Kaitlin Luna: Hello, and welcome to Speaking of Psychology, a bi-weekly podcast from the American Psychological Association. I'm your host, Kaitlin Luna. Before we start, I want to remind you that if you have any comments, questions or ideas for us, please email me at kluna@apa.org. That’s kluna@apa.org. Now, onto the conversation.
Anxiety among teens and young adults is rising, and studies have shown that it has skyrocketed in girls. One study found that the number of girls who often felt nervous, worried or fearful jumped by 55 percent over a five-year period. What factors are behind rising stress and anxiety in girls and what can we do about it? Our guest for this episode is Dr. Lisa Damour, a clinical psychologist and executive director of Laurel School's Center for Research on Girls. She has a new book out now called “Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls.” Dr. Damour also writes a monthly column about adolescents for The New York Times. Welcome, Dr. Damour.
Lisa Damour: Thanks so much for having me.
Kaitlin Luna: We're delighted to have you with us. In your book, you get right to the point in the introduction when you write something has changed. Anxiety has always been a part of life growing up, but in recent years it seems to have spun out of control. What are you seeing in your practice and in your work with the school and as the mother of two daughters?
Lisa Damour: So, it's interesting what I have noticed. I would say. What kind of around the last ten years is that the general population talks about anxiety a lot more — talks about stress a lot more and talks about both as if they were always into everywhere pathological. That there was no healthy form. Whereas we, of course, the psychologists know that anxiety and stress are normal and healthy functions that can reach, you know, pathological levels, but they really are sort of a part of daily life. And so that change in kind of the popular discourse really caught my ear. A lot of you know, girls sort of showing up in my practice or coming to see me at the school where I consult two days a week and popping down in my chair in front of me and saying I have anxiety and talking about it as if it were a life sentence and something that they were stuck with indefinitely, where, you know, I always had to sort of be careful about how I respond, because part of me wants to say, well, of course you have anxiety. You're awake. You got out of bed.
And so, I do feel like one of the things that has changed is that there is a misunderstanding, and we are taking care of a population of adults and young people -- and my focus is especially on girls who are anxious about being anxious, and my suspicion is that has helped to push the rates up a little bit. Because if you're going to feel anxiety in the course of a normal day, which you really are, and then you also feel anxious about being anxious that cannot, you know, that can't be a good thing.
I think there are other factors at play besides the sort of misunderstanding or the disconnect between our sort of clinical and academic understanding of anxiety and the popular culture's understanding of anxiety. I think, for girls in particular, you know, over time we have just gradually added more and more to their plates. But we've taken nothing off their plates. Girls are incredibly good students. They are, you know, really outpacing boys academically there at this point, you know, one statistic is that they are 70 percent of high school valedictorians.
You know, they're accomplishing things that you know, there's that in some ways there's never been a better time to be a girl. You know, there's so many opportunities, so much access for them, and yet, you know, they still worry about how they look. They're still told by the culture to worry about how they look. We still have expectations of girls will be agreeable and polite, go to their brothers’ soccer games. If that's sort of the family program and I think about, you know, there's boys were doing less well in school than they should. But there are a lot of boys were doing quite well in school, and they're working very hard. And I just know they're not spending as much time as the girls are worrying about if they look good enough. So, I think that that's a factor, among others.
So, I think there's that, there's the speeding up of the culture. Thanks to technology, I started to think about it in terms of how much content everybody absorbs in a day now — adults and young people. And that, you know, was sort of 24-hour, constant access to basically the whole world and its news updates.
We’re taking in a lot of information, and I think, you know, I know they're psychologist really trying to sort out how much can we take in a day and still, you know, be operating at healthy levels.
Kaitlin Luna: So, you know, you spoke a lot about how culture plays a role in the pressures that girls are facing. Can you talk a little bit more about what girls face with their friends with members of the opposite sex? And, as they're trying to achieve what was sort of messages are they telling themselves?
Lisa Damour: So, you know, it's interesting if we think about the culture and friends and, you know, gendered relationships, you know, how girls interact with boys. Their stress is sort of built into this and in my work, and certainly in this book, under pressure, you know, I try to address these stresses from a few sides.
You know, one is to say, look, stress is going to happen, anxiety is going to happen. These are normal, healthy functions. And even when they cross over a line into unhealthy, we're really good at treating them, you know, and this is true. There's, you know, I would say that probably a lot of psychologists would agree that if we look at the DSM-5 in terms of the diagnoses that we feel like we've really got a pretty good handle on I bet, anxiety would be very high on that list and even stress disorders where you know, we're getting better and better at managing those. And we actually have more difficulty treating other things.
But, then also within the book, what I aim to do and when I'm thinking about young people, is to then take seriously the stresses they do face and make sure that adults are responding in the most useful ways possible to those stresses. So, you mentioned with friends, you know, I think that one of the things that has sort of been slow to appreciate is that conflict is going to happen among young people. Conflict happens among people, you know, all the time — it just is again, like waking up. You know, if you're going to be in a room for some with someone for a while and both people are conscious, you know, if actually there will probably be a conflict.
And then if you take 30 people and you put them in a room and you make them be together all day every day and you do that for nine months, you know there's going to be conflict in that school. And so, I think we have not done yet enough to help people become very adept at managing conflict. I spent two days a week consulting in a school, and I and I visit a lot of schools, and I think, in a really well-meaning way, you know, our efforts around conflict often come down to us saying, you know, hey, we want you guys to get along and if you're not going to get along, we want you to respect each other, which isn't a lot to go on.
And so, one of the things I worked unpacking my writing, you know, is how do we teach kids to do conflict well? And how do we teach them what and what did the unhealthy forms of conflict and what are some healthy forms and how do we provide really meaningful guidance on it?
And I think the reason that adults have largely not done this is that adults are usually not so great at dealing with conflict and so, this is hard for us to teach kids what the things that were not really fluent in ourselves.
So, I think that those are some of the social stressors, which is that kids are having, and girls are having expectable conflicts. But, they don't really have a repertoire for managing them.
Kaitlin Luna: And it is very challenging. Some people are conflict avoidance. Some people seek it out. And so, as adults like you said, how are we going to lead by example if we struggle with it ourselves? I mean, you see it play out in the adult world all the time.
Lisa Damour: Absolutely. And I actually picked up along the way this fabulous set of metaphors from some teachers to teach conflict, and it works really well. So, when I talked with young people, I say, look, there's three unhealthy forms of conflict. There's being a bulldozer, you know, they're running people over. There's being a doormat, which is just letting yourself get run over. And there's being a doormat with spikes, which is, you know, far and away, the most common form for both adults and kids, which is basically passive aggressive behaviors, you know, using guilt as a weapon or playing the part of a victim or involving third parties in what should be, like, really, a one on one discussion.
And then I talk with them about how the healthiest form of conflict is to be a pillar, you know, to stand up for yourself while being respectful of other people. And these, you know, young people latch onto these metaphors really quickly and makes immediate sense to them. And it gives them a framework for thinking about how they may be inclined to react because most people start by reacting in one of the unhealthy forms and how they truly want to act if they decide to take up a conflict.
Kaitlin Luna: This is really a wonderful metaphor for how to approach conflict. I really like that. I think it might keep that in my back pocket for another time.
Lisa Damour: It works. It works.
Kaitlin Luna: Yeah, it's really wonderful way to describe it. So, you know, is a way to just keep yourself — to hold yourself to a high standard and also understand that you have the right to stand up for yourself.
Lisa Damour: You do. And the other thing that I will also add is you also have the right to do nothing. I especially, with the time I spend with kids, I've become aware that adults tend to encourage kids to take up every conflict. Oh, she hurt your feelings. You need to say something to her. You know? You know, he left you out of something. You need to let him know you were hurt. And, I think sometimes that makes a lot of sense. But I think in truth, no adult, no functioning adult is engaging every annoyance in the day.
That we are all day long, making very tactical decisions about, you know, conscious or not about, you know, how much do I care about this relationship that I need to repair that problem with a person? How likely do I think it is that if I bring up this conflict with someone, they're going to handle it well, and if I pillar it, are they going to pillar back? You know, all of those things. Am I better off just sort of maintaining a polite distance from this person? And so, I also think as we help kids learn to navigate conflict, we have to put right on the table next to pillaring the possibility of what I call emotional aikido.
Right. And I've heard other therapists call it this, too. Where, in aikido, this form of martial arts, if someone comes at you, the first thing you do is you just step out of the way. You just sort of let them go right on past. And a lot of drama does die from lack of attentional oxygen. And I think sometimes in our well-meaning way, when we're saying the kids, you need to let her know she hurt your feelings. We may actually be fueling something that didn't really — was never going to be result and that the girl didn't even care that much about the relationship to want to try to work on it.
Kaitlin Luna: Right. That's a really great pathway to resolving conflict. So, do anxiety and stress in girls need to be treated differently than it would be in boys?
Lisa Damour: Probably not, you know. And I think that one of the rules that we know a psychologist is that fundamentally, boys and girls are more like men and women are more like than they are different. And we do see high rates of anxiety in girls. You know, this is a long-established finding, you know, because the other thing we know is that when girls are in distress, they tend to internalize. When boys are in distress, they tend to externalize. But, if I'm sitting with an anxious client, my bag of tricks is pretty much the same for boys and girls. I think that I'm of interest, you know, of particular interest to me, and when I'm writing about is that probably the causes of the stress and anxiety are not totally the same for boys and girls. That they are each, you know, there's certainly a great degree of overlap, but there are also some very unique stressors to being a boy in our culture and being a girl in our culture.
Kaitlin Luna: So, those groups seem to be addressed — addressed appropriately. But, you said how you treat it would be basically the same – I mean tailored to each person, but similar.
Lisa Damour: I think that's right. And I think again, you know, anxiety is kind of like smoke, you know, there's fire underneath it. And so, you know, we're good at treating the smoke. We're good at helping people manage their emotional reactions, to things that make them feel very, very anxious. And I think our tools for treating anxiety are established and they work well and we're good at it. I'm interested in the fires.
So, whether it's the pressures on girls about how they look, or the ways in which girls, I think sometimes are over exerting themselves at school and nobody stops them, you know some gender specific sources of anxiety. And I'm interested in what we can do as a culture to address those before they become a problem for girls, you know, or to give girl strategies for managing the strains that come with being female in this culture, so that they are not trying to navigate those alone.
Kaitlin Luna: Absolutely. And your book is full of advice for parents of teen girls. And so, what are one of the biggest takeaways parents need to know?
Lisa Damour: Well, I think one thing that I find very reassuring is that how parents react to stress and anxiety goes a long way to dictating what happens next. And for me, I think the best metaphor, the best moment in parenting, the time when parents really tend to get this right is when you're parenting a toddler who scrapes her knee or his knee. You know, there's a very distinct pattern of what occurs.
You know, the toddler falls down, scrapes her knee and then they look at their knee, and then they look at the parents face and what is going on in the parents’ face is really going to shape the rest of the interaction. If the parent is stricken and panicking, that is usually pretty scary to the kid and they sort of fall apart.
If the parent, even if they are feeling stricken and panicking on the inside, if the parents can sort of maintain their composure and say “oh, ouch, you know, let's go get you inside and get you cleaned up,” usually the kid’s like okay, you know, and sort of takes it from there.
And so, my aim in writing under pressure was both to try to do a little bit of a public service announcement about anxiety and stress being normal and healthy and manageable when they're not. And then also to articulate all sorts of things that adults can do to help make things better. And so, one really key one is for adults to manage their own stress and anxiety sufficiently that when they are faced with a young person who's feeling very, very stressed or very, very anxious, they can summon what a bounce to a containing response, you know, not dismissive, not invalidating, not minimizing, but a sort of a confidence that yeah, wow, you know, your knee looks kind of bloody or yes, that does seem like a very big test. I'm here to help you through it. You're going to get through it. We'll figure this out. You'll figure this out. Those kinds of reactions make a very big difference for parents.
Kaitlin Luna: We've talked a few times already about the importance of leading by example. So, what are some other ways parents can lead by example for their teens in terms of whether it's watching their time on their cell phones or in front of a screen, or if it's about going to sleep earlier? How can parents do that a little bit better?
Lisa Damour: Well, I'm so glad you brought up sleep and technology because I think, you know, if we, you know, if you said like what's really making kids fragile these days? I think one of the lowest hanging fruits -- one of the simplest explanations is they just get nowhere near as much sleep as they need. You know, and I think there's also a lot of misunderstanding about how much sleep kids need. Most parents will say, I think they need about eight hours. That's not actually true. Elementary school kids need around eleven hours, on average. Middle school kids need about ten average hours on average, and then high schoolers need nine. You know, which is much more than most get.
Kaitlin Luna: Oh, absolutely.
Lisa Damour: You know, we've studied sleep up, down and sideways and we know that it is, you know, the summer headline is it's the glue that holds human beings together. And so, one thing parents can do is to model really good habits around sleep and especially around technology and sleep.
So, easy fixes or simple fixes. They may not always be easy to implement are things from as severe as you know -- one of my friends, I love this, has a rule in her house that no technology goes to the second floor of the home ever, and that's where the bedrooms are in their house. Other people I know have a rule that no technology ever crosses the threshold of the bedroom at any point in the 24-hour day. You know that just that is not allowed.
Other families, you know, sometimes there are teenagers who do a really good job of studying in their room with their technology. So, I think for those families, a really good rule is that's fine. But the second you know, by a certain point in the night, it has to come out. You know that it can't stay in the room overnight.
So, things like that, especially when they're laid down early. I think sometimes it's hard to walk these back if bad habits have been established. But it's, you know, it's not that hard to convince, you know, a nine-year-old that they cannot take technology into the bedroom. And so, I think once that's established and also when parents model it — and it's funny because I know, and this may be in places where the quarters were very, very close or kids need to be very, very carefully supervised. I know some families make a rule where the parents charge all the technology in their room overnight. You know, they get a power strip and they charge it in their bedroom. And I think this is a great strategy if you really need to know that your kid isn't sneaking out of your room to get a little extra time.
But I would say, gosh, if you can actually model that it doesn't go in a bedroom, that would be my first choice. And that it really is divorced from resting and sleeping and that part of our lives that we do not do nearly enough to protect.
Kaitlin Luna: And you really, I want to touch on what you said in a recent “CBS This Morning” interview, where you did talk about screen time and in the interview, you talked about -- but I thought this was a really beautiful way to put it — about that limiting screen time is not about deprivation. It's about preserving what’s important, whether that's family, time, hobbies, sleep, whatever it is, it's about protecting those things and not necessarily about depriving and taking away technology from yourself as a parent or for the teen.
Lisa Damour: That's right, you know, it's interesting. You know, there's a lot of interest in what the data are going to say about how technology shapes childhood or, you know, alters the adolescent brain and mean we're psychologists. We know these studies are going to take a long time to come in. They’re going to be pretty murky in their findings. You know, it's very hard to do good longitudinal research. It takes a lot of time, so I sort of feel like, well, while we wait for the data to come in, let's go with what we know, you know. And what we know is that there are essential elements of life that are critical to healthy development and children.
So, getting enough sleep -- hugely important part of healthy development. Having one on one or not even one on one, face to face contact, learning social skills through practicing social skills through reading social cues for, you know, learning how to do that — hugely important.
You know, meals where people are talking, you know, uninterrupted time with people who love you. Physical exercise — you know, physical activity is important, and then this we could talk about a great length, but I'll just sum it up — studying without unnecessary interruption, right? We know everything we need to know about human attention and what it means to disrupt it and how much time is lost. Even if you're interrupting yourself, you know what interruptions due to concentration, what they do to accuracy, what they do to speed of work.
So, we know all of these things. So, I think it's most useful when parents say to their, you know, to young people look, I'm not against technology. I am for sleep. I am for, you know, face to face conversations. I am for you getting your homework done in a focused, concentrated way. I am for you, you know, being up and about moving your body. So why don't we make sure all of those things are happening as much as they need to be happening, And then we'll look at the time that's left, and some of that certainly can go to technology.
Kaitlin Luna: And obviously, social media plays a big role in this. And in that same interview, you were asked about what's causing teen depression, anxiety and suicide rates. And again, I thought your answer was really very interesting and wonderful. You said simple answers are appealing, but they're probably not accurate. So, we need to take a broad look at the issue. Can you elaborate on that a little bit more?
Lisa Damour: Yeah. I mean, I think this is where psychologists can sometimes become so frustrated with the media because they want sound bites and pithy, you know, pithy little bits. And so, you know, it's so often, you know, you see things where it's like, it's the phones. You know, the reason is the phones, right? And it's so easy for people to sort of bang that drum.
But, it's not really clear it's the phones, right? I mean, we don't really have the data to show that. And I'm not going to say that you know, the dawn of digital technology is a minor thing. I mean, it is a game changer for everybody, but it can feel to me a little dismissive, a little diminishing, not really recognizing the complexity of young people and the complexity of the environments they live in. And, you know, the APA has done fabulous surveys on you know what's causing stress for young people. You know, in that recent report that you put out about stress in America, you know, and young people worry about lots of things. They worry about school shootings. They worry about climate change. They worry about, you know, immigration and deportation. You know that they are nuanced, smart, paying attention, tuned in and I think sometimes, you know, to boil it down to one thing just isn't fair and cannot be accurate.
Kaitlin Luna: There has to be more at play in what’s going on?
Lisa Damour: Yeah, people are complicated, and that's why we're psychologists, because we like that about them. And so, we had to sort of do the work of communicating that complexity in a way that does appeal to a broad audience that is used to pithy sound bites that are rarely accurate.
Kaitlin Luna: I want to touch on what you say, but you mentioned before earlier when you were talking about the teens being over scheduled. So, can you talk about the importance of allowing for free time, unstructured time? You may hear that a lot for young children, but how important is that for teenagers?
Lisa Damour: I love this question because there's a lot of ways to slice it. The first way we want to think about it is from the standpoint of stress and, you know, just a psychologist. You know, we find anxiety. It's a helpful warning system that alerts you when things there I miss, you know, stress is a healthy and normal function. It's a sign that you are stretching, that you're working at the edge of your capacity. It's not inherently problematic. It's got an inoculating function. We know that, but stress is only healthy if there's an opportunity for recovery. You know, chronic stress is not something that we're a fan of.
So, kids need downtime and especially by high school, given how demanding high school is for a lot of students these days. And I mean, they're very ambitious and they do a lot, you know, if they're given the opportunity. We do need to think about the importance of a chance to recover. And when I look at you know, our most ambitious, most hard driving students, you know, right now, the average number of AP’s being taken by kids who are applying to Ivy League level schools. They're taking eight AP’s in high school, which is a really huge amount. And, you know, it goes up to as much as 13 AP’s in high school.
And the problem with this is not that the work is too hard or there's too much work. They can do the work. They are bright enough. They're capable enough. They have the work ethic to do the work. They can't do the work in the time they have available to do it unless they never rest. And that's actually where the problem rests. So, it's important for there to be down time.
What's interesting to me, though, is that what constitutes downtime is highly idiosyncratic. You know, how you relax is not going to be how I relax. And so, I'm also really fascinated by the wide variety of ways in which kids recover. So, some kids really need to go home and watch TV for a little while or listen to music or, you know, cuddle with their dog or, you know, go for a run. You know, there's any variety things.
Other kids recover at sports practice, right? They have a really busy, intense day, and then they go out and they play basketball and they get it all out and they hit their homework feeling renewed. And so, it may look on paper like that's a very tightly scheduled kid. You know? She works hard at school day. She runs right to basketball practice then she hits her homework. That may work for her, so long as there's recovery in those activities. Other kids, they were going to need to be away from people. They're going to need some downtime. And so, the question of whether or not a kid is over scheduled, I think, is very individual to the child and how quickly they recover and what for them constitutes recovery.
Kaitlin Luna: So, maybe helping the teen, your child, identify what makes them feel energized and where they feel depleted. Because I think that could be difficult sometimes. If you think I enjoy basketball, or I enjoy debate club or whatever, but you know, they might still feel drained after a need to have some quiet time.
Lisa Damour: They might, right? And that's where, you know, we watch them and get to know what works for them. And they observe themselves and get to know what works. And, you know, I think mindfulness is, you know, phenomenal and so useful and so scalable, you know, to a broad population.
But, mindfulness is not going to be a way to reset for everybody. You know, not everybody, it's not going to float everybody's boat. And so, we have to — as much as you know, there's all this fantastic new mindfulness programming coming into schools. We also need to be careful that, you know, if a young person has a system that works really well for them. You know, I think of an example of a girl told me that when she was very, very upset, what she felt helped her most was to rip up a piece of paper into lots of little bits and then tape it back together like a puzzle. That’s just so funny and so particular.
But I thought, man, you know, you don't need a mindfulness practice like you have what works for you. You know, why should we rest to that away from you and, you know, impose upon you what we think will work?
Kaitlin Luna: Yeah, absolutely. It's like, whatever you know, whatever works for the individual person. I wonder how this all plays into this concept that we hear often about helicopter parenting and how that affects teens. Because research has shown that children with parents who are overly involved in their lives tend to have more anxiety and less satisfaction with life. So, you know it can be — while it can be helpful for a parent to help their teen navigate life, is it also helpful for the teen to find their own way and sort of figure out what works for them?
Lisa Damour: Absolutely. You know, and I'm just thinking about this, you know, how do we think about it at a fairly granular level? And, and one of the things I think that often happens at home with young people is, you know that a young person will get very upset. You know, something will have gone wrong. They'll have had a fight with a friend or they bombed a test and they become very upset. Which, of course, is, you know, as a parent, that's very upsetting for you, too. And there can be this rush to try to address the problem quickly, right, on the part of the parent.
And there could almost be, I think, it's sort of a communication of a sense of like your emotional upset is like a fire that we got to put out, right or else it's just going to get out of control, and I need to make it stop right now. And the effect of the parent rushing in is that feelings remain pretty scary, I think for young people. This sense of you know I'm upset, now we've got a real crisis and also a sense that you know, the way that crises get solved is that somebody comes in and helps you a whole bunch. You know, they call the parent of the other kid. They, you know, hire a tutor and what I'm interested in instead, you know from parents who could be more restrained, right?
Which is not to say just letting kids hang out high and dry. But for parents who can say, you know, I can see you're very, very upset, you know? Do you want some tea? You know, would it help if we just hung out together here for a little while or do you want some time alone?
When parents hold back a little and don't step in and helicopter, what young people get to discover is that emotions are very rarely like fires. They're much more like waves, you know that they rise, and they crust, and then they flow away. And, you know, one of the things I remember learning in my training is, you know, with a hard feeling the only way out is through. You just have it. And when we create time and space for young people to discover this, about how emotions work you know, two things happen that are really important. First of all, emotions become much less frightening because you're like, oh, yeah, I know. I'm having a big one, you know, let me write it out, and then I'll feel better after a good cry, right? That's such a great thing for young people to learn.
The other thing they learn is it's basically an autonomous system, right? That they don't need anybody else for it. And it's I mean, it's really nice if a living person wants to sort of be there with you and be patient and quiet while you're having your moment. But. what a gift right to model this total comfort with distress, which then helps young people feel more at ease with distress when it does occur. So, at the most sort of granular level, we can rob young people of a chance to discover that humans are built in a way that we actually are pretty self-correcting our self-righting. And then we can, of course, take that up many, many levels. You know, if there's a problem with a teacher, you know the parent intervening. If there's a problem with an application, the parent intervening, you know, never sort of learning how to self-correct or that in some cases there's sort of an automatic self-correction that will occur.
Kaitlin Luna: So, how can parents and families help teens embrace stress and realize the difference between unhealthy stress and healthy stress?
Lisa Damour: Well, so the first thing we've got to do is even articulate that there is healthy stress and teach young people that. And I think one of the easiest ways to do that is to – one of the easiest ways is to talk about stress in the same way we talk about weight lifting, right that if you want to build muscle, you have to lift weights that are heavy enough to be uncomfortable. And what happens is that when you lift weights, eventually your muscles adapt. You know they gain strength, and what was difficult becomes easier, at which point, you know we move you up to heavier weights.
So, school stress, which is a lot of stress, you know the kids manage is just like that. You know when you get new material. When you get to a new grade, when you take a new hard class. At first, it's very, very stressful. It's new, it's heavier. It's harder than you're used to. If you stick with it, you will soon adapt. Your capacities will expand, and you gain strength, intellectual strength that you get to keep. And as soon as you've got it, we're going to give you harder work.
So, we can help teenagers embrace stress by acknowledging that there is such a thing as healthy stress. And though it is not pleasant, we can say, but here's the benefit. This is how you get a lot smarter. This is how you really build your intellectual capacities.
And then in terms of unhealthy stress, that's where we need to focus on recovery. Because, like I said, this dress of school is doable if there's an opportunity for recovery and so helping teenagers really know how they recover, how they like to recover doing that, moving right to it, doing it efficiently, creating space for it can make a big difference.
Kaitlin Luna: A few times during our conversation, we've talked about the need for parents to deal with their own anxiety. But I imagine you know, for parents who are who have read your book and you are listening right now, they might feel alarmed by these statistics and quite worried. So, what advice you have to keep for parents to keep calm so then they can then help their teen?
Lisa Damour: I think parents should feel very reassured, reassured by how much power they have here. That if parents can be calm, we know from research, it makes a tremendous difference in terms of the likelihood of their child becoming unusually anxious. So, the statistics are worrisome. But the news is good. There’s a huge amount we can do, and you know, then we can do it at a lot of levels over time. You know, we can help young people manage their friendships with one another. We can help them manage their romantic landscape, which is really, really anxiety provoking for them. You know, by talking about, you know, gendered relationships in the healthiest possible ways. We can give them strategies for a managing at school and also for girls in particular, think with them about what the culture asks and equip them to be shielded a bit from some of the really unfair expectations that our culture does hold for girls and young women. So, there's much, much we can do, and I really think parents should feel, you know, kind of delighted that this one is much more in their hands than they may have otherwise felt was true.
Kaitlin Luna: Absolutely. And overall, what do you think are the most pressing challenges facing young people today? Boys and girls?
Lisa Damour: We ask a lot of young people today. They are, I mean, accomplishing things academically in high school that we know are very unlike what their own parents were accomplishing. They are flooded with information. They have constant access to one another, which is sometimes fun, but I think it's often very tiring. I think those are all very big challenges.
I think, another thing I worry about is we don't talk very well about young people that when you look at how young people are described in the media, you know, it tends to sort of fall into these kind of negative stereotypes of, you know, the kind of naughty or they're, you know, they're doing the wrong thing or they're not, you know, doing what the adults want them to do. And, you know, we have the data that we are raising the best-behaved generation of teenagers on record. You know, they do fewer drugs, they're delaying sex. If they are having sex, they're using contraception. They drink less. You know, and there's some little blips here and there in the data, but, you know, on the broad strokes, these are really good kids.
And so, I actually think we should add to the stresses that teenagers face is that people don't really give them credit for how much they're accomplishing, how thoughtful they are and that we’re often instead focusing on behaviors that relative to previous generations, this is a really, really good group of kids.
Kaitlin Luna: Yeah, I think that's really fascinating. If we do give teens enough credit, you know, to, obviously they need people to guide them in their lives to make good decisions. But you know, a theme that's come up in our conversation is the fact that a lot of times teens can figure things out on their own or at least be given the chance to do that and that, you know, according to those, you know, the recent stats from the CDC, teens are using drugs less, drinking alcohol less, having sex less often with fewer partners. So, you said we are raising a good generation of young people. But at the same time, we're also looking to all you know, looking at all the things that aren't going well, or this to people who feel anxiety or depression or feelings of hopelessness. Do you have any more thoughts on that?
Lisa Damour: I think kids live up to expectations and kids live down to them, and so we never want to gloss over real problems And there are, you know, worrisome increases in the suicide numbers and we need to take those very, very seriously. But I do worry how it feels to be a young person who is so plugged into the media when so often the messages that you're broken or you're not doing it right. And I wonder if there can be within that a danger of a self-fulfilling prophecy, you know, a sense that, you know, emotions can so readily be out of control when in fact, most young people banish their emotions really very well.
So, I think we have to both be vigilant and take very seriously trends that, you know are moving in the wrong direction. And at the same time, I think, you know, we know so much in psychology about how to take care of people who are suffering, that I would love to think that we get our voice in there to say, Yeah, you know, there are things we can do, though, and there's ways to prevent feeling unduly anxious and if you do suffer with depression, weaken, really treat that. And to continue to advocate for, um of the ways in which human beings are resilient and could be helped to be resilient, that it doesn't have to be such a dark story.
Kaitlin Luna: I want to touch on your column a little bit for The New York Times. I mean, what are the topics that seemed to get the best reception from readers?
Lisa Damour: You know, it's such a funny thing. Sometimes it's a really timely topic. I wrote a piece called “Parenting the Fortnight Addict” and that piece just got a ton attraction because a fortnight just came up, swallowed a whole bunch of kids before parents even knew what happened on.
And you know what was so fun about that particular column and this is my favorite part about getting to write this column is that I got to actually unpack all of our psychological research about how videogames work in terms of, you know, basically an intermittent reinforcement schedule and various other things you know and describe that to a general audience.
But then sometimes it's the columns about really timeless issues. So, other columns that I've written that have gotten a lot of traction, basically people are just desperate for any help with their teenagers. People want to connect to their teenagers. They like their teenagers. And even when their teenager’s great, that doesn't always mean they're teenagers being great at home with them.
So, you know, in some ways, it's easy to get trashed with columns on teenagers. But others, you know, take up questions — like I wrote one about why teenagers become allergic to their parents, you know? And just that moment you don't often sort of thirteen is the height of it were like nothing the parent does is okay. And you know that one, you know, just got a tremendous response.
And I recently wrote one about how to give advice to a teenager. It was around the holiday time. And I think that the headline was you know “How to wrap a gift, how to wrap, a gift your teenager might open.” Right, because I think this is sort of one of those kind of perennial problems that parents have. You know, they’ve got all these, really, you know, terrific things they want to share with their teenager, and they cannot seem to do it in any way that gets a satisfying response or even a response. So, you know, I really try to sort of move around in what I read about both from the, you know, immediate concern things. So, obviously I've written a fair bit about stress and anxiety, to the sort of universals of family life that are difficult but normal and just to try to really, I use the training I got to make it available to a broad audience. You know, I think that that's a real thing that, you know, I'm always so grateful to see psychologist writing for, you know, general audiences because you know, we know a lot and it's not always well described by the media and we can do a good job of it.
Kaitlin Luna: I want to talk a little bit more about fortnight, briefly. It has taken the world by storm and, you know, parents seem to be struggling to keep their kids away from the game because it is a very social game. You can be on your phone, on like a game console, on the computer, it's really everywhere. But, how can parents manage their kids gaming overall?
Lisa Damour: Yeah, probably say in the same way, you know, I would start with the same advice I gave around managing technology, in general. You know, first draw lines around what you're trying to protect. And we have these things and, you know, and doing those things, you know, sleeping, studying, being with the family, getting physical activity. You know, those will keep a kid pretty busy if we protect them at the levels they deserve to be protected and so start there.
So, you might even, you know, just to paraphrase again, Like you might say, it's not that I'm against gaming is that I'm for sleep, you know, so the sleep is non-negotiable. And then I think, you know, from there it becomes very specific to families. You know, where they set limits on it. I've seen families do a whole bunch of different things from, you know, it's only on the weekends or it's a limited amount of time per day. Or, you know, you have to self-regulate, and if you can't, I will. You know, I think there's a lot of different ways for parents to manage it.
But, we do want to see the kids have variety in their lives. You know, it's just not healthy to just do one thing all the time. And, you know, certainly there are kids who really get lost in gaming and, you know, that's a moment where the parent needs to find a way to insist on some variety in terms of how their time is spent.
Kaitlin Luna: So, all is not lost.
Lisa Damour: No, no, no, no, no.
Kaitlin Luna: Some of the articles I was reading it seems like the few parents have just kind of thrown up their hands or just at their wits end. I don't know what it was, but I think it's important. You said just to it all is not lost or still boundaries that could be set and, you know, maybe phrasing it as not a deprivation, but what you're gaining from limiting screen time.
Lisa Damour: Absolutely. There are things that have to happen, and gaming is not one of them.
Kaitlin Luna: Well, thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Damour. I really appreciate your time.
Lisa Damour: Thank you for having me. Great to be part of your show.
Kaitlin Luna: If you've been a long-time listener or are new to our podcast, please consider giving us a rating in iTunes. And if you have time, write a review, we’d really appreciate it. Also, as I mentioned the top of the show, we love to hear from you directly. So, if you have any questions, comments or ideas to share, please email me at kluna@apa.org, that's kluna@apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is part of the APA podcast network, which includes other great podcasts such as APA Journals Dialogue about new psychological research and Progress Notes about the practice of psychology. You can find all our podcasts on iTunes, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also go to our website SpeakingofPsychology.org and listen to more episodes. I’m Kaitlin Luna with the American Psychological Association.
Lisa Damour, PhD, is an APA member who writes the monthly 
