We’ve talked about this before (even as recently as a few months ago) about when our kids were babies, almost every seasoned parent said to us “just wait until they are teenagers.” The thing is, we love our kids. We especially love the young adults they are becoming. There are so many richer conversations we can have and activities we can do. Honestly, we’ve gone through the last couple of years wondering what all the warnings were about. Well, now I am starting to get it.
It’s not that teens are bad, there are just a lot of dynamics to navigate. There are a million books about what to expect when you have a baby, but there aren’t a lot about what to expect when you have a teenager. Enter one of our very favorite podcast guests, Dr. Lisa Damour to the rescue. Dr. Lisa has been on our show a number of times and has written some of my favorite books about raising teens, including, Untangled and Under Pressure. We had her on our podcast this week to discuss her latest book, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers.
Distress Will Happen
There is an adolescent mental health crisis going on in America right now. It’s so severe, in fact, the US Surgeon General issued a rare advisory on protecting youth mental health. Take an already emotional developmental time and couple it with a global pandemic… that’s a lot on teenagers. Dr. Lisa explained that distress should not be your main worry as a parent of a teen. Distress is going to happen. What should be our focus is what our teens do with the distress. How do they cope?
The goal of improving our mental health isn’t about feeling good. It’s about having feelings that fit the moment and managing them well. It’s natural to be upset, especially if something upsetting happens. It’s how we handle distress.
You can hear more in our conversation with Dr. Lisa on the show. We’d like to give a special trigger warning that we do discuss the uptick of teen suicide in this show. While Dr. Lisa’s words are encouraging, if that’s something that you have a hard time with you may want to skip that section of the talk.
