Alison Wood Brooks

What are they excited about?

How can we leverage that in our next conversation?

It can go a long way.

This is such a fascinating question.

I think something to keep in mind with teenagers is that they are just learning to have conversations, even though they appear to be fully formed human beings.

Learning to be a good conversationalist is probably the most important skill, and they're very much still learning it.

I think as parents or really anyone who interacts with a teenager, something I find helpful to remember is that our job is to help them learn those conversational skills.

So even if the conversations we are having with them directly aren't that great,

You should feel good knowing that even when it doesn't go well between the two of you, that's definitely helping them learn how to have conversations with other people, with their friends, with their teachers, with their coaches.

And ultimately, that's an adult's job in a teenager's life is helping to make them the best person they can be.

um and so in a way it's almost not about you even though we i know we all want to have delightful conversations with our teenagers but you shouldn't expect every conversation with a teenager to be deeply rewarding or great or they're not going to always give you compliments they're not going to ask you questions back you're not going to figure out what the right right questions to ask them are they don't want to share everything about who they are what they're thinking about because

They don't know.

They don't know who they are yet.

They're just figuring it out.

And so giving ourselves and certainly giving some grace to our teenagers is a great mindset to have.

Thank you.

There is.

I mean, it's my whole book, right?

It's all of the things in the talk framework.

Prep topics before a conversation starts.