This is NPR's Life Kit, with tools to help you get it together.

Hey everybody, Mary Elsa Garrett here.

Remember what it was like to be a teenager?

Life was so exciting, so full of possibility, and also so damn painful.

You know, one day your crush stops by your locker and chats you up. And the next he has a girlfriend.

One day you're completely in sync with your best friends, and the next they're freezing you out and you don't know why.

The ups and downs would be a lot for anyone to handle, but that's especially true for teenagers whose brains are still developing.

Psychologist Lisa DeMour has dedicated her career to working with teens.

I have an enormous personal fondness for teenagers. I think it is such an extraordinary and pivotal time of life.

And what I really appreciate about teenagers is that they are heat seeking missiles for dishonesty.

They can smell it or detect it at a hundred yards.

And I think there is something about the rigor with which they engage the world and their high expectations for the adults around them.

That I find incredibly compelling both intellectually but also in terms of my own.

Personal development, I sort of feel like if you can get a right with a teenager you're probably getting it right.

She says thankfully there are tools you can use to help the teenagers in your life work through their hard moments and big emotions.

On this episode of LifeKit, NPR's Rachel Martin talks with Demore about those tools and about her new book, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers,

Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescence.

By the way, even if you're not a parent or a caregiver to a teen, stay tuned because there's a lot in here about how to feel and also how to show up for your loved ones regardless of their age.

Can you help us explain or help us understand what is actually happening inside a teenager's brain?

They are actually undergoing a pretty grand neurological renovation that kicks off with puberty and often kicks off even before adults can see the outward signs of puberty.

And that over time will make their brain much more powerful and efficient.

But one of the real challenges for being a teenager and being around a teenager is that their brain does not upgrade all it wants.

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