Ellen Galinsky Takes Us Inside The Breakthrough Years & Raising Thriving Teens

Debbie:

Hey Ellen, welcome to the podcast.

Ellen Galinsky:

Thank you, it’s such a pleasure to be with you.

Debbie:

I’m really looking forward to this. I’ve been looking forward to this interview for quite a while. And actually, I would love if you could just take a few minutes and I mean, you can’t sum up your career in a few minutes, but just to kind of tell us how you came to be doing the work that you’re doing today and what you’ve created in the breakthrough years, because I’ve known about your work since Mind in the Making, your book that came out in 2010, The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs. And now you’ve just come out with this incredible new book, The Breakthrough Year. So tell us a little bit about your why for the work that you do.

Ellen Galinsky:

Well, it’s my, The Breakthrough Years is Mind in the Making Grow up. Essentially, I felt I couldn’t stop with the questions that I had if I just stopped with the early childhood years, which I define as birth through eight. So there were a number of reasons. I mean, I’ve followed questions all my life, questions that I wanna know, questions that I think other people wanna know, questions that I think will matter, questions that we can take to action and with mind in the making, my question was, what keeps the fire for learning burning in children’s eyes? I know that school engagement drops precipitously in the older years and I wanted to know what we could do to keep that fire burning and discovered the importance of executive function skills. With the breakthrough years, there were a number of reasons that I continued. One is that development doesn’t stop in the early childhood years. If we start things, we need to continue them. There’s no magic pill for what we can do to help children learn and thrive. And also, adolescence is a sensitive period, just like the early years. It’s a time when our brain is very responsive, very sensitive to the environment where we are shaping the connections in our brain that help us now and help us in the future. And that’s particularly important for the issue that I’m interested in, which is the skills that help us learn and thrive. And I knew how important those were. So for all of those reasons, I wanted to study adolescence.

Debbie:

Yeah, and you studied adolescence. I mean, you went deep and spent, you know, and I had the honor of being at your book release party and it was so wonderful to hear about just what a deep dive this was for you and your long commitment to the process and to, you know, you weren’t just trying to like get this book out the door. Like this was all of who you were, you actually call yourself a civic scientist. Could you kind of explain what that means?

Ellen Galinsky:

Civic science is the kind of research that I’ve always done. I’ve done a lot of research on the workforce and workplace, which is another reason that I decided to write this book because employers are always screaming, why don’t people have the skills we need, the kids these days, you know, they blah, blah, blah, blah. So it’s true. We are not giving young people the skills that they need. So civic science means that you don’t study someone or group of people, you don’t do research on them, you do research with them. So I always start in the studies that I did of the workforce and workplace and the studies of adolescents by asking people, what keeps you up at night? What do you want to know? If you had one wish to improve the lives of people your age, what would that wish be? I ask very open -ended questions so I can get at what are the burning issues that they have.

And in the case of adolescents, it’s comprehensive because there were several things, more than one thing that they wanted us to know about people their age. So that’s what took me so long. What I did was to start by interviewing adolescents. And you met my oldest grandson who actually got married this weekend and he’s 30 now, but he was actually an adolescent when, you know, he’d just finished college when I started this. And he and I went out and talked to young people. Then we interviewed and filmed 45 leading cognitive neuroscientists answering the questions that both I had and that young people had. We did a nationally representative study of close to 2000 parents and their nine to 19 year olds. We did it first, then we went back during the pandemic to see how they were thriving and who was doing well and why. And we did a behavioral study of executive function skills in 22 schools across six states. And so it was, and I did it in the middle of all that, I pulled out some of the people from the nationally representative study and asked them more questions. Because when you follow questions, they lead to answers, but they always lead to more questions. And I really wanted to be true to what they, what young people wanted to know about themselves and what they wanted us to know.

Debbie:

Mm -hmm. Yeah, I was just, I was so inspired by your process. I’m a researcher, but I feel like I could learn so much from you and just like the way that you talk about it, you light up when you, it’s clear that you love doing this work. And I want to talk about even just teens because before I even started Tilt, I spent almost 10 years writing nonfiction books for teenagers. — like how do you kind of create a life that you love? And I was trying to heal my inner teen, you know, who was just at 30, like I’m still a recovering teenager. I can’t figure this out. So I have such a sweet spot in my heart for teenagers and I love teens and you do too. And I would love it if you could share a little bit more about what people get wrong about the teen years and why you love that time of life so much.

Ellen Galinsky:

When I first started talking to these 14 to 18 year olds with my grandson, and I asked them what they wanted adults to know, they said, why do people hate teenagers? They mean, they really said it that way. Or look at us, we’re not the people you think of when you think of the stereotypical teenager. And they asked me to ask researchers what words they would use to define a stereotypical teenager and what words they would use to define the word, the teenagers they studied and why the disconnect? Why do we have these ideas about teenagers that they don’t think represent them? And we continue it. I mean, every time I talk about, I’m writing a book about teenagers or I wrote a book about teenagers, they’ll say, you know, spare me, you know, wake me up when it’s over kind of thing. And it is, you know, I just really want us to see that this is a time of such enormous possibility.

And there are things that we know and that we can do, easily do, that turn it from a time of turmoil to a time of possibility. So whenever I interviewed a teenager, whenever, and I would be asking them, I was really interested. I really wanted to understand how they think, how they feel, what their experiences were. They would say thank you for listening. They would always say that. And it was, it started to strike me that maybe they don’t get listened to very often in terms of what they’re really thinking, what’s really on their minds. And that people don’t necessarily want to know that sometimes I feel we don’t, we just want to tell them what to do. And, you know, but it’s, but if we know that, if we know what they think and feel, it’s just so much easier for them. I mean, I ended up with very simple things that we can do to help young people grow up in a different way and really thrive.

Debbie:

Yeah. And why do you think it is that we don’t see teenagers as human? Like we see them as broken, right? Like they’re, I forget the term you use in the word, but they’re…

Ellen Galinsky:

A deficit adult.

Debbie: 

Yeah, a deficit adult. And that is just such a flawed way of looking at what is a developmentally appropriate way of navigating the world and all the important work that they’re doing. So I’m just wondering, do you think it’s because of adults, again, like residual teen baggage? Is it our own stuff that we’re bringing to this? Why do you think we are so close -minded about it?

Ellen Galinsky:

I think that’s such a good question and one that I really wanted to better understand. And in fact, one, well, not just one, but I started the book with one who said, why don’t you understand this? You were once a teenager. You must have felt the things we’re feeling now. Why? Why? Why? And she said, I asked myself that so many times. So I think that there are a number of reasons. I just want to stop, pause for a moment though and say, sometimes when I was working on this book, it would really upset me that we feel this way. If we talked about, this is one quarter of the population, adolescents in the United States are one in every four of us. And if we talked about any other group in the United States, the way we joke around about teenagers, it would be seen as awful. So why do we do that? Why do we do that? So I think that a main reason is the curse of knowledge, which is a cognitive bias that we all have. Once we know something, we can’t unknow it. And we can see things from a greater perspective. So we want to protect them. We want to keep them safe. We want to make sure that they’re OK. So in doing that, it becomes hard to remember how it would feel. I remember it was actually my editor who said to me that he used to leave a list of instructions on this on his teenager cereal bowl in the morning, you know, do this, do that checklist, basic checklist. And one day he thought when I was talking about how it feels, he said, my gosh, you know, if I came to work and I got a checklist from my boss, you know, how to breathe every single second, I’d be flipping out. And he said, you know, why do I think that it would be okay to do that to my child? So it’s just hard. You know, that’s the curse of knowledge. I think we do want to, you know, we are afraid for them. I think that that’s true. It’s a, you know, it’s in our culture to do this. When the field of adolescent development was founded in 1904 with the publication of G Stanley Hall’s 2 volume book on adolescence, it was described as a time of storm and stress. It’s just in the water, in the air. Other cultures don’t necessarily do that by the way. So, part of it is cultural. And, you know, it’s also they’re going to leave. So sometimes it feels a little easier to break up with them if we hate them. You know, I’m just exaggerating. You know, they’re not going to leave, leave us. I can tell you that as a parent of two grown children. But, you know, it feels easier. And then that makes us, you know, we’re walking in this path from birth to death. And you know, as they grow up, it’s also we’re just getting farther along in that notch and they have all of those possibilities open to them. And that’s also hard. I think it also brings out our inner teen. If they get rejected, we can feel rejected. We don’t want that to happen to our child. So, I mean, I think they’re how to bring out our inner teen, as you said. I think that there are a number of reasons, but it’s not helpful. And it’s 38 percent when I ask, what do you want the adults of America to know about people your age and it’s true in other cultures too. 38% wrote, don’t label us, don’t stereotype us, don’t call us the anxious generation or the COVID generation or you’re all snowflakes, you’re all entitled or you’re all lazy or you’re all dumb or you’re all, you know, they had all of those words that they used, but don’t do it. We’re individuals and build on our strengths. And that’s actually human. I mean, we all want people to see us for our strengths, not our weaknesses.

Debbie:

Absolutely, absolutely. So you just touched upon one of the key messages that you learned in talking with teens. Okay, so in your book, you break down the core messages that you heard from teens through all the research that you did. One of them is what you just said, don’t stereotype us, don’t label us. Would you share with us the other big lessons that you took away that you share in The Breakthrough Years?

Ellen Galinsky:

Yeah, there are essentially five lessons and each of them has to do with them. So the first is understand our development. And I think that’s really critical. The way that I understood it was to ask parents for one word or phrase to describe the team brain and only 14 % of those words were positive. So not, you know, kids aren’t wrong about the way we feel about them. And, and, when they weren’t positive, controlling for everything I could control for, and I had a lot that I could control for. I knew about how much conflict there was between the parent and child. I knew how, you know, because we asked, I knew what they thought about their own child, because we asked in open ended terms, and we asked, and we had them do a checklist of the characteristics of their, of their own child. So I could take out any negative feelings they had about their own child. When we have, when we use negative words, our own kids aren’t doing so well. So it matters. It really does matter. And it’s correlational. It’s not causal, but it does matter, I think. And the second and then the words that parents used were also at least the deficit adult that we were just talking about. The word immature was used 11 % of the time. And that is like mega huge in an open -ended study to to use that and another 8% used words that were unfinished and complete, mush, undeveloped, underdeveloped words like that, that mean immature. And so we’re seeing kids for what they’re not. And I just thought when I looked at that, we wouldn’t say to an infant, you’re an immature toddler or to a toddler, you’re an immature preschooler, preschooler, you’re an immature school -aged kid. We understand those ages of development for what they are. So the lesson from this is we need to know that they’re not all taking stupid risks, very few of them are, but that they are, we need to look at their strengths, we need to understand them and to know that they need to explore the need to have very strong emotional reactions. I call that a developmental necessity because it helps them know if they’re safe or not safe whether they belong or not, those sorts of things. So I think that’s one message. 

The second message is talk with us, not at us. And there, the research is very, very strong that autonomy support. The kids phrase is if we’re the problem, then we need to be part of the solution. And they’re so right because this is a time when they’re learning skills to manage themselves. And if we teach them skills, this is what they want to learn, this is what they need to learn during this time. And if we teach them those skills, and I’ll come back to that because that’s another message too, but if we teach them skills, if we parrot them or teach them in autonomy supportive ways, and that means not fixing things for them, but helping them learn to fix them for themselves as they’re developmentally able to do that, if we do that, and the adult is still in charge, structure, which means adult guidance and expectations are always there, but that will make such a difference. 

The third message we’ve talked about, and there I would say that the take home message is give them positive risks. Not many of them are taking negative risks. By parents on count 12, 14 % of their own kids were doing risky, you know, making negative risky decisions. So nine in 10 aren’t more or less, but they all want a chance to learn to be brave, to learn to go out into the world, to try new things and just think about what we could do. I mean, if we gave them opportunities to make a difference in their own community, it could be helping your grandmother. It could be cleaning up a polluted pond in your neighborhood, you know, with other kids. It could be feeding the homeless or giving, bringing food to homeless people or shelter or that sort of thing. There are a million things that we can do to make the world a better place. And kids are more likely to prosper when they’re the helpers, not being helped. So that positive risk and connecting it to helping is important. 

The fourth message is that kids are trying to understand their needs and they are actually needs. There is a theory in psychology called self -determination theory, which says that we have basic psychological needs, just like we have the need for food, water and shelter. And that,t o me, is that we all need to feel we belong. It’s not just some of us, we all need to feel it. We might not know we need to feel it if we’ve been in the same place for a long time and we know how we fit in and how we belong. But as soon as we go to a new party, to a new job, to a, you know, we’re in the hospital and unexpectedly, whatever it is, then we need to figure out how we fit in, how we belong. And so do kids, that is a psychological need. And we have other needs too. And I think that that’s our responsibility to meet them. One of them is the need to contribute. And I just talked about that. It’s so important to help kids be helpers and to do things. We see all the uprisings on campus. That’s just an expression of the need to contribute, to feel like you don’t have to take the world the way it is. You can try to make it a better place. And if we could channel that in positive ways, that would make such a difference. 

And the final is, and the reason that I wrote this book is that they’re saying we want to learn stuff that’s useful. We want it to be meaningful. We want to learn stuff that’s useful. And that to me is executive function skills. Executive function skills are the skills that we pull together, our social, our emotional, and our cognitive capacities to problem solve, to achieve a goal. They are the most important skills that predict our success now and in the future. And we know they’re very neurocognitive. They’re not soft skills. They are just the most important skills that we can learn. And there are hundreds of things that we can do to help kids learn the skills. This is autonomy support again, to learn, which is very predictive of kids thriving and learning. So are executive function skills. They are more important to school success than IQ often, or than socioeconomic background. So if we could help the child who forgets their homework, you know, not, bring your homework, but what would help you remember? Help them learn about their learning. It’s everyday simple things that we can do to promote these skills. And that would make a big difference in their lives.

Debbie:

I mean, everything that you’re describing, it’s like, yes, we talk about self -determination theory here. We definitely talk about autonomy, supportive parenting. And it just occurs to me, I think parents raising neurodivergent kids may have considered some of these things more deeply because if we have a child who’s maybe more demand avoidant. And so we have to really think about, how do I help this child? How do I scaffold for a child who is resistant or more rigid, so we have to get kind of creative in all these ways. I’m just wondering, your thoughts on that with narrow divergence. My hunch is that a lot of parents who are just kind of humming along doing their thing and their kids haven’t been really demanding in terms of having extra support needs and extra scaffolding, that these might be really new concepts for them. Have you found that?

Ellen Galinsky:

I think they are new concepts and I think this is where the neurodivergent community can lead the way, can teach us a lesson. I mean, first of all, I think that we need to understand the neurodiversity among us all and not just think that those are some people and here’s the rest of us. No, no, no, no, no, no. We all, you know, we need to understand our individuality, our differences. And I just so admire the leadership in the, and that’s why I was so excited to be interviewed by you, the leadership among that community. We have ADHD in our family. I fully understand the extra scaffolding that needs to happen, but it just makes it visible. All kids need that. All kids need that. And so we now say, gosh, we’ve got a mental health crisis. We do. But if we were teaching kids to learn to fix their own problems, hopefully when they’re little, but definitely when they’re teenagers, if we could help them to learn how to take on challenges, we would have much less of a problem. If we could help them think about how they learn, we wouldn’t have the lack of engagement in schools. I mean, schools need to, you know, make the world interesting too. I’m not saying it’s a one -way street, but, but there are just so many societal problems that we angst about, you know, that we’re just up in arms about. Take social media if you want. That if we applied these principles and we taught kids these skills and we learned these skills because we have to learn them to teach them, we would all be so much better. 

Debbie:

Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. I want to dive into one of the messages a little more deeply and that’s we are trying to understand ourselves. So I was personally drawn to this message of trying to understand ourselves. We talk a lot about that in my online community. The theme last month was identity and belonging and how do we help our kids in creating that. So I was really interested in that. And I’m wondering if you could just share some of your findings about this need for belonging as opposed to fitting in, because they’re two different things. And if there are ways that kids can get that need met that may look different than what we think belonging looks like, does that make sense?

Ellen Galinsky:

To begin with, I don’t think we think of belonging as a psychological need like food, water, and shelter. We just don’t. So if we understood that it was, teachers would make sure that the kids felt that they belonged in their classrooms. I mean, I walk into classrooms all the time and there’s no evidence that specific children live there. Their pictures aren’t things that they drew aren’t on the walls and I’m talking, you know, what they wrote isn’t up there. You don’t see any, you see lots of teacher made stuff, but you don’t see kid made stuff. All of us need to belong, but other people have to help us feel that we belong. We can want to belong all we want, but if we’re in an inhospitable place, we won’t belong. So I guess the first thing is we have to understand that it is a need and it is not a need of some people, it’s a need of all people. It is really, really crucial. And then I can think of some research that was about some people, but that normalized it to help us understand how all people need this. I’m thinking of Greg Walton studies on social belonging. The understanding that when you make a transition, and he was looking at the transition to college, that you don’t necessarily feel you belong. And that’s particularly hard then if you’ve got views about yourself as not belonging. I’m going to take girls in science and engineering, which he’s done studies about. So if you go into a science class and there are not many females and then you struggle, because all people struggle you know, when they go first into college, you know, that you say, well, maybe I don’t belong. You tell yourself that story versus everybody struggles. It’s really hard. 

And so what Greg Walton and his colleagues did was to create a mindset intervention where they first, if you were part of the intervention, you would, and in the experimental group, you would hear stories about, how when everyone got to the science and engineering college, they did this, you’d hear it from people who were black and white and brown, you’d hear it from males and females, you’d hear it from upperclassmen who were hot shots. So you just knew that it was normal. So when you didn’t feel you belonged, you told yourself a different story. This is normal, this is a transition I’m supposed to feel that way versus thinking, well, maybe I don’t belong, maybe I’ll just quit or I won’t try. And then what Greg and his colleagues found I think is so important, the thing that made the difference in that study, well, they did another thing, which is they ask the people in that experiment to be helpers. So now that you know the feeling that you don’t belong as normal, please write a curriculum for next year’s class about belonging. So they did. So they were helpers. And that’s the way you really incorporate what you learn. Not feeling like you’re in deficit and you’re being helped, but feeling like you’re, you know something and you can help someone else. Okay. So then what Greg and his colleagues found was that once you have a different story and you’re struggling, you are more likely to get help. You reach out to other people. So it isn’t just the different story that matters. It’s the action you take as a result of it. And he found that it’s social, he calls it an experiment in social belonging. I think that support is another, I call it caring connections and belonging and support. Those two are important. They in some ways go together. They’re inter -correlated. But what I found is that kids who felt that they belonged, and I looked at relationships, the relationships you have in your family, the relationships you have with your friends, the relationships you have with people at school, the relationships you have with people in and out of school time, the relationships you have online. If you felt you belonged in those five environments with the people in those environments, and you felt you had support and there are other needs too, that you were much, much, much more likely to thrive doing a very hard period in our country, which was the pandemic. So these are like fortifications. You know, they help us when times get rough.

Debbie:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I, I appreciate that, you know, talking about the story, I think that, you know, for a lot of listeners who have kids who maybe haven’t necessarily felt that deeper sense of belonging. And I think one of the things you talk about in your book, and you just mentioned it, is that you can have belonging in your family, like belonging can look lots of different ways. And there are different ways to get that need met. It doesn’t have to be in this kind of very stereotypical social click or whatever that might be. 

Ellen Galinsky:

One of my friends, when she read my book, I loved what she said. She said, because she worked with kids who did have drug problems or were in gangs or that sort of thing. And she said, you know, people who are in gangs and recruiting kids to be in gangs know all about belonging. They know how powerful it is. They’re doing it. Why shouldn’t we do it?

Debbie:

Yeah, yes, yes. And people who start cults know a lot about belonging as well. So yes. Yeah, absolutely. I wanted to touch upon another concept that you share in your book, or that you refer to in your book called Shared Solutions, as a way to, I think, bolster and teach those executive functions.

Ellen Galinsky:

Yes, it is a need we all have.

Debbie:

We’ve talked a lot about Dr. Ross Greene’s collaborative and proactive solutions model in kind of building lagging skills and addressing unsolved problems. So could you talk with us about the shared solutions model and how we can use that to support our kids in learning those important life skills?

Ellen Galinsky:

Yes, I can. I lucked into this notion, shared solutions, when I was first a teacher and I had a kid named Isabel. I was a teacher in New York City, so we went to the park for outside time. And I had a student named Isabel who always climbed something really tall that I couldn’t climb when it was time to leave the park and go home. And I had all these children and I had Isabel up in some jungle gym or something. And I had to figure out a way to manage all of these children and Isabelle and get them safely back to school. And so there was another teacher there, I wasn’t alone with them. But so I discovered that if I had a meeting to talk about, okay, the rule is that everybody has to leave the park when we all leave the park, you know, it’s that safe and you understand that. So, and so you can’t climb or run away or do any of those things when it’s time to, so the adult sets the rules. And then, and then I would say, what ideas do you have for solving that problem? And then, the process has several steps, the adult states the problem and the rule, then you brainstorm the various solutions. Then you evaluate the third step as you evaluate what would work and what wouldn’t work about that solution for all of the main people involved.

So it has to work for the adults, has to work for the kids, can’t work just for one group or another. And then you pick a solution to try and you see it as an experiment. And if it doesn’t work, you go back to trying it again, because things will work, you know, sometimes for a limited period of time. So it is that, you know, if you need to have consequences, you decide on the consequences then and there so that you’re not saying you’ll never play with anyone again, or I’ll never take you to this place again, or, you know, whatever you’re, you know, the threats we make when we’re upset.

So let me describe a person that I talked to after the book came out. I actually wrote a blog about it on the Substack blogs that I write and I call her Grace. It’s not her real name, but I call her Grace in the story. And she heard about Shared Solutions and she read the book and then she tried it with her child. Now she had a child with ADHD. He would come home from school. He would be rushing in the door, he would throw everything down all over the floor. Literally, you could, you know, the tracks, you know, the shoes, the backpack, the water bottle, the, you know, nothing was put away. It was all littered on the floor. And then he would rush to the couch with his device and he would want to, you know, he would say he was, school was stressful. He needed to bed, Johnny needed to play his games to calm down. And it was tempting for Grace to let him do that because then she was working at home and she could get, you know, maybe an hour or two more work done. If he was vegging out on a machine, he wasn’t going to, you know, she put some food there and wasn’t going to bother her except for that. Then it bothered, there was a real problem later because he hadn’t done his homework and the stuff was still all over the floor. She didn’t want to pick it up and it just would end up in a very difficult evening. So she tried it with him. They had a family meeting with her husband and her son. She told me they had to stop from making suggestions for ideas of what would work. So they stated the problem, this isn’t working. We have these difficult evenings. I mean, it may work for a while, but it’s not working in the long run. And I don’t really want the evening to be like this. I don’t think you do either. And so we need some new solutions. And when you write down, it’s really important to write down the solutions and not judge them, not to say, that’s the stupidest idea I ever heard. You know, it might feel stupid to you, but you need them to evaluate them, not you. And then you, this next step is that you evaluate them. What would work about that for you? What would work about that for me? And then you pick one to try. In this case, this child picked that he was gonna literally come in a different door. 

Now you can step, you can zoom back out here and this is James Gross and his theories of self -control, the whole process of self -regulation. He’s modifying the situation. He’s not going into, he’s not completely going to a different house, not changing the house, but he’s modifying the house. He’s going into it through a different door. Happened to be the door where the hooks were and the shelves were to put away the stuff. That worked well. And then what he wanted to do was to have 45 minutes. He was gonna decide whether he was gonna do his homework first or whether he was going to play games, but he was gonna set a timer and he was responsible for switching out. And then he would do his homework so it wouldn’t be too late. And after I talked to Grace, it was working and it may not work forever, but it worked for them. What was so powerful and she cried when she told me was that he came up with a really ingenious solution. Now let me step back for another minute. I talked about James Gross, but let’s step back for one other minute. So what’s happening there? It’s the skill of problem solving. The first step is meaning making. What’s the meaning? And the adult again is setting the rules and so forth, but the kids are contributing, it’s autonomy supported. The second step is creative thinking. You’re thinking of many different solutions. You’re not just going on automatic. Then you perspective take. You think about what would work and what wouldn’t work. You’re evaluating. You’re looking at, and then you’re making a decision. So it’s got the steps of problem solving, which is an executive function based skill in there. You are teaching your kids skills. So when they go to college, they don’t have to call home and find out what they do when they get overwhelmed. You’re helping prepare them for now and for life.

Debbie:

I love that example so much. And there are so many skills there. And it’s so respectful. And it’s behind all the things that we talk about and that we believe in. I know we share this deep belief of respecting and seeing young adults and teens as humans, as creative, resourceful, whole beings on their own journey. 

Ellen Galinsky:

Then they don’t have to butt heads with us as much.

Debbie:

Exactly. It feels so much better. Feels so much better. Even though it might initially seem counter to especially if we were to raise in a more authoritarian household and it’s not what we experienced as kids. There’s so much that we could get into, which we’re not going to. I’m going to really encourage listeners to check out Alan’s book, The Breakthrough Years, a new scientific framework for raising thriving teens. It’s just full of so many wonderful stories and the voices of kids and just so much to learn from. And if you could just kind of close us out by one thought on why it’s worth taking the time to really understand teens.

Ellen Galinsky:

There was a developmental psychologist named Dan Stern who once said to me, all any human being wants in life is to be known and understood. He said it’s at the root of marital problems. It’s at the root of work problems. It’s at the root of parenting problems. We all, all of us want to be known and understood. And I think that when our kids feel known and understood. There’s no better gift than we can give them.

Debbie:

Yeah, great. Wonderful note to end this on. Ellen, thank you. This has been such a pleasure to get to know you more through your work and to have this conversation with you. Thank you so much. I’m curious to see. I know you’re gonna be working in this space for a long time and I’m just curious to see where this takes you next. So thank you.

Ellen Galinsky:

Yeah, I know that I’m a little, you know, I’ve spent my life pushing the envelope, you know, always been, you know, like who really wants to hear from kids, et cetera. But I, there’s just so much wisdom in bringing together the science of development and young people’s voices. And that’s what this book, that’s what my intent for this book was.

Debbie:

Yeah, it’s so exciting. Well, thank you. Thank you so much. Let me hit stop on.

Ellen Galinsky:

Thank you.