Why Is My Teen So Snarky?

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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.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Depression in teenagers often looks like irritability. It looks like snarkiness.

Reena Ninan:
But what teen isn’t snarky?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I guess this is just teenagers, but is it? There’s a lot of thinking that phones cause mental health problems in kids and kids who aren’t sleeping enough look depressed.

Reena Ninan:
How do you tell the difference between snark and depression?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Do not miss this. Do not write this off as just teens being teens.

Reena Ninan:
Well, that was quite an episode last week on smutty fan fiction, Lisa.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah. Well, have you checked it out? Have you taken a look?

Reena Ninan:
Can I tell you the silliness? I am now worried that if I start looking at that site that it’s going to change the algorithm in my home and start pushing stuff to my kids that they’re unaware of.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay. Go to some internet cafe, Reena, and have at it, have at it with this fanfic.

Reena Ninan:
Oh my God.
Well, I just don’t want to change my opinion of Harry Potter too. There’s that.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, there’s that. There’s also that.

Reena Ninan:
You know what I loved about our conversation last week was it’s still the topic of sex and how do you approach it and talk about it, but today we’re moving on to another S, snark. So many kids are so snarky and you have presented a whole other reason to be as to why they potentially could be. So I want to read you this letter.
Dear Dr. Lisa, my 15-year-old daughter is snarky, like really snarky. She was in seventh grade, A switch flipped and has been this way ever since. When she was in middle school, I went through a mourning period for my sweet, spunky, creative and curious daughter. I knew that snarkiness and teens go together like croissants and coffee, but I really think her behavior is more extreme than her peers. She says she hates school and complains a lot. She’s on her phone all the time despite our best efforts to control it with the iPhone parent controls. Her behavior has been really hard on the family and her two younger sisters are always getting their feelings hurt, despite looking up to her so much. Recently, she opened up a little bit and she told me that she feels sad a lot despite working hard in school. She said that she feels less motivated and has even started going to bed around 10 when she’s always been a night owl. I would love to hear your thoughts about the connections between irritability and teen depression and when a parent should worry. Thanks for your wisdom. I am always so grateful for your podcast.
Do you think the parents should be worried here?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I think yes. I think the parent is raising, especially towards the end of the letter, like the real concern about irritability. And one of the things that we’ve talked about and I will take any opportunity to talk about is that depression in teenagers often looks like irritability. It looks like snarkiness. It’s how we miss depression in teenagers that people dismiss it of like, oh, there goes a snarky teen. I think that there are very legitimate questions to be asked here about whether or not this kid should be evaluated for depression and maybe treated for depression. I want to put a pin in that. I think there’s other questions that we want to actually chase down here that are raised in the letter, but I think out of the gate I will say, if this family called me and my practice and came in, that would be a diagnostic rule out something I would be thinking about really closely.

Reena Ninan:
You think of teenagers as being snarky, but I don’t know that necessarily the correlation between snark and depression, is that something that you see often?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
In teenagers if they’re depressed, the answer is yes, and I remember Reena learning this in my training and it is something you actually have to learn in training. It’s not something that’s understood broadly, and it’s actually very unique to adolescents that when little kids are depressed, they look a little bit more like depressed adults, they can be sort of weepy or low and little kids is often, we call it somatic symptoms, like their tummy hurts or they’ve got headaches, and that’s how we can start to diagnose depression and adult depression tends to look like the way we picture it with sort of a lowness. There can be some irritability for sure, but it’s more low mood, low affect, all of that. If I hear about an adolescent who is cranky with the adults at home, cranky with the adults at school, can’t stand everybody. Everyone rubs them the wrong way and it’s a lot of, it’s the universality of it that I’m looking for. That for me is such a flag for depression. And Reena I remember when I was in the middle of graduate school, I was moving along well enough in my program that I could actually go back to Denver for a summer and just work. I didn’t have to stay on campus and do my grad school work. And I took a job at the Denver Children’s Home, which was basically an inpatient setting for adolescents. So these were kids who were struggling enough that they could not be cared in an outpatient setting, and there were also a lot of kids who were sort of in the system that they were in foster care, that they had very, very hard lives. And I remember we had this boy show up and he was 14 or 15 and he was kind of awful to be around and I hate saying that, but he was just such a prickly porcupine and so unpleasant and no matter how gently or kindly you tried to approach him, he was just awful, just terrible.
It felt terrible to be in his presence and I remember I was like 23 or 24, I was very, very young in my training and I remember one of our attending psychiatrists was like, this kid has depression. And I remember thinking, what are you talking about? Nothing about him reads depression the way I’ve understood it, and I remember they started treating him for depression, including meds, and Reena honestly to god, three weeks later we were looking at a different kid.

Reena Ninan:
Wow, interesting.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It really made that mark on me of like, okay, do not miss this. Do not write this off as just teens being teens.

Reena Ninan:
So how do you tell the difference between snark and depression?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I do think there’s that universality piece. I think this is a theme that’s sort of emerging in this season of what is typical about teenagers that we need to be okay with. One of the things that’s typical is sometimes a kid who’s pretty grumpy or spicy at home and then the parent goes to school conferences and the teachers are like, oh my gosh, your son is just so lovely. Or so charming where there’s this big gap. It’s not fun at home and you don’t want to have it be all the time, but that’s not unusual. I don’t start to think about, oh my gosh, is this kid depressed? If I hear that they’re getting along with everybody but their folks for me, I’m like, okay, well that’s something else altogether that’s a family issue, but if I am hearing that it is across the board and even their friends are irritating to them, that is for me a time to start to be concerned and to do a deeper dive.

Reena Ninan:
So it sounds like you’re saying it’s snark with irritability that you might need to look out for?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Snark, irritability, and everybody bugs ’em, not just like this teacher bugs them or these parents bug them. It’s got to be everybody or nearly everybody. I think that that’s the kind of thing we want to be looking for, but there’s some stuff in this letter I think raises some other questions for me.

Reena Ninan:
What stands out to you?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
One was that they can’t get the kid off the phone.

Reena Ninan:
I was going to ask you about phone use next. I mean a lot of kids spend a lot of time on their phones.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
They do, and it gets to this really interesting big cultural conversation right now that we have about what causes mental health problems in kids, and there’s a lot of thinking that phones cause mental health problems in kids. There’s not universal agreement on this In terms of the academic field, I think that we like to get into the weeds of it as we should around, well, who’s vulnerable and who’s not. But I will say Reena, when there’s pushback on that idea of, okay, maybe phones don’t cause depression, the pushback usually takes the form of once kids are depressed, they may be spending more time on their phones and that’s probably not good for them. So I’m not going to say, oh yeah, the phone’s causing her depression or causing her ill mood or bad behavior or snarkiness. But I will say, okay, by the time a kid is there spending a huge amount of their time on their phone is probably not going to help the situation. I don’t love kids spending tons of time on their phone and I sure as heck don’t love it if they are having problems with their mood or their behavior or their relationships.

Reena Ninan:
Do you know what stood out to me in this letter? Was the parents like, oh, and she’s going to bed at 10, she’s a night owl. Does that also have an impact? Were you concerned when you heard about the sleep pattern?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I caught that too and what she said is the kid used to be a night owl and now she’s putting herself to bed as early as 10. So how old this kid? This kid’s like 15, 10 o’clock’s. Not terrible for 15 year olds. But then I’m like, okay, well how late was she going to bed before?

Reena Ninan:
That’s what I was wondering. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah. I think a lot of kids, 10 o’clock is good if not early for them to get to bed, especially if they’ve got a big academic schedule that keeps them up late with homework and things after school. But it made me concerned to hear that she had been staying up as late before that. It also, from the way the letter was written, and I don’t really know the whole story, it also had a quality of that the night owl-ness was not seen as a problem or may not have been something that the parent was pushing back on. I think it is a problem. What we know is that at 15, basically high school aged kids, they need nine hours of sleep a night. Very few kids are getting anywhere in that department, but no kid even going to bed at 10 o’clock at night is getting nine hours. They would have to be up at seven. Usually they have to be up way before then. So I do think there’s a question about depression, but also when I’m doing diagnostic work, if I hear that a kid’s not sleeping very much and my hunch is this kid is not sleeping anywhere near where she needs to be sleeping, that to me is where we start because kids who aren’t sleeping enough look depressed, and once they start sleeping more, they often look a lot better.
So before we say, yep, this is a kid who has depression and needs to be treated accordingly, I think we need to remember the basics matter and basics like getting enough sleep are really important to address before making big diagnostic assumptions.

Reena Ninan:
I love the episode we did with Lisa L. Lewis who looked at sleep because she really gave us good perspective as to why that’s so important. The other thing in this letter that I’m looking at here, Lisa, is she’s got younger siblings who idolize her and are watching her behavior. Were you concerned about that when you heard that and she’s being very hurtful to them?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah, I mean you’ve got kids who are close to each other in age. What’d you make of that? What was your take on that?

Reena Ninan:
I mean some of that you see often in the dynamics of older, younger siblings, but I can see how when someone’s really, really, if you’ve been around people who are really, really snarky, they say things that can kind of cut to the bone a little bit and aren’t really funny. You don’t need to cut down somebody by saying that. And so I really worry about the impact on younger siblings who idolize their older siblings and are really being torn apart. How do you deal with that?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I agree with you and let’s keep holding for a little on this question of does this kid have depression? Whatever else, this is not working. What is happening at home is not working and she’s being really hard on her siblings and the letter writer doesn’t say this, but I also imagine this isn’t fun to parent through either, right? This is not pleasant. Understandably, when a person is really suffering, especially from things like depression, we don’t often talk about what it feels like for everybody around them. But Reena, it is so hard to live with somebody who’s depressed. It is so hard to live with a kid who is so unpleasant and I just think back to the kid we had on the inpatient unit. I mean, I was only there eight hours a day and that kid was really wearing me down. When we think about motivation to fix this and to get it on track and to take seriously that this kid is suffering and also causing suffering, the impact on the siblings is a real thing that should not be minimized, and I think this parent deserves to enjoy a more pleasant relationship with this kid.
The kid deserves herself to feel a heck of a lot better than she does, and her siblings should not have to feel like they are kind of punching bags as this kid as this 15 year old’s working things out. So it is concerning. It’s very hard on the family. Often when a kid is suffering, we don’t talk about it enough and I know why we really want to focus on the needs of the kids, but this is also very real and these are other kids.

Reena Ninan:
What would your advice be to the family when you’re dealing with a child who may possibly have depression?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
So if this kid were in my practice, I think the first thing I would do is really hone in on the sleep question I have found clinically you deal with that first because you kind of can’t see what you’re dealing with until the sleep question is managed. I would be asking a lot more about sleep. I’d be asking where the phone is at night. You know how I feel about phones in rooms. If the kid was deeply resistant to having their phone out of their room, I would make the case that until the kid is feeling better, it needs to happen. When the kid feels better, we can revisit it, but as long as the kid is feeling this lousy, we’re going to start by putting sleep in place and making sure it’s going well, figuring out what the barriers are, addressing them and getting sleep in place.
I would want to see this kid sleeping decently for a couple of weeks before making any further decisions. I would be curious about whether she can be busier in a way that has less time to spend on her phone. I remember one of my favorite supervisors saying people feel good about themselves for the things they do well. I wonder if asking her to do more activities or more service or something would have a double benefit of less time to just be on her phone and more time to actually do stuff she could feel good about. I would do a 2, 3, 4 week assessment of if we get sleep in place, if this kid’s busier and less on her phone, if she’s doing stuff she cares about, does her mood start to shift? Does her snarkiness ease? I would be asking all of those questions. At the same time, Reena, I would not drag my feet on this.

Reena Ninan:
Really?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah, I would have, in my mind clinically, I would have in my mind, does this kid need to be on meds? That would be in my mind.

Reena Ninan:
I’m so surprised because what really surprises me about this episode as we were digging into it and researching it, I just never really understood the correlation between snarkiness and depression. I just think snark is part of teens. What teen isn’t snarky, Lisa?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, snarky sometimes, but if we do all these things, if this kid is snarky across the board and then we do all these things, sleep is in place. She’s less on her phone, she’s busier with good things and there’s still this cranky, cranky, unpleasant, and also the kid is complaining. She’s like, my motivation is low. I do not like school. She doesn’t feel good either. She’s not making people around here feel good. She doesn’t feel good. I’m just imagining this and I’m filling in pieces here. So with that caveat in mind, one of the kinds of things I have found myself saying clinically to families in a situation like this is to say, I’m beginning to have a real question about whether or not there’s a biologically based depression here. Whether or not there’s a major depressive disorder at work, because we’re doing all the right things and they’re not really working, here are your options.
I am very happy to work with her in psychotherapy to see if we can get psychotherapy alone, talk therapy to relieve her depression. We could at the same time get a psychiatric consult to see if there’s medication that could be of help to her and we could do it alongside the talk therapy you as a family can choose. I will also tell you what my recommendation would be, and I will usually make a recommendation and I would probably say I think we should probably get the ball rolling on a psychiatric consultation. It can take a long time to get with a psychiatrist. Meds themselves can take a long time to work, but I don’t want to lose too much time with her feeling this bad without doing everything we can to help her feel better. I think that’s close to what I’d be saying at this point.

Reena Ninan:
This sounds really serious, the way you’re laying this out. This isn’t something, as you said, to take lightly. Is there any concern for you if you just don’t catch this? What happens if you just let the snark continue, don’t address it, write it off as just normal teen behavior. How can this affect someone’s wellbeing into adulthood?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I think you’re hearing and you’re asking about my urgency around this.

Reena Ninan:
Yes, that’s exactly right. Yes.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah, and I think what you’re hearing, and I’m hearing it too, right? It’s sort of interesting to think through how would I handle this as a clinician? I think one of the things that I have come to through experience and practice is that teen years are like dog years. A year of their life is like seven years of ours. So much happens. There’s so much going down. Think about trajectory, right? They’re getting themselves on trajectories, and so I don’t like to lose time with a teenager who is suffering because it does shift their trajectory. If this kid is pissing off teachers, not making friends, not taking school seriously, all on the back of a depression that goes untreated, that is going to dictate how 16th year, 17th year, 18th year options are going to look. It’s funny, Reena, as we think it through together, I find myself at this point in my clinical career being more easygoing about most things.
I mean, the last episode, I’m like, what? Okay, fan fiction, it’s not easy.

Reena Ninan:
Yes, you were!

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Right? So more easygoing about things that maybe would’ve gotten me more anxious or reactive early in my training or early in my career, and then more interventionist and more urgent about things than I probably would’ve been when was younger. If I see eating pathology, I am like we are on that yesterday. If I see a kid who I think actually their mood is swamping, their capacities, their mood is getting in the way of their relationships, their schoolwork, their teacher relationships, I am so much more aggressive about that than I think I probably was 25 years ago. I don’t want this kid losing another minute. I don’t want their trajectory changed by something that we could have treated. So as we talk this letter through, I know what I want to rule out, but having ruled those things out, I would probably be all over this.

Reena Ninan:
Yeah. Thank you for that because I hear the urgency and I see, well, snark, that’s not a big deal, but I like how you’ve laid out for us when it can be a big deal and when you need to pay attention.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
A hundred percent. And I’m so grateful that for the letter, right, because it really is, I think, describes how a lot of people feel like, I guess this is just teenagers, but is it? Right? That’s the question in the letter’s.

Reena Ninan:
Exactly right. So what do you have for us for Parenting to Go?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
You know, we don’t often talk about meds on our podcast. I know a lot of families have a lot of worries about considering medicating their kids, and it’s a real concern. I think it is not something I ever recommend lightly. Often when I am talking with families about whether medication makes sense, whether it’s for ADHD or depression or something else. We are weighing costs, right? The cost of medicating a child versus the cost of not medicating them. And so there may be costs associated with medicating kids, though by and large, we know these medications to be very, very safe and we have good psychiatrists who do good work that hopefully families can access.
But when parents have reservations, and I think it’s something worth considering, I will also point out there are real costs to not doing this, right? If your kid could have felt much better and had a better trajectory as a result, and we don’t do that, she may end up with many fewer options at 18 than she deserves. And so meds aren’t simple, they’re not all good by any measure. There are definitely complexities with them, but we do need to kind of look at them in context and look at what it means for the kids’ development over time.

Reena Ninan:
Appreciate the guidance, Lisa. I feel like back to back, we’ve had two topics that I never thought we’d really dive into, but an important, just the complexity of the teenage years that I don’t think I ever appreciated until I became a mom of teenagers.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah, no, they are wonderful and complicated and they’re my favorite.

Reena Ninan:
They certainly are. And next week, Lisa, we’re going to talk about is my son too obsessed with his girlfriend? Love in the time of the teenage years. Look forward to chatting with you about that. I’ll see you next week.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
See you next week.