Quotes About Communication

I've come to learn over my years of practice, which is that having a delicate conversation with a teenager is like trying to talk with someone on the other side of a door.

More than we realize, girls understand us to be saying that they must always be utterly and completely forthright. That's a problem, especially when we combine it with the cultural injunction to be agreeable. A girl can't actually accomplish both because, like any other human, every girl contains a world of complicated thoughts and feelings. She cannot possibly be simultaneously see-through and utterly pleasing to others.

sharing one's true feelings at home makes it a lot easier to be charming out in public.

Girls often aim their most severe meanness at their mothers—especially if they have had a particularly close relationship in the past—

if you feel you must criticize your daughter's friends—and sometimes you must—use your words and your tone to communicate that the girls are in a tricky situation, not that they are bad people.

If you really want to help your daughter manage her distress, help her see the difference between complaining and venting.

girls told us that they would be open to telling an adult if a friend showed signs of an eating disorder, except for one thing: they didn't want to be seen as disloyal. They were fiercely committed to supporting one another and keeping one another's secrets, and they worried that telling an adult about a troubling change in a peer's eating would be a social transgression.

girls know when they're stepping over a boundary and find it strange when adults seem not to notice.

People don't do nice things for people who are mean to them. Better for your daughter to learn this lesson before she leaves your home than after she is out on her own.

At its worst, digital technology undermines a teen's capacity to cultivate meaningful in-person connections and actually amplifies the negative aspects of their relationships.

You should start by allowing your daughter more privacy than she had as a child. Interestingly, findings from a research study that examined how much parents seek to know about their teenagers—and how much teenagers choose to share—suggest that we grant greater privacy to our sons than to our daughters. We are more likely to ask girls what they're up to behind closed doors, and our daughters, more than our sons, answer our questions.

In good marriages, partners can help their children appreciate what they should and shouldn't take personally in the other parent's behavior. My husband has told our daughters that I've been clean crazy for as long as he's known me and that he stopped taking it personally years ago.

Raising teenagers is not for the fragile, and that's true even when everything is going just as it should.

It's critical to remember that by the time teens are telling us that they feel anxious or angry or sad or any other emotion they choose to put into words, they're already using an effective strategy for helping themselves cope with it. As a psychologist, I know this through and through. As a parent, though, I often forget it.

When teens are trapped with parents who would rather flaunt their power than negotiate on even minor points, it doesn't always end so well.

Complaining to you allows your daughter to bring the best of herself to school.

Personal discretion, respect for our daughters' privacy, or even competitive feelings within tight communities make it hard for parents to talk with one another about the garden-variety challenges that come with raising teenagers.

Sure, they all have iPods, smartphones, whatever. Generally speaking, it's in our own best interest to keep some kind of electronic device in their hands. Otherwise they might talk to us.

Because sometimes pain is knowing, and sometimes pain is sharing that knowledge with someone who loves you but can't do anything to help.

That movie Fatal Attraction really ruined things for women. I mean, you can't even call a guy 150 times a day anymore without having them get all bent out of shape.

Her favorite animal was sea lions. Mine was giraffes. Her favorite movie was Casablanca, which she said was old and black-and-white and very romantic. She tried to tell me what it was about, but it all sounded about as much fun as eating burned bread crusts.

When you do choose to speak," she told me, "speak truths.

The best gift anyone can give, I believe, is the gift of sharing themselves.

Mark my words. The telephone will never become a practical necessity.