Latest Resource
Why Communication With Boys Is Different (and How to Make It Easier) Boys are often described as ‘distracted,’ but the truth is—they’re incredibly tuned in. They notice your tone before your words, your posture before your questions, and your mood before you open your...
Raising a teen boy can feel like navigating a maze of mood swings, risk-taking, and one-word answers. In this episode, Suzy and psychologist Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst dive into what’s really happening in boys’ brains during adolescence and why communication gets so tricky.
From emotional vocabulary and power struggles to anxiety, independence, and those “What were you thinking?” moments, you’ll get practical tools to stay connected, cut through the shutdowns, and guide your son with confidence—yes, even through the messy middle.
Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst is a licensed psychologist, author, mother, and grandmother with nearly 50 years of experience helping children, teens, and families strengthen emotional connection and communication. Based in Maryland, she provides therapy across Maryland and Washington, DC, using Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) and Internal Family Systems (IFS) to help clients understand themselves, navigate relationships, and build healthier family dynamics.
A longtime advocate for boys’ emotional development, Dr. Vanderhorst teaches parents—especially mothers—how boys experience, express, and regulate emotions differently as they grow. Her compassionate, research-informed approach gives families practical tools to create emotional safety, resilience, and lasting connection.
Learn more at drvanderhorst.com.
Watch the previous podcast: Tips for Teaching Young Boys to Use Their Words: Advice from an Expert.
The information provided in this podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. Consult with a qualified professional for specific guidance.
Check out the resource page created as a companion to this podcast, which includes a downloadable Feelings Sheet.
Subscribe to our newsletter for podcast updates and more.
Hi everyone, and welcome back. I’m your host, Suzy Shaw, Boy Mom, author of Mothers of Boy Survival Guide, and someone who knows that raising teen boys is basically like living with a person who likes to leave all their clothes on the floor, hangs on the refrigerator full of food, and complains that there’s nothing to eat, and answers questions with one word, typically, “fine.”
Today, we’re picking up where we left off in our last episode, tips for teaching young boys to use their words, and advice from an expert. This time we’re stepping into new territory: pre-teens, teens, and young men.
Our returning guest is psychologist, Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst, who has spent nearly 50 years helping families build healthy emotional connections. She’s joining us today to talk about what’s going on in the brains and hearts of our teenage boys, and how to keep the lines of communication open during these critical years.
Welcome back, Dr. Vanderhorst. You survived round one; now we’re heading into male puberty and beyond. God bless us all.
Dr. Vanderhorst: Yes, Suzy, thank you very much. And heading into this territory really is dangerous, right? It’s walking into the jungle or finding yourself in quicksand.
Boys are interesting characters, right? They’re busy, they’re engaged in sports, in academics, socializing, sometimes even hiding in their rooms, and you know, they have a range of emotions that they are just getting used to themselves, right?
When those hormones dump into their system, they change who they are, right? So you might think you’re getting used to them, but they’re also getting used to themselves.
And so it is important. Our adolescents need help; they need to be launched. And you know, like the runway at the airport, you’re the tower, right? You have to check the traffic, and you have to make sure the runway is really safe for them so that they can be successful as they leave home and move into the larger world.
Suzy: And that is the goal, to get them off the couch and out being productive members of society and happy, you know, happy and independent was the goal of my husband and me, which is why I put it on the cover of the book.
Dr. Vanderhorst: You know, you have done such a marvelous job with that book. Every mother, even mothers of girls, should be reading through that, right? Because they’re going to interact with the boyfriends of the girls. They also need to understand how boys are functioning and developing.
Suzy: Right. Thank you.
And in fact, I had a woman who had three girls do a review, one of my first reviews of the book, and she said she was using tips on her girls. And one of the ones she liked the most was when my boys would fight, I would tell them, “You either fix it, or I will fix it, and no one will be happy.”
Dr. Vanderhorst: Right. Well, that’s true.
Suzy: Right? And they typically fixed it because they knew they were not going to be happy with my solution.
You know, when my boys were going into middle school, and there’s a point when, you know, it’s time for them to do their own laundry because they smell, right? Their laundry smells, they smell, the pad smells, smells like teen spirit, it is time to teach them to do their own laundry.
I was really determined to teach the boys to clean up after themselves, to stack the dishwasher, to cook, to do some of those basics. And I call them man-cubs during that stage because they’re man-size, and now they’re, they’re getting closer to my eye level and then surpassing.
Dr. Vanderhorst: That’s right… or taller…
Suzy: Right? They shot up… my youngest, call them Ernest and Exuberance, Exuberance grew four inches in one semester, his junior year. I mean, it was just crazy.
What is happening developmentally here in our man-cubs’ brains, and how can moms support independence and that communication, and still keep a connection?
Dr. Vanderhorst: Yeah. Following your model, I believe, is key. There are so many families that do not prepare their boys or their girls for reality, for the next phase of life. They are going to leave home. They’re going to go to college or they’re going to go to work, and they have to have certain skill sets. And many families do not take that seriously, but every child needs these skills. They need to be able to do their own laundry. They need to be able to clean a bathroom and be serious about picking stuff up, organizing stuff, and vacuuming a place.
I mean, they’re going to end up living with somebody else. You send them off to college, they immediately have a roommate or maybe even two or three, or they might share a suite where there might be six of them sharing a, you know, sharing a bathroom and a kitchen. You better believe that expectations will be heavy for these children, but they also need to know how to manage some other parts of their life, like their bank account and how to track it and how to keep track of paying their credit card bills, right, balancing their checkbook.
You know, I tell parents, you have to be thinking about what this person will be responsible for as they grow, and you should start early.
Suzy: I couldn’t agree more. And I think I sort of arrived at that they have to participate more because I was also working. And I think working moms probably reach that conclusion sooner because there’s just a reality of time.
Dr. Vanderhorst: Right. There’s a “have to.”
Suzy: There is a have to. And, you know, we joke about teen attitudes, but there’s real brain remodeling going on.
Dr. Vanderhorst: That’s right.
Suzy: And you can, you know, as soon as the beard and the hair start coming on their arms and their face, I mean, you can you can see the testosterone coming into their system.
One of the funniest things I ever saw was chaperoning an eighth-grade field trip. And I recommend that for all moms. But you have the girls who are ready to go off to college. I mean, they look like they have totally surpassed. And then you have the boys who are either man-cubs and just coming into their own, or haven’t hit puberty really much at all. And they look like they’re still in elementary school. And it’s hysterical.
Dr. Vanderhorst: That’s really funny.
Suzy: Can you help us understand what’s going on in more of an emotional, neurological, you know, perspective?
Dr. Vanderhorst: Sure.
You know, adolescent boys, I think, are definitely at a social disadvantage. They really don’t have access to the full range of emotions that their sister does. All right. Or other girls in their class.
We allow girls to tap into the full range of emotion. And we train boys very early on to cut off access. So their bodies are changing, their relationships are changing, and their physical size is changing. I mean, they’re being surprised by what’s happening for them physically. And then the dynamic with their peers, some peers are maturing early, some peers are not maturing early.
I mean, the complication of the relationship is just amazing. And they need access to understand themselves, which means they need to be able to identify what they’re feeling.
We’ve robbed them of that capability very early on. So we have to give it back to them.
Dr. Vanderhorst: And you talked about this in our previous podcast, about how to not, you know, cut off, you know, the feelings that younger boys have.
So this is a great follow-up to that.
Dr. Vanderhorst: It is. So I tell, I have a list of feelings, I think it’s four pages long, four columns on each sheet of just names of feelings.
Suzy: Can you give us an example of what’s on the sheet?
Dr. Vanderhorst: There are just tons of feeling words.
Some simple things like lonely, irritated, confused, elated, and I say, put one in the kitchen on the kitchen table, one in the family room, one in the bedroom, so that you have easy access to this list. Because the truth is, we can always identify what we’re feeling. We can’t produce it.
So you take a teenage boy, and he’s feeling something, right? He can’t figure it out, but the list in front of him, he scans through that, two, three, four words will pop out automatically, because your brain is brilliant. It holds onto and identifies all of the feelings that a human being can experience, because that’s your survival mechanism. You came into the world with the ability to identify every feeling a human being can have. You never lose that ability. You just lose access to that storehouse. So this gives you the opportunity to help your adolescent boy access that storehouse.
And then you can have a conversation. I’m feeling demoralized, pops out. Well, hey, instead of just saying, I’m unhappy, I can really work with demoralized. That has a whole different meaning to it, all right? Now we’re off to the races, and we can have a good conversation.
There are so many things that happen for an adolescent, so many changes that are taking place in the brain. I could encourage every parent to do a quick study of the brain and its development, so that you can really understand what your adolescent boy, in particular, is experiencing.
So their impulse control is out of whack. Their ability to kind of plan and organize. Parents will say, “Well, my kid did this impulsive thing. He’s never done anything like that before. It’s crazy. What was he thinking?” Well, I can tell you exactly what he was thinking. He was not thinking. He can’t, right?
There’s such a strong, powerful impulse to have an experience that the impulse overrides everything else. So you’re already into the experience, all right?
So you’ve borrowed mom and dad’s car, and you see a field off the road, and you think, hey, let’s do some off-roading, right?
Suzy: Oh, yeah, that happened to my brother, and a friend did that to my mom in her Honda Civic.
Dr. Vanderhorst: And you tear out the undercarriage of the car, not realizing that you can’t go in a field with stumps or even corn stalks sticking up, right? You’re going to collect a mess.
And they don’t do it intentionally. There’s no absolute, right? It is, I had the idea, and I took action on the idea before anything else.
So the risk-taking is going to increase, the emotional vulnerability and volatility is going to increase, they’re going to be more impulsive, they don’t make good decisions. And it’s really hard for the parent to have the tenderness, it really requires tenderness, to relate to an adolescent boy and appreciate, okay, I get it. It just occurred to you, and you took action on it. There are consequences for taking that action.
And I would say that piece, from my perspective, is really important, that parents know that some consequences have to be in place. They should never be severe, but they should have a learning focus to them.
Suzy: Yeah, and the consequences are so important, and personally, I did not like grounding because that made me the warden, and that took too much time.
Dr. Vanderhorst: It takes way too much monitoring.
Suzy: I just didn’t like that role.
So testosterone plus independence can really spike into conflict and sometimes almost physical, when they start getting, at least for me, when they were really looking directly in my eyes and yelling at me, that was a big deal. And then also there would be sometimes this independence that would go on with their father.
There was certainly a male-male who’s in power, then going on with both of them, that then the mom gets in the middle of. So what are the strategies to help with the power struggles in communication?
Dr. Vanderhorst: First of all, I’m glad that you have brought up the power struggle, because that is a normal, natural part of maturing, particularly for males.
Girls do it as well, but it is particularly powerful for our sons. You can’t avoid the power struggle. Don’t fool yourself that you think you can, because this is a way that they are practicing for adulthood. They need to be able to assert themselves and to have power over others, because sometimes they will need to exercise power.
And it is important that your son be able to win some of those. If I’m always on the losing end, then my ego is really injured, and I won’t be able to be assertive outside of the family system. We need to learn and teach our sons negotiation skills.
They have to be able to, first of all, identify what’s my individual need, what am I actually feeling, and then how can I be assertive about that? What can I focus on? What are my needs? What do I want to experience for myself so that I can communicate that clearly?
And if you want to engage in a longer conversation with an adolescent male, figure out a way not to face that person. Now you might think that sounds crazy, but it isn’t crazy. Go for a ride in a car, go for a walk in the woods, sit on the couch, and don’t face each other so that the adolescent is not distracted by all of the facial expressions and body language that’s going to cause them to be more cautious or to change directions.
Suzy: So one of the things that was most difficult for me is when I knew one of my boys was lying to me, and the tells were different between Earnest and Exuberance. Earnest would spin right down into himself, and Exuberance would be very expressive outward.
And I found that it was often because they were embarrassed about something, and they couldn’t admit it to themselves, and so therefore they were going to lie to me about it because they didn’t want to admit it.
So what kind of tips can you give us about talking?
Dr. Vanderhorst: Yeah, first of all, most of that happens impulsively.
So I think one of the things that goes off track is that parents end up feeling this is intentional. And I would say to you first, imagine this is impulsive, this is not intentional, this is impulsive, it pops out automatically, it’s a form of self-protection, and if you look at it as self-protection, then you can have more empathy for your son than if you look at it as intentional.
So normalizing it is really what I’m saying. I appreciate, I understand that sometimes in order to protect yourself, you’re going to tell me things that aren’t completely true or accurate.
Now, notice that I did not accuse him of lying, right? The accusation that you are a liar is incredibly powerful, but normalizing, which is really what is happening, so I don’t want to box a boy into a corner; I want to give him flexibility.
And I want to appreciate that I can identify with that feeling state, otherwise he’s isolated and he’s all on his own, but I’m not going to disconnect from you, right? And if I accuse you of being a liar, that’s a rejection, that says, I don’t want to be in a relationship with you, and many times parents will say that very directly.
“You’re lying to me, and I don’t want to be in relationship with a liar.” Well, this is an adolescent, right?
This is an adolescent who is experimenting with getting comfortable with a broader range of life experiences, feeling experiences, so they’re not out there calculating, I will lie to you.
Suzy: Right. And it’s amazing what you find out when they’re all grown up. And you sort of suspected it all along, but the confirmation is sometimes like, okay, you could stop sharing now, because we made it through.
School pressure, especially when they’re trying to figure out the girl scenario, the boy pressure, the anxiety, what is the best way to approach a conversation without getting them to go into that shutdown mode about what’s going on, when you can tell that there’s something percolating underneath the surface?
Dr. Vanderhorst: That’s a great question. Anxiety can be really quiet. I tell parents, you have to listen with a third ear. We all get busy. And honestly, if your boy’s not requiring a lot of attention, you can kind of settle into a place where you really lose track of what’s happening inside for him. Or the boy that isolates in his room, you can get uncomfortable and go, Oh, well, I really shouldn’t go in, but there’s a reason to have rituals with your sons.
And it’s very important to have rituals. Sometimes those will be family rituals. We are all going to do fill-in-the-blank, right? And we do this thing every week or every month.
It’s so important that you participate in the things that your boy is interested in as well. So maybe it’s video games. Maybe it’s sports activities. And it’s very important to have even a small ritual with your son. It could be that you walk the dog together, right? And you’re just in the habit of doing that. Some of those walks will be quiet and silent, and some of those walks will just be full of chatter.
Suzy: Yeah, and you’ve got to roll with it.
Dr. Vanderhorst: You’ve got to go with whatever is happening, but keep doing the ritual.
Suzy: Yeah, that’s great.
Sometimes my husband and I couldn’t get through to the boys for one reason or another. And so we would pull in somebody else. And it wasn’t always someone a professional, it could have been an uncle, right? And we would call up the uncle and say, “Hey, could you reach out to Ernest or Exuberance? And this is what I think is going on, but just contact them and say, hey, how you doing? I could use help doing X, Y, and Z, and let them be productive with you.”
And that made a really big difference in the team, I think, in the approach of parenting.
Dr. Vanderhorst: Yes, that is so important, right?
Aunts, uncles, teachers, principals, coaches, right? That team approach is powerful because we are born connected, and we want to continue to establish connections. And so these outreaches are incredibly important for an adolescent, because the adolescent is really constantly asking themselves, Do I belong?
Suzy: Yeah.
Dr. Vanderhorst: Right? Do I belong? Does anybody care? Does anybody want to be in a relationship with me?
Suzy: So Exuberance, in particular, was always testing the boundaries, and he was capable of sneaking out his window and thinking that I wouldn’t notice that there are leaves, and that the screen’s missing. What they thought you wouldn’t notice was always impressive.
And there’s a picture on the cover of my book where he is literally jumping off a cliff, a very, very high cliff. And I discovered that on Instagram. So can you help us understand this decision-making ability? Because there is just such a disconnect.
Dr. Vanderhorst: Well, there is. It’s an impulse. We all have impulses. And as an adolescent, and particularly an adolescent male, those things are generally physical. They want to test themselves in a variety of physical ways.
And I could just see this image that you’re describing of him jumping off the cliff. And if you ask him in midair, why did you do that? He would go, oh, I didn’t even know I did it until, right? And now what am I going to do?
We have to accept that experimentation is going to happen. And I don’t want to shut that off, because one of those experiments, right, might lead to inventing something that’s incredibly valuable to them.
Suzy: So, how do you respond as a parent when you discover that?
Dr. Vanderhorst: So I think the curiosity is just, tell me more. It isn’t, tell me what you were thinking. That’s a criticism. Tell me more. That’s an invitation. I want to hear how this came about, and I want to know now how you feel about it. So I stay connected instead of disconnecting, right?
If it terrifies me, then I need to do some work with myself before I engage that boy, because I don’t want to engage when I’m emotionally heightened in some way.
Tell me more.
Suzy: And not screaming your head off, right?
Dr. Vanderhorst: Not screaming your head off.
Suzy: Even though that’s what you want to do.
Dr. Vanderhorst: Right. Now, I want you to be transparent. Scary for me.
Right. If something’s irritating me, I want you to be transparent. And most of the time, we’re scared.
Suzy: Yeah. Oh, for sure.
Dr. Vanderhorst: The irritation comes second. The fear comes first. And we get irritated or mad to escape our own fear.
Suzy: So, for families where dads or male mentors are not present, what do you recommend for moms and single moms, and how do you build that supportive male influence when they’re teenagers?
Dr. Vanderhorst: Well, you start that when they are preschoolers, right? There has to be a tradition of you showing interest, care, and concern, and having some form of a ritual that communicates to your son that he’s an important person in your life and that there will always be an opportunity for connection.
You have to be intentional about building relationships if you want to have any opportunity to have influence in adolescence, where they actually need guidance, influence and forgiveness for some of the crazy things that they attempt.
But you build that in preschool. That’s where it starts.
Suzy: You know, I was thinking recently that parenting, it takes you like 25 years to know if you are successful.
Dr. Vanderhorst: Right. It does.
Suzy: I mean, it is a long game, right?
Dr. Vanderhorst: It is definitely a long game. And if you are a single parent, whether a single father or a single mother, you need to build a network, right? You have to build a network. Not only for yourself, but for your son as well, because it gets hard to move through adolescence. It’s difficult for the parent. It’s difficult for the son to move through adolescence.
This is a trial-by-fire experience for everyone, and you need to be able to have adult relationships that you can lean into for support and that your son can lean into or that your son will respect when that person comes to lean into him.
Suzy: Right. And I think that that word respect really resonates, you know, because I think that’s what we all want on both sides, right?
Dr. Vanderhorst: Absolutely.
Suzy: So both of my boys, you know, ended up going away to college. And as with everything else, they had very different reactions and experiences. And Ernest went away, and he was homesick, and so we would go and see him and try to make him comfortable and talk to him and help him with the confidence and the self-confidence.
But when Exuberance went away, he was like, mic drop, I do not have to talk with mom and dad anymore. I am… later crazy people. I mean, he was off the radar. And would not communicate, right? I would have to stalk him. And so I finally said, because I’m not above bribing, I think bribing can be an effective communication pattern.
Anyway, I said…
Dr. Vanderhorst: Let’s call it contracting.
Suzy: Okay. Contracting. I did. I had negotiated a contract with him, and I told him he had to communicate with me once a week. In fact, I called it Proof of Life Money. And I would sometimes text him POL$ to remind him that we had not had this proof of life conversation.
And so I negotiated an amount of money with him just so that he could have some spending money. And we had rules. This was also part of the negotiation of what did I considered a phone call. So if I called him, that didn’t count. He had to call me. And when he called me, he had to tell me his high of the week, the best thing that happened to him that week, the low of the week, and what was the worst thing that happened. And then this is really sort of important, and I did it accidentally, but I said, You have to ask me how I am.
And so we learned how to have adult conversations during that period. And it wasn’t like you have to talk to me for an X amount of time. But those are the three things that have to happen. And then I would send him the money. And it only lasted about a semester, then he got a job on campus.
But he would call me, and he knew how to have a conversation with me now. And it just totally changed our relationship.
Dr. Vanderhorst: Oh, absolutely. You taught him to ride a bicycle. That’s exactly what you were doing, right?
Suzy: Yeah. And all future girlfriends appreciated it.
Dr. Vanderhorst: And future bosses, future co-workers, right? You just gave him the basics of having a relationship and maintaining a relationship with someone who has these elements.
Other people out there that you meet and interact with will expect you will show an interest in them. They will show an interest in you. And that you will have conversations that have some meat to them. So it’s fabulous.
Suzy: Yeah.
Dr. Vanderhorst: I think everybody should use your process with their teenagers.
Suzy: Well, I also found that you can’t ask them to do more than three things. So you have to keep all the communication.
Dr. Vanderhorst: That’s right.
Suzy: No more than three. Three is the magic number.
So before we wrap up, if a parent does feel that there are some signs that are being troubled and their sons do need some sort of support, do you have any suggestions for where to start?
Dr. Vanderhorst: So, first start with observation. You really need to be looking at your son and not be intimidated so that you don’t look.
So key behaviors that need immediate action are the boy who isolates himself in his room and starts to withdraw from family experiences or events, right? Doesn’t show up for dinner, for example.
If there are physical changes that seem to be out of character, for example, all right, the guy starts wearing long sleeves and long pants in weather where you would think, gosh, he should be in a t-shirt and shorts. What’s all of this covering up about?
Or any other changes, changes in relationships, changes in friend groups, changes in grades or loss of interest in things that have been concerning in the past and enjoyable in the past. These are signs that you need to pay attention and that you need to be serious.
It would be just like noticing, well, his nose is running all the time. His nose is running all the time, there’s something wrong. Same thing is true with behavior. When behavior changes, you really need to be taking it seriously and you need to move towards that son, not away from him.
Suzy: You know, you talked earlier about the rituals and dinner, you just mentioned dinner. And in an earlier podcast, we interviewed a mom of seven, and she gave us her Top 10 Tips. And she had four boys, three girls. And one of the things that she said was, because we asked her, what do you do with dinner? I mean, how could you have a family dinner when you have people going in so many different directions?
And she said that what they would do is they would have dessert. So at the end of the day, even if it was like a bowl of fruit and everyone would get around the table and just have a little bit of dessert or a cookie or something, that it didn’t have to be the full meal. It didn’t have to be that long time, but they tried to have a ritual of dessert.
Dr. Vanderhorst: It’s fabulous. It is so powerful when the family can come together for any period of time, for any reason or function. Sometimes it’s, you know, come together and play a game, right?
Doesn’t have to be around food. It could be come together and everybody take a walk, go have a picnic. And it doesn’t have to happen every day, but it does have to be ritualized. So it is expected by everyone and everybody gets an opportunity to participate, to look forward to it, to be irritated by it, to have some emotional reaction to it, but they still participate because we all need to be connected, and we need to know that we really belong someplace and somebody else cares about me.
Suzy: Oh, so true. So true.
So as we wrap up our podcast, I ask all of our guests to give us a little mantra, something for moms to say to themselves as they are, you know, dealing with their teenage son, their adolescent son. So what would you suggest?
Dr. Vanderhorst: The first thing that comes to mind is I will survive this.
Suzy: I will survive, I’m going to break into song.
Dr. Vanderhorst: Because it’s true, you will, right?
And you will have a stronger relationship with your son because you have been conscious about building through this period where they are a challenge, and they need to be a challenge, so that they’re prepared for the next phase of life.
Suzy: And I do want to tell all the moms going through this that I call that last phase of life, you know, so far, the remarkable transformation, because just when you think they’re never going to get it, it’s like somehow it just all kind of snaps together around 23, 25, you know, in that early 20 period, and it is remarkable.
Dr. Vanderhorst: Yeah, that’s when their brain is actually fully developed. It coordinates with the development of the brain.
Suzy: Well, Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst, thank you so much for joining us.
Dr. Vanderhorst: You’re welcome. I’ve enjoyed.
Suzy: We really appreciate it. And I’m sure all the moms listening, hang in there.
This too will pass. And although your teens may not show it, they really need you more than ever. So take those grunts or hip checks or those signs of affection, which can be a little clumsy, take it as a positive.
Thank you. Make sure to subscribe, share this episode with a fellow boy mom and stay tuned for more conversations on raising kind, confident young men.
