Dr Rick Smith on Why You Only Get Two Questions With Your Teenager

Parents in Hong Kong ask me the same questions in different words. Why won't my teenager talk to me? Is the phone the problem? Should I be worried about the IB, the tutoring load, the silence at dinner?

Here is what I've come to believe, and what our conversation kept returning to when I sat down with adolescent psychologist Dr Rick Smith: the phone is almost never the whole problem, the silence at dinner is usually a response to something, and the thing worth watching isn't a mood on any given Tuesday. It's a pattern.

“

I never work with a kid in mental health that has mental health issues who exercises at the same time. Like it just doesn't happen.

Dr Rick Smith

Watch Video7:21

Mental Health Has a Floor, and It's Boring

Before anyone reaches for a diagnosis, an app, or a therapy modality, look at the floor the whole thing stands on. Sleep. Other people. Food. Movement. Sunlight. Unglamorous, unbillable, and the first things to go in a city where a teenager's evening can disappear into tutoring, exam prep, and a screen.

When I asked him what actually matters, he didn't reach for anything clever. Good sleep, time with other people, an okay diet, moving around. "This stuff really matters," he said, and then the clause that does the real work: "things that deviate from the fundamentals are huge red flags."

That last clause is the useful part. Deviation is the signal. Not a bad week, not a slammed door, but sleep that never recovers, a diet that's gone chaotic, a body that has stopped moving.

Movement is the one I'd watch hardest. He put it about as starkly as a clinician can: he has never once worked with a kid in real mental health trouble who was exercising at the same time. "It just doesn't happen."

This doesn't mean exercise cures depression. It means the absence of movement reliably shows up next to adolescent mental health problems, and you don't need a label before you act on it. If your teen has stopped moving, stopped seeing friends, and stopped sleeping, you already have enough information.

Screens Aren't the Problem. The Missing Skill Set Is

Parents usually arrive with one request: get them off the phone. It's the wrong request, and it's wrong in an interesting way. The fights over YouTube, the deleted apps, the timers that get argued into oblivion by Thursday, none of that is a screen strategy. It's what you do when you don't have one.

The real challenge, as he framed it, sits with the adults, not the kids. Parents "don't have the tools and they're not equipped, and they're just trying things like timers and deleting apps and fighting over YouTube." Those aren't a plan. They're what's left when there was never a plan.

What need is the screen meeting?

A phone is rarely just a phone. It can be escape from academic pressure, access to peers when school feels hostile, status, novelty, or the only place a teenager still feels competent at something. Remove the screen and you've removed the coping strategy. The need is still sitting there, now with nowhere to go.

Making real life more interesting than the phone

So the target isn't minutes per day. It's the life the phone is competing against. As he put it, "it's not about less screens, it's about getting their life to be the type of life that is more interesting than a screen - that they actually want to live."

That is much harder than installing a screen-time app, which is precisely why parents reach for the app. It means friends, movement, projects, a room in the house where nobody is being evaluated. In Hong Kong's always-on digital culture, that work matters more than any rule about hours. If this dynamic sounds familiar in your own life rather than your kid's, how to be a man in the always-on digital world is the adult version of the same problem.

You Get Two Questions. Spend Them Well

Most parents think the problem is that their teen won't open up. The sharper version is that teens have a razor-thin tolerance for interrogation, and most of us burn through it before the food arrives.

There's a number worth sitting with. A study asked something like 10,000 teens how many questions their parents could ask before they got annoyed, and the average answer came back at "two." So you'd better make them good.

Two. Not twenty. Not a running commentary on grades, posture, screen time, and whether they should do an IB degree. Two questions before the wall goes up, which means those questions have to be about connection, not control.

And the answer to the dinner-table standoff is almost too simple, which is why it works. A parent had asked him how to get a kid off his phone at dinner, and his reply was that something in the room just has to beat the phone.

Being listened to. Not lectured. Not assessed. Not walked through the university decision again. If your teenager has learned that every conversation with you is a performance review, the phone will win every time. The phone doesn't grade them.

What Actually Warrants Worry

Parents tend to wait for a dramatic crisis, and the earlier signals are quieter than that. Watch for sustained deviation from the fundamentals: sleep that never comes back, withdrawal from friends, loss of interest in things they used to care about, irritability that doesn't match the situation, academic collapse that a single bad exam doesn't explain.

Then watch for the pattern I see most often in Hong Kong, the one that hides in plain sight: a teenager who is fine on paper. Grades holding. Tutoring attended. No real peer contact, no life outside performance. High-functioning distress is still distress, and it is very good at buying itself another six months.

If anxiety or low mood is also live for you as a parent, or in the household generally, our work on anxiety and depression sits alongside adolescent support.

When to Reach Out for Adolescent Support in Hong Kong

You don't need a crisis to get help. Reach out when the fundamentals have been off for weeks, when the conflict at home has gone circular, when your teen won't talk to anyone, or when you're simply out of tools and the fights keep escalating.

Adolescent counselling isn't adult therapy with a younger client in the chair. The work usually includes the parents, sometimes the school, and always the systems around the teenager, not just the young person in the room. Fit matters enormously. Confidentiality has limits, and any counsellor worth the fee will explain them clearly at the start.

We work with adolescents and the families around them. If you want to know who we are before you book, start with about.

Protect the fundamentals. Stop treating the screen as the whole story. And make real life, including the experience of being listened to at your own dinner table, worth putting the phone down for.