How Many Piercings Should a Teen Have?

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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:
Piercings and teens, is it really that big of a deal?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
This is a place where I think reasonable people disagree. Teenagers want to do things their folks don’t want ’em to do. Doing something that is very, very edgy may get in the way of how you are perceived in terms of your competence or appropriateness for front facing jobs.

Reena Ninan:
Our children’s generation are very adamant. If they’re not going to hire me for that, then I don’t want to work in that place.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I mean, I hate to say this, I think teachers will judge kids differently.

Reena Ninan:
Does it matter where the piercing is?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Here’s what I think.

Reena Ninan:
I just loved our episode last week. You always come up with these great concepts that are easy to incorporate in family life, so thank you for that.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
You are welcome. I will say the best part of my job is that I just get to keep thinking and pushing my own thinking about how to be useful, what I want for my family, what I want for other families, and then to have our little world of our podcast where I can then with you share that broadly. I have the best job in the world. I know I do.

Reena Ninan:
I absolutely loved it. I thought it was great and got some great feedback, so thank you. But this is a very interesting letter that you wanted to take up and I want to get into it. It’s about piercings and teens. I’m going to read it for you.
Dear Dr. Lisa, I’m a 16-year-old girl and my mom loves your podcast for the most part. We get along, but there are some things we just don’t see eye to eye on. I was wondering if you’d ever talk about piercings on your podcast. I have two right now and I wanted a third for years, but my mother doesn’t understand why I want them. She’s absolutely against it. I see it as a way of self-expression with jewelry and I love the look of it. I think she thinks I’m going to want more and more and maybe she’s right. I see her side as well, and I know for a fact if you talked about it on one of your episodes, she would have to see both sides. Anyways, love you and your content.
Oh my gosh, I love that we are getting letters from cool teens. How cool is this teen?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
They are so cool. So she is so cool. They are also cool, but I also love that she’s like, “I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to get these piercings and I’m going to go through the podcast that my mom likes to work on this problem,” and they’re the greatest. They’re the greatest in the world.

Reena Ninan:
When you suggested this, I was like, what? And then our team showed me the letter and I was like, okay, we totally have to do this one. Okay, my first question is who’s right on the piercings?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, I don’t know that there’s a right, I don’t know that there’s a right. I think there are extremes where it’s probably easier to have some clarity, right? I mean, if this kid were saying, I would like to pierce every visible surface of my body and my mom is being kind of a stick in the mud about it, I think I would probably be like, I can see why at 16 your parent may have some real reservations about that. I can also see unless there’s, and I imagine there are communities where there’s religious injunctions or reasons why you don’t do this, but I can also see the other extreme. If a kid wants to get her ears pierced and she’s got no piercings and all her friends have them and they live in a community where that’s happening, and the parent without any other broader rationale related to religion or culture is saying absolutely not. I can see where I would totally take the kid’s side, but this one’s in the middle. This one, she’s got two piercings. She’s not saying where she wants the third piercing. I’m registering that it could be her nose, it could be her ear. My hunch is it’s her ear. I don’t know why, but what do you think if you, as a mom and you’ve got a daughter, you also come from a culture where piercing has different parameters. So if this were your kid, where would you be with this?

Reena Ninan:
First off, in Indian culture, it is not uncommon. It’s actually quite common that babies get their ears pierced under one and they wear nice gold. Jewelry is very big in India, especially gold and that sort of thing. So it’s not uncommon. Now multiple piercings. My parents are so conservative, they just would never have allowed that, but I can see it on your ear. That’s totally fine. I was at the gym a couple of weeks ago and I was heading to the shower, and then I saw a woman who had both nipples pierced that I never would’ve expected the piercing. It kind of shocked me.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
And never would’ve expected because of her overall look, the rest of her overall look did not telegraph nipple piercing?

Reena Ninan:
It did not telegraph nipple piercing. So when we got this letter, I was curious why do people do it? Do you know the psychology behind why people choose to pierce and why it’s so important to some people?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
That’s a great question. I dunno that we have a developed psychology.

Reena Ninan:
There’s no research on piercings, Lisa?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I bet there is. I actually bet there is. Now I’m going to go look at all the research on piercings.
But what this kid is talking about and what that woman is, I don don’t know why she pierced her nipples. It’s self-expression, right?

Reena Ninan:
Yes.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I think it’s sort of under that big umbrella of self-expression and all of the ways we express our identity through our outward appearance, our clothes, our hair, that way we wear our makeup piercings.
Wait, can we come back to a question about India and the culture?

Reena Ninan:
Oh yeah, absolutely. Let’s do it.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Tell me those little nose studs. I think those are really cool. Are those seen as less than conservative in Indian culture or are those sort of under the?

Reena Ninan:
My parents think if we were to have my mom on, she would say they were very low brow, but

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Oh, that’s interesting.

Reena Ninan:
She does not. So I don’t feel like it’s a homogenous that just because some people do it is accepted, but you’re right, I kind of feel like that originated in India. I have no proof of that.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Take this is for what it’s worth. But if I see an Indian woman with that, to me that seems utterly cultural, utterly cultural, but it’s so good and wonderful to learn from you. Well, not necessarily that there’s diversity within the culture on this as there is within any culture on anything.

Reena Ninan:
Yes, yes. And my parents come from the standpoint of getting more than your ears pierced is crazy.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay, so then where are your parents and where are you on a third ear piercing?

Reena Ninan:
Pierce all you want on your ear, I don’t think that’s crazy. And this woman at the gym had me looking at piercings completely different. I actually think it’s kind of cool that she’s got piercings and nobody else needs to know that.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah.
Anytime there is something where I have parented through it and made my own parenting choices, I sort of feel like I owe it to our audience to be kind of upfront about where I’m at with this. And I have been very at ease. My older daughter wanted two extra piercings, one on each ear, and she was like 15, 16, and I think I made her wait and I want to come back to that. I think I didn’t do it instantly when she asked for it, but to me it’s not that big a deal. And I will tell you part of why I’m okay with it is that in high school I got a third piercing.
Do you have only two? Do you have two holes, Reena? One on each ear.

Reena Ninan:
I have only two. And let me tell you, the one that I had apparently, guys, you’re not supposed to sleep with your earrings on because it ripped through my ear and I had to have it kind of, yeah, it’s kind of gross. So I can barely handle one in each ear. That’s me personally. I have nothing against people with piercings. I actually think they’re kind of cool, but yeah.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, and it’s interesting. I don’t even remember actually consulting my parents on whether or not I got the third one. And the way I got it actually is a little bit weird and kind of funny. I was headed to college and I decided I wanted one for college, I think sort of under the self-expression want to be cool. And it was the summer before college and I was actually working in those surgical rooms at Denver Children’s Hospital. I was working on a research study that had me in and out of the surgical rooms. It’s a long story, but I mentioned to the nurses that I was working with that I was thinking about getting a third piercing and they were like, oh, our syringes are way sharper and cleaner than anything you’re going to find, bring in a needle tomorrow. We’ll do it for you. And so they did it in the hallway of the surgical rooms. They just right into my ear. I was actually 17 and I truly, I have no memory of ever checking this with my family.

Reena Ninan:
Did they notice?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I don’t even remember that Reena. I mean, and also I know my mom, I don’t think she cared that much. I think she’d be like whatever. And also I was literally weeks from heading to college, so I think it was sort of towards the back end.
Okay, so what should happen here? So one thing I mentioned was the waiting. So one way to size this up is, first of all, I don’t think there really is a right answer. I don’t feel like, oh, there’s such clarity on this. I can see where the mom is like, why don’t you hold off on it? You wait. I can see where a parent might be like, sure, fine, you can have it. I don’t on one extra piercing and let’s presume it’s the ear or maybe even I think a stud in the nose is cool, but that’s my view of things. I don’t think there’s a really clear one way it should go. I think the broader framing we want to put around this is that teenagers want to do things their folks don’t want ’em to do. Teenagers by their nature, push boundaries are pushing forward and in many ways the picture of health in an adolescent’s life, in a family with an adolescent is that the kid is sort of pushing and asking for more than the family wants to give and the family is pulling back that. That’s actually the kind of tension I like to see. I don’t want a kid who’s asking for everything and it’s a constant fight, but I also don’t want a kid who is so mild and so compliant that they’re not actually pushing. So whatever we do by way of helping this family resolve this or not.
I just want to say right here, right now, this is perfect. Adolescence. The kid is one more piercing. One more piercing. The parents are like, no, no, no, no. I love that. And I think we don’t talk about that enough. This is health.

Reena Ninan:
This is a great reminder about the tension because I think everyone wants to avoid conflict and you do remind us that tension with your teen is not a bad thing.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
No, and actually I expect to see it and I always have said, I like my teenagers spicy. I want a little something that’s kind of pushing the adults, rubbing the adults the wrong way, nothing dangerous, nothing harmful, nothing that’s going to matter when they’re 30. That’s I think always a really key measure. I think that there may be a place where if the parent has their reservations, which obviously the parent does, they say, you know, why don’t we do it for your 17th birthday? So it’s a little bit like I’m not giving in, but I’m also not saying no. Right. That tension is maintained a little longer. I wonder if that’s a way that everybody wins, that the kid

Reena Ninan:
Why that tension, like making them wait, what does it do? The waiting.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I think there has to be some tension. It’s funny, and I’m thinking this through as we talk it through together. I think that it’s healthy when there’s tension in a family where the kid is sort of pushing against something that the adult doesn’t necessarily want, and I think you want to maintain. I think it should be there if it’s gone, if it goes away too fast, if the kid’s like, I want to use Zyns in the house, and the family’s like, okay, fine, we’re not even going to get into it with you. I think they would’ve expected tension, so they’re going to find it. The last thing we want is a kid ratcheting it up to find tension. I think that there’s value in having some tension.
I was driving home from my office yesterday and I saw these four boys who had just come, we have a skateboarding area.

Reena Ninan:
Oh, cool.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It is cool. It is cool. They, I think to a lot of adult eyes, kind of sketchy looking teenagers, they were in black sweatsuits and they had their hoods up, but they were all carrying their skateboards, but they definitely had a very edgy look and I was just like, this is what I like. I like this. Right?

Reena Ninan:
I agree.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
None of what I am able to see on these boys will matter when they’re 30 and they’re doing skateboarding, I love skateboarding. It is a little bit dangerous, a little bit risky, a little bit edge pushing, and it’s literally going on at our community park and they’re walking home.

Reena Ninan:
What a great point. You’re so right. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Make room for this, make room for this with teenagers.

Reena Ninan:
Does it matter where the piercing is? Do you have reservations about that?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I do start to. Do you?

Reena Ninan:
You do really? Okay.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah. But do you have pierce- does it all seem equal to you wherever she gets it?

Reena Ninan:
No, because I’m a total wimp and could barely handle, like I said, ears, my ears being pierced. In fact, when I got my ears pierced, my mom loves to tell the story that I was eight and she said, I wish I was a boy and was really angry at her for taking me to get my ears pierced. I didn’t really want to do it.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Oh, interesting.

Reena Ninan:
Yeah, yeah. But it was like, oh my God, she hasn’t had her. Culturally, it’s sort of like everybody has their ears pieced.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Culturally it was an imperative.

Reena Ninan:
Yes.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
That’s really interesting.

Reena Ninan:
Isn’t that interesting?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah. I love learning about each other’s earlier lives through this podcast.
Okay, so here’s where, and I could totally see this is a place where I think reasonable people disagree. Here’s what I think. I do think where it happens matters because at least where I live in the suburbs of Cleveland where it’s not super hip all the time, I think if one of my daughters was like, I want to get my lip pierced, or I want to get my tongue pierced in a way that will be visible to people, or I want to get a ring on my nose, there’s a special name for that ring that goes in the middle of the nose.
I would be like, I’m going to be asking you to get a retail job pretty soon, and we need to grapple with the fact that doing something that is very, very edgy, at least in our community, may get in the way of how you are perceived in terms of your competence or appropriateness for certain things, like a retail job that I’m going to require you to have. Now, is it right to judge people? No. Is it a measure of one’s competence or capacities or ethics or anything where you have a piercing? No. Do people make those assumptions when they are doing interviews with potential employees, especially for front facing jobs? Oh, yes, they do. So I think the “where” is an issue.

Reena Ninan:
Yeah, no, that makes total sense. But when you go to the thing of self-expression, I also feel like our children’s generation are very adamant about certain things and they’re like, well, if they’re not going to hire me for that, then I don’t want to work in that place.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, that is exactly right. That is exactly right. You totally have embodied what a smart teenager would say, which is, I don’t want to work for somebody who’s going to judge me based on my nose ring. That is exactly what a smart teenager would say. I think that then the parent may be a little bit stuck. They may also say, we’re going to put parameters around a job for you in terms of what our expectations are. Or even, I mean, I hate to say this, I think teachers will judge kids differently based on nose ring, no nose ring. I think that there is a conversation to be had about you’re going to make things more uphill for you in a context and environment where you’re going to be asking the teacher for a college recommendation or you’re going to be trying to get a job from that person, and that may be a place where the parent puts their foot down and I was like, no, not while you’re still trying to get into college or trying to get a job or whatever. It does also raise the question of something that’s removable.

Reena Ninan:
I’m just curious. I was just going to ask you, do you feel the same way about tattoos?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Boy, tattoos are so different now than they used to be.

Reena Ninan:
Tell me more. Why do you?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I think about this all the time. I was watching an old video of the singer role model singing on SNL. That guy’s got a lot of tattoos. It doesn’t even register anymore as a lot of tattoos. Growing up, that would’ve seemed so much.

Reena Ninan:
Totally. You’re right in a generation, so much has changed. I actually, maybe it’s my years in television news. I love hanging out with people with piercings and tattoos. They’re just far more interesting and they’re often behind the scenes working the audio or the camera, and they’re just the silent observers on everything. It’s just so interesting to get their takes on stuff.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
And did you watch that? I mean, how much tattooing was happening just probably changed very dramatically in the course of your career in terms of what you saw?

Reena Ninan:
Well, I think a generation ago if somebody got a tattoo, they were so judged, but today is it really that big of a deal?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, okay, so I think tattoos and piercings are similar and different enough, right? Similar in that it’s a form of self-expression that definitely young people are interested in. Piercings, most of them you can take ’em out. Most of them it can be walked back. Tattoos not so much. I can easily see a parent saying, you know what? I’m drawing the line at tattoos. You’re going to be 18 soon enough. There’s nothing I can do once you turn 18 if you want to do this. I mean, there are things you can do. You can threaten to take stuff away, but that’s a decision a parent needs to make. But you can say once you’re 18, it’s between you and your tattoo artist, especially if you put it somewhere where I can’t see it. But I think that a parent would have to have a lot of comfort with tattoos.
Of course, a lot of parents have tattoos, a lot of parents have their own tattoos, and I hear all the time about parents who go with their kids to get tattoos or it’s like the 18th birthday. So again, a place where reasonable people disagree. I think again though, it’s changing a lot. The argument could be made about, let’s make sure this doesn’t hurt you in any area where you don’t want to be hurt or given constrained by having this thing. But obviously tattoos are a lot harder to walk back than piercings. One thing I heard that I thought was really clever, if a parent was agreeable to a tattoo, and this is just another tool in a parent’s toolbox is to say to the kid today is come up with a date. Today’s January, whatever, mark on the calendar a year from now, the tattoo you think you want today.

Reena Ninan:
Oh, clever.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
And if you still want it in a year from now, I’m good with it. That’s one option. If a parent wanted to exercise it.

Reena Ninan:
I love that option. I think that’s wonderful. You give me a year and see how they feel differently. I want to get back to this letter though. What’s your advice for how this mom and daughter resolves this?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, they’re talking to each other. They’re really thinking it through. There’s something here that I want to actually underscore that I think may help towards resolution, whatever the resolution may be. So what’s quite remarkable about this letter is that the kid is really doing a great job. I think of standing in the parent’s shoes. She’s like, she thinks I’m going to want more. I’m not sure she’s wrong. I mean she’s really able to be like, and the kid’s not fully articulating what the parents’ reservations are, but this kid is not saying, my mom’s a jerk and won’t let me have it. I mean, she’s really thinking it through. One really wonderful technique that I want all families to have in their toolbox is if they come to an impasse with their kid, which is what’s happened here, the kid wants the piercing, the mom doesn’t want the extra piercing.
A really helpful exercise is for each person to voice the other person’s view of the thing. This girl has already done this in this letter. She said, I want this, but my mom thinks once I get one it’s going to be floodgates. What this girl’s also telling us is, if you all take this up on your podcast, then my mom will need to see my side. What I would love is for the mom in her words, to try to articulate to the girl the girl’s interest in this, to say, you want this because, and try to do her best job of filling in the blank and then even say to the daughter, what am I missing? What did I not capture about why you want this? There is something incredibly powerful about having to articulate the other person’s position in your own words, say them with your own mouth.
I have seen over and over again that this helps people dislodge an impasse a little bit come to a new way to think about the problem that felt like it was intractable before they did this exercise of each person saying the other person’s point of view and checking to make sure they’ve got it thoroughly. So I don’t know what the solution is here, and I don’t think there is a beautiful solution that’s just going to be the magic bullet that fixes this, but I think the next step is if the parent is like, okay, I’m going to sit with this terrific kid and I’m going to try to say in my words why it is she wants this third piercing and see if they can’t make a little headway on it.

Reena Ninan:
That’s a great tangible exercise to do. And by the way, I did this, I love, you’ve mentioned this before. I did this with social media, certain social media platforms that I felt like they did not need to be on in doing this exercise. I saw that there were platforms that the kids were on that they’re missing content and then missing a whole piece of the social component to their conversations. I know not every parent feels that way, but it just helped me understand a little bit in the moment that I, by articulating it, was better able to feel it and understand it.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
That’s it exactly. That when you articulate it, your empathy for the position of the other person goes up, and as soon as we’re having conversations with more empathy, right, and I think there probably is room for the parent to say to this girl, I want you to say in your words even more about what my worries are, and I think there’s probably a little wiggle room on this. This is why teenagers are so great where this kid’s like, I don’t know, maybe I do want more. Where the parent might say, you know what? Wait until you’re 17 for one, and then don’t even bring it up with me until you’re 18. We’re not even having this conversation.
One is the limit for our conversations while you’re under the age of 18. So I think there’s good room in here for them to come together and come up with something that is a compromise. That is just a compromise.

Reena Ninan:
What do you have for us, Lisa, for Parenting to Go?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, I’m thinking about compromise and I’m thinking about what a compromise means is nobody gets everything they want. Everybody gives something up, and I got to tell you, there’s a lot of compromising in raising teenagers. Now, there are things that you don’t compromise on, and I think my will it matter when they’re 30 rule is a pretty good place for compromise is not going to be something you’re going to do around things like drugs or driving 90 miles per hour. No. I think once you’re into the healthy tension, the outcome will not actually determine their lifestyle or quality of life or even healthy at 30. I think the nature of the game with teenagers is you got to be ready to do some compromising.

Reena Ninan:
Great advice, interesting takes. I love when we take on a topic and I had a certain viewpoint and you helped me shift and change a little bit. I love that about you. I’ll see you next week.

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