Protecting Our Children From Fear

can only be as healthy as our youth are. And so on today's show, I get into a conversation with the child psychiatrist, doctor Jess Shatkin, and I talk to him, you know, about a lot of things that have been

on my mind. You know, for one, I say that I get nervous at the beginning of every school year, probably since to be honest, you know, new Town, that I get worried about how many headlines we are going to see, how many young people we are going to see pictures of on nightly news who have been robbed of their futures due to gun violence, due to school shootings.

And you know, I think about the impact that the stressors that we are all taking in as adults on a regular basis following the news, following the headlines of One day it's a devastation in Maui. Another day it's a devastation in Florida. Another day it is a shooting at a dollar store. Another day it's a grocery store, an authoritarian takeover. Another day it's books being taken away

in band or you know, threats being made. Every day, it is something, and the stress and our cortisol levels, I think as a nation are at an all time high without much ease, insight, and that feeling, that anxiousness,

that fear seeps into our children. Right, And so I talk today with doctor Shatkin about what are some of the things that we can be doing right, whether or not you're a teacher or an administrator, if you are a parent, if you are an uncle or an aunt or a godparent, what are some of the tools, you know, some of the things that we can be thinking about to ensure that yes, you know, kids understand that bad, terrible things can happen, right, but that we will do

our best to keep them safe, and you know, and they can do their best to keep themselves safe and keep their community well and give them some agency in

what is happening around them. And so today's conversation is about just that, really understanding what kids are going through, how they are feeling, and how as the adults in their lives, we can do a better job of ensuring, particularly that the people that we are electing actually give a damn about their wellbeing and don't just see children as a problem or as a political football or a stunt, but are really creating policies that are about their future

and their well being. Coming up next, my conversation with doctor Jess Shatkin, Folks, I am very happy to welcome to OKF Daily for the very first time, doctor Jess Shatkin, who is a child psychiatrist and a professor at NYU School of Medicine, to talk about something that I find, you know, regularly really important to bring up to all of you, which is the health and well being of

America's children youth students. Doctor Shaftan, let me start with this, when you come across a lot of these headlines right that every American reads about the unc shooting and lockdown that just took place at Chapel Hill, the shooting that took place in Nashville at the return of every school year, right end of August beginning of September, I get a nod in my stomach about what this school year is going to have in store for America's children, and so,

you know, as a as a child psychiatrist, I want to get your thoughts on how you feel at the start of every school year knowing that there is danger ahead.

be prepared. I think one of the things that it does, however, because school is still the safest place for our kids to be because compared to how many people go to school, while these shootings and these incidents are horrendous, it doesn't happen to the vast, vast, vast majority of people, and most of us are not affected directly by it other than this not in the stomach you describe. So I still think schools are safe. I still think schools are

where we need to send kids. I think we need to do a better job of managing access to violent means and keeping an eye on our schools and keeping things safe. I'm a big advocate for gun control, but you can't work with kids and not be There's just no way that you can't be an advocate for gun control. I can't think of a logical reason that most people need an assault weapon or a handgun. But those are other issues that you know, maybe we do it don't talk about. But I don't worry as the school year

starts because I'm a hopeful person. I think that's why I do the work that I do. I'm excited by fall. I always like when the kids are back in school, and I mean I like summer too, but I like when the kids are going back to school and I'm talking to the teachers. I also am a professor at the medical school and at the college at NYU, and I like seeing the students and being engaged with them. So for me, I'm not troubled by the beginning of school.

But every day, twice a week it seems I'm hearing about a shooting, and that, of course, is extraordinarily troublesome.

I think about the guidelines and protocols that are being put in place, but what fear that conjures in young people? And so I just want to get an understanding of while we live in a society that requires this type of preparation, what does this type of preparation do to you to young kids?

when I was a kid growing up in California. We had to get under our desks for fire drills and earthquake drills regularly. Sorry it was a fire drills, you outside, earthquake you get under desk. And we also had nuclear bomb attack drills too, and we would joke about them and make fun of them, as kids do. The kids who are bothered by those things generally tend to be

kids who have already experienced trauma. And so if you've already experienced trauma in your life, then seeing the repeated media replays of the violent episodes, the fires, the earthquakes, the shootings, that is troubling for kids much more often if those kids have been exposed to trauma already of any sort, if they're stuffering from post traumatic stress. So those are the kids that we really worry about.

But those kids who had had trauma in their lives already, those kids who had been abused, those kids who had suffered or seen someone in their family suffer, those kids were bothered. So I think it's probably the same sort of thing now in certain neighborhoods, more impoverished neighborhoods, more

minoritized neighborhoods. There you're going to see kids who have had more exposure to trauma in their life on average, who are in environments where their glocal cordicoord levels or stress levels are high to begin with, and so those kids might be more bothered by that too, But it's hard to know, and we don't study those things directly, So it doesn't have an impact on the vulnerable kids for sure, but how much it's hard to say.

That had happened, And I remember that my first and second graders were terrified, like they you know, their parents were watching the news and they're seeing all of this water coming in and they're seeing little kids like them, you know, grab their you know, grab their belongings, and they were terrified, and they wanted to talk about it and understand like, am I safe? Will I be safe? How can we help those people? Because children are naturally empathetic, right,

and less taught not to be. And so I'm wondering, what are some of the ways that if you are a parent, a caregiver, a teacher, and a child or classroom of children is wanting to talk about these things as a means to calm you know, their their systems and their imaginations. What are some of the of the tools that you would advise.

very low. And I don't have the numbers in front of me, but if we were to, although these episodes happen sometimes two or three times a week in our country when we hear about them, still the likelihood that any one of us will be in an environment where that happens is remarkably low. And so I think you frame that as best you can for kids, and kids can understand that differently at different ages. So high school student can understand the numbers, whereas a kid in elementary

school wouldn't understand the numbers. But you tell them basically that school is still the safest place to be. This is the place where we learn, This is the place where we engage with each other, where we have activities, where we have fun and support, and teachers are here. And if parents aren't squeezing their can the hand of their child desperately as they drop them up in school and they say be safe, honey, it's okay, it's okay, be brave. When a parent does that, that imbuse fear

into the child. So the parent needs to correspondingly have confidence. It's the same thing as when you drop a kid off the kindergarten or preschool. You know, a lot of parents who themselves have separation anxiety or other anxieties will be very holding on to their kids, and the kids get anxious. But if you let your child go, if you let your child know that this is the place to be, it's all good. The kids almost always adapt to that well, and when they don't, we have a

few ways to help them with that. But I think a lot of this is us as teachers and clinicians basically being matter of fact about the place and what's happens there and this is how it goes, and parents being relaxed enough themselves to let their kids go. And again, for parents who might be listening, the risk that your child will be in one of these incidents in general is remarkably low. It's much more likely they'll get hurt in an automobile accident that they will be hurt in

a household actiscident, that something terrible will happen. So the media is on top of this now, in part because I think it's mostly the more progressive media who's trying to say listen, we need gun control. This is happening so much. A lot of this stuff has always happened. You know, in the seventies when I was growing up, there were tons of kidnappings. We have very few kidnappings now, it's not really a common thing, but there's a lot of kidnappings back in the seventies where you know, and

sometimes it wasn't always like some organization. It might just be a father who takes a child from a home or and isn't living with the homer, it doesn't have custody. But those things happen. It used to happen an awful lot more than they do now. And it wasn't until we started advertising them on the milk cartons that people became sort of savvy about it, and then people came very concerned about it, and then our anxiety started to

lead us around a little bit. It's not that we should be cavalier and not acknowledge that these things happen. It's important we acknowledge it. It's also important to realize that most everybody is safe, most all of the time, and we can do more to short that good feeling up, not by acting in denial, but by normalizing it. Bad things happen sometimes, It's absolutely true. Uh, we do everything we can to keep you safe. We do everything we can to enjoy our time here and to learn together.

Let's have parents on the same page, and let's let our kids go to school. If the school is unsafe, if the neighborhoods unsafe, that's a different story.

regular basis, whose cortisol levels are quite high. Can you talk to us about, you know, us as as as adults that are really living you know, at a at a heightened state, and like you're saying, can bring that in to the the kind of the understand you know, bring that into the home, bring that in to our connections with young people, and so talk to us about what happens with the stressor and then why it's important to kind of bring those levels down given what we're

all seeing, right and how we're all tapped in on a regular basis.

And it can basically help us feel less pain, and be more strong and muscular, and be more acutely focused, and all these kinds of things that can make us at times almost superhuman, so we can get through the stressors that we face. But unabated high levels of cortisol are also released when people are stressed, and that makes sense,

and so the levels stay high. And when they stay high, although they protect us and they allow us to sort of be ready for any disaster or any possibility that can happen, they also have a wear and tear effect on our bodies because you can't maintain that high cortisol without some pain. That pain would be high blood pressure, that pain would be a rapid pulse. That pain would

be irritability, agitation, anxiety, and so those things. While again it's protective and helpful for us, if you are a child that's say, growing up an impoverished neighborhood and you're an unsafe school and you have an unsafe route to school, but you've got to go by yourself, and you live in a disorganized and violent area, then your levels of cortisol are high, and you're primed always for disaster because you hear sirens at night and your sleep is disrupted

and always have a great night of sleep. And you also have a great meal every day because the food is little insecure and you're not sure that you are you're not warm enough for the cold days and cool enough for the hot days, and so your body is always sort of primed for any kind of urgent situation,

and that wears you down. That leads to higher rates of anxiety, drug abuse, school drop out, Your behaviors around like things like early pregnancy or getting involved with a rough group as much higher you're risk with age of obesity, hypertension,

heart disease. You know, these people who are in these environments die on average twenty to thirty years earlier because of these high levels of court is all that take a toll on their body, causes their circulation to break down, increases the likelihood of diabetes, makes them not very efficient at processing glucose. Pancreas doesn't work as well, or insulin isn't as effective. So there's all sorts of things that we've learned in the past three decades or so about this,

and so we're cautious about it. And on a very micro level, if you're a kid in school and you go to a typical school, well, there are some kids, of course who are bathing in cortisol all the time because their environments are unsafe. There's abuse in the home, someone's in and out of jail, there's drugs in the home, there's a lot of instability in the home. They live in a poor area, whatever it is. And so those kids go to school primed for fights, primed for tension.

And those kids, we actually know that when you show those kids even an ambivalent face, you're walking down the hall and You're not one of these kids who's affected by this. You're a typical kid, but you don't, you know, you just have a sort of a straight face on or maybe you smile a certain way, which a lot of kids would interpret as awkward, weird, ambivalent, unsure, or even friendly. Some of these kids who are primed for disasters see that as a violent face or a threatening face,

and they get agitated and they respond to it. These kids get into more fights, These kids get into more detentions, these kids get kicked out of school, and all that stuff sets them up for all the other things I was talking about, you know, bad food, lower income paying jobs, earlier pregnancy, more drug use, likelihood of being incarcerated. So all of this stuff works in and it becomes this

big stew. Cortisol is not the only thing here, but it's a big part of our biological response that leads to uh OR as a result of these exposures and then leads to more problems.

norm for everyone. Right. That when you have environments that are are riddled with these with these issues that are societal issues that are ignored, the effects then become domino right from youth all the way into adult. And I think that that is something that is really important for us to think about when we think about again what kind of elected officials we are putting in place and where their priorities are. Before I let you go, I do want I just punctuate, Yeah.

certain type of foster care or placement. But whatever it is that we do, when we move them into an environment that is structured for them, that gives them a reliable way to learn, a reliable sort of behavioral patterns where they're waking around the same time and going to sleep around the same time, and they're eating healthy meals, and they're getting exercise, and they're getting teachers who identify their learning difficulties and support them if they have them.

When we do that, people get better. They may still have to press or they may still have ADHD, they may still have autism. It doesn't treat all that stuff, but it makes them so much less less intensive, and some of those things that are triggered by environmental situations never show up in the first place, or they're so minimal they don't need treatment because they're getting all the

supports in place that they need. There are a million political reasons that we don't always invest in those interventions the way we should. Politicians are elected for a few years, these things take a number of years to show their benefits, but they do have. Every study we've done looking at this shows that these are cost effective that if we follow them for four or ten, eight years, are multi systemic treatment. Things like Boystown. I was just in Boystown

consulting with them in Omaha, Nebraska. It's the same thing. They basically bring these kids into homes, these are foster kids or kids who've been in violent environments. They just raise them in a safe home with a family where they have reliable meals, reliable activities, and the vast majority of them do very well and go to college, or they go get jobs, they get training. They are kids who are able to function very well when taken out of a very disruptive vironment or when given the supports

in that environment that they need. So and a lot of this happens not because people are lazy, and not because people are bad, as you're suggesting, but because people have had well, We've got all sorts of generational trauma. We've got genetic changes, we've got racism, we've got poverty, and those things really chip away at people and it makes it very hard for people to get back on their feet. And I think that if we could level the playing field, we would see a huge change in our population.

and their centers. Just give me your thoughts and response to those decisions that are being made in school districts also that happen to have predominantly black and brown children.

putting them right back in the same place. It doesn't make much difference for ninety nine point nine percent of people. They stay clean for two weeks and they're back in the same problems because they're in the same place and nothing is changed in their home environment. Nothing has changed with the people they hang out with, or the way they earn their living, or the activities they're engaged in. So I think that setting up a disciplinary center will

not teach our kids anything. It will scratch the itch of the adults in their lives who are angry and are frustrated and say, don't you mess with us. We will make you pay for that. But that doesn't change anything, and it takes an extraordinary it's natural. We all have this natural tendency to want to punish when somebody does something wrong. The dog junks on the counter and the dog eats your dinner, you're angry at the dog. You

don't praise the dog for that. But if you hit the dog, the dog learns nothing, and if you put the dog in a cage, the dog learns nothing. So there are ways to teach people and to make behavioral changes. We've known about behavioral modification for We've got really good data for sixty seventy years on how to raise kids with behavioral modification tools. And there's variations on the theme,

but basically it's positive reinforcement. You know, it's giving and leading people and rewarding people for good behavior, and it's sometimes punishing a little bit, but the punishment is not to be devastating. The punishment is brief, focused on the problem, and then we're neutral afterwards, we're not continuing to grind them in the ground and make them pay for this one act of jumping on the counter food. The dog doesn't remember, and a lot of kids, quite frankly, don't remember.

When you punish a child for more than a day by taking something away or taking away their television privileges or their phone or whatever, they barely remember what they did. They just think of you as a angry you know,

parent who's exacting a lot of retribution. Punishments when they happen should be short and focused on the problem, and then we get right back into all the positives and the guidance and the structure, because that is what really makes a difference, and we have gobs of data on that, but it doesn't scratch our own itch of like I'm going to make them pay. You know. That's why Rambo movies and die Hard they're so they're so unbelievably fulfilling for us to watch because the bad guys pay and

that feels really good. But that's not how the world really works. Well that's a fantasy.