From Chaos to Connection: Rethinking the Teenage Years

Foreign. Welcome to the Where Parents Talk podcast. We help grow better parents through science, evidence and the lived experience of other parents.

Learn how to better navigate the mental and physical health of your tween teen or young adult through proven expert advice. Here's your host, Leanne Castellino.

Welcome to Where Parents Talk. My name is Lianne Castelino. Our guest today is a mental health writer, a keynote speaker and a journalist.

Rachel Kelly is also a best selling author of five books. Her latest book is called the Gift of Teenagers. Connect More, worry Less. Rachel is a mother of five and she joins us today from London, England.

Thank you so much for taking the time.

My absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Rachel, you have raised five children. You've worked for over a decade in schools and universities with kids, and you've written extensively on mental health.

Can you take us through how all that came together in the Gift of Teenagers?

Sure. So my first focus was on adult mental health.

When I started in this field, I wrote a book about my own experience of severe depression, including some postnatal depression.

And because of that, I was so lucky, I started collaborating with mental health charities and particularly King's College London, where I became an associate in their psychiatry department. And at that stage I was looking more at adults.

But about five years ago, a little bit longer, I began to get more and more concerned emails from parents saying they were worried about their children, especially their teenagers. And I started to be more and more in touch with teenagers themselves going into schools, as you say.

And I began to think, there's something going, going on here. Parents are finding life very hard. Teenagers are finding really life very hard.

I think I'm going to pivot and focus more on young people and teenagers.

And that's when I started researching the book, talking to adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, talking to young people, teachers, parents, and obviously my own experience, and weaved it all together. And then the result was the book came out in May. Yeah, the Gift of Teenagers. Connect More, Worry less.

So doing that research and thinking about this topic as you did, your lived experience, as well, as a mother of five kids, and some of them being teenagers themselves at this time, what sort of stood out for you? What gave you pause?

I think that I was just so struck by how worried people were and how anxious people were, especially parents. And it felt to me as if this was not the best place to raise calmer and more resilient teenagers.

Because if we're worried ourselves, that gets reflected back in our relationship with our teenagers. And quite early in my research I did an interview with an adolescent psychiatrist. I was very, very struck by what she said.

She worked with sort of stick models like mom, dad, and teenager who's finding life difficult. And she was saying that in the therapy room, if you're working with a troubled teenager and the stick figures of the mom and dad, you collapse.

The teenager just cannot cope. They are overwhelmed themselves with some very strong feelings and a lot going on for them, a lot happening to the teenage brain.

And they need us parents to be calm and steady.

And so that was really what I was thinking, was that could we find ways as parents just to sort of dial the down, dial the d, can't get the right cliche, dial the worry, dial down a bit, stay a little bit calmer, and then interact with our teenagers from this calmer, more settled place. And I myself had been a very anxious mom, so I was kind of working on how could I be a little calmer?

And then I noticed that this was a much better way to get along with my teenagers.

It's interesting because a level of anxiousness or anxiety, a little bit of worry is sort of par for the course if you're a parent. But the book is called the Gift of Teenagers, which I have to admit caught my eye, Wondered, you know, where. Where is this going? Where's this title?

What does this title mean? Why did you choose to frame it as a gift?

Well, it was a bit of a big learning curve for me, but I think, you know, the cliche is that this is a very difficult time. And I. And I understand that. And to your point, I'm not saying we're not going to never worry because there will always be times.

But it seemed to me, and maybe this reflected my own experience with difficult mental health over the years, is that teenagers are a gift because we go to deep and dark places as parents of adolescents. And this is how we learn and grow. There are other ways to grow and learn. You know, lots of ways to find that psychological growth.

But sure as hell, raising teenagers is a very demanding time for a lot of adults. But we can turn this around by going deeper and looking into our own strong responses, whether we're angry or whether we're sad.

If we feel rejection, we can learn a lot. And actually, we grow and learn as people when times are tough.

So for me, that's one big reason that teenagers are a gift, because they force this deep psychological work on us.

And I'd say the second argument why teenagers are a gift is that this is a period when we can change our relationship with young people and end up with a very close adult to adult relationship. And this is a gift. We, we are raising an emerging adult and we have a chance to have a very unique relationship with that growing person.

And we're changing our relationship. They don't need us in the same way. We don't have to wipe their bottom or drive them to college or.

But we can shift that relationship from a kind of needs based, transactional, almost relationship to an adult relationship based on love and respect and connection and less worry. And so that's the second reason I call the book the Gift of Teenagers.

Because a of the book is how do we build this relationship and what could that relationship look like? And for me, it's such an exciting relationship and I just wanted to turn the whole dial around. You know, we can look at this in a very different way.

It seems to me, Rachel, as you're talking, that so much of it is about mindset, right? The parents mindset 100%.

Yeah.

So what can you say in terms of, you know, tips you can offer a parent about how to shift that perspective, sort of tweak that mindset to invite more connection and, you know, keep the worry at bay?

Okay, so this is almost the simplest thing, and it's on. When I started doing it, it immediately shifted the energy and the connection in the relationship.

So when you're engaging with your teenager, take a pause, try and get yourself nice and calm, maybe do a couple of breathing exercises, a little bit of mindfulness, and then before you even speak to them, bring to mind all their great qualities, all their gifts, and all their strengths.

So one of the dynamics I think it's really helpful to step away from is that they're the victim and that we're sorting them out and only we can fix them. As opposed to they are strong, growing, independent human beings. And if you bring to mind their strengths.

So before you say, please, can you pick up that floordrobe or I need you to help with dinner is just to turn around and think of all the times they've already helped, all the times they did pick up their clothes on the floor. And it's very subtle because it's a lot to do with energy. And it's not even anything you say.

It's just the kind of, almost the kind of kinetic psychic energy that you come to that relationship. And there are little practical things you can do, like lower your voice. You know, teenagers are very alive to threat.

Their threat system is more developed than ours. And so if we shout or raise our voice, they're immediately going to go into fear, fight and flight.

So little things like lower your voice, you know, don't shout at them, things like that. And then I'd say the third really obvious one is just. And it is allied to thinking of the virtues of them.

But also, and this is where there was some lovely research, and I love finding their research. It's called the Pygmalion effect, sometimes called the Rosenthal effect, which is to do with expectations.

And if we have high expectations of them, high expectations of trust and good behavior, they're much more likely to behave in a decent way. And that is so relevant to more dangerous situations or taking drugs or drinking or all the things we're scared of.

If we have high expectations, we're more likely to, to have a good and sort of nourishing and connected relationship.

When you say high expectations, some people might think, well, you know what, that's a really fine line because you don't want to exceed your expectations of them so that it is something that they can't attain. What can you say about how to channel and manage the expectations that you have as a parent of that child?

It's such a good point. And it's almost like it sounds sort of stressful. Almost like anything with the word high in it, it's immediately stressful.

Like high exam results, high expectations. What I would say is if you ally high expectations with reframing mistakes, which is, I like to say that there aren't any such thing as a mistake.

There are, you know, every, every stumbling block can be a stepping stone. Everything that supposedly doesn't work out can be a way that. To think again and to reframe things. I give you an example.

Let's say you have a boundary that you have a rule that they're home at 11 and they overstepped the mark and they're home at 12, on one level, they haven't lived up to your high expectations. They haven't followed through. But that can be a chance to sit down with them and maybe talk about what's happened and often use the I word.

So, like, I find it very hard because I have to go to work the next day. And if you don't come home when you're going to say you're going to come home, then I'm going to be exhausted.

Exhausted for work and that, those sorts of conversations. So I think if you ally high expectations with reframing the idea that anything is a mistake, you can come to a kind of a happy medium, as you say.

One of the things that your book talks about and you've been very candid about is your own mental health struggles. And I'm curious as to how that experience helped and shaped your parenting approach and especially parenting teenagers.

I think the really biggest learning that I probably had to do with my mental health was that when I was growing up. And I don't blame my parents, it's not in the spirit of judgment, but I was particularly good at doing what other people wanted.

I was really good at jump how high other people's expectations are of what I should study, what I should do, what kind of friends I should have. I was very alive to being a sort of people pleaser.

And I think that the way this has informed my parents is my parenting, is that what I would most wish for my teenagers and for your teenagers is to let them line up with what is truly right for them as opposed to what you want. And I see this all the time and I have huge compassion for parents because I don't think any parent doesn't get up in the morning and try their best.

But there can be this merging of what you want for yourself and what, what they want.

And I give you an example, like, so we have, you know, elite universities in Oxford and Cambridge here in the uk and you might hear a parent saying, hey, I got into Oxford. And you know, they have totally merged their identity and their wish fulfillment with their teenager.

Now look, it might be right for their teenager to get into Oxford, but you know what, maybe that teenager wanted to be a plumber and they didn't have that chance. And when I look back at my own mental health breakdowns, I had two very serious depressive episodes in my 30s and I ended up in hospital.

I think what a lot of therapy and a lot of work and research has done has been to try and help me line up with what is right for me and to do it with compassion and boundaries. But just to be able to do things like say no. I mean one of the reasons I broke down is I couldn't say no.

You know, I was working, I was being a mom, I was being a wife, I was being a hostess, I was being a friend. And I just didn't look after myself. So it's allied to a sense of self care and looking after yourself.

But it's, I think that's what I most try to do with my teenagers. And what I would say is that the five have very different outcomes. And in that I feel good.

They're not all mini me's, they're following their own dreams, more or less. There's a few bumps on the way. I wouldn't like to say it's all perfect, but remember, stumbling blocks are stepping stones.

So we're not trying to be perfect now.

One of the things that you get into in the Gift of Teenagers is the importance of parents really understanding how the teenage brain works. In terms of the brain science around this, what surprised you most in the research that you, that you delved into?

I think really a. How ignorant we are. We only really started looking at the teenage brain around 15 years ago.

We used to think that child development was just very big sort of naught till two, when we knew the brain was doing crazy things and all these new neural pathways. And then we figured out that the adolescent brain was also going through a crazy amount of change for quite a long time through to around 25.

So my book is called the Gift of Teenagers. But you know, actually a lot of, a lot of what I talk about can extend through into the 20s. I mean, I do make that point in the introduction.

It's, it's, it is a broad, a broad sweep. So, so that brain development keeps happening right through till 25. I think the other huge thing that I learned was that everything is very nuanced.

I give you an example. So people talk about peer pressure. So you know about this idea that teenagers are very influenced by peer pressure.

Well, they are, but actually it's a little more subtle than that. They do mind what their peers think, but only certain peers in certain situations. So they can actually be quite sensible.

Where things start to go wrong is if they're with the really cool guys, then the peer pressure becomes way more intense. And there's a very narrow understanding in the teenage brain, which is fascinating, and I didn't realize is that teenagers are really conservative.

They want the girls to be pretty and, you know, have blonde hair and be a certain kind of curvaceous shape. And they want the guys to be tall and strong and good at sport. It's really amazingly conventional.

I mean, it has broken down a little bit and the peer pressure really kicks in hard if a teenager feels they're in this kind of cool group.

So that's very interesting because that makes a difference for us as parents to keep a little eye on who are children are hanging out with and who their friends are.

And what I would say is if you're a parent and you're worried about peer pressure and what's happening to the teenage brain and that sensitivity, try and get your Teenagers to have one sensible friend. So they're going to a party, set up a buddy system, somebody you trust, and then that will dial down the peer pressure.

So I think bits of research are just a little bit more subtle sometimes than this sort of slight cliche about, you know, they'll do whatever their peers are going to do. No, they're a little, little thoughtful about how they respond to things.

In that same vein, your book has been described as being full of practical strategies for parents. Are there any other key strategies that you think that, you know, the average parent of a teen should really know?

Well, I like to give the example of sort of old me and newer me after sort of 20 years on the teenage front line or 15 years on the teenage front line. So I think when I was first a teenage mum, I was, as I say, quite a people pleaser.

And it got to the stage that one child would eat this and one child would want that. And I would make a big effort at dinner and all the different dishes and then I would shout upstairs and say, dinner, dinner.

You know, not doing this. The sort of the gentle voice that I was telling you about before.

And then of course, well, not of course, but they wouldn't necessarily come down, so I would scream harder and say, come on down. You know, it's dinner, you got to eat, you got to eat. If you don't eat, you're not going to, you know, how can you concentrate at school, etc, etc.

And I would be tremendously trying to force this sort of outcome. And one of the things I think that made that I learned was that you can really wish for your teenagers to come sit around the table with you.

You can't force the outcome. And the less you let go, the more you let go of trying to force them to do stuff, the more likely they are to come.

So I changed how I was as a teenage mom at dinners. So I used to just make what I wanted to eat and then I would get myself a drink and a nice magazine. I'm a journalist, I love magazines.

And I'd get my plate ready, everything would be ready. I would call up once and I'd say, it's dinner. And then I would just go settle and start to eat.

And it took a while before they realized that I was doing things differently.

And then they started to come for dinner on time and eat what was on the table and mums would say to me, well, you know what, if you don't force them to have dinner, they're going to be hungry. If you ever met a teenager who isn't hungry? They are going to come down eventually. And it's a little like the war on drugs in America.

You say no to drugs, you're drawn to drugs. You try and force them to do things. And another big thing happening in the teenage brain is this desire for autonomy. They want to be independent.

There's something called individualization, which is. A psychologist called Erik Erickson came up with it.

And it's about this sort of separation and they're becoming individuals and the way to do it is to go with it. And this is a good thing. Remember, it's a gift. We want them to grow up. We want to have an adult to adult relationship.

Would you tell your friend, would you scream up the stairs to your friend to come for dinner? So I think those are very sort of practical ways of changing.

And a lot of them are to do with you figuring out your own emotional regulation and your own ways of thinking and just getting yourself to this nice, calm place, you know, yes, you could have that really strong desire. Can't force the outcome, but honor it. Don't try and shut it down as a feeling. We can't shut down feelings. The more we resist, they persist.

Honor it, allow it, be with it, but don't try and force it. And it's a much less exhausting way to be.

In that same vein you talk about as well, you know, parents engaging with adolescents better.

What does that look like in terms of, you know, how can those engage that, that engagement be more successful at a time when that teen brain is developing and there's all kinds of physical, emotional, social things happening and you're just trying to communicate as a parent, but at the same time being mindful of engaging them.

So two things. The first is a sort of more broad philosophical point.

I think you're going to have to accept that you're not always going to engage them and that's okay. You know, we, we feel under such pressure. And, you know, it's funny because I call the book Connect More, Worry Less.

Sometimes that connection might not be a conversation. You could even just feel inside, you know, any parent listening.

If you close your eyes and you think how much you love your teenagers, I know they can drive you mad, but that connection is there. So sometimes they're not going to want to talk to you and that is okay. And you need to attend to the bit of you that might feel rejected.

Maybe you're going to have to call a friend or maybe you're going to go for a swim. Or do something else that addresses your emotional need for connection. So that's just a philosophical point, I'd say as a practical point.

A little bit of research I really like is the golden nine o' clock hour. And this is nice. So this is the idea that we want to appeal to our teenagers autonomy. 9 o' clock is a good time.

They're on a different circadian rhythm. They get up later, they go to bed later. You're probably pretty tired by 9 o'. Clock. Maybe you've been at work, you want to go to bed.

In a way, it's a, it's, it might sound like a not a good time to talk, but it's almost like your defenses are down. You're, you're less trying to be the powerful mom, like forcing or dad, like forcing them to do their homework or this or that.

You're, you're kind of less bossy. You might even be getting ready for bed. It's a great time for them to come in.

They get to choose as they come in, they get to choose how long they talk to you for. They get to choose, you know, what they want to talk about. And it's very interesting.

It's almost like imagine them like a deer that sort of would bounce away in the florist.

But if you're just available at a time that suits them, the worst possible time, obviously to try and get that connection is first thing in the morning. You're tired, they're tired, you're trying to get them to school, you're going to. The connection's not going to be so good.

So just being artful about when you try and connect as well as some of the things we talked about earlier, like that gentle voice and just being in a good, good space yourself.

Absolutely. Now we mentioned that you have five children ranging in age from 21 to 30.

So you've been through those teen years having done the research, having listened to all of that information and all of those perspectives. What else would you have done differently, if anything, when you were raising those kids?

Oh, I mean, so many things. So I had a very long experience.

So my older children who are in their, you know, my eldest son is 30, as you say, they were pre digital, largely pre Digital. So my 28 year old and my 30 year old, my 25 year old daughter is like, was like a pivot, the digital thing was starting.

I was deep into the digital world with the younger two and I think that one of the things I had to learn was what that means bringing up children in the digital age and what that means for them and trying to navigate that and understand what that means and how it changes your relationship. So I think probably I was a little asleep at the wheel because I'd had with the older ones, I hadn't had to engage with that, and I made quite a bit.

Few mistakes understanding the digital thing. I understood phones fairly early on, and I didn't give the younger ones smartphones. I gave them brick phones.

And my husband was pretty sharp on it, too. We haven't really mentioned husbands, but they're a key part of the story if you're lucky to have one or a partner or somebody who can help.

But yes, I was good on phones, but I was bad on computers. I didn't understand somehow computers had this aura of respectability. You know, we work on computers. They were doing homework on computers.

We had an office where part end of the kitchen where the computers were. And I thought, well, it's in the kitchen. We can see what's going on. Computers are okay, but actually they're not.

They've had quite a particular experience. They've been through Covid. They're completely digital natives.

And there are some particular issues around them which I had to really get up to speed on.

So what then did you learn in terms of.

And what can you offer in terms of how parents can navigate what really amounts to the minefield of social media these days, which, you know, you talk about the pandemic, it's just only exacerbated in terms of its impact on people's.

Lives in that age group in particular, 100%. I mean, I think I would. I would make a broad philosophical point before a sort of practical point. I think we have to think what is.

What is underlying the phone thing? Why. Why are teenagers so drawn to their phones? Why are we so drawn to our phones? And I would say that underneath it all is a longing for connection.

You know, what do we want? You know, I'm chatting to you now. I want to connect with you. I mean, I'm talking to your audience. I want to connect with them.

And our teenagers are no different. And I think that is the essential lure of the digital world is this longing for connection.

And it's not all bad because, you know, say you are in some lonely village in the middle of Nowhere. You're never going to find maybe another teenager who has perhaps the same outlook on some issue around identity or sexuality.

And that can be a wonderful way to find that connection online. So it's not all bad.

But what I would say is that we need to stay super connected as parents for as long as we possibly can, so that when our teenagers go online and they have the chance to connect with whoever they want online, and we're never going to be able to control that.

They start from, they bring themselves to their phone and if we keep that good connection, which the whole book is about, really how you're going to do that, and we've already shared some ideas, you got a better chance then of not losing them to this sort of Internet rabbit hole, because you hold on tight to that connection. And I'd say in practical terms, I think the best thing you can do is everything has to be done in a joint way, has to be collaborative.

If you tell your teenager, you know, you can't do this, you can't go on that, they're going to find a way. I have never. If you. If I talk to 30 teenagers in a school and I ask them, have you got round any restrictions? 100%, they get round, they.

They buy burner phones, they get their own vpn, they will find a way to go online if they want. You cannot force them not to.

The only way to do it is to build on high expectations, trust, communication and a straightforward conversation about the kind of stuff that they're going to find. And being very open is like, if you spend six hours on TikTok, how does that make you feel? And probably they're going to say, you know what?

I feel terrible. So we have to keep that kind of open communication and a very straightforward, like, you know, open questions like, how is it going to make you feel?

You know, what do you feel about it? And one final thing I'd say about phones that seems to work so well with teenagers is they have a very strong sense of social justice.

They are at the forefront of a lot of impressive movements. You know, Black Lives Matter, a lot of tolerance and acceptance of difference.

And if you talk to them about some of the exploitation that is happening in the pornography industry, if you talk to them about some of the exploitation that is happening among tech firms, about how they're using their data, they do not like it. And if you go back to the teenage brain, they are actually slightly more altruistic than adults.

And I think we want to tap into that and go with the grain of teenage development and appeal to their love of social justice and have those kind of conversations. And those seems to, they seem to work well together to reduce the horrors of social media.

If there was one thing that you would want readers of the Gift of Teenagers to take away from your book, Rachel, what would that be?

Oh, I would say believe in yourself. Line up with what is really true for you. Even though I've given you all this advice at the Gift of Teenagers, you have the answers.

And I think my book is just a way to help you figure out which. What are the answers for you? What is true for you?

The very best thing you can do for your teenagers is to be aligned and at ease and true to your values and what works for you. And from that place you'll have a great connection and you'll probably worry less and you may even enjoy them as a gift.

I would be remiss if I didn't ask you about the Netflix series Adolescence because it talks, you know, in many ways about what you're talking about and from the perspective of parents who may not know much about their kids lives.

So my question then is, what from that series did you take away in terms of how parents can maybe be more proactive about truly enjoying the gift of teenagers?

In a way, it's kind of like everything I have said so far is, is kind of relevant. I mean, it's, it's hard just to sort of, you know, give it one answer.

But what I would say is the most, for me, the most devastating scene in that film is the love and compassion of the parents. But they just didn't know what was going on. And I think a big motivation in writing my book was that I didn't always know what was going on.

And I feel that I've really tried to research their world.

So, you know, if you remember in the film, they don't know about what all these different emojis mean, and they don't know about things like incel culture and they don't know about how much the boy is a little bit like me. Remember, he's on his computer every chapter in the book.

So whether that's about the Internet or pornography or, you know, bullying, because essentially that boy was being bullied. What kind of things are your teenagers going to encounter at school online? And our best bet is to be informed.

And I mean, you know, each of those chapters has probably got about 30 or 40 bits of references and bits of research. You know, what is actually happening? What does it look like for them to take drugs what does that look like? It's not like it was for us.

They just go on their phone, they see a bunch of emojis, they press a button, an Uber drives up, they do a meetup, and they didn't even know that there are children being exploited in Bolivia, whatever it is.

So it's knowing what their world looks like and keeping that communication over and discussing it with them and, you know, just keeping open, open communication and being informed. Because there's nothing that irritates a teenager more than you don't know what you're talking about.

I mean, of course we're never really going to get inside their heads or their world, but we can do a jolly good, a jolly good try. And maybe gift to teenagers is at least trying to say, okay, here's a roadmap. This is what I found. This is what's going on.

Absolutely. Certainly so much food for thought for parents of tweens, certainly teens as well.

Rachel Kelly, author of the Gift of Teenagers thank you so much for your time and your insight today. We really appreciate it.

My pleasure. To learn more about today's podcast, guest and topic, as well as other parenting themes, visit whereparentstalk.com.