Into the Digital Future: Teens, Tech, and Emotions with Dr. Lisa Damour

In this episode of ‘Into the Digital Future,’ hosts Laura Higgins and Jordan Shapiro speak with psychologist and best-selling author Dr. Lisa Damour  about the complex emotional lives of teenagers and their digital habits. They explore how some digital habits can serve as a form of self-care,  the impact of algorithms on social media experiences, and strategies for parents to support their teenagers’ mental health. Dr. Damour emphasizes the importance of understanding each child’s unique needs and provides practical advice for managing risks and encouraging positive digital habits. The conversation covers both the potential harms and benefits of technology, advocating for balanced and informed approaches to adolescent digital interactions.

This transcript of the Into the Digital Future podcast has been edited for clarity. Please listen to the full episode here, and learn more about the season. 

 

Lisa Damour: I’m Dr. Lisa Damour. I’m a psychologist who cares for children and teenagers and their families. And I do that in all sorts of ways. I write books. I write articles. I have a podcast called Ask Lisa: The Psychology of Parenting. And I also get to do wonderful collaborations with groups like the Joan Ganz Cooney Center.

Jordan Shapiro: And Inside Out 2. 

Lisa Damour: And Inside Out 2. Yes, that was a really fun one. 

Jordan Shapiro: I know your work well. I read the books on girls when I was writing Father Figure and I actually started reading The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, forgetting that you were coming on our podcast about two weeks ago because I was just trying to figure out how to manage my own teenagers and I thought, hey, let me read some about it. So, I’m very excited to talk to you about it. I’ve got a lot of questions. I live with four teenagers… 

Lisa Damour: Wonderful. Lucky you. That is a good thing. Yes. 

Jordan Shapiro: What I really appreciated about the book is this whole concept of the way that the wellness industry has really made us just think that happiness equals mental health and that everyone’s supposed to be happy all the time. And I don’t, I don’t know. I mean, I think as you say, the teen years are supposed to be turbulent, right? It’s an emotional, up and down, rollercoaster.

I mean, tell us more about that perspective and why it’s so centered in the book. 

Lisa Damour: So, the good news is. I’ve done this a long time now. Um, I got my PhD in 1997, so I’m pushing 24 years, where I’ve had my full credentials, you know, but obviously I was caring for kids and teenagers before that and in my practice as I was in my training. 

And so, I’m really enjoying bringing to this point in my career, the sort of long view of how we’ve thought and talked about teenagers from a clinical perspective. I mean, not just my own experience, but how I’ve worked with them as a psychologist. And I can tell you, we are in a moment that is unlike anything I have ever seen where, as you said, Jordan.

There’s a lot of anxiety about what it means to be mentally healthy and a lot of misunderstanding, in terms of that, with people thinking you’re mentally healthy when you feel good. And if you’re working with that definition, you’re going to be anxious a lot because the natural aspect of being a human being, much less a teenage human being, is that you don’t feel good all the time.

And I’m also caring for parents who are more anxious than any parents I’ve ever cared for.  I think all of the negative headlines about teenagers, all of the worrisome headlines about teenagers, all of the, I would say collapsed or simplified, headlines about social media have rendered parents incredibly anxious and frightened.

I can tell you, I have never seen high anxiety or fear improve people’s parenting. So that’s where we are right now. Here’s what I can tell you about adolescence forever and always, and then we can look at it in this moment. So, the forever and always is that change equals stress. That is a cardinal rule in psychology.

Okay. You take a 10-year-old, which is the onset of adolescence, 10 or 11, put that kid next to an 18- or 19-year-old. You are looking at people who are hardly from the same planet. I mean, they could not be more different. There is so much change in development compressed into eight years, nine years, right?

I’m almost 54. Me eight years ago, I’m wearing the same clothes, I’m cooking the same meals. I haven’t changed a whole lot. I have a 13-year-old, I have a 20-year-old. My 13-year-old in eight years will be a different creature altogether, right? Just a different person in so many ways. If you compress all of that change into a limited period of time, it’s inherently stressful. It’s stressful for the kid who’s going through it and it’s stressful for the people all around that kid. So that’s the baseline. And then we have complexities like social media, having weathered a pandemic, wild social disruption all around us, the adults are feeling more unsure of where all of this is headed than we have ever felt before. So, it’s a lot. There are timeless aspects of being a teenager that are hard and there are timely aspects that are hard. 

Laura Higgins: Yeah, absolutely. I think that really resonates, you know, I’m also the parent of an older teenager. I have so much fun with him now where he is in this stage in his life, you know, he’s very much a young adult.

We go out to dinner, we drink cocktails, and it’s a wonderful thing to be able to do together. But yeah, the thought of when he was 11, very much is like, oh, who was that person? I don’t recognize them now. So much happens. But one of the things we know is all about, you know, the risk taking, experimenting, maybe taking a few bad decisions and playing with bad behaviors, bad decisions and sort of working out who they are.

I think it’s very reassuring for everyone to go, Hey, it’s just a stage. They’re going to be different. They’re going to get through it. How do we find the right balance? Do you think? 

Lisa Damour: I have a lot of empathy for how anxious parents of teenagers are. I think it’s worse now than I’ve ever seen it.

But it’s not like it was ever easy. And Laura, you brought up the thing that I think is the one we want to focus on, which is that teenagers do take risks, and they are built to do so. It is natural for them to do so. Sometimes they take risks that are really scary and sometimes teenagers do things that cannot be undone.

And what I can tell you, from my time in of caring for parents of adolescents, this has always been the irreducible, most frightening aspect of raising a teenager, that you cannot lock them in the house. They are going to go out and do stuff, and they’re sometimes going to go out and do dumb stuff. 

And it’s just painful. I remember a point in my career where I got to where I could say to families, I cannot guarantee your kid’s safety. And that is really hard to live with. That is like, it just is irreducible, okay, but there is a lot we can do to help teens make good choices.

And I think that that’s where we have to spend our time and energy. One thing I will tell you is that I can measure the safety of a teenager in terms of their proximity to adults. Teenagers who have at least one good, working, trusting relationship with an adult are, I think, safe. The more they have, the better.

However, teenagers who do not have good, working, trusting relationships with adults are not safe. Now, what’s really cool is that we— you know, I’m using my hands to make big space, less space—we can change how much distance we have from teenagers by our conversations about risk itself.

So when, as happened in my home, my older daughter, when she was in the eighth grade, she came home and she’s like, you know what, there are kids who are using weed gummies, right? That is not what you want to hear as a parent, much less of an eighth grader, right? Okay. The answer that creates a great deal of distances: “Oh, what’s wrong with those kids? And oh my gosh, if you do that, you’re going to military school!” Right? Like a whole lot just got communicated in that, but a whole lot of distance was created. The answer where you say, “Whoa, what do you think of that?” Or “Gosh, that makes me really worried about those kids’ safety. Like what’s going on for them and who could help them?” Now you’ve brought yourself closer. So, kids are going to bring up risk, we’re going to want to talk with our kids about risk, and it’s the topic itself. I mean, I think this is sort of a magical thing that can bring us together and make it clear. I am here as your partner in safety.

Your safety means more to me than anything in the whole wide world. Blame all your good behavior on me. Call me if anything goes wrong. Or can put us at a great distance of what’s the matter with those rotten kids? And if you do something like that, don’t let me catch you because you’re going to be really sorry, right? Those are two different stances that get two very different outcomes in terms, I think, of how safe that kid’s going to be. 

Laura Higgins: Thank you, Lisa. I’m going to remember that when my son goes out on his motorbike later.

Lisa Damour: It’s hard not to lose sleep when you have a teen. 

Jordan Shapiro: I’ve definitely aimed to do that with all of my kids and to let them talk first and, that while there is, while there are boundaries, certainly I’m I’m first here to be your support system.

Of course, there are times where they go, why can’t you just be normal, like all the other parents. So, you’re up against a lot of social pressure in problematic ways. But I I want to shift gears to social media, video games, technology. That’s what we’re supposed to be talking about. One of the things I really loved in The Emotional Lives of Teenagers was the way you talked about seeing this as escapism, which it certainly is. And that some escapism is actually, we all need it. We all do it. I certainly have the nights where I’m binge-watching Netflix because I just need to veg out. It’s been a hard day. And I think if I understood your position correctly, as long as that’s not out of proportion, that’s nothing to worry about. As long as it’s not the only form of escapism, as long as they’re not escaping all the time. How can parents know when we’ve sort of veered into this problematic territory versus just a healthy, you know, the same as any toy, book, anything?

Lisa Damour: So you are capturing something that’s important in my book, that I think is not actually so much circulating in the culture. The book is about helping kids manage emotions. And I bring across in the book something that’s very well established on the academic and research side, which is that when psychologists talk about how we manage emotions, we actually think in two categories.

Sometimes you manage by expressing feelings. Getting them out, as teens would say. And sometimes you manage by taming feelings, quieting them— as my mother would say, pulling yourself together, you know? I think we’ve kind of come to a place in the culture where we privilege too much expressing, right? That you can manage a feeling because you can just talk it to death. That doesn’t always help people. It can help. But it’s not the only answer. So, I really deliberately put on equal footing and gave equal weight to expressing and taming, because that’s what we know is part of overall health.

And one of the ways we tame emotions is by using distractions. And psychologists are okay with that. And I think that that has really not gotten the airtime it deserves. So, for any approach to managing emotions, you want it to bring relief and do no harm. Whether it’s an expressing approach or a taming approach.

So, if we then narrow down to distractions—brings relief, does no harm. So, if a kid’s had a hard day and they want to come home and just hop on their video game for a little bit and not think about it, and it helps them bring that feeling down to size and they feel better and they don’t then spend three hours on the video game and fail to do their homework, that’s a good outcome.

If you’ve had a terrible day, maybe you got into something with a colleague and it feels really lousy and you can’t quite fix it and you need to just actually step back from it and you can lose yourself in Netflix to just, you know, get some distance on it, get some perspective, come back to it, see it in a fresh light because you haven’t been ruminating on it for two hours straight, that is a good use of distraction. So, if it brings relief and if it does no harm, it’s okay. Kids can use digital technologies to bring relief without harm or bring relief with harm. So, the with harm is, you know, if they’re hopping on social media and they’re being jerks about it. If they are hopping on social media and looking at stuff that’s distracting, but also bad for them, and they shouldn’t be spending time there.

If they are playing video games to the exclusion of all the other stuff they’re supposed to be doing in their lives, then you’re into harm. So, it’s really just a question of moderation in terms of time spent. And then there’s the content question, and I think there’s actually a lot to say about the content kids are exposed to, especially on social media and wanting to really put some nice guardrails around that, you know, as well as I know the research on video games, and, you know, it’s really a very varied set of responses, right?

Video games build all sorts of cognitive capacities. Violent video games are problematic. Um, they’re not bluntly as problematic as I wish they were, right? I mean, when we look at the data on violent video games, they don’t say what I want them to say, which is like, this is going to turn your kid into a violent kid.

We know that it makes kids a bit more violent than they were, which is not okay, but it’s a murkier picture. So, I think the content piece is important in its own right. 

Laura Higgins: I think so too. And, you know, Roblox is a very social space, you know, we saw particularly through the pandemic, it was a place where young people and their families who weren’t connected in the real world would go and hang out.

But with evolution of all of these spaces, whether it’s social media, video games, or wherever teenagers are hanging out together. You know, I’m quite intrigued by what’s different between this and when they used to go and hang out in the skate park or youth club or wherever they were spending time together, you know, are we seeing different issues and problematic behaviors?

And, you know, to the point of the content, a lot of that is either user-generated or it’s bullying, or it’s, you know, people feeling inadequate because of body image and all of those sorts of pressures. Are they exactly the same as they were in the in the so-called real world, or are we seeing different sorts of issues emerging? I think there’s different ones. 

Lisa Damour: I think there’s, you know, some overlap. What it means to be human gets carried out every across these different domains, but I think there’s some differences. I’ll start by saying there’s a lot of pleasure and joy in this.

And I have watched my older daughter, who’s now 20—she got social media later in her adolescence and has a wonderful group of friends and they are incredibly kind to each other in real life and they’re incredibly supportive of one another online and for her I can say, and I know not every kid has this experience.

And I think part of it was waiting until she was a bit older. Social media has been a very pleasant, supportive environment for her with very little nonsense and I think it’s critical that we share that a lot of what we know about the data is that social media tends to reflect what’s happening in real life.

So kids who enjoy, you know, good social landscape tend to enjoy that online and kids who are struggling socially, that also happens online. It’s unfortunate from a developmental psychologist perspective because we’re like, oh man, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer. It amplifies whatever’s happening.

I think the piece that is unique to social media is the social comparison piece. And when we see data that I think are legitimately concerning and have an impact, also concerning and distressing kids, but also have an impact on behavior, the social comparison piece is very real, you know, where kids are looking online and feel less than in any variety of ways.

But my number one concern — what is it that social media can do that real-life interactions don’t do? The algorithms make me very anxious, and I don’t get anxious easily. I will tell you, I am very slow to blame social media for things. I go very cautiously into that space. I was working through the pandemic, practicing through the pandemic and called my editor at the New York Times.

And I’m like, this eating disorder stuff is out of control. We are going to see a ton of kids with eating disorders in the pandemic and after the pandemic. And I was watching this happen in my clinical practice. I was talking to other clinicians, kids were home, bored, lots of energy. needing to, wanting to better themselves in some way.

So of course they start searching for fitness, health, well-being content, and suddenly their feed is flooded. And this is where the algorithm kicks in and makes me anxious, flooded with imagery of ultra fit, ultra-thin. That can’t happen in the real world. And the challenge, especially for teens, is that they are vulnerable to norms, more than kids are, more than adults are. If you are looking at a thousand images a day of ultra-thin, ultra-fit bodies, the chances for a teen that that’s going to change your behavior are not small. So while there’s a lot of overlap between what happens in real life and what happens online, the algorithms take us to a totally different place in terms of flooding kids with a very specific kind of content.

And if that content is not good for that kid, that’s a problem. 

Laura Higgins: I absolutely agree, Lisa. In my previous work, I ran helplines that were safeguarding children in digital spaces and dealing with online harms. And 2014, ‘15, ‘16, we were seeing hashtags like “thinspiration, thinspo.” This was all being talked about and, you know, we’re having more and more regulation because platforms weren’t taking action. And we’ve seen awful outcomes around the world.

So, you know, just thank you again for raising that. And, you know, on behalf of the tech industry, we are really trying to get better, but everybody needs to get better on that point. 

Jordan Shapiro: Well said. It’s been shown again and again, the degree to which adolescents are influenced by social rewards, right? Not just peer pressure, like, like hard, measurable neuroscience that can, that can prove that. And I guess as we’re having this conversation, I’m sort of curious about the way that having a phone, having 24-hour access to your social group—are we seeing an increase in risk-taking even when they’re not in groups of friends because they always have access to friends? Even this question about phones in school— I feel like this is all mixed up in this question of this ability to have a social connection to be public. 

Lisa Damour: I actually think when we look at the data on risk taking in the real world, it’s going down. Like we’re raising the safest generation of teenagers on record and some of it is, they don’t leave the house, you know. When I was a teenager, we were running around town to see our friends. We had to go out. They’re having way less sex than our generation did, they’re driving less, so in physical/material terms, they’re actually safer than teenagers have been in a long, long time.

I don’t know that that gets any traction in the discourse. But the 24/7 aspect of being able to socialize, now that is very real and very problematic. I am all in on taking phones out of the school day, a hundred percent. I will, in the name of full disclosure, share that my husband is a high school teacher. He is a gifted and career educator. And I think some very large degree of my conviction about why this is so important has just come from our conversations in the home. And he thinks so deeply and so carefully about what a profound distraction it is to be in to have access to a phone during the day.

And the reality is, if you’re doing school right, it’s hard. And if you’re doing school right, you have to grapple and get frustrated. And there is no class that can compete with how much fun it is to hang out with your friends or go on TikTok. So that tension existing all day through the school day is so hard on kids, and frankly so hard on the adults who are really wanting to give them what they got.

I’m talking to more and more people in schools, more and more superintendents, more and more principals. It’s not easy to walk this back, but I think it would be worth it to walk it back because it’s a great time for kids to be away from their phones. They are surrounded by adults.

If you need to be in touch with them, you can be in touch with them. They’re losing so much in terms of social interaction and learning when the phones are in those spaces. And then they can have their phones on either side of that. 

When I talk to teenagers about, phones going away during the school day what I hear from them is, we’re okay with it if it is totally universal, but if one kid has their phone and I don’t, okay, fine. For kids who are privileged enough to get to go to sleep away camps, where it’s a universal rule, they will be the first to tell you it’s the best two weeks of their year.

As we think about things like learning and emotion regulation, and focusing and tolerating frustration, Jordan, to your question, let’s take six of those hours, seven of those hours out of the 24 and let kids really build those muscles. 

Laura Higgins: I love that. And it sounds like there’s a real balance. We know there’s been some really high-profile discussion about banning social media and mobile phones for youth.

And I think that’s a little bit too extreme. Um, as you say, we can’t totally wind it back. We are where we are, but I think trying to get that balance, isn’t it? Is really vital. 

You’ve been fantastic and talked a little bit about the potential risk or less risk now, but also some of the things that kind of worry you about digital spaces and kids being online.

What are you excited about? What makes you happy? Where’s the kind of optimism side for you?  

Lisa Damour: So, teenagers— and it’s really fun for me to have kids on either end of adolescence. What I love, love, love— I mean, first of all, we have so much fun texting and so much fun on a family text. And it’s a way to be in touch with my kids that actually works really, really well through adolescence and really well with my college student, you know, in a way that, you know, trying to get on the phone for long conversations makes zero sense at all, but we have a blast over text. And same with my younger daughter. And the sophistication and speed of the humor in teenagers, you know, the muscle they have built with how they play with one another, the use of memes, the creation of memes. I mean, I look at the stuff that my 13-year-old is putting out or working with, and I’m like, that is so much more sophisticated than things I was doing at 16, 17— I mean, like, it’s really cool. And I did a piece years ago for the Times about teens and social protest. One of the things I was really interested to learn is how much they learned how to do social protest and have very, very complex conversations by doing it online.

So someone makes a statement, somebody critiques the statement, someone responds to the critique, and they are watching, at a pace that they can follow, arguments get made, refashioned, challenged, reworked, and again, are at a level of sophistication that I know we did not have as teenagers, and if you are raising a teenager, you know this is true because they are on your case all day and they’re right and they’re faster and better at this than we are.

Laura Higgins: Painfully true, Lisa. 

Lisa Damour: It’s true. And I am a better person for it, and I know it, but sometimes it’s a little exhausting. 

Jordan Shapiro: Yeah, I’m a better person for it because of it, not during it. Yes, exactly. 

Lisa Damour: That’s exactly it. That’s exactly it. 

Jordan Shapiro: One last question for you before we wrap up— a kind of vision question. What do you think needs to change in our screenager discourse? Whether that’s from parents or educators or researchers or policy makers or tech, you know, any, any, any stakeholder, what, how does our screen age or discourse need to change or what, or what would make it better? 

Lisa Damour: I’m a fan not of telling parents how to parent, but telling parents how to think about parenting challenges because kids are really different.

I have in my practice made different recommendations for children in the same family. I’m like, that kid cannot have social media, that kid, okay. I think there’s a lot of variables, but you can give people ways to think about it. I wrote a piece for the Cooney Center about how to onboard kids onto social technologies, and I got up to as far as saying I think that social media should wait until kids are at least 14—that there’s a neurological watershed at that point that allows them to be much more critical of what’s put in front of them. Then, you know, of course, since it was for the Cooney Center, I wrapped it up at age 14, but like to take it a step further, if we’re going to say, well, if you get them to at least 14, how do you think about what comes next? So, one thing I’ve been playing with is this idea of thinking about social media being like a high school party. Kids want to be there, their friends are there, and things can go wrong.

And those are familiar risks. We all went to high school parties. Okay, who belongs at a high school party? Not middle schoolers, right? So, kids under the age of 14. And then, what 14-year-olds? The really level-headed ones who will let you know if something is wrong. Those are kids you can probably feel more confident putting on social media.

There are also 17-year-olds who will go find the darkest, creepiest corner of anything. They do not belong in high school parties, and they probably don’t belong on social media. So, I think encouraging parents and caregivers to look at the kid in front of them, trust their assessment of who they are working with, and then make decisions with some hopefully useful parameters for working with that information, as opposed to handing down prescriptive guidance. It’s very hard for one size to fit all 

Laura Higgins: That’s fantastic advice.

Thank you, Lisa. I think I’ve got a few takeaways and Jordan, I’m sure you have too, the conversations we’ve had in the last few days. This is really good stuff. 

Lisa Damour: You’re welcome. Thank you for having me. 

Jordan Shapiro: Yeah. Anything you want to add that we didn’t ask about? 

Lisa Damour: I love the work you do. It is such an honor to get to think together with you. And I was thinking the other day, like I had the best job in the world because. I adore kids and teenagers and then my professional life puts me in the path of other adults who adore kids and teenagers and so I have such a fun time at work because what I do brings people who have the shared interest in my way, and they happen to be my favorite kind of people.