Oct. 28, 2025
Mental health problems in teenagers. We can't just blame phones.
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What do you think of this episode? Do you have any topics you'd like me to cover? Why is it that so many teenagers today seem to be struggling with mental health? In this conversation, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Matt Richtel reveals the surprising science behind adolescent development, explaining why teens aren't 'difficult' they're doing an important job and how there's a fundamental mismatch between biological adolescent development and the world in which we now life. One of th...
What do you think of this episode? Do you have any topics you'd like me to cover?
Why is it that so many teenagers today seem to be struggling with mental health?
In this conversation, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Matt Richtel reveals the surprising science behind adolescent development, explaining why teens aren't 'difficult' they're doing an important job and how there's a fundamental mismatch between biological adolescent development and the world in which we now life.
One of the key problems nowadays is that kids are going into puberty earlier, while the information age is bombarding them with vast amounts of new data and ways of comparing themselves before they're developmentally ready.
In response, instead of going out to conquer the world, they're now conquering on the inside, which is why he's called them Generation Rumination.
What explains adolescent behaviors, risk-taking, reward-seeking, and the ongoing mental health crisis? How does adolescence shape the future of the species? What is the nature of adolescence itself?
In this episode, Matt explains why the neurological mismatch between an ultra-potent environment and a still-maturing brain can lead to anxiety, depression, and other mental health challenges.
More importantly, he gives us solid, science-backed techniques, to help our kids navigate a difficult new world.
Matt Richtel: https://www.mattrichtel.com/
Rachel's Substack: teenagersuntangled.substack.com
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I don't have medical training so please seek the advice of a specialist if you're not coping.
My email is teenagersuntangled@gmail.com
And my website has a blog, searchable episodes, and ways to contact me:
www.teenagersuntangled.com
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You can reach Susie at www.amindful-life.co.uk
WEBVTT
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Rachel, hello and welcome to teenagers untangled, a parenting hug where we combine expert information and our own experience to help you come up with the best options for parenting your tweens and teens. Judgment free.
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I'm Rachel Richards, journalist, mother of two teenagers and two bonus daughters. Now do you ever wonder why there seem to be so many teenagers with mental health challenges, why youth emergency rooms that used to be full of broken bones are now dealing with broken minds and what you can do as a parent to help your child not just cope but flourish in a shifting world. Well, today's guest has answers from explaining what's going on with what he calls generation rumination, how what we sometimes see as problems are actually an important feature of being an adolescent, and He offers us some solid, science proven answers for how to help kids flourish. He's also a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and dad of teens himself. It's Matt Richtel, author of how we grow up. Hello.
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Thanks for joining us. Hello.
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How are you? I'm really, well, I'm great to have you
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on what are bonus daughters?
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Oh, they're my stepdaughter. They're such a bonus. Oh, yeah, no, they're they're 30 and 28 and they've been in my life since they were two and six, and I just adore them. And they are an absolute bonus. Gotcha, because, because it was, it sounded to me like you opened a box of cereal.
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I guess that makes sense. Yes. Well, now everybody knows. If you've all been wondering and thinking, I need to write to Rachel, here it is, you have the answer in 2020 you were dispatched by the New York Times to try to understand the adolescence mental health crisis, and you've been investigating it ever since. So we're not imagining this mental health challenges and this big increase in self harm. But you're clear it's not covid that caused it, and it started earlier than that. But what have you been discovering? Yeah, thank you. And yes. This began with exploring adolescent mental health, and it it led to some answers and to some more questions. The answers included, yes, something is going on with adolescent mental health. Part B, it's not that simple, and some of the answers you've heard are oversimplified. And finally, it led me to ask, okay, we've talked a lot about the phone and the device, what about the person holding the phone? Who are these creatures? And I realized that predicate to understanding the relationship between phone and adolescent meant first understanding adolescence, and I've come up with a way of framing adolescence that I think represents a whole bunch of learning over the last 15 to 20 years that's a little different from The framework Freud held and Anna Freud held, can I offer a new framework for please do Thank you. Okay, we're here to learn adolescence is a period with a very clear purpose, and that purpose is this, the reconciliation of the known and the unknown in a very fast changing world, what is known is what your parents tell you, Hey, these are the tools you need to survive. This is how the economy works. This is what culture and society looks like. What's unknown is what actually works.
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And as the world changes, it is vital that each new generation learn to take what we've understood and match it against what is actually out there.
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Evolutionary Biology has, in effect, programmed a group of young people to take the baton we've handed them and make sure that their direction and our direction can work together.
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Last sentence, this is in effect, a period of profound information processing, and it's happening right now when there's a lot of information, yes. And in your book, you talk about how, for generations, the territory being explored was physical, and now it's it's not, it's not, yes, the information that they were trying to reconcile at one point was, let's just call it more basic, or more physical. For instance, we as adults had explored or conquered a certain amount of physical territory.
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The exploration from young people happened by crossing the river behind our home.
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Or our territories, our nation states, our states to discover whether what was true in the town that they grew up was also true in the mountainous area.
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Remember the phrase? Well, this is an American phrase, but it's it's probably gained wide currency. Go west, young man, yes. Does that ring a bell? The full of the phrase, which is never quoted, is, go west, young man, and grow up with your country. Now setting aside that that was about men and so it was both American centric and male centric. Throw that out. The bigger idea was you will go conquer some physical territory and help us discover what else is going on in the world. But now, much of our exploration is happening between our ears. Who am I? What are these ideas? What is gender?
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What is right and wrong? These are entire new territories that young people are exploring today.
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Yes, and that in itself, I mean, that's it's not a bug, it's actually part of who they are.
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And I was very interested, because you said something that also has been said by Dr Lucy Fuchs on this podcast, which is that not all teenagers are rebellious, because we look at them and we say, Well, why is my teenager being so difficult? But they're not. They're not all rebellious. In fact, they're very conformative a lot of teenagers, but it's not conforming to necessarily what their parents are telling them.
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They're conforming to things that matter to them outside of the home. Yeah. So really, really, good point. And I would even quibble with whether they're rebellious at all, but I'd like to break down that group to the conforming and non conforming. First of all, there are huge chunks of adolescents who, generally speaking, trust what is known their parents are saying, and their schools are saying, This is what you should do. And many follow those attributes. What appears to be rebellion, or has often been characterized as such, to my mind, is a spectrum of young people who are more prone to test whether the things that we say are known remain true or ever were true in the first place. And you might say, Well, that sounds like rebellion.
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They're being jerks. They're not trusting us. But actually, you're right, this is a feature, not a bug. They're not only testing for their own sake.
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They're testing for the sake of the survival of the species.
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Yes, if the world changes and we don't retest it, or if a premise we held was too simplistic and we missed the next beat, we're not going to be eradicated, but there could be real cost to not exploring. The brains of adolescents are programmed to think about the new information and question what they've been suggested and told yes, and the rewards, if they manage to find that new thing, can be very high. You know, it's like finding a new a new world or a new whatever.
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You've picked the word reward, so that in the brain of an adolescent, reward is much more salient. The way I would think about it is, Rachel, is that at this point in my life, if you said to me, Hey, how would you like to go have some pints of beer? I would think, well, the reward may be modest, and I'm going to feel like crap tomorrow. Yes. But if you're a young person, you think, hey, something good could happen. And I'm not even thinking about tomorrow morning.
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I'm thinking about the potential reward of that experience.
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Because, as you said, something magical might happen. Probably not. Probably you're just going to be hung over, but some period of the time it'll work out.
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Yeah. Also the things we want our teenagers to do have risks in them, in themselves. So, you know, we want our kids to venture out into the world in a in a way that aligns with what we think will be safe and will reward them in in line with what we've always believed to be the right thing to do, like get a good education and get a good job. But for them, these are quite risky things, because we've actually got quite a high level of competition in the workplace now compared to what it used to be, because there's so many graduates coming out of universities and and just generally, socializing, when people have spent a lot of time online, all those things can feel very risky now to teenagers, is that what you're finding? Yeah.
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Yes, and you've almost got something that is one of the biggest, one of the biggest sources of blowing my mind in the course of learning about this, which is that things we held to be true were, in fact true for us. And I will give you an example that pertains very much to this conversation.
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It was true for me and my generation, that reading books was how we learned. It was social currency. It was how we trained our brains, and there was enormous efficiency. It was, in fact, Rachel true, yeah, my kids listen to podcasts.
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They this is how you and I are communicating information. Now, is that any less true? But parents are, I don't know if you feel this with your it's 19 and 17 or your girls, yeah, yeah.
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And hold your bonus kids, 30 and 28 how much? How often do you have you had a conversation about reading with them? Well, actually, fair amount, because we do read a lot as a family.
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Okay, so you do, yeah, it still reads.
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Feel rotten. Well, you're in a, you know, not, in an anomaly, but it's harder and harder to get kids to read. For them, much harder. To your point about the complexity or changing economy, it may serve them to ingest, digest and metabolize information in a different way.
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Here's the punch line of this that's blown my mind. Both things are true. It was true for us that a certain way of learning was was the way to survive. It is true for them that a different way of learning may be the way to survive. And if you want to add a wrinkle about why this is also stressful and feels like rebellion to adults. It's because this is also very threatening to us.
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It's one of the big takeaways of this book, how we grow up.
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We cannot always take things so personally. As parents, they are not rejecting us. They are matriculating, sometimes, into a new environment, and one that economically can be scary for us because we don't understand it.
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I That's so profound. I absolutely totally agree. And I think I do wonder, though, when we look at what they're trying to navigate, the big difference for between the world we navigated in the world they're navigating is our world was, by definition, quite limited, whereas for them, I think you even said this in your book, there's almost too much opportunity. There's too much design space, and that can be overwhelming. Yeah, and I want to put that you really, really important point you bring up, and I may I divide it in 2.1
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is every generation of parents has felt the same way. So one thing to recall is that in the 1960s the parents of those children thought they're going into the wilderness. It's so complicated they have no idea. And you can even go back and read quotes at the time where people said, the world so complicated it will never be any more complicated than it is. So bit of context is that has been experienced by parents and older generations for a big period of time. But nonetheless, I think it takes us to a real fundamental point about how we help our kids, which is not to help them.
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Our emphasis shouldn't necessarily be helping them figure out a specific instance or a specific challenge, but rather how to cope emotionally in a very fast changing world that throws a lot at them. And this is why the book How We Grow Up also applies to us as parents, because of if nothing else, what I understand now is this world is not getting simpler, and one of the challenges that we face as older generations, and I would argue even reflects our complicated politics today, is some people are very hopeful we will return to a quote, unquote, simpler time. But there is no evidence in any prior experience that things are going to go back to the 1950s No, so that's a really good point. So it so it makes us the tools we want to give them are not you must read a book, because books are how things are always been done.
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Rather.
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Other.
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How are we going to help you recognize that it's a very complicated world, and you can't get thrown off emotionally every time something changes, feels chaotic, feels emotionally up at ending. Oh yes, that's actually a really, really important point. And I think one of the problems, which you raised in the book, is that kids are reaching puberty way earlier than they ever used to.
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So you know, they're physically changing and they're they're tipping into puberty when their brains really aren't up for the level of things they're being exposed to, right? So this fits in directly. Puberty. We've often thought of as being about reproduction, but it's actually a really fundamentally a neurological and neurochemical event, and that event is set up by puberty, when a bunch of hormones come in that sensitize the adolescent brain to the world around them. Why? Oh, yes, the reason goes back to the very what we've been talking about earlier for a long time. As a child, pre puberty, you've been raised in a home where you were taken care of. When puberty hits, your body and mind are preparing for reproduction.
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Should you choose to do that, but they're also preparing for you to be able to care for your offspring and yourself, and in order to do that, your attention has to go from take listening exclusively to the people who cared for you, your parents, to paying attention to the world around you so that you can navigate it. Okay, that's big picture, but now what's happened is puberty has set in earlier.
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Why that is is a bit complicated, but just to give you the numbers, roughly in the Western world, puberty hit for girls at the age of 14 in the year 1900 now it's about 12 for boys, it follows a similar path. We don't exactly know, because there's first menstruation for girls, so we can measure it. Boys don't have so singular of an event.
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For the sake of simplicity, the theory is that as our caloric intake has changed, we our bodies have understood that we are safer to reproduce at an earlier age because we have enough energy. But that is not settled science. What is more important for this discussion is, if you are age 12, and your brain becomes alert to the world around you, so now it's two years, earlier than used to happen, you are suddenly sensitized to a whole bunch of information. But the big but here is, the rest of your brain is not fully developed, yet the prefrontal cortex has not developed any more quickly.
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Therefore, there's a mismatch between what you're taking in and you're sensitive to and what you can process effectively.
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That's so fascinating. And that mentalizing, I think Lucy Fuchs talked about it,
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the mentalizing being that you start to understand that other people think things differently from the way you think, and that they will be having opinions about you, and that when they smile, they may be being sarcastic, whereas when you were younger, that wasn't such an important thing, because biology tells us this could be life or death.
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They could they might be about to kill us, if they're being sarcastic. Bingo. And one of the, one of the my, my most favorite studies that I learned about in this book is drawn, is drawn from a nonsense word that researchers at Stanford came up with. And the nonsense word is called tweetish, www, if you're listening and you say that has no meaning, you're right, it's made up. They what these researchers wanted to do was find a word that no one had heard of before, and then they asked mothers to speak this word to their children, and they asked strangers to speak, strange women who were not known to the child to speak this while these children were having their brains imaged, and they followed the brain imaging through puberty or across puberty, and what they discovered was, after puberty, the brains of children lit up more so when they heard a stranger's voice say, puigdewalt, but before puberty, it lit up for their mothers.
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Now, why do you think that would be? Well, they tuned into learning from other people, not the people at home. They only got one ear open for what their parents are saying, and you know, the other people.
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Much cooler, and they've got things to offer them that they will learn from. They have to they must, because they're they're mothers and fathers, we are less relevant in that movement to the rest of the world. So you say, Why does my kid listen to the peer group saying totally stupid stuff when I'm telling my kid totally smart stuff, it's because it's not about smart or stupid at that point. It's about moving into the environment. You must survive it. And so the example you give of the smile is the smile, real or sarcastic at the age of eight, it may not matter, because the person who you have to read is your parent. That's where the food comes from.
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That's where the bed, the roof, gets put over your head. But at some point you've just got to know, what does that smile mean?
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Is it www? Is it angry? Is it sarcastic? Is it authentic? If you don't know, you may not eat or you could be imperiled in the grand evolutionary scheme of things. Yes, yes. It makes so much sense. And for us parents who are watching our kids look outward, it's quite stressful, but when you understand it, it makes it much easier to cope with. But so now we've talked about puberty, and I you know there was lots of stuff in the book about some of the chemical things that are going on, but actually, what I'm interested in is, how does that make you then, as a parent and as someone who's looked at the Science view the relationship with social media and with having access to the internet, yeah, The the the big argument to this point has been that social media is making our adolescents anxious and giving them mental health distress.
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I think it's too simplistic, and the first thing I want to say is that there is a lot of science that has tried to connect the dots between using social media and anxiety and depression, and if you look at the very specific science that measures what happens after a young person uses social media, some feel less Happy and some feel more happy. So that alone does not describe why young people are distressed.
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However, one of the arguments that I find pretty powerful here is that when someone is online all the time, this can be TV, it can be social media. It can be whatever they are online at the expense of some very important behaviors that we know to be healthy for the developing brain. Yes, this is what I think of as a Displacement Theory.
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Foremost, Rachel, full stop, is sleep. So, yeah, I wish you could exactly No, I did one. I did an episode just just recently about the importance of sleep. Absolutely, I'm 100% with you. Go on. Sorry to any adult out there, I would say name the circumstances under which you've overreacted, gotten mad at someone for something you weren't actually mad about, had a tantrum at work or with your spouse or partner, I would argue that so much of the time it's when you are tired. So now you take an adolescent who is already hyper attuned to the world, and you take away an hour and a half of sleep because they've been playing Bing Bong on their internet. Bing Bong, not an actual name, but right there, you've explained a huge amount of the problem. Then mix in, you're online all the time, so you're not exercising.
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Exercising not only can make you tired, but it can reduce those that adrenaline and it can help you process information that you're already feeling overwhelmed with. So when you see things like sleep, exercise, in person, interaction which allows for processing of information, when you see those things go down, it's not a direct result. The challenge isn't necessarily a direct result of watching Instagram, it's what all those hours displace that are very healthy so. So the way I think about it isn't is social media harming my kid? It's what do I first need to give to my kid in their lives to create a foundation upon which they may go do some other things that I don't understand or like are not part of my truth, and may be part of their truth. But first, there are some things I know to be scientifically proven, sleep, exercise, in person, interaction.
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Www, Matt, I feel like you read my sub stack. I wrote an entire section where I wanted to explain to parents how I would go about introducing devices into the home and how I would think about them. And I said, before you do anything else, and even if they have devices, go back to are they getting the sleep? Are they getting the in person interaction, and are they exercising? These are absolutely fundamental things that really, really matter to the mental health and that and just the physical health of us human beings, right? Yeah, it's, it's, it's. These are not negotiable things. Reading maybe a form of bringing in information. I'm not picking on reading. I write books, but I just want to draw a distinction between things that are essential. And you would say this of nutrition. If you ate sugar all the time, it would come at the expense of eating good things, and you would suffer, and you would get diabetes. It's obviously, we're all coming to the similar thing.
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Yeah, it's just important that we put this stuff in place. So I wait, Rachel, can I? Can I just can I interrupt there real quick, because we're all coming to the same things, but we're not, and this is really important. There is a line of thinking that says these devices are destroying our young people, and the reason I make a nuance about this is that I don't think these devices are going to go away, and I think they're part of the economic structure of our young people's lives. So I think we need a different framework than just saying this is the devil and we must keep it out of our lives. I'm not. I make no defense of the tech companies.
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They want all our attention, but I think some of the narrative has been too simplified in a way that is going to create an internal conflict in our society that could be really challenging for us with our young people.
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Let's get at the truth, which is, there are certain things we need, rather than feel threatened by something that is inherently part of our lives, and PS that we are capitalizing on through our own podcast.
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There our own demands for attention. I mean, it just some of the troubles me. It's how I talk to a lot of my listeners, and when I said we are, I mean, it's this kind of podcast, and the guests that I have on this podcast, I really am grateful to Jonathan height for for bringing this to people's attention, but I think that what's happening is these singular, singular messages can be really problematic, and they also cause huge tension in homes. I've got lots of parents writing to me talking about the impact it's having on their relationship with their spouse, because they can't agree on the way that they run this at home, and it's it's causing a lot of problems. I'd like to add a layer to it, and I agree it's great that it's Jonathan put this on the map.
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But I what I argue in this book is that the challenge we face as a society is much more fundamental for how our young people grow up and how we grow up, and the much more fundamental is whether it's the device or something else, the complexity of the world is not going to change. We are going to continue to have change, and it may even continue to accelerate.
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So if our devices are the current modality in which that information or change is presented to us if they're the current way in which information is being delivered. They may not always be, but the fundamental challenge remains that we have a highly sensitized brain of an adolescent trying to reconcile what is known and what is unknown in a fast changing world. And if we're going to help them grow up. We have to get it that we can't just say it's only the device's fault.
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Yeah, I know I love that. I love that. So, so we've talked about the ways in which devices can displace really important activities, and I absolutely concur. I love what you're saying. What other things would you say are fundamentally important, coming back to the mental health challenges that you're talking about, and are the importance of building resilience into our kids lives.
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The way I started to think about this is I've started to think about how what it feels like to feel like an adolescent, and I think I can give the rest the way all of us an experience of what that is. This is what I think adults may try to internalize as we get to what to do about this. Have you ever had a day where you got bad sleep and you had an argument the night before with your spouse or partner, and you're driving to work the next day and you see a car next to you, and the person gives a look that you can't interpret, and you suddenly decide you want to murder that person. Ie Rachel, this is road rage, and it's important. What's important about the analogy is we feel this way occasionally.
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As a young person, you may feel this way a lot, but the this way in the sentence is, what's important about that story is we're not actually mad at the driver across from us. We're tired. Maybe we're processing something that happened with our boss or our jobs, our work, our company. Maybe it's something that happened with our partner, our spouse, our kids, as we approach our young people, I want you to imagine that they're going through that road rage experience. But it may be the road rage version, or it may be the I'm suddenly in love version, or it may be the everyone in eighth grade hates me version, but there's not a one to one relationship between the thing they're expressing.
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IE, everyone in eighth grade hates me. I hate that driver and what actually prompted that emotion. So the very first thing I would ground this resilience conversation in, as you put it, is, how do we help people, young people, understand that they're going to be thrown off a bunch emotionally by a complicated world, and when that happens, how do I get back to a place of center and sanity where what I actually do is just ignore that driver altogether, or maybe wave and smile. Oh, I love this.
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That's That's where, that's, to me, the framework for the next steps in this, I think, where we've come as a society from, the place where everything was Freudian, where that discomfort came from your parents or whatever is we we increasingly understand that this is a kind of information overload. What do you do in a period of information overload where you're tired, you can't make sense of what you what's known and unknown?
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A few basic steps. The first one I'm going to call take a cold shower.
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It sounds overly simplistic and silly, but it's a metaphor and a concrete example at the same time, in those moments of intense neurological phenomenon, our brains are essentially hijacked by a concoction of chemicals that we can't necessarily talk our way out of. Maybe you can.
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But what's interesting about some of the science today that's drawn from cognitive behavioral therapy and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy is they're aimed at helping young people, or all of us process emotion that is as much a neurochemical event as it is a reaction to a specific thing. If you take a cold shower, it can actually change your neuro chemicals, but let's not overdo that one, because it's it's too simple.
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Doesn't work for everyone. You can put your face in the snow, you can get exercise, you can get a good night's sleep. You can have a cry, and if you can afford it, and this is probably where society should go, is you would have some tools taught to you by cognitive CBT or DBT. Do you know these broad ideas your audience? Yes, we talk about Yeah, that will help, help you learn to process these emotions in a way that doesn't have you ruminate necessarily on them.
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For instance, your kid comes to you and says, everyone in eighth grade hates me, if that, if you ask your kid, let's talk about whether everyone in eighth grade hates you, you you may actually get them ruminating on that very idea when, yes, when that is a period of time when their brains are, I don't know. It's like when they say, You made me the same thing for dinner. I hate your guts. I I don't know. You can go down the list of things that sound, that are sound irrational, and they are irrational.
00:34:04.619 --> 00:34:59.920
What the metaphor of being in the cold water or any of these other examples stands for, is helping them work through that period of intense emotion, so that then you can have the conversation the next day, after sleep or after exercise or after a meal, or after, you know, just letting that metab that work through their system. You might go, they might say, You know what, I realized Johnny likes me in eighth grade, and then you never even had to seize on this period of intensity when people point at the mobile device as the cause of this. I think what they're getting at indirectly is that there's a whole bunch of information coming at someone that someone has to process. Our job is to help them figure out how to get through those periods when the emotion is too much.
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When the overload is too much, and then they can look at the driver next to them in the car and go, Oh, you were actually smiling. Let's listen to Sergeant Pepper on the same radio station. I don't know why I thought of that example.
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So that that's that I think, is how we grow up is by coming to terms with this information processing experience. So it's actually going through it the whole thing, rather than trying to put it away and ignore it. It's interesting, isn't it? Because I don't know you see, you, you've got a boy and a girl. I've got girls. I know that they come at things in a slightly different way. And I have found with my girls that one of the most effective things is just, if they come home and they're keyed up, I you know, sometimes they need to just go off and do their thing. And if you push them, it's all you're just going to cause problems. You have to let them find their path through that emotion. But also, if they do tell me something, I just go, That sounds really hard. Bingo, and that's it. That's all this validating. Yes,
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it the reason is, going back to our framework, let's say we add more information. I'm going to tell you what to do. This is you're actually adding information to information overload. So it would be like when your computer is frozen and you're just like hitting the enter key.
00:36:23.420 --> 00:36:54.460
That's a great analogy. That does not go well. Also, letting them do their own thing is an important leads to another some leads to something we began with, which is, you can't take this stuff personally. And a lot of times, what parents do in that situation is they go, I'm going to my room and shutting the door, and then the parent says, Don't talk to me like that. I put, you know, they take it personally, but that is also adding information into a system that is already overloaded.
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There is no rational way for that brainstorm to take in any more wind or rain, let it pass. But that means, dear parent, fellow parent, my compatriot, I love you. I know you're there. I feel it is when they say that mean, that thing that comes off as mean to us,
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we can't react.
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Yeah, it's it's counterproductive, and they're not learning a lesson in that moment because they cannot.
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Yeah, no, I absolutely love that. I mean, one of the other things that you talk about in terms of just help, because you've got the sort of DBT things, like the ice water, and you can physically just stick your head in a bucket of iced water,
00:37:40.820 --> 00:37:53.260
and that way you're saying you can or you can't. You could, one could, you can't. I have done it. You could, yes, so just kind of reset the system.
00:37:46.840 --> 00:38:59.739
It's surprisingly effective some portion of the time. I urge people to try it. It's a really strange transformation. I don't think this sort of dive reflex, isn't it? It's sort of, anyway, the other thing, one of the other things you talk about, is the dinner table. And I go on about this all the time because, and I'm quite surprised by how many parents don't do this. And I totally understand when people have got very difficult schedules and their kids are off going different things. You know, it, it does slide. I understand that. But finding at least one day a week when you're all around the table can make such an important impact on your child's life. The way, the way I've come to think about the dinner table is the original form of social media. And if we're going to counter program our kids in certain environments, the dinner table is a great place to do it, and I've thought about another piece of the dinner table to avoid being part of the problem. The dinner table might you might think of it as being less of a negative space. So let's say you're constantly preaching at the dinner table because you feel it's your only chance to talk to the kids.
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But if you think of it as the original social media space, I don't think we need to add necessarily to the fear mongering that the world is already projecting upon them. So sometimes I really avoid saying like, man, the politics are this or what a terrible world we live in, because you're in effect, adding a message of fear and information that is really hard.
00:39:27.440 --> 00:39:59.920
Let let them talk, tell them things are going to be okay, because they most certainly are going to be okay in all but a few circumstances. So just think of yourself as the original form of social media, and what would you want your message to be, Oh, I love that. I love that. And I think also as a parent, so you know the mother or the father, what we're doing is we're setting an example of what it is like to be an adult in the world, and if they see us really not navigating it well, or all doom and gloom, it's just going to add that, that sense that everything's going.
00:40:00.000 --> 00:40:55.239
Going to pot, and it's, you know, nothing's ever going to be good. So I do think a bit of levity, and also don't stress about the quality of the food. I mean, just put something, something. The other word I'd use here, and I think it's, it's a watch word for them as they go through this and us, is curiosity. If we could teach them even there's a handful of skills, but one of the most important, I would say, is curiosity. And the reason for it, going back to the framework for how we grow up and survive in a difficult society or a changing society, and which makes it difficult is the more curious we can be in our approach to that, the less rigid, the less threatening all of those changes are going to be. So if we can model curiosity when they come across a new thing in the world, rather than see it as a threat, they may say, that's an opportunity to learn something.
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Yes, yes, absolutely. And so we can be curious by showing them whenever they say something, rather than thinking, Oh, I have the answer to that. Or I can fix that is asking them questions. My daughter's just started at university, and she'll hear things that sort of surprise her or upset her, and I said, Just come at it with curiosity. Just always ask the people. So how did you come to that viewpoint that's really interesting, and you don't even have to put your viewpoint across, because I think all of us feel that it's really important to have a view.
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And I've noticed my teens feel very this is really important.
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It is actually what I would consider to be a pretty significant defect of the political and cultural environment that we're in right now is that everybody has to have an opinion, because what it forces us to do is it forces us to become rigid about things that are complicated, yes, and then we can't. Then our egos get involved and and I would suspect that happiness and curiosity are pretty closely linked, although I have zero evidence to that effect, as I now exhibit an opinion without but, but what I what I really am getting at is when someone's backed into a corner and feels they have to defend a position that is pretty rigid. It's, it's not an easy place to be. If you can say, you know, these are my inclinations, but I'm there's, this is pretty tough topic. What do you think you've immediately taken a huge burden off yourself? Yeah, and I think that so many kids, they're seeing a lot of stuff on social media, they're seeing people with very strong political opinions, and they don't know enough. And I keep saying to them, you don't have to have an opinion on everything. Just, you know, pick things that really matter to you and the rest of it. Just ask questions and allow people to tell you what they think. One thing I want to do before we finish is I also want to go through one of the really wonderful things you talked about, which is this critical role of routine. A while ago, I asked all my listeners, look, anyone who's not having arguments at home about bedtime and thing, you know anything, just tell me what's your what's your secret? Tell me your secret. And every single one who wrote to me and said it's Oh, it's simple, said it's just routine, it's our family, all stick to the same routine. We have a very certain way of doing things, structure around certain things, so that you wait. And you talked about this in your book, where you say, teens crave structure, you know, the bedtime they're getting the homework done, limiting, limiting device use, but not rigidity about what they're thinking and saying, yeah, yeah. What those routines do is they establish the things that we know work so that there is more brain space, emotional space, neurological muscle to grapple with the things that are more complicated. There is nothing complicated about whether you need sleep.
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Therefore, if the routine involves taking the device out of the room at night to reinforce sleep. If the routine involves this is when we eat, and these are the healthy things we eat. Those help the brain through this explosive information processing period.
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The beauty of routine is it puts the tools in place so that other things can work. And I really like the point you make about being less rigid about what people think and feel, because in particular, feelings are when, when they get cut off, they create a lot of sense of conflict inside a young person, we can't tell them what to feel, no can't tell them what to think, but they but if they are rested and fed and cared for and loved, they're less likely to have destructive or self destructive feelings, because their neuro chemicals aren't going nuts.
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Is trying to compensate for sleeplessness and lack of nutrition and lack of feeling safe.
00:45:08.760 --> 00:45:25.519
I love that. I just want to say that there is a genetic predisposition in some kids to be more distressed than others, and that's that's that's not, that's not necessarily what the parents doing or anything.
00:45:21.920 --> 00:45:33.320
That's just, you know, we, we have to understand that, yeah, it's we. What we've left out here is there are rising rates of anxiety and depression.
00:45:33.739 --> 00:45:43.480
Remember we were talking about in the old days, you would cross a river and you'd have broken bones, and pediatricians used to see much more physical ailments.
00:45:40.360 --> 00:46:39.019
They see more mental health ailments. The spectrum of young people we're talking about are those who have a predisposition from familial history or genetics and those who don't, but in an environment where things are increasingly internalized, the spectrum of people who could be harmed emotionally, mentally, spiritually, grows a little bit because that's where the activity is taking place, internally. All of us can stand whether our children are predisposed to this or not to having some training for helping our kids navigate this internalized environment. Yeah, yeah. I think that's absolutely a brilliant thing to end on. And just in in terms of the book, for anybody who's been listening thinking, Oh, I'm interested in that book. What I really enjoyed about it was, you took several young people, and you told their stories, you know, starting off, explaining where they started.
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Then we had a middle bit, and then we had an end bit, you know, a reconciliation of where they got to you've done lots of research finding out the points of lots of academics, and that's all in the book. So it's a really good read. I really enjoyed it. So thank you for that. How would people get hold of you?
00:46:52.719 --> 00:47:15.719
Well, if they actually want to send me an email, which I would welcome, my private email is my name. Matt Richtel, M, A, T, T, R, I, C, H, T, E, L, at Gmail, if they're interested in the book and learning more about me, and it's my website, is mattricht com, and it has all kinds of glossy photos and
00:47:16.920 --> 00:47:22.460
images and blurbs and all the things. So go there and all the good stuff.
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I'll put the links in the podcast notes. And like I said, it's great to have another person who's looking at this stuff, but also who's a parent.
00:47:27.860 --> 00:47:49.480
Because you get it. If you found this useful, please send it to at least one other person, anyone you know, who might benefit from it. You can reach me at teenagersuntangled@gmail.com my website is www.teenagersuntangled.com and my sub stack is teenagersuntangled.substack.com is all the teenagers untangled, and that's it for this week.
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Thank you very much. Big hug for me. Bye, bye. Now.
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