 Hello, and welcome back. Thanks for finding a way to this room. I'm just gonna make sure. Let me just check. Oh, you are awesome. You're almost all here. I think you're all here. So we're ready to begin. So in these times, as we've been talking about and hearing so far, it's really hard to talk about the mental health of children and youth and us as a matter of fact, without thinking of the impact of the global pandemic and not to mention the other horrendous incidents, natural incidents that have happened since and during the pandemic. Our next presenter has a unique insight into the impact certainly of the pandemic. At the beginning of COVID, Dr. Gillian Roberts began tracking a small group of young people to capture their lived experience during that time. Lots of foresight and insight, I should say there. Today, she'll share those findings with us and also some of her thoughts and insights about how schools can promote resilience in children and youth given what she's discovered. Dr. Roberts is a registered psychologist, a research associate professor at the University of Victoria and award-winning author of children's books as well. Gotta check those out. Again, please just add your questions and thoughts into chat while Dr. Roberts is talking and I'll bring them up on your behalf as soon as we have our chat. So please welcome now, Dr. Gillian Roberts. Hello, everyone. I'm just gonna share my screen here and to get into my presentation. Just a second here. There we go. I first want to tell you all how excited I am to be here and to be able to share my thoughts with you. I would like to start off with a territorial acknowledgement. I'm speaking to you from my home which is on the traditional lands of the Wasanich peoples and I come here having been born on the territorial lands of the Sanayimo people but also with my husband who is a member of a citizen of the Métis Nation of BC as are my children. And so we are here as grateful visitors wanting to uphold and honor all of the indigenous traditions around the world. Today I'm gonna be sharing with you some interesting things. So I am both a research professor and I am a clinical psychologist. And so right from the beginning of the pandemic I've been able to understand what we've been going through a couple of different lens and I wanna share with you what we've learned and I want to also share with you some resilience-based recommendations that I hope will be of help to you as you plan your way in your communities through the pandemic. So I think where I'd like to begin is that it's really important to acknowledge that the pandemic has been hard on all of us but it has been particularly hard on our young people. In fact, I have young people, little ones that don't even remember a time before the pandemic. They've just sort of come into their own awareness of the world and everybody has been in this place of panic and worry. I also have lots of young people whose critical periods of development have been disrupted by the pandemic. So as they were supposed to be doing things in their own developmental journey, those important developmental things have been disrupted and their developmental journey has been impacted by that. First, what I wanna share with you is what we are observing in clinic. So in clinic, we have two clinics. Our clinics see a lot of children and families and this is what we're observing. We're observing a tremendous amount of isolation and loneliness just at the time when young people are trying to make social connections and develop social competencies. Many children have been isolated and alone. There's been a tremendous amount of health-related anxiety. People just incredibly worried about the pandemic catching the virus, their family catching the virus and what that will mean for them. There's been a sense of languishing and apathy, not knowing when all of this is gonna end, not feeling like they have any control over their lives and a sense of gloom and not being able to look to the future with a sense of hope. A loss of important milestones, both developmental milestones, like going out for sleepovers or for state or things like having trained to be a ballerina and miss that stage when they could go for that higher level training before their body got angry or training for different sports competitions or grad or that high school trip that they'd been saving up for, but a great deal of loss as well as loss of important people in their lives. There's been intrafamilial stress, families cooped up together, parents trying to do work and homeschool at the same time. Families, especially in tourism-related parts of our province, losing businesses. I've had children move in, like the whole family move into grandparents' houses. I had one family where seven generations were all living in one home. What has been a bit of a silver lining throughout all of this, though, is that mental health and the importance of mental health has come to the fore. There's a tremendous increase in referrals. I have had to double my clinical team to be able to keep up with the referrals. And it's really interesting for me how, like five years ago, I'd have to sit with a little one and pull it out of them, what was worrying them, whereas now I have young ones coming in with like a list of things that they wanna talk about, just this understanding that mental health matters. And I've noticed burnout. Doctors, nurses, healthcare workers, counselors, teachers, those of us that work in human services, we've really been burning the candle at both ends. I'm not gonna read all of these quotes to you. They're just meant to be part of the background here. But these are direct quotes from young people that we've worked with. One person telling us that they were sitting in class and too afraid to go use the washroom because they were worried the washroom would be full of the virus. So they sit in class uncomfortable or worried that they might have an accident through to people feeling in a panic or down a deep, deep dark hole. So very, very poignant comments from the young people as they're trying to make sense of what life has been like for them and their families. One thing that many, many, many people are saying no is that having someone to talk to, having a mental health person available to them right now has made a significant difference for them and that it has allowed them to organize their thinking and their life goals and their planning for themselves in a way that has given them an increase in agency. So I was really interested when this pandemic started because this isn't the first time I've been in a situation like this. Early on in my career, I was at the hospital for sick children and I studied the first wave of children that grew to school age that had been infected with the virus. That study became my doctoral dissertation. I followed that up with a postdoc where I studied the best way of telling children that they were sick or that their parent had HIV and that idea of how to tell children difficult things has stayed with me my whole career. When I finished that research and came here to UVic for my tenure track position back in 1999, it was just four years after the municipal water was infected with toxoplasmosis and there was a cohort of pregnant women infected with toxoplasmosis. And along with a pediatric team here in VEHA, I was able to study the neuropsychological outcomes of all of those children infected. So when I saw what was happening around us with the pandemic, I mobilized my research team to begin to document what we were seeing. And so with the help of funding from UVic and I had a lot of students to choose from, I picked seven students that came from very varied backgrounds, all sort of late adolescents on their way soon to be transitioning or just having transitioned to post-secondary. And they were gracious enough to allow us to repeatedly interview them over the eight months, the first eight months of the pandemic. We're still interviewing them, but what I'm sharing with you is the data from the first eight months. What we did then is we analyzed the findings for themes and then looked at those themes through a resilience lens. So just a minute to talk about resilience. I know it's a term that we use an awful lot, but you might not know where it came from. It came in large part from a psychologist by the name of Dr. Emmie Werner. And she did one of the most important psychological studies that we have ever seen. It was one of the longest longitudinal perspective studies. It started in the 1950s. It studied individuals from high-risk backgrounds on the island of Kauai from birth all the way through to middle age. And Emmie Werner went there initially to measure risk. She was curious, if you could measure risk, what would be worse? Like for example, a mother dying or a father dying in a family. And what she soon realized was that it wasn't risk at all. It was actually the protective factors around the child that really mattered more. So if you have two families where a mother has died, if one family could have a grandparent step in, a church community step in, an older sibling step in, that's what made the difference, not that it was a mom or a dad that died. So coming out of Dr. Werner's work, we understood this concept of resilience and how important that concept was. We got to understand that we could reduce risk factors and we could increase protective factors. And that shaped the way psychology has thought about resilience ever since. Now, after Emmie Werner came Dr. Ann Mastin, who's an amazing thought leader in this area, and she is still a professor at the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota. And what she learned, she learned two important things. She learned that resilience is not a trait. It's not like having blue eyes or brown eyes that you're born with one or the other. It's something that can be developed within each of us and in fact, it can be taught. And Ann Mastin also did some really important work after Hurricane Katrina. So if you remember, Hurricane Katrina was at the end of August in 2005 and right after Hurricane Katrina, kids were supposed to go back to school. Some kids, some school districts decided that, life is too chaotic, children need to be with their families, they need to heal, academic gains don't matter as much as that family being together. And so whole towns decided to cancel the school year. Other towns though, had a different approach and they thought, you know what, let's get portables in, let's get out of state teachers, let's get the kids back to school and back to a sense of normality and let the parents have some space to rebuild their lives. So Ann Mastin studied both of these different types of approaches post-Katrina. And I'm wondering if you in your own mind can predict which group, which type of approach had the better outcome? The answer is the kids that went back to school, the kids that got back to a sense of normality and all the social connections and they're learning not as disrupted, they did significantly better than the children that stayed home. So there's a lot that we can learn from both the work of Emmy Burner and Ann Mastin as we plan out the recovery from this pandemic. So what we did with our findings is that we looked at them through a protective resilience lens and we looked for particular protective factors in this group of young people and there are four that I wanna share with you today. One is the importance of positive relationships. A second is efficacy and sense of control. Third is purpose and ambition and fourth is sense of normality. So the young people talked a great deal about how it was important for them to have access to unconditionally supportive and caring adults that made a significant difference for them, whether it was a parent or a family member or a teacher, having that connection made a huge difference for them. And that is similar to the work of Emmy Burner. She also noted the importance of an unconditionally supportive adult in a child's life. And it was actually that early work that set up that research base set up. The reason why we have boys and girls clubs now and big sisters and little sisters or big sisters and big brothers groups around North America. It was based on that idea that every child needs at least one unconditionally supportive person in their life. The students that we looked at also had a really hard time with control and efficacy. They had a really hard time wrapping their mind around having no control, getting to a place of acceptance that they didn't have control and they couldn't predict when this would all be finished. But they also talked about ways that they could try and achieve control in their lives. And the ways that they did try to do that were helpful for them. So some of the ways that those young people tried to create a sense of control is they continued to set goals. They continued to flesh out their plans for their life. They're better understand their ambitions. And they talked about how important it was to receive guidance from someone through all of that. Like the importance of career counselors, school counselors around things like university choice and career choice. Young people also talked about the sense of normality. If they could create and regulate for themselves a kind of routine where they were exercising and being careful with their diet and structuring whatever social life that they could, that sense of agency that allowed them to create a sense of normality was really important to them. And we can see some links here to the findings of Mastin and Werner. Werner found that the oldest children in a home tended to do better than the younger children. So older children who would get up and help get younger children ready for school had better outcomes. And Werner believed it had to do with the sense of agency and self-efficacy that they were developing. And Ann Mastin now when she creates programs like Emotional First Aid, Following Disasters, talks about the importance of giving people some sense of control, even small control, color of a sleeping bag kind of control, but any kind of control or agency that you can give someone following a disaster allows them to become more resilient. And the more routine and normality you can have following a disaster helps with that as well. So what I've done is I've tried to synthesize all of this information into 10 takeaways. I'm very conscious that I'm talking to important people, important educators who can make decisions and can influence policy. And so these are my top 10 recommendations for you. So number one, make sure that you're making decisions based on solid evidence. There's lots of good information in our extant knowledge, what's out there. There's a lot of great information in the field and go out and see what the extant literature says. Prioritize the need for human connection. Our young people have been starved human connection is important and a powerful protective factor. Promote routine and structure. So if there's like an eighth wave, for example, and everything becomes fuzzy again, the more routine and structure you can maintain in the lives of your students, the better off they will be. Communicate frequently with them with the best information that you have, not having a sense of what's going on and not knowing what's going to happen next is a risk factor, but having some agency because you understand what everybody else understands and you've got a good access to information flow is a protective factor. As much as you can, ensure that students can exercise a sense of agency, choice, decision making, even if it's perceived choice, it's helpful that allowing children to feel a sense of being in the driver's seat of their own life is something that will strengthen their inner core. Encourage the development of self-regulation skills. Self-regulation is incredibly important, whether it's to learning or emotion or to life planning or to diet and exercise, but whenever we can help young people regulate themselves, regulate how much time they spent online rather than enforce it, help them regulate it, that's what's going to be important moving forward. We need to promote and normalize mental health. At the beginning of my career, I was almost nervous to say I was a psychologist where I was afraid people were gonna think I was analyzing them or something, whereas now I think it's much more normal to go see someone to help you with your emotions. We need more people devoting their lives to mental health. Our communities need to create more capacity for human service devoted to mental health. Now, when it comes to ambition, one of the key protective factors that came out of this study, it is also clear that young people need good guidance at times of transition. That was one of the key findings of Emmy Werner's work as well, that young people that had good guidance counseling, navigating high school to post-secondary or high school to the military or something like that, they did way better than people that didn't have help when those train tracks were changing. Kids are on a certain track, they just keep on going, that track ends and they're in a bit of a floundery. They need help getting themselves understanding which next track and firmly on that next track to keep on going with their life. And finally, we need to all of us, we need to actively work to build resilience within ourselves, within each other, and within our communities. Now, I wanna share with you that I've been working really hard for the past 10 years to build out a systems-based way of thinking about resilience to make it easy for educators to promote resilience. One of the most wonderful things Ann Mastin ever said that resonated with me is that resilience-making doesn't have to be grand gestures. Resilience-making can be things that happen a little bit every day. She calls it everyday magic or ordinary magic and educators are with children almost every single day and there are things that we can do in our classrooms that promote resilience. I don't have a lot of time to talk about my particular model, but I'll just share with you that I developed this model first and then I developed the different titles that I've been working on. So I think I've published 15 children's books now. The books are all basically about how to talk about difficult things with children, whether it be death or divorce or sexuality, prejudice, homelessness, tragedy, and then I've developed books on regulation and parent-child attachment, but my books have been based around promoting this resilience compass. My resilience compass for educators was published in the Canadian Teachers Magazine in 2019. So these are my final thoughts to you. I'm just going to read this because I put a lot of time into thinking about what I wanted to say here, but here we go. With the intersection of my clinical practice and community-based research is a kind of truth. Wisdom emerges from taking the time to study its essential structure. Facets of this wisdom include the inherent desire for and capacity of the human spirit to be resilient. Resilience is not forged through happenstance. In fact, we can accurately predict and thereby foster what promotes our capacity to bounce back from adversity. Let us be guided by the sound principles of social science as we lead the recovery of this pandemic. So there we go. So I'm ready for questions. I'm curious what you might want to know. And I see that in the chat box. There's probably some questions now. So I'm going to jump in there. OK. Hi there. I'm here with you too, Jillian, to support you because while you were talking, some comments were coming in. Wonderful. Yeah. Thank you for that. Just grabbing another question here before I jump in. Come on yourself for a sec. One of the thank you for that and that whole thinking about resilience and what does it really mean? And some one person just won, I wanted to share this to see if you had any knowledge of this particular book. Shirley said that it made her think of a book called Children of Katrina written by Father Gil and Peake. And out of Katrina, what was learned about resilience. So you're familiar with that book as well, right? Actually, I'm not. So I would be really grateful if after, if you could just write that name down so that I can go look that up. I'd love to read it. And Mastin, so at the University of Minnesota, has done a lot of work around Katrina. And you can go on to her website. She has her CV up on the website. And you can actually see all of the different articles about Katrina that she's written. Great. Thank you. One of the things I wanted to ask you first of all is, were there any surprises for you? When you heard from these seven young people. Um, I shouldn't be surprised, um, but I was surprised by how quickly they bounced back. Um, I, I, you know, one of the things when you work as a psychologist is that we see clinic referred children. And so clinic referred children mean that they've come to us because they've been referred from a school or from a, um, a pediatrician. So I tend to see children that are, you know, I've been waiting for a long time to be seen and are really, really vulnerable. The children that were in the study were not clinic referred. They were just like random sample children from our community. Um, and I was delighted to see, um, how, like within a couple of months, how they, how they found their groove. Um, and that makes me hopeful that post pandemic, we can help a lot of our, our families find their growth. What were the things that, I think that's probably what your whole talk was about the things that contributed to that bouncing back. Doesn't make me curious about, um, the fact that some, and I've asked this of other speakers, you've probably heard today that some young people, some children, um, bounce back. Um, didn't even have a lot to bounce back from. What's your reflection on that? What's the, what are the differences that make the differences that, that one child is more, um, maybe if not resilient, maybe more temperamentally, uh, set for to deal with crisis. What are your thoughts about that? I think for me, it had a lot to do what was existing in that child's life before the pandemic. So if I had children whose parents were going through like a nasty, nasty divorce and one child had to go and lock down with one parent and couldn't see the other. Um, that was like different than a family that was stable and, um, could just hunker down together and play games and go for walks in the forest. So what, what was in the child's life? Um, I think really made a difference, but, but Emmy Werner talked about temperament a lot in her work. Um, how having a positive mindset really made a difference in terms of how, um, though the young people in the Kauai longitudinal study could bounce back. Um, and Martin Seligman, you know, he's interesting. He was, he's the learned helplessness guy. You know, he was the guy that started off his career with, you know, dogs and a pen and electric shocks and coin. The term learned helpless that we've all used and thought about in our work. Um, when kids are feeling, you know, like that, the work in front of them is too hard and, and they shut down. Yeah. Um, and Martin Seligman now is like a big promo, proponent of positive psychology. Uh, and he talks a lot about the importance of optimism and instilling optimism and building positive temperaments. And of course a big question is how, how do you do that? In a great deal, we do it by modeling and we, we do it by helping, um, regulate. We need to regulate ourselves so we don't raise our voice and voice in front of kids. Um, and we need, when children are, are struggling to regulate themselves, they need to be regulated within a loving, unconditionally loving co-regulatory, um, dyad. Mm hmm. And, and that is a perfect transition to a couple of the other questions that came in. Um, one is taking a look at that list of yours, your resilience compass. I, oh no, no, it was a list of 10 that you would come up with and they're looking at the number eight of the top recommendation, self-care among professionals. The question is, should school districts take a more proactive systemic kind of approach to looking at, um, impacting the staff rather than I think relying on the, um, it said, I think that focus of many organizations is shifting well beyond self-care. The onus is on you take care of yourself. You can do this to, uh, focusing on a systemic, um, approach. So it's a system. Um, I think probably you're going to support that because you're resiliency, but what the question is, um, the question here is should they be, but why should they be? And what that might that look like? What are you seeing? Well, I think that would be innovative and I think that would be leading, you know, the schools that do that would be leading the way and would be set, you know, leading by example. And I think that is incredible. I've actually got goosebumps. I think what, what a wonderful idea. Um, I think that the reason for that, why that's important is that when people are not, um, not well and they're pushing through and they're tired than they're cranky, they're not able to self-regulate well. They're losing their temper. There's, they have short fuses. They're not engaged with kids. They're kind of going through the motions of the day. And all of that is a huge risk factor for our children. So the, the, um, we must, there's, there's a lot of ways to, um, to, um, I think that's the key to the process. Um, I use a lot. One is we must always share our calm. Not amplify the chaos of the child. Okay. And the other thing is when a child is having a hard time, we must understand that that they're not meaning to give us a hard time. They just really are having a hard time. And to be able to have your head. And to be able to do that. And to be able to do that. And to be able to do that well in yourself. And so whatever schools can do to help the people that work front line, be well in themselves is going to have this kind of pay it forward positive ripple effect for our kids. And then what happens, sorry. And then those kids go on to regulate better with their own kids who go on to regulate better with their own kids. Right. It's like this beautiful domino effect. Um, one of the other questions here is related to one of the important protective factors being culture. And we haven't really talked about that yet today, except kind of it, um, incidentally, this is about what we call now cultural sensitivity about understanding that not every child has the same context. So the question is, um, have you on earth? Did you want to, if anything in your research about the importance of connecting to culture? Yes. Um, I don't know, um, I don't know if it's, um, like in, in, in large part today, but it is very clear that our indigenous children who have close connection to their culture. They do far better than children who don't. Um, and, and we, I think we can expand beyond that to people that feel a sense of belonging. Um, whether it's a sense of belonging within, um, you know, uh, uh, or kids that feel a sense of belonging at church, or a sense of belonging at a cultural center, but that sense of identity and sense of belonging, um, is a powerful protective, um, um, factor. And I think it goes then towards the, for me is how beautiful that we live in a country so full of so many varied cultures. And how beautiful it would be if we could reach out and embrace and learn about and celebrate. The culture of every child that walks into our schools. And how that would, um, bring the family and the community into the school, at least in spirit, if not, you know, in actually being in the school and that, I think what you're saying is that would, that would build resilience. Right. And, and the LGBTQ community and the deaf community and, you know, various, the military kids in their community, the children, the parents, the parents, the parents in the community and all of the other people in their community, like let's be open and loving to all of our communities. Yeah, the other aspects of resilience. I think, and someone's picked up on it and their question is, um, if we think with the deficit lens that the child is broken, one of the risks there is that we become too protective. So can you speak to that? The risk of being overprotective is that you're subtly communicating to the child that you don't think that they're capable of figuring it out on their own. Right, like an overprotective parent is communicating. I am afraid that you don't have the skills to be safe in this moment or to figure things out in this moment. And so I have to do this for you. And the risk there is that you're interfering with the child's ability to foster agency and self-efficacy. So it's a fine line. You know, it's a very fine line. You know, giving children enough protection, but not so much protection that you you deprive them of learning how to protect themselves. Barbara coloroso sorry, Barbara coloroso talked about snags, right? Think about the big things. Does it really matter if the child has purple hair? You know, not really like, you know, you can cut the hair, the hair will grow. Think about protecting kids with things that really matter will matter five years from now. If something isn't going to matter five years from now, let the child explore, let the child develop their own sense of self and identity and agency step in when it really matters. What does that sound like? I'm a student who are a person who's standing in front of you who's feeling broken, who's feeling afraid. How do you talk to me so that I, I know you support me but you're not being overly protective, right? Well, Dan Siegel, you know, I love Dan Siegel's work. He talks about these four S's, you know, he talks about children needing to be seen. You know, not just like one of 100 in the class, but each individual child needing to be seen for that child to feel emotionally safe. For that child to feel secure in their attachment with you, like secure in the fact that you like them, secure in the fact that you care about them. And then only after they've been seen and are secure and feel safe, would you ever go to a place of soothing. And, you know, telling a child to calm down or telling a child to back up or that doesn't, that doesn't have any real positive effect. Even, even if you have to say that to the child, you know, it doesn't have any positive effect until you've done those first three things, you know. Another thing that Dan says that I often hear myself saying is, and it's been phrased a little bit differently today, but it's connect before redirect. And so, even in those moments where there's tension, and where there's some behavior. It's a reminder to me that everything I want to happen or if it should happen is more likely to happen in a way that's going to promote resilience if I connect before redirect. What is that for you. I love that. I also, I also prickle a little bit at this idea of children being attention seeking, you know, a continuation of that connect before for redirect is, if a child seems to be attention seeking, could it really be that their connection seeking, you know, that they're, they're wanting a human connection they're wanting to engage. They're wanting to be seen, you know, they're wanting to feel secure they were they're wanting to be light they're wanting to be a part of it to have a sense of belonging. So to, to, to try to see the world through the eyes of the child, not from sort of like a jaded adult perspective, but rather look at what is going on from the eyes of the child. And every child that feels seen and respected that feels a sense of being cared about. Every time, if you if you can't, if you can do nothing else in a day, but leave a child feeling loved and respected. You know that that that will be a day where you knocked it out of the ballpark. Looking somewhere else I am listening to you I'm just so moved by all the comments that people are sharing. One of the questions is about whether or not this this gets to teachers are not therapists. This gets to the question of whether or not there should be more clinical counselors in terms of racial to support more vulnerable children. And I don't think it's up to what policy but just just your idea about that balance between clinical counseling and the job of the school and the teacher support workers. Absolutely. Like with without question. And I mean, there's lots of different forms of mental health providers. You know there's psychologists, there's psychiatrists there's registered clinical counselors there's registered clinical social workers. I mean, there's child and youth care workers. There's I mean there's a lot of different fields. There's psychiatric nurses like there's a lot of fields where we're devoted to mental health, and absolutely, we need three times as many of all of them, all of them. And, and that and that goes to our universities to create to to ensure that we're programming in a way that creates that capacity for our community. So, absolutely, absolutely. I was wondering about the generalizability of your research. I wasn't couldn't quite and couldn't quite get who your, who your seven young people were but I, what age were they and what more did they have in common how did you select them and, and then the real question is, can we learn from that just in general about kids during a time like this. Well, you know, qualitative research isn't isn't designed to be generalizable where qualitative research where it's powerful is when you have an innovative situation, or a novel phenomena, where you know nothing at all. Like, if you went out to go create a questionnaire about the pandemic, you would be shooting errors into a barrel you have no idea what's important and what's not. What my ultimate goal of the study was to create something. It is actually created called the RQ 20. It's a, it's a 20 question resilience questionnaire that we would be able to administer at the beginning of a school year to kids, see where they had strength somewhere they had weaknesses in terms of things like agency and people in their lives that were unconditionally supportive. And then we would be able to put into place different supports for that child based on what the questionnaire said. And then at the end of the school year we could readminister that questionnaire to that child and see how we had made progress over time. So, the, the study that I did was designed to be like a fact finding mission to give me a foundation of knowledge from which I could develop a questionnaire that still still needs to be validated. But that that was what my hope was from from the study. Yeah, you know, it also makes me think about the exciting thing about that kind of qualitative research is that what you're doing is telling us what you heard. And maybe it's up to us in our communities of support or learning communities to try to make meaning of that ourselves to there's certainly literature that tells us something but maybe I know for certain people who are joining us today. Have a lot of wisdom and what do you think about that idea looking at your research looking at your findings and and making meaning in in and amongst themselves and on their own. We are listening to the children right like when we're when we're documenting what children are saying, and we're taking the time to consider what they're saying, we're listening to our children. We're making sure that they're being heard. Maybe we need to do a lot more listening. You know, maybe we need to take, take these ideas, these findings and do additional research to to look for bigger patterns across larger populations, but by listening to the children we know where to start. We know we know what direction to go. I think, I think that when when something rings true inside of you like when you're listening to something and it's ringing true. I think you're, you're understanding that there's something there to pay attention to. And throughout this magical experience repeatedly interviewing these is just amazing young people. There were more many times when it was like the greatest wisdom coming from the mouths of babes. And just as you were talking is about therapeutic small t value to the young person of just being asked these questions of just being checked in and and that's not just in the case of the research you're doing but it's probably something there in terms of building resilience and young people by asking them, what's going on for you. It tells them they're important. It tells them that they matter. It tells them that it gives them a sense of agency to express themselves being like whenever school boards allow university researchers into their classrooms. It helps with all of that. And I know it can be exhausting, you know, getting all these requests from all these schools to have, you know, researcher a or B come in and study classroom, be your C, you know, but when superintendents and schools allow the universities to partner with them. It allows a tremendous set of good things to flow from it. You know, right after we finish speaking today, Julian, we are being joined by two young people. And it would be interesting to hear their reflections about how being involved having a voice affects their own mental health so that's thank thank you for raising that we can't let you go without tapping into the other part of the world which is all the books you've written and maybe just a word about how do we talk about the pandemic and other issues like other things that are going on in the world that are big and scary. How do we talk about it. What are your generalizations about how we can talk about these things with young people of different ages. Well, thank you. I think back to my early work, learning how to tell a child that they had HIV. And what that meant, learning how to tell a child that their parent was sick or perhaps their parent gave them HIV. You know that that early work around disclosure really has framed how I've thought about sharing difficult things with children. And, and I've written a great deal about it in both English and French and actually five other five other languages too but those were translated. I think we need to have good information available to children. We need to answer their questions we need to promote question asking. We need to answer their questions in a developmentally appropriate way, giving them enough information to understand but not more than they can. And as they get older and older, ensure that they have access to additional sources of information, and that they can go off they can find information and good information and be a good curator of the information that is flowing at them through different forms of social media. But, but absolutely, it is making sure kids can can access good information so that they can make good decisions and they can tell the difference between good and bad information is going to be one of the key learning outcomes of the century. One final quick question we have one minute left. Do you see that the connection to technology and people connecting with each other through technology did that promote resilience. Do you know what, it actually did. You know, and I know we're really afraid to talk about technology use, but I found that technology became the new playground, you know, kids would play a multiplayer game with with another child, or do you like a zoom kind of birthday party sleepover, where it was all these different, you know, young people in different rooms and beds painting their toenails but all by zoom. But I did find that technology allowed a kind of safe like like a lifeline to kids. And, and I was really sad for the children whose parents didn't allow them that. During the pandemic I actually had one child that went away to university back eastward that you could go in person and the first thing that young person did was by technology and couldn't regulate themselves on it because they've never been allowed to use it before so. Yeah, I think we can use technology in a healthy way. And I think we need to learn to regulate our use of technology in a healthy way. Julian, thank you so much and thank you for all the work that you do in this area for all the books that you've created to help us connect with our own children. And especially for really looking closely at the impact of the pandemic on on young people. It's provided some good guides. Wonderful. It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me. You're welcome and on behalf of everybody. Thank you. My pleasure. And I'm going to stick around because as I said just a moment ago, as we were preparing for this event. We were of course looking for young people who would want to share their experiences as as change agents as agents of change for mental health and their schools and community. And it will come as no surprise to you that there are so many I'm sure 25 young people are at least are coming up into your head right now. That their interest is in keeping out of themselves safe, but that that that compassion altruistic power power or agentic desire to do that for others. It's my pleasure now to introduce you to two young people we connected with who want to tell you a little bit about what they've been up to and the impact that's had on others and on themselves. So join me now I can see hope. Blancom is here and Isaac Craig, you just see. There we are. Hi hope hi Isaac. It's that maybe just unmute yourself and hope to just so we won't spend many seconds doing, you know, doing that welcome. Have you been watching any of the, the mornings proceedings and maybe other speakers. Not a lot. You've been busy. Yeah, you've been in class. Hopefully you'll get to see them later. Thank you so much for joining us and for taking time out of class for this. This conversation, one of the things that we have been talking about is how, how we as adults can support young people, support your mental health at all times, in particular this time, those kinds of things. You really the experts, because you are a young person but also you've been asking yourself that question as well. So before we start hearing about what's what what you discovered. Would you tell us just a little bit about yourself, where do you live, who are you, what do you want to tell us so that we can situate ourselves in your conversation hope to want to start. Sure. Hi. My name is hope. I go to less which is in Fraser Lake. My pronouns are she they and I'm happy to be here, because it's an advocate for change and being here kind of puts my foot in the door so that other kids younger than me the younger generation can grow up and make change themselves. That kind of I'll get you into the second Isaac but I remember hope when I asked you why did you say yes to this opportunity. You know who's in the audience. Why did you say yes. I do want to provide information for people who need it. Thank you hope. Isaac, tell us something about yourself and answer that question to why did you decide to take time out of your day to come and speak to us. I'm Isaac. I go to NBSS in Vanderhoof. I'm in grade 10 and my pronouns are he him. I wanted to do this because it's a great chance for me to have my voice be heard and like make a pathway for other students and people my age to express our feelings and like what's working what's not so exciting as we're talking people are excited that you're here just to say that. All right so one at a time maybe before we start ask I'll ask some digging questions about what you're doing but first we need to know what you're doing hope how would you describe what initiatives what are you actually actually doing in your community to promote mental health and well being free young people and why did you choose that. I actually chose to do this and how I am doing it is making it known that it is okay to ask for help that it is okay to reach out to the people around you when you need it. So I saw a nod from Isaac and I need to understand why, why did you think that was something that you need to emphasize do you think in general that's not the case young people don't in your world don't realize that they can reach out for help. I really agree with hope said because students tend to feel like there's something wrong with them and like that they don't want to see people to see them broken when they feel like they need help they're too scared to ask for it. So I feel like we need to normalize the idea of asking for help when you really need it. That's the way that doesn't end when you're a young person unfortunately that's characteristic that many of us carry into old age. So what did you in your community hope. What is the action that you take and what is the initiatives that you're involved with. I am involved with student leadership which is creating events that other students in the school can join and participate in, and I am also in the schools GSA, which is the Gay Straight Alliance, and I help run the board that shows the love is loves. And what exactly. I understand you do a lot of the work. Is that right. So how did you learn how to do that boy, how, how did you begin doing this work. I began doing it because as a student who is in the LGBT I want to show that we are in the school and a teacher came up to me and said hey would you like to join this and like, absolutely I would love to. So you know who's watching this right a bunch of educators and so what you're saying is that you had this desire but it actually took someone saying do you want to join us for you to step up is that what you're saying. It only took the teacher coming to me because I didn't know that we had one in our school. Wow. So just a little tiny trigger like that got this going and so now what exactly do you do a farmer student in your school what do I experience that's different because of your work. When you walk into the main hallway there is a board, a bulletin board that currently says love is love with a whole bunch of hearts and different sexualities, different sexuality flags within the hearts, all around the shared love is love. Just want to say if just I just have to do a technical thing for a moment somebody just says possible to have hopes camera on so we can see them and hopes camera is on for me. So I'm sorry that you don't see hope but just so you know that it might be at your end if you're having trouble seeing hope. And people are saying can they come and speak at our at our community to so you're going to be busy after this. Hope thanks for describing that what you're doing in a minute I'm going to ask you what the impact of that is. But Isaac, can you tell us more about what exactly you chose to do to promote mental health and well being and why did you choose that. Well, I'm part of the student voice in the district and I am also part of the queer alliance in my school, which wasn't a thing for a long time. And being part of those two things mental health is greatly intertwined with them. Because in queer alliance like queer students are often like overlooked and not, you know, portrayed much in within the school and like being part of that and making kids realize that they can be seen and that they matter. And it's probably had an effect on their mental health, having them like have that exposure. Of course that's what we want to hear more about. I'm wondering. I know that one of the things that you're doing Isaac to to within the work that you do is to share your, your, your many gifts and one of them is that you're an artist and do you mind if we share a poster that you did for the initiative you're talking about. Do you show us that poster. You can tell us about it while we're looking at it. This is for and what were you hoping when you created it. Well, I was asked to create a design for the May 17th day last year. I wanted to promote the day. And I wanted to include inclusion with it. So we have the rainbow in the background, which represents the LGBTQ community and then the trans flag within the hands that are multi ethnical. And I just wanted to incorporate a lot of, you know, diversity to it. It's beautiful. And have you, have you had I'm sure you've had reactions to this that people said that it did exactly that we wanted it to do it have the impact you wanted to do people are saying tears it's stunning while it's amazing it really is. Yeah, I actually didn't think it would be as widely used as it is and I didn't think it'd be used for this long as well so I'm really surprised and really grateful that it is being used this much. Totally grateful. Julia would you mind just taking this slide down now. We're just going to continue talking and and of course if people want to see that people are sharing slides I think so so Isaac will see if we can get permission from you to share that as well. So I think I'm getting a sense of what you did you you identified a need. Let's talk a bit about that how did you know that it wasn't just you that was feeling something but that there was a need in your particular community of students for the initiative that you decided on hope. Could you repeat the question please. How did you know that there was a need for doing the work that you're doing. How did you figure that out did you talk to other students did you just think well if I feel that way other people must feel that way how did you identify that there was a need for both. And I forgot to mention that I'm also in soon voice. So the hearing the other people in there, saying that mental health is a huge thing. Really made me bring it back to my school and notice it with another within the other students. And yeah, there's a lot. How did you how did you know. Well, being someone that is part of a minority and always having to deal with that constant like feel of unsafeness and insecurity within the school and then speaking to other students and friends and realizing that they felt the same. I realize I would rather speak up than stay in the dark and feel this way. So that's an interesting moment because I think what we're really curious about is what, what conditions or what relationships or what conversations within a school can happen. That would just pick up on that moment when you said to yourself I don't want to be quiet about this I want to do something about it. I mentioned that one teacher told her about one resource and it made a difference but on a broader scale for all the people who are watching. What do you want them to know about what can happen in a school that would help a person get that spark to want to be part of the solution and or pick up on that spark and help you do that. Who wants to start with that this is advice. I think something that really made me like personally made me want to stand up and speak out was seeing the amount of harassment and bullying in the hallways. Towards everybody in general. And that's when we really end up. So then you have that that, you know that feeling in your heart that fire and you get that I want to do something about it. What then. I went to teachers I went to our principal and I said hey what can I do what what things can I join. Where can I take this. And that's when you had the one teacher tell you about this group and you also said student voice. What was that. The one voice is when a few schools, a few students from each school in the district gets together and talks about what we want to change within the school district. So I think what I'm hearing you say is that adults need to be there ready, then it's your space for you to be able to ask those questions like what can I do how can I help. So how about you. What advice do you have or what wisdom do you have about how adults or the school system can encourage people like you to be involved. Yeah, I think, like, opening up the doors to like diversity and inclusivity and having like minorities heard and represented is a great way for students to want to become more involved. Like, because if they see themselves portrayed, they'll know that it's okay to speak up about their issues. Is that what you've seen. I'd love to hear about what impact the work that you're doing has had. Well, seeing the clear alliance get bigger and like more events happening it's been really nice seeing younger kids get involved and find themselves right. And with student voice, having seen changes in the school as like soon as after we've had a meeting and talked about this stuff it's amazing. We had bathroom situations for like gendered bathrooms, and the schools have already started working on those. And they also got back to us about changing the program a little bit because right now up here in our district, it's a little bit outdated. Hmm, just, I'm just thinking about that. The process that you, you wanted to do something there was space within your school within your context to do something. And you actually had some concrete, some concrete changes are made. That's really something that makes a big difference I bet Isaac on the washrooms were changed, for example, to more young people want to become involved when they see those kinds of concrete changes. I think so like the student voice doesn't get a lot of exposure. But the clear lines definitely does and seeing people like come up to me and asking like when's the next meeting it's really it's really nice. Hope what about you that question of the impact of your work what have you seen and what do you think are the ingredients that make those positive outcomes happen. I definitely have seen a lot less bullying and harassment within the school, and more people are joining the GSA, the schools, GSA. I have to remind a few of them but they still end up coming and another thing is the exposure I wish there was more exposure but there's definitely more time for that in the long run. What do you mean. I can make announcements I can put up more posters saying that to these are the days with the meetings, and yeah, that it's open to everybody. How would you make that happen that more exposure. I would more likely spend time after school or during the actual meeting, making posters maybe creating announcements so that the. So they can be read off in the morning. Hey just a thought I know a person who does really good. Maybe the two of you could connect sorry just lost my year. Do you think that doing this work. We're drawing now to the end of this conversation but I can see by our chat that you're going to be contacted by people to to to find out more about what you're doing. Just before we go, do you think that by you doing this work that it's improved your own mental health and well being. Okay, I hope you go first because your head is Bobby. Yes, most definitely it has positively impacted my mental health to where I can feel confident with being who I am and not being scared of being harassed not being scared of being bullied. And seeing other people come out of their shells shells have also encouraged me to come out of mine, even more. I said how about you. What has it done for you. Yeah, I agree with a lot of the stuff that hope said, like, seeing other people be able to express themselves and come out of them, their shells has really come back on me in a sort of way. And it's really, really great seeing work that we've put into on the communities come out on younger people. Well, you know, you've only just begun, we're going to need you for the rest of your life to keep doing the work that you're doing. And just coming on here and sharing your wisdom and your experience with all of the influential people who are on the line that is educators is is do I hope you know the ripple effect that you've started today just by sharing. You know what you're saying but who you are what I'm reading in the chat is this is this is authentic youth voice, you're the real deal. So thank you. And when we're finished or you just have to turn your camera off and we're all good but I can only. I hope we can say I think we can save this chat and send it to you so you can just see how appreciative, everyone is, and proud, your school and proud of you for the work you're doing and and also for just coming in speaking out. So thank you so much. So thank you. Thank you. You're welcome. Well, my eyes are teary. That that brings us to the end of day one of the mental health and schools conference I'm just so grateful as I watch the chat continue how engaged, you've been today and how much you've shared of yourself even through listening even through just this little box with words I get it I get that you're there and I really appreciate it I'm sure you appreciate it about each other. I hope you're able to use your note catcher and that you can reflect tonight and later today about what happened today, and that you were able to hold on to your intention today. I look forward to seeing you tomorrow and and then tomorrow continue to explore the research that practice the reality of mental health and schools have a have a good evening. Stay well, and we'll see you tomorrow morning at 8am. Thank you everyone the stream has been disabled I'm now going to close this zoom call.