From Trauma to Triumph: Building Resilience Through Parenting

Welcome to Where Parents Talk. My name is Leanne Castellino.

Our guest today is a professor of psychology at Barnard College in New York City and a leading researcher in the area of Child Development. Dr. Tova Klein is also director of the Barnard College center for Toddler development. She spent 30 years as a child psychologist working with families of kids and teens. Her recent research has also focused on childhood trauma, including 9, 11 and the long term impact of global instability.

Dr. Klein's latest book, slated to be published in the fall of 2024, is called raising Resilience, how to Help Our Children Thrive in Times of Uncertainty. She's also a mother of three and she joins us today from Birmingham, Alabama. Thank you for being here and making time for us today. Thank you for having me. Really interesting subject matter because it is so timely and so relevant when we talk about trauma and what kids and certainly adults are exposed to increasingly, it feels like today.

What specifically led you to sort of adding this piece of childhood trauma to your area of expertise and research and its impact on the parent child relationship? Yeah, well, actually it's, it's, I have to go backwards because it's where I started my career and my work with children long ago.

I actually write about this in my new book because I was interested from even before I became a professional in sort of the bad things that happen to children, but also the power of the parent, that even when a parent was hurting a child, such as in cases of abuse, severe abuse, children still call for want and need that parent. And that was really the eye opener for me of wow, what is it about that relationship that's so powerful and important?

And also what is it that allows children to thrive in spite of really bad things happening? And that always gets back to a positive, secure relationship with an adult. It can be parents could be grandparents, it could be some other important caregiver in their life, but that there's this need for stability in that relationship to help them either overcome and develop that resilience.

So in other words, my interest so long has been this idea that when bad things happen, it doesn't have to be a lifelong scar. And then the question is, so what is it that either buffers them from the harm to begin with or we can bring in to help them recover? So it's a very optimistic view of, yes, bad things happen all the time, unfortunately. And yet what can we do to support children and parents, parents and children to thrive? Very important background that you've just provided and context.

So take us through then what you sort of used as your approach in writing this book. Like what catastrophic events, what destabilizing realities that we're all sort of living through, whether it's 911 or geopolitical unrest, you know, the economy, et cetera, did you look at in the course of writing this book? Yeah, so I, I studied a group of children after 9 11. These were young children who had been direct witness to the World Trade center attack.

So these are children living downtown or living in Brooklyn. And we did a study of parents and children. I did this with a colleague, Ellen Devoe, who's now in Boston but was in New York at the time. And we were there together really trying to understand how, what was the impact, so what was the mental health impact? And also the narratives, how did young children in particular come to understand what they had witnessed? And this was in the year following the attacks.

And we had also done interviews with parents starting six weeks after the World Trade center attacks. So that was like the first big, big kind of population. Why you could say certainly a global event, but very much New York City event. And prior to that I had done a lot of work with children, pediatric aids. There were many, many cases while I was in graduate school and then when I came out of graduate school.

So I was working with families and children who were dealing with at the time was really a life shortening disease. So a mother would have it or both parents would have it, and then the child would be born with it and then would be growing up with it. But there was no cure at the time. There was nothing to prolong really life. And so that also became very interesting for me, like how do people deal with both chronic and fatal illness or accidents? And so I started putting this all together.

And then prior to that I had worked with families and done a study again in New York City where I was, of families who were living in homeless shelters. So primarily mothers, because that's who they allowed in these, what they called family shelters that were really horrific places until the city. And I think the federal government poured money into supportive housing. And again, I kept seeing mothers in these horrendous situations who are able to protect children against all odds, really.

And each of these pieces said to me these are terrible things that shouldn't happen to children or families, whether it's illness, accident, World Trade center, and yet what's buffering so many of them and what is a parent doing? Because if I could understand that that's a place that we could intervene. And so that's really what propelled me kind of into my life work that always toggles between trauma and devastating things, because that happens in people's lives.

There's the uncertainty and then the uncertainty of everyday life. And so that's what really led to this book, is that I had been doing work with families and children, starting out with young children and then older children and then teens, and always with the parents. And so a number of years ago, I thought, you know, parenting is about uncertainty. That's what we know from research. That's what I then knew from a lot of experience.

How do I help parents understand that what they're doing every single day in their relationship with their child is actually going to be their buffer when the really bad things happen? And so that got me interested in this concept of uncertainty.

And then Covid happened. And so I've been mulling over the ideas and writing up ideas and thought, oh, this seems very uncertain to me. None of us knew where we were going when it started. And that's what really led me to write this book, to say I can really meld what I know, what we know about trauma and the aftermath and how to help children recover and bounce back and become resilient in time.

And what parents are doing every single day, because every single day I'm going to call them smaller bad things happen or their tough moments, or children are disappointed. You know, they're ghosted by their friend or the, you know, their friend they wanted to play with that day doesn't show up at school. You know, parents suddenly has to go on a business trip. So there's always uncertainty, and we're always helping children develop what we call resilience.

It's so interesting to hear you say that parenting is about uncertainty because that might actually catch a lot of parents off guard. I don't know that we actively or intentionally think about parenting that way. So what exactly do you mean by that? Because I think it's a really important point. Yeah. So if you think about, you know, we become. We get prepared to become a parent. And many people read or talk to elders or community and say, like, you know, what do I need to know?

And how do you do this? And even when I teach, I teach at Barnard College, I have Barnard and Columbia students. When I teach developmental courses, we teach it as if development's going to be one step at a time. You know, these things happen. And here's. And yet it's much more nuanced than that. And being a parent is too. You know, I said, they hand you this baby, and every baby is different.

From the moment they hand them to you or the moments, let's say you adopt a child, they're different because of what they bring into the world. And then we're going to nurture them and love them and sort of mold them in a back and forth in a relationship. But you really don't know who that child is. That's uncertain how they're going to react today. You know, you don't really know know who's coming down the steps when you're, you know, five year old wakes up or your 12 year old wakes up.

And then different things are going to happen to them every day. You might, you know, pack their lunch and help them get their backpack together and send them to school. But there may be some unpredictable things that happen, including a, you know, sudden fire alarm goes off and at home we have the same thing and then we have our lives which are uncertain.

So people lose jobs or there's new work stress, or I'm at home and I have a day planned and I can't get the tasks done that I told my child I was going to get done. You know, a grandparent gets sick, there's all of these things that happen and then you have that really broad layer of the world.

Like I mean, maybe somebody out there was predicting Covid, but for the most part, even as it was coming, most of us weren't thinking, oh, we're about to go into a shutdown for many months and then a pandemic that will last several years. So all of these pieces are uncertain, but they don't have to derail us.

And that's really what became my interest of so what is resilience? What are the factors we need to get there? And resilience is really about something that we need to face uncertainty, whether it's kind of the smaller uncertainty or the bigger, which is how do we help children learn to adapt and adjust and be flexible, which is a process that happens over time.

And that's kind of the counter, not yet the counter to uncertainty, but also how we help them and ourselves, which is the really important piece, handle the unpredictability and uncertainty of life. It's interesting because for adults, so much of what has happened, the events that you outlined are hard for adults to comprehend.

So is it reasonable for us to think that as parents we can equip our children, however young they are, up to teens, etc, with what they need in their toolkit to address these uncertain, volatile events, devastating events, with certainty, with optimism, through resilience? Yeah, I like your Question. So it's certainly possible because that's what the parent child relationship does. It gives children a grounding in I'm not alone. It builds security.

You know, the back and forth of I'm going to be here for you, I'm going to tell you when things are hard and I'm going to help you through it is what keeps building their ability to then say, I'm not alone, I'm going to be okay, and I can handle this. Depending on their age, if they're very young, with a parent at my side as they get older with a parent I can trust to be there for me when they, when I need them. And I can take that inner trust forward.

One of the things I write about in the, the book are these five pillars. Not that they're in any order, because they're all pieces of what's developing within the child. But what I call the fifth pillar, but in many ways could be the first is this self acceptance that builds in the child from the trust in the parent. The trust the parent instills in them becomes inner trust. I can trust myself, I can accept myself.

That's where a lot of children's strength comes from so that they can face the hard things every day. One of the, I think, misnomers that we all go into being a parent with is that our role is to make our children happy. And I've said this, I feel like for 30 years now. It's actually not like children know how to be happy. You know, there's so much joy even in hardship to be happy. Our role is to help them through the really tough stuff.

So the negative emotions, how to handle those negative emotions, which again is a process over time, how to build trust in the parent, which then becomes trust in other people. So peers, other adults, so as they move more independently in the world, they carry this with them. They're literally taking the parent child relationship into themselves and moving it out in the world. And that's where the resilience comes from. You know, in psychology we call it internalization.

So internalizing that security and trust then becomes, I can go out and explore the world and become more independent because I trust someone to help me. But also I learned to trust myself. And that's the core of resilience.

When you talk about the different elements that you discovered through, you know, speaking with the participants that you talked about, looking at all those events that you outlined and by the way, very stark life circumstances, right, with, you know, mothers with AIDS and mothers with children living in homeless Shelters, etc, etc around the trauma piece. Like what did you discover that really struck you that perhaps is. Is now included in your upcoming book?

Yeah, I. In a sort of packaged way, right. When parents are able to handle themselves first, even faced with very difficult situations that gets communicated to the child. I'm going to take care of you. I can handle this. One of the examples in the book is of a father driving his child to safety through some raging wildfires out west number of years ago. And the children were literally like a. Okay. Once they got reunited, mommy, daddy, children.

And the father was quite rattled and traumatized weeks later. Understandably, he's driving through fire on both sides. But what he did was started to sing songs with them. And then one of the children wanted to sing about colors because the fires, as the father described them, were raging in different, you know, red, yellow, orange. And I asked him how did you keep so calm through all of that?

And he said I knew the danger, but I knew we had to get out of there and I knew that I had to help the children feel safe so I could get them to safety. That I think is what parents do. It's an incredible story, but that's what parents do when they're facing life threatening situations, just chronic hard situations, when they're given the support or they're bringing with them the wherewithal that they've gotten from their own relationships or their own reflections.

So a big part of my book is around who are you, the parent, I call it the you factor. So that the parent reading this can reflect on themselves because being the, the core and the center for a child is a lot for any of us as parents and we have to do that work on ourselves. That's how we become the buffer for our children. So when parents are buffers, even in really stressful situations or traumatic situations, that's what protects the child in the long run.

Even if right away there's going to be impact in the long run, the child will be okay. In your experience with the children and families that you work with, when you talk about parents having to look at themselves first, can you give us examples of what that might include? So often that's looking at what, what do I bring to this relationship of being a parent? We're all human. Every mother, father out there is a human being. So that's really reflecting on our past.

From what good things did I have as a child, you know, who then grew up that I want to, to give to my own child and also what didn't I have either what pieces were missing or what bad things happened? You know, did I have parents who were harsh? Did I have abuse? Or did I just have pieces like not the most connected, not the most caring.

So really reflecting back on what the parent brings with them, which can be hard, I mean, it makes us very vulnerable, often ashamed, as if that child years ago who was hurt by a parent or hurt by life was responsible, which they weren't, and then coming to terms with, okay, that happened to me. I don't want that for my child. And it is possible to change. We know that from years of research. That was actually part of my own dissertation 30 plus years ago in graduate school.

What does the parent bring? How can we become aware? Self awareness is the first piece that happened. I don't want that for my child. And I have examples in there, as you know, of parents saying, whoa, why did I react this way to my child? I don't want to do that again. And that's the beginning of work around, okay, you don't want to do that. Where is it coming from? What do you want to change?

So then how do we go about as parents and let's focus on the tween and teens and adolescent age group for a minute because that age group, obviously there's a lot going on there. How do we go about using proven tips and strategies to raise resilience? So here's the nice thing about the, the tweens and the teens of them getting older because yes, it's a challenging time because they're starting to say again, as they've said when they were younger, who am I?

And I need to define myself and I. Often that age group will push parents away just when they need them to stay close. So it's a back and forth again. So the first thing I say to parents is, you have to do work, not to take that personally because often we feel terrible. Why don't you like me? Why don't you want to be with me? Why are you putting me down? And the way to help teenagers become resilient is number one, listen to them. You know, we often want to teach or give lessons or punish.

Listening to that age group, middle, middle schoolers, high schools, high schoolers, goes a long way and says to them, I value you, I value your opinion. And then to ask them, let's say they come home with a problem, often they want to vent. Venting is a big thing for children and a really big thing as they get older. So listening to them, letting them vent, and then asking in whatever way Feels right to a parent. Do you want some help with that or do you want me to listen?

And it can move from really wanting you to listen to like, yes, I need help, what do I tell my friend? Or why did she do this to me? Right. Because teenagers take things very personally too. So it's often giving advice that's been agreed upon with the teenager. I think we tend to discount our young people is they're moving towards adulthood, but they're not yet adults. And they need a lot of explicit help sometimes from us, but we don't value their opinion enough.

So when we come together and say, I'm wondering what you're thinking is a good idea. Do you want to hear what I'm thinking is a good idea? So that's one piece. The other piece I would say is bad things happen in the world all the time, unfortunately, and are going to continue to.

So when we give our children, you know, our teen children explanations for them and listen to what they're thinking, what they're worried about, it's going to be very different than what a parent is worried about and then saying to them, these are your worries, let's talk about them. But also let's talk about what really happened in that horrible incident, whether it was in your town or in this country or in the world that they want to talk about.

So some of it is listening, some of it is what we call scaffolding and then some of it is problems, problem solving with them, not leaving them out of that, not lecturing them. No one wants to be lectured. They don't hear you. And it's an important point.

And I wonder if, you know, making the point too, by reverse engineering it to say, what is the short, medium, long term impact on a child, a teen, of not addressing the traumas in the world, etc. And I'm not sure if your research touched on that, but maybe that's a way of sort of. Because we're not all researching this, like yourself, but for the average parent like me, kind of looking at it to say, like, if I don't make this a priority, what could happen?

Yeah, I think it's an important question, especially because teenagers in particular are inundated with information, we all are. But certainly by that age they have access to unbelievable amounts of information. And so checking in, even with that child who's not a talker, like we always think it's about talking, sometimes it's just about being there. You know, I heard what happened at your high school today and it sounds kind of scary. I'm here for you.

Or do you want to talk about what happened? Or some version of I can tell you what the principal sent me in the email and then why don't you tell me what you know if you want to. So addressing the close in incidents and the far away incidents. So it's not just the research, but I think the experience of when we're quiet or silent, it's very scary. Something bad happened. I heard about it from a friend and now I go home and I have parents who aren't saying anything. Oh, what does that mean?

So the importance of putting it out there to say, I'm not sure if you saw what happened or I've been reading about the war or the protests or whatever it is that's on your mind, says to the child who's now a teenager, I am here and I'm not afraid of what you might bring to me. I'm okay discussing whatever you want to discuss. Which again means doing a lot of work on ourselves as parents because it's often the parent who, understandably, we don't want to talk about a lot of this stuff.

And if that message is given to the child, then they're going to go either hide from it as well or get information from friends and others who may not be the most reliable sources. And that that can become problematic. So it's better to keep this open dialogue which comes through listening. It gets back to this idea of listening because when children feel like they're not heard, those teenagers, they just say, forget it.

No, I don't want to talk to you about that and I don't want to hear what you have to say. But when they say, oh, you value me and I can trust that you're going to help me when I'm really scared, they're going to be more open.

Let's dig a little deeper into resilience. And the fact of the matter is, is that resilience is a buzzword today and has been for the last number of years. Some researchers and others would even argue that perhaps it's misused, overused, abused. How do you define resilience? And in the context of your book, what is the message that you want parents or readers of the book to receive about raising resilience? So I agree. I think resilience is a buzzword.

And I will tell you that when I started writing this, I was like, oh, how do I write this without using the word resilience? Because it's so overused. But what I got back to is I really wanted to speak to parents about how do you raise a decent human being, one who can care about themselves and care about others, be confident in themselves and want to be generous towards others. So it's both.

And that gets to how do I handle the tough stuff in life, the hurdles, the adversities, and that's the role of the parent again, so adverse adversity. Resilience is the ability to handle the tough parts of life, the ability to adapt, to adjust and face what is going to come into your life, which are those uncertain things. You don't know what they are. But the resilience piece is, I can face them. I'm not alone. I can adapt.

You know, we may have to flee an earthquake, but I'm with family who can help me adapt in a new place. So that raising resilience is helping children feel safe, be able to adjust and adapt and learn to be flexible even when it's hard. And so those are the pieces that make up resilience. It's related to stress, and stress is related to trauma.

It's also the message I want parents to have, excuse me, is that they're building resilience every single day, on the most mundane day, the nicest day of their life, the most boring day with their child, if there's such a thing. They're building that every day through their interactions. And all of the mishaps, the little mishaps. Oh, we don't have Cheerios. I did say I was going to get them at the store. It is disappointing that we're not going where we said we were going today.

Any of those mishaps give parents a chance to come back and reconnect and repair with their child. All of that is building what we call resilience. It's saying, sometimes things go wrong, I can help you through it, and then we can keep moving forward. And that's an everyday process that gets highlighted when really bad things happen and your resilience shows through. But it's developing all along the way. And that's what I want parents to know. It's not something you wait for.

They're doing it and they don't know they're doing it. They're already doing it all the time. In your book Raising Resilience, you also talk about emotional intelligence, cognitive flexibility, and social know how can you take us briefly through why each of these elements is important for parents to know about and certainly for them to teach their kids about?

Yeah. So you know that emotional intelligence is this idea that children in time learn what their emotions are, become more self aware when it comes to emotions, Parents are a key player in this because you help your young child and then your older child who then becomes a teenager, learn to handle those emotions. It's what we call emotion regulation.

That process of first doing it right alongside them, calming them down from tantrums, labeling emotions, then becomes the child eventually being able to do it for themselves. That means they can read other people's emotions and they can become empathic. Oh, this is a person in need. I can see that she's upset. I can see that he needs help. So that's emotional intelligence. And we know that that maps on to all kinds of success measures from academics to peers to life.

And then the cognitive flexibility, which is a tough one for children and for teenagers by the way, is this ability to say, okay, I had a plan and that's not going to happen. So what can I do differently? And you know, that starts off with like I'm building a tower and it falls down and I'm four years old. Do I want to walk away from it? Which is a good option. Do I want to rebuild it? Which is an equally good option. So the ability to adjust. And then as children get older, the plans changed.

My friend called and said, we're not going to the movies tonight. You know, the high school social got moved to another day and I can't make it. Whatever it is, that ability to then say, that's disappointing, I can handle. This is the cognitive flexibility that every child needs and gets built again over time. Parents have to have it too. And then what's the third one you were asking about?

Social know how. Yes, social know how. So that goes with the emotion regulation. The cognitive flexibility is this ability to relate to others because there's a lot of reading of social cues and children start off not so good at that. But you're doing it with your child every day in the back and forth of your relationship. You're reading them. I see you're really disappointed. Disappointed. Let's see if we can figure this out.

That then becomes, I can understand other people, I can learn to get along with other people, even when it's tough. And that moves into peer relations, relationship with teachers, with other adults in their life. And that those social emotional domains which are often called unfortunately soft stuff, soft skills in the research in the education field, I'm always saying, no, these are the real skills. I don't think we need to call them hard. These are the real skills.

Because being able to go get along with people Handle your emotions and be able to adjust what we call cognitive flexibility. But adjust and adapt. We know from research that that's what predicts success for children, not iq, not how well they did on yesterday's test. It's these other pieces then combined with the ability to function in a group that allows them to learn every day in school, even if they don't love what's going on, that then maps on to success.

So these are really important life skills because they're about humanness, they're about people. And ultimately, that's what we need in life, is connecting to others and accepting ourselves. Dr. Klein, you have three children of your own in their 20s, and I'm curious as to how you've gone about.

With all of the knowledge and expertise you have, in addition to being a parent yourself, how have you gone about navigating the societal traumas that we're seeing, you know, raising resilience in your own family? So it's a good question. I have three young men at this point, and they're all so different, right? They're all male. And for years, people would say to me, oh, you have three boys, as if they were all the same. They could not be more different.

The piece that I've honed in on is you can ask me anything, and I'll try to either discuss it, answer it, tell you what I know, or figure it out with you. You know, particularly as they've gotten older, is one, and two is. I've really had to hone my own listening skills. I mean, the world throws a lot at us, and I often want to give my opinion, but what I have to do is first hear their opinions and their struggles and their worries and their challenges. So listening first.

And each of my children wants to be listened to differently, and each wants to discuss differently. For, you know, for one of them, it's really just kind of hanging out and then casually bringing up something on his mind. Another one's very direct. So really learning who each one is over their life course. That nuance is so important for a parent, and it can be a challenge for me as well as any other parent.

So I think it's the listening piece, really understanding who each child is as best I can, and then trying to be in that listening position that they want me to be so that they can open up and then ask me questions and not be afraid to ask me something, because the world is complicated, their lives are complicated, and their struggles are complicated. And I. My hope is that they feel comfortable coming either to me. Or their dad or another trusted adult.

But to one of us to say, hey, I'm struggling, or I have some know, can we talk about it? Dr. Tova Klein, so many important messages. The book is called Raising Resilience. We so appreciate your time and your thoughts today. Thank you so much. Thank you.