Greetings, everyone, from Boulder, Colorado. I’m at the annual conference for the National Association of Science Writers, where, funnily enough, I just served on a panel about newsletter writing. On the panel with me was the head of newsletters at the Wall Street Journal as well as the newsletter editors for Science magazine and Nature magazine. It was very cool to be in such esteemed company.
My entire family has been here for the conference — my husband is a science journalist, too, so we came and brought our kiddos, which we’ve never done before. It’s super fun but also a bit weird to be so overtly mixing work + family life. Like, oh, hey, there’s my 9-year-old in a stained T-shirt, standing in line for the bathroom behind Slate’s features editor. Okay.
Today in my newsletter I’m thrilled to be running a Q&A with psychologist Robyn Silverman. You’ve probably seen Robyn’s name here before — she’s been a source for several newsletters — and today is publication day for her amazing new book, How to Talk to Kids about Anything. It’s a deeply-researched and fantastic resource for parents who want to know how to talk to their kids about, yes, literally anything.
Her book is one of the books I’m giving away this month, along with Mom Rage by Minna Dubin (I’ll be interviewing Minna here next week). If you’re a paid subscriber, enter my October giveaway to win:
For today’s Q&A, I talked with Robyn about why it’s so important to talk to kids about uncomfortable topics and how to approach those conversations. Then I asked her to weigh on two specific topics: Talking to kids about taking responsibility, and talking to kids about pornography. But I recommend you read the entire book — it’s so helpful.
Robyn, why is it so important for us to discuss difficult topics — sex, racism, death, war, etc — with our kids?
It's important to talk to kids about difficult topics for a variety of reasons. One is that if you don't talk to your kid, it doesn't mean that they're not curious and that they will not seek out the answer. They just might not seek it out from you. They might seek it out from another source and it may not be a source that you think is particularly trustworthy. They might get it off the internet. They may turn to an influencer or Tiktok. They may turn to the boy at the back of the bus, some buddy’s older sibling. And they may be getting incorrect information or information that's counter to your personal values. They're going to find it out anyway, so you want to make sure it's from a trusted source — and the most trusted source is yourself.
We also want to talk to kids about tough topics because the research actually says that they want to hear it from their parents. With sex or suicide or porn, kids are saying they wish their parents had talked to them about it, or they want to be able to talk to their parents about it.
Also, when you talk about the small things, they come to you to talk about the bigger things. You definitely want them calling you in the middle of the night to say, “I'm at my friend's house. They've been drinking, I've been drinking. I need somebody to pick me up.” You want them to come to you and say “I'm feeling really depressed. Something's wrong with me. I don't feel like anybody cares. I'm lonely.” One thing that parents say is, “I just wish that I had the conversation with my kids.” But then it’s sometimes too late.
You’re highlighting something that's really important — that maybe parents don't intuitively always recognize — which is that showing your kids that you're willing to talk about difficult topics opens doors. They will then come to you when they are struggling. And if you hadn't shown that you were okay having these conversations about these really gnarly topics, then they might be too afraid to. So it sort of opens this two way street.
Yes. It’s so important.
What are your key tips for approaching tough conversations, regardless of topic?
One is to make sure you're not stuck in what I call a soliloquy, where you're just talking and lecturing on your own. That is not well received. A conversation happens between two or more people, not one person.
Another one is to make sure you're listening. You're listening to the words the person is saying, but not because you want to respond with your own agenda. If you find your mind is starting to go to your agenda — “You can't do this!” — that voice inside your head needs to quiet down so you can hear what your child is saying. And if you're driven by your agenda, you're not hearing the tone, the mood, what's underneath those words.
You need to listen to your own intuition as well. So you might say, “You're telling me that some of your friends are thinking about drinking at this party. And I really appreciate you telling me about this. And I just have this intuition — and you're not going to get in trouble for this — that you are actually considering it, too.” You take the risk so that you can open up the conversation.
So you're listening on three levels — the words that they're saying, the tone and the energy and the mood behind the words, and then you're also listening to your intuition. You have to at some point take the risk and say, “Hey, if you're thinking about this, there's some other things that we need to talk about.” Maybe they're telling you their friend saw porn, but what they're really saying is that they saw it. Or they say they saw somebody getting high — there's a reason why they're telling you and testing things out. So you’ve got to listen on these three different levels.
Is it ever not a good idea to talk to kids about something? I’m thinking of a conversation I had with psychologist Lisa Damour a while back. I asked her: When you have a kid who's upset about something and then they seem fine an hour or two later, like should you bring the issue back up? Should you keep sort of probing to make sure they're okay? And she said that sometimes tweens and teens can get over things more quickly than we expect, and it can be better to not bring the topic up again.
You know your child best. And distraction and avoidance are not always a bad thing. Sometimes you just need to, in order to move forward a little bit, put yourself in a different situation and then you're going to feel better. That might be a coping strategy. So yeah, you don't want to be bringing it back up at that point. But I think it's also okay to say something like, “I love that we were able to talk earlier.” You're not bringing it up; your child can either take it or leave it.
I love that. That's a great idea. Okay, one question I've gotten a few times is related to helping your kids take accountability and responsibility. Parents have said things to me like, “My kid refuses to accept blame and is constantly blaming his sibling for something that was clearly not the sibling’s fault.” Like maybe a kid spills the milk and then blames their sibling for causing the spill by standing too close to them or surprising them or something. What are some suggestions for engaging with a kid who is actively refusing to take responsibility?
When you and they are hyped up in a particular moment, you're probably not going to get through to your child. That's not the time. Yet a lot of the time, parents don't talk about that stuff out of the moment.
It’s better to wait and then say to your child, “What happened earlier? The milk was spilled, and I know you did not mean to do that. I was just wondering if we could revisit that for just a moment. What I'm realizing is sometimes when the milk has been spilled, you seem really worried you're about to get in trouble.”
And they're like, “Yeah, well, who the heck wants to get in trouble.” Now they're part of the conversation.
Then you say, “When that happens, sometimes you'll say things like, ‘Well, my sister shouldn't have been standing there.’ And if you think about it — you didn't mean to spill the milk, but your sister also didn't know it was about to be spilled. So it wasn't her fault. I want you to be thinking about these things, because when you said it's her fault, she she got really upset too.”
You want to bring the empathy piece and keep your voice even keeled. Nobody's in trouble. You could say, “Think about if you were in the situation but everything was flipped, and your sister ran into the room and she was all excited, she was flapping her arms and dancing around and then she got milk over you and then she said it's your fault….” Now you've kind of taken them through the ride.
So you can say, “The next time we're in that situation where something happens — it's not your fault that it happened. But it's also not the other person’s fault. Maybe we can have a code word. Maybe we can have a code signal. Maybe we can just say, ‘Remember that conversation we had?’ And we just stop for a minute. Nobody's in trouble. And we just stop and we clean up the milk together.”
That's so helpful. I have to sing the praises of my husband for a minute, because we had like a situation almost identical to that last night, where my dog ate my son's pizza. And in the moment he blamed his sister for it because she was closer to the dog. He was like, “Why didn't you pull the dog away? Why did you just let the dog eat my pizza?” And and in the moment, he was upset — but like an hour later, I heard my husband say, “That must have been really hard when when Ozzy ate your pizza. That must have been so frustrating.” And my son was like, “Yeah, I was so frustrated.” And my husband went on to say, "Let's think about whether it was really your sister's fault.” He went through it like that, and it was just beautiful.
Beautifully done. And I love the empathy piece. Because clearly your child was upset in that situation. They wished it didn't happen.
Yes — tapping into that empathy at the beginning makes such a difference. Okay, one more question for you. I just loved the part of your book when you shared how you talked about pornography with your kids at the dinner table. Can you share what you said and how it went down?
I kind of equate it to ripping off the band aid, because there's really no cavalier way of getting into this topic. And you don't really want to wait until you walk in and see your child watching it. You want to front load it with what I call pre-talks.
So I had been doing my research and I read a couple of studies and one of them had said that the majority of kids by age 11 have seen porn. So I just walked over to the table — the chicken parm and all that was on the table — and my children were sitting there serving themselves. I plopped down into my seat and I just said it outright: “I read a study that said that the majority of kids see porn by age 11. Have you?”
Now there are my children. One, I think, at the time was aged 11 and the other one was 12. So both were right there in the mix. And it was jarring — but at the same time, they didn’t have time to think, so they just answered. One said, “Yes, I was Googling something and something popped up and I exited out of it right away. But I didn't tell you because I was afraid I get in trouble.” And I said, “You will never get in trouble for that kind of mistake. And if you come to me or Dad and tell us what happened, we will help you in any way that we can.”
Then my daughter said it happened to her too. She was with one of her friends. She said they Googled something, maybe they spelled something wrong and something popped up and they slammed the computer screen down and didn't touch it again that day. They were so alarmed.
And she said something like, “I really wish I didn’t have to talk about this,” or something like that. She was, like, dying inside. And I said, “Listen, here's the thing. I want to know if this ever happens to you because it's really super important. I've done a lot of research on this. I've interviewed experts on this. And what they keep saying is that kids who see porn, their brains get affected by it and their relationships get affected by it. And so, to me, it's not the fact that you by mistake came upon it — I just want to talk to you about it and want you to know you can talk to me about it. Because we don't want you seeing it. We don't want you seeing it because it's really bad for your body and your brain and bad for your relationships. And I'm really glad you're telling me about this now and no, you're not in trouble and you will never get in trouble for telling us things even if we really wished they hadn’t happened.”
By front loading it, your child is in such a better position. If they're in that situation again, if a friend decides they want to put it on, they have knowledge. And they also have their parents’ voice inside their head. So with that, they can make a better choice.
I also really liked that when when you first brought it up — as you said in the book — you defined what porn was, which I think is something parents struggle with. You said, “Sometimes kids your age come across websites, videos and images that show naked bodies.” That's just so simple. You don't have to get into sex — just talk about naked bodies and that's enough. And I loved how many times you emphasized that they weren’t in trouble. I know kids really need to hear that over and over.
Yeah, you've got to hammer that home. My daughter actually said to me the other day in the car — she's in high school now — “If I was ever at a party, and people were drinking, and I needed to call you in the middle of the night, would you be so mad?”
I said, “Absolutely not. No, I would not be mad.” And she said, “What would you think when I got in the car? Would you say something to me?”
I said to her that that would definitely not be the time that I would talk about it. I said, “If you had been drinking, I would take care of you and I'd be so happy you called me and not gotten into a car with somebody and left.” I said, "You know how I feel about it. And so we would probably talk about it a different time. But no — would you be in trouble for it? Absolutely not. 100%. I want you to call me.” Is the getting in trouble piece more important than your child being safe, and you being the trusted source?
That conversation says so much about your relationship with your daughter and why you are the perfect person to have written a book called How to Talk to Kids about Anything. You know that?
I do. And I'm not saying she tells me literally everything. I'm sure she doesn’t. There's boundaries. But she is telling me things, and her friends have said to her, “I wish your mom was my mom.” What they're really saying is, “I just wish my parents were more open like that.”
Speaking of talking to kids about difficult topics: Here’s a brief interview I did a while back on the Spawned podcast with Liz and Kristen from CoolMomPicks on how to talk to kids about war and scary events in the news.
Thanks for this great interview - I ordered Robyn Silverman's book!