You are listening to Feeding the Mouth That Bites You with Ashley Parrish and Jessica Pfeiffer.

A weekly podcast guide on parenting teens and launching them into the world.

As always, we are joined by psychologist and author, Dr. Ken Wilgus.

Hey, everyone, and welcome back.

On today's podcast, we'll be discussing critical teenagers and critical parents.

This is going to be an interesting episode, Dr. Ken, because it's hard when your teenager

criticizes you.

Sometimes you recognize some of that criticism in yourself.

So I'm looking forward to this episode and talking about some of the aspects of critical thinking towards each

other, critical words towards each other. Yeah, we aim for critical thinking. That's a good thing.

That's not the kind of thing we're talking about. Not the same. You know, I think it's one of the

reasons why when I, you know, I do family therapy, if you will, with teenagers and their parents,

but I rarely have them in the room together just because when I, you know, I do family therapy, if you will, with teenagers and their parents,

but I rarely have them in the room together just because it really depends on the teenager, whether I can trust that they're going to be constructive and able to really put into words

the things that they are concerned about rather than just kind of launching into a tirade in which parents have a bad

habit of answering as well.

It just kind of becomes this sort of criticism battle and it's not very useful.

What's hard?

You feel engaged when they start to fight with you and criticize the way you do things or

tell you you you're doing it all wrong.

Well, it surprises me some on how many teenagers nowadays do that. I don't think, I mean, I'm sure I was

critical in my parents, but not much and not very loud. You just, you know, we've said so many

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