001good evening and welcome my name is Abbie right I'm the director of student services it's a pleasure to have you here it is my honor tonight to welcome dr. Erin Krasnow he is the associate vice president of health and counseling services at Arizona State University and an Arizona license psychologist he has worked in the field of mental health and higher education for nearly 20 years with a focus on creating accessible and healthy educational opportunities for youth and adults please welcome dr. Craig Zena everybody hear me okay I can see you almost okay I'm gonna be wandering around the stage mostly just so I can make eye contact with most of you if those of you who are in the back want to move forward we will watch you do it if some of you in
002the front now want to take an opportunity to move to the back fine so it's my pleasure I'm honored to be here today an important topic that I'm glad to dialogue with you about and I would like this I think we can even pull it off in a room that's 900 seats big a little bit of a give-and-take and then at the end I'll hang out sometimes people want to talk about something in particular you know or something that I referenced and we can go from there but I'll save time for some Q&A as well so intro was exactly right that is Who I am I've spent my career really in that intersection of Education and emotional and physical well-being I didn't really know that that's where I was going to end up I thought
003I was going to be an engineer and then I visited some engineering schools and I had no idea what any of the other students were talking about on the tour we would be walking around I was with my dad and they would be asking questions and that likely were about engineering stuff but I didn't really know that and so we were I remember we were at Rensselaer Polytechnic upstate New York and the tour made a left around a corner in a lab and we just like stayed behind the corner and ditched the tour and they went on their way and I don't even know you know now I work at a university and I could just imagine what they thought like what happened to those people but so we're driving home I grew up in
004Vermont we're driving home it's about an eight hour drive from from there to where I lived and I remember just like really panicking and like I thought I wanted to be an engineer but this didn't feel right and things like that so my dad's talking to me it's like what is it that you thought you liked why would you want to be an engineer what I really wanted to do is I wanted to build prosthetics like that was in my head like I want to build prosthetics like why do you want to do that and it wasn't because I was interested in robots it wasn't because I was interested really in any of the other there was something about the building of advanced prosthetics that led to somebody's life changing and being something that would
005allow them to achieve things that they might not have otherwise been able to achieve or or solve problems from them that was really interesting to me he says well there's other careers like that so we started just kicking around those things and that's how I ended up basically taking psychology courses because there's the least amount of math requirements associated with that major and also had the intersection of helping people where their things so since that day that became my freshman year at the University of Vermont I kind of kept building a psychology career but I've had all sorts of different roles in in psychology and education and I find myself in this really privileged position in this current role and being able to speak to folks like you where we're really taking a broader look
006at what ails our societies I don't I don't do direct service in the same way anymore that was an important part of my career and I was glad to do it to provide direct care to to college students or others but now I get to be in this more supervisory advanced strategy space and also get to have these kind of conversations in which I'm dialoguing with families or districts or teachers or other educators about how we tackle some of the most pressing issues and so that's that's me and that's why I keep doing this stuff because it still goes back to that day my junior in high school and I ditched the tour which is all I want to do is try to advance other people's opportunity to achieve whatever it is that they want
007to achieve in their life so onward we go so we're talking about youth mental health and you don't have to even be that savvy a media consumer to know that the media is paying attention in fact there is media paying attention right now hi everybody wave at the media some of you are even interviewed by them earlier the media is paying attention because it is real there's an interesting movement right now in the media's portrayal of youth mental health crises there was a there was a period of time about five years ago where it was all like the sky is falling and it's just like everything's a crisis it's all terrible and a couple years ago it moved into like it's pretty bad and some people are trying to figure this out and now we're
008in a really good space open space that's much healthier as a society which is there are real solutions that there are real things that we can do and we can host events like this and we can be in these dialogues we don't have to just absorb the pain and the suffering and the difficulty and then just wait for something magical to happen and we also don't have to just bandy about like searching for solutions there are real solutions available to us that we can adopt or we can invent them ourselves and that's that's amazing the reasons for this circumstance are not crystal clear I'm going to talk about some of that and of course the solutions are not straightforward they t they take all of us working on that and I'm I really look forward
009to you all telling me your ideas and how we can move things forward so the reality is though as we think about the reasons these things are happening is there's a lot of blame going around so just we have a small enough group here and I can see all of you I'm a little blinded by that one but I can see all of you who wants to throw your hand up and yell out what you've heard the the reason the blame about why it is that youth are struggling with mental health in ways that they might not have before yes so technology devices forcing them here that was a very loaded sentence technology devices forcing isolation all four of those matter and you line them all up so and then therefore related to increases in
010some of the symptom ology good okay what other blame parenting yeah so tell me more yeah what about them to helicopter parents yes oh the hell look at the idea of helicopter parenting if people couldn't hear it the idea of helicopter pairing is hovering over them or over something over someone managing monitoring not letting a make mistakes you said in there there's helicopters parents there's lawn mower parents oh there's run you right over and chop you to pieces you know there's there's all this so parents are blamed often what else social media so not just the devices but like maybe what's the the devices are capable of what about social media yeah so the social media you don't know what's real and what's not you don't know and particularly young people might not be able
011to be good at discriminating the difference between sort of a cultivated profile and one that's not by the way adults aren't very good at that either but children are especially bad at that and so social media has some toxicity in that regard is that is one of the things that's blamed what else yeah yeah what about rapid changes to blame absolutely so the idea that there's rapid change in our society and it's accelerating is really really it's true and then often is pointed to as the blame what was thought of as like how you would understand like a generation of young people was often you know 20 years 15 years and now it kind of feels like five years like for those of you who have children of different ages you can see like how
012different that child is and what they grow up around versus one that's five years older or five years younger or if you work in education you can see like yes freshman in high school and seniors in high school or freshman in college at senior cons have always been different but they seem like they're from different planets now because they're they're engaging with the world in such radically different ways they're consuming information in such radically different ways in such a short period of time what else what else is to blame yes yeah traumatic experiences so there's a heightened sensitivity to the fact that many people and especially children have experienced trauma particularly in childhood and then that has these cascading impacts and so that's been to blame another thing that's into blame is kids these days
013all right has anybody heard like basically the generation like this i gen or gen z like something's wrong with them or like i was on the radio last week and the people the question was like you know when you when parents asked like or is everybody just like a snowflake now and that term is out there like people are coddled maybe it's because of parenting or their they don't know how to relate to other people maybe because of technology but just like something wrong with them and so that that blaming of of kids is really pervasive and we don't have a lot of kids in the room right now but they saw a couple but they can feel that they feel that blame they'll say it to us when we talk to them they can
014feel like they are that the the social context of the depression anxiety increases they're somehow their fault even if we might not always say that out loud that's enough in the ether and that's actually pretty common and so I'm gonna play a little game with you just to test this theory it'll be easy for you because you're you're well informed group so you know indulge me in this easy one sometimes I do this for groups that are not as involved but you know I'm gonna I'm gonna name some quotes that are from like op-eds like media reports keep talking about the media where's our meeting again so I'm going to name some things that I've seen in op eds and I want you to guess the generation okay and I'm gonna put up which generation
015so you just we're gonna vote you tell me which one it is a little game be easy okay actual quotes just to show what's in the ether to close with their mothers mothers getting a lot of weight too close for their mothers selfish and self-involved to focused on technology lack sufficient work ethic you know lazy unmotivated to achieve okay to go through their mother's selfish technology lack work ethic unmotivated to achieve alright here are your choices is amazing here are your choices the greatest generation right so this is the generation that fought in World War two or surrounded the war effort in our country so born between 1901 and 24 ends up around teenage to 20s around the time of World War two the Silent Generation which almost nobody hears heard of and that's why
016they're called that and so we don't need to spend a bunch of time on them but that's the group right after World War two baby boomers we've heard of them there's some boomers in the room Generation X I'm a gen Xer yep with some generation yeah we go Jen ik Millennials up to about 2004 again these numbers aren't perfect but Millennials is that is that group these are like a little bit of college left and then people after college kind of the early 20s early 30s and then Jen Zi Jen so if you have children in school right now this is how they're naming your generation whether you're if you have like kindergartners whether they'll be part of that it's hard to tell right now but you know like the middle school to college age
017right now okay so those are your choices too close to their mother too wrapped up in technology no work ethic what it is who thinks it's the greatest generation but a show of hands okay silent we'll move on we got one back there we got one person voting for it for greatest generation without your vote okay you're on the record look at on the record baby boomers got a couple Gen Xers naming their parents Millennials who thinks this is describing Millennials alright that's a majority opinion right there and then I'm sorry and then who thinks Generation Z okay a couple people maybe a gens ear right there nice job yep takes one to know one buddy so well the reality is these quotes were about generating the GI Generation generate the greatest generation so these
018were quotes that I pulled from newspaper articles written about that group of people when they were young too close with their mothers too wrapped up in technology do you know what technology they were wrapped up in radio so when radio came out and it became popular American households It was as if all of society was going to end and the stories that we're told was like this is destroying the fabric of a family now people come home and instead of farming or whatever it is that we were doing before they gather around this box and a disembodied voice speaks to them and they don't relate to each other and they just listen to this thing they sound familiar right and so those of you who said you you can relate to this in the other
019generations the story has not changed it's identical too close to their families around this time there's a big change in America as it relates to where the population centers were and how the American family change also around this time is when public schools started to form as a little bit later than that as children were no we're less likely to be in factories because the laws associated child labor had changed and there were fewer farming communities right so we had to do something with his children and so they would go to school so everything's changing and you get this like to close with their mothers well children prior to that didn't talk to their mothers that wasn't part of the engagement of family so the family structure changed and now they're being shamed for having
020a relationship with their mother technology already talked about sufficient work ethic now look how times have changed that generation in the United States is lionized as the most selfless they defeated the Nazis right the most selfless whether you fought in the war or changed your life to work in a factory or any of those things that happened in our country they were seen as completely antithetical to this stereotyping and yet the stereotyping persists today because there was enough diversity and credit to you for voting for the right one this happens to every generation it has not changed it will not change the reason it won't change is that old joke that we all tell which is like every generation thinks the generation after them is the worst although this time we might be right because
021that's so I'm Gen X well Gen Xers in the room what was what were we called slackers we called slackers so I don't think I've slacked in my life now it's true when I was 20 I was sitting on a couch on a flannel shirt at the University of Vermont so I kind of fit the stereotype of a gen Xer but that doesn't mean that was a good representation of my generation or of me these are stories that we tell because of the changing nature of our society and the rapidity of that change often accelerates this and so this is more intense now maybe than it was before plus we have more channels to look down on a generation in the old days it might have just been the New York Times which is where
022I pulled most of that now you have thousands of channels to shame i gen and millennials for the lack of work ethic or that they're too wrapped up and their technology or any of that other stuff so most of you did think this and if you go on google it's sort of affirmed now you know how Google's algorithm works Google is that Google's algorithm work so it's trying to guess what you're gonna write but it's not just like you know guessing other people have written these sentences into Google so now it's trying to guess based on that and they're trying to put it's trying to put things together to give you a little head start into where you need to go so if you type in Generation Z are you get all sorts of stuff
023now I don't know what this generation Z are millenials why so many people are typing that because it's not true but maybe it's very confusing out there but then you know the worst and depress and useless and not Millennials so those people are arguing you know killing Facebook doomed and then look at the bottom line generation Z is stressed depressed and exam obsessed which is a big part of what drove you to come here today right this this thing of like what's happening with this generation and how are we stressing them and how are we preoccupied with certain things and not others and this has been mainly on our mind and borne out by by the evidence of Google if you type in Generation Z will now starting to look a little bit more positive
024which probably means a lot of Gen Z people are using Google they're like we're gonna we're gonna tackle this thing transform the future of the workplace and pay you know these things well that I like all right that's nice about Jen's eats I'm like let's look at millenniums they've gotten a lot of grief you Millennials in the audience you know from what I speak you've gotten a lot of heat in your life so Millennials are killing these brands I don't know what brands losers killing the doorbell industry how dare you how dare you kill the doorbell industry it's probably like the GI Generation killed the horse and buggy industry there's Google existed back then it probably said that you're growing horns apparently this was interesting I wrote Millennials are so and then so helpless how
025about that with Millennials with sociopaths it was it I wasn't using it at not I was using that the word so but it must people were like Millennials are really sociopathic and then I spelled Millennials wrong and Google's still movement at what I meant I didn't catch us until after I made the slide but Millennials are ruining look wait look at what Millennials are apparently ruining the wine industry you're ruining Applebee's I haven't been in Applebee's in a while but now I'm afraid to go cuz it's like probably ruined ruining brunch you ruined Halloween Fox whatever that is Sara Halloween Fox so this is born out this is like pervasive in the environment so why do we do this why do we engage in this it's critical as we move into like what are we
026going to do to support our children we engage in it because there's a tendency as humans to do something called the confirmation which is we seek information that confirms something we already believe it's why we're in the political challenges we're in right now is like everybody's existing in an echo chamber and some of the technology exacerbates that but we also have a human tendency to seek that to be confirmed by it and so if we see some so if I believe that Generation Z is too wrapped up in their technology and then I see a child on an iPad it confirms the thing I already believe I don't know anything about why that child's on that iPad I don't know anything at all but it confirms this preconceived notion that I have we also do
027engage in what's called the vividness effect which is things that are more vivid are more memorable more noticeable so I can I'll confess with you so I have this thing about people walking around in public like facetiming while walking around you've seen people do that maybe you do that right so there's like video chatting while walking around it drives me crazy like I look at it I'm like it's so like I turned into like the oldest demand I'm like I hate it and you know kids these days and and unbearably of why I get most annoyed because they're in they're younger than me which increasingly is most people and so I'm looking at it like I just don't like it and because it's so vivid and it confirms things that I deeply help me but
028the reality is that there's no actual difference between the person talking to someone else on a video and then talking to someone next to them I can't even reasonably make a case where there's a difference because I can't say like I don't need to hear your conversation well I can hear your conversation if you're talking to another person walking down the street I just sort of attuned myself through my life of that's not what I'm intending to but this somehow is distracting me because it's so vivid but if I just tuned into your conversation and you were next to me I can hear your conversation it's just two people talking but there's something about it that really gets to me and it's vividness and it's confirmation are there and it's not really their problem it's
029my problem but I know based on how when I said this and I some of the nods I got some of you have the same fights so there's the availability heuristic which is just easier to think of whole generations of people as something it's just harder to see differences it's harder to be more nuanced in our verse Asians it's just be like you know how millennial Millennials they're ruining Applebee's right it's just an easier thing it's like it's a it's a talking point for us particularly amongst Jenner between generations it allows us to join other people in our generation and really slander those people who are not in our generation which is the ethnocentrism of generations it's in-group out-group stuff alright so if I'm around a bunch of Gen Xers we can vibe on what
030it's our parents and then you know kids these days be like you know might you know my day and you hear yourself talking like this be like wow they don't know what hard work is those people who defeated the Nazis right it's like he engaged in stuff you're like oh that's and all of this is just human psychology this is just a tendency yes but I'm highlighting it because everyone in this room because you're human is engaging in this and when you're aware of your tendency to engage in these behaviors you can catch yourself doing it and you can back up you'd be like oh well this is me doing that thing I have a bias about younger people because I might it's changing so fast and I don't necessarily know what's happening I have
031a bias because it's very vivid it's confirming something that I want it doesn't mean you're wrong necessarily but it doesn't mean you're right and it gives us a chance to slow down enough and notice these biases and ourselves so that when we're approaching young people our children especially we have a way to relate to them that is not infected by some of this really natural human behaviors but we have enough awareness of it we kind of short-circuit it but yet this current generation ijen has some significant challenges that are real there are rising rates of depression and anxiety suicidal thoughts self-injury those are true that's those are true data points and so in the most recent API stress in America survey when they're surveying teenagers young adults middle adults middle-aged adults older adults they ask
032them what are your top stressors and the top stressors for young people teenagers right now way more than any other generation are these social issues gun violence climate change immigration and interpersonal violence these are stressing them at rates very different than any other generation right now so I care about all four of those issues but I'm not stressed at the rate that young people are generationally I might be in I could be individually stressed by that differently but as a group my generation versus theirs as a group they have a higher anxiety higher stress about those things they're more preoccupied with it than that's they my generation or others there's rising income inequality which creates pressure on all this stuff and then there's the impact of technology as we talked about already both the good
033and the bad of Technology and I'm gonna get into that in a second so gene twins wrote a book not too long ago called ijen there's a lot of good what I would call correlational data in this it's not that causal it's not saying like this caused this but she highlights some important stuff like the advent of smartphone use in America the introduction of the iPhone and then it's pervasive use is related we don't know the direction of the relationship but is related to all sorts of problematic changes in young people's behavior not hanging out with friends away from their parents by itself for an individual may not be bad but as a group it's restricting opportunity to engage in some additional social skill building that those of us who didn't who were in that
034circumstance had to do earlier than later so it doesn't mean that this generation won't build that but they're building it maybe later so it's kind of like a delayed adolescence in that regard related to social skills and hanging out with friends away from your parents and you can see how it tracks with when the iPhone was released more likely to feel lonely loneliness is upstream of all sorts of mental health issues and it's also downstream of those issues so mental health issues can cause loneliness and loneliness can cause those issues and this generation is much more likely to report feeling lonely and you can see how it's tracking with the introduction of the smartphones and then sleep is one of the also upstream and downstream of social emotional experiences and problematic ones and then we're
035the iPhones released 2007 you see this up chicken people are less likely to get us to sleep so these are you know again the causal direction of this is we're not gonna get into too much unless people are interested the more important is that these things are connected somehow they matter and they matter at things that are very very important for the mental health of young people and we need to look at their the technology's role in their lives technology has all sorts of positive benefits I mean I again I went in universe in from out I grew up in from I grew up in the woods my town of 3,000 people if I was a member of a historically marginalized identity group there and I didn't know somebody else who had a similar identity
036as me I would feel utterly alone I would actually think I was the only person on the planet who thought that way felt that way behaved that way believed that way I would be utterly alone that is not the case anymore for many people because they're able to connect across distances it's still difficult to be part of a group of people whether it's a a sexual orientation identity gender identity race culture class religion where you feel like you're alone in your community that's still extraordinarily difficult difficult but more people have access to other humans who match their identities or at least are similar or will provide support the other side of that coin is they're also in touch with way more toxicity associated with whoever they are so what gets in can be support but
037what also can get in is harm and so that's a really mixed bag of Technology over the good and the bad and that's just one example you all have plenty of other examples so what do we do is and now we're getting into the practical stuff well here's what we're not gonna do I'm not gonna do what you get a lot even if you wanted it even if this is why you're here I'm not gonna tell you how to parent what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna talk to you about the complicated nature of parenting and maybe give you some mindset things to then look at how your parenting and see how that might have influence on your child and if you want to make adjustments with that you do because parenting how to media
038right now falls into three categories all of them are kind of problematic one is an enormous amount on skills here's what you do and so I'm the parent and I'm an anxious parent and so I was am still but often preoccupied with reading everything I can about what to do about everything and all you have to do is read more than one thing to see where they start to contradict and even the books that everybody swears by and you all have that - you have a book you might recommend to someone else and then they've all recommended books to you you read those things and you're like okay and then you try and do some of the things maybe maybe not actually a lot of people read books and don't even try the things but
039even when you try them it may not instantly work despite what's written on the back this changed my life I know we were we were the worst family and now we're the best family or whatever and there's all this like how-to stuff and most people when they engage in the how-to part of the of the marketplace they end up feeling worse about what they do because they end up comparing to this idealized state written down in a book and then comparing themselves to that and that is often very defeating because of course all how to's are building over time all skills have to be built over time but these books and most of them how people consume them it's kind of like what I did the thing and it didn't work and it's like obviously
040there's something worst about me because there's so that's I hear that a lot from parents the other is the inspiration books I sold everything we moved to Costa Rica and that my wife oh she sends me those things all the time she's like look they sold everything and I was like have you seen our stuff like I don't think we generate enough money it's like you know here's our IKEA table with scratches and paint all over five bucks we're that much closer to Costa Rica so it's like idea that there's this way to be if you just were more centered if you're just a mindful parent it's in the spiritual space without I have nothing wrong with those people there's nothing wrong with people it's just not useful it's not useful for most people in
041terms of consumption on these issues it might be useful as an ethic it might be useful as a North Star but when your child is depressed that inspiration thing rarely leads to a parent going I figured it out because I read you know the mindful parent they want to know like do I take them to the doctor do I just wait right they're looking for something in that practical space and then there's an enormous amount of shame in the media in the parenting how to media a lot of blaming blaming of children even books I like like the how to raise an adult kind of books there's an element of their like if you don't your child will not be an adult right there's an undercurrent of that and I think that books actually still
042pretty good but coded messages in there is it's up to you we're all counting on you because I've raised an adult and if you don't raise an adult you've ruined it for the rest of us because now we got to take care of your baby adult you know or you will they're gonna move back you know like god forbid your child loves you enough to want to move back all this that goes back to the shame space right if your child returns back to the to the nest you've failed and they've failed and like not necessarily because there's cultural variables there's also economic variables all sorts of complicated things but the shame industry is powerful so I told you why you can skip that so what if we did this instead what if we used
043our strengths the things that I already know exist in this room and what if we parent through those strengths so the first one is what if we use their sense of humor I'm going to go through these in depth build upon our natural human capacity for empathy really trust our gut which that's advice you've gotten a million times trust your gut but I'm gonna show you what I mean because that's that's sort of trite advice you know what you're the parent trust your gut you're like well there's lots of stuff that I trust my gut on and I was totally wrong right and so it's like how do I know what part of my guts or two minutes a little bit different than that oh I bet 1 to 2 I obviously wasn't very being
044very mindful while making these slides those are tied for second most important and then all of us have a desire for personal growth I know that because you're here tonight so there was something else you could have done other than this so some of you've got a babysitter some of you can test that to me some of you got a babysitter and what you could have done was use the opportunity to have a babysitter and go and gun on for dinner you probably passed the casual pint on your way here it's like right down the street so you could have gone there instead of this but you desired personal growth you want to grow as a person all of you chose to do this because this can't be the most fun thing you could have
045done and there's other things you could have done instead as responsibilities and so I know that's in the room and we're gonna capitalize on that now I've got five and then there's advocacy and now we're gonna at the end we're gonna talk about what you can do as parents to advocate for your children and other children to solve these things on a macro level so let's find some humor so this wasn't very hard to do it just went on Twitter to look for some people commenting about parenting so I'll just put them up there I can relate to this one yeah me too I show this one to my wife well both of us were on our phones texting about whether we should let our kid watch YouTube so I'd like these in and they're
046relatable because if we don't have a sense of humor about our circumcision we don't really understand why it is that we do the things that we do and don't really have grace and appreciation for that we're just constantly shaming ourselves or shaming each other into an idealized state that we can't achieve and so laughing at ourselves is very very good for parents it's it's increasingly rare or sometimes we'll do it like in a fit of sort of like shrieking hysterics like it's all so bad he just like burst out crying laughing like that whole thing like we can laugh at ourselves way before were dissolved into a puddle on the floor you know laughing like a lunatic like we can back up and be like this is absurd earlier tonight the the gentleman from the
047news SP said to me why is this so difficult likewise and I said to him parenting is extraordinarily hard and he was like waiting for me to say something else that's it it is ridiculous it is absurdly difficult it is if you described it to somebody else you would stop halfway between you'd be like well I've said enough right because I want to go on and on the things that we've done to try and raise people even if we're not a parent just being parent adjacent is ridiculous and you would never do this thing except for all the reasons to do it and we should laugh at that and we should help each other just find humor in it so there are communities that do that really well our online like Facebook groups and things
048like that are not particularly good at this they actually make things a lot less humor they're humorless if you trade in those spaces it's a lot of like I've got this problem with my what's the brunette like DD or des is that right darling son in these things I've got this problem and then it's a bunch of like super advice or it's kind of that like you got this mama it's like well no I honestly don't because I just spent four paragraphs telling you that I'm not going to um and and there's opportunities in these online spaces and in each other to actually short-circuit that and just just joke around a little bit more about it because it is so hard okay so now let's think about empathy and perspective ticking so empathy is a
049skill but it's born out of a human capability that almost all humans have not all of them but almost all humans have there's this developmental period in which we figure out as children that my mind and your mind are different like I start to understand that you have your own thoughts and can see things with your own eyes and I have my own thoughts and could see things my own eyes and that's not automatic early on children can't do that so this this in development psychology it's called theory of mind so the idea is that I have a theory that you have a mind and I have a mind and there's a period in which that develops and so development psychologists had to figure out their to figure out how to determine when that happens
050because it's very difficult to interview a child and be like do you think I have thoughts and they're like what are you what when you look at me do you imagine that I have my own internal world like you just can't ask children that and not that young so you got to devise like an experiment to do it so here's how these amazingly clever developmental psychologists did it they built this mountain playset and has old each side is all different like one side there might be like a goat and a barn and a little bit of snow on the top of the mountain on the other side there might be a waterfall and or in a lake and a cow or winner I don't really know if it was a goat or a cow was
051a long time ago that I was in graduate school but whatever bear with me goat in a cow on one side River barn on the other and they bring in children at different ages and then they let the kid kind of play with the mountain playset and the kid is verbal so they can talk to them about what they see and they like what's this thing oh it's a barn and what's that thing it's a goat so they can name the stuff and they explore the whole site and each side is different and then and it's a very tall mountain so then they have the child sit on one side of the and then the interviewer sits on the other side of mount they can see each other around the mouth and the interviewer says
052the child what do you see on your side of the mountain and the child can name it I see a goat and a barn and then they say and what do I see on my side of the mountain and there's a age in which the child can say what I as the because they know what's on that side because they were over there can say you see a cow in a lake and there's an age where they can't and so that's when the theory of mind develops the ability to take the perspective of the other theory of mind is the basis for empathy I have to know that the other person has their own thoughts and feelings in order to be empathic towards them empathy is different than sympathy sympathy is kind of an intellectual
053understanding what you're going through empathy is the capacity to feel it and feel it with you and communicate that I also recognize that you are feeling those things and do so in a way that you as the person I'm empathizing with can feel that to know that I'm being authentic and honest and so that's empathy and it's built on that theory of mine and what we can do with children is we can remind ourselves and we can seek to see their side of the mountain a parenting challenge for us is we will start with our side of the mountain and then maybe we'll ask them what they think think or what they feel and so we in many ways are short-circuiting this ability that all of us have which is to see their side of
054the mountain to see like tell me how you saw that so that there's all sorts of advice that goes with with technology if you see something problematic on your child's phone or their tablet a lot of parents will rush in me included I did this morning and then tell the child that it's inappropriate which is really my side of the mountain and not particularly empathic and I have no idea why what he thinks of that thing I don't even know I don't even know if he understands what it is that he just saw I could have started from his side of the mountain hey what's that because maybe he'll describe it exactly as it is or maybe he'll describe it completely differently I've already judged what it is I've already told him what it is
055and now I have no way to retreat from there to find out what his thoughts are even about it because maybe he's scared by it or maybe he's not bothered at all by it maybe he didn't even notice it and we can pause on him so that's that's something we're just kind of before you get into all the complexity of empathy and struggling with another person's difficulty pausing long enough to remember this talk and this idea of their side of the mount and saying start with them describing their experience before we interact ours because I don't have to maybe tell you what's on my side of the mountain sometimes the child will be able to say what's on their side of the mountain and you say how do you think I might see this and
056they'll surprise you with what they'll tell you because sometimes they'll tell you exactly what they think what you're thinking and sometimes not now if they're telling you exactly what you're thinking great you can say you're right that is what I'm scared of and you're in a dialogue there or maybe they're wrong and you can say well actually I was thinking okay I get that but actually I was thinking this which could surprise them because they may not be able to see your perspective yet and but you got to start there and there's so much fear and there's so much concern about how they're doing that again I did it this morning I jumped in and I told him what my concern was before I even checked with him about how he was consuming whatever it
057is I was worried about there's time for that it wasn't going to instantly harm so two minutes so although I just like joked about all the books and all the whole like parent improvement marketplace there is an area that I do recommend and that is keying in on human development and understanding where your child is in their development and a tuning yourself to that now as part of a research lab when I was in graduate school that looked at maternal child abuse mothers getting their kids the number one predictor of mothers hitting their kids was a misunderstanding of their child's developmental capacity what I mean by that is mothers who saw their children as developmentally older than they actually were or more capable than the actual were were more likely to abuse their children is
058if as a parent today I think about her all the time because when I'm frustrated with my child and I find myself I'm never gonna hit him but what I find myself escalating my own things it's giving me something to retreat back to and be like well what's a seven-year-old supposed to be doing what is reasonable to believe that he and then even if some seven year olds can do that can my seven-year-old do that which really is like did we ever teach him how to do that did I ever really focus on who this human is in front of me and what he's capable of and if he has proven capable of this before and he's not doing it now that's one thing but if I have no evidence that a seven-year-old could even
059do that or like be worried about I had a hard day or any of that other stuff that sometimes happens when we're not attuning to the developmental level of the person that would come up all the time in our lab mothers would hit their kids because the kids wouldn't be sensitive to how hard a day they had and then that idea of a child being attuned to an adult day is late adolescence if that those are you a teenagers know what I'm talking about like if that but some of these mothers were thinking about it in like a four-year-old would understand that when mommy comes home after a hard day that they should now that sounds bizarre except as a parent I bet you can relate not maybe to the hitting part hopefully but to
060the part where you you get like you should be able to so what you need to do is you need to educate yourself in my opinion on all sorts of developmental psychology there's great the internet makes it so easy now just like looking at different ages that it's appropriate to do things and immersing yourself in that less on how to just know what development looks like it also will help you if things are if your child is struggling and knowing like oh this is something that maybe I want to talk to somebody about because they're not where I think they might be I don't want you preoccupied because a good developmental psychology does not put a bi6 they should they give big ranges and so that big ranges can help slow us down between the
061ages of five and nine not by nine the age of the seven and eleven and because there's big ranges in development by immersing yourself we get in touch with concepts like the zone of proximal development this is a one of the premier developmental psychologists of our time then Vygotsky he came up with this concept which is our job is to push on young people a little bit harder than they currently can do but not so hard that it overwhelms their capacity and you know if you're a parent in the room you know that you can see where that's working you can also know where you've overextended them and you've gone too far and pushed them too far and then they retreat and they pull back or they have the failure experience and they refuse to
062do it whether that's homework riding a bike doing chores in the house all of us have these experiences of like oh that I kind of I kind of hit it right and other ones were like I way overshot what I how hard I push them over shooting is not the problem staying in that space is the problem those parents who stay saying like I don't care I'm gonna drag them to the finish line there's more problematic outcomes for their children those parents who don't do anything who don't push at all there's more problematic outcomes what we want to find is and then what that requires is to be so attuned to the other human that you're watching how they're doing how they're feeling backing off when you feel like in your gut it makes sense
063to back off pushing a little harder when you make sense there's no perfect way but the person in front of you will tell you all right so let's talk personal growth this gets a little hairy a lot of particularly as you see online and other things a lot of the issues that I hear as a professional and then doing this kind of stuff from parents about how to parent are actually their issues not their child's issues and the desire for control the desire to make this go right is born out of the fears that we all have that something's going to go wrong some of its more acute and some people than others but control is an effect of that and we I'm an anxious parent so I have to work on my tendency to
064hover like a helicopter I have to observe myself doing it I have to helicopter above my helicopter and won't be like oh you're overly monitoring this thing back up those are your issues not his and you keep doing it it's gonna hurt him also we the the isolation that children are telling us about themselves is true about us as parents too and I use these Facebook groups as an example of so much of the online conversation amongst parents about parenting looks to me like these people have nobody to talk to and I know that's true for the majority of us in this room it is incredibly isolating society right now we are on a very bad trajectory as society in terms of social isolation it is housing it's having catastrophic impact on not just teenagers
065but on middle-aged people and particularly the elderly the United Kingdom just a few years ago named a minister of loneliness because they see this as a social problem amongst the elderly minister of loneliness by the way sounds like the worst Monty Python sketch ever but the the idea being is they recognized that they needed somebody to manage this condition of older Brits living by themselves in a tiny flat somewhere getting money from the government and never leaving their house and they were getting sick at a great early or dining at a faster rate because of that well we have those same social problems in the US and technology makes that more difficult and our political challenges make that more difficult than we're getting more isolated so I read those things and so much is basically
066shouting can anybody hear me I'm struggling and they post unbelievable things I can't even believe sometimes with the things that make posted people will post in a group with a hundred thousand members my husband's such an ass never there what does your husband know that you posted that because they just have no one to talk to so they would take something do something so silly like that where they're just sort of throwing out their personal business maybe their husband knows most the time they don't and then sometimes they'll get reflection hey you might not want to share that and they'll say that people say things like oh he's not on Facebook as if that's gonna prevent anything from ever happening but it's this distortion we live in in this isolated society in which we start
067not even understanding how social networks work or how acute relationships work we have to look at that isolation and reach out to each other and give each other comfort and be able to take those risks and be vulnerable with each other to be limit that isolation limiting that isolation will make us better parents not just because we'll have a babysitter although that helps but also because we'll be able to release some of that stress when I talked about earlier about the ridiculousness of being a parent because we'll be able to bring that forward to somebody else to have it someone empathize with that and help us through tough times and then projection projection is I take my issues and I put it on you and in the academic achievement space as it relates to that
068right now the stress depressed and exam obsessed most of the academic achievement challenges that are happening in America related to preoccupation with like AP and other things like that those are adults projecting those things onto children it's not the children themselves that came up with it you know what I'd like these are adults have created these systems we're projecting them onto children because of our beliefs about what school they should go to or what it means to achieve and all that other stuff despite all evidence to the country so we're doing it to them and we have to look at that we have to go through that alright so advocacy then I'll go through this and then if there's questions I'd be I would love to hear them so you also exist in a very
069powerful space as as parents and members of this community any community your voice matters and you can push for things and so I'm gonna give you some recommendations some things that I think we should all push for we can treat mental health issues as a diversity and inclusivity issue not only a problem to be managed away not only something to find and fix but actually part of our diverse the diversity of our society that some people are struggling at different times and some people have different neuro capacities and some people and some people and some people and some people because it's all of us some people have experienced traumatic events some people have not some people grow up in families in which they're struggling economically and some people have nothing and all of that downstream
070is all sorts of other impacts on our social emotional well-being and if we look at that as part of the fabric of our community we D stigmatize those challenges and we make it part of who we are that some of us will struggle with some things at different times and that's okay it doesn't mean they don't deserve our help we don't just look at it be like live and let live because that's not inclusivity that's tolerance I'll get to that in a second inclusivity is like and there are responsibilities we're part of this together we can do this in policy we should look at all our school policies all of our community policies all of our municipal policy our laws and look at how this is playing out in the social-emotional lives of our children
071and ourselves where is it that we're restricting access in ways that may are intended or unintended and change those things there's movement right now in the state of Arizona in that regard I'm very proud I was I've been here a long time it wasn't always the case where you could kind of push through legislation and municipalities or at the state level that would be in the service of things that we're looking at now like mandatory training for mental health yeah it's gonna be difficult yeah we're not a hundred percent sure how that's gonna go yeah there's not really a budgets that are going to work attach to that but it's a line drawn in the sand that says we are not going to exist in an environment in which people who are responsible for children's
072well-being are not trained in children's well-being that's a gigantic advance for Arizona and I'm proud of us for doing that we could recognize that the history of marginalization still affects our groups and affects them majorly and affects them differently and that part of our communities are people who have experienced these things in greater intensity or greater numbers than some of us some others of us and that we can recognize that affirm that recognize it and seek to change it it's not a it's not enough to not be racist we must be anti-racist it's not enough to be not sexist we must be anti-sexist it's not enough to be tolerant of mental health difficulties in our environment we must seek to change those things now this group you're already there but not everybody is and that's
073our advocacy to say we need to take an active role there's no cavalry coming we're in and so you're on the frontline of that because you chose to come here today and a whole bunch of other people did not and so we need to help them get to that space that you got to so that we can advance all right let's talk tolerance acceptance and celebration of strengths so one of the things I'm proud of with your school I've been a part of it a few times your district and others is that they're really moving towards the celebration of strengths of the community we've moved past for the most part in our society believing that tolerance is enough it's not just that I acknowledge that it's okay for you to exist it actually is not
074even where I accept you I need to be celebrating who you are and I also should expect the celebration of who I am at the same time and when we get to that point in society issues like mental health issues just look like part of a lived experience they're not as intense they can get intense but in general they're not as intense because it's like yeah you know she has bad days and here's how I hope as opposed to she said get to the therapist or she said that's her problem it's she said and what do I do to help because she has value I celebrate who she is I want her part of this community I don't want her just not to be depressed I want her and that's a shift because a lot
075of this stuff is really focused on minimization of the symptomology and this shift is maximization of the human of which sometimes they have difficulty so we can do these things that are proven to help we can build community better what we're doing tonight we can try and limit certain language I struggle with this tonight I even I put this on the slide and I'm still a work in progress I even called something crazy tonight and I'm working to try not to do it but I'm not there yet but I can keep working at it there's certain words we've eliminated we know we can do this because if anybody says the R word right now around children or around us for the most part it rings like a bell and we see it as problematic so
076we have a history of succeeding here plus all sorts of other words we can get there when it comes to things like crazy or insane I'm not there yet obviously I'm working hard but I'm not there and replace it with other things well one thing when we say like wow the traffic was crazy we can replace that with the traffic was bad or took a long time like we don't have to use that word it's just built into it right now and a lot of times people are like well what else am I going to use well they made that same case for the artwork we're calling things gay we have transcended that we're better than that and we can be better than this I can be better than this we can learn and teach
077micro skills everybody in this room knows some micro skill on how to calm down or center yourself or something like that we were doing a talk with some high school students about how they can take a more active role in their community and one of the students like wait a minute I know how to do four corner breathing and everybody in the room is like what's four quarter I mean I knew what it was I'm a psychologist she said which is I know how to do four corner breathing and everything what's that and then she taught everybody that's a twenty seconds and now everybody in that room has fundamentally changed because they learned a really critical breathing technique helps calm you down when you're feeling anxious it's a really good grounding technique if you're triggered
078and you have a history of trauma it's fantastic - 20 seconds and so in that regard all of us have these things we can put ourselves out there and teach each other this stuff these micro skills exist already in our community you don't need a psychologist to teach you that I can yes I will no yeah yeah I mean I would and then finally where I get to the rest before I teach you and then the rest of it we can adopt a public health model to all that we do this is a mindset you can even apply it to your family but let's apply it to like a school or municipality what do all of us need to do and know what do some of us need to do and know and what do
079a few of us need to do and know so I've kind of mapped it out with a little thing here so if you think of like a school students teachers staff families community alumni that's the that's who's connected to a school what's good for all what's relevant all what could all do where can I'll help what's relevant for some what's relevant for a few okay so here's some examples so if you're doing things on mental health awareness campaigns are good for everybody anti-stigma campaigns social norming social norming is giving people facts about something juxtaposed next to some other thing that they already might believe that's different than the facts I'll give you one from ASU it's less than it used to be but it's still there that sometimes people think that at ASU that our
080alcohol use rates are high for a cut for a university we're actually nationally in the lower end and so for example for underage students it's below 30% we have used alcohol in the last 12 months and for all aged students it's just north of half and that's for graduate students of every age right so including everybody over 21 so I share that and I know what happens in in groups immediately many people in the audience immediately doubt everything they're like well that can't possibly be true there's no way that's true your data it's something wrong with your sampling people are lying so there's one person in this room who knows how the survey works who's responsible for the data and is responsible for its accuracy relative to national norms who's that person me none of
081you are in that seat but some of you don't believe me because the perception that back to the biases the perception that you have is so powerful so I can't convince you because you know these are using the vernacular of nowadays times we were like well that's fake news right so this idea like I'm giving you a fact and you're like nope and I'd be like well how do you think that you'd be like I heard well when I like any any Sun Devils in here any graduates yeah well you didn't I mean some of you may have graduated recently but some of you didn't right and so when I was there or I why didn't say zero right so we use all of that inside of us to then doubt facts so that's doesn't
082work we have to do as a social norming campaign which does this simultaneously when we tell parents and orientation and students when we're welcome to the University these facts about alcohol use we also show them the data that we collect on the perceptions of alcohol use so we ask students how many how many of you have had this much alcohol in the last year they tell us and then we ask them in addition we ask them how many of you are peers how many college students are drinking so the rate of underage use is south of 30 percent they perceive it to be 92 percent just like you so we put those side-by-side that does some powerful stuff one it may even forces them to reconcile their own report because it's not make-believe it's their
083data we say we ask students like you you say this here you say this here which negates the whole worry about the sampling error because they relate to the 90s we thought everybody wait and then they're like well then how do you explain this it does another powerful thing it's really important in these kinds of public health campaigns when you are a non drinker and you come to college you're in a seventy percent more than seventy percent majority you think you're in an eight percent minority so what does that do to your experience you feel isolated you're more likely to drink it's difficult to find other people because everybody perceive you're perceiving them mostly incorrectly so you have 70% of people mostly miss reading the environment about other people doing the same behavior or the
084lack of the behavior in this case as them which increases risk and it increases isolation so by showing them this we short-circuits some of that and we say you know it's very difficult to see a non-drinker it's really easy to see a drinker like a proven right now if I did this talk and you sir we're listening to me and you were as attentive as you are right now and writing stuff down but while you were doing it you were swirling a martini in your hand it would be the only thing I could focus on I'd be giving a talk and I'd keep looking over there and I'd be like I like all of them set of onions and he's like he's swirling it the whole time and I would I would be like laser
085focused on it it would be so distracting because I could see him drinking because if you asked me and he described the room and I wouldn't be I would never say yeah I was in this room I was doing this talking and nobody was drinking alcohol people like yeah obviously but if I saw one person drinking one person out of a room of 80 people it would be the only thing it would be the story I would tell forever later tonight I'd be having a conversation with Katy McPherson Katy's over there and I would be saying to her Katie can't believe a guy brought a martini it's like a whole shaker he made it really look really good I wouldn't I wanted one myself I did felt weird asking it would be I would tell
086that story forever every time I came in I might at my next talk my next gig I might say you might want to remind people not to bring alcohol I would be so over responding to it because of how vivid it is and also with it with a child with someone joining in University they're already primed for that because like you they already proceed environment wrong so social norming campaigns compare those two things so with things about mental health or things about struggle of things about the idea of failure that not every not every test is gonna go well and all that stuff you got to put both the perception and the reality next to each other everybody thinks they're the only one who failed the test but actually it's pretty normal to struggle in
087math and put those things side-by-side that so people can do the reconciliation because if you only share one of them people dismiss it if you say to people it's totally normal to struggle there like whatever adult or if you say you know if you only put up the the messages about how it's going for them they can feel isolated in that regard or the perceptions of it so you put them over the top side so that's social norming campaigns and then there's always gonna need be a need for specialized services so it's gonna be need for social workers and special educators and and hyper involved parents who are running the PTA and like there's always a place for the few of us and in that regard we all fit somewhere in this space but we
088have to do it all at the same time some communities are really good in the few category they've invested a lot in specialized services they have ten out of a thousand super involved parents but not enough others others are doing better in the all category but have not invested in a few category they push out a lot of information to parents but they'd have no one really running the parent engagement strategy or the parents involve themselves using parents as anything we got to do it all you can advocate for that so here's an example for any issue as I've lined down one thing I'm very proud of is that we have started to work with local area high schools right now to help them start or accelerate existing or start new ones mental health clubs
089on their campus the mental health club is just a group of students who care about the mental health of their peers we train them up and awareness how to have good conversations we don't turn them into mini counselors we just turning into better friends they're already talking to each other about their mental health inverse um one is at risk other people other young people know in their environments someone who's at risk they might not know what to do or they're afraid that they're gonna be perceived as snitching on them or they're just overwhelmed with the pain and they just need more information about when to seek help from an adult and how to do that in a way that doesn't you know make you feel that you're ratting out your friend and all this like
090there's ways to do that we can teach that so we've been partnering with with some schools to come in and help start those clubs and do that as a way in that some category some students can get trained up in how to train others and how to influence others so that all students can get this good experience and it's a peer to peer impact strategy and always the clubs need an advisor and other things like that but by doing this we're seeding this in the environment where students can make a difference in each other's lives we're doing this with as many schools are interested in with us and one of the things I think it's cool is we're going to be matching over time ASU college students to those high schools as mentors so they
091have college student mentors for the high school students who are trying to make big change in their schools as it relates to the climate of social emotional difficulties so we're always looking for interest in that regard so if you are part of a school and you involved as a parent and you want to talk to me that I'll be happy to talk to you about all right so you wanted to learn Fall Quarter breathing breathing so you pick something with four corners that you can see and so if you pick the podium if you want and you just start on the top left and as you start on the top left you inhale four four move your eyes over to the top right hold until four down to the bottom right exhale slowly for a
092count of four don't inhale yet move over to the bottom corner inhale and just keep working your way around giving that why this works I mean deep breathing works for anything why four corners works does it gives you something to focus on and allow and a lot of people like the structure of just following it and there and honestly their squares everywhere so it's really easy to find and you can do it and you can do it really privately because a lot of times people teach deep breathing and they're like put your hand on your belly and another thing and then like everybody's sitting in class or in your office there was like I know nobody wants to do it but you could be sitting in a meeting and feeling upset or anxious or annoyed
093and you can just they're at a ceiling tile just calm yourself down or centered or put yourself in a little bit more exam space so there it is that was probably 40 seconds and it's it is it deep breathing I'm sure everybody in the room knows is important it's just a strategy to do it with a little structure because it's very difficult to remind yourself to do it so sometimes you'll see squaring it just decide to disagree so with that I say thank you and I welcome any questions that you have yes yeah so good one extraordinarily difficult question so thanks for kicking it off let me reframe your question it's a complex political landscape and how can I not indoctrinate my child but also not let other people in doctrine it's so they can
094live then and learn for themselves and I don't know but I'll give you an answer because that's what I do sure yep in any advice yeah any advice on how to talk to the kids about no but did did the the recommendation have any advice so so my recommendation without having seen that what you want to do is keep your kid talking and so asking them questions is good if they're a kid who likes to be asked questions and you know if your kid is one of those kids or not and that changes by interest rate so we don't they're not recommending interrogating them but if your kids open to that or priming that was saying because if you're supposed to talk to your cave which is a good idea saying what have you heard
095about the lockdown drill tomorrow so you ask kind of an open-ended question in that regard and then follow their lead now as it relates to social issues depending on the age of the child there's some times when talking about those in a more open way where you can kind of flesh out what they think or feel and then be able to handle differences of opinion that's that's a developmental thing so high school students can handle that differently than a middle school student or not at the same time you all have opinions about those things you have values connected to those opinions all the things that are up there are not disconnected from family values they all are and so I also don't want to stop anybody from talking to their children about what they value
096in the world and how that's related to something like gun control or immigration there anything else now you can talk about those values without it being talking about gun control or gun access or gun violence you can talk about what you think about things and then say and this is why we think this about this issue which de-emphasizes the focus on the issue and emphasizes your family values because all of those things are connected to those family values and people sometimes get that mixed up because it's so difficult and it's so hard and it's and it's fraught with such emotion those topics but if you trace it back all of your opinions about it that you have are all related to what you value in the world which is why in the political landscape it's
097so difficult for people to change their opinions about these things that's why we're at stalemates a lot because we're actually not talking about values we're talking about policy or we're talking about opinions of those things when we start talking about values we can get a lot closer together you can get a lot closer together with your child and say in our family we value these things this is what we believe now someday they may believe something different but early children they're just looking for what's my family about who are we what do we value and having strong values and your family is great and then of course then that extends into your feelings about social issues what else yes in the back so yes with a caveat developmentally four to seven you start to see
098the twinkling zuv that but a lot of it is still very egocentric kind of their world which is why you get more like young young children like cheating and games and things like that they're not really thinking about what cheating means or anything else that just kind of trying to win my son will like you will play Candyland still and he'll say I'll go set it up you know now he can count and read and everything and so then like he's like mom you go first and then she goes and then like invariably the best card is the third one in there it's pretty clever so he's either gonna be just like a lawyer or associate pathum I'm not sure yet that's if they're not anyway so that's not really someone not being empathic or
099not having a theory of mine that's just him trying to figure out himself in the world but there's elements in where he is being empathic and I can see that in other things less about a certain age range and more about the feeling of empathy is that other people matter and that works earlier like that hurts mom I don't want you hurt that hurts them that hurts the dog that kind of stuff can be taught even if the person can't quite understand that the dog has their own thoughts and feelings or that the dog has a brain that operates on those things they can get kind of like the approximate concepts on it so you can start that really early what kicks in later is sort of a natural tendency to have the ability to
100reflect on the inner world of the other person which is much more complicated but not necessary to wait for in terms of doing that and that's seven eight nine when you get you know what some parents talk about like I'm not there yet as a parent but some people have said like you know the children sometimes are at the sweetest you give it not all children are at that way at seven eight and nine but sometimes some get very very sweet because they kind of keep that sweetness of like caring about others and kicking in you know my son gave keeps giving his pokemon cards to this girl that he's his friends there and so it's fine it's very sweet and everything but it's like getting a little expensive and and so I was talking
101to him bad I'm like this is really good but you know it's she doesn't have any you know okay yes it's cool she doesn't need to get any and they and I said you know but you know we're spending our money on this so I was wondering like can we think about are we buying it for you and her or just you know we're trying to do that and he's like I don't care it's your money right she's not a particularly empathic thought but it's like this combination of like having empathy for her because she feels sad that she doesn't have any and then no empathy for us because it's my money you know it's like a whole mixed bag the attunement helps you navigate that what are you seeing in front of you what
102do they really have the capacity to do what can I really reasonably expect them and then in that middle school is when you can expect a lot more for their capacity to be empathic and this is not all children and some children with neuro differences that kind of it's more difficult for them kids on the autism spectrum and have trouble sometimes with with those experiences so this is not all kids but even for all kids there's ways to teach the skills associated with empathy even before they have the capacity of the internal working how about one more and then I'll hang on I know we're way over time we're under time I have no idea but I'll stop thank all of you and then yes okay I take right yeah I know the best person
103to answer yes there you are so all in tonight thank you again for all of your questions your attention for all the work that you're doing in the community I'll hang out a little bit if you want to talk some more thank you [Applause] [Music]