Psychology & Counseling
![Lisa Damour Ph.D. - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B01BOL4CM0.jpg)
The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents
An urgently needed guide to help parents understand their teenagers' intense and often fraught emotional lives-and how to support them through this critical developmental stage-from the New York Times bestselling author of Untangled and Under Pressure
In teenagers, powerful emotions come with the territory. And with so many of today's teens contending with academic pressure, social media stress, worries about the future, and concerns about their own mental health, it's easy for them-and their parents-to feel anxious and overwhelmed. But it doesn't have to be that way.
Parents who read this book will learn:
• what to expect in the normal course of adolescent emotional development and when it's time to worry
• why teens (and adults) need to understand that mental health isn't about "feeling good" but about having feelings that fit the moment, even if those feelings are unwanted or painful
• strategies for supporting teens who feel at the mercy of their emotions so they can become psychologically aware and skilled at managing their feelings
• how to approach common challenges that come with adolescence, such as friction at home, spiking anxiety, risky behavior, navigating friendships and romances, the pull of social media, and many more
• the best ways to stay connected to their teens and how to provide the kind of relationship that adolescents need and want
With clear, research-informed explanations alongside illuminating, real-life examples, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers gives parents the concrete, practical information they need to steady their teens through the bumpy yet transformational journey into adulthood.
In teenagers, powerful emotions come with the territory. And with so many of today's teens contending with academic pressure, social media stress, worries about the future, and concerns about their own mental health, it's easy for them-and their parents-to feel anxious and overwhelmed. But it doesn't have to be that way.
Parents who read this book will learn:
• what to expect in the normal course of adolescent emotional development and when it's time to worry
• why teens (and adults) need to understand that mental health isn't about "feeling good" but about having feelings that fit the moment, even if those feelings are unwanted or painful
• strategies for supporting teens who feel at the mercy of their emotions so they can become psychologically aware and skilled at managing their feelings
• how to approach common challenges that come with adolescence, such as friction at home, spiking anxiety, risky behavior, navigating friendships and romances, the pull of social media, and many more
• the best ways to stay connected to their teens and how to provide the kind of relationship that adolescents need and want
With clear, research-informed explanations alongside illuminating, real-life examples, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers gives parents the concrete, practical information they need to steady their teens through the bumpy yet transformational journey into adulthood.
Editorial Reviews
"The Emotional Lives of Teenagers is written as clearly, usefully, and warmly as anything I've read about the psychology of adolescence. Lisa Damour explains why intense feelings-including negative ones-are a key part of teenage development, and how we can help young people understand and embrace the full spectrum of human emotion. I give it my highest recommendation!"-Angela Duckworth, author of Grit and co-founder of Character Lab
"Lisa Damour applies her decades of clinical experience to one of the most essential questions of our time: How can adults best support adolescent mental health? She hands parents, teachers, coaches, and mentors the playbook they need to help teenagers feel heard, healthy, and whole."-Jewel, singer-songwriter and mental health advocate
"This book offers a crucial reframing that helps parents understand teens, their emotions, and their behavior. I couldn't love it more. Damour gifts us with knowledge, words, and practical advice to reach our teenagers so that we can be the parents they need us to be as they become fully themselves."-Tina Payne Bryson, co-author of The Whole-Brain Child
"In her latest book, Dr. Damour dispels harmful but pervasive myths about teen mental health. If, like most parents, you find yourself alienated or confused by your teen's unpredictable feelings, add this book to the top of your reading pile immediately."-Michelle Icard, author of Fourteen Talks by Age Fourteen
"I can't recommend this book enough. Damour gives parents practical and actionable research-backed advice to ensure their children develop the emotional skills they need to thrive."-Marc Brackett, director, Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and author of Permission to Feel
"Lisa Damour is a wonderful, rigorous thinker who draws beautifully from both research and clinical practice to help adults understand teenagers. Damour's striking clarity and insight make her the perfect guide for those looking to make sense of teens' emotional lives."-Richard Weissbourd, author of The Parents We Mean to Be
"Lisa Damour applies her decades of clinical experience to one of the most essential questions of our time: How can adults best support adolescent mental health? She hands parents, teachers, coaches, and mentors the playbook they need to help teenagers feel heard, healthy, and whole."-Jewel, singer-songwriter and mental health advocate
"This book offers a crucial reframing that helps parents understand teens, their emotions, and their behavior. I couldn't love it more. Damour gifts us with knowledge, words, and practical advice to reach our teenagers so that we can be the parents they need us to be as they become fully themselves."-Tina Payne Bryson, co-author of The Whole-Brain Child
"In her latest book, Dr. Damour dispels harmful but pervasive myths about teen mental health. If, like most parents, you find yourself alienated or confused by your teen's unpredictable feelings, add this book to the top of your reading pile immediately."-Michelle Icard, author of Fourteen Talks by Age Fourteen
"I can't recommend this book enough. Damour gives parents practical and actionable research-backed advice to ensure their children develop the emotional skills they need to thrive."-Marc Brackett, director, Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and author of Permission to Feel
"Lisa Damour is a wonderful, rigorous thinker who draws beautifully from both research and clinical practice to help adults understand teenagers. Damour's striking clarity and insight make her the perfect guide for those looking to make sense of teens' emotional lives."-Richard Weissbourd, author of The Parents We Mean to Be
Readers Top Reviews
Dr. RobynDr. Roby
Dr. Lisa provides an "insider's" view into the teenage brain and emotions that helps you to understand what teens are dealing with on a daily basis and also how we can help them through it. With encouraging words and specific stories, you feel like you are sitting with her in her living room! I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Lisa on my podcast, How to Talk to Kids about Anything, and she said many memorable things regarding the material in this book but her top tip stuck with me: "The best gift we can give our teenagers is to do what we can to be a steady presence when they are having a powerful emotional experience." This book shows you how.
Avid ReaderDr. Ro
I'm a Lisa Damour follower, so this is the third one of her (three) books that I've read. And I'm here to tell you that she is still finding ways to surprise and enlighten me. Even though her other books also deal with teenagers, this one digs deep and unearths the stuff that you and your kid go through that you maybe didn't realize is pretty universal. I love her anecdotes, they're as fun and interesting as the stuff she's teaching you and reassuring you about. Her basic concept that being mentally healthy doesn't always mean feeling good is so basic but so helpful. Can't recommend this highly enough. Dr. Damour doesn't disappoint! :)
Carole A. BarkerA
Being a teenager has never been easy, but it has become so much harder in recent years. The rise of social media, the lockdowns of COVID, increasingly competitive academic and extracurricular environments…it is no surprise that there has been a rise in mental health issues for our young people. As a parent, I have seen what my daughter, her friends and her classmates have experienced. And like so many others, I have struggled to know how and when to intervene, and when to step back. Dr. Damour’s book offers some concrete guidelines and suggestions to help us navigate this challenging time. One big takeaway for me was to realize that being emotionally healthy does not mean that someone feels good all of the time. As a parent, I don’t want to see my child stressed, anxious, or sad…if she is, surely I’m not being a good enough parent, right? Wrong. Our children are going to feel these and other negative emotions, and being a good parent means helping them to learn to handle these feelings appropriately. Whether there is a teen in your life who is experiencing the highs and lows of adolescence, or a child approaching those years…do yourself, and them, the tremendous favor of reading this book.
Lisette923Carole
As a middle school counselor, I jumped on getting this book as soon as it was released yesterday. I had the privilege of attending a Learning & the Brain conference in 2021 where Lisa Damour was a keynote speaker. She is just amazing! I've read both of her previous books - Untangled & Under Pressure. I can honestly say that I enjoyed The Emotional Lives of Teenagers even more than her previous books - and that is saying a lot! There are so many specific, recent statistics (including post-COVID statistics) to help us understand adolescents from different backgrounds so that we can better support them. I love the way she stresses validation and includes ways that we, as adults, can foster conversations with students so that they can feel seen and heard. I also love how she talks about how we need to model positive coping strategies. I could go on about how wonderful this book is but I'd like to share 2 quotes that stood out to me: "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." and "When adolescents bring us their fears, disappointments, and frustrations and we respond with curiosity and empathy, we reinforce our connection with them and model what we want them to expect in all of their close relationships". Every educator, coach, parent, or adult that interacts with adolescents should read this book!
christyann74Liset
Useful and well written. This book will guide all parents in raising and building relationships with their teens. I voluntarily read an advanced copy.
Short Excerpt Teaser
Chapter One
Adolescent Emotion 101: Getting Past Three Big Myths
"Dr. D," the text read, "can I come c you sometime this week? Tom." I didn't recognize the phone number it was coming from and had no one named Tom on my weekly practice schedule. As I stared curiously at my phone, three dots materialized, followed by a message that seemed to come from a mind reader: "It's me Tommy-I got your number from my mom."
Tommy! Of course. I immediately remembered a sweet nine-year-old I'd first laid eyes on in my waiting room years earlier. When we met, he was standing anxiously next to his mother as she sat with one hand resting calmly in her lap and the other gently stroking her son's back. Any progress she'd made in trying to ease his nerves evaporated when I opened the waiting room door. Tommy took me in with wide-eyed dread. His dark hair stood up on one side-bedhead that had impressively survived an entire school day-seeming to underscore his overall sense of alarm. On the phone, Tommy's mother had explained that he was having nighttime fears that were keeping him and the rest of the family up late. At my office, Tommy and his mom followed me to my consulting room, and there we slowly began what would grow into a long and fruitful working relationship.
Tommy was born tense. As a baby he startled easily and went on to have enormous difficulty separating from his parents when it was time to go to preschool. His worries morphed over the years into nighttime fears, which thankfully yielded to my efforts to be helpful and his parents' steady support. After those fears were resolved, nearly two years passed before I heard from his folks again. In the summer after seventh grade, Tommy bravely tried going to sleepaway camp but within two days was begging to come home. I had a few calls with Tommy at camp and several with his parents, and I also consulted by phone with the camp director. Together, we decided to pull the plug, with the hope of trying camp again the next year. Tommy met with me throughout that summer, both to address the anxiety that brought him home and to process his feelings of frustration and humiliation around being unable to stay.
Remembering all of this as I looked at my phone, I realized that nearly four years had gone by since I'd last heard from Tommy-now Tom-or his parents, which would make him a high school senior. We set up a time to meet and I prepared myself for the likelihood that I'd hardly recognize the person in my waiting room. Sure enough, Tom was now tall and broad-shouldered. He was wearing long, loose shorts that were poorly suited to the chilly late-October temperatures in the suburbs of Greater Cleveland. At once awkward and friendly, he greeted me with a deep voice that I didn't recognize.
After we settled into my office and caught up briefly, he turned to the reason for his text.
"I'm working on my college applications and don't want to apply too far from home. I'm okay with this, and my parents are too, but my college counselor is kinda making a thing of it."
Tom was at the top of his class, thanks, no doubt, to the fact that his anxious temperament also made him a highly conscientious student. He was a sought-after cross-country runner and had also developed into an accomplished oboist. Despite the many ways he had matured, Tom explained that although he had hoped to attend a five-week intensive music program in Michigan the previous summer, he could not bring himself to go. Based on that experience, he decided to apply only to colleges within a three-hour drive of home.
Northeast Ohio has no shortage of excellent colleges and universities, but the college counselor at Tom's school still felt that Tom was limiting his opportunities. I wasn't sure what to think. From the gray couch in my office, Tom shared his reasoning with me. If he started to feel nervous or unsure when he was away at college, Tom wanted to be able to come home for a night or two without its being a big deal. He was sending applications to seven very fine area schools-he would certainly have excellent options when the admissions decisions came in. And he wasn't applying to any college within thirty minutes of his house, because he really did want to feel that he'd gone away to school.
"I still get super anxious," Tom said. "It's better than it was, for sure, but I've never liked being away from my family. I'm just trying to come up with a solution that doesn't leave me feeling like my anxiety could mess up my freshman year. When I explained this to my college counselor, he said: ‘Tom, your worries are clouding your thinking.' "
Though I knew where the counselor was coming from, I didn't share his perspective. To me, it seemed to be grounded ...
Adolescent Emotion 101: Getting Past Three Big Myths
"Dr. D," the text read, "can I come c you sometime this week? Tom." I didn't recognize the phone number it was coming from and had no one named Tom on my weekly practice schedule. As I stared curiously at my phone, three dots materialized, followed by a message that seemed to come from a mind reader: "It's me Tommy-I got your number from my mom."
Tommy! Of course. I immediately remembered a sweet nine-year-old I'd first laid eyes on in my waiting room years earlier. When we met, he was standing anxiously next to his mother as she sat with one hand resting calmly in her lap and the other gently stroking her son's back. Any progress she'd made in trying to ease his nerves evaporated when I opened the waiting room door. Tommy took me in with wide-eyed dread. His dark hair stood up on one side-bedhead that had impressively survived an entire school day-seeming to underscore his overall sense of alarm. On the phone, Tommy's mother had explained that he was having nighttime fears that were keeping him and the rest of the family up late. At my office, Tommy and his mom followed me to my consulting room, and there we slowly began what would grow into a long and fruitful working relationship.
Tommy was born tense. As a baby he startled easily and went on to have enormous difficulty separating from his parents when it was time to go to preschool. His worries morphed over the years into nighttime fears, which thankfully yielded to my efforts to be helpful and his parents' steady support. After those fears were resolved, nearly two years passed before I heard from his folks again. In the summer after seventh grade, Tommy bravely tried going to sleepaway camp but within two days was begging to come home. I had a few calls with Tommy at camp and several with his parents, and I also consulted by phone with the camp director. Together, we decided to pull the plug, with the hope of trying camp again the next year. Tommy met with me throughout that summer, both to address the anxiety that brought him home and to process his feelings of frustration and humiliation around being unable to stay.
Remembering all of this as I looked at my phone, I realized that nearly four years had gone by since I'd last heard from Tommy-now Tom-or his parents, which would make him a high school senior. We set up a time to meet and I prepared myself for the likelihood that I'd hardly recognize the person in my waiting room. Sure enough, Tom was now tall and broad-shouldered. He was wearing long, loose shorts that were poorly suited to the chilly late-October temperatures in the suburbs of Greater Cleveland. At once awkward and friendly, he greeted me with a deep voice that I didn't recognize.
After we settled into my office and caught up briefly, he turned to the reason for his text.
"I'm working on my college applications and don't want to apply too far from home. I'm okay with this, and my parents are too, but my college counselor is kinda making a thing of it."
Tom was at the top of his class, thanks, no doubt, to the fact that his anxious temperament also made him a highly conscientious student. He was a sought-after cross-country runner and had also developed into an accomplished oboist. Despite the many ways he had matured, Tom explained that although he had hoped to attend a five-week intensive music program in Michigan the previous summer, he could not bring himself to go. Based on that experience, he decided to apply only to colleges within a three-hour drive of home.
Northeast Ohio has no shortage of excellent colleges and universities, but the college counselor at Tom's school still felt that Tom was limiting his opportunities. I wasn't sure what to think. From the gray couch in my office, Tom shared his reasoning with me. If he started to feel nervous or unsure when he was away at college, Tom wanted to be able to come home for a night or two without its being a big deal. He was sending applications to seven very fine area schools-he would certainly have excellent options when the admissions decisions came in. And he wasn't applying to any college within thirty minutes of his house, because he really did want to feel that he'd gone away to school.
"I still get super anxious," Tom said. "It's better than it was, for sure, but I've never liked being away from my family. I'm just trying to come up with a solution that doesn't leave me feeling like my anxiety could mess up my freshman year. When I explained this to my college counselor, he said: ‘Tom, your worries are clouding your thinking.' "
Though I knew where the counselor was coming from, I didn't share his perspective. To me, it seemed to be grounded ...
