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

“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

“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

“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

“People make choices, choices have consequences.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“...harassment is actually a sexualized form of bullying. Bullies use social or physical power to intimidate and demean others. Harassers put a sleazy spin on the same dynamic, simply deploying vulgar language and unwanted advances to accomplish the same end.”
― Lisa Damour, Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls

“Researchers who study peer relationships have found that there are actually two different kinds of peer popularity. Sociometric popularity is the term used to describe well-liked teens with reputations for being kind and fun, while perceived popularity describes teens who hold a lot of social power but are disliked by many classmates. These two distinct groups emerge in studies that employ a simple peer-nomination method to examine social dynamics in school settings. Girls are given lists naming all the girls in their class (and boys are given lists naming all the boys) and asked to circle the names of the three girls they like the most, the three girls they like the least, and the girls who are considered to be popular. With this technique, researchers have found that many well-liked girls aren’t considered to be popular, and that many girls who are considered to be popular aren’t actually well liked. In fact, the disliked-but-popular girls are described by their classmates as domineering, aggressive, and stuck up, while the liked-but-unpopular girls are described as kind and trustworthy. A third group also emerges: well-liked girls who are identified by peers as being popular. They are amiable and faithful but differ from their liked-but-unpopular peers in that they aren’t easy to push around. In other words, the girls in the liked-and-popular group have found the relational sweet spot of being both friendly and assertive—a skill set girls often struggle to master and to which we’ll return soon. So we know from the research that when teens use the term popular, they’re likely to be describing girls with perceived popularity—girls who use cruelty to gain social power. Adults would like to think that girls who are mean would be shunned by their peers, but unfortunately, the opposite tends to occur. A girl who allows herself to be mean enjoys many “friends” who are eager to stay on her good side, and she is often”
― Lisa Damour, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood

“There’s something to be said for detaching from others. When we are alone and disconnected from technology, we can reflect on our feelings, vent silently to ourselves or our diaries, and imagine what we might say or do while considering the impact of any real action. Everyone who grew up without digital technology recalls having written a letter we’re glad we never sent or having a rant we’re glad no one heard. Using private time to express and get to know a feeling lets the feeling come down to size, teaches us a great deal about ourselves, and acquaints us with our internal resources for managing distress. Social disconnection also allows time to develop a considered plan about how (or if!) we want to act on hard feelings. In other words, we have time to keep our thoughts and our feelings separate from our actions.”
― 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

“Girls often aim their most severe meanness at their mothers—especially if they have had a particularly close relationship in the past—”
― Lisa Damour, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood

“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

“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

“There’s no excuse for either girl’s behavior, but there’s an explanation: as a culture, we do a terrible job of helping girls figure out what to do when they are mad. As far as girls know, they can either be a total doormat—think Cinderella—or flat-out cruel like Cinderella’s stepsisters. We rarely help girls master assertion—the art of standing up for oneself while respecting the rights of others.”
― Lisa Damour, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood