A 10-year-old girl is training for a gymnastics competition. Actually, it’s not just any competition, it regionals and a chance to qualify for nationals. She was a serious gymnast. She trained 4 hours a day, 4 days a week and competed every weekend. She loved it and wanted to be the best she could be.

Then 3 days before regionals, she did a vault and hurt her ankle. She tried to tell herself it wasn’t a big deal, but it hurt really bad. She was determined to compete at the regional competition. So, she wrapped it, iced it, elevated it and did everything she could those 3 days before the competition (other than go to the doctor).

Her dad, a martial artist – a master of the art of Aikido, told her that one of the keys to healing her body, was her mind. He helped her do visualization and energy work. For three days she rested her ankle while she mentally sent energy to her ankle to help it heal and visualized every movement of her routine, over and over again. She knew her routine; she’d done it a million times already so visualizing every second of it came pretty easy. So, she worked on her routine and her ankle, mentally.

Although her ankle still hurt a little, she went on to compete at regionals 3 days later, remembers feeling no pain during her routine, and qualified for nationals.

But after the competition, when the ankle was still bothering her, her parents took her to the doctor and they all received some surprising news. Her ankle was broken.

I’m Ann Coleman and this is Speaking if Teens.

That little girl, Alia Crum, went on to earn her bachelor’s in psychology at Harvard and her PhD in clinical psychology at Yale. She’s now an associate professor in psychology at Stanford and focuses her research on the power of mindset to alter objective reality.

You’re probably most familiar with mindsets in terms of “growth mindset” versus “fixed mindset”, the research advanced by Dr. Carol Dweck that has influenced the world of social science and had an impact on tens of thousands of students.

But that’s just a couple of examples of mindsets focused on the underlying belief people have of whether they can increase their intelligence or not.

Mindsets generally are the lens through which our mind processes our life. They’re core assumptions, frameworks, or belief systems that help us make meaning of the world. Our meaning. They help us set expectations and make predictions.

I heard Dr. Alia Crum talk about her experience with her ankle and her research on mindsets on an episode of Hidden Brain. If you’ve never listened to that podcast, you really should – it’s fascinating. I’ll tell you a little about her research in a minute but let’s talk more about what mindsets are.

A mindset is subjective. It’s how we interpret or perceive what’s going on in the objective world. Everything is how our brain interprets it to be.

The interesting thing is that most of us don’t even think about it. We don’t realize we have mindsets about things. We think the way we view the world simply the way it is – but that’s far from true.

Our belief systems, things we’ve decided to believe about the world and about ourselves, determine how we feel and how we react to people and experience situations, and even how our bodies respond physiologically. Everything is filtered through our mindsets.

Our mindset can even impact how others – like our kids – feel about the world and themselves. Our mindsets can limit us or allow us to do great things but unless we’re aware of them, we can’t work on them or make changes to them.

We all have an overall mindset or worldview, which is made up of lots of smaller mindsets. Some of our mindsets help us in life and others can hurt us. Researchers have studied a variety of mindsets, but there are no doubt, plenty of others yet to be identified.

For example, Dr. Crum (the little gymnast) has done research into stress mindset. Someone with a stress mindset believes that being under stress helps them perform better, be more productive and even enhances their wellbeing. At the other end of the spectrum are those of us that believe stress is bad – it’s harmful to us, our health and happiness and keeps us from performing our best and being as productive.

In part of her research, she looked at candidates in the Navy SEAL program. Famously, only 20% of candidates actually make it through the program to become a SEAL. She wanted to see if their mindset had anything to do with whether or not they were among that 20% - so she evaluated them before they went through the training to see where along the continuum of stress mindset they each fell – at one end, stress is debilitating and at the other, stress is enhancing.

She found that on average, the SEAL candidates were over the midpoint of the scale towards the stress is enhancing mindset. Which was interesting because every other sample population she’d studied, from tech and finance firm employees to undergrads, tended to be toward the stress is debilitating end of the spectrum.

Her study showed that the specific stress mindset of each of the SEAL candidates predicted whether they ended up making it through the training to become a SEAL. The more of a stress is enhancing mindset they had, the more likely they were to succeed. This one measure not only predicted whether they made it through the training, but it also correlated to higher scores on the obstacle course and higher peer ratings.

Think of someone you know who always sees the glass half full. The one who looks on the bright side, finds the silver lining or makes lemonade out of lemons. They have a positive mindset and likely succeed at most of what they do. Those you know with a glass half empty or negative attitude haven’t gotten very far in life – Negative Nancys rarely do.

But most people don’t fall at the tip end of any mindset spectrum – we fall somewhere around the middle or just over the middle towards one or the other end.

Another example of a specific mindset that’s been studied is the entrepreneurial mindset, where people are comfortable with risk, they’re innovative, creative, have critical thinking skills and great communication.

Then there’s the challenge mindset, the abundance mindset, the mindful mindset and of course the growth mindset.

Our mindset can literally change our body’s physiology and our health. The placebo effect, for example, is well documented and accepted across the board by the scientific and medical community.

The placebo effect is all about mindset – if I think I’m taking something that’s going to make me better, I have a high likelihood of getting better (depending on the problem). The placebo effect is so well grounded in science that in clinical drug trials to get a new medication past the FDA, researchers for the manufacturer will give one group the drug and another the placebo (a sugar pill) and if the data doesn’t show that the proposed drug works better than the placebo, the FDA says “back to the drawing board”. And it often happens that the placebo has just as much of an impact on the participant as the medication. You see it more in areas like pain management, stress-related insomnia, or cancer treatment side effects like nausea. But the point is the participant is told they may receive the newly proposed drug or they may receive a placebo

that has no real medication in it. And despite what they receive, many feel better – often as much as those who received the medicine. They want it to work so badly that it actually does.

What our minds think and want and believe – matters.

In another study performed by Dr. Crum and her colleagues they examined how mindset can modify a person’s physical performance and physiology – just like Dr. Crum was able to get through that competition with a broken ankle all those years ago.

For part of the experiment, they recruited participants and had them do an endurance test on a treadmill. Then they ran a specific genetic test on the participants to see if they carried a variant of a gene that impacts a persons’ endurance level – whether they’re more or less likely to tire easily.

Then they randomly divided the participants into 2 groups and (without paying any attention to the actual genetic results), they told one group they had the gene variant that made them tire easily and the other that they had the variant that boosted endurance.

Then they put both groups back on the treadmill to compare their results to those before they were told anything about their genetic makeup.

Now, remember, there were people in both groups that had both variants of the gene, they were not actually divided by genetic test results. The results of the experiment were fascinating. Those who were told they had poor endurance genes (despite whether they actually did or not) stopped running sooner than they had before they were told and had poorer lung capacity, and their bodies didn’t get rid of carbon dioxide as well as before. And those who were told they had the endurance variant ran a bit longer than before, no matter their actual genetic makeup.

So, you had some people, who, despite having the low endurance variant of the gene who ran longer and those who despite having the high endurance variant, stopped running sooner and their actual physiology changed from before. The only difference was what they’d been told. Their mindset had been manipulated and therefore, so had their bodies.

Mindset matters. What we tell ourselves matters. What we tell other people or infer to other people (like our kids) matters.  A changed mindset equals a changed reality.

Our mindsets have an enormous impact on our world – obviously. So, we know they can affect our parenting and how we respond to our kids, how we talk to them, discipline them, the expectations we have of them…and even how they feel about themselves and how they perceive the world.

For example, it’s been shown that a mother’s perception of her child’s academic competence can impact their academic behavior and ultimately their academic outcome. It turns out, the more competent we believe our kids to be, the less interfering we do in their school work (the less we hound them about studying and doing their homework, the less we try to help them with it, or do it for them) and the more they learn to make mistakes and learn on their own, leading to a better academic outcome.

Studies show that our perception of our child’s academic competence can have more of an impact on their actual performance than the child’s own perception of their competence.

A parent’s mindset about whether intelligence is fixed (a fixed mindset) or can be enhanced (a growth mindset) also has an impact on the child. The mindset the parent has affects whether or not a child adopts a more persistence attitude towards learning, which of course, directly impacts the child’s performance. This is true even when kids aren’t old enough to have adopted a growth mindset of their own. That’s how powerful our mindsets are as parents.

Our mindsets also impact other areas of parenting. And we’ve touched on this several times in other episodes. For example, it’s been shown that people who were raised by harsher parents – authoritarian, stricter, spankers, less flexible, less in tune with their kids’ emotions and need for autonomy – the parents who were raised this way usually end up parenting their kids in less-than-optimal ways. Usually, opting for that same authoritarian, my-way-or-the-highway form of parenting. Research shows that moms raised in a harsher environment have negative attitudes and unrealistic developmental expectations about their own children.

And as we’ve discussed before, the outcomes for kids raised in a more authoritarian environment is worse than those raised by parents with a kinder and gentler parenting mindset.

There are some very specific mindsets that we need to adopt as parents of adolescents – 7 specifically. We’ve touched on most of them here or there in other episodes, but I want to mention them here again all together briefly before we talk about our biases:

1. You must have an empathetic mindset – You need to understand their developmental capacities and limitations. They’re not adults, they’re brain is still in flux, and they are not the best yet at making good decisions or using self-control. They may do things that seem completely irrational to you. But, you have to keep the mindset that they’re doing the best they can with what they have. They don’t want to disappoint you. They don’t want to be overly emotional. So, understand that you’re mindset about their behavior matters – a lot. Having the opposite mindset – that they could do better if they just wanted to or tried harder, or that they’re being dramatic on purpose or trying to manipulate you with their emotions – having these negative mindsets will have a devastating affect on your parenting and the relationship with your child.
2. You also need an autonomy mindset – By this I mean, you need to be able to support their autonomy, their need to be able to make decisions for themselves and make some mistakes to learn and grow. Accept your position as their consultant rather than their manager. Learn to invite their opinion and listen to what they have to say, negotiate the rules and consequences with them. Having the opposite mindset, feeling the need to control them whether out of fear or wanting to “make them mind”, make them “respect” you or be more obedient, - all these mindsets are detrimental to your parenting goals – things will quickly spiral totally out of control.
3. You have to develop a teaching mindset. Remember that they don’t know everything yet and that discipline actually means to teach, not to punish. Punishment will do nothing but drive their behavior underground and make them rebel. Natural or logical consequences are what you want when possible but it’s not even necessary that every single infraction has a consequence. Talking is good too.
4. Then there’s the mindful mindset. Being in the present with your teen or tween rather than predicting the future or remembering what they or a sibling did last week or what happened to you in the past. Being able to stay with them in the moment and address only that child at that point in time is so very important. Drifting into the past or into the future means you’re parenting out of fear.
5. I’m going to call this the participatory mindset for lack of a better term. This is understanding and having an attitude that how you think, how you feel and how you behave has an enormous impact on how your child thinks, feels, and behaves. We are a big ole’ boulder in their pond and our ripples can bounce them right out of their boat or guide them safely to shore. Instead of looking only to your child when they’re having a hard time, remember that you could be playing a role. Ditch any mindset you may have that your kid needs to be fixed, that there’s something wrong with them and look at what you may be doing to make things worse. The way we parent matters, and our mindsets impact the way we parent. Our history, the way we were raised, our emotions - all these things play a role and being aware of that and where we are is critical.
6. The next is really important and that’s your connection mindset. Keeping connection in the forefront of your mind at all times with your adolescent is necessary if you want to keep it. They’re not going to be very good at it for a few years. They want to stay connected but it’s uncomfortable and they’re really busy with their friends and you’re embarrassing, and you don’t understand what it’s like to be them. All of these issues make it really hard to connect with them but not impossible. Don’t adopt a defeatist mindset about your connection. Don’t let your ego get in the way. Quit feeling hurt that they stay in their room all the time. Stop withholding affection to teach them a lesson. Be the adult and make the effort to connect.
7. This last one I’ll call the positive anticipatory mindset – expecting the best of them, not the worst. Yes, adolescence can be hard for some kids (and parents). They can all have their moments but having the mindset that teens are just inherently going to get into trouble or cause problems is counterproductive. As a matter of fact, it can lead to exactly that happening. You have a great kid who happens to be an adolescent, who happens to not have a fully operational brain. But that doesn’t mean they’ll always make the worst decision. It doesn’t mean they can’t show great maturity at times. It doesn’t mean they’re always irresponsible or lazy. Expecting the worst, assuming it, can have dire consequences for your relationship with them because it will affect your behavior toward them in a negative way and it will then affect their behavior. So, assume the best of them, look for the best in them, praise the best in them.

So those are the 7 mindsets you need to adopt as soon as possible and I’m going to list those in the show notes and list the other episodes that will help you go back and think about these mindsets, okay?

Mindsets, as we’ve seen are powerful – our mind – our thinking is so powerful that it can make us feel better when we’re sick, even help us do things that seem physically impossible. So, how we think about our parenting, ourselves, our teen, it all matters a great deal. Let’s look at this a little closer.

There’s something else our brain does that we need to be very aware of when it comes to our parenting. (you’ll see you how it all fits together in a minute.)

Our mind takes shortcuts. It makes predictions, estimations, or assumptions about what to expect. These shortcuts are called heuristics – it’s a system our brain’s worked out for taking way too much information and breaking it down into a simple prediction.

When we need to make a quick decision, our brain simplifies the information for us and allows us to forgo all the complicated calculations – it’s a much easier way for us to navigate our world.

We use different heuristics daily without even thinking about it. For example, there’s the availability heuristic, which causes our brain to prioritize information that we’ve heard recently or something that was extremely memorable. Let’s say your 15-year-old daughter asks to go to a party tonight and there was a news story just this week where a 14-year-old died at a party, you’re likely to latch on to that information and say No to the party.

Another heuristic we tend to employ is the called the fundamental attribution error. This is when we assume that other people behave badly because of their character – who they are as a person. But we tend to look at our own bad behavior as a matter of circumstance. For example, you decide because your teen sleeps in on the weekends and won’t pick their towels out of the bathroom floor that they’re lazy. But, if you go back home after morning carpool and take a nap and leave the dishes in the sink for a day or two, you’re just had a “stressful week”.

You might see how heuristics, our mental shortcuts, could get us in trouble. Because they’re operating within our mind which has already formed mindsets – core beliefs, frameworks through which we see the world. So, these shortcuts are only helping us see things the way we already believe them to be.

And because our mindsets are subjective – they’re how we see the world, not necessarily how the world actually is objectively, our mind can take a shortcut which is fundamentally flawed – in error – a sort of faulty heuristic.

This phenomenon is called a cognitive bias.

Now, when most people hear the word bias, they think of the general definition – being prejudiced in favor of or against something or someone or a group of people in an unfair way – but that’s usually a conscious or intentional bias.

But it’s the unintentional, the faulty shortcuts we’re talking about here – this is what gets parents in trouble because we don’t realize we’re making this subconscious thinking error – and it affects the way we interpret information. These cognitive biases cause us to make inaccurate and irrational decisions and judgments.

Researchers have apparently identified and labeled somewhere around 175 of these specific cognitive biases, many of which could potentially impact our parenting directly or indirectly.

The anchoring bias is when you use the first bit of information you hear to form your opinion of something or someone. This might happen when you find out your teenager is hanging out with a certain person. They show up at your house smelling like smoke or you’ve already heard something about them – maybe they’ve gotten in trouble at school or at a party. So, you automatically form an opinion about this friend without giving them a chance. You could be right, but you may be wrong.

There’s the Halo effect – you might imagine what that one is. “My kid would never do that.” “Not her, I’m sure you’re wrong.”

And there’s the Optimism bias – nothing bad is going to happen to us - “Sure, you can have you’re senior party here and we’ll buy the keg” Invite the whole class.

But let’s talk about the cognitive bias that probably gives parents the hardest time – we’ll start with a quick experiment. I’m going to give you 3 numbers that follow a certain rule and you have to guess the rule, by giving me additional three number-sequences and asking me whether or not these new strings meet the rule.

Okay, well, wait, that won’t work, will it? So, I’ll just start and then I’ll tell you how it goes. So, here’s the first string of numbers: 2, 4, 6. Now, if you could talk to me right now, you’d give me another set of 3 numbers and ask me whether or not that met the rule.

And I’m going to go ahead and guess that you’re thinking 8, 10, 12. Am I right? That’s what you’d say to me if you were here. And I’d say, yep, that meets the rule. And the point is for you to guess the rule. So, you might go ahead and guess right now and say it’s increasing the numbers by 2 or ascending even numbers, right? Well, no, that’s not the rule.

And I’ve seen this experiment done, so I’ll go ahead and tell you that people will keep guessing, 24, 26, 28  – yep, that meets the rule (and they look completely puzzled again when they say, well, it’s got to be increasing by 2 or ascending even numbers) Nope, that’s not the rule. And it goes on and on.

So, here’s the point of the experiment – and it’s brilliant really. The point is to demonstrate confirmation bias. When you hear the numbers, 2, 4, 6, you automatically decide what the rule is and that’s why you think 8, 10, 12. And when I say, those numbers meet this secret rule, but no, the rule is not increasing by 2 or ascending even numbers, you think, well, what the heck, and you give yet another string of numbers that meet the rule you’ve decided it is – 14, 16, 18.

And here’s the point - you could have more easily figured out the rule if you’d guessed strings of numbers that you thought did not meet the rule that you’d already hypothesized that it was. But no one wants to do this – no one wants to disprove something they’ve already decided is true.

But it would make guessing the rule so much easier - Let’s say you guessed 10, 29, 2,000 – which isn’t increasing by 2 or ascending even numbers. And I said, Yes! That meets the rule.

Then you might have known that the rule is any 3 ascending numbers. I know – but in the real experiment done by the researcher, only 1 person in 5 was able to guess the rule. And that’s because humans have a tendency toward confirmation bias. Our brains are wired that way. We see what we want to see – believe what we want to believe. We’d much rather interpret new information as confirmation of our rightness - even if the evidence that proves us right…is wrong.

You can see how this thinking shortcut can be dangerous – it leads us to ignore, poo poo, or trivialize anything inconsistent with our beliefs – information that causes cognitive dissonance.  So, it can lead us to be blind to the objective truth of a situation – we just don’t let that information in.

There have been so many studies done on confirmation bias – to the point of making people look just downright silly.

The fact is, once we have convinced ourselves of a certain reality, once we believe something, it takes more than logic and science to break it down. The evidence can fall apart, and we’ll still cling to it. We’ll ignore the facts, the evidence right in front of our face. Think about how many times you’ve seen this play out with other people – well, you’re doing it too – we all have.

Sometimes we simply will not recognize information that contradicts what we already believe to be true.

And when it’s obvious to everyone around us, we provide some type of way to “mitigate” the  incongruency. Our minds crave consistency and we already have so much information being thrown at us – we do what we can to avoid challenges to what we already “know”.

We interpret the world around us using a mixture of the information, memories, and experiences we already have stored in our brain. Everything we think, feel, and do depends on a comparison to our own unique brain mixture...that churns out evidence to reinforce our worldview, our mindset, our beliefs and find reasons not to believe the rest. The way our brain assimilates information is naturally biased.

Humans on the whole, are just not critical thinkers. It’s too hard. Flat-earthers despite all the evidence that the earth is round, still deny it.

In the extreme, confirmation bias can be deadly.

For example, cults that have popped up throughout history with some sort of doomsday scenario and a booklet full of beliefs that you wouldn’t think any rational person could believe. Yet, these folks get so far down the road in the belief system that they can’t see a way out even when presented with clear facts and evidence.

Look at the Heaven’s Gate group that wound up in Southern California. 39 people dressed in matching gym suits and Nikes killed themselves in 1997 because they believed they’d leave their containers (their bodies) and go up into a spacecraft hidden behind the Hale-Bopp comet.

Some of the group had literally waited since the 70s for this space craft to show up and when year after year it failed to appear, they didn’t lose their conviction, they doubled down and when the Hale-Bopp commit was discovered in 1995 they were convinced the commit was the ticket out they’d been waiting on – but this time they weren’t going to just sit and wait to be beamed up.

Without a doubt, the most striking example of confirmation bias today are the 2 political parties in the US. Over the past few years, these two groups have moved further and further apart to the extreme ends of the left and right. They’ve each declared the other party the official cause for the end of democracy. They appear to have become mortal enemies and will absolutely not entertain the thought that there could be a smidge of truth to what the other is saying about any issue - at all.

Both parties with their biased television news stations, their own biased newspapers, blogs, and celebrities. Classic confirmation bias. Let’s keep watching, reading, and listening to “our” information to confirm what we believe

rather than research the actual facts (which we all know in many cases, lands more toward the middle).

As Leo Tolstoy wrote:

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.

And as Neil deGrasse Tyson says, “people prefer reassurance to research.”

And this same confirmation bias can be detrimental to the parent-child relationship and to the child’s mental health and general wellbeing.

 

When we, as parents, have a certain mindset about parenting, about our teenager, we will look for things to confirm that mindset, confirm those shortcuts we’re using.

So, if you believe your teen is being dramatic to manipulate you, or you believe that they’re disrespectful when they share an opinion or question your authority, or that they could control their temper if they tried harder or that they’re lazy or unmotivated or entitled or you’re afraid they’re going to become an alcoholic or a drug addict or that they’ll never be able to make it in the world…your brain will look for ways to confirm those core beliefs, those assumptions – those things you expect to happen, your brain is going to try to prove you right, not wrong.

For example, you’ve decided based on a few recent events that your 15-year-old son is spoiled and entitled. Tomorrow, you hear him make a comment about not being caught dead in anything from that store and it just confirms that bratty, entitled kid theory. You start seeing the signs every day. He refuses to be seen with you in your “old beater” or he asks why you can’t dress “a little less embarrassingly”. You start trying to control the entitlement out of him. You issue new rules about the clothes he can buy, who he can hang out with (because it’s that rich kid down the street causing this). It becomes a daily argument.

Another example. You find out your 14-year-old daughter’s been smoking weed. You’re devastated and disappointed and despite talking to her you’ve decided it’s going to keep happening and you’re terrified she’ll get into harder drugs. Every time you see her head for the frig or look less than fully alert, you automatically think, “I know she’s been smoking weed again.”

 

You start restricting her comings and goings, questioning everything she does, accusing her, dissing her friends and cause argument after argument until, yep, she’s smoking weed – as much as she can get her hands on, she’s being sneaky, she’s combative and things are out of control.

Confirmation bias can be devastating to your parenting goals, the relationship with your child, their mental health, and their ultimate outcome. As research has shown, our kids absorb our expectations of them. We get what we expect to get from them. It’s the old self-fulfilling prophecy. How many times have you heard people say, “well, I was being accused of it so I thought I might as well go ahead and do it.” It sounds like a good excuse, but it does happen – all the time.

And it’s easy to let our mind suck us in – it’s usually our fear. Fear for our kid’s future. We don’t want them to be an entitled dick. We don’t want them to be lazy – they’ll never get through college and get a decent job and live the life we want for them. (lots of flawed thinking there).

Having a negative mindset, combined with confirmation bias is one of the quickest ways to wreak havoc in your home with your teenager.

So, how do we avoid it? Well, first of all you work on developing those 7 mindsets we talked about earlier and ditch the opposite. And how do we combat confirmation bias?

1. The first step is awareness. Now that we’ve talked about it, it will be much easier for you to spot it when you’re doing it. And when you notice it, you’ve got to stop and think about the mindset that has allowed you to even go there. Reframe your thinking.
2. Challenge your thoughts by trying to prove them wrong. We don’t do that with confirmation bias, we’re only looking to prove that 8, 10, 12 comes next. So, try to disprove what your mind is telling you is true. Maybe she’s just really hungry and doesn’t have the munchies.
3. Remind yourself that your child internalizes these negative mindsets and biases. It’s not just you reacting to them, it’s being absorbed into their very being. You haven’t totally screwed them up, but you need to pay attention now and reverse course if you’ve gotten into a pattern. If you expect the worst, you’ll end up getting the worst. They will eventually give up trying to please you and give you exactly what you’ve expected all along.
4. Start noticing the positives about your teen. Now I know sometimes this can be really difficult. If you’ve gotten into this pattern of arguing and negativity. But even in the most difficult situations, the things you are focusing in on – the negatives – even they can be seen as positive if you dig deep enough. Maybe they’re loyal to a friend that maybe you don’t approve of – but they’re a loyal friend. That by itself is worthy of praise. Maybe they’ve made some really great arguments for something you don’t agree with – but the arguments and the insight was impressive – let them know. Make sure to remind yourself daily of their positive qualities to help take the focus off negativity.
5. Along those same lines, don’t discount the positive things they do that you think they “should” be doing anyway. Just because you think they should do it doesn’t make it any less positive or good that they did. Thank them when they take out the trash. Give them a hug when they clean up their room. Praise them when they hang their towel up. Those little positive nuggets make a difference to them and cost you nothing. You’re not taking away from the fact that they should do it by thanking them for it.
6. Start asking yourself if you’re responding to a fact or to your own fear. When you get upset with them, angry, what’s happening in your mind? Why are you angry – really? Dig deep and get specific. Most of the time you’re going to see that you’re afraid of something. Afraid for them, for their future. But is that fear rational? Does leaving empty soda cans in their room make them unappreciative and entitled? No – they have other things on their mind. They just don’t think about garbage cans that much. Bring yourself back to reality and try to see things for the way they really are – objectively.
7. Notice those things that trigger your biggest emotional reactions to them. Think about it. Ask yourself why. Look at your own personal history or things that have happened with their siblings. Where’s this big reaction coming from? What is it about this situation that gets to you? The more aware you are, the easier it will be to change your thinking.
8. Any time you hear yourself saying “you always” or “you never”, stop yourself. Always and never are key words for confirming things you already believe to be true. “You’ve done this thing, just like you always do” – really? Are you sure about that? It’s kind of rare that people always or never do something, so examine that thought closely.
9. And we’ve said this enough times but listen to them. When they’re trying to explain that it’s not what it seems, that you’re mistaken, listen. Have you ever had someone assume something about you that wasn’t true? Do you recall how maddening it was to feel like no matter what you said, they didn’t believe you? It’s a horrible feeling to be doubted or mistrusted by a family member. The very people who should trust you the most. Mistrust breeds untrustworthy behavior.
10. Of course, you have to be willing to admit when you’re wrong too. Learn to take a step back and admit when you’ve been biased, made a mistake in your thinking, jumped to a conclusion. Admitting when your wrong and apologizing teaches your child to be able to do the same. It takes courage to admit when you’re wrong. It also saves a lot of arguing and ill will. There’s something very powerful about a parent apologizing to their child when the child knows full well that they should.
11. Remember to lead with empathy. Put yourself in your teen’s shoes. Remember how their brain works and what they deal with on a daily basis at school, with friends, on social media, not getting enough sleep, having too much homework. Being a teenager is really, really hard and you need to remember that – always.
12. Last, help them focus on their strengths. A kid who feels like he’s surrounded with negativity is going to be negative. If he or she feels like they don’t excel at anything, they’re going to have a negative mindset about themselves. Everyone needs to feel accomplished at something. Even if it’s a specific video game or skateboarding or hiking. It doesn’t have to be an extracurricular for the college application. Everything’s not about achievement on paper. Intrinsic accomplishment, inner strengths matter more to their wellbeing. Help them find it.

Here's what I want you to take away from today’s episode:

I want you to think about how powerful our mindsets can be. How they influence how we interpret the world around us. And then think about the mindsets you’ve adopted about parenting your teen. Think about those 7 we discussed that you should adopt and their opposites that you need to ditch.

Remember these mindsets not only impact the way you parent your teen, but they will impact your teen’s thoughts, emotions, and behavior. If you develop negative mindsets about them, you’ll look for confirmation at every turn – and you’ll find it….unless you’re aware and use those 12 ways we just discussed to combat that confirmation bias.

Now, go start thinking about your thinking!

Speaking of Teens is the official podcast of neurogility.com.

Go to neurogility.com/herewego to find lots of free parenting guides and e-books to help you learn more about parenting your teen.

Thank you for listening today to this 30^th episode! Now, go tell a friend to listen too!

If you need a reminder of any of this, just tap through to the show notes in your app or go to neurogility.com/30 – I’ll put the list of parenting mindsets to adopt on that page along with episodes to refer back to for each. You’ll also find the link to the transcript of the episode if you want to review those 12 ways to combat confirmation bias.

As always, you can reach out to me at acoleman@neurogility.com – I read every one of my emails from you and I appreciate them SO MUCH.

I’m not supposed to be back until the 27^th with a full episode but, as I’ve been doing, for the past few weeks, I’ll at least have a brief message posted for you (maybe a longer one) this Tuesday the 20^th.

I’ll see you then!