 Gail is going to, Gail is standing in our audience and she's going to introduce everybody, okay? And then we'll go on. That's great. Thank you. Good to meet you both. Hi everybody. I'm Gail Maslach. I am here representing the foundation site. We are excited that you came out for this great event. We are also gonna thank, so let's talk series here at Bedford Playhouse for letting us post on through event for this event. I'm going to introduce the head of Anthony. We go by Tony or Anthony. Tony's fine. Tony is good. But before I do, I just wanted to mention that what the foundation does. A lot of people have heard our name around but are not really sure what we do. We are an organization that helps to raise money to support the school district, all schools in the Bedford Central School District for academic and social-emotional programs. So if that's something that you feel strongly about supporting, we'd be happy to take donations after the event. We're always looking to support the teachers with the grants that they send us. So the more money we're equipped with, the more we can support this. So with that, I'm just going to introduce our authors. So both Tony and B have written books, what referred to the book, prior to this new one that's coming out called Dressed Years of Their Lives, Helping Your Kids Survive and Drive During the College Year. And that's it. I have it here. It's a guide, a guide for parents of college students who wanna help support their kids' mental health. And they have a book that's just coming out, which we have up there called You're Not Done Yet. Which I think we even see it on the path of a college student. I think we feel like that in college too. But when they're out of college, I've been hearing my friends saying that to me as well. You're not done yet. Parenting young adults at an age of uncertainty. And that's a new book that's coming out. It is available on Amazon pre-order. So if you want to go for it, find it there. And it's a clear-eyed, optimistic guide for parents with adult children who need help navigating the challenges of launching an independent life. Being kids has 30 years of clinical and academic experience and is a recognized authority of family issues with a focus on parent, child, generational, and partner relationship. She is also the author of, Try to See It My Way, Being Fair and Love and Marriage, newly licensed as a psychologist and family therapist. Dr. Hedges holds the highest credential in the marriage and family therapy field as an approved supervisor for the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapist. Dr. Hedges is also the recipient of the PPA Psychology and the Media Award for 2021. Congratulations. Thank you. Tony Restain is Chief and Chair of the Department of Psychiatry, Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics, Cooper University Health Care and Cooper Medical School of Rowan University, Life Fellow American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Gold Humanism Award, University of Pennsylvania, 2017, and board member of the Higher Education Mental Health Alliance. Dr. Restain's research interests focus on improving clinical outcomes for patients across the lifespan with neurodevelopmental disorders and on creating effective service systems for these patients and their families. So with that, we're going to have the pleasure to hear them talk to us about their most recent book and their philosophies and knowledge and then we will open it up to questions. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for inviting us. I want to tell you a little bit about why we decided to write this book. First, our agent reached out to us, this is during COVID and said, oh my gosh, everybody wants to know what's the new normal? And so Tony and I bedded that around for a while and the preliminary title of the book was the tyranny of normal, which is kind of what the marketing team came up with, but we didn't really love it. And so backstory is, we tried to kind of go, well, they're new normal. Like, I mean, this was all during COVID. It's like, who knows? Like what we know is that uncertainty is normal and that we're gonna keep having uncertainty and we're gonna keep having kind of a rollout of the after effects from COVID on young adults, but also on their parents and their families. And so as we kept trying to explain to others in a really shorthand way elevator pitch, what's the book about? I kept finding myself saying, well, you're not done yet. Like, you're not done yet as a parent. And so that's how we came up. You know, Tony and I were like, yep, that's so true, isn't it? So part of what we want to say to parents is that we think families are so important and parents are so important. And as a mom, my best credential, I got really tired of having parents, especially moms pathologized as, oh, you're the helicopter mom, or you're the, this or that. And so many books that are written for people in their 20s really cast parents in these usual tropes of like hovering, overbearing, people that the young adults have to recover from. And I'm like, wait a minute, wait a minute. We worked really, really hard to do everything we can to support this young person, even if they still need our support and many do. So I also wanted to correct the impression and Tony and I wanted to correct the impression that many parents have because parents have a hard time talking about like, yeah, my kid's not exactly doing okay. And because we all think that like somehow after some tracing of our own young adulthood, you know, our kids will have hit the kind of big five markers of adulthood that sociologists turned out in the 50s, kind of outdated that I hit, probably you hit, which was like, finish your education, get a job, live independently, find a partner, settle down, get married, have 2.2 children. Well, I didn't hit the last two in all honesty until my 30s and that was like ancient by then, right? Because most people in that era between the late 40s through the 1980s hit those markers in their late teens to early 20s. So if we go on our own kind of blueprint of young adulthood, you know, there are these kind of polarizing narratives. Parents are like, what's wrong with kids today? Like what are you not getting on with it for? And kids are more like your generation ruined ours, it ruined the climate. There's all this like crosstalk that blings, you know, the generations instead of saying, you know, we have a shared history and the parental mission is always let us help you launch your life. And what we wanted parents to understand is first of all, that outdated notions of what's normal now for young adulthood have massively outdated. So in 2020, and this is before they started doing all the COVID research, only 24% of young adults had hit these five adulthood markers by age 34. So it is harder for the young adult generations today and it's not because something's wrong with them or they're over entitled or babied or it's a big socioeconomic hit that happened when the US stopped becoming the economic superpower the political superpower and that began to happen in the 80s but people didn't really have the kind of tsunami hit from that until like the financial crises of 2000, 2008 through 12 and then it's like just when we thought, okay, we can come up for air again, then there's COVID. So they've been all these like enormous kind of crushing pressures on young adults but also on parents. And one of the things that we really wanted to help parents understand was how extensive their support of young adults has been. So not only is it a decade longer, it is going into arguably the most decisive decade of a child's life where they're going to make incredibly important decisions and parents throughout that decade still have questions of will my child, the my young adult be okay? What do we need to do? What do we need to make sure of? And I think one of the reasons that the Sam Beckman free parents have gotten such kind of obsessive attention in the press is that it's a little bit like driving by a car crash and going, could that be me? Like I've tried so hard. I had all these great hopes and dreams. How did this happen? That is clearly a super exaggerated like story but most parents have those fears about will my child, my young adult be okay? So part of what we wanted to also talk about was that parents have a lot of different roles now. They provide housing, their emotional supports. They're often financiers if they can afford to be. They often are career counselors. As many young adults have the questions of like, is college still the right ticket as more and more colleges see attrition from like the enrollment role. So part of what we're wanting to do also is focus on parental mental health because parents may be surprised to know that even though there's enormous attention and support for parents who are caregivers to their parent generation, there are more and more parents who are caregivers to their young adult than to their older parents. And those do not make the headlines and that is a fairly lonely road to travel. So we really wanted to let you know, you're not alone. Here's resources, here's resources to help you navigate these really seismic changes that your young adult is gonna be challenged by. Here's how to challenge your own assumptions perhaps about like, what we think of as like the truths of young adulthood and how to learn something about how young adults think and also how they, how we can best relate to them in order to support them because they're gonna need it. And just as parents are gonna need to find how that can, there can be a balance to take care of themselves as well. So that's a brief overview and a kind of why we wrote this book. So. Yeah, let me just segue from there. One other point to make that is that when we wrote stressed years, we were already seeing these, as B puts it, these epic changes in the social and emotional world of young people and the stress on parents to produce kids who were gonna be successful led to all kinds of distortions of the parenting experience. And we remembered at the time, as we were publishing the book, the college admissions scandal came out and people were, again, in one of these other, in the spotlight, what were these parents thinking? But B and I saw it as, no, they're just acting the same way most parents do. They're trying to maximize their kids' odds. Obviously they took it too far, but the same pressures were everywhere that we could see was parents were really paralyzed with anxiety and felt obligated to be those quote, helicopter parents because the circumstances had changed and we sort of wanted that book to help, A, encourage parents to understand why it's harder for their kids and B, what to do about the pressure on themselves. So when we were asked to do this book, it was like even clearer that college doesn't end, going to college doesn't end your dependency as a young person on your parents. So that was why we felt good about writing this book. I guess I wanted to focus on one, I guess two important areas that I've been focusing a lot of my work on. One has to do with the difficulties that we encounter with young people with managing the complexity of the world is something we might call executive functioning difficulties. And we wrote about this in the first book, but spent a lot of time in the second book really focusing on what does it mean that you can't manage so many things all at once. In a nutshell, executive functions are the things that allow us to work towards a distal goal and not get distracted and not get discouraged and work towards that goal relatively efficiently. And it includes not only being able to regulate your attention, but being flexible if things don't go your way, finding another path instead of rigidly pursuing something that isn't going well, being able to inhibit your impulse to do things or this sort of search for a gratification, being able to say, oh, I can have fun later, let me get to this task. And then things like working memory and remembering what you need to do next and holding that in mind. Well, all of these things have, I mean, I see them clinically in my patients with attention deficit disorder, which is largely now being defined as a difficulty not in hyperactivity so much as in a bill and not even strictly about attention, but about being able to regulate these things we call executive functions. And one of the things we try to show through case examples and reviews of what's going on now is that this difficulty is broader than just people with ADHD. It includes people that are in situations that are really demanding, right? Like going to medical school, I see medical students now who are like just overwhelmed, law students, people in graduate school. And even people just trying to find, doing a job and having what we saw during COVID, for example, was that people had to do so many things from just sitting in their homes that it was really hard to stay on task. People slept less, people drank more. So we were trying to sort of look at what was COVID doing to the executive functioning abilities of people? And it was mixed bag, right? There were some things that were easier, but a lot of things that were harder. And what it talked a little bit about one thing that clearly is rampant now is what I would call this tendency to procrastinate endlessly till the last minute and using things like the shiny silver screens we look at so I'll tell you about that in a moment, but we try to give advice to parents about what do you do when your kid is like not getting the job done, not applying for their job or not taking charge of the things they say they wanna do. It's a real mixed bag for parents. How much do you nag or tell them what to do? It doesn't work so well, but how much do you step back and see them becoming more and more discouraged, immoralized, and if not outright, frankly, depressed and defeatist. So we kind of wanna point that out as there are ways to handle that. There are tools and there are approaches that young people can use to help them get through what they're trying to do a little more efficiently. Relatedly then, we have a particular interest in the impact of digital media, interactive media on everybody, but we're looking at its impact on young people especially. And my sense is that we've witnessed again something that's a generational difference between the world that parents grew up in and the world our young people grew up in. And no one's gonna argue that there aren't tremendous benefits from having at our command these powerful tools where we can explore the world, where we can find other people, where we can look and find entertainment. I mean, it's endless how you can sort of navigate an internet that takes you all over the place. But what we are really noticing as well is that there are a lot of risks to this interactive media use. And we kind of see the extremes of it leading to something similar to like addiction. Some people refer to it, I like to call it problematic interactive media use or problematic internet use where it really becomes harder and harder to say no and to leave it aside. Now look, we're all distracted by this technology, okay? Because we're all prone to look for information. In fact, neuroscientists liken this to the way that all animals forage for, let's say squirrels forage for nuts. We forage for information. We are information seekers. That's what makes us human. But when you've got access to endless amounts of information, how do you draw the line? What do you do to create a boundary between this world that is so enticing to us and just getting things done in the, not in the virtual world, but in real life? It's funny, it's called IRL, in real life. I mean, the fact that there's even an abbreviation of an acronym for being alive in the world, it's IRL, right? Well, I mean, I have, you know, so, and we talk about the fact that everybody thinks you can multitask and get away with it. We know that's not true. Task switching makes us less efficient. It really has reduced people's attention span, the average attention span of college students now is anywhere from three to five minutes. You know, that's lower than what it was, you know, a decade or two ago, it was about seven minutes or eight minutes, and before that, it was longer. So we're seeing this progressive shortening of attention span and less and less patience, more what we might call delay aversion, not wanting the answer right away. Gotta have it right now. And so there's this seduction about this technology that we wanted to write and clarify that we're all prone to this. We all need to find ways to deal with, for example, dealing with the anxiety of having to stay connected, you know, FOMO, fear of missing out. That's a real thing. And then there's nomophobia, which is the fear of not having your phone near you. Okay, and that's real. Like people are studying this, right? Or even adults, they can't have their phone more than two feet away from them. And so, you know, this also leads to distracted driving all kinds of other health problems, sleep disorders and depression and anxiety. So we just said, okay, you know, let's identify the hallmarks, the signs of problematic internet use. A lot of interest now is in sort of comparing it to gambling disorder or other behavioral addictions. And again, you know, right now, if you look at most studies, anywhere between four and 18%, four and 18% depending on the country of young people have this internet addiction. That's a large number of people. It's higher actually in Asian countries than in the US, but cross-national studies are finding this. Even in the US, it's between two and 12%. Okay, so what we try to do is talk about not only parents looking at their social media usage but also, you know, thinking about how to help and point it out to their young person. And the way you take charge of it, like anything else. You know, you have to turn it off, you have to put it aside, you have to limit your access to it. And then shift your focus to the things that make you feel alive without having to be constantly checking your phone. We do also talk about taking care of yourself throughout the book and, you know, taking time for reflection and gratitude and mindfulness and exercise. These are all the things that get really, really undermined by this constant checking and this constant looking. And you all see this. You go out to dinner anywhere, people are not talking to each other, they're looking at their phones or they're talking to each other, but they can't wait to check the phone because they heard a notification. So there are all kinds of strategies to, you know, reduce that kind of stress. And then I guess the bigger picture here, which is kind of what B and I are trying to do in this book is to empower parents and young people to look at the big picture. Understand that, you know, you don't get from here to there in a straight line, but everything you do is made up of choices and being more conscious of those choices rather than semi-conscious or unconscious of those choices. So that's what I'll say for my introductory comments. That's really great. Thank you. You know, I wanna get to, this is a perfect segue to like the art of conversation because, you know, kids and parents need to talk and you do a lot of great writing about this in the book. So can you talk about a couple of things that might help our audience? What's careful listening? What's fast versus slow thinking? And also, can you talk about therapy and talking with people about how you're not trying to win all the time? You're actually trying to have a conversation because I think that's very important and I think that's kind of a baseline for everybody. So thanks, Vanessa. You know, there is, we devoted a whole chapter kind of on takeoff on an old book, how to, you know, how to talk so kids will listen and listen so kids will talk, but this is really more like- It's classic, by the way, it's still a great book. It is, it's still a great book. This one is like how to listen so your young adult might share. And part of what's going on is that parents have to accept their role has really changed. Their role is no longer just being an advise in an advising capacity, but in a capacity in which their job in a way is to be curious about whatever is going on for a young adult and to, and change their mindset really from my job is to be responsible and tell them what they're doing that's wrong and tell them how to correct it to asking them to think with you and to be curious about, gee, I'm not sure I understand that or thanks for telling me like kind of what's going on with that, you know, kind of issue. What do you think will help? So the notion is to get your kid and this actually begins like much, much younger but by young adulthood, they're gonna begin to have a total bristle response if you have a like, well, let me just suggest blah, blah, blah. So part of it is, I mean, you know, people from the age, very young ages, like really tune parents out when they say, well, why don't you go do do the, you know, instead of what you're doing right now and I learned this for my kids are probably five or six years old, why don't you go play your favorite? It's not my favorite game. This just gets worse if you don't change your style of relating. And so part of what we're talking about here is how developing a responsive versus reactive style. So I practiced for many years saying to my kids, thank you for telling me. It could have been some horrible cringe worthy thing which sometimes they still tell me, but I would say, well, thank you for telling me what's that like for you instead? And I was trying to just kind of go and now I'm taking a deep breath and not trying to, you know, give them advice. And then I, and so it's a partly learning how we can learn as adults what a better response style is. So when I say slower versus faster, so many people have heard of thinking fast and slow by the Nobel Prize winner, Kahneman. But as we apply it to talking with our, you know, our young adults, our children too, our teenagers, it's really leading with curiosity, leading with an openness to like find out more if they'll tell you more about, you know, how did that? You know, tell me a bit more about what's going on or how do you make sense of it or what do you think and will be helpful? So it's a little bit like getting their buy in to have a plan forward rather than creating a plan for them that they'll probably reject. So that's part of it. And then there's a very interesting section on what's called a like learning from children because children really have a very open mindset to there's more than one right answer. And they will pursue multiple answers far longer than adults will. Adults are more like, okay, I've made a conclusion here. I give the da-da-da, that's my answer. And then they shut out all the other information which is called fast thinking. It's very efficient, but it's not particularly useful when you're trying to relate to somebody because it just leads to a tendency to orient yourself toward like, I'm right and I'm gonna prove you wrong. And you have to kind of remember what I tell parents over and over again is what's your goal. If your goal is to be right, game over because you're gonna just alert kind of the defense system of your kid or your partner works with partners too. If your game is to feel like, what do most people want? Most people want to feel understood. In fact, my favorite definition of love is feeling known and understood. That's what kids want from their parents. That's what most of us want. So how we convey that is not by telling people what we think but learning like kind of by being curious about what did they think? How do they make sense of that? Validating what we can, letting them know what kind of where we're coming from because by that point they're more willing to listen and they haven't been shut down by how we're interacting. So let me like close that out and ask Tony if he'll add on to the next part of your question. Oh yeah, no, so well, how does that lead to therapy then? You know, the job of therapist. Well, we're there when situations aren't working out when these attempts at dialogue or at communication break down when conflicts don't seem to ever get resolved, when there's a lot of misunderstanding, a divisiveness, negative mood prevailing in the family system or where a parent may feel themselves like I just don't know what else to do. I'm stuck, I don't know where to go here, where to turn. And one of the purposes of the book is to point out that a lot of people that provide psychotherapy to young adults have this closed mindset to involving parents. We think that's really a problem. We're actually in opposition to that sort of tendency in our professions, both psychologists and psychiatrists and other mental health practitioners really make a big mistake when they just buy into the parents, the parents are the problem. Now, of course, there's not to say parents aren't causing some problems because everybody causes problems. One of my supervisors quoted another well-known psychotherapist who said that psychotherapy is one mess taking care of a bigger mess. In other words, we're all humans are messy. We're not perfect in any respect, but when people feel stuck, what practitioners like Bea and I do is invite anybody who's willing to come in to talk about the situation. So we've had stories in the book where parents want the kid to come in. The kid doesn't wanna come in. We say, okay, we'll meet with you. Or the kid comes in, but he doesn't wanna meet with the parents. Okay, we won't meet with your folks, we'll start with you, but eventually we're gonna have to talk with them because you guys live together. And some of the stories evolved out of the recognition of the new reality, if you wanna call it that, that COVID imposed on people, which is for some families COVID was a blessing. They got together more, they got to know each other, they spent time together, it was like refreshing. Cause in a way prior to COVID, people were actually, when we looked at studies of family closeness and family spending time together, now everybody was doing their own thing. But for some families, COVID really brought a lot of discomfort. Difficulties were getting used to this older person who didn't wanna be told, as B was saying, when then they should go to bed or whether or they should or shouldn't go out during the curfew, write the lockdown, like, whoa, this person wants to go and meet their friends. Are you kidding me? You're gonna bring the virus back in. So all kinds of conflicts emerged. And from our point of view, the most effective and efficient way to get at this was to bring everyone into our room, into the console room and to sort of hear everybody out and say, you know, everybody's got a view. Everybody in here's view is important. And rather than trying to say who's right and who's wrong, as B was pointing out, we just wanna create a space for everybody to listen and to kind of speak their truth and to give everybody's truth a place at the table so that when it comes time to solving problems, we have a bigger set of options that people can look at in order to say, hey, I never thought of that. So most of the discussions of therapy, it's not strictly family therapy because at times you really do need to work with an individual or with a dyad, but we find it over and over again that many people come to see us. And I just heard of this story today of a parent who said, listen, my kid's been going to therapy for years and the therapist won't talk to me. That's what we hear over and over again. And from our point of view, that's just a wrong-headed approach. Even if we wanna promote the separation and individuation and growing up of a young person to be able to handle things on their own, to exclude the parents is really to exclude important resource and to our, I think to our credit, B and I, I think we still manage to maintain good relationships with the young person if they're in the room, if they come choose to come. So that's really what therapy for my standpoint and I think B would agree is creating a new place for solving problems. It's not for settling scores or proving who's right. Hey, you guys can't seem to solve this problems that you're having. Maybe by coming and talking, we can come up with new strategies. You can come up with new strategies. We can foster that change process. Now there are more and more directive therapies now around specific kinds of problems, substance use, depression, trauma. Like, of course, we need those skills too. But what it really comes down to when it's kind of like across all the different therapies, no matter what the orientation is, is a respect for the individual and their experience of the world and the ability to link and connect with that experience. And so that the person trusts that the process will be something that, even if it's difficult, is worthwhile. Great, thank you, B. Did you want to say something? Yeah, thank you. We're gonna take a question from the audience. Who has a question out there or a comment or something to talk about? Just one second, we're gonna get a mic, okay. Yeah, we needed a mic to hear people. Yeah, absolutely. Hi, thank you, you're fascinating. I have a million questions, but still, my situation is, I have a 27 year old who's failure to launch, you know, nail. My question to you is, am I his roommate? Like, I don't know how to, you know, the other question to be is, when you talked about that bristling, like how do you undo the bristle? Because we're definitely not the bristle. And can you, like at 27 and 61, can we undo all of the 27 year old bristling that I've done to him? And I don't really, like, am I his roommate? Am I, I mean, like, I'm his roommate until he decides that he can't make a decision and he's gotta come up from the basement and I don't know how to do this. Hi. Thank you for sharing that, by the way. Yeah, really, thank you for sharing that. Let me start off with the bristle and maybe we can go from there with Tony. You know, one of the things that is disarming, I think, to a young adult, is to just own up to the mistakes we've made. And so I'm gonna give you an example in my own life. My mistake is I'd go on too long with all the convincing research that I think will be helpful to, this is like one of my young adults, this is a few years back. Anyhow, he would begin to literally back out of the room. So we can call that a bristle effect, right? It was kind of like, he was really done with like my going on someone. So finally I said to him, I realize I go on too long and you're probably tired of me hearing, saying the research shows, they would also tell me what they had already archived of my material. And I said, so what phrase would help me know when I've gone on too long? I'll try really hard not to do the fill in the blank, but I probably mess up. What would help? What can you tell me that would be a neutral way for me to know I've gone on too long? And he said, how about fire hose? And I said, okay, fire hose. So when you say fire hose, I'll know done here like I went on too long and he would say that and I say, I got it, thank you. And then we disengage because he was totally on overload. So part of it is recognizing that, I mean, we all make mistakes, you know, despite our best intentions, despite what we believe is in someone's best interest, parents feel terribly responsible to be helpful, to tell them there's actually a new form of therapy called, listen to your mother, I'm serious. So we all feel responsible for telling our kids like what they should do, need to do would be in their best interest, blah, blah, blah. And then kids get sick of it, right? So part of it is just owning up to that. So if you know, as in speaking to you individually, what drives your son nuts, then you own up to it. You say, look, I know you're like cringing when I began to talk about da-da-da. How can we undo this? Because I want to change what drives you nuts or what's getting on your nerves. And I will do everything I can to change that. You tell me what would help you. And then if I still make the mistake, let's come up with a phrase. It's not mean or like super blamey that I'll know, uh-oh, there I go again. Now I don't know if that will work for you, but it's very effective. In many families I've seen, I just, I always tell people, I've tried this and it works. I never tell people to do something I haven't tried. So that would be a starter point. I think what you're also addressing, and I'm gonna turn to Tony, is like, but your son is avoiding you. He's staying in the basement. It sounds like as much distance as he can. Which may be appropriate, it may not be. I mean, I think there's some feelings you're having about how he's hurting your, you know, he's avoiding you. You may feel like he's being disrespectful or, you know, not really treating you fairly. And you start off with a humorous question. Is he my roommate? Well, let's supposing he was your roommate. What would you expect of a roommate? Like, don't roommates have to figure out what their arrangement is? And so in a way, you're asking a fundamental question that we can't answer for you, which is what are the expectations each of you has of the other one? And in what areas are you meeting them? And in what areas are you not meeting them? You know, instead of it being sort of black and white, you know, this is no good. It's, well, there are things we do okay and there are things we don't do so well and there are things that we're not good at at all. And then the other thing is to, so hopefully the question could be posed something to the effect of, well, you know, we've been living like this for a while, how do you think things are going? Like, are you happy with the situation we've got ourselves in here? I also, I use the phrase, we're sort of stuck together here. So what do we do to make this experience a little better for each of us? Like we're in a rowboat together or we're doing like the, you know, we're in a crewboat together. Like if we're not rowing together, we're kind of going around in a circle. I mean, you can use all kinds of metaphors, but I think your son should be invited to have a conversation, not about why aren't you doing this chore or why haven't you found a job or why do you stay in your room? Because those questions aren't really questions. They're actually criticism, you know, framed in a question. And whenever we ask someone why, by the way, not a good question. Because when we say why, there's a hint of, first of all, a lot of us don't know why we do things. In fact, there's some evidence to suggest we make up explanations when in fact, but why we do certain things is totally different from why we think we do things. So rather than, you know, it's like, I would say that focusing on the experience, what's it been like for you? What are the things that you like about this arrangement we have? What are the things that aren't working for you? And I'd like to tell you what it's like from my side because we are roommates. And, you know, it's not going so well from my point of view, but I also think we can do better. And that way, emphasizing we can do better, we can find a way to make it better. And then like, for example, if there's something that you see that you, like B pointed out a trigger. When she starts to do something, young person backs off. So B asks, what's going on? Like, what am I doing? And they're saying, you know, you're being a fire hose. Oh, okay, I'll stop. I'll turn off the spigot. And guess what? They don't back away as much. And so that little micro change in her behavior by giving her son a chance to say enough already in a nice way gives the young person the sense that, oh, I can influence my parent. They are listening. And so then it becomes less conflictual. It's never sort of, it's like little steps like that, little rapprochements. And then the other thing I would really suggest, and this is something I didn't get to say much about this, but, you know, initially I was pretty confused about why the kids spend so much time like in their rooms playing these video games, you know? And it worried me even with my own kids. And then I began to watch what they were doing. I realized, whoa, those are pretty cool things they're doing. And so one, this is in family systems therapy. It's called taking a one down position with your kid, meaning they're the expert, you're not. Can you teach me about this game you love? Like you like, so you like Grand Theft Auto, like you mind if I could just watch for a while while you're playing, I just wanna see what you're doing. And then you go, and you go, wow, this is pretty cool. If you get invited, now you may not get invited and you might say, well, what can I do to get an invitation? Like, you know, is there a time we can set up a time for me to learn your games? And, you know, a radical next step would be to invite, have your son invite you to play one of these games with you. So you can, A, you can show how terrible you are at it and they can laugh, but at the same time, you know, that you're really curious and interested. I think the statement that B made in the first part of our talk was if you maintain a stance of curiosity, that immediately changes you from being judgmental to being open. Like what's going on here is the best question, I think we can ever ask about ourselves, each other, the world, what's going on here? Like, hey, whoa. And that way it's non-judgmental. It's really about trying to figure it out together. And one incredible thing you just said about why, I'm never gonna ask a why question again, ever. No, unless people ask first, like I'm wondering why, like sometimes people come to me and go, Dr. Rossin, why do I keep doing the same stupid thing over and over again? And I go, that's an interesting question, but they're bringing it up, not me. And again, I ask, by the way, I also point out to them, is that, are you asking why in a self-critical way? Because it sounds like you're pretty upset with yourself for doing the same thing over and over again. So maybe we ought to take a different mindset towards the pattern you're in and be a little less judgmental because we need to understand where it came from. We have another question. When I started out with one, and then after the answer, I had 30 other questions, I will say my son introduced me to a game that I actually like more than him now. And so he joked, I'm like, mom, I don't know what's going on. So he thinks it's pretty funny. But my question for you is, like thinking about, I'm just curious if you've seen any socioeconomic differences in like the parenting behaviors. And I'm a younger sibling. So I have a brother who has like post-college child. And I have to remember not to be judgmental of my nephew living in a basement, right? Or my brother, and like, you know, really reserve myself from asking what, why or what's going on. Because I did get to go up at a different time where you are expected, right? So like move out and chart your own life, but then from a diversity and socioeconomic perspective, parents, previously in certain, you know, races just couldn't afford to keep raising you, right? Like you have to kind of get out. So I'm just wondering if you're seeing any differences in your life or have thought about that. And then, you know, how do you recommend me not to be so judgmental of watching what's going on in my brother's household? I don't know. I missed the part about the brother and there was something about college. I'm sorry, there was a little fuzzy. I couldn't hear clearly. So, yeah, so I have a nephew that, you know, sick right now and living in the basement. So same thing. And I have to try to reserve my judgment on that, right? Because you grew up differently or whatever. So I find myself needing to check myself. So the question is, you know, are there recommendations for how to be empathetic, right? Or to like recognize your own judgment. And then two was about the, if you've seen any socioeconomic differences in parenting, rearing and pushing for children to be kind of off on their own. Got it. Tony, can I go? Tony, you go ahead. I was just gonna say one thing. I think it's great that you're asking the question, how can I be less judgmental? Because that means you already suspect that there's something about the way you're viewing your nephew that may be a little unfair to him and to the circumstances in which he's finding himself. We always, B and I always ask the question though, is there something about that 26 year old living at home that's causing a problem for him, for the family? If so, what kind of problems are being caused? Because as B said earlier, the majority of kids his age are living at home. All right, this is the first time in 100 years that that's been the case. Of course, lower socioeconomic families have actually always lived that way with being in the, if not at home, right around in the neighborhood. Whereas higher mobility with higher income families, the nuclear family that was disseminated across the country became more of the norm arm in the post-war period. But we're going back to something that was common in the 19th and 18th centuries, right? That's what... So the question really is, is your nephew having a problem and trying to leave but can't or does the folks want him to leave and he won't? I mean, is there a conflict around that or is it just that he's living the same life that many of his peers are? And it's sort of part of the new normal if you want to call it that. I don't know, B, go ahead. I didn't want to take it all off. I just wanted to add, it's like the default position for more than half of young adults. And those are in your 20s and that would be the age of your nephew. They have, is multi-generational living in their parents' home, not with a partner, not with friends, not on their own, more than half of young adults in their 20s are doing this. So it may be that you don't see that very much and it's really, really different than what you would have expected. As Tony's saying, absolutely. It's partly a function of the parental resources available and we do devote a chapter. I mean, there's so much that became highlighted. It was true before COVID, but suddenly began to make the headlines in terms of the socioeconomic, educational health disparities between what you think of as kind of middle class and lower socioeconomic classes and minorities and then first gen to college and what would happen to the young adults. So most of them actually, I mean, in terms of sociological issues and parenting, they had the same parental investment lower socioeconomic kids from their parents, but they didn't have the same socioeconomic resources, material resources. So the parents could be very strong advocates of them. Like, you know, and in some ways, they didn't have as many options. They had to go get a job. So whereas it was really commonplace, you know, in the 60s, 70s, you know, the college for all Reagan's mission back in the 80s, there weren't that many people who went to college. They went right to work out of high school and they didn't really need a college degree to get, you know, a good manufacturing job. You didn't need one to be a middle class and to support a family, but now you need one and you need a, I mean, there's some less discrimination about not having a college degree since COVID in terms of employers being short staffed and trying to staff up, but it's still a very high price tag. You know, my younger son is, I would say something of a cynic about college says it's a very expensive ticket to say, you know, you should consider me for a job. And he's right. It's a very expensive ticket. Tony and I traveled to Canada this spring. They, it's free. Like through community college and sometimes through college, it's free. And there are, I mean, we sadly, you know, have a very capitalist driven system that penalizes people who are not well off in terms of their educational advantage. So anyhow, I'll stop. I wanna add one thing to what you're doing. It's really important. We have a whole chapter at B's instigation, which was brilliant, is all about getting a job, you know, because you go to college, but your degree doesn't get you anywhere more and more, except what Will said is, you know, oh, it gives you a chance to say you should hire me. But there are strategies even before college and certainly during college where, you know, we advise that, you know, that you begin to think about what is it that you wanna do and do you need college or not? And how do you maximize the chances of finding your way to a kind of employment that you feel good about that expresses, you know, your talents, not just your interests, because interests may not make it enough. You know, there are other ways to assess this. So a lot of the, I know that most of the people that I know, and now of course I'm biased because people come to me when things aren't going well. So I'm seeing a group of people who are quote stuck. I don't like to say that they failed to launch because the word failure in that case seems like a, you know, an unfortunate heavy duty wait to put on people, but they're stuck. They're not sure. They're trying to find their way of virtually every single one of my patients who I've started treating before or during the time they went to college, after they got out of college, unless they went into graduate school somewhere, they're home looking for a job. And they stay there sometimes more than a year, you know, and of course the economy is getting better now. There are more sort of entry level positions with college degrees, but, you know, no college does not prepare them. It costs them disappointment that everybody's realizing is, you know what, college isn't doing it in terms of this economy for me, unless the ones that, you know, were able during college to say, oh, this is gonna help me. And of course after college, they immediately get into a good position. It was for a while, the, you know, IT kinds of majors, you know, computer engineering, all of that. But guess what? They're predicting with AI that fewer of those jobs are gonna be needed to be done by humans. So guess what? Now that same degree that was getting you a job five years ago, they're not predicting that in the next few years. They're saying, you know, there's gonna be a problem finding employment for everybody in going into the STEM major. So can I add one thing? Cause I really want to thank the woman who raised this question. And it was also an impetus for us in writing this book to recognize how much the generations don't really understand what happened that made it so much harder for this generation. And so your question is really meaningful because we're so unacquainted typically with anybody outside our bubble in a way who's different or has had a different experience, especially if they're younger. And it seems just strange, like, you know, like what went wrong or something or maybe it's their parents or maybe it's them or, and so we're trying to de pathologize this. It's not that kids don't struggle, don't have challenges may, you know, be not doing well, like 26 or seven living in the basement or something, but, and so that can be another issue, but it's a very common experience generationally because it's so vastly different than what we came to think of as normal to really understand what happened. And so that's partly what we're after in the opening chapters of the book is helping parents understand what happened. Yeah. And I would just occur, thank you. Yeah, I agree with B. Thank you for that question. It makes me wonder if you have a way then of taking what we said and going to your nephew and or your brother and just saying, hey, I want to understand a little more like what's going on here because it isn't to say, because we don't know the data that you know, a lot of kids are struggling not just because the environment has changed and the work, the nature of work has changed, but also because they are themselves less prepared and it's not anybody's fault, but the, and that gets back to what I was saying about executive functioning, you know, we really emphasize this in the first book too, which is taking care of yourself, getting up in the morning, doing everything on your own. It takes a lot of work. It's a lot of energy. Learning to manage yourself, learning to take care of business, so to speak, doesn't happen and it doesn't happen automatically. And even college is sort of a protected environment. You know, you can learn a few things. You got to manage your time and study enough and sleep enough, which some people don't manage to do. And, you know, that's why it takes six years to graduate before your college on average. But for what happens afterwards? Gee, you know, if your nephew's having a hard time, like understanding then, what's making it difficult for him to get to where he wants to be and being a good aunt in terms of listening like we did. I think, by the way, even though B and I wrote this set about parenting, I think aunts and uncles and grandparents and they're all parts of the parenting group, you know, it takes a village. So anybody who's around in this young person's life who can both get to know them and help them look at see what's what, you know, my sister was an incredible resource to my kids, you know, because she's not, she wasn't their mom or their dad. And they could tell her stuff and they could learn from her. It was a real, and same with her husband, you know, their uncle has always been like terrific. So I think it's great that you as an aunt, they're worried and, you know, hope what we've said is helpful. I just, yeah, hi, this is Gail. I was just walking around with my, but I wanted to just follow up, Tony, what you were saying about executive function and the question about executive function, which is if a young adult is having a problem with executive function and moving themselves forward in whichever direction they want to go, of what, how did they start? Like, well, how did somebody start moving forward? Okay, so that's part of my other books. It all have to do with kind of coping with ADD or executive function difficulties. There's all kinds of coaching available now. You don't even have to go to a therapist to start with a lot of DIY approaches, but you do have to work at it. The thing I tell everybody is it doesn't come in a pill. It doesn't come in a bottle. You know, it's like you have to learn to create new habits because we're all habit driven people and we have to look at each habit we have and say, is this a good habit or is this a bad habit? And if it's a bad habit, what can I do to push back against it? So if the habit is procrastinating, how do I get a, how do I get a learn better, how to better get to started on things? If the habit is being disorganized, how do I become better organized? If the habit is losing track of time or spending too much time on the internet, how do I concretely tackle? And it's all about tackling one thing at a time and practicing, practicing it. Because like, it takes time to plan your time. You can't just start your day. You gotta plan your day and it takes time to plan your day if you don't already have a structure in place. So I worry about a lot of the, what happened in sort of the COVID miasma is that people didn't have to go out and do things and come, and suddenly they were home, everything was at their fingertips. Now they come out of COVID, boom. They didn't factor in how long it takes to get from A to B, or that you need to know after B, what you're gonna do next and what you're gonna, because it was all right in front of you, right on your desk. And that's what, a lot of people don't even wanna go back to work because they've gotten used to just sitting at home and the top is this and the bottom is their pajamas and now they gotta get dressed, they gotta go shopping, they gotta get in the car, they gotta. So I just think, I think the answer to what you're asking Gail is that executive functions get better through practicing explicitly new habits and finding ways to guide yourself around those places that you know, if you go there, you're gonna just slip into the ozone. So like one of the things, I'm doing a study now with college students and with ADHD and we're working in the group's cognitive behavioral therapy approach. And we're really getting the young, the students to like practice putting things in a planner, like duh, a planner, like that does help you stay organized. They'd never had a planner that was all figured out for them. Now they have to use it. Guess what? After a while they go, gee, this is really good. But the first time around, it's like it's hard, it's hard, ooh, I don't know how to do it. And we sort of joke, we go, well, the first time you tied your shoe, it was hard. But now look how easy it is to tie your shoe. I wanna put a plug in for the book. There's another question, but because you're talking in the book about thinking about thinking, you're talking about process. You're talking about, I mean, you're talking about different things, differentiation between habit and a disorder. A lot of really, I mean, there's just a ton of information and great thinking and writing about all these issues. Okay, we have a bunch of questions. Okay, sorry. And then Melissa, and then Melissa. Okay, I can't wait to get my hands on this book. Thank you. What advice do you have for helping launch your kid? Knowing that you should get tuned out. Do you go tough love and say, starting two months from now, you're paying rent and it's gonna cost much. How do you motivate them to get over whatever blockage they have to go out and find that independence or get over the sort of fear that they have and trying to find the right job, et cetera. How do you navigate threading that needle between pushing them and helping and having them sort of find their own way? By the way, I'm the husband of all. I had the same question independently framed a different way. All the wonderful advice you've given so far to the at least four of us who have stopped children have been on the lines of here's how you can get along better at home or here's how you can, here's how to help the kid who wants to aspire. What if the kid doesn't want to aspire? It was just fine. You know, those kids actually want to have an independent life and part of the struggle is helping them identify what's blocking it. What's the barrier to it? So I mean, I understand that there's different ideas about is it tough love? Is it setting limits? Is it like, you know, giving a timeline? But that's imposing from the outside and most motivation is an internally driven what are my hopes for myself? What, and then finding out what's getting in the way of realizing it. So I would say it starts with a conversation rather than like a rollout of a plan. I'm not saying that rollouts can't be useful. You know, parents have to set limits. We're not, we all have like operate within our own means and we may not be able or we may not want to, you know, just have this be open-ended. Again, I would see it as a conversation, you know. And then I think sometimes kids are terrified and sometimes kids feel very despairing after college. Like I, if it has been college, I thought I'd be able to get a job or I don't like the field. I thought I was going to be in and I don't know what to do next. So, but a lot of times young adults just like adults are, they're loath to be vulnerable. They don't want to seek help. And so they get more withdrawn and shut down. So I'm going to pause for a minute just to see what Tony wants to say. But I would say, yeah, you can implement all these strategies. But if you don't understand the meaning of what the like, I'm going to call it hesitance to launch is, you're missing something. Yeah, look, the hardest thing to work with it are people who are a-motivational or who appear to have no desire to change. So that makes me raise the question of what's, not only what B said, which is what's getting in the way of the change process that you're hoping would happen. And a lot of times young people will say, oh, everything is fine the way it is. I don't want to change. And you got to ask yourself the question, really? Is that true? Or is there a statement that everything is fine? A way of avoiding looking at what's not fine about the situation. So that's what B was getting at. Now I would say in our book, there's a discussion about young person who's really stuck and is really not able to and has all kinds of problems, not just internet addiction, but ends up becoming a problem drinker and really creates tremendous ruckus and does not want to change, by the way. Because he insists that he's fine, okay? He's in... So what we introduce as a concept for you to consider is what's referred to as the trans theoretical model of change. This was developed to help people who needed to lose weight or stop smoking. It actually started with smoking cigarettes. Like how do you get people to stop smoking cigarettes? And you look at, they looked at people and they realized like, well, not everybody's ready to change, right? Even though they know they should stop smoking, they may not be at the quote, ready for change. So, you know, Prachaska and Clemens and other brilliant psychologists in the 90s, began to like lay this all out and said, okay, are you in the pre-contemplation phase? That's sometimes called denial. That's what you're describing. This young person is saying, there's no problem here. Then from there comes the contemplation stage, which is, well, maybe there is a problem. Maybe I do need to do something, but I don't know, you know, I'm not sure. Then you move from contemplation to pondering or considering action. Gee, if I were to change, what would I need to do? And finally, there's the readiness for change. And that's when you start working on the plan that, you know, you would like your, so you're, when we get proscriptive to people, what we're saying is, this is what you need to do to change. But if they're not ready to change, they'll say, no, thank you, bye. So this model, you have to kind of look at, if your child is in the pre-contemplation phase, the only thing that works is pointing out like, maybe there could be a reason to change. It's called consciousness raising. But you can't tell them, stop what you're doing and change. You need to say, hmm, what's good and what's not good about the way things are. And there's a whole approach called motivational interviewing. You may all know about it. Some of you in the audience, I don't want to assume this, but that motivational interviewing approach has revolutionized the care of people with behavior disorders like addiction, like problems with overeating, because what you do then is you get the person to start looking at their own decision-making, their own motivations. And that's why it's called motivational interviewing because there's a motivation to change, but there's also a motivation to not change. And those two are in a battle with each other. And to get to the point where you're ready to change, you've got to go through these different phases, if you will. And some of them take weeks, months, even longer. You know, I addressed a group of parents last year from a group in New York City. And I won't name the group, but they basically have been meeting together for years and their kids are in between 28 and 35 or 36. And they meet every month to talk about being the parents of these young people who don't seem to want to move out. And I learned a lot. I really respected what they're doing. And I learned from my conversation with them. I wanted to write about it in the book, but they didn't give me permission. So we weren't able to include their insights. But one of the things I learned from them was you just have to learn to be there in whatever way you can. And slowly but surely, people start to move. Even if it's looking glacially. Because if you try the tough love stuff, it often fails. And I would say that more often than not, the tough love isn't really all that it's cut out to be. That's different than setting limits. I think parents need to set limits. But to someone who doesn't know how to take care of themselves or doesn't have a job, you know, to throw them out in the street, it's not gonna get them to do that. They're really gonna have a hard time. So I think what I learned from this family is that these families is a certain kind of, and I find that, I find all of you, by the way, every parent that's trying to parent and understand their kid who's having trouble, I get some sort of inspiration from because I realized that, you know, we're all trying to understand what's going on with young people and it isn't a straight line. And that's what B and I keep saying. It's, you want it to go from A to B in one step. But often you've got a zig and zag and there's a step forward and a step back. And so that's what I learned from these parents is that sometimes all you can do is bear it, you know, bear it. And that's pretty amazing that they can do that. I think we have time for one more question. Okay, but I have two questions. I have to try and combine them into one. So I have three children, they're in their 20 and they're all still in school. One's in law school, one's getting her master's and my youngest is still in college because he took a gap year and took a COVID year. So my husband and I find ourselves in this position of financially supporting them all because they're all in school. And yet they're adults and they do stupid things like we all do, I do, my husband does, the kids do. And it's frustrating because you can't really punish them the way you could back in the day. So I guess, you know, I'm kind of following on with the previous question about setting boundaries and limits and so on, you know, with kids who are in their 20. But that's one question. And then my other question, which is, I spend a lot of time with my own children with their friends. And one thing I have really noticed which was mentioned a little, I think the phrase substance abuse came up and was mentioned in the right up to this event tonight. And I wouldn't say my kids or any of their friends necessarily are the classic substance abusers. But what I have noticed is that when I was in college, you know, we drank beer, maybe we smoked a little bit, whatever. These kids are drinking, you know, they're doing shots, they're drinking, you know, hard liquor, all of it. They're, you know, the amount of wine that these girls have sit around at four o'clock in the afternoon, you know. If they're anxious, you know, so many of them are under depressants, any anxiety, you know, they're medicated. It's as if they can't, you know, sometimes it's okay to be a little anxious or not to be able to sleep or to be a little deaf. And yet it seems this generation is very different from, you know, maybe, and I'm 60 by the way. Maybe we just didn't know what was going on in my generation, but they just seem a little more emotionally delicate. So those are my two questions. Maybe you can tell them together something. Well, can I just comment? One thought that occurred to me is I don't think B&I would ever suggest that kids don't owe their parents something when they're living at home, especially. So you could say, hey, you know, that phone you're using all the time, you know how much it costs? You think you could contribute to your own phone? You think you could contribute to the rent? Do you think you could? Because to raise the question, because it is costing me to send you all to school and I want you to succeed, but you know, you could get a little, you could earn some money while you're here. There's a lot of ways you can earn money to contribute to the rent, the phones, et cetera. I don't think we ever suggest for one minute unless someone is really disabled and that's a whole special group. But for the most part, young people who are living at home ought to be contributing to the household, making it work. Because again, a hundred years ago when young people lived at home, they gave their whole paycheck to their parents. That was it. They had a little bit of spending money, but mostly it went to the upkeep of the family. So I just think that concept is everybody should be contributing to the maintenance of this family in some way. It could be economic, it could be taking the dog out or doing some things that are meaningful. I don't mean just taking out the garbage, which is the least of it. It is like making a contribution if they're capable because they'll feel better too. They won't feel like I'm just a piece of nothing sitting on a lump in the log in my parents' basement. But I'll let B take that other question because that's a fascinating set of questions about the alcohol and the ways that people are self-medicating. And I'll let B talk. So one of the things that we talk about in the book, there's a wonderful graphic. It's called Shaking the Family Tree. And part of what may be going on, I don't know, but it's kind of an opening to that kind of discussion to say to whichever kid is sitting around drinking wine in the afternoon and maybe taking anti-anxiety meds too. Hey, you know, I don't know if I've told you what runs in the family because shake the family tree and like huge number of kind of genetic vulnerabilities fall out that basically are in the psychological realm including substance use, substance abuse. And there is more access I think to substances. The binge drinking age for girls has really climbed to the level that guys had had, you know, it's kind of the record of. And that's in the 20s. That's like in, you know, like early 20s to probably about 25 or 26 when they become basically more responsible for like get up in the morning, make money and have a life. So part of it is that, and sometimes we haven't talked to kids about that but I think why not? Like if we haven't, why not? It's like, it's not like we're throwing ourselves or an aunt, an uncle or a grandparent under the bus. It's like, these are genetic vulnerabilities. Everybody pulls a joker card up something from the family deck, could be substances, could be vulnerabilities to these kinds of, you know, kind of anesthetic effects that you can get from a substance. So I encourage parents to just have a kind of like, I don't know like if this might be going on or not but like, let me just kind of let you know kind of what runs in our family. Because it is, there is an inherent and an inherent ability factor. So that's one thing. Having your, you're also absolutely entitled to say, you know what, I'm not comfortable having like a group of four or five kids hanging around drinking in the house here. You know, I've seen parents go like, if you're going to here's kind of where my comfort level is but not beyond that. So you have to kind of make your own decisions and again, kids also look at what parents do. So I mean, I had parents who try to enforce rules for their kids about smoking, marijuana or drinking that are more I'd say conservative than their own. So that never flies. But again, it's partly what's the context and you know, there's some benefit in seeing it. So you actually know what's going on, but you don't have to keep tolerating it. You do get to say what's concerning to you and like what, you know, and have a conversation about it. But I think what you're describing also as Tony saying it's like if you're supporting three kids, you know all through these years, what they contribute whether it's helping around the house whether it's doing chores whether it's like earn a little bit of something or other that's fair and you know, when you said are they more vulnerable? This generation really, I mean we've been tracking this since for 20 years. Yes, higher levels of anxiety, higher levels of depression COVID has been something that is gonna scar this generation for a long time in terms of some of what they experienced went through some of their losses. Some of them want to be called two years younger than they are cause they say, I lost two years. So- I want to emphasize that. Can I just- Okay. Go for it. What you're seeing, which is being viewed on campuses as well is that the years lost from COVID did delay maturation and they're like looking to catch up and they want their time, right? So if they didn't have it in college now they're back home they want to do the drinking parties that they didn't have a chance to have in college. Drinking is way up, it really skyrocketed not just among young people, among everybody. The alcohol industry did very well during COVID. And if you probably, you notice this there were literally online cocktail parties people would, everybody would sit on Zoom. They teach each other how to make the latest powerful mixed drink martinis of this or that flavor and they'd sit and get sloshed and hang out and goof and laugh like as though because what they were trying to do was recreate a real party with people in their room but they were not, they were stuck at home. So I think some of it is what B, you just said was right on is they're saying, hey, you know what? I was deprived and I'm going to have my time doing what I want to do. And then the other issue which I think is also hidden in there is this sense of and is like, hey, you know you adults, you screwed this up for us. Look at the world, it's burning. Look at all the stuff going on you guys didn't take care of. Who the hell are you to tell us to grow up? Now they won't say it like that. They'll do the quietly quitting. They'll do the, you know, whatever angle they can get around. And I'm, you know, I'm part of me is trying to empathize, understand as best I can. And I have to deal with medical students and residents who really complain about having to be on call once a week. I used to be on call two to three times a week and, you know, days at a time and we give them one call a week and they go that their work-life balance is screwed up. So there's a whole new set of expectations about how hard you should work and their response by the way went and I never tried to say, well, when I was your age because that won't go anywhere. What they do say proudly is we're all about taking care of ourselves. So like, what am I supposed to say to that? Yeah, we taught you to speak up for yourselves, you know? So now that kind of, you reap what you sow, you know? I hope we answered your questions somewhat. I mean, it's clearly it's, you're not the only one experiencing this and that's why the book is written to say, hey, take care of yourself when you're feeling aggravated and don't go for a martini. Go for a run or meditate or watch a nice movie or, you know, spend time with your partner and just say, ah, it's like, what can you do? Melissa, did that answer it? I need a couple punishments. Oh, she needs a couple of punishments. A couple of punishments. A couple of punishments. When they do things wrong. Logical consequences are the really most effective. Like if they left a huge mess after they, you know, drank in the living room or basement or something, the consequences, you have to clean it up, you have to wash up, I need your help. This is like, you know, you left a big mess. So it's logical consequences. They're usually the ones that get the least pushback because they're like, hey, you should have the negative consequence, not me, you know, from your behavior. Right. Tom. Melissa says thank you. She's very happy. And she's like, I mean, there are, yeah, you can, and I guess you would want to let alert people ahead of time like, hey, the next time, if you're going to have people over, this is what I expect. Like, you know, if you're going to mess things up, you're going to have to clean them up or pay for the housekeeper who's going to come and do it, you know, whatever. Right, Bea and Tony, thank you so much for being here. Our audience is really love this. Thank you to the audience. Thank you to the Playhouse. Thank you Dan. Thank you Gail, the foundation, who left up around so they can see you, they've been talking to you. Oh yeah. You want to see who you've been talking to? Yes, sure. They're really great. Thank you all also, and thank the audience. Hi everybody. We're so happy you came out tonight to see us. Sorry we couldn't be there in person, but we love the Playhouse, by the way. We had such a great time when we were there a few years back. Oh, that's great. And maybe you can come back, maybe you can come back and sell books here, because I think you're going to sell a couple of books from tonight. Yeah, when it comes out, we're happy to. We would love to. Yeah, we're hoping another pandemic doesn't shortchange our world book tour. That's great. Thank you so, so much. Thank you everybody, Vanessa. Thank you.