welcome my name is natasha sherman and i am your host and my guest today is dr lisa dunmore lisa is a clinical psychologist she directs laurel school center for research on girls she has a private psychotherapy practice she consults and speaks internationally and is a clinical instructor at case western reserve university she also writes a monthly column on adolescents in the well section of the new york times and she is the author of untangled guiding teenage girls through the seven transitions into adulthood which actually is a new york times bestseller and which we'll be talking about today welcome lisa thank you for having me i'm so happy you're here my children are past adolescence and they were boys but i do understand that challenges of adolescence in any case and i read your book and there is so rich with information not only information and ideas but solutions and things you can think about and things you can do so today we're just going to do sound bites i want people to get a feel for what you have to offer them if that's ok sure so one of the things that struck me was we often talk about teenage years particularly with girls as kind of hormone driven and that's why it's all happening and you say that the brain remodels dramatically during the teenage years the changes in your daughter's brain and the events that occur around her are more likely to shape her mood than the normal hormonal shifts or currying inside of her so you're saying that there are actual physiological brain changes could you to talk a little about that sure so as we've evolved in our understanding of the brain and its development we've come to appreciate that the brain actually remodels a huge amount  course of outlets and what we know is that it models on the front which is the order in which it initially developed and it turns out that the emotion centers are in the back of the brain so the part of the brain that speaks in information and then has an emotional reaction to it gets upgraded before the control centers which are in the front of the brain so these poor teenagers have these very powerful very reactive emotion response centers and the parts of their brain that help them calm down or help them maintain perspective are not yet fully online and so this is how you get really wonderful and really rational teenagers who sometimes seem like they have lost their minds and then once the a calm down making get perspective again they can come back to a more reasonable state and i think the experience for the parent is my kid seems crazy and i think the experience for the kid is i feel crazy and i think that we now create that there's a neurological reason that one of the things i like about talking in terms of brain development as most of hormonal development is the first of all it's more accurate you know it actually fits better with what we know from the data second of all it's more helpful for teenagers to explain it to this this way to them as well as that when i talk to teenagers about this it makes sense they get it they feel less crazy they feel relief whereas the parlance explanation also doesn't feel good and it makes right you know like you know nobody likes that explanation and the thing that we tend to forget so it's not like we as parents have to roll over and do nothing or you know i can't explain it so i can let it occur we still have to guide them but i think it gives us some breathing room to allow for those experiences and it gives them some breathing room because as you say they feel crazy too they do and i think one of the best things we as adults can do is to not overreact to a girl's overreaction right that i think that you know it does not control things happen very fast in the adolescent mind and when adults get as upset or frightened as the girl is it does two things one is it actually makes her feel like oh my gosh this is really at control i thought i had a teenage size problem but now that you don't is freaking out so maybe this is much worse than i thought of runts and the other kids were not there to be helpful in a useful way you know that we're actually throwing gasoline on a fire as opposed to you know turn some water on it or just letting it burn out in its own time which it almost always will and i think that having a neurological explanation makes it feel a lot less personal for everybody involved yeah and you know it's interesting heard someone being interviewed and they were talking about emotional independence like i'm not getting dragged into somebody else's emotional real estate so that they can be allowed to express that emotion feel that emotion and as parents of course we get there are reactive we want to fix it or stop it and it really is part of it is just allowing them to own their own emotional realestate that's a great turner phrase absolutely the advice i give in the section of the book i don't give tons of advice but i try to give pieces where i think it could be generically useful is one thing parents can say is is there anything i can do that will make this worse why right and then that you know does a lot of work in a very short space because saying again have atlases i get that you feel terrible i can stand it right your big feelings are not actually terrifying me i get that most of what i might try to do to help will actually make it worse but i'm sure  available i'm not going anywhere and for a lot of girls that helps bring things down to size yeah and i think you know i just saw something the other day talking about you know children will at every stage of development will push against the boundaries and the parameters and as teenagers they're going to push a lot harder and so it doesn't mean we have t acquiesce all the time that in some sense they're counting on you to stop them at the appropriate time absolutely one of the stories i tell in the book is a very common interaction i have in my private practice where a girl will say to me oh you know jenny's mom she buys beer for us it's kind of cool and i say is a cool or is it weird i mean it's weird it's really weird you know my mom she's not like jenny's mom but at least she doesn't do stuff like that i think that for teenagers they feel like we're the ones who get to be out of control we're the ones who are struggling with the rules we need to know that the grown ups are not acting like teenagers themselves yes yes so i just want to go  you said yes i want to go into the whole world of tech technology and you said research shows that intense use of digital technology can impair young girl social skills and interfere with their healthy face to face relationships so technology is here to stay so how do you manage that guide that coaches set boundaries around it i think you said the magic word some boundaries kids need breaks from technology and they're not great at some posing breaks nor are adults for that matter yet race oh my god yes and so i think the way i've come to think about technology is that teenagers use it to act  teenagers you know they want to be connected to their friends they want to talk about each other they want to check in on how well they're being received by their peers they want to do things that draw attention their way you and i did the exact same things when we  the problem with technology is teenagers don't get it for you know i went home you went home at the end of the day we could look at anybody nobody could look at us eventually somebody kicked us off the fall and you know there was downtime that was just a function of having more technology but that gave us a relief and some time off from being you know completely interconnected with everything happening with our friends and so i think you know feel only really benefit when they say at dinner and everybody  at nine pm everybody puts it was acknowledged and when we're in the car together on the long ride you can check it every half hour or so but then the rest of the time it's just us and it's not the technology is evil or the teenagers are evil it's that we all need a break so that we can focus on the inquire with our selves are enjoying in person company or managing our feeling without stirring up drama i mean we all need those things and teenagers need them as much as anybody yes and you know it's like on the one hand it's here to stay but so is alcohol you know and it doesn't mean you can consume tons of alcohol so it's a same thing and you did mention that research shows that families that have dinner together more consistently the kids do better in life even  later years absolutely no this is a consistent finding the family dinner has some magic to it and one of the things i've come to think about and i've written about this a bit in the book and have written about in the new york times when we look at all of the research on good outcomes for kids the qualities of family life that really make a difference one of structure and one is warmth and you need those two things together and i think by the time a few months having dinner together there's a lot of evidence of both of those because it actually takes a lot of structure to get everybody to the table right i mean in all of our families everybody's going in twenty different directions so for a family even to make it so that at least one parent and a teenager are sitting down that takes time and effort to get to that level of structure a parent to say it's a priority for us to sit down even for ten minutes and be together community is a lot of work right if i care about you i want to be with you i'm going to arrange my schedule to make this possible i'm going to impose this on you and by the time you have those two things everything's moving in the right direction and i say this is often as i can because i think a lot of us feel like the benefit of family dinner is that we sit down and we have these adults heart to hearts and everybody saw lovely and like that is not what it looks like ever right i mean maybe once in a blue moon and i think it's more about the rodder features of family life that show up when we all start trying to make a priority of just even a quick dinner together more nights and we get that not yet even if there's more than one kid and they're teasing each other and whatever else and even if it's argumentative at times there is that interaction there is any even for parents that you know i'm not going off that's not how i would much of that structure moment yeah right so that in and of itself get sent what we know is good for family life even if nobody's having a good time you know and i think that it's pretty good and if they have it even if it is and we've come to a place where i think parents are made to feel like parenting supposed to be pretty fun your kid supposed to like you your kid supposed to do what you ask them to do you should be enjoying this and if you're not somebody is messing this up and that in no way fits with what we know about normal development here's what you do all of these things are hard yes someone said to me years ago if you base your self esteem on what your teenager thinks of you you're doomed yes yes so it's really you know they are going to be battling against you and telling you how wrong you are and whatever but i think also you mention even a drive in the car if you're just checking your technology even just you don't have to talk to each other your kind of they are together sharing space now that's valuable like you're about being with you yeah so then this is another one teenager's benefit when adults distinguish thinking and feeling from doing because everyone has thoughts and feelings that are on pleasant can you say a little bit about bad sure and i think this is true of humans universally and especially true of teenage girls and i think teenage girls can sometimes feel like their thoughts and their feelings and their actions all have to be in perfect alignment and so for example imagine a girl has a classmate she dislikes which every girl is going to have a classmate it's not a slight so for some girls they'll say well i don't like her and this is what i feel so i'm going t it right because it's all got to be lined up other girls will think i'm not supposed to tell her and i know that even had the thought of feeling great so some girls will cause aggression some girls at a cause and but neither of those are necessary and one of the things we can say to girls and i often say this to adults also is thinking in feelings over here doings over there you cannot control the thinking and feeling there's a lot of information there that you might want to access you have to make careful choices about what you're going to do so i sort of goes on the below polite that's the worst you can be you don't have to be super nice you don't have to go out of your way to be her best friend but you're doing is going can be and should be often separate from what you think and feel and there's nothing wrong with that that's not manipulative none of that and i think it's really important to be able to distinguish that even as adults as you say you know i'm a life coach and i always say you don't wake up in the morning to think your thoughts they just come slamming in you know so then it doesn't mean you're a bad person it doesn't mean you're going to have a terrible day it's just noticing them and as you say they're rich with information and then you get to choose how you want to behave around that was one of my favorite colleagues in town says you know if you have a personal board of director your thoughts and talk about you know how you define popularity because very often you want to be with a popular people but you don't even like them and then you want to be popular but being popular requires a lot of work especially now so talk a little bit about bad sure so one of the research studies that i on track in my book is a fascinating study that showed us that there's actually two kinds of popularity when kids use the word popular they actually mean two different things sometimes  mean popular like everybody likes the person right off the name in popular isn't powerful that this is somebody who everybody knows that she's going to be mean and so they want to be her friend so as not to be her target and so one thing i  found very helpful of her parents is to unpack that term a little bit so when he goes oh you know so and so she's so popular but then again say or she powerful you kids like her or do they just want to be her friend because they make she makes them nervous and that is such a relief to kids because it's popularity off of that pedestal and it needs to come up with there and then like you say how ever kids come by being popular whether they have friends who genuinely like them or they have a lot of social connections for another reason it turns out to be a very taxing position for the girl who's in it that's a lot of kids to maintain you know connections to no group of girls or any adolescents is going to get along all of the time so girls who have a lot of social connections are often doing a lot of peace keeping are going back and forth between them when we look at the research the happiest kids have one or two good friends and i love any time something that gives me a chance to say that research training and say it because that is such a relief for girls and families and then again if you look back most of us in our own history that one good friend that was all we really needed it is and one of the things actually some interesting work on this comes from anthropologists who talk about the necessity of sustainable routines we all need to know in the day to day if for upset who are we going to call if we want to go out that evening who are we going to call and that actually reduces stress very substantially and  girls have many many social connections they get upset and they think oh if i call molly and she hears that if i'm jenny then she'll be mad at me you know so it's something that should be automatic or could be automatic becomes fraught and causes stress and so great for teenagers to hear that because it kind of lets them off the hook to keep trying harder effort taking and feeling that's accepting they have to live into that they don't know how to do that i'm going to jump to another subject because i think this one is really important you say parents of teenagers must live with the painful truth that teenagers can and do in gage in dangerous behavior instead of reflecting on why we have rules teens focus on trying not to get caught while breaking them so come out from behind the curtain and offer the real reasons for your rules frank conversations about dangerous behavior in terms of bottom line risks your daughter might face not what will happen if she gets busted up that's right i think i will say have taken care of teenagers and their parents for a long long time now and the most difficult problem i come up against is that parents are skeered for their teens safety and sometimes their you you're going to military school and it comes from a lovely place but it will sometimes push kids to them think about so how do i not get caught doing the thing you're telling me not to do when what we really cigarettes well here's the deal cigarettes are highly addictive you could get lucky lung cancer i love you i don't want to think that happened to you we want to always freedom in terms of what's the safety risk why do we have the rule not because i love having rules but because i love you and the rules are there to protect you and i think any time parents can get to that space they are helping to raise a safer teenager yeah and you know i'm thinking back as a teenager if somebody said to me you know long cancer or whatever i mean even adults you know lung cancer you know some people get it not going to get it so there's no i suspect there's no magic formula for what you say to your kids and kids i think just really on some level think they're invincible and they it's not going to happen to them but there was one example you gave in the book that i thought was really striking about some girl who was invited out by a guy to go on a boat or something and she had said yes and so instead of saying are you crazy then it was like do you really i think the questions you asked are do you really want to go how do you go with him so can you talk a little bit more way i tell the story in the book but it's very much grounded in events that occurred is that a very deep delight alison girl came to my practice one afternoon and said wait till you hear what i'm up to for the weekend and she describes that she's going to go out on a boat on lake erie with a guy she does not all that well and of course i'm starting to panic as a clinician because this is really frightening to her and she says don't worry don't worry i thought i'd go through write something ok and then she goes on to describe how she through not getting caught by her mother and she describes this elaborate scheme involving cell phones and friends all of those things and i pulled myself together and i said you were you getting caught like your mom is the least dangerous thing that could happen to you this weekend and thank goodness it actually worked for me to say that because she then could step back and think about the realities that she was so focused on not getting caught that she wasn't thinking about the risks that she was considering and once we actually detail the risks she actually ran them down for me she said oh i didn't want to do this you know yeah but again when kids are tracking the adults or the cops or the principal and how to not get busted they're looking in the longer action yeah so they're always going to do that and i remember doing that but at the same time if we educate them to think about ok let me just think this through what are the possible you know so here i've arranged not to get caught but let me just also think ok so is there anything dangerous about this who i really want to do that i think is just educating them and training them to think that's how we want them to be thinking yeah so then there was yeah let's go into body image and what girls will do to i've actually lost sound on you let me just keep talking and then it's back a good so this is the you know the it's great that we can talk via skype but then of course there are always possibilities of breakdowns so the whole thing about body image i mean it's such a an overwhelming and compelling thing for the world mostly and but as teenage girls oh my god it is so easy to get consumed by and you know thinking that your value lies in your body and body image and whatever like the girls which are of course adolescent girls here's i think a place to try to start and it's very hard to get there because we're also caught up in the culture food and weight can actually be neutral that when it comes to food there is a biological reality that our bodies need a lot of nutritious food and can definitely handle some what we call sometimes but you know some stuff this process to maybe not situations and that if we engage in food that that way it's healthy and we're eating in a healthy way and that's our application in terms of taking care of ourselves and when it comes to weight if you are too thin that is not healthy and if you are overweight that is not healthy that we all have that we maintain a weight that is healthy for ourselves and we do that again in the interest of self care so i think sometimes parents can actually take that just from that standpoint there are biological realities here about how he eat and how much you learn and you need to cleave to those because you care for yourself i think that can sometimes be more productive than saying don't worry about your body everybody's beautiful and you look fantastic i think girls don't find that very compelling i think if you like no not everybody is beautiful and you're my parents what are you going to say so i actually think sometimes chucking medical conversation and dealing with the biology of health is actually a better way to have this conversation have you actually are teenagers and respond to that you know i think they like the relief of a very neutral matter of fact biological reality they do really well the facts right are accurate and they know it and what i have found the flip of it is what if you go into a much needed girls and say you are all just everybody is beautiful the almost brain there i rule it muscles right i mean they just that's baloney to them and in some ways it's belong in our culture we don't think everybody's beautiful we'd like to see we do but we don't and i think as soon as you are into a territory rick girls know there's not reality on your side anything you say after that you're probably wasting your breath right it's a tough one because a lot of them are doing damage to themselves and you know i once spoke to someone who had i guess i don't know if it was believe me or anorexia i just spoke to her by phone and she told me how much she weighed and she said you know my family i have a child i've come close to dying a number of times and this is an extreme yet she said i look in the mirror and i see someone who sat well and that is a person who is struggling to care for herself and she is not taking her care of herself and if she can do it she needs help and i don't i really like that in the sense that you know almost matter of fact to kids and it's not saying it wants her you know and then forgetting about it it's kind of it's really holding them accountable in a way without saying i'm holding you accountable look those are the facts this is a lawful thing stuff that happens with your body and it's up to you you can just damage to it hired and i think that because adults can walk up to the situation with so many of our own powerful feelings about it and body image that we can actually lose track of the fact there are just plain old biological realities here about how much energy you need and where it comes from yeah so whereas the end of our time it's been a really great thank you so much for your wisdom in the work that you do and i invite people to check out the book and you have a web site and  i invite people to check that out and the last message thank you for having me you know and i think the bottom line is i wrote this book because i love teenagers i think they're fantastic and they are it i think a lot of parents feel like it's a very chaotic time of life for me this book is about bringing order to that chaos so that we can enjoy your teenagers more yeah and i really like that love your teenagers you may hate the way they behave and everything else but the reality is they're so full well thanks my name is natasha sherman thank you for joining