Raising Happy Teenagers | Raj Raghunathan | TEDxUTAustin

[Music] as some of you might know I have an online course on happiness I teach the same course to Macomb students both MBAs and undergrads wonderful students I also teach the same class to fabulous students from the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad India I even have a book on happiness so I get lots of emails every week dozens of them from people from all around the world some of them write to me to thank me for my course or for my book others write to me asking me for extra happiness tips which I tell them I'm very happy to provide for extra happiness money I'm just kidding my tips are always for free the topic on which I get the most number of emails by far though is the happiness or maybe I should say the unhappiness of teenagers sometimes these teenagers write to me directly like this one here who feels suicidal on an almost daily basis other times I get emails from parents of teenagers were desperate and at their wit's end not knowing how to deal with the huge mood swings of their teenage sons and daughters the teenagers are of course world famous for being difficult to deal with and there is some evidence supporting it from science that these are difficult years there was a study conducted with over three hundred thousand respondents from all around the world this is a graph from the study the graph plots self-esteem on the y-axis and age of the respondents on the x-axis I'll get to the teenage bit on this graph in a little bit but I want to point out to two other things that catch many people's attention one is that it turns out that the happiest days in our life are all where depending on how old you are as nine and ten-year-olds after that it's a rollercoaster ride pretty much going downhill another thing that stands out from this graph is that men reports significantly higher levels of self-esteem then do women this is perhaps not that surprising given that even in this day and age men enjoy greater freedom and access to resources than do women also as one of my own study showed co-authored with two other people showed that men report feeling better on the outside than they actually feel on the inside whereas women are more honest about how they truly feel but the thing that I want to focus on in this talk is this that it turns out that our unhappiest our worst years often are as teenagers that is not only at the teen years our most awkward in terms of how we look and behave they're also our worst in terms of how we feel on the inside now this is perhaps always been the case so for example if you're in your 30s 40s 50s and above raise your hand if you're in this age group in the audience probably felt pretty miserable as teenagers if you guys can remember that far back but the unhappiness of teenagers seems to be to be especially pronounced now since 2005 teenager depression has increased by over 40% over a third of teens today feel that they're already high stress levels are going to be even higher in the coming year perhaps the saddest finding of all is that more than three thousand teenagers in the US alone in grades 9 through 12 think about taking their own life every single day this is a huge societal and global problem actually but it's also a personal problem in a sense 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 well the first step is to try and understand what are the top reasons for teenager depression and anxiety here are three top reasons first unrealistically high pressure to perform in school and in life in general second too much time spent on screens especially on social media and third lack of adequate sleep in the rest of the talk I'm going to discuss a few things that parents of teenagers and teenagers themselves can do in order to address each of these three areas of concern let's start with the pressure to perform now it's totally understandable that parents want their children the teenagers to succeed in life that's of course 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 engaging in social comparisons in order to motivate your children to achieve success like for example saying things like why can't you be good at math like Ranas why can't you start reading big books like Maya does how many of you as parents are guilty of trying to compensate for your own failures by pushing your children to achieve the success that eluded you I once heard a mom tell her teenage daughter you better get into that school orchestra because I never did how many a few parents are actually guilty of physically hurting your teenage children the irony about these pressure tactics is that not only do they actually lower your children's self-esteem perhaps for life they also lower your teenagers chances of achieving success now don't get me wrong I'm not suggesting that we pamper in mollycoddle our children that's not good either rather what I'm suggesting is that rather than use pressure and punishment to motivate our children we use love and compassion to do it motivating children through love and compassion might take a variety of forms including actually participating in the activities in which we want them to succeed so if you want your teenage child to be a great piano player then take those piano lessons yourself too right or if you want your child to be good excel in history then consider watching history documentaries with your children you should definitely not enroll your children in a class like Kumon format if they are kicking and screaming about it right you should at least at the very least consult them and get them to be motivated to do it first before you enroll them in those classes another thing that parents can do is recognize that the current world is very different from the world in which they themselves were teenagers current teenagers are in the far more pressure because of the internet it's very easy for teenagers to engage in social comparisons at the click of a mouse a teenager in India for example can compare his life with that of a teenager in America this easy access to social comparisons highlights the discrepancy between a teenager's ideal life which might be to own my own room or have my own laptop or go backpacking in Europe and his actual life the highlighting of this discrepancy between actual and ideal life is a big reason why there is a rise in teenager 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 or whatsapp or Instagram or Facebook and what they themselves lack findings also show that teenagers today are subject to far more intense bullying than were teenagers in the past this too is because of social media the cloak of anonymity that online mediums provide make teenagers engage in brutal cyberbullying so it's not a big surprise as this study showed that the more time a teenager spends on social media on phones in particular and the less time they spend on physical activities the more prone to depression they are and the more they are likely to think about taking their own life so as parents we probably can't do much to change the status of the world right but we can do a lot to mitigate the negativity that exposure to the Internet and social media has on our teenage children how first by keeping our lines of communication open with our teenagers so that they feel that we to understand them just as much as their peers and friends do and also by putting in place certain rules rules that are not meant only for our teenagers to follow but also for us to follow right so one of the big rules I think which is very important is to minimize time on social media and digital devices and one of the best ways to do this that I have discovered is to crowd out the time that our teenagers can spend on social media so here's an idea to carve out certain times of the week let's say Saturday mornings for going hiking right or Sunday afternoons for cooking together as a family and the more you get your teenagers buy-in and a great idea is to actually ask them to suggest ideas for spending time together as a family the better off it's going to be a final thing that parents can do is to practice good sleeping habits you might know this that teenagers need more sleep than do parents or even preteen kids sometimes as much as 10 hours a night this is because of the intense hormonal changes that are going on in a teenager's body right and so the best thing to do here for them to be able to get that adequate sleep is to actually put in place certain healthy sleeping habits that everybody in the family including the parents follow so I'm going to give you three tips for getting a great night's sleep in the first is to make sure that you go to sleep and wake up at the same time every day this is the single best thing you can do to get a good night's sleep doesn't matter if it's the weekend or the weekday you should do this why because our bodies are habit-forming machines and the more regular your sleep hours are the better sleep you'll get second is to keep light emitting devices outside the bedroom if you're having an affair with your cell phone or laptops or iPads and taking them to bed with you every night now is it time to stop this is because the light that these devices emit actually lower the levels of a very important hormone sleep hormone called melatonin so you're not able to fall asleep well and you're not able to sleep deeply if melatonin levels are lower this is why you don't want to take light emitting devices in your bedroom and the third is to prepare for the next day the previous evening itself so that come morning you have a little more shut-eye time like preparing lunches together for example including for everybody in the family including the teenagers now if you're a teenager listening to all this I'm sure that you agree that you could do with more support from your parents and from adults in general that's definitely going to enhance your self-esteem but guess what you can do more for yourself than can other people for you right even if your parents aren't doing all the things that I mentioned and they'll never never well for whatever reason you shouldn't lose faith you are actually much more powerful than you might think you have more control over your own happiness than does anybody else okay so what are some things that you could do to enhance your own happiness levels first try not to internalize the pressure that other people including your parents or others are putting on you one way to do this is to recognize that the single biggest determinant of your success is great and hard work single because determinant of the success in other words the harder you work at something the higher the chances of your success unless hard you work with something the lower the chances of success as simple as that in other words the pressure to perform doesn't really enhance your chances of success in fact if anything it actually undermines it okay and on top of that it also undermines your self-esteem now you might have noticed that sometimes you try to motivate yourself by putting pressure on yourself it makes you sometimes work harder a much better way to motivate yourself though is to find something that you're passionate about find something that you love to do and then carve out some time on a sustained basis to devote to that activity ideally every single day if you can do this on a sustained basis everything else will fall into place second minimize the amount of time you spend on screens I can't emphasize this enough I actually like to call what we call smart phones dumb phones because their mere presence in the environment even if somebody else is using it impairs your cognitive ability and the top of that it also makes you feel worse as we saw earlier now you might argue that everybody that you know is on social media and so you can't really afford to be off it so do this 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 you should aim to spend no more than two hours every day on across all your mediums the third thing that you should do is to lead a healthy lifestyle you should never ever compromise a healthy lifestyle for anything partying pressure peer pressure parental pressure nothing should count come in the way of a healthy lifestyle healthy lifestyle really constitutes three things eating right not eating junk food or eating it very rarely moving more exercising every single day and sleeping better of these three things I would say sleeping better is the most important sleeping at least eight hours every every night one study showed that students who had slept eight hours or more the previous evening scored significantly higher across a battery of tests including an IQ test than did students who slept less than eight hours what can you do to make sure that you get at least eight hours of sleep every night as a teenager well in addition to the three things that I mentioned earlier namely making sure you go to sleep at the same time wake up at the same time not take light emitting emitting devices into your bedroom and preparing for the next day the previous evening itself here are three additional tips first lower the temperature free room to be about 68 degrees Fahrenheit or about eighteen point five degrees centigrade that's the temperature at which we get our best sleep second exercise every day for at least thirty minutes hopefully in your school you have a period dedicated to sports don't spend that time alone by yourself reading a book or chatting with a friend even certainly not on your devices digital devices use that time to go to the gym pick a sport that you like even if you're not good at it just do it engage in some physical activity it is guaranteed to improve the quality of your sleep and last maintain what I call a gratitude journal okay and one of the easiest ways to do it is to actually write every single day in your journal just before you go to sleep three good things that happen to you that day all right now I'm clearly not a teenager although if you ask some people they might say that I behave like one sometimes okay but just to show you that I actually walk the talk I have somebody with my journal here and you can see in my journal that every single day I actually do it I maintain a list of three good things that's what I end with every single 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 that for feeling happy overall okay now if you're writing new journal every single day then there won't be big good things there won't be things like today I got my job or today I got a raise in my salary or today I found my life-partner hopefully that doesn't happen every day right there's gonna be small good things things like I found a parking spot close to my office so I didn't have to walk a whole lot right and the second one actually happened to me couple of days back that I took my journal to my class and I forgot it there but thankfully it was there the next day so I got I went and picked it up sometimes you do get lucky and there are big good things that happen like yesterday I wrote I'm giving a TED talk on teenager happiness I'm so grateful to be in a position to help out teenagers around the world right so this is a very very powerful practice and I highly recommend it so the teenagers are difficult to deal with there's no doubt about it it's a time of great hormonal changes boy-girl problems arise there's a lot of social comparisons who's the coolest kid in town who's the nerdiest kid in town it's also a time of great uncertainty depending on how well you do in school you might get into the College of your dreams or fall by the wayside with the rest of your life seemingly in jeopardy it's also a time and a lot of teenagers feel that they ought to be given the same freedom and autonomy that adults enjoy but they simply lack the access to resources to be able to do what they want to do right and so this is a lot going on you know in a teenager's life but that's always been the case let's not do right but what's new is that the advent of the internet and social media has made it far more far worse for our current batch of teenagers so maybe it's too much to aspire for teenagers to be as happy as 9 or 10 year olds but we can definitely hope that teenagers are less depressed and less prone to suicidal thoughts than they currently are if you liked what you heard here please share this link with others around the world that you think might find it useful - and who knows next time researchers look at the relationship between self-esteem and ages across the u.s. we might have together turn teenagers into a much happier group than they currently are thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 42,410

Rating: 4.9067883 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Life, Childhood, Children, Education, Happiness, Parenting, Teaching

Id: 35n_H7ObY-s

Length: 17min 58sec (1078 seconds)

Published: Thu May 23 2019