Ep190: Building Trust With Teens

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Well, hello there, friend.
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Welcome back to Thing to Learn in Therapy.
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I'm your host, Dr.
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Beth Tremell.
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I'm a psychologist, and I love working with folks on how to make words matter for good.
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I uh love trying to encourage intentional communication, um, thoughtful responses.
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And today we are going to talk about teenagers.
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So I was recently asked by an organization to come in and talk with parents at the request of teenagers.
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And so it's kind of this interesting um kind of shift, right?
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That often I'm asked to come in to help the child or the teenager at the request of the parent.
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And I loved, love still that this organization kind of flipped the script a little bit and said, hey, as much as we are pouring into our teenagers and trying to help them make more aligned decisions and make the right decision or smart decision or whatever, they also want us as parents to be thinking about what the smart and right decision for us might be in our relationship with them.
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And so I kind of posted about this on my social media a couple of weeks ago, about how our goal with teenagers, so if you're listening and you have a teenager, your goal is not to get them to tell you everything that I remember what I was like as a teenager, and I didn't tell my parent everything, and you probably didn't either.
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And there's a reason for that, right?
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In terms of development, we want our teenagers to start to have more and more independence, you know, unless you want your kid to live in your basement for the rest of their lives, you know, and I'm I'm kind of joking here, but in some ways, we kind of want the independence, but we don't want to actually give them a whole lot of leeway.
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And so we have to find that balance.
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And so our goal isn't to get them to tell us everything, our goal is to become and maintain uh a safe connection with them so they know they can come back to us.
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And so a few things that this specific group of teenagers asked that their parents consider is sort of this whole list of things, right?
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That they want their parents to um give them a break sometimes, to listen from uh the teenager's point of view, to remember that they have a lot going on too.
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And before you dismiss this specific part, I think sometimes it's easy as parents to be like, what they got going on?
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They ain't got bills to pay, they ain't got no job, or they have a part-time job, or you know, they don't have this or this or this.
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But I think what's happening for our teenagers now, and what happened for us even, you know, decades ago, is this increase in social pressure.
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We have this period of development where we are trying to understand what relationships are all about.
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We want to be liked, but we don't want to have regret about doing things that aren't true to who we are, and and who am I really?
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And now my body is changing and I have all these feelings, and you know, during adolescence, our feelings are perhaps a little bigger than uh we're used to seeing when they're younger because of kind of puberty coming along.
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And so that all kind of has always happened, but I think the other thing that's happening now is that we have all of this other stuff happening with technology, with social media, and with expectations, right?
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Believe it or not, your child is aware of the level of expectations and how they have changed.
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You know, I often think about even with my own teenagers, right?
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So I have two teenagers and I have a tweener, and then I have a fifth grader, but I think about the amount of pressure that we're putting on our kids.
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I went to high school, I graduated with my high school diploma, and I did take some AP courses, but I didn't feel any kind of pressure to have 10 to 20 college credits before I left high school.
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I didn't have any pressure to take multiple, you know, each year of high school AP classes or dual credit classes.
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And I don't have any problem with this, right?
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So I'm not telling you it's a bad idea to do those things, but I'm just saying if this is a path that your teenager is taking, and if this is a path that you want your teenager to take, you also have to remember that that pressure includes part of this.
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I have a lot going on.
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So I think it asks us to remember that even though in our minds it doesn't seem like they have a lot going on, they might have a lot going on.
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And when they're having a lot going on and they don't have a whole lot of great outlets to communicate these things with, it may be stewing in them.
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And so again, that's not necessarily a bad thing.
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That's part of um coping, that's part of growing up, that's part of development.
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But we just have to see that as parents as something that adds stuff for them.
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You know, another thing that the teenagers and of this particular group also asked for is modeling how to talk about feelings.
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Um, I could spend a whole lot of time here because we aren't great at this.
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We really aren't great at modeling how to talk about feelings.
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We might talk about feeling tired or stressed or overwhelmed, but even if we talk about those things, we probably don't talk about how we're coping with those things, right?
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And I think there's a real balance.
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And I think sometimes we get um cautious in how we're talking about feelings because we don't want to dump our stuff onto our kids, which is true.
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We don't want to dump our stuff onto kids.
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I'm not promoting that, but I am promoting we have to start using some of these feeling words and then modeling how we manage them.
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We might want to label what we see in our kid, right?
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When they're saying, oh my God, I'm so angry.
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You might say, I can imagine you're angry, and I can also imagine you're disappointed and frustrated and perhaps embarrassed or exhausted, right?
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I think there are other words that we can use to kind of help model with that.
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And the resource I often share with this is pull up a feelings list.
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I really like the feelings wheel.
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If you just search up either of those terms, you can start to see some other words.
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Sometimes it's like taking an essay test, you know, where you're like, I don't know what is the answer out here, versus pulling up a list and looking at it and saying, oh yeah, these are feelings that I experience and can model for my teenager.
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Teenagers also want us to trust them.
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And I know this is a hard thing.
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I experience this every day of my life, this trust part, especially when they are proving or they have done something that make them less trustworthy, right?
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And so when that's true, right, they've done something or they continue to do things that make them hard to trust them, it is really fair to have this conversation with them about trust and say, I really want to trust you.
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But this and this and this decision has made it hard for me to trust you.
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Now, if your teenager is mostly trustworthy and you're like, I still don't trust my teenager, it may be a moment to reflect.
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Is this about you or is this about them?
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Our teenagers want us to apologize when we get it wrong.
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And there are lots of resources about good apologies.
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One of my favorite resources is uh the podcast that Brene Brown did with Harriet Lerner.
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Um, it's an older um episode, but it is so good where Harriet Lerner talks about uh the essential parts.
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I think there's nine essential parts of a great apology.
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And the one that I often uh share, though there are many that I love that she talked about, is that a great apology actually uses the words I'm sorry.
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That's different from my bad or I didn't mean to.
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A great apology says I'm sorry.
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And a great apology also, sorry, there's two things I want to say.
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A great apology also um doesn't include the word but, right?
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So I'm sorry, but you're the one who wasn't trustworthy.
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I'm sorry, but those are not real apologies, right?
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Our teenagers want us to acknowledge that they may just need a day.
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They may need a day, they may need a moment to just kind of catch their breath, acknowledge their own mental wellness.
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And sometimes, and I would say often, our teenagers don't want us to fix it.
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They just want us to listen.
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And so recognizing that when they come to us with things, one of the best things that you can reflect back to them as they're talking to you or as they're venting or as they're sharing about things, is ask them, do you want my advice?
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Do you want some ideas, or do you want me to just listen?
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And that's actually true for basically anybody in your life, all right?
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If your spouse or partner or friend is talking to you about something, you might just offer that as a sentence in response.
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Do you want my ideas?
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Do you want any advice, or would you rather I just listen to you?
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And often we just kind of want somebody to be there with us.
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We want somebody to listen.
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So I want to talk about a few areas that I think um parents can reorient away from kind of too much focus and shifting focus a little bit in a different direction.
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And so the first place that I actually encourage you to reorient is around their grades.
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So I probably have an unpopular opinion in that if your child is generally doing well, if they are generally keeping up, if they're generally doing what they need to do, you do not need to check their grades.
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You just don't.
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You don't need to check their grades.
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If they can be trusted to do the things they have to do, you don't have to be on power school.
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You don't have to get the notifications.
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Because here's what happens.
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And I can't tell you the number of times in my, you know, 22-year career.
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I mean, it's just countless times where I've had people in my office, people in the classroom that I've been consulting with, where the child's grade in Power School is not actually reflective of their actual grade in the class.
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And it creates all this problem, all these problems at home where they say, you are failing math class or you're getting a D in math class.
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And inevitably the child says to you, I did that.
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The teacher just hasn't put the grade in.
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I mean, if you're listening, you maybe have fallen into this argument also.
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And a great majority of the time, the child is telling the truth, right?
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Teachers will put an assignment placeholder in and it makes the grade drop until they get a chance to enter the actual grade.
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So I think for me, if you wouldn't have seen that moment in time where the teacher didn't get a chance to put the grade in yet, if you wouldn't have seen that moment of time, you wouldn't even have to have this argument with your teenager.
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Listen, if your teenager is really struggling, if your teenager is like getting C's and D's on like a regular year, I'm not necessarily talking to you in this moment.
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If they need extra support, I think connecting with the school, getting an evaluation, getting additional support at the school is absolutely appropriate.
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And when that happens, I also am sort of saying, do you actually need to check their grades?
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Or can you put trust in the teacher?
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Can you even email the teacher and say, hey, I don't want to be a person who nags my kids about grades?
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Could I just rely on you to reach out to me if there is something happening that I need to know about at home?
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Partnering with the teacher and letting the teacher let you know when there's a problem may actually be better for you and your relationship with your teenager.
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Sharing with them, like, hey, your grades matter to me, but it doesn't tell me everything about who you are right now and how hard you're working and how much effort you're putting in.
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And so I don't want to have to worry about your grades, but I also want for you to maintain a certain level of standard.
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And whatever that standard is for you and your family, sometimes you have to just tell them explicitly what your expectations are.
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And though that might sound like, oh, Dr.
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Beth, are you serious?
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They already know what my expectations are.
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I promise you, uh the number of times I've had teenagers around me that I'm like, well, what do your parents think?
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And they're like, I don't know.
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And it's not that maybe you didn't tell them, it's that maybe the moment you told them, they literally weren't paying attention to you.
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And that's happened to me lots of times where I'm like, hello, we've talked about this, and we're gonna talk about it again because it is clear that maybe you kind of missed the mark there.
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So grades are one thing to think about.
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Maybe you shift your focus from their score, their missing work, whether they're doing enough, to um focusing on what they're learning, focus on their effort, their ability to problem solve, their ability to recover when they make a mistake, really trying to separate that worth that they experience from you from their performance, right?
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That you care more about them than about their grades.
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So the second area that I think we could maybe think about adjusting focus is around the issue of risk.
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And I think this is one of the most challenging parts of raising teenagers is managing risk.
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We have to allow them to take some calculated risks, right?
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And those might be social risks, those might be um physical risks.
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So learning to drive is a calculated risk.
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And I, yeah, I did not love that phase of helping my teenagers learn how to drive.
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I realized how anxious I am as a driver and as a rider with teen drivers.
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But anyway, so we have to be able to move from preventing every bad choice or controlling every variable to really teaching more positive or better judgment and better decision making.
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Having those guardrails and having them kind of understand how to make good decisions for themselves is better than us kind of protecting them from every potential disaster.
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Now, I kind of talk with my friends sometimes and I talk with groups sometimes about how the scariest part of risk is that some things are kind of life-altering mistakes, right?
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And so we kind of want for our teenagers to make small mistakes, but we kind of want to protect them from making big life-altering mistakes.
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And I think finding the balance of how do we do that is something that each of us has to spend a moment to reflect on.
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But having some conversations around their decision making might sound like, okay, so walk me through your plan.
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What could go wrong?
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How might you handle this?
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What are potential ways in which this might not go well?
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What can you do to ensure that it will go well?
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Sometimes having those conversations might help you see their decision-making process, but it might also create a path for them to think about their own ways of making decisions.
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The last part I want to talk about, and I have other options, but the last part I want to talk about is respect or attitude from teenagers.
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And this, again, I could spend a lot of time on because we often misinterpret teen emotion for attitude or disrespect, which only fuels the negative emotion that they're feeling.
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And listen, I want all teenagers to respect, I mean, frankly, all people, right?
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I think respect is at kind of a base level of healthy interactions and healthy social relationships.
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But I also think that sometimes we as parents get stuck in our own feelings around our kids' response to something that we've said when really they just need a minute to kind of manage their immediate feeling.
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And we all experience this, right?
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Where somebody says something or does something in our own lives and we have an immediate reaction to it.
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Our supervisor says something or our coworker says something, and we're like, what?
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You know, or you might have like a really strong immediate reaction.
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But what's happening for you as a grown-up are a couple of things.
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One, your frontal lobe is your executive processing area.
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And so it's allowing you to filter things, right?
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It is allowing you to inhibit your immediate response.
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It's slowing you down and shifting the narrative to say, I'm actually not gonna say that thing that is coming to my mind right away.
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Our teenagers, that part of their brain is not fully developed yet.
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And so they really are, they're they're not always just trying to be a jerk.
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You know, sometimes their brain has not fully formed the pathway to be able to respond to the emotion they're feeling in the way that we want them to respond.
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In these moments, we can pause, we can say, Hey, you seem frustrated by that.
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We can take a minute, I want to hear you, and we still have to speak respectfully.
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You can pause and say, Hey, I'm gonna need you to try that again.
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I say this to my kids, my teenagers all the time.
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I'm gonna need you to try that again.
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Hey, what just happened there was not okay.
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I need to take a breath.
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I need you to take a breath, and I need you to try again.
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And if they still don't have the response, then you might need to tell them what the response is.
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I need you to just say, all right, mom, I don't love that, but I'll do what you've told me to do.
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All right, mom, I don't really feel like doing the dishes right now, but I know it's my job to do dishes today, right?
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I think sometimes we have to give them the space.
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If they still don't know, if they can't access it, we might need to then offer the right, and right might be kind of too far award, but we need to offer to them what the response that we're expecting should be.
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The last thing I want to talk about today is that for those of us who really want our teenagers to open up, we have to take a good look in the mirror about how we respond when they do.
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Because, like all of us, our teenagers are learning how to respond, how to engage, how to interact based on past experiences.
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And so if they brought up something that was maybe hard for them to bring up and you lost your mind about it, they're probably not going to bring something else up.
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I mean, I just that's just the truth.
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I wish that that weren't true, but that's just how we all operate.
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And so we really have to think about when your teenager actually talks to you, our first response really teaches them whether it's safe to keep talking or not.
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And so for us, we have to pause.
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We talk, there's all this info out there right now about regulation and making sure that you're regulated yourself.
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So you have to get steady, you have to stay grounded before you start correcting and questioning and lecturing or panicking.
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You might say something like, Okay, I'm glad you told me.
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Give me a second to take this in.
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If it's shocking, right?
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If it's like, I gotta fix my face, you gotta fix your face and say, okay, I did not think that that's where this was going.
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That's a fair thing to say.
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You could say, All right, I'm gonna pause to think about how this might impact us.
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Or that might be a moment to say, okay, I'm gonna pause and I'm gonna see if there's anything else you want to say uh about what happened, right?
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If you want to tell me more about what happened, I'm just gonna pause to listen.
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That's great.
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Because really we have to listen for the need.
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Do you want to be heard, helped, or hugged, right?
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Um, some version of that.
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But do they need to be helped, protected, coached, given space?
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Do you want me to listen?
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Do you want me to help think you through that?
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Do you want me to help you figure out what to do next?
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Right?
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Those are great statements that you can make as they are kind of sharing this story.
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We want to validate without automatically agreeing, right?
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They don't need us to like pick up a pitchfork and Start like, you know, they might need us to be the voice of reason.
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And so validation means, you know, we're validating their experience, that their experience makes sense, right?
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I understand why you were angry.
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And maybe we should talk more about what happened next.
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Maybe we should talk more about another option that you may have tried.
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Validating without automatically agreeing.
00:22:25.680 --> 00:22:28.559
I always, always, always talk about getting curious.
00:22:28.720 --> 00:22:35.680
And so getting curious before we get instructional is a great kind of next step here.
00:22:36.000 --> 00:22:41.839
And so I love asking questions like, what was the hardest part?
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What do you wish I understood about what happened?
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What do you wish they understood about you or what happened?
00:22:49.359 --> 00:22:55.680
Any of these kind of curiosity-based questions keep us from sharing judgment, right?
00:22:55.839 --> 00:23:00.160
Because judgment is the thing that's going to really keep your teenager from talking more.
00:23:00.400 --> 00:23:07.680
And I think the last part of this is to try to keep the door open and say, you know, we don't have to solve all of this right now.
00:23:07.759 --> 00:23:10.960
We don't have to know exactly what to do right now.
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Let's come back to it later.
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Let's sleep on it together.
00:23:14.400 --> 00:23:15.440
Let's pray about it.
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Let's explore some ideas together after we've had a chance to think about it a little bit more.
00:23:22.240 --> 00:23:38.799
I think the other thing that this does, as we are kind of keeping this door open, is that we're saying that decisions, especially important decisions or things that have caused emotion in us, should be reflected on and then evaluated later.
00:23:39.039 --> 00:23:42.720
So we do this with kind of big decisions, right?
00:23:42.799 --> 00:23:46.960
We're like thinking through a thing and then we table it and then we come back to it.
00:23:47.119 --> 00:23:49.279
But our kids don't always see that process.
00:23:49.440 --> 00:24:01.920
And so part of keeping the door open is saying, let's think about it together, let's think about it apart, and then let's come back together again to reflect on both the decision you made, both the reflection you've had and what you've learned.
00:24:02.079 --> 00:24:05.920
And that's really how we keep the door open for them to continue to come back to us.
00:24:06.160 --> 00:24:12.400
The take-home message here is that we be warm and firm, right?
00:24:12.480 --> 00:24:19.440
I've been talking about this a lot in terms of gentle parenting, the bad rep that it gets because we don't do it well.
00:24:19.680 --> 00:24:22.559
We think that we only need to be warm and not firm.
00:24:22.640 --> 00:24:25.359
And that's just not great parenting, right?
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If we are just warm and fuzzy all the time and have boundaries for kids, it just is not a great situation.
00:24:34.240 --> 00:24:52.319
And so we want to kind of practice being more reflective, realizing some of the ways that we may have um kind of closed the door with our teenager, the way we maybe have kind of closed the door or been too hard on certain situations, and come back if you want.
00:24:52.480 --> 00:24:58.960
Come back to that conversation with them and continue to work through whatever it is that's in front of you.
00:24:59.200 --> 00:25:00.960
Thank you for being here today.
00:25:01.279 --> 00:25:04.640
This was um just a brief episode on teens.
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I would love to hear from you.
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Um, any of these things resonate?
00:25:08.640 --> 00:25:21.279
Any of these things, something that uh you might want to explore more about um other questions or issues that you're having, would love to hear from you, Beth at MakeWordsMatterforgood.com.
00:25:21.519 --> 00:25:30.960
And um, I can include those on kind of the list of things that I work through on social media and or um on the next podcast episode.
00:25:31.119 --> 00:25:32.880
So thanks for tuning in.
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And until next time, stay safe and stay well, friend.
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Ciao.