Raising Happy Teenagers | Raj Raghunathan | TEDxUTAustin

As some of you may know, I have an online course on happiness. I teach the same course to Macomb students, both MBA and undergraduate. Wonderful students. I also teach the same class to fabulous students at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, India. I even have a book. about happiness, so I receive a lot of emails every week, dozens of them from people all over the world, some write to me to thank me for my course or my book, others write to me asking me for additional advice on happiness and I give them I am very

happy

to provide extra money for happiness.

I'm just kidding. My advice is always free. The topic I get the most emails about by far is the happiness or maybe I should say unhappiness of

teenagers

. Sometimes these Teenagers write to me directly like this one who feels suicidal almost daily. Other times I receive emails from parents of

teenagers

who were desperate and at their wits' end not knowing how to deal with their teenage sons and daughters' huge mood swings. Of course, teenagers are world famous for being difficult to deal with, and there is scientific evidence to support that these are difficult years. A study was conducted with more than three hundred thousand respondents from all over the world.

This is a graph from the study. The graph shows self-esteem on the y-axis and the age of the respondents on the x-axis. I'll get to the adolescence part of this chart in a moment, but I want to point out two other things that catch many people's attention. One is that it turns out that the happiest days of our lives are all the ones that, depending on how old you are when you're nine and ten, after that it's a roller coaster that goes downhill. Another thing that stands out from this graph is that men report significantly higher levels of self-esteem than women.

This is perhaps not so surprising given that even today men enjoy greater freedom and access to resources than women, as one of my own studies co-authored with two other people showed that men report feeling better on the outside. about what they really feel inside, while women are more honest about how they really feel, but what I want to focus on in this talk is that it turns out that the unhappiest are ours The worst years are often those of adolescence, which is not only the adolescence when we are most awkward in terms of how we look and behave, but they are also the worst in terms of how we feel inside.

Now, this may have always been like this. For example, if you're 30, 40, 50 or older, raise your hand if you're in this age group in the audience, you probably felt pretty miserable as a teenager, if you can remember that from a long time ago, but unhappiness of adolescents appears to be especially pronounced now since 2005, adolescent depression has increased by more than 40%. More than a third of today's teenagers feel they are already tall. Stress levels will be even higher next year. Perhaps the saddest finding of all is that more than three thousand teenagers in the US alone in grades 9 to 12 think about taking their own lives every day.

This is actually a huge social and global problem, but in a sense it is also a personal problem for me and many other people. I have a teenage son and a soon-to-be teenage daughter, so what can we do about this problem? The first step is to try to understand what the main reasons for depression and anxiety in adolescents are. Here are three main reasons: First, unrealistically high pressure to perform in school and in life. in general, secondly, spending too much time in front of screens, especially on social media, and thirdly, lack of adequate sleep. In the rest of the talk, I will discuss some things that parents of teenagers and teenagers themselves can do to address each of these three areas of concern.

Let's start with the pressure to succeed. Now it's totally understandable that parents want their children and teenagers to succeed in life, that of course is very, very understandable, but I think a line is crossed when parents start putting undue pressure on their teenagers to succeed. How many of you, as parents, are guilty of making social comparisons to motivate your children to achieve success, such as saying things like why can't you be good at math like Frogs, why can't you start reading big books? Like Maya? How many of you, as parents, are guilty of trying to compensate for your own failures by pressuring your children to achieve the success that eluded them?

I once heard a mother tell her teenage daughter that she better join the school orchestra because I never did. Some parents are actually guilty of physically harming their teenagers. The irony of these pressure tactics is that they not only lower your children's self-esteem, perhaps for life, but they also reduce your teens' chances of achieving success. Don't get me wrong. I am not suggesting that we pamper our children, that is not good either, but what I am suggesting is that instead of using pressure and punishment to motivate our children, we use love and compassion to do so.

Motivating children through love and compassion could require a variety of ways, including actually participating in the activities we want them to succeed in, so if you want your teen to be a great pianist, then take those lessons. of piano yourself too, or if you want your child to excel well in history. then consider watching history documentaries with your children. You definitely shouldn't enroll your kids in a class like the Kumon format if they are kicking and screaming about it. You should at least consult them and motivate them to do it first. Before enrolling them in those classes, another thing parents can do is recognize that today's world is very different from the world in which they themselves were teenagers.

Today's teens are under a lot more pressure because the Internet is so easy for teens to engage with. In social comparisons, with a single click, a teenager in India, for example, can compare her life with that of a teenager in the United States. This easy access to social comparisons highlights the discrepancy between a teenager's ideal life, which might be having my own room or having my own laptop or backpacking in Europe, and their real life. Highlighting this discrepancy between real and ideal life is one of the main reasons why there is a rise in teenage discontent around the world and this discrepancy is further magnified by social media.

It's easy for teenagers. today to see what their friends have on Snapchat, WhatsApp, Instagram or Facebook and what they themselves lack. The findings also show that today's teenagers are subject to much more intense bullying than teenagers of the past. This is also because social media is under the cloak of anonymity. that online media provides cause teens to engage in brutal cyberbullying, so it's not a big surprise since this study showed that the more time a teen spends on social media, particularly on phones, and the less time they spend on physical activities, the more prone they are to depression. and the more likely they are to think about taking their own life, as parents we probably can't do much to change the state of the world, but we can do a lot to mitigate the negativity that comes with exposure to the internet and social media. about our teenagers: first, by keeping our lines of communication open with our teenagers so that they feel that we understand them as much as their peers and friends do, and also by establishing certain rules that are not intended only for our teenagers to follow, but also We must follow it correctly, so one of the big rules that I think is very important is to minimize time on social media and digital devices, and one of the best ways that I have discovered to do this is to shift the time that our teenagers can happen on social media, so here's an idea to set aside certain times of the week, say Saturday mornings to go on a hike or Sunday afternoons to cook together as a family and the more you get acceptance and support from your teens A great idea is to ask them to suggest ideas for spending time together as a family.

The best thing will be that the last thing parents can do is practice good sleep habits. You may know that teenagers need to sleep more than parents or even pre-teen children sometimes up to 10 hours a night, this is due to the intense hormonal changes that occur in a teenager's body, so the best thing you can do here So that they can get enough sleep is really sleeping implement certain healthy sleep habits that all family members, including parents, follow, so I will give you three tips to get a good night's sleep. The first is to make sure you go to sleep and wake up at the same time. every day, this is the best thing you can do to get a good night's sleep, it doesn't matter if it's the weekend or midweek, you should do this, because our bodies are habit-forming machines and the more regular your sleeping hours are. sleep, more Sleep better The second thing is to keep light-emitting devices out of the bedroom If you have an affair with your cell phone, laptop or iPad and take them to bed every night, now is the time to stop it, this will be Because the light that these devices emit actually reduces the levels of a very important sleep hormone called melatonin, so you can't fall asleep well and you can't sleep deeply if melatonin levels are lower, it's because that you don't want to carry light-emitting devices in your bedroom and the third is to prepare for the next day the night before so that when the morning comes you have a little more time to sleep, like preparing lunches together, for example, even for everyone family members, including adolescents.

Now if you're a teenager listening to all this, I'm sure you agree that you could use more support from your parents and adults in general, that will definitely improve your self-esteem, but guess what you can do more about? yourself than other people, even if your parents are not doing all the things I mentioned and will never recover for some reason, you should not lose faith, you are actually much more powerful than you might think. more control over your own happiness than anyone else, what are some things you could do to improve your own happiness levels? First, try not to internalize the pressure that other people, including your parents or others, are putting on you.

It is recognizing that the greatest determinant of your success is great, hard work, just because it is a determinant of success; In other words, the harder you work at something, the greater your chances of success, the less you work hard at something, the lower your chances of success. As simple as that, in other words, the pressure to perform doesn't really improve your chances of success; in fact, if anything, it undermines them, and on top of that, it also undermines your self-esteem. Now you may have realized that sometimes you try. Motivating yourself by putting pressure on yourself sometimes makes you work harder.

However, a much better way to motivate yourself is to find something you are passionate about, find something you like to do and then dedicate some time on a sustained basis to Ideally, dedicate yourself to that activity every day if you can do this on a sustained basis, everything everything else will fall into place second, minimize the amount of time you spend in front of screens. I can't emphasize this enough. In fact, I like to call what we call smartphones. dumb phones because their mere presence in the environment, even if someone else is using them, affects your cognitive ability and also makes you feel worse, as we saw before.

Now you could argue that everyone you know is on social media and therefore you can't really afford to be off of it, so limit the amount of time you spend on it. Nowadays we have apps like moment and screen time that can monitor the amount of time we spend on apps and on various social media platforms. Try to spend no more than two hours a day on all your media. The third thing you should do is lead a healthy lifestyle. You should never compromise a healthy lifestyle for anything. Party pressure. Group pressure. Parental pressure. Nothing should count. form of a healthy lifestyle a healthy lifestyle really consists of three things eat well do not eat junk food or eat it very rarely move more exercise every day and sleep better of these three things I would say that sleeping better is the most important Sleep at least eight hours each day Each night, one study showed that students who had slept eight hours or more the night before scored significantly higher on a battery of tests, including a coefficient test.intellectual, than students who slept less than eight hours.

What can you do to ensure you get at least? eight hours of sleep every night as a teenager, in addition to the three things I mentioned above, i.e. making sure you go to sleep at the same time, wake up at the same time, don't bring light-emitting devices into your room, and get ready For the next day, the night before, here are three additional tips: First, lower the temperature of the spare room to about 68 degrees Fahrenheit or about eighteen point five degrees Celsius, that's the temperature we sleep best at. Second, exercise every day for at least thirty minutes, hopefully. at your school you have a period dedicated to sports don't spend that time just reading a book or chatting with a friend, even certainly not on your devices, digital devices use that time to go to the gym, choose a sport that you like even if you're not good at it, just do it, do some physical activity, it's guaranteed to improve the quality of your sleep and lastly, keep what I call a gratitude journal, and one of the easiest ways to do this is to write down every a single day in your diary right before you go to sleep three good things that happen to you that day clearly now I'm not a teenager although if you ask some people they might say I act like one sometimes, that's fine but just to show you that In fact, I do what I preach.

I have someone with my journal here and you can see in my journal that every day I do it. I keep a list of three good things. With that I end each day. I've been doing it for five. years because this is one of the most powerful practices for getting a good night's sleep, not just for feeling

happy

in general. Okay, if you write a new diary every day, then there will be no big good things. like today I got my job or today I got a raise in my salary or today I found my life partner, I hope that doesn't happen every day, right, there will be little good things, like I found a parking place near my office, so I didn't have to walk much well and the second one happened to me a couple of days ago: I took my journal to my class and I forgot it there, but luckily it was there the next day, so I went and I learned, sometimes you get lucky and great good things happen, like yesterday when I wrote.

I'm giving a TED talk about teenage happiness. I am very grateful to be in a position to help teenagers around the world, so this is a very very powerful practice and I highly recommend it because it is difficult to deal with teenagers there is no doubt that it is a time of great hormonal changes problems arise between boys and girls there are a lot of social comparisons who is the coolest boy in town who is the nerdiest boy in town, it is also a time of great uncertainty, depending on how well you do in school, you could get into the college of your dreams or fall by the wayside with the rest of your life seemingly in danger.

It is also a time and many of Teenagers feel that they should be given the same freedom and autonomy that adults enjoy, but they simply lack access to the resources to be able to do what they want well and, therefore, a lot of things happen in the life of a teenager, but That's always been the case, let's not get it right, but what's new is that the advent of the internet and social media has made things worse for our current group of teenagers, so maybe it's too much to aim for We expect teenagers to be as happy as 9 or 10 years old, but we can definitely expect teenagers to be less depressed and less prone to suicidal thoughts than today.

If you liked what you heard here, please share this link with others around the world who you think might find it useful and who you know Next time researchers look at the relationship between self-esteem and ages in the US together we could make teenagers a much happier group than they currently are, thank you