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Ep. 89: How to help a teenager who's lonely
241 Plays8 months ago
"Loneliness is a condition that's just as bad for you as cancer", says Dr Richard Pile, a GP and specialist in loneliness. He goes on to say that the age bracket most affected by loneliness is young adults aged 16-24.
Loneliness at a young age can leave mental health 'scars' in the same way that physical injuries stay with us for the rest of our lives. So it's important to help our teenagers identify when they're lonely, and learn what to do about it.
What can we do to prevent loneliness in teenagers?
- Try to mitigate the effects of academic pressure. Richard sees a lot of teenagers who are isolating thanks to the stress of expectations from schools and ambitious families. We need to help our kids work out what makes them happy, and encourage them to spend time doing more of that.
- Help them realise that feeling lonely at times is normal. Boredom, stress and loneliness help kids learn who they are and work out what they want to do next. It's only a problem when it's long-term.
- Digital connection is valuable (especially during the pandemic) but a lot of young people got out of the habit of connecting in a physical space because of the ease of online interactions. We need to help our kids learn how to enjoy being with other people more often.
- Fight the "cult of the individual". Wellbeing comes from interdependency with friends and family - community.
Who is Dr Richard Pile?
Richard is an NHS GP specialising in Lifestyle Medicine and Cardiology. Outside of the surgery, his other jobs include promoting lifestyle medicine amongst the public and health professionals, training & appraisal, and being a mentor and coach.
He has written for the national press and the British Medical Journal and is the author of a book on wellbeing.
More from Richard :
- Listen to Richard's TEDx talk on loneliness in young adults.
- Get Richard's book Fit For Purpose (affiliate link)
- His website Feel Good For Life
- Other links, including Richard's newsletter, podcast and social media
More from Helen Wills:
Helen wills is a teen mental health podcaster and blogger at Actually Mummy, a resource for midlife parents of teens.
Thank you for listening! Subscribe to the Teenage Kicks podcast to hear new episodes. If you have a suggestion for the podcast please get in touch.
You can find more from Helen Wills on parenting teenagers on Instagram and Twitter @iamhelenwills.
For information on your data privacy please visit Zencastr's policy page
Please note that Helen Wills is not a medical expert, and nothing in the podcast should be taken as medical advice. If you're worried about yourself or a teenager, please seek support from a medical professional.
Episode produced by Michael J Cunningham.
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Transcript
Introduction and Purpose
00:00:00
Speaker
any parent listening to this who is going, oh, that's terrible. There are children out there who don't tell their parents everything. Even if that doesn't happen in my family, you are absolutely kidding yourself. Welcome to the Teenage Kicks podcast, where we take the fear out of parenting or becoming a teenager.
00:00:27
Speaker
I'm Helen Wills and every week I talk to someone who had a difficult time in the teenage years but came out the other side in a good place and has insight to offer to parents and young people who might be going through the same.
Understanding Teenage Loneliness
00:00:42
Speaker
Today I'm talking with Dr Richard Pyle about loneliness, the surprising stats around loneliness in young people.
00:00:51
Speaker
Richard is an NHSGP specialising in lifestyle medicine and cardiology. Outside of the surgery, his other jobs include promoting lifestyle medicine amongst the public and health professionals, training and appraisal and being a mentor and a coach. He's written for the National Press and the British Medical Journal and is the author of a book on wellbeing, which I'm going to ask him about later.
00:01:16
Speaker
He says loneliness is a condition that's just as bad for you as cancer. And yet we can all help cure it via connecting with others. I'm going to ask him what we can do as parents to make sure our teenagers aren't part of this problem. Richard, welcome to the podcast. Hello, Alan. Thank you for having me.
00:01:38
Speaker
Oh, no, it's great. Richard, I was going to say I met you. I mean, I probably met you at a school concert or something, but actually what catalyzed this conversation was seeing your TEDx talk at TEDx St Albans in 2023 last year, the first St Albans TEDx.
00:02:00
Speaker
And you spoke very eloquently, as everyone does at a TEDx talk, because it was such a marvellous job with us all. It's about loneliness affecting teenagers. Well, young people, you said, more than anyone else. And I was so shocked as the daughter of a very, very elderly, lone parent. I thought that was the age bracket you were going to tell us about. And you talked about young people and teenagers.
00:02:31
Speaker
How have you discovered this? Yeah, I mean, obviously I did quite a lot of research for the talk. As you say, we're highly trained and polished when we do TEDx talks, aren't we? And that included having to pitch your talk to the person that you were effectively auditioning for to get the job, as it were, and then to go and do a lot of research about the content of it.
00:02:55
Speaker
And I looked at various sort of national websites and it came across clearly that these were the two peak groups and I expected the elderly and frail one because as you suggested, you know, you might have lost your lifelong partner, you're going through changes, your health's failing, you're asking yourself some pretty big questions, a lot of your friends may have passed away and that's all totally understandable.
00:03:22
Speaker
But there was a clear and consistent theme through well-published data showing that actually the group that was one of the peaks, but the even bigger peak.
00:03:31
Speaker
was young adults. And you could debate whether what age it starts at, but clearly you would think we're talking about 16 to 24 young adults. And by the time I gave the talk, of course, I wasn't shocked about that. But what struck me, such as your comment today, was the feedback both at the time in the auditorium chatting with people afterwards. But also since then, so many people have said, I was shocked by that. I can't believe that. So it really has come as a surprise to a lot of people.
00:04:01
Speaker
But it's true, and I think it's significant because these are young people starting out on their lives without wishing to appear unkind. If you're 85 and lonely, you don't have lots and lots of life left ahead of you. It's not to say you shouldn't be doing what you can to do things, but the implications for young people physically and mentally for the rest of their lives are huge. So I think it is a really important topic.
00:04:27
Speaker
Yeah, well, you just made me think that what we talk about here is setting kids, teenagers, young adults up for the rest of their lives, because these are such formative years. I mean, childhood is formative anyway, but when children are beginning to become more independent, they're separating from their family, their parents,
00:04:50
Speaker
and finding their own way in the world, they're still really quite vulnerable, even though the majority of them tend not to feel it. That's my summation of young adults. They don't feel vulnerable, or if they do, they don't know that they feel vulnerable. So I'm imagining that whatever behaviours, patterns of thought, senses around who they are in the world,
Teenage Brain Development and Mental Health
00:05:17
Speaker
happen to them during those years, you said 16 to 24, are formative for the rest of their lives. Is that something that the research backs up? Well, I think we know, even outside of that conversation about the research, we do know that obviously people's brains are still being formed at that stage. In fact, you're not
00:05:37
Speaker
neurodevelopmentally speaking, you're not really mature until you're 25. Yeah. And certainly most of us, she says slightly for centuries later, looking at our own children would probably agree with that. And so those are really important years. And of course, just because I'm saying 16 to 24, you know, it doesn't mean you can't be lonely when you're 14 as well. So yes, it's partly how our brains develop.
00:06:02
Speaker
And I think it's also partly alongside that, but perhaps slightly separated. If we encounter significant problems, particularly mental health problems in that age, an episode of mental health problems is not really any different from an episode of physical health problems. And you might be left with a scar or a consequence, both mentally as you would do physically. But of course, those scars aren't visible, whereas they are if you've had a bone fixed or your appendix.
00:06:31
Speaker
and so it can then shape the rest of our lives.
00:06:33
Speaker
That's a really interesting way of putting it actually, because mental health scars are scars that we don't see. So we almost become, I think some people become, well, let's just speak for yourself, Helen. Disattuned or unattuned, whatever the word is, to our mental health scars. And I'm training to be a counsellor and I've gone through a lot of counselling over the years and I'm gradually
00:07:02
Speaker
learning to notice where my mental health scars are. And it's transformational, but we, whether it's a Western thing or whether it's a human thing, we tend to, in the absence of any other guidance,
00:07:18
Speaker
Overlook those scars, neglect them, shove them down to the bottom of our consciousness. So there isn't a reminder. It's not like a burn on your arm. There isn't a reminder every day that you've got something that needs paying attention to and taking care of. So it's a really good way to describe it. Yeah, that's a fair point.
00:07:40
Speaker
I'm just going to backtrack and go to the question that I always ask at the beginning because we will get into more serious, heavy stuff about this, but I know from your TEDx talk that it's a really positive conversation. So guys who are listening, hold on till the end because there is a lot you can do about this. Richard, I want to ask you about your own teenage years. What was life like for you growing up?
00:08:04
Speaker
I'm going to say, I think the words I used to you the other day were something like, pleasantly uneventful or something like that. I came from a middle class family, had a nice core of a small group of friends at home and at school, mostly enjoyed my time at school, didn't really have
00:08:29
Speaker
what I think consciously of as any major sort of trauma or upset. My men, my strong memory of my teenage years is spending an awful lot of time listening to music. I was raised in Manchester, so you could listen to any music you wanted as long as it was part of the Manchester music scene. Having bad skin and being interested in the opposite sex, that was mainly my teenage years. A lot of reading as well, a lot of reading.
00:08:52
Speaker
God, wasn't life so simple then? Wasn't it? Yeah, you know, the phone was in the hallway. I had a rubbish computer, the Spectrum 48K, which didn't connect to the internet, but gave me hours of amusement. And life was very, very simple, the good things. And I genuinely
00:09:15
Speaker
Pity, is that too strong a word? I feel bad for our young people that life has potentially become so much more complicated because I do see the upsides of some of the ways in which the world now works for them and helps them to be more connected. I'm sure we'll talk about that in this conversation. But I also see so many of the downsides. So yeah, my life was uneventful and I'm a digital, what do you call it? I'm a digital immigrant, not a digital native. I was raised in the analog world, whereas my kids are digital natives.
00:09:43
Speaker
Yes. Oh my God. Computers that don't connect to the internet. We've just lost all the teenage audience right there. They're going, what? What? He didn't have a what? It's when I say, I say to my kids that when they introduced channel four on the TV, we all thought it was a little bit too much for channels who needs that many.
00:10:07
Speaker
That's crazy, isn't it? That's like a 33% increase. And Channel 4 was the dodgy one, wasn't it? It was the one that was more likely to have sort of sex and whatever going on. Yeah. That's the one your mum didn't let you watch.
Academic Pressure and Its Effects
00:10:18
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. It was too much choice. Too much choice. It was Channel 4. I know, isn't it hilarious?
00:10:25
Speaker
Yeah, OK, so you had a really nice upbringing. Your upbringing sounds kind of similar to mine in that I spent most of it lying on the floor in my bedroom playing records and the pressure of school. I mean, I've got I've got issues there. I was under a lot of pressure at home to do well at school, but I don't remember there being massive pressure at school. And we are such an academic
00:10:54
Speaker
Oh, well, are we? My perception is that we are such an academic nation. Now it all...
00:11:02
Speaker
The rhetoric says that it all hinges on your GCSE results, which of course we know it doesn't, it all hinges on your A level results. But actually, if you're going to university, it doesn't hinge on even that. But certainly, I don't know what your kids are like, but my kids certainly have been caught up in that academic pressure and I know many, many, many of their friends have. And I see people
00:11:26
Speaker
messaging in my sort of teenage Facebook groups and on Instagram about when's the right time to get a tutor. In fact, I've got a podcast episode on when's the right time to get a tutor. And actually I asked the lady interviewing with me, is there ever a time not to get a tutor? I really wanted to dig into why it's not worth getting a tutor.
00:11:48
Speaker
Do you see, I'm building up a picture here of like really quite pressured teenagers. Is that your perception? Do you see a lot of that?
00:12:00
Speaker
Oh God, yes. I've gone full circle. So, full disclosure, I went to a school in Manchester that was highly competitive to get into. It was an independent school and it was an intensely pressurised environment because they made it very clear at my school that you were going on to be captains of the world. That was what was going to happen. Right. And a lot of the sixth form went to Oxford and Cambridge. I didn't, by the way. I went to Nottingham because I didn't fancy all the extra exams and I wasn't posh enough.
00:12:24
Speaker
So it's interesting, but that didn't trouble me because I was academically a very high achiever and I didn't have to work as hard to do what some of the people might have had to do and I didn't mind it. But that probably left me with a view of the world, Helen, that was kind of you go to school, you get good marks, you go to university, you get a good job doing whatever.
00:12:43
Speaker
And then you rinse and repeat, you then, you know, meet someone, marry them, have children and do the same thing all over again. Right. And of course, that's classically what people in St Albans do. So we're actually having a not very St Albans conversation, you know, because full disclosure, none of my four children so far have done what you would call the conventional route. And none of them have gone to university after A levels.
00:13:06
Speaker
One's doing Open University at the moment, but alongside other stuff. They're all creative. My oldest one, Luke, has severe epilepsy and a low disability, so he was never likely to go to university university, but he does have some higher education. So in some ways, it's really challenging me. Having Luke, excuse me, meant that immediately my perceptions of what life should look like and what my aspirations for my children should be are completely blown up.
00:13:31
Speaker
Right. And once I got on over that, it's actually been really freeing. And I looked at other people and the angst, the pressure as a GP, the number of anxious teenagers, both genders, but I will say particularly girls, being, his parents are ringing up, talking to us on the phone, under so much pressure, whether it's real, whether it's perceived, the messages that the schools give, you and I have some, I think, shared experience of particularly secondary schools.
00:14:00
Speaker
I've actually had to be an antidote to that for my kids when they wheel out that bloke every year who bangs on it. Is he Dutch or something? He bangs on it. Yes. Get these perfect marks otherwise the rest of the time is going to be ruined. I do sit down again. You do know that's bollocks, don't you? That is... Am I allowed to say that on this programme? Absolutely. Go for it.
00:14:18
Speaker
And you do know that's politics then, you know, yes, it's fine. If you want certain routes in life where there are absolute minimum entry criteria, and that includes going to university to read a particular subject, and you're sure it's what you want to do, knock yourself out, crack on. But I know from real life experience, as someone who's on the other side of 50 now, that message that you're being peddled is rubbish, mostly. And the cost to some people of that, and I do sometimes really want to help, I just want to sit down with parents and their kids and say,
00:14:48
Speaker
Oh, just take a breath about what's really important to you in life and why and ask yourself lots of questions. I could talk about this nonstop for now, but yes, it's a real issue. And St Albans is a big, big example of a problem in that respect, because it's a commuter town packed full of people who themselves went to university and have jobs in the city who assume rather automatically in some cases that that's what should happen to their kids as well.
00:15:14
Speaker
Yeah, a little bit of disclosure from me here, just for anyone that might be trying to second guess what's going on here, Richard and I have children who both went through the exact same secondary school. And I know exactly who Richard's talking about and my kids, and I've got one child still in that school, so I need to be probably a bit careful what I say, but my kids came home every year and rolled their eyes about this talk that they got every year. It was supposed to be motivational and did, to be fair, give them some decent revision tips, but
00:15:43
Speaker
the message that was hammered into them that you're only as good as your exam results is one that I've really fought to negate. Let's put it that way.
00:15:55
Speaker
And yeah, no, that's a really good point about St. Albans. We often say it's like every school in St Albans is like private school, except you don't pay the private school fees, you pay the house prices. And we're very privileged and very lucky to be here. And my two have benefited from it from an academic perspective. They both are quite academic, they enjoy it, they have gone up, they are going on to university.
00:16:25
Speaker
But I look at the pressure they put themselves under to work. My daughters at Cambridge and the pressure at Cambridge for work is phenomenal. And I, like you say, take a breath. I've always tried to say to them, just pick something you love doing and then figure out a way to make money out of it. It really isn't about the piece of paper that you've got.
00:16:51
Speaker
Anyway, that's a whole other podcast and we're here to talk about loneliness, but I think it's relevant because I feel like for some of the kids who feel a lot of academic pressure, that can be quite a lonely place.
Digital Age and Loneliness
00:17:05
Speaker
Is there any kind of, what does your research tell you? What have you perceived in your studies of loneliness around what contributes to it in young people?
00:17:18
Speaker
Yes, so I will say I haven't personally conducted scientific research myself, but based on the research that the other people have done, and you know, and lots of great books have been written on the subject, I would say, I think first of all, we should be honest and say actually asking yourself big questions and feeling lonely is a perfectly part of natural parts of life as you stress. There's nothing inherently wrong with stress. There's nothing inherently wrong with a bit of loneliness.
00:17:46
Speaker
And actually, it's from those times that we learn things, you know, when we deal with boredom, when we deal with loneliness, when we deal with stress, it helps to make us, whatever you want to call it, better, stronger, more experienced people potentially. But it's about the dose. So I think it's natural to be lonely in your teenage years at times. But I think the dose has been increased. And I think that's because on top of that, we've now got a more toxic environment. We've, it's almost like in every aspect of our lives, and we've applied this to relationships as well, we've gone
00:18:16
Speaker
What does it take to really thrive as a human? Okay, let's not do that. Let's do the opposite of that. We're applying that to food, we're applying it to sleep, we're applying it to conversations about physical movement, and now we're going to apply it to what we instinctively know about what we need as humans when it comes to relationships, and we're not going to do that either.
00:18:34
Speaker
And maybe that 100,000 years from now, societies evolved to deal with loneliness, but that's not going to happen in the next 100 years or the next 1,000 years. So why does it happen? I think a lot of it, and I know it's an easy target, but apart from the pressure that you've described living in a place like St Albans, I think a lot of it is about the digital world in which we live.
00:18:54
Speaker
Right. I think that as we were discussing earlier, Helen, we didn't have that as an issue when we were kids and I didn't feel disadvantaged because of course you don't feel disadvantaged about something that you don't even know exists. But now the problem is that our brains know the difference between a real life face-to-face interaction and a digital virtual interaction. But we're kind of pretending that it doesn't matter.
00:19:19
Speaker
so so much more of people's relationships are conducted online and they had to be in lockdown and I guess you know you and I are of an age where that was a small proportion of our lives it was stressful it was unpleasant actually there were some quite good bits of lockdown to be honest yeah I will say that but it was a little bit of our lives some of these young people were talking about it's an
00:19:41
Speaker
big chunk of their lives, people now who are in secondary school or going through their GCSEs and A levels, the last two, three years plus has been pretty weird and so to some extent it had to become more virtual but I think then sometimes we don't go back
00:19:57
Speaker
to valuing the real relationships as much because we just get into habits the way that we live. And when you look at social media, I know it's another topic that all old people like me bang on about, but no, it is a toxic environment. It wasn't invented by the big friendly giant. It wasn't invented by someone who goes, let's make Facebook and Instagram.
00:20:21
Speaker
and snapchat oh i wonder what we could do with that can we make the world a better place do you know what we could even sell stuff using it no no these are evil corporations who basically you know if what is it they say if the product is free then or if the platform is free you're the product and so yeah well i've got all these
00:20:41
Speaker
ways of distracting our attention, fragmenting our real relationships, getting addicted to the dopamine hits when people like things that we say, all the obviously even more negative downside of that, the bullying that goes on, the trolling, all that stuff. When I left school at the end of the day, when I was 60, with the one phone in the house on the end of a physical line, if someone had been horrid to me at school, that was where I ended.
00:21:06
Speaker
and I could go home and lick my wounds and whatever. Now there's no barrier because of the digital well-believing as well. So I think that's a major component. I think another factor is we've seen the rise of the cult of the individual.
00:21:21
Speaker
There are so many messages saying it's all about you. It's about what you want. It's about what you can achieve, where we're making promises to young people that can't be fulfilled. And the more we're encouraged to think in a fragmented way,
00:21:37
Speaker
about what's in it for us, the more ironically we end up lonely because actually well-being is interconnectedness, it's interdependency.
Individualism vs. Interconnectedness
00:21:47
Speaker
How well you are doesn't just depend on literally what's going on inside our bodies and brains, it's about our families, it's about our friends, how we support each other and anything that fragments that
00:21:59
Speaker
creates more loneliness. So you can try to look out for number one, but it rarely ends well. And I think a lot of that, along with broader pictures like less stable family structures than we once used to have, less stable institutions in society that previously used to help us all understand how we all operated to get there. I think all of that is a challenge.
00:22:22
Speaker
Wow. Okay. There's three episodes there, so I won't go too far into the social media one. What I really need is somebody to come and talk to me about a negative experience on social media, because I've not had that. I hear
00:22:40
Speaker
Parents of my generation, parents, as you say, who were kind of dragged into the digital world rather than growing up with it, maligning social media and saying how awful it is and it's responsible for everything and it's the root cause of all evil with our children.
00:22:59
Speaker
And I take a different view because I've seen some of the value and the connection, and you've alluded to this already, that it can bring. My daughter has type 1 diabetes, which was a really shocking diagnosis at the time. And I only survived because of Facebook. Right. Because the real people in my real world
00:23:23
Speaker
had no idea how to support me. So I found people who now are my real people in the real world. I found people online who knew, who got it and could support me and her. And then I also make the point to parents who want to confiscate phones and delete social media accounts for their kids that this is their reality. This is their real life. It is their real world. So they have to learn how to handle it. And I think
00:23:50
Speaker
Maybe that's your point and it's worth investigating. Not here another time, but how do we teach our kids to navigate and use social media for their own good, but put it down? And I think there's a difficulty, you mentioned the dopamine hit. I don't think that's something that people have got their heads around yet.
00:24:14
Speaker
about why it's so addictive and how natural and neurophysiological it is to become addicted to online apps and social media.
00:24:25
Speaker
So anyone listening that wants to come and be a guest and talk about that with me, please do. But let's not go there today. I'm really fascinated by the cult of the individual. It's not a phrase I've heard before. And yet as you describe it, I recognize it. I can see it in myself even. And we're encouraged and social media encourages us into that.
00:24:51
Speaker
And you're right, it is about the connectedness. So in my training to become a counsellor, I have necessarily given of myself and received from other people a lot of truth from a group of people who've been with me for the last three years. And I can't tell you what that's done to my own mental health, my own wellbeing, because I'm so connected with
00:25:20
Speaker
a group of other people. They're not similar to me, except they're interested in counselling. They've got completely different life experiences, but the connection that I have with them is immense. It's made a huge difference.
00:25:37
Speaker
What's your take on how we achieve, how we help our teenagers achieve that? Because I can tell my kids who are permanently connected to their phones, how bad it is for them, how they're becoming addicts, how they need to be out in the real world, kicking a ball in the sun, chatting with their friends. But it's not going to land from me.
00:26:02
Speaker
How do we help our kids and gosh, especially the young adults, the 20-somethings who are more outside our remit than ever before now, how do we help them to understand this?
00:26:18
Speaker
You mean specifically about loneliness and the importance of having connections with other people?
Modeling Connections for Teens
00:26:23
Speaker
Yeah. I think, as you say, I think it's a case of showing not telling, isn't it? Because you can lecture people all day long, and as we've agreed, we're not going to spend hours talking about social media today. It's more about showing and not telling. So I think we model that to them. They should see how we conduct our lives, how connected are we to other people.
00:26:46
Speaker
We, you know, if we stop in the middle of a conversation with a real life person to check our phones and be like the one from Miranda who goes, bear with, bear with. If we do that, that's really not sending the right message. Them seeing us interacting with our friends in terms of physically getting together, eating together, walking together, going out together.
00:27:10
Speaker
talking about the workplace conversations you've had. Those are all modeling what happens in real life, I think. And also, I think maybe sometimes instead of lecture, you know, it's easy for me to lecture my kids and for you to lecture yours, isn't it? But maybe talking to them about how they could help each other and help others.
00:27:33
Speaker
some ways that's more appealing. You're not telling them off. You're having conversations about how they could help others who are struggling because maybe they don't perceive that they are struggling. Maybe they're quite happy with their Instagram and TikTok and whatever else. And the thing I talked about in the TEDx talk, I talked about the three L's of loneliness. I talked about look, listen and lend a hand. And then for the look bit, I was saying, look for people that you know who are having a hard time, who've
00:28:02
Speaker
because of your personal knowledge of them, they might have changed their behaviour, they might be withdrawn, they could be angry, that can sometimes surprise people that, you know, the response of being lonely is to lash out rather than shrink into a corner. They might be, as I say, excluding themselves from social events, they might be drinking more, taking drugs, whatever, self neglect.
00:28:22
Speaker
And yeah, they will be able to see that and some of their friends and family members, perhaps. And then the other hour was listen, which was thinking about how we have conversations with people, encouraging them to listen and to let people tell their stories.
00:28:45
Speaker
The power of listening shouldn't be underestimated. If you just sit with someone for long enough and let them tell you their story without interrupting, it can be amazing because people can get so much off their chest. And I know as a doctor, there was a study once that showed, this was years ago now, so there may be more up to date information, but when I was a trainee, they said the study had shown that the average length of time for which a doctor waited for interrupting a patient was 19 seconds. And that was about 20 years ago.
00:29:14
Speaker
Um, the idea that, you know, even when my friends talk to me about stuff, it can be tempting, can't it, when you're having a conversation to fill in that awkward silence to ask a quick question. But actually, if you just wait for those few seconds longer, they often then, you know, unfold a bit more and reveal a bit more.
00:29:29
Speaker
and showing people that you're really interested in what you've got, what they've got to say, that you're not just doing that. Hi, how are you? I'm fine. Yeah, I'm fine too. Go your separate ways. I know that that is a necessity sometimes because you're in the middle of something really busy walking down the high street or at work and you don't have five minutes to stop and talk to someone. And that's okay, a bit of social nicety, but when it is that family member or when it is that person that you meet at work,
00:29:54
Speaker
You might notice that and think, right, well, either I'm going to have that conversation now or we don't have time now, but I want to show them that I'm bothered and I'm going to offer to meet up with them later for a coffee or whatever. So that was the listen bit. And then there was the lender hand bit, which was about.
00:30:11
Speaker
you might be the answer to their loneliness because you may be their family member, you may be their spouse, you may be their colleague, but also even if you're not, you could at least, having listened to them, maybe point them in the right direction where they could get advice and support from, whether it's social prescriber at the surgery or a counsellor or another friend. So I think maybe encouraging our young people to think about how they can help each other
00:30:38
Speaker
maybe rather than don't spend so much time on your phone you'll be ever so lonely because you know a prophet is without honour in his own town I think is one of the verses that comes from the bible and you know I can lecture my family till I'm blue in the face.
00:30:51
Speaker
up these things, but until they discover it for themselves or someone else who's not me says it. Oh, I just had this great sort of, this great idea and I'm like, yeah. So there isn't an easy answer there, is there? But that's what I would probably start with, encouraging people to help others. Yeah.
00:31:12
Speaker
Yeah, no. Well, you've answered one of my other questions, which was, as parents, what should we be looking for? Because our kids hide quite a lot from us. That's part of growing up and becoming an independent adult. I don't tell my parents stuff. My friends are my people now. So we don't always get to see, but you've pointed out some of the things that we should be looking for if we're concerned that a child of ours might be lonely. And then you also raised the age-old parenting
00:31:44
Speaker
skill of not telling our kids not to do something, but showing them that there's something else they could be doing. So it's like, don't sit on that chair. They will sit on that chair, but which chair would you like to choose out of all the five that are here?
00:32:03
Speaker
You give them choices and alternatives and make them feel like it's their choice and that they're more likely to do something about it. I was going to say, Helen, I think you raised a point about secretive. I'm looking to say it now, any parent listening to this who is going, oh, that's terrible. There are children out there who don't tell their parents everything.
00:32:23
Speaker
OK, even if that doesn't happen in my family, you are absolutely kidding yourself. You are lying to yourself whether you know it or not. Is this audio or video or both? Both. So you can see my face. I'm laughing right now at people who are asking that. And I've been there. I've been there.
Parental Awareness and Support Strategies
00:32:41
Speaker
You know, it is the nature of young people to do exactly that. So it is balance, isn't it? Because you could spend every moment trying to spy on them and disbelieve them, which is also not the right way to go.
00:32:53
Speaker
Yeah, but just looking for those clues. My wife, to give her credit, has great radar, and this is where perhaps we should acknowledge not everyone's the same. She refers to it as her mummy radar. She has great radar, and she is the one who consistently in our family has noticed when things aren't quite right. And sometimes I'm the one who's gone, I'm sure you're imagining that.
00:33:15
Speaker
And it turns out that she was correct. So being attuned and not so wrapped up in our own little worlds and not assuming that we've got it perfectly right and our kids are great is definitely smart. Yeah. Yeah.
00:33:30
Speaker
Yeah, well, and that story that they do tell us is only the version that they want us to hear. They're like the walking epitome of Instagram versus reality, telling those things. They don't want us to hear something, so we shouldn't necessarily, whilst we should be there to support our kids all the way, whatever they tell us, we shouldn't necessarily leave out the pinch of salt with some of the things that they say.
00:34:00
Speaker
And they might be deciding that they're going to test you by opening up a little bit. At least some things that you're probably going to find uncomfortable, but they're not the thing that you're going to find really uncomfortable. And they gauge your reaction to the medium uncomfortable things. And if you think it well, then there might be a further conversation where you get to learn the real truth. But if you don't react well to the PG-13 version, then you're definitely not going to get the 15 or the 18 version at some stage. So yeah.
00:34:27
Speaker
That's the sound bite for this episode, Richard. Because actually, we're talking about connection being the antidote to loneliness. Connection with teenagers is a parent's
00:34:40
Speaker
Oh God, endless pursuit. I get countless messages from parents saying, although my kids are alienating themselves from me, how do I maintain the relationship? And I always will say, it is about as far as you are able, staying open to whatever they have to tell you and listening, as you said, listening to your friend, colleague, child, parent,
00:35:02
Speaker
um when they open up and not trying to fix it or solutionize or god forbid judge and all and and this goes with a caveat that all parents and i've got my hand up here do this all the time i frequently get it wrong i definitely judge it's but it's noticing that i've judged and checking myself and going back and saying look i'm sorry i made a judgment there and actually
00:35:29
Speaker
this is your reality, tell me about it. And I'll keep my words to myself and I'll aim to just be there for what you're going through. And that's how they become independent adults who can connect with others and speak their truth.
00:35:45
Speaker
Yeah. And I think also it's about how you have the conversations as well. So interrogating people, we know as parents rarely works very well, does it? Particularly if they've just come out of school or whatever, or you just have not. I totally have a bit now. Yeah. Right. It's the parallel conversations that work really well. The amount that I've learned from going for a run with one of my kids or playing pool or going to the pub. That's a good one. Buy them a pint a bit. Obviously when they're middle age. Yeah.
00:36:13
Speaker
Have a conversation. I've learned a lot from that because it's a more natural conversation, isn't it? You may have people in your life where it's perfectly acceptable because of the nature of your relationship where you can literally just fire questions at them and they don't mind that because that's how your relationship works. Maybe we're very close friends, it could work like that.
00:36:30
Speaker
But I think with kids, the parallel conversations are really important and the listening is very important. A friend of mine, and my brother actually, this is a connection between me and my brother and one of my best friends. So my brother's got this system that he uses for, that he describes for listening to people. He does this for a living. He listens to people and he gets people to talk and tell their stories. He's very good at it.
00:36:54
Speaker
And he told me about this system, and it was all about listening, essentially, and offering the right things at the right time. But really, really listening was how to sum it up. And with my best friend, I was giving his son a lift somewhere for about three quarters of an hour an hour. I remember this was years ago now. He said, you probably won't get a lot out of him at the moment. So I sat him in the front. I thought, I'm going to do what my brother does. So I tried out this tool on my godson.
00:37:20
Speaker
And he didn't shut up for 45 minutes. Because I really, really focused on doing more listening than talking. So yeah, I definitely think that's important. Yeah. Is there any magic to this tool?
00:37:35
Speaker
I don't think it's magic. I can't even remember what the initials were that he used to describe it now, the acronym. It was about silence, encouraging people to comment, showing empathy and showing that you'd reflected back by reflecting back, showing you listen to what they've been saying and where appropriate, offering a little bit of disclosure or advice. But you only did that bit right at the end. And you only did that bit if
00:38:01
Speaker
you felt the conversation was going well and that they would accept your offer of an example from your own life or a bit of advice, but it was more about the listening. Yeah, brilliant. Oh, right. Well, there's another soundbite. So parents are really desperate to connect with their alienated children. Listen to that one and try.
00:38:21
Speaker
Richard, is there anything else that we haven't talked about yet that you think is pertinent for parents to know or even young adults? Because I do get some teenagers and young people listening to this podcast who are feeling lonely and don't know what to do about it or see that in their child and don't know how to support. I think, I mean, we talk quite a bit about the parental perspective, haven't we? So maybe we should talk a little bit as if we're talking directly to that young person. Yeah.
00:38:53
Speaker
When it's fine to be lonely for a bit, as I've said, and of course there was a difference between being alone, which we all need, some of us more than others, you know, introverts, extroverts, we all need people in different doses, but someone saying that they don't need people at all, it's like, and again, this is not my quite, but it's a good sound, but it's like someone who's got a small appetite saying that they don't need people, sorry, that they don't need food.
00:39:15
Speaker
I don't really like lots of people so I won't have any of them. We all need people, we evolve to survive and to thrive as a tribe and if you don't have a tribe then you are going to be in trouble. Now your tribe doesn't need to be big, it's just you want to see other people.
Nurturing Relationships: An Analogy
00:39:34
Speaker
and you know ideally physical connections but you know some of those might be remote if they live a long way away but just remember that other people feel like you do lots of other people out there are very lonely their instagram and their tiktok and whatever else they're using may suggest otherwise but as we know that's mainly rubbish and and just presenting for the sake of it yeah so lots of people feel like you do
00:39:56
Speaker
And I know that you might not want to walk up to someone in the street and say, I'm feeling lonely, would you like to be my friend? Obviously, that would feel a bit weird. But in effect, you can have those conversations, you know, you can notice other people who are obviously lonely and chat with them and strike up relationships with them.
00:40:16
Speaker
There are other ways of befriending people that don't involve you putting everything on the line. So it's like joining clubs, isn't it? And societies, people who've got similar interests, you know, the choir at school, the cross country running club, the, you know, whatever else it is that you're into, computing.
00:40:35
Speaker
Because naturally, when you have a group, you then end up having conversations. People can really bond over that. And you haven't had to say, would you be my friend? Because that kind of inherently is what the club is about. I'd also encourage you to think about your relationships in terms of, so the analogy that I've given before, I don't think I mentioned this in the talk, is imagining that your friendships, your relationships are like a garden.
00:41:00
Speaker
And in your garden, there are things that you'd like to plant and grow. Maybe there are people that you really are interested in that you've never spoken to or not spoken to very often. And you want to make a bit more of an effort to get to know them because you'd like to have people like that in your life just as you might benefit other people by being in their lives. So there's the bits you want to grow and cultivate and put time into those relationships. There's the relationships you've already got where you just want to nurture them a bit more and help grow those as well.
00:41:28
Speaker
You've got the ones that maybe need a bit of pruning because maybe you don't need quite as much of those people in your life as you currently have. And some relationships are like weeds. I know we're talking about loneliness. It is genuinely okay sometimes to get rid of some relationships. You need them out. And lockdown was a perfect opportunity, wasn't it? My wife loved lockdown. She wanted to write to Boris. It was Boris back in the day, wasn't it? She wanted to write to Boris and say, could we have it extended indefinitely?
00:41:54
Speaker
Because all the people that you previously kind of saw out of obligation, but they weren't very good for you. You just, you couldn't, you couldn't meet them. I'm terribly sorry. I can't, it's the law. So, so think about the planting, the growing, the pruning, the weeding, because actually part of you becoming happier and being more connected might be making more time in your life for more positive relationships. They're the ones that don't help.
00:42:18
Speaker
Yes. And I don't just mean people that are needy because we've talked about how the fact that you give and you take, but it's the ones that are actually toxic, the ones that are damaging you, the ones you think, sorry, not only am I not getting anything out of this, but I feel worse every time I spend time with you. Get rid of those. Yeah. So being really quite targeted about and noticing, I think there's a mindfulness thing here, noticing what works for you and what doesn't, what you want more of and what you need less of. Being intentional.
00:42:47
Speaker
Intentional, that's the word. Yeah, yeah, exactly that. That's a really good point. And I also want to pull out that for introverts, there is some bravery involved in joining the choir because people have imposter syndrome. So that's a different episode.
00:43:05
Speaker
just actually having the guts to get out there. And I think the key to that is what you said about knowing that there are multiple other people around you who feel exactly the same way and are maybe not able to be brave. So just have the guts to do it and hopefully someone will come along with you. Absolutely.
00:43:26
Speaker
Richard, thank you so much for chatting
Resources for Further Help
00:43:28
Speaker
to me today. Is there anywhere that you would point people to or just drop your book here as well? We'll put the link in the show notes that might be helpful for people. Thank you, Helen. A shameless plug is always welcome. I say all the social medias, I'm not on Snapchat and TikTok.
00:43:48
Speaker
So I'm on Twitter, you can, and if you, I think you might be able to put in the, in the show notes, I've got one of those link tree things that therefore, listen to all the different social media stuff. So all my stuff's on there, mainly Twitter, a bit of Instagram. My websites feelgoodforlife.uk.
00:44:04
Speaker
Um, and you can find me on the TEDx talk as well. And my book is called Fit for Purpose and it was published by HarperCollins in 2021. And I assume you can still get it from a good bookshop or buy it online. And if you're really unlucky, you can go for the audio version where you get to hear me read the whole thing out. Oh, fantastic. I always think authors reading their own books should always be a thing because you need to hear the voice that it came from.
00:44:29
Speaker
I like it when I've heard other people do it in the past. Yeah. I think it's interesting doing it. I will grab all of those links and put them in the show notes. So anyone that's listening right now and wants to know more, just scroll down when you finish listening and you'll find everything you need. Richard, thank you again for joining us today. Thank you for having me. It's been great.
00:44:49
Speaker
Thank you so much for listening. I really do appreciate it. Thank you too to everyone who's already rated and reviewed the podcast. If you're listening on Apple Podcasts or Amazon, it would mean the world to me if you could leave a review. It really helps get the word out, as well as making me very happy to read what you have to say.
00:45:08
Speaker
If this episode strikes a chord for you, please share it with anyone else you know who might be in the same boat and hit subscribe so you don't miss the next episode. If you have a story or a suggestion for something you'd like to see covered on the podcast, you can email me at teenagekickspodcast at gmail.com or message me on Instagram. I am Helen Woods. I love hearing from all my listeners. It really makes a difference to me on this journey.
00:45:38
Speaker
See you next week when I'll be chatting to another brilliant guest about the highs and lows of parenting teens. Bye for now!