Your silent teenager won’t look up from texting. Your not-so-silent one screams in your face, “I wish I was never born!” Either way, you might be wondering if you’re doing this parenting thing right. For USC’s Julie Cederbaum, the answers require taking a look at the bigger picture.

Healthy households grapple with teen angst holistically, says Cederbaum, assistant professor in the USC School of Social Work. That could mean counseling—for everyone in the family.

“Otherwise it’s like a game of telephone,” says Cederbaum, whose philosophy draws on her background in public health and social work. “You don’t know how the dialogue in a one-on-one session is being translated later at home.”

A specialist in risky teen behaviors, mental health and HIV prevention, Cederbaum understands the challenges facing parents. To nurture a healthy parent-teen relationship, she advises, communicate early and often, especially about uncomfortable coming-of-age topics. Many parents believe teens have already heard it all, but research shows that children make the healthiest decisions about sex and substance use when they hear messages from their parents. “We fail kids when we think that they can navigate an adult world alone,” she says.

That’s because teens, while highly intuitive and acutely aware of everything around them, wear blinders when it comes to long-term planning. “Adolescents do not have consequential thinking,” Cederbaum says. “They’re very in-the-moment—and that’s totally developmentally appropriate.”