Global Speaker Series: Damour Touts Warmth and Structure as Parenting Goal

Lisa Damour, PhD, a clinical psychologist and best-selling author of three books with a fourth on the way, had a simple message for all those people trying so hard to be perfect parents: stop. 

“Good-enough parenting is better for your children,” said Damour, who added that the phrase was first coined by English pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. “Perfect is a bad model.” 

Damour, who kicked off this year’s Global Speaker Series Sept. 30 in the CFA’s Hale Theater, said that society’s overcorrection from the relatively laissez-faire parenting styles of the 1970s — which she emphasized is not some idyllic model to emulate — has helped to create this “intensive parenting phase” where parents, chock full of good intentions, are trying to protect their children from a host of new dangers and forgetting that, by its very nature, development during the teenage years is a bumpy process. 

So what should parents do? Damour, who partners with Thayer’s Peer Education Collaborative in its health & wellness component, made that clear as well: provide warmth and structure, the two factors demonstrably proven to help young people thrive. 

“Your job,” she told parents during the night’s informative Q&A session with Head of School Chris Fortunato P ’26, ’28, “is to provide a reasonable amount of warmth and structure, and you can’t get an A in both at the same time.” To make her point, she offered the example of a teenager asking to stay up late to watch a favorite movie together — to say “no” is to score poorly in warmth but well in structure; to say “yes” is to produce the opposite result. 

With the head of school’s prompting, Damour then posed a question to the audience: If your child needs cupcakes for a school event, should you: (A) make them from scratch; (B) make them from a mix; or (C) buy them at the store? She then quickly answered her own question. 

“The answer is whatever boosts your warmth at home,” she said. “There’s no right cupcake answer. There’s a what-builds-warmth-in-your-home answer.” 

Damour’s evening Q&A with Fortunato capped an entire day’s visit to campus. At an Upper School assembly, she discussed the power of norms — those created by the law, by family, by religious institutions, by schools, by sports teams, etc. — and urged students to pay attention to the norms affecting their lives and their development. Particularly, Damour hammered home the incredible power of social media and social media algorithms, which often have a profit motive behind them. 

“Think really carefully about the norms shaping your behavior,” said Damour, noting the incredible norm shifts in her own lifetime regarding marijuana and gambling, both “over there” topics during her teenage years but now much more part of the mainstream. 

At the Middle School Damour facilitated a discussion on how to handle conflict in a healthy, effective way. She began by reassuring the young students that conflict is a normal part of everyday life. She then walked the students through less healthy ways of dealing with conflict, from being “a bulldozer” (aggressive) to “a doormat” (passive) to “a spikey doormat” (passive aggressive). A better approach, she told students, is to be “a pillar,” addressing the conflict directly with respect for yourself and the other person. She even offered the concept of “emotional Aikido,” or the skill of deciding when a conflict is small enough to simply let go. Damour’s down-to-earth approach infused with humor helped these messages to land with students. After the talk students had lunch by advisory and engaged in dialogue about their experience with conflict and friendships. 

At the evening Q&A Damour touched upon all these topics and more, including healthy stress, the dangers of burnout, anxiety and ways to deal with it, healthy coping, the unhealthy roles of guilt and shame, adolescent drinking, the prevalence of porn among teenage boys, the prevalence of body image pressures among teenage girls, the rapid growth of AI, and the often lonely nature or raising teenagers. 

“We’re all doing the best we can,” Damour said at one point. 

Damour is the author of three New York Times best sellers: Untangled, Under Pressure, and The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, which have been translated into 23 languages. Her new book, The Emotional Lives of Parents, will be published Feb. 9 of 2027 and is available for pre-order. Damour hosts the Ask Lisa podcast, works in collaboration with UNICEF, and is recognized as a thought leader by the American Psychological Association.

The Thayer Global Speaker Series brings thought leaders, innovators, and difference-makers to the Thayer campus to engage the community in issues that matter to the world.