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

episode, we'll be discussing teens and life purpose. This is a big topic.

I'm going to throw it right to you, Ken, because you've been reading up on this.

I have. This is what made me think of it. I know. You've been thinking about. Yeah.

Well, so in, in, just recently, a University of Illinois study came out. They had,

it's really not complicated research. They just did some survey

stuff on about 200 teenagers. And the headline was about, this was published in the Journal of

Happiness. Yes, we have a journal of happiness research. So anyway, and it said teens who

scored higher on purpose in life were more satisfied with

their lives and experienced more positive emotions and fewer negative emotions. So I'll read that

again. Teens who scored high on their sense of purpose were more satisfied with their

lives and experienced more positive emotions

and fewer negative emotions. I think one of the reasons I thought about this is that, first of all,

you have to think about psych research, like the stuff that comes out like, what are you people

doing that you say these things things and sometimes you'll hear an

outcome of a study that if you step back you go uh yeah so you're saying that you feel good if you know

that your life has purpose and meaning you have to go do a study on that uh you know that that

so it's kind of obvious, but, you know,

I always find these things kind of fascinating, but it also is sort of, to me, is one of the

dangers of how we look at psychology research, then even parenting. Like, like, the problem here is,

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