How to Communicate Effectively with Your Tweens and Teens

Episode Transcript

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Hi everyone, welcome to the show, I am Dr. Nicole, and on today’s episode, we’re talking about parenting kids in the preteen and teen phases of development. These can be tricky stages, they involve so much brain and body growth for our kids during these times, and as parents, we can really feel like our kids change overnight. What used to work might not work anymore. The relationship we once had might suddenly feel different, and communication with our kids might change, but even as this phase is marked by kids seeking more independence, in many ways I feel like they need our guidance as parents more than ever during these years. But figuring out how to provide that can be tough for us. So how do we communicate best with our kids during this period of their development, and in today’s world, what are the kinds of things that we should be talking with them about, especially as we’re thinking about them entering the high school years. To give us insight into all of this, I have invited Michelle Icard on the show today. Let me tell you a bit about her.
She is a speaker, author and educator who helps kids parents and teachers navigate the complicated social world of early adolescence. Her latest book is Fourteen Talks by Age Fourteen, out right now, and it guides readers through the fourteen essential conversations parents need to have with their kids before they start high school. She also has her first book, Middle School Makeover: Improving the Way You and Your Child Experience the Middle School Years — oh my goodness, how many of us could have used that when we were that age, and it’s a primer for the social and emotional changes parents and kids navigate when midlife meets middle school under the same roof. Michelle is a member of the TODAY Show parenting team and NBC News Learn. Her work has been featured in lots of different publications, her leadership curriculum for middle schoolers has been implemented at schools across the US, and she also has a summer camp curriculum that’s offered at many summer camps each year. She lives with her family in Charlotte, North Carolina. Michelle, welcome to the show!

Michelle Icard:
Hello! Thank you for having me!

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
So excited to have this conversation because this age group of kids, this sort of developmental stage kind of gets a bad rap by parents, by educators, by people, it’s like “Oh, it’s such a hard age!” I’ve often said for myself, I think there are very few adults who would choose to go back in time and relive these years. They’re just tough. As a parent of a couple of young adults and a couple of teenagers, I feel like I have spent lots of years now personally in this, as well as professionally. So I just think this is a really important age group to be talking about, what their needs are and how we can help.

Michelle Icard:
I agree and I’m with you, I don’t know many people who say, “Boy, I loved middle school and I would love to go back and feel that same way again.” A few do, and when they show up at my talks, I always say “Please don’t feel bad” because they’re embarrassed. “What’s wrong that I liked it!” So if that is you listening, that’s great. But I will say you sort of won the lottery, because for most people, that was a really tough time of life and that’s part of why I love it. First of all, I like helping people through that, and I also like exploring what makes it so tough because when you dig past all the awkwardness and the pain and all of that, there is some really exciting stuff happening that’s driving that, and I find that fascinating.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Yeah, it is such a fascinating thing and I also just am intrigued by my very first teaching job, I was a teacher way back in the day before I became a psychologist, and as a middle school special education teacher, and man, I just found it fascinating and loved the challenge of it, but it can feel overwhelming to a lot of people. I’m curious, just before we dive into things about the book and what we can be doing as parents, how you developed a specific interest because there are not a lot of us professionally who really are curious about this and specialize in this. So I’m curious how that happened for you.

Michelle Icard:
Sure. To make a long story short, what had happened was I was certified to teach, thought I would teach 7th through 12th grade English, and ended up getting a job at a big consulting firm and thought, “Oh, maybe I’m a business person. Maybe I’m not a teacher.” And I went into that job and every role I had at the firm, I turned into a teaching job. So I would say, “This is an interesting program. Can I please write a manual to help explain it to people? Can I lead a training on this?” So I really was called to teaching. There was a huge scandal with that consulting firm. You may remember the Enron scandal way back in the day. 80,000 employees lost their jobs and I was one of them. At that time of life, I had a not-quite two year-old and I was seven months pregnant, no job, no maternity leave. So I really had to reinvent myself, and I realized, boy, I’m always teaching anyway. But again, that pregnant, I was like “I’m not going to get a job right now.” So I ended up starting a tutoring business and working with kids who were mostly in middle school.
My intention, initially, was “I’ll help these kids get organized, teach them how to study for tests, that kind of stuff.” And they began confiding in me about all the social and emotional stuff they were going through that was making it so hard to focus on school, and I was sent right back to my own middle school experience, which was pretty miserable.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Mine too.

Michelle Icard:
I call middle school the stickiest time of our lives because what happens to you then sticks with you for so long because everything is forming and it gets kind of gelled into your brain. So from that point on, I became fascinated with middle school development and what I could do to help kids and parents walk through it with a bit more ease and less stress.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
I love that story, that’s great. I do think it’s a period of time that can be really stressful in families because there is this sense of “Okay, my kid has suddenly changed and is different.” The things that we are working on before, the ways that we were connecting, things we were talking about like, now it’s just suddenly different. It can really throw parents off in terms of “What do I do now?” I think especially in this age of 24/7 connection with technology and social media, the landscape of that for kids at these developmental stages has gotten even more complex for sure.

Michelle Icard:
I agree, and it’s naturally a time for reinvention for kids, and I call this period of life “The Middle School Construction Project” because they are building the three things they need to become an adult. When I ask parents “What do you think your kid needs to become an adult?” They’ll say things like “Oh, they need to become responsible and they need to be critical thinkers.” We all know adults who are not these things. So it’s a much more fundamental construction project where they’re building an adult body, an adult brain and an adult identity. That identity piece is what I love to study and think about and help parents understand, because that’s the part where kids are reinventing, they want to become an individual, apart from their parents, apart from their family. But there are many upsides to that, that’s the healthy, right thing for them to be doing. The upside for parents is that it’s an opportunity for parents to reinvent how they approach their kids. So if you feel like yeah, everything, as you said has been working up to a certain point and now it’s not, know that that’s natural and that this is really not a punishment, it’s an opportunity. Now you get to relate to each other in a different way. And that can be very fulfilling if you can figure out how to do it, right? And that’s what the book is supposed to help you with.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Well, I do think it does trigger a lot of things in us as parents, depending on our own experiences during that phase of life, and so I think that can lead to some of the challenges between some parents and kids. We get triggered by what’s happening with our kids, by their responses to us, whether we are consciously aware of it or not, ways that our parents related to us back then, and so it can be a triggering time for everybody, I think. And many of the parent listeners to this show have kids with some type of mental health challenge, neurodevelopmental disability, and I just want to comment on that too, that these are kids where there are some extra challenges during this time because their brain and body are going through — I love, as you said, a major construction project, and it’s an additional layer on top of this some challenges that they are already dealing with. So if you have a child who is prone to anxiety anyway and now is having all these hormonal changes and all of these social landscape changes, that can be tricky. Or even a kid with autism or ADHD or those kinds of things, this sort of preteen, early teen stage can add just an extra layer of challenge for sure.

Michelle Icard:
It can, and I want to point out a study that came out in the past few years that I found really fascinating, which is that this study found that — I think it was just looking at moms, that moms of kids in middle school are reportedly, that is the loneliest, most stressful time of parenting in any mom’s life. And it’s that feeling of separation. We’ve known what to do for so long and we’ve made choices that we think work well for the family for so long, and that kind of blows up in a lot of different ways, and it can leave a parent feeling like “I thought I was good at my job, I thought I was good at this. Now what?” So I do want to normalize that for parents, that you’re not alone if you feel like you’re blowing it all of a sudden or like your kid doesn’t want to be with you or the kid isn’t presenting the way you expected them to present at this age. That’s all happening everywhere to everyone in some varying degree.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
I think that’s a really important point because parents, moms especially, tend to internalize that and think that there’s something that they did. And as you pointed out, this is a normal phase and actually, the upside of that is kids need to move through this phase of development in order to come out on the other side and be stable, independent, well-adjusted adults. It’s tricky, I think, because as I said in the intro to the episode, it’s hard because there is this push-pull at this age, right? It’s like this sense of kids pushing us away some of the time. I want my space, I want my independence, I don’t want to be told what to do, and yet, there are also these times when they’re right up next to us like “Help me, be with me, fix this for me.” And that can be really tricky as a parent to read that and to stay sturdy and steady within ourselves in that and to recognize that this is normal, these ups and downs, these pushing away but then coming close, this is all part of that confusing but important phase.

Michelle Icard:
And to not resent it when your child has been dismissive of you or mean to you and then wants to cuddle up and ask you to make them a snack. You’re like, “Who? Huh? Now you want something from me?” I think that can be a piece of it too, that for many parents, they’re like, “Heck no.” And then the kid is like “What? I haven’t done anything. I just want to spend time with you!” It creates a lot of cross wires. So just the simple perspective that you just gave of knowing this is purposeful. If my child doesn’t go through this phase right now and figure out how to individuate and figure out how to be their own person, even though it feels, to me, like rejection or being a contrarian or whatever it is, what it really is is them practicing how to be independent, and if they don’t do that, they’re going to end up in unhealthy relationships later in life because they haven’t figured out how to be their own person. So when I can explain that to parents, I think it just eases the burden to be able to put it in that frame of view. Like “This isn’t personal. They do not hate me. This is simply them not knowing how to do this and messing it up a bunch but just figuring it out purposefully to be happier and healthier in their relationships later in life. So I’m happy to sacrifice the purpose of it. It’s harder to do it when I think it’s just for no reason at all.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
And I think that is a really important thing because we can figure out how to manage our own thoughts and feelings around that and then our own behaviors around that better when we realize that this isn’t some sort of personal attack. This is something that is normal and is a phase of development. So let’s dive into — I think one of the real challenges is around how we effectively communicate with kids at this stage where a lot of the time, they seem like they want nothing to do with communicating with us, and yet we know this is an important and tricky phase of development. They do need us, they need the information and guidance and support that we offer. So let’s talk about ways that we can effectively initiate and communicate. I know that you’ve got some phrases that you feel are important, that help to increase the likelihood that we will have some success of having a connection with them, and then also some phrases that will send them going in the other direction and lead to conflict. So let’s start with some practical things there.

Michelle Icard:
Sure. So as you said, kids this age really stop wanting to talk to us quite so much, and I do want to point out that I say in the book, it’s the job of language to tie groups together, and it’s the job of teens and tweens to break ties apart, so they become sort of incompatible at this age. So again, I’m saying that just to make you feel better as a listener that this is normal. It’s not that your child doesn’t like you or doesn’t want to talk to you, but they need to begin forming relationships with peers as part of their move towards independence. So I suggest that this is a time when parents need to learn a new language. They have to really re-learn how to talk to their kids. As you mentioned, there are some things that turn kids off right away. One of the big ones is assuming how your kid feels or assuming how they will feel in the future. The one thing that I hear parents say a lot when they’re trying to convince their kid not to do something, or to make a certain choice, they will say, “You’re going to regret that later.” And it’s in this sort of all-knowing, omniscient — like, “I have experience, I have been there and I can tell you, as someone who has gone through this, you will regret it if that’s a choice you make.” And what the kid is thinking is “You don’t know me, I’m becoming my own person. You don’t know what thoughts are in my head” and I know 13 year old Michelle would have dug her heels in and been like “I will show you what I will not regret!”, just to prove that I was my own person and could think for myself. So beware making assumptions about how your child feels or will feel in the future. And the flip-side to that, and the flip-side to most of these, what I call “conversation crashers” is to ask your child. To be curious and to explore your child. So instead of saying “You are going to regret that”, “What might it feel like or look like in a week if you choose that? How do you anticipate other people reacting? What do you think you’re going to feel like?” Or whatever the example may be. So another one that kids don’t like is absolutes. And this is just a sort of basic communication device that many of us fall back on, parents especially, because we can’t seem to get through. So we try to really hammer our points home. So it’s like “You never pick up your stuff when I put it on the bottom of the stairs for you to carry to your room, and it’s always left for me to do and I never have the time.” These “always” and “Nevers” and absolutes are really easy for a kid to discredit, because maybe one time they did pick up one shoe and left the other one and took it up to their room, and they’re like, “But I do!”

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
And they will remember that and they will tell you about it.

Michelle Icard:
They are little lawyers at this age, they are constantly arguing their case, so beware of using absolutes, it will backfire. Instead, I suggest you just ask for what you need instead of “You always do this and I always do this”, just say, “This is becoming hard on me. These things are here often, I feel like I’m often carrying them up. Why is it difficult for you? Let’s talk about how we solve this together because you need to carry your stuff upstairs. So what’s a better system? Help me out.”

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Yeah. I think that approaching it from a problem solving approach is really so helpful because not only does it get off of that hamster wheel of arguing and negotiating but it focuses on building some skills that they’re going to need, and I think that’s so important at this age as they are moving into more independence, it’s like how do we problem solve this this so that you can be be more independent, so that you can learn these skills. So I love that approach. I wonder what you think about — I’ve done this both as a parent with my own kids, and also as a therapist with kids, you said saying things like “You’re going to regret that” or sort of being like “In my infinite wisdom…” and here is a thing that we often do know, but they can’t hear that from us at that point. I have sort of shared what my experience was. “I remember when I was your age that this happened, this is how I felt” and just sharing that in not a “This is how you’re feeling” way, but just “This was my experience with it” in sort of a wondering way, like I wonder if maybe that’s going on for you. What do you find? Do you find that to be a helpful approach?

Michelle Icard:
I do. I think there are two add-ons to that approach. I really like it. I think one is to ask first, “Can I share with you my experience with this, in case it helps you make your decision?” And I only say that, it’s a little precious, we are sort of pandering to our audience here, but they’re in an age where they appreciate that, they have very little authority. So when you can find a moment to give them a little authority, I think it feels really good to them. So just saying “Can I share this with you?/Can I tell you what happened with me?” feels to them like a real shift from “My mom’s trying to teach me a lesson” to “Oh, my mom is relating to me”, which I think is really nice. And then I do have a piece in the book where I Talk about “Beware the Overshare”. I think many parents have a really good internal barometer for what’s appropriate to share and what’s not, and some don’t. Maybe they weren’t modeled what was appropriate to talk about with their parents. So there is some guidance in there for what is okay to share and what’s not. You hear parents sharing things that they are sharing just to disparage the other partner or person in their life, or they’re sharing to get cool points, like “Listen, I’m someone you can trust because I also drank a ton when I was in…” You know? So there are certain things that you do not want to share, and if you’re kind of wondering “What should I or shouldn’t I share?” That’s in there too with some tips.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
I think that’s a great point and that does shift over the course of those years. I mean what might really be inappropriate to share from your own personal experience with a 12 or a 13 year old is really different than an 18 or a 20 year old, depending on that. And realizing that there are such profound developmental shifts during this time. It’s always so interesting to me when you think about us putting 9th through 12th graders together in the same building, and yet the difference cognitively, socially, emotionally, physically between 9th graders and 12th graders, it’s like night and day, it’s like they are totally different human beings!

Michelle Icard:
14 and 18, 14 is still cuddly and cute, 18 is like a man.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Yes! So I think recognizing that, and to your point, it is important to gauge where your kid is in that and for those of you who have children who maybe chronologically are in these years but still developmentally in various ways may be younger, you need to use that as a gauge too, in terms of what you focus on, how much you share and how you approach some of these tricky topics which we will get into in a minute. Continuing this idea of strategies that are helpful around communication, let’s talk about what you find to be the best setup for that. So the best kind of places, time, situations, because man, can we go wrong quickly when we don’t navigate that properly, right? So how do we set that up well?

Michelle Icard:
So I think a couple of things to keep in mind when you are setting this up: One is that kids in this age are impulsive thinkers. That often improves over time, a long period of time, but they don’t like to feel ambushed. Because if you bring up a subject and they haven’t had a chance to process it on their own, they’re going to feel like it’s a battle. You’ve already prepared. You know what they’re going to say. They’re having to come off the cuff or they don’t like to multitask, they’re focusing on something else, whether it appears to you to be valuable or important doesn’t matter. So I say just be really careful about the ambush. A nice thing you can do is to schedule a time to talk with your tween or teen. So if you know you’ve noticed grades slipping and you’re concerned about that, rather than while they’re having a snack at the counter, you say “Hey let’s talk about grades, what’s going on? I noticed they’re not what I expected.” You can just say “Hey, I was looking at the online portal. It looks like grades might be a little different than we expected. When can we set up a time to talk about this? Do you want to talk about it after dinner? Do you want to do it tomorrow after school? You let me know.” So that’s a really good way to get started. You can let your kid pick the place. “Where would you like to talk about this?” Is a good one too. So many parents will say that not having eye contact during these conversations is helpful. I have a sort of generic tip that I recommend to every parent of a child aged 11 and up, it’s my best communication tip and it has nothing to do with what you say. It’s a top called having a botox brow. So there is a really cool study that came out of one of Harvard’s teaching hospitals where they took adults and put them through an MRI and showed them pictures of people’s faces and said “Can you tell me what this person feels by looking at their face?” And adults can do that really well, they can say “That person is angry/This person is scared/They are happy”. The MRI shows that they use a different part of their brain, they used the prefrontal cortex and teens doing the same experiment got it wrong half the time. They used the emotional center of their brain. All this to say, your child, when they look at you and they see your forehead scrunched up, which to me is like “I’m focused on you, I love you, I’m listening. That’s my focused face.” To them, it reads angry. So there is so often miscommunication between parents and kids this age because kids just can’t read facial expressions until they get older very well. So say how you feel, that’s helpful. Like “I’m not angry, I’m curious” you can use your words, like we say to our toddlers. Or you can just have what I call a — pretend you’re overly botoxed on a late night talk show and you can not move your forehead, so just have a completely neutral forehead. Not wide-eyed and crazy, but just totally neutral and this is the tip that parents come back to me with over and over again and say, “That was a game-changer, my kid talks to me more now because they don’t think I’m mad at them.”

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
It’s a great point, and even as I’m thinking about kids who have various kinds of processing challenges anyway, the whole reading of nonverbal communication adds an additional layer of challenge and complexity, and just neutralizing that, taking that more of the equation helps them to be more attuned to what’s actually going on and what you’re actually talking about.

Michelle Icard:
And along those lines, I find texting to be super helpful in this situation. So sometimes, again, if a kid wants to think at their own pace, and not your pace of conversation, you can just send a little text like, “Hey, I was hoping we could talk about this, we can do it over text or you can come to my room tonight if you want, totally up to you.” But lots of kids are not great auditory processors or they want to just go at their own rate of speed. And I think texting or a chat feature through technology can be very useful here.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
I love that. And I have found being in the car is such a place where kids at these ages will open up because there is no eye contact, it’s sort of like something else is going on but you’re there at the same place, you have privacy, and it’s interesting, because as I’ve talked with parents over the course of the last year with the pandemic, many of them have said that that’s been one of the things that they realized without having all of the things that they typically take their kids to or in the car that they have realized that that has really reduced the number of conversations and communication opportunities because it made them aware of how much of that happens when they are traveling in a car together.

Michelle Icard:
It’s so true, so maybe walking the dog is a similar replacement.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Yeah. But I think that point about how we tend to think, “We’re going to have this conversation. Sit down. Sit across.” And it’s like, no, no be doing something else, whether it’s making a snack together in the kitchen or walking the dog, be doing something else because kids, especially at that age don’t want to have that pressured feeling of “We’re here and you’re talking to me about something.”

Michelle Icard:
Right.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
How about ways to help kids stay engaged and interested or open? Does that have to do with the kinds of questions that we ask? How do we really keep them with us? Because I know a lot of parents feel like they put something out there, and then immediately the kids are like “I don’t want to talk about that”. Or they listen for a minute, and then it’s like “Yup, I’m done with this now.” So how do we keep that going?

Michelle Icard:
So that is the crux of the reason that I created what I call “The BRIEF Model for Conversations” and that is this universal approach that I explain in the beginning of the book, and then for every topic in there, I offer up a script of how this model can be used to talk about a bazillion different things. But you’re right. Parents think, “Oh gosh, I have max 30 seconds to get my kids’ attention before they zone out or pick up their phone or walk away or roll their eyes.” So what they tend to do is start at the end of a conversation with like, “Hey listen up real quick, I need to tell you. I don’t ever want to catch you vaping, it’s terrible.” So they’re quick to the punch. That would turn anyone off. Of course it turns a tween or a teen off. Though I understand the impulse to try and get through while you can. The BRIEF model, BRIEF is an acronym and each letter stands for a different step in the process. So if a parent can begin to adopt this process for their conversations with their kids, they will find that the kids are much more willing to stick around for longer.
So the B is Begin Peacefully. And that’s just starting with not hitting the nail on the head. It’s a gentle curiosity about the topic, not about the kid. Not about “Have you ever vaped?” But “What have you heard about/What are kids thinking about vaping these days? Do they think parents are totally overblowing this issue? So Begin Peacefully. And then R is Relate To Your Kid. So that’s just showing them that you are not there to bust them, you are not suspicious, this is not an interrogation. It’s just like “I know these conversations can be kind of weird, I remember having them with my parents, but they were about smoking cigarettes. This is like a new territory and I’m happy that I can learn from you.” I is Interview for Data, and this is where you can start to ask some questions. But again, I say it sort of clinically, Interview for Data, because I don’t want it to feel like it’s an emotional interrogation. Again, you’re trying to bust your kid, you’re just trying to develop a rapport where you can talk about hard things together. So this might be just some general questions like: “Well, what are you seeing? Have you read any articles about what the health repercussions are?” Things like that. E is Echo What You Hear. And anybody who has been to a therapist or seen a therapist on TV knows how this goes. This is like “Okay, so it sounds like you are saying some kids do it but it’s maybe less than it used to be.” And then F is Feedback, and this is the final part of the process. This is where the parent can give some advice, make a suggestion, if needed offer limits or boundaries, whatever the case may be. But when you start there, that’s when kids tune you out, immediately. When you work your way up to that a little bit more gradually, there is this building of trust and rapport that keeps kids hanging around.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Yeah. I think that’s great, and such a helpful process to think about, as you said, really, with any topic. And in the book, you really focus on these 14 topics or these “Fourteen Conversations” that we need to be broaching with kids at this developmental stage and using that BRIEF model to have those conversations. We won’t have time to get into all of them, but how did you arrive at these 14 or these things that you find are just really important to start the conversation on because they are kids that kids will be exposed to as they get into high school. How did you arrive at these 14? And then maybe just share a couple of them.

Michelle Icard:
So I wanted to really think about the whole child. I didn’t want every conversation to be a bummer. What is a bad thing that can happen to a kid in high school? Okay, we’re going to talk about drinking, we’re going to talk about being taken advantage of sexually. It’s not like that. What I did is I listed all those out, I listed out everything and I actually rented an Airbnb for a week and it looked like a serial killer’s apartment because I wrote on little index cards every possible horrible thing or interesting thing or important thing that you might want to talk to your kid about at this age, and then I just laid them all over the Airbnb, and then I looked for patterns and I was like, okay, there are 10 things here you would want to talk to your kid about, and they range from “Please wear deodorant” to “Suicide”, and they’re all under the umbrella of taking care of yourself. So the chapters themselves are these kind of broader whole child concepts like creativity, independence, taking care of yourself and within them are sample conversations that run a broad range of things that could come up in middle school and high school, and that I want parents to practice talking about again, because it’s about rapport building, so that later, if something happens, you never want your child to feel like “I couldn’t go to my mom, it would have been weird”, right? That’s what I am trying to erase.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Yeah. I think that that’s great because there are so many of those things, and they can feel overwhelming as a parent too to even know, “Where do I start with all of this?” Things are different now. The stuff that our parents needed to talk to us about or that we wish they would have talked with us about, many of those things are the same, but there are additional things now too. And I think one of the challenges for parents of kids who may be in some areas of their development, are a bit younger or less mature, there is this dynamic of trying to figure out: Okay, they’re going to be in a high school building, so there are things that we need to talk with them about and yet they are thinking about things in a younger, maybe more naive way. That can be a real challenge for some parents, whether their child maybe has a more significant learning disability or a developmental disability or even things like more significant ADHD. They’re just less mature, it’s like “Okay, I have to talk with them about that they might walk into the bathroom of the school and some kid may be vaping or they might be kids smoking pot in there or whatever might be going on, I need to help them understand those things and yet, still recognize that they’re developmentally maybe at a younger phase, I think that’s really challenging for a lot of parents.

Michelle Icard:
It is. And I think one thing that’s helpful is asking questions before you begin to explain. So like “Tell me what you notice, what you think is going on. How did it make you feel and what are your concerns and what would you like to know? Because sometimes the kid can say “I’d like to know what it felt like, what they were doing.” Or they might say “I’d like to know if it’s weird if I just turn around and walk out.” So before you assume what you need to say to them, do a little detective work.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Yeah, I think that’s so true, and for some kids, it is a matter of giving them some specific scripts or strategies or whatever, like “Look, if you encounter this, this is how you’re going to handle it.” I was talking with a family — it’s like the perfect timing for this because I was talking to a family yesterday, the parents of a 15 year-old who developmentally is more like probably like a 5th grader but is now in 8th grade and heading into high school next year. We were talking about this issue and I said, “Look, he is not thinking about all of these things in that way, but he is a target. He is going to be vulnerable, and so we need to give him some scripts, some strategies where if you walk into the bathroom and x, y, or z is going on, let’s talk about how that might feel. And also, here’s what you’re going to do: You’re going to back right out of that bathroom and you’re going to go right back to your teacher…”, because kids, especially, if they are just more innocent or naive or developmentally not quite there yet, they need us to provide them with some real specific tools for that, I think.

Michelle Icard:
And I would say, even as an adult, I would love to be able to have a script or a tool. There are many times someone says something at a party and I’m like, “Ugh, it’ll take me 3 days to figure out what to say back to that!” So for sure, for the kids who you are describing and for sure for all kids, I think it’s very helpful to think ahead, role-play, talk about stuff, what might happen and what you can do because most of us get sort of cut off at the knees at some point, especially at high school.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Absolutely. I love how you divided it when you talked about these sort of categories of things, because I do think that a lot of times at this age, parents are like, “Ugh, I need to sit down and have the conversation with my kid about sex/smoking/drugs, or whatever.” And first of all, to recognize that these are ongoing conversations, these are not things that we should just be thinking about “Alright, I’ve got to work myself up to sitting down and talking about this one time, and then I can say I’ve done it, that’s not really how that works. So these are evolving things. But also, while we think about these big sorts of things that could be personal safety issues or whatever, there are lots of things that we should be talking about. I love that you go over these conversations around creativity and changing in friendships and taking care of yourselves, these are things that our kids at these stages are wrestling with and can use some guidance and support around, so I just think that’s important for us to hone in on, that it’s not just these important conversations around teen pregnancy and drug use and what college you’re going to go to. It’s about connecting with them on this level of a whole person, and everything that they’re dealing with.

Michelle Icard:
I love that, that’s exactly the intention of the book. Just to keep the door open because I could never write a book that included every conversation I hope you will have with your kid. My hope is that this is a way for you to practice and not worry about being perfect. You don’t need to know the right answer, you’re just working on developing that language skill with your kid and that relationship so that when the conversation comes up that is specific to your child, whatever it may be, they feel really comfortable coming to you.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Yeah. Which is really what we want at that age, even if we feel like they’re pushing us away, they want nothing to do with us, we keep leaving that door open and showing up as a person who can provide that support when it’s needed, and invariably, they will take advantage of that and come to us if they feel like they can, and I work with so many teens and young adults in therapy who feel like that door is not open with their parents. And that can lead to a lot of emotional distress, a lot of behavioral issues. They just need to feel like — even if we feel like we’re being really clumsy at it, just continuing to put ourselves out there in that way, even if it seems like they don’t want it, there will come a day where they will lean into that and then we can be there for them in that way. And I think just trusting that process is so critical.

Michelle Icard:
Gosh, that is perfect. There will come a day. Just keep at it. I love that.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
So this book is fantastic, it’s Fourteen Talks By Age Fourteen, it is out now, go get it whether you have a kid in this age range right now, whether you have one who is younger, because guess what, they’re going to be in this phase sooner than you imagine. And even if you have an older kiddo who is still at home, who you’re still working with around these things, these tools for how to have these kinds of productive conversations and keeping these communication doors open, I think are helpful to us in so many areas of our lives. So I really want to recommend that people get the book. Michelle, share with us: Where can everyone go to get more information about you and your work, and specifically, where can they get the book?

Michelle Icard:
Sure! The book is available pretty much at all booksellers. So that’s Amazon to Target to your favorite little indie bookstore. My website is just my name, so it’s michelleicard.com. You can find me on Instagram, I’m having a ton of fun on Instagram right now, so please join me there. Keeping it fun and funny!

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
My favorite current platform!

Michelle Icard:
You know, I shied away from it for a long time, I’m still on Facebook, but I’ve just fallen in love with it recently. So it’s just my name, Michelle Icard, and then if anyone’s interested, I have a private parenting group on Facebook, it’s called Less Stressed Middle School Parents. You can find me there where we can talk about all your concerns and worries, and we will put you at ease.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Every parent of a middle schooler needs that group. Man I wish I’d known about that a few years ago. Great resources, we’ll make sure that all of those links are in the show notes, so that all of you can take advantage of finding the information and the resources quickly and easily. Go get the book. Michelle, such a great conversation, I really enjoyed talking with you. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us and just sharing about this really important age range with us today.

Michelle Icard:
Thank you, I love talking with you.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Alright, everybody, thanks as always for being here, we will catch you back here next week for our next episode of The Better Behavior Show.