135: The Emotional Lives of Teenagers – Part 2: Interview with Lisa Damour, PhD

Episode 135: Today's episode is the second of a two-part series with Lisa Damour about her 2023 book, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents. In today’s episode we talk about how decades of research on the gender binary can provide insight into the emotional lives of adolescents across the gender spectrum. We talk about intersection of race and gender. We end our conversation talking about how it is important to help teens express their emotions, but perhaps more important to help them regain control. In Part 1 we talked about the difference between adolescent distress and adolescent mental illness, how the COVID-19 pandemic made it more difficult for parents to distinguish between normative adolescent distress or pandemic-related mental health concerns. Lisa talked about the most destructive myth that is out there about adolescent mental health and what we as parents, professional and a society can do about that. Along the way Lisa shared some practical tips about to manage a teenage meltdown, a story about swimming pools, and she encouraged us to think critically about the research that is being done on adolescent mental health and how the news media is portraying adolescent distress. You can read a transcript of today's interview at You can connect with other social workers at the Social Work Podcast Facebook page at or follow the Twitter feed at

You can listen to 135: The Emotional Lives of Teenagers – Part 2: Interview with Lisa Damour, PhD online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

135: The Emotional Lives of Teenagers – Part 2: Interview with Lisa Damour, PhD is an episode from The Social Work Podcast by Jonathan B. Singer, Ph.D., LCSW.

This episode is 34:38 long.

This episode was published on Apr 5, 2023.

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