First love can feel all-consuming—especially for teens navigating overwhelming emotions, identity, and digital pressure all at once.

In this episode of Where Parents Talk, host Lianne Castelino sits down with acclaimed journalist, professor, and author Lisa A. Phillips, whose book "First Love: Guiding Teens Through Relationships and Heartbreak" explores the emotional rollercoaster of teen romance.

The conversation unpacks the deep impact of first love and heartbreak on adolescent mental health—and how today’s always-connected world is shaping those experiences in new, often challenging ways.

What role should parents play?

How do social media and smartphones complicate modern relationships?

How can we help teens build resilience while respecting their growing independence?

From the importance of consent and healthy communication to navigating online drama and emotional overwhelm, this episode offers practical, compassionate strategies for parents—and timely insights for anyone supporting a teen.

Key Takeaways:

• First love is intense—and real. Fuelled by hormonal shifts, adolescent emotions are heightened, making early romantic experiences feel deeply powerful and, at times, overwhelming.
• Open communication is essential. Parents who foster a safe, non-judgmental space for honest conversations can help teens better navigate the highs and lows of young relationships.
• Validation builds trust. Dismissing teen relationships as “just a phase” can damage emotional connection. Acknowledging their feelings shows respect and reinforces emotional well-being.
• Social media reshapes relationships. From texting to TikTok, digital platforms influence how teens express love, face rejection, and seek validation—often intensifying emotional challenges.

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• New York Times
• Cosmopolitan
• Psychology Today
• State University New York
• Making Caring Common

This podcast is for parents, guardians, teachers and caregivers to learn proven strategies and trusted tips on raising kids, teens and young adults based on science, evidenced and lived experience.

You’ll learn the latest on topics like managing bullying, consent, fostering healthy relationships, and the interconnectedness of mental, emotional and physical health.

Links referenced in this episode:

• whereparentstalk.com

Foreign.

Welcome to the Where Parents Talk podcast. We help grow better parents through science, evidence and the lived experience of other parents.

Learn how to better navigate the mental and physical health of your tween teen or young adult through proven expert advice. Here's your host, Lianne Castelino.

Why does first love matter? And how can parents better support their teen through relationships and heartbreak? Welcome to Where Parents Talk. My name is Lianne Castelino.

Our guest today is an accomplished journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Cosmopolitan, and Psychology Today. Lisa Phillips is also associate professor of journalism at State University New York, and she's an author.

Her latest book is called First Guiding Teens Through Relationships and Heartbreak. Lisa is also a mother of one, and she joins us today from Woodstock, New York. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Thank you for having me.

Really interesting topic because it doesn't really get talked about a lot, I find, just in general terms. You've written about relationships and mental health and teens for major publications.

What drew you to explore the subject of teen love in particular?

What drew me to explore this subject was my daughter. Shortly after she turned 13, she started dating a neighbor boy. I mean, literally, as I look through the woods, I can just about see his house.

And he was very nice. And they had, for a middle school relationship, quite a fine relationship. I was not fine, though.

I was really worried and worried in this profound way that was out of proportion to what was happening. I was worried what would happen if they were in his house or at our house alone together. I was worried about the emotions.

I was worried about the fact that middle school relationships typically don't last. So I was scared that my daughter was going to get her heart broken. And the feelings were so intense.

Kind of that same vigilance that parents sometimes feel when their kids are really, really small, newborn, that kind of thing when they just all they want to do is protect them. That I really felt I needed to listen to those feelings.

And there were other reasons to listen to those feelings, too, which is that as a journalist who'd been covering mental health and relationships for a number of years, I knew how important this was going to be for her to have an entry into what I call love life that, you know, felt healthy. So I started doing what journalists do, which is to look around at what books are out there, who's talking about this?

And what I found was that though there was quite a bit and quite a bit of quality material on sex and sexuality, there was not as much. There was a real dearth, a Real silence around the emotions of first relationship experiences.

And when I say the word experiences, I include crushes and dating and all kinds of things along that spectrum of experiences. So because I saw that hole, I thought, well, this is the book I need to write, because this is the book that I need to read.

And I certainly can't be alone in this.

So really interesting. Now take us through why first love in particular, as you talk about that is such a powerful experience for teens.

And what makes it feel more intense, let's say, than an adult relationship, for example.

Well, adolescence is a time when emotions are powerful. The brain is developing in a way that will help young people navigate the social world on their own.

So they have to be sensitive to things like how people look at them, how people treat them, whether they reject them or not. All those things. It's just that's part of what the work of being a teen is all about.

So, of course, the feelings of romantic attraction and romantic relationships are going to be particularly intense because as we all know, any of us who've been in love know those feelings are innately powerful throughout the life cycle.

So you're sort of adding powerful feelings of adolescence plus powerful feelings of love and the fact that the adolescent has never experienced this before, so you have the novelty of it all. All those things combine to make first romantic experiences incredibly powerful and meaningful.

However, in our culture, we don't always treat them that way.

So often our first impul, especially if we're talking about younger kids, 13, 14, 12, is to minimize, because we want to see it as puppy love, as cute or sweet. But I also think we want to minimize it because we're kind of freaked out about how strong those feelings actually are.

So along those lines, then, many parents do see, you know, teen sort of romance as trivial, as fleeting. So what would you say to somebody who brushes, brushes it off, brushes off their teen in terms of their first heart heartbreak.

You know, just telling them something like, it's just puppy love, or, you know, some of the terms that we often use.

I would say that the first step would be to ask yourself to take a pause on that word. Just, just a crush, just first love, just puppy love, just teen romance. Because we don't need to do that.

It's just not true and not validating of the young person's experience to do that.

And I also think it's not validating of where we are, that because adults and parents react in this way about first love, because we're scared of those feelings, we experience them ourselves. And we want to minimize our child's level of reactivity and stress around it and pain around it.

Potentially, if it's something that's ending or not requited, that that is what I would call an earnest but misguided attempt to do that when you really just, just can't do it. So what I would say is, from the time your child starts talking about crushes, and this is something that is not.

I'm the journalist, this is from the experts that I've spoken with, and this is also from the teens that I've spoken with.

The most important thing you can do is to validate what's going on with your child and to take an interest, because that first thing that your child feels that's in that landscape of love and relationships and crushes is a first opportunity for parents to show that they value love and relationships and their various ups and downs and challenges. When you minimize.

Young people, especially at that age, are remarkably quick, and I heard this again and again in my interviews, they're remarkably quick to shut down and say, well, if my parents aren't treating this as a big deal, then I'm just not going to go there with them. I don't need to go there with them.

They're going to tell themselves they don't need their parents when in fact they very well do, and they'll shut down often for several years. They'll carry those early experiences with them of like, oh, my parents don't think this is important. It is important to me.

So I'm going elsewhere to get validation of that importance. Take that step. If your urge is to minimize, take that step in the other direction and be curious what's going on? Let's talk about it.

So where were you on that spectrum, Lisa, as a mom yourself, who's watching this, you know, unfolding before your eyes and is, you know, moved to want to learn more. Where were you with your daughter in terms of. Of that very question.

Oh, I love that you asked that. I don't get asked that a lot. Of course, I was super curious.

I would have asked her all the questions in my mind every day for hours, if I would have let myself.

I had to actually be careful in the other direction, which is that I was worried that, especially because I have a daughter, that if I place too much emphasis on every little in and out that she would feel over identified with the person she was in relationships with. And she's straight. So I think that's particularly important.

She says Even now she's 21 now, and she says, like, mom, everybody in your family, all they want to do is talk about. About my boyfriend, you know, what about it? Kind of. She didn't put it this way, but it was like, what about me?

So what I did was I. I kind of titrated it.

I just gave myself little doses of curiosity, tried to give it a lot of space, and tried to communicate whether she was up for talking or not, about what was going on, that I was there and I was curious and I was interested, and that was my way of treating it, along with doing things like talking about situations that wasn't. That weren't directly hers. You know, if something came up on tv, we listened to certain podcasts together that I would use those as portals into.

Okay, where's your mind at? Around relationships and sexuality and all of those things. And that was how I approached it.

So I was definitely on the spectrum of very curious, very interested, and not wanting to overdo and overwhelm, because that is something that young people can pick up on as well.

So then what led you to writing this book, First Love? What was your impetus?

Because you talked about having done some research and finding that there wasn't really anything directly related or focused on this theme that you've written about. So what was the impetus and catalyst for you? And also then what was your approach in writing this book?

I think that when I began to look at the research early on, I came across a statistic by a wonderful organization called Making Caring Common, and it happened to be run by a man that I had done some work for years ago. His name is Richard Weisbord. He's brilliant. I call him my.

My rabbi in these matters because I. I've been, you know, asking him basically, my daughter's whole life questions about parenting, and he's so wise on those issues. But to circle around to this. This outcome from Making Caring Commons research.

More than 70% of young people between the ages of 18 and 25 wish they had gotten more information from their parents about romantic relationships. And so this was the confirmation that this wasn't just about me and my worries. This was something that young people actually crave.

And when they're actually teens, like 15, 16, they may not be in a place to be like, hey, I really want all this information from my parents. In fact, they may act the opposite, as if they. They don't care.

They don't want to hear from you, but to find ways in regardless, which is a big part of what my book is about, those communication strategies of finding ways to make connections and talk about this subject, you have to keep telling yourself those little touches where you're asking questions and expressing curiosity capacity are so worth it because if you don't do it, if you don't try to engage, later on they'll feel this hole of like hey, I really, I really wanted more guidance with this stuff.

It's never too late, of course, but just the fact that that young people look back on their teen lives and miss it if they don't get the information made me feel like, okay.

What I can do with this book is give parents resources and scenarios from across the spectrum of relationship experiences where they are hearing from experts, from parents and from teens themselves about what is going to where parents can be supportive, where they can be allies to the their young people as they go through this journey of working through the various problems and challenges of romantic relationships.

So take us through that journey a little bit, Lisa, in terms of having that vantage point which you bring by the way, that multi layered perspective of being a parent, a journalist, a professor. So you're looking at it through all those lenses. Plus you've got sort of market research, let's call it, in your own home with your daughter.

And you know, what did you learn through the research that maybe gave you pause?

What did I learn that gave me pause? That's a really good question.

I think one thing that gave me pause was that at certain points it is very effective for parents to reveal things about their past romantic experiences. At other points it is absolutely not.

So I'll try to make that difference for you and for your listeners clear when you are in a non crisis situation talking to your child.

And I also want to keep in mind that there are people listening perhaps who are trusted adults and not parents themselves or not parents of the child who's going through this.

So when you're talking to a young person about relationships in a general way and they're not an immediate problem, that telling stories about your past can be really effective and they hang in young people's minds.

Mom's bad boyfri, who she went through a rough couple years with and had to seek help in certain ways and so forth becomes this kind of like mythical figure in coming of age of many young people. And they like that, they like hearing about those difficult things.

As long as you're careful about just those basic things about not, you know, not expecting your child to take care of you. For example, like if you're still suffering directly from some kind of trauma, you're not necessarily wanting to shovel that onto your child. Child.

But if you're talking about it in a way that shows that you have learned and you've grown from something, even if it was very, very difficult, those things are incredibly important to young people. And if you keep some of that stuff secret, that can often be very young people kind of know. It's very interesting.

That came out a lot too in my interviews. So.

But when your child has just been dumped by someone they were crazy about, that is not the time to talk about your breakups and your past difficulties. That is the time to be like, all right, let's dig in, validate where you are right now.

Do some concrete problem solving with the immediacy of the situation. But that's not going to be a time to bring up your old stuff.

So the, those two things really made me pause and think about my own habits and what kinds of conversations was I having when and was I taking that care to choose my moments.

So much of what we're talking about here really is rooted in the strength of the communication that parent and child have with each other. And it's not the same in every household or with each child in a household, etc. Etc.

What would you say are some of the key communication strategies when we're now talking about something this intensely personal for a young person that maybe parents should keep in mind?

Yeah, one of them I have already mentioned, which is that when you belittle, even if completely unintentionally, or express a judgment early on in a young person's romantic explorations, that can lead you into a really tricky spot.

And I want to keep, I want to add to that a bit, which is it doesn't mean you can never express thoughts or feelings or values that you feel you need to express to your child.

But if you, for example, if your child announces, if you have a daughter and your daughter says, I have a girlfriend and your daughter's like 13 or 14, and you come back at her with, as one parent did to one of the young women I interviewed for my book with, how do you know you don't like boys? Right? You're going to get like that sense of judgment right away of like, wait a second, I just shared something important and vulnerable.

And then now I feel like my parent is questioning who I feel I am right now without any real curiosity that, you know, you really want to avoid that, that kind of shutting down, belittling, judging, which can sometimes be extremely well intentioned, not meant to harm. But those kinds of things have lasting power And I just. It was a theme in my book again and again and again, and then other communication strategies.

I think that I always tried to keep in mind the parent who would tell me, my teen doesn't talk to me, doesn't talk about personal stuff, because there are many teens like that. I had years like that in my own household. So the game then is to.

Again, not overwhelmingly, but just regularly expressing interest, being like, hey, I'm still here. I'm still here.

And we all have to reckon with the fact that as parents of teens, we can get incredibly frustrated by being brushed off, by being told it's none of our business, all of that stuff.

But I think to continue to try to explore external material again, like books and movies together, to philosophize about romantic situations in a way that can sometimes get young people going, like if there's some kind of a scenario in their school. And, you know, none of us like to gossip or whatever, but sometimes you have a situation where person A is cheating on person B, right?

And even though there are things about it where you want to be careful about rumors and gossiping and so forth, you can kind of draw back and say, like, okay, well, why do you think one person would do that to another person and look at it as a philosophical problem? And young people. I also teach ethics in my life as a professor.

Young people get really excited by those kinds of questions, and they don't really have that many spaces to talk about stuff like that. And so I think things like that can be helpful, too.

So there are many more tips and moments in my book that can help lubricate those processes for parents. But those are some places to start.

Curious as to what you uncovered, what you heard from the teens that you interviewed with respect to how they would prefer their parents behave during this time of their life. When they are exploring relationships or are experiencing a first love or heartbreak for that matter, what do they want to see from their parents?

That's a good one. So what do they want to see they definitely want. I mean, of course, some young people will be like, I want to be left alone. I don't want rules.

I want to be able to go where I want, do sleepovers, what have you. But what I think young people want is transparency and dialogue. And they may not say it in those ways. I want transparency and dialogue.

But what I would hear over and over again would be situations where certain rules were laid down and the teen would just feel like, wait, I don't really know why these rules are there and these Rules are really getting in the way of, of talking about things.

So I think that young people want this kind of open door because, for example, if you're criticizing a young woman's way of dressing too sexy, too this too that, you can certainly put limits on how someone dresses and so forth. But what can happen is that that young woman, that teen girl, can do this calculation of like, I'm not supposed to be sexy or sexual.

Therefore, when I'm in a situation where being sexy and sexual is actually happening because I'm in a relationship, I don't know how to talk to my parents about this.

And in a few cases in my book, the situations got really grew tragic, became abusive relationships, and the, the problems around that grew more complicated because of this like, thing in that. That that girl's head, which is, I can't go to my mom about this because it has to do with sex.

So I think a certain amount of being willing, even if a parent is not going to like, set the same, even if a parent has different values than their kid, right around having sex, for example, or around dating or anything else, finding a way to continue to communicate no matter what is really, really important.

A kind of amnesty where it's like, if something really tough is going on or if you're in a situation you don't know how to get out of, just come to me no matter what. I think that is something that young people really, really, really want and frankly really need.

Let's dive into that a little bit more because, you know, when you talk about going through something emotionally difficult, heartbreak, something not working out, or in your example, something even more tragic, what do parents need to keep in mind if they, let's say, feel like that may be happening, but they're not sure? Again, you know, trying to be gently curious, but at the same time there's a sense of urgency.

You know, what are some things for parents to keep in mind in that scenario?

Okay, so if you're suspecting abuse or not a healthy situation, great. It's not great, but I'm glad you asked the question because that's a really important part of this.

So I have a long track record in my life of being active around issues of sexual assault and domestic violence. It was a trained volunteer, wrote about it as a journalist, did a lot.

But there were some things that were really difficult to see in the my own daughter and her world. And I write about that in the book.

I share that because it's really important for parents to just be aware that we're Going to potentially get into our own way if we're not in touch with where we're at around these issues, what our old messages are, if we want to be able to see their world as plainly as possible.

If you're suspecting something's going on and the young person in your life is defending the situation, that is incredibly common and also incredibly scary because they're standing up for something that could potentially be really hurting them, dangerous to them.

One of the teen dating abuse experts that I spoke with gave me a really important tool, which is to dialogue with your child around the ideas of the feeling and the fact. Because the child may be defending the situation on the basis of but I love him, but I love her.

But alongside of those have to be some facts, which is that you're telling me things that suggest that this person could be dangerous to you at some point. So I hear that you love this person.

But what do we do when, for example, when they drive off in a car with you and you unlock the doors and you're not sure how to get out, Things where a child feels entrapped, where you want to set a new passcode on your phone and the other person isn't letting you, things like that.

So along with the feelings that they have that they are calling love and could be feeling as love, you want to be dealing with, with the facts of you could be in danger. Let's have a plan for you if you are feeling endangered.

And let's continue to collect data, meaning what really are you doing when someone needs to have the passcode to your phone and your Instagram password and all these other really personal things that you're not supposed to share with anyone. What's really going on there? So sort of like validating the love, which is like a really horrible prospect, right, for any parent to do.

Be like, okay, you are attached to this person, even if this person is unhealthy to you. But if you don't validate the love, then the relationship will go underground, you won't be able to access it.

So you're validating that there are strong feelings and you're focusing on data and facts and strategy and hopefully getting the young person to more expert sources of help along with that. But carrying that feeling and fact together can be incredibly important and powerful in getting a young person out of an abusive situation.

This is only a small tip for a big, big problem.

There's a lot more in the book about this situation that I hope no one here is going through, but odds are it's happening to one out of every three teens. Odds are someone out there listening, many people out there listening will say, okay, yeah, I need to go deeper into this.

You talk about social media and I wonder how much does that whole world, along with texting and the digital culture, how does that impact, you know, how kids are experiencing love and heartbreak today?

Oh, man, it, it's everything, right? I, I always think about the, you know, when I was a teen and had a crush in math class, right? John C. In my math class in seventh grade. Remember him?

Well, I would go home and there'd be one phone in the household and there was limited access.

If somebody tried to call me like a boy tried to call me, right, the whole household would know I'd only have a few minutes on the phone because someone else needed the phone, that kind of thing. And now everybody's got this device where possibilities are endless.

Possibilities for checking for signs of interest, checking for signs that the person is interested in somebody else, checking to see if they liked your post or your story or your reel or your TikTok, all those things. So the feelings are endless and the sense of always needing information from someone is endless.

And this is actually very burdensome for young people. They would say all the time, my experience with someone over text is completely different from my experience with someone in person.

What do I do about that?

If I'm off to college, how do I tell my long distance boyfriend that I just don't want to be watching movies with him every night instead of going out with my friends and absorbing college life? So it's like constantly recently posing challenges for young people.

We tend to talk about young people as like, oh, they're so addicted, they can't live without their phones. They did not ask for this.

And all those addictive qualities which were engineered and developed by, you know, multinational corporations that are worth billions feed right into the innate addictiveness and obsessiveness of love. So it's really, really rough, right? It's rough and it's endless.

So that is something that basically parents can never forget that their child is sort of never able to gain distance from whatever romantic challenge they're going through, like any other social challenge. And that is an incredibly difficult way to go through things.

Lisa, what would you want readers of First Love to take away from your book?

I would want them to take away something that that doesn't quite fit into an interview or conversation, which is the abundance of testimonials from parents and from teens about their lived experiences around these things. I didn't want this to just be like a book of facts and research.

I wanted people to really feel the specific experiences that young people go through, the ways they get stuck, the ways they're in pain, and the ways that they're in joy around these things, too.

So I think that, that I want people to turn to the book for information and advice and research, but also for that sense of, like, I'm not alone in this. This is important.

Here's a whole world of other people who have gone through this, worked out problems, faced difficult challenges, and gotten to a place where they felt they had wisdom to share with the journalist.

So much insight shared. Lisa, thank you so much for your time.

Lisa Phillips, Associate professor of Journalism at the State University of New York, author of First Love Guiding Teens Through Relationships and Heartbreak. We really appreciate your time and your perspective.

Thank you so much for having me.

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