Shows
Parenting teenagers untangled. 🏆 Your Weekly HugWhy teen friendships feel so intense, and the most important thing to sayAsk Rachel anything'Early adolescence is a friendship meat grinder, and your kid will eventually find their people,' according to Megan Saxelby of Wild Feelings. But oh boy it's tough! Megan wants parents to know that using words like “dramatic” to describe genuine social pain can accidentally give us permission to dismiss their emotional reality and teach our kids that their experiences doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously.In today’s episode we explore why it hurts so much to watch our child struggle socially, and why our instincts to either dismiss o...
2026-02-0455 min
Parenting teenagers untangled. 🏆 Your Weekly HugChristmas and other family gatherings with teens. Magic or misery? VintageAsk Rachel anythingWe all have traditional times when our extended families come together to celebrate, give thanks, and share the warmth of mutual love. In the UK, December is a non-stop reel of songs about 'Simply having a wonderful Christmas time', and Instagram is awash with pictures of happy celebrations. Being with our family can give us a welcome chance to relax and be accepted for who we are but - let's be honest - it can also bring out the worst in us. The break in routine - where everyone is forced together...
2025-12-0223 min
Parenting teenagers untangled. 🏆 Your Weekly HugMental health problems in teenagers. We can't just blame phones.Ask Rachel anythingWhy is it that so many teenagers today seem to be struggling with mental health?In this conversation, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Matt Richtel reveals the surprising science behind adolescent development, explaining why teens aren't 'difficult' they're doing an important job and how there's a fundamental mismatch between biological adolescent development and the world in which we now life. One of the key problems nowadays is that kids are going into puberty earlier, while the information age is bombarding them with vast amounts of new data and ways of comparing themselves b...
2025-10-2948 min
Parenting teenagers untangled. 🏆 Your Weekly HugMotivation: How to motivate a young person, teen or tween: Vintage.Ask Rachel anythingWe'd all love our children to breeze through school, enjoying a satisfying academic life, having lots of friends, and coming out at the end feeling a success. But what if you have a child that doesn't thrive in an academic environment? What if they can't or won't do the work? How do you deal with it and what techniques can you use to motivate them?According to eminent psychologist, Dr David Yeager, when kids hit puberty they're primarily looking for experiences that give them social status and respect.He says...
2025-07-0945 min
Parenting teenagers untangled. 🏆 Your Weekly HugRespect, artifical intelligence and toxic femininity - the teenage view.Ask Rachel anythingWhen I asked listeners for their questions one stood out as a worthy of almost an entire episode: 'What does it take to respect people around you, especially your parents?'There's so much that could be said on this topic that it think I might give it a deeper dive at some point, but the insight from my teens was very interesting nonetheless.Artificial Intelligence is everywhere in the news, but what I don't see is a coherent approach across education. Again, it's an area that the s...
2025-04-3041 min
Parenting teenagers untangled. 🏆 Your Weekly HugSuicide: How to talk about it with teens, and offer proper support.Ask Rachel anythingIn a recent column in The Times, Caitlin Moran wrote about how five young men in her social circle have taken their lives in the past 18 months. She's not alone. My daughter has experienced this, as has Benedicte's son, the listener who contacted me to suggest I cover it in an episode. In the UK, the leading cause of death for men under the age of 50 is suicide, and the statistics in the US are even worse. Boys are particularly vulnerable, and we know that there's the risk of social...
2024-12-1844 min
Parenting teenagers untangled. 🏆 Your Weekly HugDriving lessons - Top tips for a smooth road ahead.Ask Rachel anythingWhether your teen is currently learning to drive, or those days are in the future, it helps to prepare ahead. Both Rachel and Susie have teens learning, so it's a great time for Rachel to go through all of the tips and data to help us all think ahead about what is involved and how to make their life behind the wheel as safe and smooth as possible.The free RISK ANTICIPATION driving course:https://www.teendrive365inschool.com/safe-driving-resources/teensNEW DRIVER AGREEMENT...
2024-08-2138 min
Parenting teenagers untangled. 🏆 Your Weekly HugRachel's top ten lessons to celebrate 100 episodes!Ask Rachel anythingIt doesn't matter how much we know, and how much we work at it, we'll all struggle to parent well at times; it's just part of being human.To mark the 100th episode of the podcast I decided to give you a top ten of the best lessons I've learned, and continue to mess up.In case you can't be bothered to listen, you're bored by me waffling, or you just want the list, here goes:Connection over correction.It's not personal, and it's not about you.Kick the...
2024-08-1426 min
Parenting teenagers untangled. 🏆 Your Weekly HugExams, depression, work, national service, Sigma and Bigorexia,Ask Rachel anythingI scan the newspapers daily to keep an eye on what's going on that might be relevant to us parents. I usually share it on my Instagram and Facebook feeds, but it's also good to sit down with another, equally interested but unpolitical, parent, to simply chat about the state of the world that our kids are growing up in. None of it is scientific, or based on deep fact, but sometimes it's nice to chew the cud and hear other parents talking freely about the issues that might affect our own p...
2024-05-2935 min
Parenting teenagers untangled. 🏆 Your Weekly HugFailure to launch: What we can learn from struggling young adults.Ask Rachel anythingWe all love our kids and hope for the best, but we also worry about how well they'll navigate life once they're old enough to leave home. It's a fine balance between supporting them enough for them to feel loved, and letting them fail so that they learn the skills they need.With the reported increase in kids who 'fail to launch' I thought it might be really helpful to talk with someone who spends his days helping young adults who're struggling.We talked about the vital importance of routine, h...
2024-05-2231 min
Parenting teenagers untangled. 🏆 Your Weekly HugMissing out: The pain of FOMO. Why it’s particularly bad for teens.Ask Rachel anythingMissing out can cause visceral pain; particularly for teenagers, but why is it so awful and can anything be done to help them with it? This episode was inspired by a parent whose daughter is at an expensive private school, but the family are finally having to accept that they can't afford it and will have to withdraw her. We love our, kids and want the best for them, but why choose something that's a massive stretch for us? What is 'the best' and where do we get our ideas from?
2024-05-1535 min
Parenting teenagers untangled. 🏆 Your Weekly HugNagging: Reducing the friction using the magic of routine.Ask Rachel anythingIs it a constant battle to get your teens to do the right thing? Getting them to bed on time, eating healthily, keeping their screen time to an acceptable level are all problems that come up regularly. So when a listener asked for a script to use to get her teens into bed I decided that it was worth delving into what other parents are doing right and how we can adapt their behaviour to our own households. The research has made me rethink my own life structure and the importance of...
2024-05-0833 min
Parenting teenagers untangled. 🏆 Your Weekly HugSchool: Angry kids, bad behaviour, and school avoidance.Ask Rachel anythingNearly one in five teachers in England has been hit by a pupil this year, according to a BBC survey.But it's not just in England. Stricter school discipline is making a comeback to Australian classrooms in a bid to help teachers stamp out disruptive behaviour. France is bringing back school uniforms to tackle the issue, and in America, more than 70% of 1,000 educators said in a recent national survey that students are misbehaving more now than they did before the pandemic in 2019.Meanwhile, teachers are leaving...
2024-05-0150 min
Parenting teenagers untangled. 🏆 Your Weekly HugWhere’s my village? The stress of parenting in the ‘sandwich generation’.Ask Rachel anythingMy aunt and uncle provide a huge amount of free childcare so that their son and daughter-in-law can work, but many say that's not been their experience. The Boomers have become notorious as a generation who are known to have reaped the rewards of the post-war boom but who appear to be more interested in travelling and enjoying themselves than supporting the next generation in their child-rearing struggles. Having a living parent who's 65 or older whilst raising a child under 18 is Pew Research's definition of someone in the Sandwich Generation. Being a S...
2024-04-2434 min
Parenting teenagers untangled. 🏆 Your Weekly HugPerfectionism: Overcoming the need to be perfect.Ask Rachel anythingNobody likes making mistakes, but some of us find it much harder than others. Whilst most of us look on with admiration at the kid who's prepared to keep working until they do things perfectly, underlying that drive can be a painful belief that they're never going to be good enough. The knock-on effect can be a lifetime of anguish and all sorts of issues with starting and finishing projects.So when our listener asked us to talk about how to help her daughter who's showing signs of being a perfectionist, we...
2024-04-1734 min
Parenting teenagers untangled. 🏆 Your Weekly HugMoney: Giving teens and tweens an allowance. Two years on.Ask Rachel anythingWhat we give our kids to spend, and when, is a perennial problem for all parents. Money is a really tricky topic in any relationship; behind it lurks power, responsibility, and freedom. When our kids hit their tween and teen years their needs and desires begin to rise rapidly, so how we enable them to get those things will have a lot to do with how we feel about handing them money, and what we say to them about it. Early on, I decided that I would use money during th...
2024-04-1034 min
Parenting teenagers untangled. 🏆 Your Weekly HugFun: Having fun with our teens, and the bonding power of laughter.Ask Rachel anythingMany teenagers say their relationship with their parents is very stressful and they yearn to be able to get along better. They often feel that their parents are on their case all of the time and that they never talk about anything interesting or light-hearted. Conflict is an inescapable part of parenting, but it doesn't need to be the only part. As parents, we can make such a difference by setting a more light-hearted tone. It's one of the best ways to build the bond in our relationship, which then makes it ea...
2024-04-0339 min
Parenting teenagers untangled. 🏆 Your Weekly HugResilience: Growing Resilience In Teens, or GRIT.Ask Rachel anythingGrit is the ability to keep going toward a goal, even in spite of significant obstacles and distractions. It's a very apt name for the charity created by Dr Louise Randall, who was seeing many kids coming into her doctor's surgery needing help with difficult problems - such as self harm, eating disorders, and other mental health issues - and very little help available. In this interview we talk about how she uses boxing to teach resilience to help teens connect with their place in life and their own bodies, in a...
2024-03-2733 min
Parenting teenagers untangled. 🏆 Your Weekly HugConcentration, and the troubling effect of too many choices.Ask Rachel anythingDoes a goldfish have a longer attention span than us humans - as a Microsoft study found - or do we believe the latest study on concentration which says adults have actually increased in their ability to pay attention since the 1990's?The latest study made us wonder about what's really going on, because we all know that gamers have phenomenal powers of concentration, but the rest of us feel we're struggling with attention.Perhaps our real problem is a lack of focus caused by too many choices for what w...
2024-03-2032 min
Parenting teenagers untangled. 🏆 Your Weekly HugEldest daughter syndrome and the trouble with parentification.Ask Rachel anythingThe hashtag #eldestdaughtersyndrome is reported to have had a whopping 24.7 million views on TikTok, and counting, but what is it and why is it getting so much attention? We look at the issues faced by the eldest sibling in the family, then talk more specifically about why daughters can feel resentful of the role that's foisted on them. It's easily done by us parents, particularly if we live in a patriarchal society. The expectation that they will do more of the emotional and domestic heavy-lifting in the family than the ot...
2024-03-1334 min
Parenting teenagers untangled. 🏆 Your Weekly HugTaking things personally, coping with adversity, teen love and changing our minds when we get new information.Ask Rachel anythingSometimes it's good to talk about our own challenges. The occasional chat in which we discuss the sorts of things we've been facing can help to dispel any myths that other people have got things sorted, and can also give you ideas of how to reframe your own battles.In this episode we cover how important it is to keep reminding ourselves to not take things personally. We talk about a teen who has battled through numerous issues and come out looking like a swan. The key message is that we want...
2024-03-0637 min
Parenting teenagers untangled. 🏆 Your Weekly HugManners: Parenting to help teens succeed in life by teaching the importance of good manners.Ask Rachel anythingMany teens roll their eyes if they hear people talking about manners. The concept sounds old fashioned - like something that should be relegated to the Victorian past - but often what they're thinking about is etiquette rather than manners. I went into the differences, and nuances, of manners in part two of this previous episode: https://www.teenagersuntangled.com/parenting-tips-23-coping-with-an-empty-nest-and-manners-what-they-are-and-why-do-they-matter/For this episode I've been joined by Brooke Romney, the author of 52 Modern Manners for Teens, about the vital role manners have in setting up our teens f...
2024-02-2832 min
Parenting teenagers untangled. 🏆 Your Weekly HugAdmitting our mistakes - talking to our kids about our own teen years.Ask Rachel anythingWe've all got a past, but telling our kids about what happened in it is a tricky subject. Whether it's all about the fun - sex and drugs and rock and roll - or things that caused deep trauma, there's a good chance that our teens will start asking questions at any point. Sometimes they're genuinely curious they want to connect, and get to know what makes the human that's one of the most important people in their life. Other questions are just an attempt at getting a free pass to do t...
2024-02-2133 min
Parenting teenagers untangled. 🏆 Your Weekly HugStandards: Setting high expectations without the pressure.Ask Rachel anythingOne of the trickiest questions for parents is how to set expectations that help our kids thrive and grow without crushing them or making them feel low self-esteem or shame. If we don't set expectations we run the risk of making our kids feel like nothing they do really matters, so they can feel overlooked and apathetic about life, but we've all heard about parents who damage their kids through unreasonable demands. Our expectations are born out of our own ideas of what matters, so how do we know that we're not p...
2024-02-1440 min
Parenting teenagers untangled. 🏆 Your Weekly HugSocial media and girls posting bikini photos. Help!Ask Rachel anythingThey're everywhere. Tabloid news feeds and social media are awash with photos of girls and women in bikinis, and why not? Women's bodies are beautiful and through antiquity the female form has been admired. Yet many parents are deeply uncomfortable with the type of photos being posted, the age of the girls when they do it, and what it all means about them. When Sharon asked us to talk about what's going on, and how she can help her daughter think more about her own values, and what she is po...
2024-02-0732 min