Lisa Damour > Quotes

“You want your daughter to become a critical consumer of the media, so use what she's watching to help her build those skills. Swing by the couch or lean over her laptop and say, "I'm all for mindless entertainment, but you know that I'm not a big fan of shows that celebrate women for being sexy and stupid." Your daughter may roll her eyes, but do it anyway. Girls can listen and roll their eyes at the same time.”
― Lisa Damour, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood

“Unfortunately, anxiety, like stress, has gotten a bad rap. Somewhere along the line we got the idea that emotional discomfort is always a bad thing.”
― Lisa Damour, Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls

“Girls often aim their most severe meanness at their mothers—”
― Lisa Damour, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood

“People make choices, choices have consequences.”
― Lisa Damour, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood

“Teenagers often manage their feelings by dumping the uncomfortable ones on their parents,”
― Lisa Damour, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood

“It’s bad enough to be rebuffed by your daughter—it’s worse that it happens right when you feel that she needs you most.”
― Lisa Damour, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood

“Party parents figure that if their daughter is going to do risky things when with her friends, she’ll be safer if she and her friends do those risky things right under their noses. But party parents rob their daughter of one of the best protections she has: the ability to blame her good behavior on them.”
― Lisa Damour, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood

“I’ve come to learn over my years of practice, which is that having a delicate conversation with a teenager is like trying to talk with someone on the other side of a door.”
― Lisa Damour, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood

“The most successful people I know do their best work under any conditions, for anyone.”
― Lisa Damour, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood

“While an adolescent remains inconsistent and unpredictable in her behavior, she may suffer, but she does not seem to me to be in need of treatment. I think that she should be given time and scope to work out her own solution. Rather, it may be her parents who need help and guidance so as to be able to bear with her. There are few situations in life which are more difficult to cope with than an adolescent son or daughter during the attempt to liberate themselves. —ANNA FREUD (1958), “Adolescence”
― Lisa Damour, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood

“Looking back on their own teenage years, most adults feel grateful that there's no easy-to-access document of all the dumb things they did.”
― Lisa Damour, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood

“There are few situations in life which are more difficult to cope with than an adolescent son or daughter during the attempt to liberate themselves.” Raising teenagers is not for the fragile, and that’s true even when everything is going just as it should. Parents of teenagers need supportive partners and friends to prop them up when they feel that they just can’t take one more push-off. Knowing that you can serve as a reliable, safe base allows your daughter to venture out into the world; having the strength to stay in place when your daughter clings to and rejects you in short order usually requires the loving support of adult allies.”
― Lisa Damour, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood

“When girls come into my office in a panic...and I can tell that they they’re just a wreck, I get out my glitter jar and I do this.” She picked up the jar and shook it fiercely the way one shakes a snow globe. The placid water immediately became a sparkling purple tempest. “And then I say to the girl, ‘Right now, this is what it’s like in your brain. So first, let’s settle your glitter.”
― Lisa Damour, Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls

“heavy social demands can undermine what cultural anthropologists call “sustainable routines,” the predictable patterns of daily life that go a long way toward reducing stress.”
― Lisa Damour, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood

“under the sway of social influence, teenagers don’t disregard the issue of rules completely. In my experience they still think about it, but in the wrong way. Instead of reflecting on why we have rules, teens focus on trying not to get caught while breaking them.”
― Lisa Damour, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood

“Thanks so much for letting me know. I am really confident that the girls will find a way to come to their own resolution.”
― Lisa Damour, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood

“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

“if you feel you must criticize your daughter’s friends—and sometimes you must—use your words and your tone to communicate that the girls are in a tricky situation, not that they are bad people.”
― Lisa Damour, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood

“If you really want to help your daughter manage her distress, help her see the difference between complaining and venting.”
― Lisa Damour, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood

“sharing one’s true feelings at home makes it a lot easier to be charming out in public.”
― Lisa Damour, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood

“shame is one of the last places we, as parents, want to land with our kids. Indeed, the capacity to shame a child is one of the most dangerous weapons in our parenting arsenal. Shame goes after a girl’s character, not her actions. It goes after who she is, not what she did. Shame has toxic, lasting effects and no real benefits. Once shamed, teens are left two terrible options: a girl can agree with the shaming parent and conclude that she is, indeed, the bad one, or she can keep her self-esteem intact by concluding that the parent is the bad one. Either way, someone loses.”
― Lisa Damour, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood

“As one of my friends put it, “My daughter has five different, extreme emotions before eight in the morning.”
― Lisa Damour, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood

“we learned that girls are much more likely to seek help for a suffering friend if they can count on adults to respect their tribal loyalties.”
― Lisa Damour, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood

“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

“Try this at home. The next time your daughter tells you that she’s feeling really nervous about a test for which she has yet to study, cheerily reply, “Good! I’m glad you’re worried. That’s the ideal reaction, because right now you know you’re not ready. As soon as you start studying, your nerves will calm down.”
― Lisa Damour, Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls

“When the subjects arrived at the psychology lab, they were sent into individual dressing rooms with full-length mirrors. Half of the dressing rooms contained bathing suits (one-piece for the women, trunks for the men) and half contained sweaters, all of which were available in a wide range of sizes. Once the subjects put on the assigned clothing, they were told to hang out in the dressing room for fifteen minutes before they filled out a questionnaire about whether or not they would want to purchase the item. While they waited, they were asked, in order to help the researchers use the time efficiently, to complete a math test “for an experimenter in the Department of Education.” As you’ve already guessed, the psychologists weren’t helping their colleagues in the Department of Education. They were measuring whether taking a math test while wearing a bathing suit would affect the women’s scores.”
― Lisa Damour, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood

“Offering to help with carpooling will come at the cost of your time, gas budget, and likely your sleep, but you will learn more about what is going on in your daughter’s personal life in the time it takes to drop off her friends and get back to your home than you will in three weeks of asking about how things are going. Wise chauffeurs know it’s best to really play the part; trying to join the conversation or ask questions usually breaks the spell and ends the chatter or—even worse—gets the girls to take the conversation to their phones.”
― Lisa Damour, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood

“You should start by allowing your daughter more privacy than she had as a child. Interestingly, findings from a research study that examined how much parents seek to know about their teenagers—and how much teenagers choose to share—suggest that we grant greater privacy to our sons than to our daughters. We are more likely to ask girls what they’re up to behind closed doors, and our daughters, more than our sons, answer our questions.”
― Lisa Damour, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood

“Raising a young woman will be one of the most vexing, delightful, exhausting, and fulfilling things you will ever do. Sometimes all on the same day. The job is hard enough even under the best conditions, and anyone doing a hard job deserves support. When we get that support, when we understand the developmental tour de force that is adolescence, we can truly enjoy and empower our girls.”
― Lisa Damour, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood

“All relationships come with ambivalence. Knowing someone well means that we enjoy the best of what he or she has to offer and must reconcile ourselves to being frustrated and disappointed at times, too. Acknowledging your own crazy spots (and, perhaps, your partner’s) welcomes your daughter to these facts of life. Don’t hesitate to extend this same lesson to adults beyond your home as well. When we help girls let go of the idea that there are perfect people or perfect relationships, they move into a vastly more mature way of dealing with people as they are and the world as it is. And on your end, too, remembering how to hold on to good feelings when we are angry or disappointed will come in handy because sometimes your daughter will do things she’s not supposed to do.”
― Lisa Damour, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood