I Read The Emotional Lives of Teenagers and Now I'm Not Quite as Emotionally Illiterate (Although I Am Still PLENTY Emotionally Illiterate...)

The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents by Lisa Damour
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book has been a running joke around the house this Thanksgiving break. Both teenagers are home for the holiday, and the college student, seeing the book on the coffee table, turned to her younger sister and said, laughing, “OMG is this for YOU?!?”

“It is for ME!” I retorted.

Just between us, it *was* originally for her, ahem, but I was less than a chapter into the book before I realized that it actually *is* for me. There’s not much that I actually do need to change about the way that my teenager handles her emotions, but there’s a LOT that I, as her parent, could be doing to better help her learn to manage them.

My biggest takeaways are as follows:

1) The goal is to help teenagers have reasonable emotional responses, not just help them be less sad. Sad things and stressful things are SUPPOSED to make you sad and anxious! So even though it’s uncomfortable to witness and I know it’s even more uncomfortable to feel, I shouldn’t try to rescue my teenagers from their anxiety about college applications or their nervousness before a big test or their sadness after losing out on a cool opportunity, etc. I mean, I don’t rescue them from stuff like that, but I DO feel helpless and anxious and guilty as hell about their negative emotions. But Damour writes, “Feeling the emotional impact of difficult experiences helps us grow up.” Apparently, learning to manage those emotions is an important part of the learning process, which is of course not news to me, but it actually also kind of is news? I… should probably learn how to do that for myself, tbh, because managing my painful emotions for me probably isn’t why God invented Delta-8…

2) A lot of the time, you don’t need to fix your kid; you need to fix YOU. One of Damour’s pieces of advice is literally to every now and then apologize to your kid for whatever mean things you might have done to them lately that they were too polite to call you out on at the time. I actually tried that one the other day, using those words almost exactly. My kid blinked, thought for a beat, then smiled and said, “Okay”--y’all, I think there actually was something I had just apologized for! I followed up, of course, with the usual litany that she should always feel free to let me know when I’d overstepped, but I remember enough about being a teenager to also remember that adults are terrible pretty often and how exhausting would it be to have to call out every one of them every time? Blech. I’ll just go ahead and keep a monthly blanket apology on my calendar, thank you very much.

On a related note, Damour writes the following passage that I thought was very interesting, because I have noticed this, especially with my college-aged kid:

“And, like me, you may have noticed that our teenagers also tend to be many steps ahead of us on topics related to social fairness and quick to point out our blind spots or narrow-minded thinking.”

I definitely get salty when my child tells me something that I said is narrow-minded, but yikes, who wants to be a bigot? Thank goodness for these kids who can save me from my Gen X Southern grossness (although I’m still not sure why they also want to save me from open-toed shoes?).

When the kids aren’t chastising me and I get a turn to parent them, I thought that this statement was reassuring: “Studies show that teenagers benefit from having high standards set for their behavior.” That one’s easy money, of course, since I already do that, but this was a perspective that I hadn’t thought of before: “These conversations often go best when they’re less about what we want for our teens and more about the priorities teens usually have for themselves.” That makes a lot of sense, and I can see how it also helps build self-motivation. It’s a good perspective shift for me to have to rearrange my thinking from why *I* want my kids to behave a certain way to why *they* should want that for themselves.

Damour discusses numerous mistaken ways in which parents think they’re helping their kid but are actually doing them harm. I pricked up my ears at this note that speaks to the ongoing--and especially current--censorship attempts in many school libraries:

“[S]everal psychological studies have confirmed that reading helps to foster empathy. Far from being harmful to teenagers, reading compelling narratives of lived experiences builds compassion and the ability to take another person’s perspective.”

I find this information really helpful! My kids have always read widely and at will, but I sometimes feel hesitant about the books that I assign them as schoolwork. Not only do they STILL both rag me about Bridge to Terabithia, which broke both their hearts that time that we all listened to it together on a long road trip, but I can easily think of numerous book passages that I personally find upsetting, and I always sort of thought that, well, who am I to deliberately put something upsetting into their young minds? They’re already empathetic; must I really make them also experience, say, the depths of dehumanization suffered by the Jewish people in Night, or the scenes of sexual assault in The Kite Runner or I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings?

But this month my teenager and I are actually listening to the audiobook of Twelve Years a Slave, a book I’ve never read before and only suggested because I wanted a narrative depicting the lives of enslaved people in pre-Civil War America and the teenager balked at the runtime of Uncle Tom's Cabin (20+ hours!!!). It is harrowing, and upsetting, and there’s a part in which a slave owner is openly discussing sex trafficking a small child that really disturbs me, but it also humanizes these concepts that seem historical and abstract, and makes them real and immediate. I get, now, why we shouldn’t try to shelter our teenagers from material like that.

And yes, 12 Years a Slave is banned in some places.

Another part that I found very helpful was Damour’s discussion of how/why parents should talk to their kids about suicide. Previously, I think I’d gotten the idea that we shouldn’t talk about suicide, I guess because it might encourage someone considering it, or promote a suicide cluster, or otherwise put the idea into someone’s head? Fortunately, earlier this year I earned a certification in Youth Mental Health First Aid, during which we were explicitly instructed to openly discuss and ask about suicidal ideation with our kids. So now that’s something that I do. Damour also gives this explicit instruction, and accompanies it with these reassuring words: “[R]esearch show that asking nonsuicidal teens about suicide does not leave them feeling worse, but for teens who are feeling suicidal, it relieves distress.” That’s hugely helpful to hear, and I think probably a lot of parents would find it to be new information.

Damour has caused me to think about children’s emotions in ways that I hadn’t previously. Like, I haven’t been spending my entire parenting journey encouraging my children into emotional numbness or anything (I hope?!?), but I’d sort of thought that my job was to help them calm down when they were upset, all that “Take a deep breath in through your nose and out through your mouth” stuff. But I guess that immediately calming down isn’t the goal; the goal is processing, and Damour encourages us to engage with our children about their painful emotions. She writes (about girls in this particular quote, but also about all kids), “[W]e want to reinforce her right to express her anger by giving it our attention.” I love that. Supernanny and the naughty step and time-out corner, etc., were big deals in my very, very early parenting years, and they didn’t really work for my kids, and now I feel pretty shitty about all that time they spent shrieking in the corner while I sat across the room and pretended to ignore them. They were in pain, and leaving them alone to sort it out themselves probably wasn’t actually very helpful or healthy. I like much better this advice to engage with my older kids about whatever is distressing them.

I also really like two other pieces of advice: that teenagers find regular ways to be of service to others, and that teenagers make time for pursuits that are “meaningful and important to them and are not done for the sake of a grade, a credit, or their college applications.” Happily, this isn’t a parenting issue that I struggle with (yay for not feeling like a failure!), but it’s good to be reminded of its importance and reassured that I’m not on the wrong track for making volunteer work mandatory and encouraging my teenager to spend as much time on her art as she does on her homework.

Overall, this work is probably the most interesting and pragmatically helpful parenting book I’ve ever read, so much so that I’ve already enacted numerous takeaways. I’m also thinking a little bit more about increasing my own capacity to accept and manage emotional discomfort, while I guide my teenagers through developing these skills in themselves.

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