To be or not to be a couch potato

Recently I have had a number of coaching sessions with parents concerned with what I call the "missing child syndrome." The teen isn't actually missing missing, but spends so much time closeted off in their bedroom cave watching movies, TV and playing video games on their laptops that it begins to feel that it's time to put up a missing child poster.

This becomes the most problematic on the weekends when there is an excess of unstructured time, and fewer activities. For younger teens, the pre-drivers, weekends can be quite anxiety provoking. What will I do? Who will I do it with? What if no one wants to do anything with me? There is a transition that occurs for kids in 8th and 9th grade. At this point some of the kids they have been friendly with, may have moved on into having a more active social life that includes meeting up at malls, parks, town centers or basements in co-ed groups. Your teen may have been left behind, not feeling ready or interested in some of the experimentation and activities of these marauding groups of kids. (and amen to that!)  So if their usual posse of friends are now unavailable to them, it leaves them potentially feeling lonely, abandoned and loserish. The computer becomes their weekend date; familiar, comforting, always available, and will always do what they want to do. I get it!!!  Hanging out with the family during this weekend time, only reinforces what they are already feeling, so avoiding you at all cost helps them save face.

Here is how you can help. First of all teens do not do well with planning ahead. That's just the way it is. Mostly its because they really don't know what it is they should do. In elementary school having a "playdate" was a no-brainer. A friend came over, you played games or dolls, or legos or watched a movie. Done! Now there are fewer options, you actually have to talk to each other, and where are you going to go and what are you going to do? So when they do feel bored on a Saturday afternoon and want to do something, the insecurity of calling someone and potentially being rebuffed because the person they want to call probably already has plans becomes a deterrent to calling anyone, and the avoidance helps them save face by thinking, "I just want to veg out by myself anyway."

 Do not at this point lecture them about waiting till the last minute. This just confirms they are a loser.  What you can do is on a Thursday night say to your teen, "I have to do X on Saturday, I can drop you and a friend at X while I do my thing, and then pick you up later. Why don't you ask X at school tomorrow if they want to go with you?" This accomplishes two goals. The first is that it gives your teen a real plan that they can go to a friend with that isn't at the last minute. Most kids won't have their plans for Saturday yet, and asking them at school, in person, takes away the worry about that potentially rejecting text or phone call. Secondly, you have understood that teens don't do planning well, and since it makes you nauseous to see your teen lying around for 18 hours watching a screen, helping them by offering up a plan takes them out of the bedroom, and out into the world.

This won't last forever. So even if they are home, the good news is at least you know where they are. Soon enough the fight will be, why aren't you ever at home?

What is the deal with peer pressure?

I read an interesting article in the New York Times today. Teenagers, Friends and Bad Decisions
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/03/teenagers-friends-and-bad-decisions/. I love when articles confirm what I already know, but in a new way. It makes me feel so smart. This referenced a study that was done at Temple University looking at the effect on teens brains while they are making decisions when they are alone versus when they are with their friends. The experiment was so interesting. Ask a bunch of 14-18 year olds to do a simulated driving game for which they will be rewarded with cash if they finish in a certain time frame. Embedded in the game are choices to be made like running yellow lights to finish more quickly. However if you "crash" you get penalized and delayed.  Scores were compared with a group of college students and a group of young adults.  "Half of the time each person played alone, and half the time they were told that two same-sex friends who had accompanied them to the study were watching in the next room." The results, no change in game playing or risk-taking for college students and young adults when told about people watching their play, but for the teens they ran 40% more yellow lights and had 60% more crashes when they "believed" their friends were watching. Remember these "phantom friends" were not even in the room with them, they only believed that friends were watching. 


This is pretty powerful documentation of the effect of what we call "the imaginary audience", a term coined by Psychologist David Elkind that refers to the heightened sense of self-consciousness in teens. This occurs because of the newly developing and growing teenage brain that is working on overtime to make teens aware that not only do they have thoughts about themselves but that other people have thoughts about them. Think of this as opening night jitters that starts the second teens awaken and ends when they have posted their last facebook message of the day. What will I wear today, how will people see me? What will I say today, what will people think about what I am saying? and so on. The study supports the thinking that when your teen is on their own they are more likely to make responsible decisions (no imaginary audience) but give them a real or perceived audience and lets get on with the show! Because often times it is all for show, just like the teens in the study who took more risks when they thought their friends were watching. 


This would be a great article to read with your teen. Here is scientific documentation of all your worries. Let them know that you are not crazy, even the scientists can see that when you are with your friends you are more likely to put yourself in risky and potentially unsafe situations. Your job here is to use that power of understanding with your teen " I get how important it is to not embarrass yourself in front of your friends, but I know that sometimes you might make a different decision when you are alone than when you are hanging with your friends. Lets try to find some ways that you can both save face in front of your friends, but make sure that you are safe. This is the kind of conversation you might have every weekend just before your teen leaves the house. This is NOT something you can change about  your teen. It is literally chemistry, but you can make your teen aware of it and provide them with strategies, scripts and alternatives to keep them safe. 

I know something you don't know!!

Here is a question a parent gave me at the end of one of my seminars: What do you do when your child tells you about some risky behaviors that a friend of his/her is now engaging in and you know the friends parents? Is it different when you don't know the child's parents?


I actually get this question a lot, because I think the underlying thought is:"I would want a parent/friend to tell me if my teen was engaging in risky behaviors. First, if your teen is sharing this information with you, you have hit the jackpot. This means that your teen finds you worthy of his/her trust and thinks that you can help in situations they may feel stymied by. Your first and most important allegiance is to your teen and his/her safety. This is something worth protecting, because it means that you may be able to impact not only the safety of your teen but perhaps someone else's teen as well. If for example your teen comes to you with a story about drinking or a party, it is because they felt uncomfortable, and lacked the experience and strategy to deal with it in a way that left them feeling OK. They don't need your judgement they need your help. If you go right into "the lecture":  "You are not allowed to ever go to that house again, if I ever find out you have been drinking or taking drugs, you will be grounded, and I don't want you hanging out with those kids again." You can be assured that your teen will NEVER come to you again for help. If you immediately call the parent of the kid(s) who he/she has told you about, you can also be assured that your teen will NEVER come to you again for help.

Here is what you can do. First, commend your teen for coming to you in the first place. "I really am glad you can tell me this stuff, I know you are worried about your friend, the situation, and now we can figure out together what might be a good plan of action." Now comes the strategy session. Do not try to solve this for your teen, work on it as a collaboration. Come up with alternatives and scripts so they are prepared when this situation happens again....and it will, despite your warnings, punishments and threats.    Just by the nature of teen's experimental, and thrill seeking drives, situations that are risky will always be present in their lives. You can't protect them from the situations, but you can give them the information and strategy that will help them when they are in the thick of it. If they are worried about a friend, then help them figure out how they might be able to help that friend before you get on the phone and call the parent.

Your job is to keep your lines of communication open with your teen. If the situation is life-threatening, or threatening to others then this does require a call either to the parent directly or perhaps calling the school's guidance counselor and sharing the information with them. This way, the guidance counselor can call the parents and say that some concerned parents have shared some information I think you ought to know about  your teen's safety. Using the school as your go-between allows you to keep your teen out of the loop and protect your trust with him/her while still looking out for the safety of this other child.

If you are friendly with your teen's friend's parent, then you might also use a more indirect approach when having coffee with your friend: " So what do you think our kids are into? Do you think Joey is drinking or fooling around with pot, I just wonder what I would do if I found out?" Now at least you can open up a conversation about your worries, and perhaps get this parent on the same worry page as you, again without divulging any particulars that your teen has shared with you. Your goal for this conversation is to gently nudge this parent into becoming aware of possibilities. You may be sick of me saying this, but your relationship with your teen is THE MOST IMPORTANT goal. Helping him/her to stay safe, may help his/her friends to be safe as well.

The ipod and the car

Who am I? The real work of a teenager Part 4

Sometimes during this whole who am I process, some teens feel a need to just take a break from it all. In a good way. We call this time identity moratorium. Maybe your teen is a senior in high school, and he/she knows they want to go to college, but they feel burnt out by school and want a break from academics. He/she really doesn't have a sense yet of the direction he/she wants to go in, and feel just to go to college to go to college seems like a waste of both time and money. This is a healthy decision not to make a decision. That is what identity moratorium is all about. It is a conscious decision to take a break from making a decision. Sometimes this happens after a freshman year, or after graduation from high school or college, needing some perspective your teen may want to work a mindless job, go be a ski bum in Aspen, or travel the world. As long as this is a plan to make a plan there are no worries. Sometimes just living in the world helps teens to explore the parts of themselves they are just getting in touch with, and that require freedom from school responsibilities. 

This breaking from the normal often scares and freaks parents out. There is a worry that their teen may never become self-supporting, fully functioning adults if they don't follow the norm. I recently met with a couple whose son is an amazing techi. In his freshman year of college, he immediately found a part-time job in his college tech support office. He loved the job and his bosses loved him. He worked longer and longer hours while his grades began to suffer. The world of work where he excelled, was treated as an equal and felt competent, was way more fulfilling then his work as a student, where he suffered with ADD. He was asked to take a leave from school because of failing grades. This was devastating for the parents, but in fact, I saw it as a gift. For this student, working at something he was passionate about and felt competent at was a self-esteem builder. Why not have work be his primary effort, and make school the part-time effort. The question wasn't whether he would finish his degree, but that he would do it in a different way. His parents understood that his path to graduation would be a different path, not a bad one, just a different one. And that is the key. There is no right way. When a parent understands who their  teen is becoming, they can support whatever path it takes to get there. 

Who am I? The real work of a teenager Part 3

Figuring out "Who am I " is not just the work of teens. Those of us in middle age, (which is most of you with teens...admit it, I'm just an older version) have the same work. Gail Sheehy, in her book New Passages, calls the adult version: Middlescence. In midlife, many of us start to look at our life through a new lens, just like teens with their new brain, wondering , is this it, is this all there is? Some change careers voluntarily, others are laid off and now have the freedom to reinvent, and others choose to go back to work after a 10 or 15 year hiatus. If work is not the question, finding meaning in life might be. Sheehy calls this a "meaning crisis". As adults in mid-life we are searching for who we will be in this next half of our life. The good news, is that we come to this journey with half a life already lived, with experience, and with some confidence and competence in what we have already accomplished. Teens starting this journey have none of this experience,  and not a lot of confidence or competence in their ability to make decisions, which is what the personal identity journey is all about, decision making.

Some teens relish the buffet table of life, trying out new dishes, saying ick to some, and yum to others, and are able to move on with the big decisions in life, Identity Integration.  Some teens are subtly pushed in a direction, never having to make the decisions themselves; Identity Foreclosure.  Then there are those teens who can't make any decisions at all. These are teens who are in Identity Crisis.  Teens who experience Identity confusion are overwhelmed with all the choices and decisions they must make. So rather than make any of their own choices or decisions, they avoid making any decisions at all.  These are teens who move from friend to friend, college to college, job to job, and perhaps become users and abusers of drugs and alcohol in order to avoid having to take responsibility for their life. They are your classic followers. If a person shows them interest or attention, then that person becomes a friend, not because they like that person, or feel that have commonalities or feel a sense of camaraderie, just that they are available. They are overwhelmed by that buffet table, and either take too much, not taking the time to decide which things they like, or they avoid taking anything but the familiar because it is just to overwhelming.

Teens heading in this direction need practice in making and taking responsibility for their decisions. If a teen grows up with either an authoritarian or permissive parenting style (see blog entry: What kind of parent am I?)  they are not given the opportunities and direction needed to experience decision-making and learn from their successes and more importantly from their mistakes.  Too little freedom or too much freedom, too much direction, or too little direction have almost the same outcome. Discovering who you are and who you want to become require the ability to sift through and pick out what interests you, what excites you,what comforts you, what moves you, and what grounds you. This is overwhelming for even the most competent. If you give your kids too many gifts on their birthday, they run from gift to gift never really enjoying any one thing, if you give them only one they never learn to choose what excites them. Helping your teen to develop their own sense of themselves is a balancing act. Give to much input, your teen never learns what is you and what is him/her, give to little, they don't even know where to start. So when your teen struggles with making a decision, no matter how small, and asks for your help, rather than jumping in with all your parental wisdom and making the decision for him/her, start with a "Well what do you think". Your job is to let them know that you have confidence in their ability to think for themselves. They just need to practice.

Who am I? The real work of a teenager Part 2

There are many ways that teens work on the process of developing a personal identity. In the last post I explained the process of trial and error also called forming an identity through repudiation and integration. That's the formal jargon. Basically, teens try out a lot of stuff; friends, interests, academic subjects that turn them on or off, religion, personas, hair, and clothing styles, music, and yes even values and beliefs. All those things that make up the kind of person you become as an adult, and that eventually affect life decisions like which college to go to, what career to work towards, who to partner with, the kinds of lifelong friends you make, and the passions and interests that give you joy. They try these things out, hold on to those that feel right, and and then discard those things that feel uncomfortable, like the jeans you buy just cuz they are cool, but only wear once because they are too tight, too low, and that ride up your behind, and end up in the give away pile.

But there are other ways that kids can develop identities that aren't so healthy. The first is something called Identity Foreclosure. Foreclosure is a word we have heard way to much of in the last few years. Foreclosure in identity development also takes something important away.  It is taking away the right to  make your own choices about who you want to become. Perhaps you have a family legacy of a college or a profession. As you look back at your family tree, you see all the guys played football in high school and/or college, or as far back as you remember a certain college was pretty much everyone in your family's alma mater, or you have a family of doctors or lawyers or plumbers or electricians or your family runs a business, and there is an expectation that when you graduate high school or college you join the family business. This is only a problem...if its a problem. I once worked with a young man in therapy. He was really smart and attended an ivy league college, the same one that all the men in his family attended. All the men in this family went on to study and practice medicine, and he followed suit, never really questioning if he enjoyed science, and was interested in medicine as a profession, kind of just went along with the family script. As the end of his first semester in med school came to a close, he became extremely depressed and anxious and ended up being hospitalized for these serious symptoms. After some introspective work he realized he followed the family script because he felt it was expected of him, though he had no interest or passion for medicine. Thank god somewhere in that soul of his, though he couldn't say it aloud, his overwhelming feelings of anxiety and depression called a halt to a life that was all wrong for him. He is happily a teacher today. His family was disappointed, and that was their problem. My client found his own way. 

If you have a profession or a college, or a passion or a way of being in this world that has become a family expectation rather than a choice, then there could be a problem. If your teen/young adult seems truly to want what has become family tradition, then there is no problem. But if you have a teen that seems to be following your family script, make sure that you say very directly, and out loud, you can be whatever you want!! Here is your I get it moment: "I know you want to go to X college because we all went there, or you think you want to become an X cause we all do that, or you like to play X cause we all play that, but here is the thing, we want you to do and be whatever makes you happy. It would be great to have someone in this family who does something different, so honey wherever, or whatever, you want to do, we support you." This is something that needs to be said not implied. Teens are very tuned into what is important to you, and truly they do not want to disappoint you. They may be a pain with the small stuff, like cleaning their room, or having an attitude, but when it comes to the big stuff, they want you to be proud of them. Giving them the absolute freedom, belief and support for their developing identity is the most important gift you will ever give them. 

Stay tuned for Part 3: identity confusion ( and this has nothing to do with sexuality)