do not need the adults around me doing the same. Like I need the adults to be the boring and predictable variable in this equation.
I think another thing that is important, is I think you cannot take yourself too seriously if you're with teenagers. I think that they are very aware of our flaws. I think that they will sometimes point them out. I think they don't always do it in the nicest way. 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. So don't be cool, own your errors, you know, don't...You know, don't defend errors if you've made them. Let me think of a third don't.
I mean, don't miss the fact that they are the most interesting human beings on the planet. I mean, like honestly, I mean, teenagers, my favorite, I had such a funny moment when I was consulting at Laurel. I brought in, I was doing a class on depression and I brought in a dear colleague from the community who's a psychiatrist, and we were teaching the ninth graders, and she loves teenagers, I love teenagers. And we were about to do a pretty heavy, pretty heavy conversation about depression and suicide prevention.
And the ninth grade girls were piling in, and they were playing this game where they were seeing who could stuff the most goldfish crackers in their mouth, right? And so my colleague and I are just watching this and just like, loving it. And what we're loving is that we know in five minutes, the same girls are going to be asking the most penetrating and challenging questions about the nature of psychiatric medication. And it's like, if you don't love that combination, there are other jobs. There are definitely other jobs.
Tim Fish: I love it. I love it. I love it. And those are, those are things that you, I mean, they will make a really good bookmark, right? Because they are things to just keep on. And I think the number one, as I look back on my own journey, this idea, like when my child is upset, it's my job to fix it, right? That doesn't, that just, it's never worked well for me.
Lisa Damour: That's not steady presence.
Tim Fish: It's not steady presence. Steady presence.That is so important. And this idea like, you know what, just be you. And if you’s a little square, that's OK. That's fine. Just be authentically you, be honest, own it when it doesn't go well. Love kids. These are pretty simple, right?
Lisa Damour: I know, it's pretty basic stuff.
Tim Fish: I don't need a PhD to do these things. Right? And a lot of great teachers, so many have those things intrinsically there, but it's that ability to sort of sit in that, and understand the different kids are going to walk through the door, the same student is going to be quite a different person at different times when he or she walks through the door. And that's just kind of, and they're trying things on, right. They're trying on, I love the way you talked about their brand. And they're sort of, they're building their brand. They're building that identity.
You know, I think back on my journey, and I think back on when separation individuation was really coming through for me. And it was the eighth grade dance, when my father was driving me to the dance. And I was like, Hey, like a quarter of a mile away, I was like, drop me here. And I've always felt bad about that. I was like, why was that? And it was things like, you know, because the car, the station wagon didn't go along with my brand, right?
Lisa Damour: Nope, you're working on a cool brand. It did not have station wagon in it.
Tim Fish: I was working on a cool brand and it did not have station wagon. It didn't have my dad in it, frankly. It didn't have all this, the goofiness of my father. It didn't have all these things that were, and, and you know, my dad, I'll tell you, my mom didn't handle it very well. My dad handled it incredibly well, you know, that he was just like, Oh, here, you want me to drop you here? No problem. And then the next time we were going somewhere, he said, you just tell me where you want to be dropped off.
Lisa Damour: This is my friend laying out the outfits. Show me what you want me to wear. And I think, you know, it's funny, I was just, this clip is up on social media right now about a podcast that my cohost Rena and I did, where I was like, here's the deal with raising teenagers. It's not personal. It feels personal. It's not personal. The more you can keep it from being personal, the better it goes.
Tim Fish: That's right, that's right. And they're doing their job, right? This idea of them moving on is the job, you know? And it's the same in our schools. That is their job. And that's our job, is to help them develop into those grownups, into those well-adapted grownups. Because as adults, they're still going to experience stress, they're still going to experience anxiety. And do they have the sort of ability to get through it?
It's the getting through it that we're after, not the removal of it.
Lisa Damour: Absolutely. And Tim, I mean, when I'm speaking at schools, what I'm saying to families is like, look, you have your kid at this phenomenal school because you're trying to give your kid opportunities. And their ability to take advantage of these opportunities hinges on their ability to withstand distress. Anything worth doing is going to be hard, and is going to have unpredictable aspects. The kids who can work with this can do all sorts of things.
The kids, and I've cared for more of these kids in recent years, who were like, I can do this thing if it's comfortable and/or you guarantee it's going to be great. They don't have a lot of choices. So, you know, for what schools are trying to offer, being able to withstand and work well with negative emotions is not like this sidecar thing, right? I mean, it's like the axle for this thing, right? And you can't go without it, exactly. Yeah, yeah.
Tim Fish: It's foundational. You cannot go without it. It's the wheels, right? And it feels to me that the way we build those very strong, trusting relationships is sometimes by standing on the side and being a steady presence, right? It's not about what we do. It's kind of about what we don't do in some ways is that, you know, you know what I'm saying? So it's, it's a less is more concept.
Lisa Damour: Absolutely. And again, this is where I think helping people understand the nature of development. Development is this internal force within kids. It unfolds on its own. It does its own thing. It unfolds with some predictable challenges for the adults around. But rather than thinking like we have to drag kids into the next stage, I think it's really about creating the right conditions where development can unfold as it should, and everybody knows what to expect, and we're all there to help make it happen.
Tim Fish: Lisa, what a pleasure it has been spending some time with you today. Thank you so much. I know that our listeners are really going to enjoy this conversation. And thank you for all you do for our schools and for all schools and for families all over the world.
Lisa Damour: I appreciate that, Tim. I am so grateful to get to think with you, and so appreciative of what you're making available to the good people of independent schools.
Tim Fish: Thank you.