Articles on Getting Teens to Talk (and Listen)

By Dr. Lynn Margolies

Back to Parenting Challenges

The characters from the vignettes in Dr. Margolies’ articles are fictitious and designed to be relatable to many people and common themes. They are not based on any patient’s individual situation or disclosure but were derived from a composite of people and events for the purpose of representing real-life situations and psychological dilemmas. Terms of Use.

10 Easy Ways to Get Along With Your Teen

Practical tips for dealing with teenagers to build trust, respect, and better communication.

3 Easy Ways to Get Your Teen to Talk and Listen

Parents get intimidated when their teenager refuses to talk or shuts down conversations. Here are 3 simple tricks to get your teenager to talk, listen, and engage in a two-way conversation.

A Counterintuitive Approach to Your Irritable Teens

In order to help teens, we must accurately diagnose why a particular teen in a particular context is irritable or reactive – rather than respond in a reflexive way.

Being a Grownup When Your Kid Hates You

This column tells a story based on a composite of real-life situations in therapy, depicting both the teen and parent’s viewpoints in divorce when the parent child relationship is affected by anger and guilt. The stories are followed by the therapist’s psychological analysis and guidance.

Being a Wise Ally for Your Kids

How do we deal with getting our loved ones to do what we want them to do? In all relationships we feel the tension created by this dilemma. The subtext of interactions between parents and children facing conflict shapes the template kids develop and carry with them.

Binge Drinking During Adolescence Primes the Brain for Alcohol Use Disorder in Adulthood

Teen drinking alters brain development, increasing anxiety and cravings, and heightens risk for adult alcohol use disorder and addiction.

Bonding With Your Teen: A Hidden Opportunity

This column tells a story based on a composite of real-life situations in families, depicting both the teenager’s and parent’s perspective, followed by the therapist’s psychological analysis and guidance.

Can a Parent Have Too Much Empathy?

Many people experience vicarious distress when imagining other people’s reactions, which can hold them back from taking needed action in those relationships.

Courage & Limits With Your Teen

This column tells a story based on a composite of real-life situations in families, depicting both the parent’s and teenager’s perspective, with teens who are too good to be true. The story helps teach parents what to look for with seemingly perfect, often high-achieving teens, and how to interpret when a child’s behavior is a disguised way to ask for help.

Crisis of Confidence in a Teen Athlete: It’s a Family Matter

This story is about a teenager who undergoes a crisis of confidence, after her identity was challenged by a sports injury. Her resulting difficulties challenged the well-being and stability of the whole family.

Easy Steps to Reconnect: A Guide for Emotionally Avoidant Dads

Empathic ability, or “mind reading,” develops in the brain when parents know how to translate their children’s reactions and respond in a way that helps them regulate their emotional states. This process also involves helping the child understand what is happening in interpersonal situations. The child then digests and internalizes these experiences, building the capacity to make sense of themselves and relationships, as well as manage their emotions.

How Parents Can Help Teens Under Academic Pressure (and 5 Common Traps)

When grades are slipping and teens don’t seem to be taking action, it’s easy for parents to react from frustration and helplessness. Under pressure, we can fall into common traps without realizing it. These common instinctive reactions, even if they feel justified, add to a child’s anxiety and discouragement, destabilizing them and further reducing motivaton.

How Parents & Teachers Can Help Prevent Suicide in Teens

Although we don’t usually think of suicide as contagious, one of the strongest predictors of suicide in youth is the suicide or suicide attempt of a friend or family member.

How to Be Protective When Your Son Thinks He Is Gay

Parents don’t have the power to influence whether their child is gay or not, but do have the power to influence how their child feels about themselves. A close relationship with parents has been found to provide the best insulation from dangers in the outside world.

How to Get More of the Behavior You Want in Kids (Without Really Trying)

When kids independently do what we would have wanted, either their natural inclinations sync with our values – or our values have been successfully transmitted. At these happy moments, an ill-timed temptation to jump in to emphasize a lesson may pop up from anxiety, perfectionism, or difficulty letting go. Instead of riding the wave and following children’s lead, we hijack it, emphasizing our approval, offering rewards, or reminding them this is what we’ve been saying all along.

How to Influence Teens Who Cover Up

What to say to teens who think everything is none of your business or other porcupine tactics that shut parents out.

How to Live With Your (Newly Returned) “Grown-up” Child

Families are in transition now as college age kids that used to be living at school are returning home. Many parents are struggling with how to live with their kids who are often bolder now and have new ways of living and acting that pose a problem for parents. This column is a response to many parents requesting help with how to approach and word unwelcome conversations with their.

Influencing People: What Works to Change Behavior (and How It Applies to Parenting)

Without accurately understanding children’s behavior, we may intervene in ways that compound the situation, creating a control struggle on top of the original problem. To be effective in helping children, we must accurately diagnose the problem and be curious: What’s causing this behavior? Though they may look the same, a problem of defiance is handled differently than one of capacity. Learning difficulties involving executive functioning are neurologically based, but executive functioning is sensitive to and impeded by stress. Parents’ reactions can, in this way, become an additional impediment to children’s executive functioning.

Online Risks & Stressors: What Teens Tell Their Parents

Online behaviors that can put teens at risk—why they hide cyberbullying, sexting, and social pressure, plus parenting tips to guide and protect them.

Parent Anxiety Over Kids’ Perceived Failures (Part 1)

One of the most common difficulties for parents is how to contain their reactions and not make things worse when children don’t do well or fail to measure up to their expectations. Families with kids who are not high achievers, or who have academic or psychological challenges, are most vulnerable.

Parent Guilt Over Kids’ Perceived Failures (Part 2)

When parents feel guilty or excessively bad for children, it’s harder to set limits, be truthful and direct, and challenge kids within their zone of capability. This inhibits opportunities for children to develop self-control, confidence and realistic expectations of themselves and others, perpetuating the cycle of underachievement.

Parenting Teens: 7 Important Questions With Answers That Sort Truth From Fiction

Parents of teens can use answers. But it’s not so easy to stay updated. This questionnaire highlights common questions and popular confusions to help parents sort out truth from fiction.

Preventing the Spread of Suicide in Teens

Teens don’t feel safe talking to adults about suicide. Some suicidal teens may be good actors – showing us what we want to see. Learn how to make it safe for your teen to talk to you and trust you, and what not to do. This article offers practical advice about how to recognize vulneralbe teens, the warning signs that they may be at risk, and how to help.

Protecting Teens From Danger: Tips & Advice for Parents – Part 2

​The teenage brain has been compared to a car with a powerful gas pedal and weak brakes when stimulated by the presence, or even anticipated witnessing, of other teens. Drawn to their peers, teens pull away from us – and then rev each other up into risky experimenting and sensation​-seeking. Parents can help teens stay safer and develop the skills to make better decisions by using approaches informed by the teenage mindset. An effective and empowering strategy with teens involves being mindful of their limitations and intrinsic motivations/drives, using their biases to our (and their) advantage​ – and in the service of positive choices.​.

Reactive Parenting with Teens – A Common Cause of Broken Connections

This column tells a story based on a composite of real-life situations in families, depicting both the teenager’s and parent’s perspective.

Seduced by Risk & Danger: Inside the Teenage Mind

Research suggests that adolescence may represent a “critical period” in which the brain is particularly sensitive to being shaped by experiences – creating both vulnerability and opportunity depending on what behaviors are practiced during this time. Teens who take the most risks have relatively poorer outcomes in adulthood in relationships and work. But, interestingly, teens who are risk averse have equally poor outcomes as those who are the riskiest.

Teenagers Behaving Badly? A Closer Look at the Complex Drivers of Recklessness in Youth

This blog discusses recent research on teen recklessness and how it’s not what you think.

The Pressure Cooker Before College: How to Actually Help Your Teen

The senior year countdown to college brings out parents’ worries and fears, which increases teens’ own anxieties and self-doubt. During this time of escalating pressure and stress in families, parents can fall into common traps that defeat their intention to help and interfere with teens developing capacities. This article helps parents recognize the traps and use positive strategies to actually help their teen.

The Startling Data on College-Age Binge Drinking

Binge drinking in college age youth and on college campuses is an alarming, prevalent problem that has been normalized in the college culture among those involved in it.

Transforming Struggles With Kids Into Successes: Simple Strategies for Parenting

The challenge of getting certain kids (for example, kids who are distracted, hyperactive, rebellious, cranky) to follow routines and guidelines can test any parent’s patience. The flavor of the struggle varies with age and topic, but begins when toddlers first discover autonomy and revel in saying “no,” and this trend can persist throughout adolescence.

What to Say About Drinking: How to Tell if Your Teen Needs Limits

This column depicts the challenges parents face when trying to protect their teen. The story is told from the separate viewpoints of Dylan, 17, and his parents in a situation involving unproductive conversations about drinking. The story is followed by the therapist’s psychological analysis and guidance to the family.

When Teens (or 20 Somethings) Think You’re Bugging Them – but Really They’re Bugging You

This article is about a common dynamic in families in which parents feel controlled by their teenage or adult child’s anger, irritability, and/or fragility and, as a result, avoid approaching certain topics or setting needed limits. Tiptoeing and avoiding instead of taking charge leads people who need boundaries to become more out of control and too powerful. The article discusses this dynamic, common obstacles to giving truthful feedback and setting boundaries, and lists practical steps for how to overcome them.