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Tell me a parenting issue everyone struggles with with tweens and teens, but no one talks about. I'm Reena Nainen and welcome to Ask Lisa, the Psychology of Parenting Podcast. I'm Dr. Lisa DeMor. We bring you science back strategies for managing anxiety, discipline, intense emotions, and more. We decode tough parenting challenges with tips that you can use right now. So subscribe to Ask Lisa, the Psychology of Parenting Podcast, and join our YouTube community today.
We're here to help you untangle family life. Episode 192 with Tova Klein raising resilient kids in uncertain times. Well, this is certainly a day of such incredible uncertainty election day. It absolutely is. Absolutely is. I think everybody's on pins and needles about how today is going to unfold. Well, we couldn't have a better guest. Let's get right to her. Tova Klein is a child psychologist, a director of the Barnard College Center for toddler development.
Her expertise in early childhood development. She is a perfect guest for today. She's got over three decades of experience. She's focused on understanding the emotional and psychological needs of young children. Her book is called Raising Resilience. How to help our children thrive in times of uncertainty. In this particular book, she's focusing on helping parents foster resilience in their children. She's got other great books as well, but we're excited to have her here to talk about this one.
Tova, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. I'm really glad to be here. Absolutely. Okay, so talk about uncertainty. Here we are. This is a day. This is a week with a great deal of uncertainty in it. Your book focuses fundamentally on the topic of resilience and helping kids to build it. Let's just start there. Talk us through what this is and why it is so essential to development. I see resilience as really core to who a child is, to a person.
I really think about it in many ways as the core of being human, which is it's not a trait. It's not like a one dose. It's something that's developed over time. It's the ability to adapt, to adjust, to be flexible. It's this construct of helping raise a child who can handle life. Whatever life is going to bring them, because it's going to be good, bad, and otherwise. It's this whole piece about being able to move through life and face the good, which is easy for humans in many ways.
But also to face adversity and to be able to handle it and adapt to it, but not alone. That's a big core of the book, where you're not alone in this. Do you've actually done research and specialized in traumatic situations in children from abuse to 9-11? What have you found in these children who are incredibly resilient? What are their parents doing right? It's such an important question. If you look, we often think, oh, a terrible thing has happened.
And terrible things do happen on an individual level and on a population-wide level, like say 9-11 or earthquake. And when that happens, or even chronic toxicity, things like being homeless or really dealing with some of the violence and poverty, there are only children who are excelling or getting through it. And then the question is, what's the parent role or the caregiver? Some adult. And they're playing a protective role. And the protective role is literally buffering them from the stress.
So it's not lying. It's not saying 9-11 didn't happen, but it's saying we're going to still be okay. You know, we had to run away, families who lived downtown on 9-11 literally were running with their children. And then saying to them, we're safe now, I'm going to get you lunch. We're going to find a place that we can play that's safe. So it's this message and showing safety once you're at safety. And keeping stress, I would say, on the parent side.
So taking care of themselves enough to say, okay, I've got to get a plan here. But I also have to keep this situation calm until I get my child to bed. So it's almost like a multitasking to keep stress out. We do it every single day with our children. With, you know, the lower level of stress is we're always buffering them. Yeah, that was hard. That was really hard. I'm going to help you get through it.
Tova, I just love that because I think, you know, so much of what we know as psychologists is the kids are taking their cues from us. So when things are going haywire, they're watching us and watching our faces. And, you know, it's so hard under those conditions for parents to not react strongly. But if they can do what you're describing, it's extraordinarily powerful. And it's not to say that every parent can at every moment and you don't have to do it at every moment.
And you don't have to beat yourself up because the first thing any parent is going to do in a really crisis situation is get the child to safety. That is protection. Yeah. Yeah. So in your new book, Raising Resilience, you talk about five keys to resilience. What are they and why are they important? So I have what I call five pillars to really think about, like, what are these internalized concepts that we want to build and children that are built over time? It's not like one day this appears.
And they all also go together. They're not in an order. This is not a stepwise plan. So the first is this idea that we provide security. We anchor our children. And why is that so important? Well, first of all, it brings down their, it can be a rouse level. But it also teaches them that there's somebody they can count on and trust that becomes trust in themselves. I'm going to be okay in the world. I can move out in it.
I can need this as much as two year olds because when they go out in the world, you don't want them just to be all over the place thinking they're allowed. So it's this security and trust. It's emotions. Are you guys talking about that all the time? This is what we do as psychologists. So this ability to understand emotions, learn to handle them, what we call regulate.
In the book, I call it the balance principle. So it's feeling them, knowing them, and handling them with the parent is helping particularly in the early years. But still as children get older, we step back. We're still doing it. And then the third one is the many ways I have to say my favorite, the Freedom Trail. Like how do you help that child get that sense of agency? So they really can go out in the world or part of it is limits, but also stepping back and giving them the space.
And this is always difficult for any of us as parents, that nuance of how do I let my child separate and be independent, which is what I want and oh my gosh, I'm worried. So some reasonable limits. And then there's this piece that we see in every child, which is connecting to others. So you can think of it as connection is being very powerful. This is what we call social intelligence. This is ability to have friends, peers, and also to be compassionate.
You know, in time, I sometimes I take care of myself and sometimes I take care of others. It's both. And really the parent child or the caregiver child relationship is going to serve as a model for this. I connect to you and love you. The child then learns to do that for others. And then the really important piece that this is going to all be part of is acceptance of myself.
So how does one, you know, a child and then a teenager and a young adult and going forward develop this inner sense of self love? I can accept myself for why I am. I don't have to be ashamed of my struggles, of the parts that other people don't like or understand. And you need a parent who says, I see you. I understand you even if it's really hard to understand you or even if you're not the person I thought you were going to be.
This is about accepting the child for who they are. It's a really important part of helping children become healthy individuals. To have I want to sort of bring back the election for a second today. Sometimes when you are jittery or anxious, you don't even realize how it's being translated down to your child and literally infused. What's your advice for parents who might not be happy with the election and where it's gone?
So look, it's a hard day. Some people are happy. Some people are not happy. And it's hard to know what you're going to feel even in these moments. So the first piece and it's a lesson for every day. It's a cute, unelection day today. But it's important for every day is to tune into yourself, which can be hard to do when you're jittery. So wait a minute. I'm feeling this today. I'm not happy or I'm anxious. Maybe I am happy about the results but I'm still nervous going forward.
I have to take care of myself first. I have to say to myself, take a moment, whether it's to exhale, whether it's to sip your tea or coffee, whether it's to go for a little walk depending on where you are today and what you have the luxury of doing. But I have to get my feet planted because even if I'm really nervous today in jittery, I have children to take care of. I have to move forward. And children count on us to say, we're going to be okay.
Today is a tough day. We're still going to be okay. When we're hysterical, children feel like, uh-oh, uh-oh, it's an alarm. It's an alarm for God. Tova, but what if I as a parent feel that based on these election results now, the future president of the United States is not going to help my bottom line?
I feel like I'm going to lose money. I feel like the floor has been pulled from under me here. How do I, when I can't calm myself down, not pass that and send a positive message of resilience to my kids after election day? It's going to be a hard day for many people, hard weeks ahead. And I'm going to go back to that is panic to some people are feeling. I'm sure there are people feeling absolutely panic today.
I'm going to be in the weeks ahead. So for those parents feeling that way, and if not today, maybe tomorrow, there has to be a process to say, I feel this way. My child still needs me to somehow ground myself. I've got to find a way to go out and vent to a friend to tell somebody else about my panic. I'm going to go for a run for some people exercises a way to get through that. But I have to manage this right now in the name of my child.
I think we owe that to children or to say, I'm having a hard time right now. I'm really not okay with the outcome of this, but we're going to be okay. Because again, when children hear us in a panicky mode, they immediately say, Uh oh, am I going to be taken care of? Am I going to be okay? If they're of an age where they're on social media where they're reading a lot, they're hearing it at school, they're fifth grade teachers talking politics, they're not talking about the election.
They're going to absorb that in the first question for every child is, how's this going to affect me? And the parent needs to be there to say is upset as I am. I'm going to take care of you and we're going to be okay. That's true for a teenager's to who are going to come home equally hysterical. And we're going to listen and we're going to let them vent and then we're going to say, yeah, this does feel scary. It feels really scary right now, but I know we're going to get through this.
To have I want to pause and take a quick break and on the other side of this break, we're going to talk to you a little bit about the long term facts of building resilience in your kids and also if you're facing a failure, how can it be turned as a growth opportunity instead of a setback. We'll be right back. You're listening to Aslisa, the psychology of parenting.
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$45 up from payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only. Taxes and fees extra, a speed slower above 40 gigabyte C.D. All right, welcome back to ask Lisa the psychology of parenting. We're talking with author, Tova Peacline, who is a specialist in resilience. And she's got this fabulous new book. We hope you check out raising resilience. How to help our children thrive in times of uncertainty.
So Tova, going back to where we were, you were talking about parents regulating their own emotions in the name of helping kids be able to do the same. So let's turn actually the lens to the kids. So say a child is having a meltdown or is really struggling. What do we do to help them develop emotion regulation? Are there techniques, activities? What do you recommend? Yeah. So obviously this is going to be age dependent, right? But we always think of meltdowns.
I think we tend to think of young children and they do have them and they have them a lot and some have them more than others. But all children and teenagers have meltdowns. They may be verbal, they may be behavioral, they may be withdraw. You know, we don't focus enough on a meltdown can go inward and your child becomes very silent.
But either way, what children need is a parent who says in some way, maybe a hand on them, maybe stepping back some children or like get away from me, slamming doors. I'm here for you. This is tough. I'm here for you. So it's one, letting them have those emotions, no matter how loud they are. If you're in public and as a young enough child, you move them. You move away. You get out of a restaurant. It's always a little better, I think, at home.
If it's a teenager, you might really listen to their venting and say, yeah, I hear you. I do hear you. That's not going to change right now. So it's some messaging of you can have those emotions. I'm going to be here for you and I'm going to help you move on when you're done. But we tend to cut it short. We either think they're bad, we think they're spoiled, how dare you be upset about something when your life is so good.
And what we forget is that life is always going to be up and down. Every single day is up and down for a child. And if the world is even more uncertain like it is today and it's going to be in the following weeks, they're also on Shake Your Ground. And so you're going to see more meltdowns or what, you know, we always call regression. And I think, well, yeah, but regression is part of humanness. Adults do it too.
We get more dependent on things that we weren't dependent on when we're scared. So if you think of it as a fear mechanism, which is a stress mechanism, they're really counting on the adults to say, I'm here for you. And I'm going to listen and you're going to be okay. Once you get through this and not shame them for it. Shame is the most toxic thing.
We can instill in children. It's the exact opposite of building resilience. I just want to underscore something that is so extraordinary about what you're saying. But I think, you know, and it's inherent in your thinking it's inherent in all psychologists thinking, but it needs, I want to bring it to the surface. Meltdowns are a done deal. Kids will be having meltdowns. And I think that we've gotten to a place where we sort of think like, why is this happening and how could it not have happened.
And for you to bring us past that point and just, you know, like remind us, we're starting at meltdown. There's no fighting the meltdowns or keeping them from happening. There's handling them well when they are. And I would add to you Lisa that it's also not that we're bad parents.
Where it's the parents listening, it's not that you're a bad parent. I would say in many ways you're a good parent. Not to dichotomyize it. But the fact that your child trust you enough. Go back to that first pillar I mentioned. Building trust that the child feels safe enough to say, they're not literally saying, I'm going to do this, but their whole body system and brain system goes, I've just lost it.
And to trust that you're not going to do something negative to them hurt them yell at them. If you do yell at them, you're going to come back and say, that was tough. I apologize. But they have to have a lot of trust to be able to completely show their true self. Sometimes in the teenage years, they shut down and they don't share as much as you hope they would share. What are the signs that my child might be going through stress and what should I do about it?
Well, this is Lisa's whole thing, which is so important because when you think about teenagers, they've got much more cognitive abilities than say a younger child. And yet they're going to complete shake up as well. So they're doing two things that once more reasonableness at times more cognitive control at times, but also a whole brain rewiring.
And I was imagined, yeah, I look back to my teen years or any of us can. But when I were all the college students that work with me, these are older teens, right? That brain is given them a lot of trouble. So when when children are teenagers in particular withdrawn some way, sometimes it's out of like, this is just overwhelming. And I can't deal with this right now, right? And I'm just going to pull back when there's stuck in that state, it's different.
If it's a day or it's sort of an up and down, they go in the room, they close their door, they're there, you're checking on them, hey, you know, do you want to come to dinner? So you're still going through your routine, you're still having touch points with them. And eventually they come out, you're okay, right?
Your stress is stress, it's part of life. But when they're really stuck there, they're not coming to meals, they're not able to communicate with their friends in some healthy way, they don't have any friends. Like often children tell us, I have one good friend, and I hear this often, I'm sure you do too Lisa. What does she have more friends? He only has one good friend.
He said, well, because some people have one good friend, that's a great thing to have a good friend. And maybe it's not at school, maybe it's a neighbor, maybe it's at church or synagogue, great. It doesn't have to be an everyday thing, but you want them to have someone. And we know this from the literature, that children who have no friends are really being rejected or in a whole other category of risk, but having somebody, and it may be online, people probably don't want to hear that.
But there is something social for some children about social media, something healthy. So it's when they really don't have any of that, and you're finding them with drawing more and more and more, and you can't find touch points. You're not having moments of having a meal together, and maybe just going out and shooting baskets with them.
Right, and then you say, okay, we're still connecting, they're having a hard time. That's what I think you really have to say, what's going on with my child and does he or she need help? Do I need to seek some counseling at school? Should I talk to a doctor who knows them? But you have to move at the teenager's rate, but we want to bounce, and you do bounce if it's a crisis.
If you think that they're really abusing drugs, if you think that they're really doing self harm. But in most cases, it's a withdrawal that you have to say, is this a long term withdrawal or is this an up and down or today? I also love that, and I think one of the things I've learned from some surveys with teenagers is what they want is space.
And I think adults can think, what does it mean that my kid is hiding in their room? And I think often that kid is hiding in their room, listening to a playlist that's helping them feel better. And that being given that space, which from the outside looks like withdrawal, is actually how they are regulating using good strategies of their own. Let me ask you about straight up failure. We are into the thick of the school year. Kids are face planting. It is election year, no election year.
Kids really run into failure, and it is challenging. It's hard for the kids. It's hard for their families. How can parents help kids handle failure well? How can they help them take these failures, which are an inevitable aspect of being a growing person? And treat them as a chance for growth as opposed to a setback?
I think of failure as such a funny word, because I think of what I was growing up, when we were all growing up, failure was really failure. Like you were flat on your face, F, failure. We live in a society, as you both know, that is so competitive for most of your listeners. The context of children's lives has become so competitive that a B or B plus is a failure. And it's not. Life does not give you card blanche to be good at everything.
And so I really think the work of helping our children has to start with ourselves. So I say it in my book, I say it in my work with parents. I call it in raising resilience. I call it the you factor. What do we bring to being a parent? So the first part, every parent has to do, and it's a challenge, is to say, what are my expectations?
And what are my messages to my 12 year old, my 15 year old, about what's okay and what I expect of them? Because we tend to do this thing where we say, I'm okay with you now doing well. So what are you going to do next time to get the A? Right, we don't say the child, hey, so the test didn't feel good. You got that great. What are you thinking? And some kids go, yeah, I'm fine with it.
Great, but we think, uh oh, is he can always be fine with a B? Again, they haven't failed. And then when they do fail, we panic. Right, we run them to doctors through to all these things. We get mad at them. We shame them. So instead, if you can say, well, this is opportunity. I mean, as I wrote this book, it was really came out of this idea that, oh, uncertainty, which is right away present all the time, heightened on this election day.
But present every single day of our lives, when my friend play with me, what teacher is going to be there for this big test today, like this always uncertain. That is a moment for growth. And so when children fail, however you define it, let's see this is my college students all the time. When there's failure, however they're thinking failure is our mistakes. You know, when children are younger, we call them mistakes. And children learn from those mistakes.
They are opportunities to say from the parents point of view, this is hard. And this is rough. And you don't make excuses for it. Well, you were just tired last night. Say, look, this test didn't go well. I gotcha. No, I don't think this is going to keep you out of college. Everybody has ups and downs. Everybody fumbles, falls, fails.
What can I do to help you when you're ready to be helped in its waiting for that child, or teenager to come to you? And that's really hard for us. We're like, can I help you study now? Can I help you study now? But instead messaging, yeah, there's going to always be tough times, hard chips. You're not going to get that part in the play that you thought you were showing for. That's really disappointing.
And children tend to catastrophize things, but so do parents. So we can say, ah, this is a moment that's going to strengthen. And where does the strength come from? It's often in reflection. Can we just go back to what happened the other day? You know, I'm wondering how you got through it. Oh, you journaled. Oh, you went for a run. So that really helped you. And you know, you were so upset. I totally got that. And then you figured out a way to get back on your feet.
Tova, there was a whole generation of Indian American immigrant parents from my parents generation who could have benefited from hearing that about getting the B. I got to say, I want to flip this for a moment on from the failure to the resilient success. I remember when I was a foreign correspondent in Jerusalem, there was a US ambassador. And I saw his two daughters show up for 4th of July celebration in Tel Aviv at their house.
And they were at these top colleges. They were freshmen in college. And I was so impressed by these two girls about how they were just talking to everyone in the room. If I was a freshman, I would be back sleeping and eating food that the cook is making, you know, in dad's kitchen. But I turned to the wife of the ambassador. And I said, how did you do it? Like they're so such social butterflies, but they're genuine.
And they seem very happy. And she goes, well, you know, in the state department, we sometimes get these postings that we're not, we don't like. And we're not excited about, but we have to go. So I made sure that when I presented it to them, I was always very excited and looked at the positives of the trip, even if the negatives far outweighed where we would be.
But I just wondered as you're building resilience, I just kept thinking of that story as reading your book. And I was just wondering what the long term benefits are of raising resilient kids and teaching them resilience early on, even if it's starting just in the teen years.
How can that help them through the adult years? Yes. Oh, such a great question. I would even back it up. We're starting it when they're very young because there's disappointments and negatives from the moment they can, you know, think for themselves, which is very early. This framing of life being good and bad is probably the biggest gift we can give children. We tend to think, let's be their cheerleaders, let's do everything positively. But there's going to always be good and bad.
And so I love what she did. Like, I'm going to frame the positives here. They'll figure out the negatives. We didn't want to go there. That's not what we had in mind. Yeah, it's not. And you know what I discovered? You get to go to school later or we get a longer summer vacation or we're going to actually find a new cuisine that I've never heard of. Do you want to go look up some of the meals we're going to have?
Right. That says we might not like this and we might discover some hidden good things. And then they do. And guess what they find out? I can handle life. I can go there and the bad. Yeah, I can handle this. And not looking I handle this. It may be good. It's just reminded me I was speaking to somebody professionally the other day and he was telling me about his child and he wanted me to hear about how his child didn't get into what the parents thought maybe the child did the best colleges.
So he kept saying, well, it was great surprise to all of us. It was great surprise to all of us and I was like, okay, you know, how's he doing? And he said he loves his college. Big Midwestern college. This man didn't know that I'd gone to Michigan. So I was like, I'm a big 10 right? And he got going on and on about how son was at one of the big Midwestern universities. He said he's actually really happy there. I think this was better for him than the places he thought he was going to go.
But it was really the places the parents thought he was going to go. But the dad just kept pulling it out. And I thought, yeah, you know what? If he could have only messaged that much earlier, he could have saved his child a lot of stress. We often find the best on the paths that we either never would have chosen or kind of just fell into us because we didn't have an option.
If we can make the best of them genuinely, which is what the State Department official did. It wasn't like, wow, our fake. It was like, we're going to really find good stuff here. That messaging to children, to teenagers, teaches them. Look around you. You don't have to sit in the negative all the time. You can look around and see the full picture. There's that saying it's so apt about like bloom where you're planted. You know, these are the conditions. Find a way to bloom.
So I want to start to wrap us up with what feels to me like an essential question around resilience and helping kids maintain it. And it comes back to something you said earlier around the parents serving as the buffering force. And that taking tremendous energy and it's a high demand on the parent.
So thinking both today in terms of the heavy demands on parents, but also in the generic in the day to day, what kind of guidance do you have for parents to take good care of themselves so that they are able to offer this buffering service to their kids?
It's such an important concept. I actually have a you factor journal that does just this, which is, how well do I know myself and not being ashamed of the parts that you don't like, or you don't know, but self care begins with, am I aware of what I'm bringing to being a parent at any age? Middle schoolers and high schoolers push us to have like new expectations and new worries in a way that younger children do not be younger children get us in this path.
So really thinking about what am I bringing to this? Why is this hard for me? So what maybe it's going to be hard for one parent is not necessarily hard for another. So what is this? Why did I react this way? Oh gosh, I really didn't want to treat my child that way. So it's a lot of self awareness. Maybe not in the moment because the heated moments are hard, but on a day to day basis when my child's upset why am I so angry at that?
That's one is self awareness, but equally because I don't want to be hard on parents and very compassionate about this is a tall order that we all take on. By choice or not by choice, we take it on once the child's here is that self care. So do I have mantras? And I didn't know what a mantra was until I had children like saying to yourself, she's just a little girl.
He's just a little boy or this teenager is not out to get me. I need to be an adult here and exhaling and doing something like you might want to try that again. Let's start over. Do you want to take a break? You know, it's getting some kind of your feet planted so you have some humor. It's also doing slightly bigger things, but we don't all have a lot of time like saying, I'm going to take five extra minutes in the shower this morning and I'm just going to sort of vent to myself or exhale.
I'm going to get up a little extra early and I say this as somebody who's never been a morning person. I'm still not five minutes early so that I can be up before my four children, whatever it is, really being aware I need a little time in space or maybe I need a break. Maybe I need to say I'm going out with friends or I'm going to go to the movie by myself. But if you have a partner at home or if you have a good friend to say, can you help me because I need to take care of myself.
This is true for fathers, for mothers, for any caregiver is we have to be the one looking out for ourselves. We can't expect others to do it and you can do it in lots of small ways if you can't get the big ones in. I love it. Well, Tova, thank you so so much for being with us. Your work is so important. I'm so excited about this book raising resilience. We need it all the time. We need it right now. You are doing the work that families so depend on these days.
Thank you. Such a pleasure to be here with both of you. The book is called Raising Resilience, How to Help Our Children Thrive in Times of Uncertainty with Tova Klein. Tova, thank you so much. Thank you. Okay, you were right. You insisted Tova's like the perfect person. We all need to hear from for US election day and you're right. A lot of good things.
Some of what she said about what toddlers need, teens also need in this moment and how you don't even realize maybe sometimes you're helping to build resilience or how you respond will help build that resilience one way or the other. Absolutely. Absolutely. So what do you have for us Lisa for parenting to go?
So I'm thinking about what Tova said about mantras and I think they really are valuable because they boil things down. They recenter us and a mantra that I just want families to have today is steady presence. That that is what our kids are looking for us to be. And what I want families to know is that either you can be a steady presence or you can try to fake being a steady presence either or fine as we find our way through this, you know, challenging time in our country.
To the degree that we can offer ourselves as a steady presence to our kids. I think that that is what Tova is encouraging us to do and it's also what I think we know can make a huge huge difference as kids. Try to feel steady in the face of a great deal of disruption. What's a very jittery day today and I think as people are determining the aftermath of everything that's great advice Lisa really great advice.
And by the way next week I think it's also a quite fitting topic. How do you talk to your teens if you've got your own mental health challenges. We'll be discussing that next week. I'll see you next week. I'll see you next week. Thanks for joining us. Be sure to subscribe to the Ask Lisa podcast. So you get the episodes just as soon as they drop and send us your questions to ask Lisa at doctor Lisa de Moore dot com.
And now a word from our lawyers. The advice provided on this podcast does not constitute or serve as a substitute for professional psychological treatment therapy or other types of professional advice or intervention. If you have concerns about your child's well-being consult a physician or mental health professional. If you're looking for additional resources check out Lisa's website at doctor Lisa de Moore dot com.