Talk With, Not At Teens
If you’re like me, you’ve probably heard a teenager say, “You just don’t understand me.” It’s a question that teenagers wonder about, too. Ayana, a sixteen-year-old living in Connecticut, told me that it’s something she’s thought about for such a long time:
That’s always been my main question. How can adults forget what it’s like being a teenager when they were once a teenager and had this same exact thing happen to them?
We’d talk about her experiences with school, friends, and boyfriends, and then she’d return to her question:
I just don’t understand how they can look at me and say, “I understand what you’re going through,” when they don’t.
There are many reasons why it can be difficult to understand what adolescents are going through, including the fact that they look and sometimes act like adults, making it easy to judge them by an adult yardstick and see their some of their behavior as “immature.”
There are other reasons too, including a cognitive bias we all have called “the curse of knowledge.” Researchers define this as a tendency to be biased by what we NOW know when we are trying to understand a less experienced perceptive—whether that’s what we used to think or feel (hindsight bias) or what someone else thinks or feels—like a young person.1 Think of a doctor trying to explain a medical condition and it gets more and more confusing—because this doctor is assuming we know what they know. That’s the curse of knowledge in action.
It also happens in parenting. Among the parents I interviewed for the Breakthrough Years study, Luke, the father of a 16-year-old in California, was unique in realizing that he actually didn’t understand his daughter’s point of view—her perspective. He’d called something she wanted to do “not smart,” and she “flew off the handle.” That blow-up caused him to rethink how he was seeing and talking with her:
Because of my experience and my age, it affords me a lot more experience to be able to look at the situation from a higher elevation.
But he felt he needed to change:
I can't dismiss it. My thought is if she feels that way, then it's relevant. I have to address it. It opened my eyes to see that I needed to look at things from her standpoint also.
A lot of us must say, “that’s not smart:” Overall, 37 percent of adolescents in the survey of 1666 adolescents conducted for the Breakthrough Years reported that people had acted as if they weren’t smart in the past year.
They also wrote about this in response to an open-ended question in the survey asking, “what would you like to tell the adults of America about people your age?” One in five said, “understand our development”—“we are smarter than you think.” Another one in twelve asked adults to listen with understanding, “to talk with us, not at us.”
We have a lot to offer—please listen.
—Sixteen-year-old boy
We have new ideas and we are important, we need more attention and inclusion.
—Sixteen-year-old girl
Don’t ignore kids our age just because we are young. Sometimes we have very important things to say.
—Fifteen-year-old boy
This theme surfaced in still another open-ended question in the survey—for one wish that could improve the lives of people their age. The response by a 16-year-old, says what I heard again and again: “I wish my concerns, my friends’ concerns, and my classmates’ concerns could be taken seriously.”
This sixteen-year-old continued with what adults say that makes her feel misunderstood:
“Everybody goes through it, you’ll be fine.” I feel this is an improper, disrespectful, trust-destroying phrase to use. Telling me my problems aren’t problematic solely because somebody else has experienced the same thing is wrong.
“That’s just your hormones! You’ll get over it.” But even if everybody goes through it, nobody should face the problem alone. Why isolate a struggling person?
“At least you don’t have [fill in the blank].” Invalidating somebody’s feelings because their pain isn’t critical is the most selfish thing I see in the lives of the people around me. Empathy, sympathy, and love is the proper response.
“This is a rebellious phase all teenagers go through.” If “rebellious” means standing up for myself, then I will be rebellious.
Half a decade of being told “You’re fine”—half a decade of having my feelings disregarded—has taken a toll.
A lifetime of “It’ll be better tomorrow” has lied time and time again.
Does this remind you of the words we sometimes use to comfort a grieving person after a death of a loved one—words like “this will pass.” Those words are well-intentioned when we say them, but can feel terrible when we are the grieving person and hear those words from someone else.
Adolescents are primed to be like emotional detectors. As they move out into the world, they are primed to react strongly to experiences so they can learn when they are safe or not, belong or not, can be themselves or not. I think of these big feelings as developmentally necessary. Young people are asking us to understand, to listen and respond with respect.
While we do so, we need to remember that they are their feelings, not ours. One friend remembers that when she told her mother about being excluded by other kids, her mother cried. That’s stopped her in her tracks. Maybe this rejection was worse than she thought. She’d wanted her mother to comfort her, but ended up comforting her mother.
I understand why her mother did this. It’s easy to be swept away by their feelings because they are intense, because they may remind us of similar experiences as adults, because they may transport us right back to our teenage selves, because we may want to protect our children from harm.
In the interviews I conducted with about close to 60 parents and their children from the survey sample, I asked both about the most effective parenting skills and strategies. Joshua a twelve-year old from California, has a unique way of putting two of the skills that emerged frequently:
“Listen before you talk” (the skill of pausing and reflecting before responding).
Listen with Your “When-I-Was-a-Child” Mind, Not Just Your “Now-I’m-an-Adult” Mind (the skill of perspective taking).
Lucy, the mother of a sixteen- year-old from Michigan, describes this as listening “with your heart—to be able to understand your child’s true wants, desires, and needs.” It means understanding each child as a unique individual and understanding their stage of development.
How we apply our “now-I’m-an-adult” mind is critical. We need to provide guidance and rules, of course, but to do so with insight into what adolescents are like. This is essential because no one—an adult or child—wants to be demeaned, observes Lisette, a soon-to-be sixteen-year-old in Arizona.
She’s right. When we feel understood—sensing that we’re appreciated, accepted, belong and being heard—can we open up, learn, and change. Lisette continues:
Maybe you didn’t do something that was really good, but if you have a sense that parents are on your side and understand, then they can counter that with wisdom and love.
Fourteen-year-old Robert says being listened to in an accepting way “is very motivating”—a stepping-stone to wanting to “do good.”
Let’s use rejection as an example of responding to their big feelings when you use the skills of pausing, reflecting and of perspective taking.
Let’s say that your child is upset by being left out. We might be tempted to say, “You’ll get over it,” but instead we can say, “Of course, you are upset about this. This is the time in life when you are moving out further into the world and your brain primes you to be on the lookout for where you belong. Someday in the future you might feel differently about this. Now let’s talk about your ideas for why you think this happened and what you might do about it.”
Let’s say it’s more than being left out. The other kids are mean. We can be tempted to say, “Don’t put any energy into what this person thinks or does. It should mean nothing to you. You are better than this!” Instead, we can say “I know you care a lot. That’s what being a teenager is all about. Right now, you are supposed to be figuring out what kind of friends you want, so naturally you care. Let’s talk about what you value in friends and how you can find friends who share those values.”
Understanding their development and taking with them, not at them can make a world of difference.
Birch, S. A. J., & Bloom, P. (2007). The Curse of Knowledge in Reasoning About False Beliefs. Psychological Science, 18(5), 382-386. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01909.x