Ep98: Practical Tips for Engaging with Your Teenager

What if you could foster a positive relationship with your teenager instead of constantly expecting the worst? Tune in to our latest episode with Dr. Beth Trammell, where we dive into strategies for engaging with teens. We discuss the importance of offering them the independence they need while helping them navigate their inevitable mistakes. Discover how to provide balanced feedback that encourages growth and problem-solving rather than focusing solely on correction. Dr. Trammell shares invaluable advice on guiding your teens towards becoming capable and independent adults.

Ever wondered how to better understand your teenager's emotional rollercoaster? In this episode, we also explore practical techniques for navigating teenage emotions with curiosity instead of judgment. Learn how tools like a feelings wheel and recognizing recurring themes in complaints can significantly improve communication and emotional support. Dr. Trammell emphasizes the power of a supportive network of parent friends for shared advice and encouragement. Remember, the seemingly unpredictable phases of adolescence are temporary, and maintaining a supportive, understanding presence can make all the difference. Join us for insights that can help you through the rewarding journey of raising teenagers.

If you, or someone you know, is having mental health challenges and is in need of assistance, please contact 988.


This podcast is meant to be a resource for the general public, as well as fellow therapists/psychologists. It is NOT meant to replace the meaningful work of individual or family therapy. Please seek professional help in your area if you are struggling. #breakthestigma #makewordsmatter #thingsyoulearnintherapy #thingsyoulearnintherapypodcast

Feel free to share your thoughts at www.makewordsmatterforgood.com or email me at Beth@makewordsmatterforgood.com

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:13

Hello listener, welcome back. I'm your host, dr Beth Trammell. I am a licensed psychologist and an associate professor of psychology at Indiana University East, where I'm also the director of the Master's Mental Health Counseling Program, and this is Things you Learn in Therapy, and I am going to share today some thoughts around teenagers and whether that means you are the parent of a teenager or you're a person who is interested in working with teenagers, then it means you're going to also work with their parents. And so here are some things that I have kind of learned over the last couple of decades in working with teenagers in the work that I've done, and so I've made a list of about six different things that are things to keep in mind as you are engaging with teenagers. And so the first thing that kind of came to mind as I was thinking about what are some important ideas for anybody who wants to work with teens or who maybe has a teenager, some particular ideas around this. So the first thing is not to expect the worst. So I know I'm kind of coming out the gate here with a maybe hard to hear sort of thing, but sometimes I think the parents that I have worked with kind of go into every encounter worked with, kind of go into every encounter, every situation every day with almost expecting the worst. And you might think to yourself well, beth, that's not really me. I know that my kid is a good kid. I don't actually expect the worst. Well, I want you to think about some of your interactions with your teenager, right? Are you kind of approaching it with dread when they call or text or say, hey, there's something I have to tell you? Are you like automatically thinking the worst? And if that's, you maybe just take a step back and remind yourself every day of those five best things about your child. Or maybe that's your moment of kind of fixing your face when they come to you with a request like, hey, can I have some money to go hang out with my friends. Don't let your first response be expecting the worst, or expecting that they are going to mess it up, or expecting that they are going to do something that you think is stupid, right, whatever that is. So instead, try to give them some independence.

Speaker 1: 2:57

Our teens are in this constant push-pull right when they're not quite adults, even though they want to pretend like they are, and so they know that they still need us in their lives, but they're fighting to figure things out on their own, and so sometimes that might look like having a conversation with them about what this decision might mean for them or what their request. You know how their request impacts, you know the rest of the family or whatever that might kind of look like. So just think to yourself like how can I expect some of the good from my child that I know is in them, instead of just expecting the worst? The second thing I'm going to talk about is kind of an interesting second point after this first point. But they are going to make mistakes, so we have to know they are going to mess up, and so when they do, we have to be really aware of our initial reactions to their mistake. You might be a few years away from a teenager, or you may be decades away from being a teenager yourself, but I promise that all of us made those mistakes as we were teens. We just sometimes forget about that. Or maybe our anxiety as parents have caused us to kind of really struggle with allowing our kids to make mistakes, or maybe we're just worried that they're going to make some kind of big mistake, and I promise that your parents probably thought the same thing, and you still made mistakes also. So, as your child experiences making mistakes, perhaps there's a way that you can adopt some language that suggests that you are okay with them making mistakes.

Speaker 1: 4:51

I tend to ask my teenagers if they come to me with a mistake. I say well, what did you learn from that? What have you learned from that? What have you learned from forgetting your water bottle at the gym? What have you learned from forgetting your you know water bottle at the gym? What have you learned from forgetting your purse at a friend's house? What have you learned from getting pulled over? What have you learned from you know failing this test that you forgot to study for?

Speaker 1: 5:19

Of what we should be worrying about as parents is helping our kids learn so that they can be effective independent adults, and so if we are constantly solving all of the problems for them, we're not really setting them up to be effective independent adults, and so think about the ways that you can encourage them to pause and think about what they've learned and what they would do differently next time. That is what I kind of always did with teenagers in the therapy room, is we would talk about things that happened for them throughout the week that maybe didn't go as well as they had wanted or maybe the way their parents wanted. And I would ask them, looking back, what do you think you could have done differently? What should you have done differently? Looking back, just giving them time to reflect and then coming up with their own solutions. And if they can't come up with solutions, then you sort of step into giving them some options.

Speaker 1: 6:18

I know that as a parent myself, I tend to have all kinds of feedback for my kids. It's like, well, don't leave your stuff here and don't bother your brothers, and make sure you're home by this time. And hey, make sure you're doing this and make sure you're doing that. And the last time you loaded the dishwasher, all the dishes on the side didn't get clean because you had them turned the wrong way toward the outside and then none of the water got there. Anyway, I have lots of feedback for them, and this brings the third point that I want to share that we have to dose, find balance around the feedback we have for them every day, because what you don't want is for your relationship to only be you correcting all the things that you think are wrong with them. Trust me when I say your teenager does not want to hear that. And, frankly, if you were in a job or if you were in a relationship with somebody who was just constantly giving you feedback, you'd be like, actually, can I just live my life? So think about balancing the amount of feedback that you give them every day. And so by feedback I mean you know you're nagging them to get their chores done, which, by the way, we're going to talk about here in a second. That nagging thing. You are telling them what they did wrong on a homework assignment that you're studying for together. Maybe you are reminding them ever so kindly about their curfew that you want them to meet, whatever it might be.

Speaker 1: 7:53

Think about balancing that with other forms of connection with your child. So are there other ways that you can connect? Maybe you enjoy playing a particular game together. Maybe you enjoy going out to get ice cream together. Maybe you enjoy doing some things around the house together, whatever that is. You want to try to balance those connection moments with the feedback you have. As you are thinking about, how's today been in terms of my interactions with my kid, if they have been sort of this ongoing nagging or ongoing feedback giving sort of scenario, you might think about ways that you can build connection instead of just giving lots of feedback all the time, and the underlying message when you're giving feedback to your child whether you mean for this to be true or not is when you're giving them feedback about something you want them to correct. They are hearing it as I'm doing something wrong or maybe I am wrong. So I think you have to realize that none of us really love to hear that we're doing things wrong all the time, and so think about ways that you can balance the amount of feedback that you're giving either with more connection moments or with additional positive interactions than just a lot of corrections.

Speaker 1: 9:15

This word, respect, is one that I want to kind of talk about with our fourth point here, because for a lot of adults, respect matters a lot, and we perceive our kids to be quote disrespectful in a lot of different ways, and if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you have heard my kind of struggle with respect in other episodes, and it's because it comes up so often. Friends right, like this, issue of respect comes up a lot, and for me, it's not necessarily that your teenager is being disrespectful. Often it is your teenager learning how to regulate their emotion. It's them learning how to manage their frustration. It's them learning how to kind of engage when they're having some sort of negative emotion, right so they're struggling with embarrassment about something that happened at school, and then you come in and say, hey, come eat dinner with us. And they're like I just don't feel like dinner right now and we interpret that as disrespect. But really it's just them not learning and not really knowing yet how to manage their emotion, and actually that's a very developmentally appropriate stage of life where they're at right.

Speaker 1: 10:39

So teenagers really are trying to learn how to manage all these emotions that are going on in their bodies. And when we are kind of adding fuel to their fire by accusing them of being disrespectful oh, you're not going to love me, but you know, we're just sort of making the relationship worse, more problematic between them and us, when we're not seeing it for what it really is. And so what I encourage parents to do is to try to pay closer attention and, rather than approaching it from this place of judgment like, oh, he's just constantly being lazy, or she's constantly being disrespectful, or she's rolling her eyes at me, or she's doing all these things approach it from a place of curiosity, right. So I wonder what's happening. I wonder what happened today. I wonder what's going on with my teenager that's causing them to behave this way.

Speaker 1: 11:36

And if they are in an emotional state, you're going to have to give them a little bit of time to come down from the emotional state before you can have a logical conversation with them, because that's just how emotion works. Emotion works from a place of illogical thinking, so they're not going to perhaps make a whole lot of sense. You're going to say things or hear things from them that you're like well, that doesn't make sense. Yes, that's where they're at emotionally. Ask them to take a couple of deep breaths, See if they can get themselves to kind of take five minutes, get themselves kind of back online and when they come back that five or 10 minutes later, they may be able to have a conversation with you, especially if you have created a relationship and that you've given them space to have those emotions relationship and that you've given them space to have those emotions.

Speaker 1: 12:27

I'll sometimes send teenagers home with a list of feelings words and you can search up feelings wheel. It's the one I love the most. It's kind of a wheel with all these different emotions that start with very kind of basic vocabulary around emotion and then it expands to be more complicated. But sometimes teenagers need a multiple choice of how do they feel, instead of us asking them well, how do you feel right now? And it's like an essay question, right, like they have to figure it out, instead of being able to look at some words that then give them a better sense of, oh yeah, this word actually does describe how I'm feeling. And so if your child is kind of in these moments fairly frequently where they are quote disrespectful or you perceive them as being disrespectful, you might encourage them to use a feelings list to have a better sense and then be able to communicate with you about what's really going on with them.

Speaker 1: 13:24

And that actually brings me to my next point, which is to pay attention to themes that your child shares with you, right? So are they having themes of loneliness? Are they having themes of feeling isolated or kind of rejected by their peers? Are they having themes of you having a favorite sibling? This comes up in my family sometimes, where one of my kids will sort of remind me that they perceive that I pick one other sibling over them more often. And while in my mind I think, well, that's not actually true, I don't have favorites as I think about the interactions that we have, it is true that I tend to probably add how do I say this? I probably do add to the argument for the other sibling because I want for both sides of the kind of argument to understand where the other is coming. But my other child really sees it as me standing on the other side of them, and so I have to really take a look at my interactions, right? Because that theme for my child is that I'm on the other side of the fence from them, you know, and that's not how I want any of my kids to feel. And so I think, as you think about those themes, those things that they kind of murmur under their breath back to you, or maybe those things that they kind of say over and over before you just discount it as well, that's not true. Take a look in the mirror and see if you can find some evidence for how it might be perceived that way, the way to practice in the car one day. Or maybe you know if you can have a moment and you can have a conversation around it figuring out how you might be able to support the opposite of that theme if you think it'll strengthen your relationship with them.

Speaker 1: 15:38

And the last thing I'm going to talk about today is just a gentle reminder. And actually I have some great friends of mine whose kids are a little bit older than mine. I have kids who, or I have friends whose kids are a little bit younger than mine also, and it's always good as a parent to have friends whose kids are in other stages of life than your own kids. And so that might be the first thing that I would say is is try to expand your friend network to have friends whose kids are the same age as yours, but also have friends who have been there already and can give you some advice or some thoughts, and then have friends that you can share that same advice with. And so this gentle reminder is that your teenagers now aren't who they're always going to be, so your teenagers now aren't who they're always going to be. And so, just like, if you think back, even to the former version of you, like who you were five years ago, who you were 10 years ago, right, and you think, wow, I have changed a lot in the last five years of the last 10 years, and we've all certainly changed a lot from when we were 15 or 16.

Speaker 1: 16:50

So if you're in this place of really struggling man, my teenager is kind of being a stink butt right now, you know, or or man it's. It feels really hard right now with my teenager. I'm here to maybe encourage you that loving them now may feel different than loving them later. Walking alongside them now is going to be different than walking alongside them later, and so, as every season that we have with teenagers continues to kind of ebb and flow, I'd encourage you to find some glimmers of hope.

Speaker 1: 17:28

You know, if you have a teenager who's in a really tough spot, in a really dark place, I encourage you to find a therapist. We have local therapists. Can sometimes be hard to find, but we have really great telehealth options now where you can see someone from across the state that you live in. Most therapists can practice anywhere within the state in which they reside and so you know, doing telehealth may be an option for your teenager If they're really in a dark place. Reach out, get some services. Talk to your pediatrician, see if they have any referrals. Get some services. Talk to your pediatrician, see if they have any referrals and if your child is just having a moment, you know, let's all take a breath, find the good and try to think about each of these three options in ways that we can, you know. Continue to search for the good in our kids by not expecting the worst, balancing the amount of feedback that we have for them, accepting they're going to make mistakes, realizing that respect may look differently than what we originally thought, paying attention to those themes and making adjustments when we can, and then realizing that who they are now isn't who they'll always be.

Speaker 1: 18:42

Listener, I appreciate you for being with me today. I hope that you got a nugget or two that you can use. And until next week, when we are going to talk about that list of 50 easy ways to be a fantastic parent, we're not gonna talk about 50 things. We're gonna talk about a few of the things and then I'll give you the link to that article. That is a little bit clickbaity, but we're going to go through it together. Have a great week, y'all. Ciao.