How Do I Guide A Kid Who Only Cares About Becoming an Influencer?

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The following transcript has been automatically generated by an AI system and should be used for informational purposes only. We cannot guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of the information provided.

Reena Ninan:
Kids want to be influencers. Is this really a big trend you’re seeing?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
This fantasy of a career as a TikToker, “That’s going to be me.”

Reena Ninan:
Our son is failing many classes at school and he thinks that once he has a TikTok account, he’ll be making thousands of dollars every month.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
This is not good.

Reena Ninan:
Where do you begin with this one, Lisa?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I mean this is on fire.

Reena Ninan:
So we’re going to talk about how kids want to be influencers. Is this really a big trend you’re seeing?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I think a lot of kids think about it. I think a lot of kids follow them. I think there’s kids who are interested in it and have aspirations and then I think there are kids who are like, “That’s going to be me.”
I think there’s a wide range of how kids engage it, but it is funny, Reena, it used to be they wanted to be rock stars, right boys?

Reena Ninan:
Totally. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
A million years ago when I practiced, when boys would daydream about their fantasies, it was like they’d be rock stars.

Reena Ninan:
Oh yeah.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
So this isn’t new, but this is the new form.

Reena Ninan:
Alright, I want to get right into this letter.
It says, Dear Dr. Lisa, I’m seeking your help in supporting and guiding our son. Our son is 13 years old and in eighth grade he’s failing many classes at school and would be expelled at the end of this year if he continues to fail, as he’s currently in a private school. He’s gotten into his head that he does not need school. He thinks that once he has a TikTok account, he’ll be making thousands of dollars every month. He thinks my husband and I who make a good living are real losers because we work for a living and can’t afford luxury items. He’s convinced school is useless. He does not accept any help from us to get himself back on track academically. To complicate matters, he’s on the autism spectrum. He is high functioning, but we can’t seem to get him to understand the importance of school. We’ve spoken with our priest, the teachers and the school. He has an occupational therapist and everyone thinks he’s a great kid full of potential. I don’t know how to help him anymore. What can we do?
Tell me where do you begin with this one, Lisa?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Right? I mean this is on fire and I think when we talk about the range of kids, I talked about this kid’s at the far end of really throwing it all over because of fantasies of being an influencer. Reena, I want to take this one actually twice. First I want to take it leaving aside the fact that the kid’s on the autism spectrum, that’s such a significant variable that actually changes this pretty significantly. So I want to do it first for neurotypical kids. Cause I also hear this with neurotypical kids.
And then we’ll come back and we’ll think about let’s layer in an autism diagnosis and then think about it.
Okay, so this is not good. I mean this is not good. This kid, it’s interesting. The thing that I’m reacting to is that he’s failing his classes. I don’t love how he’s talking to his parents. I don’t love that this is his career goal. If he were simultaneously holding it together academically, this would be a very different letter. What makes this one on fire is the fact that this kid’s shooting himself in the foot and that the school is on the verge of kicking him out. So where does one start? That’s the issue is that this kid’s about to fail out of school. I had such good training and I’m so grateful for the people who trained me and I remember one of my wonderful, wonderful supervisors, a guy named Jim Hansel, who I actually ended up co-authoring a textbook with.
We went on to be very close colleagues. I remember one time I had a case where things were pretty bad and he said, “Listen, desperate times, call for desperate measures,” and I’ve always held onto that. There’s “adolescent stuff” and it exists in a wide range, but every once in a while you come up into something where you’re like, okay, this is on fire. This is actually on fire. And a kid who’s failing out of the eighth grade, that’s a big problem. That is a big problem. And so I think I’m thinking through what we do about this, but I just want to level set. This is very, very concerning. We talk about a whole bunch of things that are just annoyances of raising kids. This is a big one. This is a really big one.

Reena Ninan:
What do you think this family should do, Lisa?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
There’s a lot I wonder about in why this kid is so disinvested from school. So there’s two things happening. One is he’s pulled towards this fantasy of a career as a TikToker, which honestly among eighth grade kids, it’s not that rare. The kids have these ideas of like, I’m going to grow up to be famous and it’s going to be awesome. That to me does not fall very far outside the typical range, but he’s pulled towards that. But what’s interesting is there’s nothing pulling him towards school. He’s not attached to school in any meaningful way. I assume from this letter that he doesn’t even seem to mind that much that he’s maybe on the verge of having to leave this school. That should be a huge deal. One of the things we know, we have tons of research on this is kids’ investment in school is often not because of what’s happening in the classroom, but because of the clubs they’re in or the friends they have or the teachers they actually like, even if they don’t maybe like the subject. And so the first question, if this kid were sitting in my office with his family, the first question I would be asking is, what is going on with his relationship at school that there seems to be no glue for this kid, that he’s willing to throw it over so quickly. So that’s not exactly an answer, but it’s a place to look. Why is he so untethered to the life of the school?

Reena Ninan:
I just think especially for boys, school is hard, especially in the middle school years if you’re smaller. There’s just so many factors that I think we don’t think about or talk about how to help them. So if they don’t have that glue, Lisa, how do you even create that glue if it’s not there?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, it is interesting, right? So it does get to the question of whether you can, and I think you should start requiring this kid to do more that plugs him into the life of the school. It may or may not. I mean it’s very hard. You can’t actually make a kid do well academically, but one thing you can do as a parent is if you feel like my kid phones it in at school and comes home and gets on his video games and has no meaningful connection to this building and the people there and the kids there and the activities there, I think that’s a place where a parent might start to say there will be no video games. There will be no time online until you are going to this club or doing. And the best thing, I mean he’s in eighth grade, so there starts to be more clubs. Ninth grade, there starts to be lots of clubs and they could be so fun and goofy and I’m like, there needs to be something that attaches this kid to school and also attaches him to something that’s not on the internet. That’s the other thing I’m feeling myself anxious about as I hear this letter is it feels like this kid’s world is in a digital environment. He’s connected there or his fantasies are there, but his relationships are not in the real world.

Reena Ninan:
So you’ve got to find a hook at school, something to tether him to that he’s excited about?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Something where he may feel like, oh, I don’t want to leave this place, or I don’t want to lose this place. So that doesn’t mean he’s instantly going to be like, so now I’m going to start doing my homework. But going straight at the academic piece only it sounds like it’s not working, it hasn’t worked. So doing more of what’s not working tends not to actually work very well. So I would start to think where are the other footholds this kid could have in the school community? So he’s invested in trying to stay there.

Reena Ninan:
Do you think he’ll grow out of this?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah, actually I do. I mean what’s so essential is that he’s 13. If this were a 15-year-old or a 16-year-old, I would be like, oh, that’s not good. We usually see less concrete thinking, less black and white thinking once kids cross 14 to 15, and we’ve talked about this and it’s such an important topic that comes up over and over again here because I think people think teenager and they lump ’em all together, but oh my gosh, a 12-year-old versus a 16-year-old, those are completely different creatures. A 13-year-old versus a 15-year-old. Once they’ve crossed that threshold under abstract reasoning, totally different creatures. I do think that with this kid, and this is a neurotypical kid, right? So we’ll come back and do it again. A little bit of it is trying to help him keep it together until he is 14 or 15 and you can start to say things to him. Listen, 18-year-old you is going to be really annoyed with 14-year-old you, if you don’t get it together academically because 18-year-old you is going to want to have a lot more options than 14-year-old is currently making available. That’s a conversation you can have with a 14, 15-year-old that honestly 13 year olds, no matter how bright they are, they’re like, “Nope, I will be an influencer. End of story. Leave my room.” I mean it’s really frustrating sometimes as parents.

Reena Ninan:
So what should a parent do as they’re waiting for their kid to mature and reach that point?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It’s funny, I have several colleagues, wonderful colleagues who take care of a lot of adolescent boys and sometimes I’ve heard one of them use the expression of well foot on the neck and I’m like, oh man, that’s so-

Reena Ninan:
Like you’ve got to come down hard.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
You know, yeah, and you know how I talk and think about teenagers and foot on neck is not high on my list of how anything gets done, but my hunch, if I try to imagine my dear colleague who cares for a lot of adolescents, I think he would be like, “Nope, he needs to be in a sport and he needs to be doing a club and if he wants to spend time online,” and I want to come back to how much time this kid’s spending online, “If he wants to spend time online, that tech is made available through this family. The kid is not buying his own devices, he’s not buying his own subscriptions. It becomes contingent on him actually doing his homework that you really do tether those things together.” Like, “Okay kiddo, you want to look at influencers all day. Well then you need to be actually getting passing grades in school and if you can do that on your own and get your studying done, fine. If you can’t, then you’re going to do your homework in the kitchen until we can get this together.”

Reena Ninan:
One of my worries is what if he gets kicked out? What do you do then?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, I mean sometimes kids have to feel the floor. It’s not great. We don’t want this for this kid. Frankly, it’s better in the eighth grade than the ninth. I mean if this kid we hope eventually will have good options after high school, he’s in a private school. Private schools can do pretty much what they want. If he’s not a contributing member of the community and thriving in that environment, they can tell him it’s his last year. I hope that their public school district is a good one. There may be another private school that they can consider. I hate it that kids sometimes have to feel the floor, but if they’re going to feel the floor, let ’em feel it in middle school. Don’t let this crisis take this kid into high school.

Reena Ninan:
When kids don’t take school seriously, is there something that parents can do to make them take it seriously? That’ll actually set in?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay, so two thoughts running from my head. One is you can’t make teenagers do anything and as soon as soon as you want to make ’em do something, they don’t want to do it. So I always fall back on this story. I just had this fabulous, fabulous, I mean this kid was so terrific, this junior girl in my practice, she came in one day, I wrote about this, I think in Untangled, super grumpy one day. The reason she was grumpy is that her room had been a mess. No, it wasn’t her room, it was her dining room table. She actually was the kid who studied on the dining room table, been a mess all week, wanted it tidied up before the weekend. She’d just been really overwhelmed, had time set aside to organize all of her materials and get everything cleared up. And it was before our appointment that she was planning to do that.
She walks in the house, her mom is like, you need to straighten up the dining room table. And the kid came in my office and she’s like, “I’m so mad. I had an hour to get everything organized and my mom told me to do it. So I just spent that hour fighting with her about how I wouldn’t do it.” Even telling me she was like, oh man, I really took myself in. Okay, so to your question, can you make a kid do stuff? It’s very hard to make kids do stuff very hard to make teenagers do stuff, but desperate times, desperate measures. Here we are. I think the leverage you have is that he wants something. Okay, so I think this kid wants to spend time online. Other kids want to go to that concert, other kids want to drive, other kids want their curfew extended, right?
Healthy teenagers want things their parents may not be all that inclined to give ’em, there’s your leverage. So I think you start saying, “You want this, then you have to show me that.” Now the kid may, and I’ve seen kids do this, they may do themselves in to take the parent down with them. They may actually be like, you know what, you still can’t make me and I will. It’s hard when a kid’s like this when they’re like, “Fine, I won’t even go online and I will fail out. And then what are you going to do?” First of all, get yourself a good clinician. Get yourself, talk to your pediatrician. Find a clinician who can help you work this way through. But I think the first step probably is leveraging something he wants that the parents can tolerate and making that only accessible when he’s holding up his end of the bargain, which is to get at least passing grades in school.

Reena Ninan:
So Lisa, if you take all of what you’ve said and you now apply it to somebody who is on the autism spectrum, what would you say differently? What would that look like?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It gets a degree of difficulty, quite a few degree of difficulties, harder. What we can reasonably predict in a kid who is neurotypical is that once they hit 13, 14 15, once they get into that sort of later puberty or they’re definitely into puberty and they’re definitely, the neurological changes of puberty are almost certainly happening that they will get some perspective and that they can sort of start to think ahead and have a different perspective on the situation. I think when we layer in a kid who’s not neurotypical and let’s say on the autism spectrum, typically that kind of black and white thinking persists, biting your time isn’t going to work in the same way it would work for a neurotypical kid. That’s one thing. The other thing is given that kids who are on the autism spectrum can be pretty concrete, pretty black and white in their thinking, they see it the way they see it, trying to make them do things. I think with the neurotypical kid, you might be able to make him if you hold enough stuff over him. Trying to make them do stuff I think can often backfire. I mean they can be very reactive or they can have some families with kids who have autism where one family would describe it as the kid would’ve fits. I mean the kid would become very, very violent with himself would bang his head and kind of become undone. That’s a terrible place to be in. You don’t want your kid going there and you don’t want to do anything getting your kid there. So if the kid is not neurotypical and there’s not a sense of time is on your side. I think the kinds of things I would suggest is trying to make the case that school will help with the plan that the young person has.
You could also do this with the neurotypical kid, but I think you’re going to need it for the kid who’s not neurotypical. So make the case of like, oh, influencers tell really amazing stories. That’s what makes somebody a good influencer. Your class, reading the material in English and understanding the material in English is going to feed your dreams of being an influencer. Influencers need to track analytics. They need to track what’s happening with the trends in their followers. That’s math. You’re going to need math. Trying to make that argument might work. The other thing I can think of is if there’s an interest in a studio, I need a studio for my influencing, I need more of the carrot. I think stick isn’t going to work. More carrot. So say we can think about building or finding a way to do your room a little bit to make it more like a studio or we can set aside studio time. We can create studio time as part of your schedule. But to do that, we’re going to need you to do this, this, and this. So you can’t have this thing until you get the work done. But it’s like you can have this other thing once you start doing the work. And the other thing may be down the line of the dream of being an influencer. So that’s what I got.

Reena Ninan:
No, that’s great. And also what I’m hearing you say is don’t crush their dream. Use it as an opportunity to get them onto the right track maybe.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I think that’s right, and it’s interesting. There’s a lot of places in parenting where a kid’s into something, the parent’s not into the kid wants to be a drummer or the kid wants to go into the military and maybe that’s not the parent’s thing on those. If it means they’re building a skill, if it means they’re learning how to work at something, I think we’ve got to have a lot of latitude for it. Teenagers are teenagers, they’re autonomous. If they’re developing something, then either they get good at the thing they say they want to do, which we have to allow, or they can take that skillset and move it over to other things. They know how to work. They know how to get better at something. They know how to self-monitor their own progress. That can be really good. Back to the, actually, I would say both versions of this story, right? The neurotypical and the not neurotypical. There’s such a strong feel and do you feel this too of this kid feels like they’re online a lot. Their world is an online world. I would just, no matter what, try to vary this kid’s experience more. Less with the video games, less with time online, more with volunteering, more with being in the world,

Reena Ninan:
Find in real life events and things that will force the child to get offline and engaging.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah. Yeah. Keep ’em busy, right? I mean, I think we worry about kids being busy, but I’m like, you know what? I would take an overscheduled kid over a kid who’s online some ungodly number of hours a day.

Reena Ninan:
So Lisa, when you step back, what do you have for us for Parenting to Go?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
So for parenting to go. It’s interesting to think about preventatives, right? If this is an outcome in the eighth grade that now you’re really up against it. There’s one more year before high school this kid is digging themselves in. It does make me think about all of the things that we do as parents to plug our kids into community, and the value of doing that as a preventative of outcomes like this. Kids playing sports or kids doing stuff like School of Rock in some communities is a place where kids find their thing and find their people, find their band, and then they feel connected in a really meaningful way. I feel like this letter just underscores. It’s not just about driving the kid around. It’s not even really about that they’re going to go on to play college sports, next to no kids go on to play college sports. It’s that you want them attached to the real world and real people in the real world and real relationships in the real world because those are valuable in growth giving and also because they help to serve as a check against situations like this one.

Reena Ninan:
That’s great, Lisa. I think it’s really hard when you know in your mind this is a crazy idea, but your child has not had the life experience to realize what you do and to kind of bite your tongue or figure out the right way that doesn’t create a wedge between you and them. So you’ve walked us through a lot of scenarios here.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It’s a tough one. I really appreciate people writing us with not fluff. I mean, this is a tough one.

Reena Ninan:
Speaking of a tough one or a parenting topic I’ve never heard about that we’re going to tackle next week. Fan fiction. What do you do when a kid is looking at naughty things in the fiction they’re reading? It’s called Romantasy, Lisa. What?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Some of it’s romantacy. A lot of it’s online fan fiction. This will be one that I am very interested to talk about with you.

Reena Ninan:
I cannot wait to hear more. I’ll see you next week.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I’ll see you next week.