Communicate with Your Kids
Words matter. From talking with my teens (above is an ancient photo!) to conveying nuance about COVID-19 in this newsletter, I’ve never been more keenly aware of the importance of effective communication.
Speaking of words, I’m grateful for your overwhelming support and feedback on my latest article for The Atlantic. Those of you who’ve been reading my COVID writings since March 2020 understand my passion for contextualizing data, framing risk, and addressing our physical and mental health in tandem — without claiming that I have all the answers or can speak to everyone’s unique situation.
So here we are — in a uniquely stressful time, trying to navigate new information and protect ourselves and our family. It’s normal for parents and caregivers to feel anxious when kids around the country are landing in the hospital with COVID. It’s normal to worry about them going off to school with so many unknowns. It’s also normal for us to need help communicating with our kids about complex issues in an uncertain time.
Which is why I’m THRILLED to bring you the voices of two experts in child clinical neuropsychology and educational coaching. My dear friends Bill Stixrud, PhD, and Ned Johnson have mastered the art of talking to kids. Their best-selling book The Self-Driven Child is chock full of parenting wisdom, and their new book What Do You Say? (out tomorrow!) is equally pragmatic.
I hope my Q & A with Bill and Ned is helpful.
Lucy McBride (LM): Thanks, you two, for bringing your expertise to my readers!
Bill Stixrud (BS) and Ned Johnson (NJ): It’s our pleasure. We applaud and admire your focus on addressing physical and mental health in tandem. You speak our language!
LM: So what are some of the biggest challenges you see facing families right now, as their kids are returning to school?
BS & NJ: Our first concern is the extremely high level of stress-related mental health problems experienced by children and teens, and the striking increase in loneliness reported by young people over the last 10 years. Although scientists were referring to a “mental health epidemic” in children and adolescents several years before the current pandemic, the family and academic stresses, the social isolation, and the uncertainties associated with COVID-19 have exacerbated these problems. Sonia Lupien, a top expert on stress, summarizes what makes life stressful with the acronym NUTS: Novelty, Unpredictability, perceived Threat (physical or psychological), and a low Sense of control. COVID clearly checks all four boxes. So, it’s no wonder that kids are experiencing what may be unprecedented levels of stress-related issues. It’s also why, as you have emphasized, Lucy, a strikingly high percentage of parents are reporting symptoms of burnout due to the new responsibilities, challenges, and losses over the last 16 months.
Our second concern is educational. Many of our clients have thrived in virtual learning with limited demands for homework, the reduced emphasis on tests, the ability to go off camera to “de-stress” when necessary, the chance to get a lot more sleep, and not being required to be “face to face” with other kids for six hours straight. Many other clients, though, have found being on Zoom excruciating. For many under-resourced students and children with special needs, the pace of their academic development has slowed, leading many parents to refer to the last school year as a “lost year.” Parents across the social-economic spectrum worry that their kids won’t be able to catch up – or will feel overwhelmed when they return to the demands and academic pressures of in-person schooling.
LM: So how can we help our kids as they return to school?
BM & NJ: We suggest that parents remember four key words:
Connect
Control
Consult
Courage
1. Stay connected to your kids. In our new book, What Do You Say?, we point out that a close relationship with parents is as near as we can get to a silver bullet for protecting kids from stress-related problems. Two of the most important keys to closeness are showing empathy and validating kids’ feelings (rather than trying to talk them out of them or tell them what to do).
“It sure sounds like you are upset that there won’t be soccer games this month” lets kids know you’re trying to understand their experience. “I’m sure there will be other ways to play” or “it’s only one month of your life” does not. As parents, we have a “righting reflex,” an instinct to fix. But, logic doesn’t calm hard emotions. Empathy and validation do. While many parents are reporting “empathy fatigue,” it’s still the case that kids feel closest to adults who listen to them without judging and don’t tell them what to do. So, use reflective listening to communicate empathy and validate their feelings: “You sure seem pretty bummed out by more school on Zoom. I’d be pretty bummed too.” Or “What I got from what you said is you’re still feeling pretty unsure about the start of the school year. That makes sense to me. Do you want to talk through this together?”
2. Foster a sense of control in your child. In our first book, The Self-Driven Child, we emphasized that fostering a healthy sense of control in our children and teens should be a top parenting priority, as it is hugely important for mental health and crucial for the development of self-motivation (which so many parents report has been lacking during the pandemic).
Steve Maier, who has studied the effects of perceived control for 50 years, teaches that a sense of control “inoculates” brains from the harmful effects of stress. When a child tries to manage a stressful situation, the effort strengthens the ability of their prefrontal cortex (executive functions) to regulate their amygdala (the brain’s “threat detector”), which fosters emotional resilience and mental clarity. Although we don’t want young brains to be stressed, unhappy, and overwhelmed for long periods, it’s actually dealing with tolerable challenges and stressors (with ample adult support) that wires the brain for resilience, a “muscle” we want all kids to develop. (Adversity + Support = Resilience.)
LM: This is fantastic advice - and akin to how I talk with patients when facing emotional challenges. Can you give us some ideas for promoting a sense of control in our kids?
BS & NJ: Make a plan…and a Plan B. Visualizing how to navigate a situation develops neural pathways in similar ways to actually doing the thing. Mentally rehearse tricky scenarios, but with good enough outcomes. Worrying is not preparation, but anticipating difficulties and making multiple plans to navigate them is. To credit Lupien, there are few things more paralyzing than feeling you have only one tool that doesn’t work or one route that is blocked. Help your kids make a Plan B – and make one for yourself too.
Let them give help, not just get it. It helps foster a sense of control in our kids when we let them help, and teach them how to. We want our kids to feel safe, but it’s better if we help them feel brave. Protecting them makes us feel better by increasing our sense of control. Their experience of helping increases theirs. When kids can see washing hands as something that helps others and not just themselves, it increases their sense of control. Hygiene becomes a super power! Even the youngest can hand wash facemasks for the family. It’s powerful medicine to have a role to play.
LM: Love it. Okay, so what about the other “C”s?
BS & NJ:
3. Consult, don’t manage. Approaching your child as a consultant, rather than as his boss or manager, allows you to stay connected, to support without controlling, and to keep calm and parent on. It can be hard, but it can also be liberating to remember that it’s your child’s life and that you really can’t make them do anything against their will. Though a “carrots and sticks” approach increases a parent’s sense of control, it lowers it for your kids and increases their stress, and it also makes it harder for them to hear your advice. If homework is a battle, tell your child “I love you too much to fight with you about your homework.” Offer to be their homework consultant, which allows you to step back without stepping away. Offer help and advice but don’t force them on your child. And, as much as possible, give your children enough space to solve their own problems so that they can develop strong stress tolerance and confidence that they can handle stressful situations.
Even with challenging issues like screens and phones, the consultant model works over time. Remind yourselves that your job is not to control your kids’ (teens’ especially) use of technology but rather to help them learn to control their use for themselves, especially before they head off to college without your supervision but with lots of your money. Even during a pandemic, kids are wiring their brains for resilience and motivation, which both require a sense of control. Lest anyone think that what we’re saying is “Back off and just let them fail”, what we’re actually saying is to stay involved with your child in a supportive role and to offer any help that’s necessary. Remember: adversity + support = resilience, a formula we more easily implement as autonomy-supporting consultants.
4. Foster courage with our own calm. We encourage parents to move in the direction of being “a non-anxious presence” in their family, as organizations work best when the people in charge are not overly anxious or emotionally reactive. While all emotions are contagious, we love the Navy SEAL mantra, “Calm is contagious.” When we can stay calm and handle situations courageously, we can help others stay calm and think more clearly. Also, because life is stressful for most people, making home a “safe base” populated by calm caregivers provides the space for the emotional recovery that wires brains for resilience.
Giving kids courageous messages like “We have a plan for this” or “This is kinda scary, but we can handle it” powerfully influences how children experience the world -- and how they anticipate the future. One way to do this is to say, “I know this is really hard. I’m also really confident you can handle it.” While we want to teach our kids to recognize potential dangers and learn how to avoid or handle them, the repeated message to “be very afraid” isn’t helpful, in part because chronic stress is corrosive to developing brains.
To be fair, it isn’t easy to always be courageous or non-anxious, even in the best of times. But it can help to remember that all of our anxiety about our kids is about their future. If you knew that they would come out of this pandemic stronger than ever, you wouldn’t worry about them now. So, remember to take the long view. Think of all the people you know who went through hard things as kids and are wonderful human beings today. By reminding ourselves of the difficulties we, our families, and our country have weathered in the past, we can more easily convince ourselves and our kids that we can handle this coming school year.
LM: What are your main takeaways for parents as we navigate this uncertain time?
BS & NJ: In sum, model courage, maintain connection, and act as consultants to your kids. This approach will foster the sense of control they most need to manage, in a healthy way, the stresses that this year, and really any year, might bring.
LM: You two are wonderful. I look forward to our Facebook live conversation this Friday at 1 pm ET!
P.S. For some further ideas on how to cope with renewed anxiety, here’s my recent conversation with Ari Shapiro on NPR's All Things Considered. I hope it’s helpful.