The Emotional Lives of Teenagers Quotes

“First and foremost, we want our teenagers to regard their feelings in this important way: as data.”
― Lisa Damour, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents

“Mental health is not about feeling good. Instead, it’s about having the right feelings at the right time and being able to manage those feelings effectively”
― Lisa Damour, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents

“Any time we hear our teenagers questioning feelings that make abundant sense given the situation, we should be quick to lay on the reassurance. “You have a good gut,” we might say. “Pay attention to what it’s telling you, because it will almost always keep you on the right track.”
― Lisa Damour, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents

“Research shows that teens with empathetic parents actually have lower levels of systemic inflammation—a biological marker of emotional stress—but we tend to breeze right past offering empathy and instead serve up reassurance.”
― Lisa Damour, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents

“It’s critical to remember that by the time teens are telling us that they feel anxious or angry or sad or any other emotion they choose to put into words, they’re already using an effective strategy for helping themselves cope with it. As a psychologist, I know this through and through. As a parent, though, I often forget it.”
― Lisa Damour, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents

“Before you jump in with reassurance, a piece of advice, or a recollection of having had a similar experience a million years ago when you were a teenager, see what happens if you just listen.”
― Lisa Damour, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents

“Mental health is not about feeling good. Instead, it’s about having the right feelings at the right time and being able to manage those feelings effectively.”
― Lisa Damour, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents

“reading compelling narratives of lived experiences builds compassion and the ability to take another person’s perspective.”
― Lisa Damour, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents

“Adolescents are often torn between the signals they’re receiving from the outside world and those arising from within. They can doubt the validity of their own emotions, especially when their feelings don’t line up with what their peers seem to feel.”
― Lisa Damour, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents

“First and foremost, we want our teenagers to regard their feelings in this important way: as data. Whether painful or pleasant, emotions are fundamentally informational. They bubble up as we move through our days, delivering meaningful feedback. Our emotions give us status reports on our lives and can help guide decision making. Noticing that you feel upbeat and energized after a lunch with a particular friend might inspire you to spend more time with that person. Realizing that you’re dreading an upcoming office party might get you thinking about whether it’s really worth attending this year. Rather than viewing our emotions as disruptive, we’re usually better off if we treat them as a constant stream of messengers arriving with updates on how things are going.”
― Lisa Damour, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents

“Having a degree of personal investment in a topic can improve reasoning, but too much emotion creates a cognitive drag that interferes with our thinking.”
― Lisa Damour, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents

“when it comes to decision making, we ought to view our emotions as occupying one seat on our personal board of directors. Other spots on the board might be held by ethical considerations, our personal ambitions, our obligations to others, financial or logistical constraints, and so on. Ideally, these board members will work together to help us make careful, informed choices about how we conduct our lives. In this metaphor, emotions have a vote, though it’s rarely a deciding one. And they definitely don’t chair the board.”
― Lisa Damour, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents

“When teenagers understand what they are feeling and why, they suddenly have choices that were not available to them before.”
― Lisa Damour, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents

“Imagine that your mind is a pond full of fish. The fish are your feelings. Aim to be the pond.”
― Lisa Damour, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents

“How can adults help adolescents manage the mismatch between their normal drive for autonomy, identity, and independence and what school asks of them? I think we're most useful when we bear in mind that sending our teens to school is like sending them to a buffet where they are required to try everything being served. As adults, many of us have figured out what we like and what we don't, and we select for ourselves accordingly. In my case, I happily consume psychology all day and haven't had a bite of physics since I was seventeen. Teenagers, however, must consume everything on the menu. There is no way they will like all of it, and we should not expect that they will. I find that the school-as-mandatory-buffet metaphor brings needed neutrality to the loaded topic of academic motivation, so I'm going to risk beating it into the ground.”
― Lisa Damour, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents

“Adolescents often realize that what they've said is over the line as soon as they hear their own words out loud. A calm, firm redirection can get things back on track quickly and help avert a blowup.”
― Lisa Damour, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents

“According to Terry, when it comes to decision making, we ought to view our emotions as occupying one seat on our personal board of directors. Other spots on the board might be held by ethical considerations, our personal ambitions, our obligations to others, financial or logistical constraints, and so on. Ideally, these board members will work together to help us make careful, informed choices about how we conduct our lives. In this metaphor, emotions have a vote, though it's rarely a deciding one. And they definitely don't chair the board.”
― Lisa Damour, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents

“Because sleep is the glue that holds human beings together. Even in the absence of a tragedy, people who aren’t sleeping soon find that they struggle to regulate their emotions.”
― Lisa Damour, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents

“appreciated by teenagers, who as a rule are allergic to interactions that seem fake or inauthentic.”
― Lisa Damour, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents

“attention to what comforts your teenager. When feeling lousy, some teens take a long bath or shower, others doodle, meditate, bake or cook, play videogames, watch a favorite movie or TV show for the umpteenth time, or read. Listening to music is an especially popular choice for teens when they are in a bad mood.”
― Lisa Damour, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents

“The neurological developments in the teenage brain cause adolescents to feel everything more acutely than the rest of us do. The uncomfortable feelings hit them harder, but fortunately, soothing activities also count for more.”
― Lisa Damour, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents

“when your teenager is obviously uneasy but not in the mood to talk, don’t underestimate the power of what can seem like small pleasures.”
― Lisa Damour, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents

“So how do we know when it’s time to point teenagers toward controlling their emotions rather than expressing them? Here’s a good rule of thumb: It’s when expression isn’t working, and feelings have become so intense or overwhelming that they are getting in the way of teens doing what they need or want to do.”
― Lisa Damour, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents

“In both scenarios, the parent’s advice might be spot-on, but when our first response is to point out how they could curb their discomfort, teenagers often feel injured. Rather than accept our input as the sound and well-meaning guidance that it is, they tend to feel dismissed or invalidated.”
― Lisa Damour, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents

“First, finding a healthy outlet for uncomfortable feelings—discussing them, having a good cry, listening to sad or angry music, and so on—usually does the job, providing all the relief a teenager needs. Second, making ourselves available to talk with our teenagers about their ups and downs is one of the most enriching aspects of parenting, and it goes a long way toward strengthening our relationships with them. Third, demonstrating our loving interest in what’s weighing on our teens models the attentive compassion that they should come to hold as a standard for all of their close relationships. Fourth, trying to implement any of the strategies offered in this chapter almost certainly won’t work unless we have already given emotional expression a chance to work its magic.”
― Lisa Damour, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents

“To recap, emotional regulation rests on a pair of complementary approaches: finding outlets for uncomfortable feelings and, when it’s needed, finding ways to rein them in.”
― Lisa Damour, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents

“Adolescents may have good instincts for how to do this, but the deliberate support of loving adults makes a great difference in helping teens develop their ability to express their feelings well.”
― Lisa Damour, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents

“First, teenagers who are hurting others or themselves are letting us know that they are suffering and that they don’t have healthy ways to express that suffering.”
― Lisa Damour, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents

“emotion, adults have two jobs. One is to recognize and accept that teens sometimes use quirky but adaptive tactics to get their feelings out; behavior that appears inexplicable at first glance may turn out to make good emotional sense for our kid. The other is to actively support their inventive approaches, no matter how offbeat they may seem to us; if your teen’s getting much-needed relief costs you only a can of seltzer water and a wet driveway, treat it as a bargain.”
― Lisa Damour, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents

“As such, our goal cannot be to prevent or chase away adolescent distress but rather to help our teenagers regulate their emotions. This means, in part, ensuring that they find healthy outlets for the uncomfortable ones.”
― Lisa Damour, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents