 Welcome, everyone. We're very glad to have you all with us today on the summer day for another installment of our Let's Talk series as we present program to our virtual playhouse. The lady on your screen is Vanessa. And we're very pleased to welcome Dr. Ostain and Dr. Hibbs. We'll be probably on in a moment. Hi, there we are. OK, great. Before we start, a couple of quick things you'll notice for those of you using Zoom for the first time or if you're not that familiar, at the bottom of your screen, there is a button called Q&A. So if at any point during this presentation you have a question, please feel free to click on that and post your question there. We will try to get to as many of them as we can in the time that we have. If you are on an iPad or a phone, I believe it's actually at the top of your screen. But please, at any point, post a question. I am now going to turn this over to Vanessa. 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We are so pleased today to be here with Dr. Estated, Dr. Hibbs, who have written a very, very important book, even more important and more just remarkable in a time of pandemic and protest. And so we're going to show you a short clip of them. Now, this clip was done. We did this a month ago. So a lot of things have happened in the last month. So they're going to kind of recap a little bit, and then we're going to be taking your questions and going through a Q&A. We'd also like to thank our partner for Let's Talk, Catherine Ferrara, and the Drug Abuse Prevention Council for their incredible support. And again, we thank you all very much for being here. And we hope that this is the first in a series of all kinds of good things to happen, and with these great doctors and writers as well. Anyway, so here we go. Here we go. My name is B. Hibbs. I'm a psychologist, and I'm also the parent of two sons who graduated from college within the last decade. And I began writing this book to make sense out of what I missed. My older son had great first semester college, and then he returned in the second semester with a medical leave from college. He went into a deep, deep depression, had suicidal ideation. And then, of course, because I was wearing two hats. You know, one as a mom, one as a psychologist, I felt even worse. Like, how could I possibly have missed it? And then I just began to follow the breadcrumb trail and like, oh, wow, this isn't just happening to my son. It's happening the whole generation of kids. I turned to my colleague, Dr. Tony Rostain, and said, would you please help us? Would you please treat Jensen? And that's when Tony first became involved. And then following that a bit later, I said, oh, and will you please join me in collaborating on this book? Yeah, so my name is Tony Rostain. I'm a child and adolescent psychiatrist. I'm also currently the chair of psychiatry and behavioral health at Cooper University Health Care in Camden. When Bea asked me first to get involved in the book project, I had no idea that I'd end up becoming a co-author. I thought I was just gonna be a commentator on sort of his story. But the book really morphed into something we think of as a broader guide to helping parents and young people as well figure out how to navigate very treacherous waters of sort of transitioning from childhood into an adolescence into this thing we call emerging adulthood or young adulthood, which is what we expect young people to be able to do when they set off for college. But too often, we realize that kids aren't ready. So writing this book was a joy as well as a labor of love. We learned a lot and we're continuing to learn a lot as we talk to people about lessons learned and as we hear from others what their experiences are like. It's really a conversation starter about making sure that kids are prepared for the future. And so part of what we'd like to do today is just give you a bit of an overview about how the themes of the book also apply to this new stressor in our lives called COVID-19 and how can we apply some of the preventative lessons from the book around social emotional maturity, risk management, resilience, how to address mental health problems to the questions and answers we may be experiencing later on in our webinar as we respond to COVID-related anxieties and stressors. The anxiety about the future has been a feature of growing up, especially in the last couple of decades that there's been a growing apprehension about an uncertain future as be like to say, constant striving for an uncertain future. And that future has now gotten a lot more uncertain with the arrival of COVID in our lives. So if anything, the anxiety level and the sort of fear reactions that we saw initially that almost paralyzed people at first and we were filled with confusion, a lot of that has started to subside. People have found a quote, way of living and dealing with things, surviving so to speak, although many people are still getting over the terrible grief of losing a loved one to the virus. Meanwhile, we're now seeing the evolution of this response in people, something more along the lines of fatigue and of being numbed and of being sort of kind of almost not wanting to think about anything in the future, almost myopic at times. How and why have last three generations been so stressed? And some parents have said, well, like, is it that there's snowflakes? Is it that they just kind of aren't used to having problems? The reality is, no, that's not the case. And this is not an artifact that there's been a huge skyrocketing incident. So anxiety and depression in youth today. And part of understanding this is that this generation, generation Z, actually the millennial generation, the youngest part of it and then Gen C have been profoundly affected historically by things that have been in the works for about 40 years, but have culminated in a couple of key factors. One is that there's harsher competition than ever before, many social comparisons that have resulted from the 24 seven availability of the internet and social media. You usually think in a time of relative stability, which we had in the prior 20 years in terms of in American society and more wealth and that sort of thing, that you'd usually think that kids would have more freedom, but actually kids have had less autonomy because parents have become, you've heard the term helicopter parent, it was really in response to parents anxiety and recognition that, oh my gosh, this is a harder place to grow up now. This is a tougher future for my kid as if there were a linear path, as if life had a very linear path and if you make one misstep, you won't have a good future. So that's what kids began to believe. And out of that, they began to strive harder and harder and have harsher expectations on themselves. So part of it was competition among kids, part of it was competitive parenting, but part of it was that parents actually exerted more control in the face of their own anxiety as our culture became more and more competitive and in which it seemed like the path to a quote unquote good life only went through college and only went through college if you went to a brand name school or if you went to a very narrow, narrow pathway. So one of the things, and we're gonna talk about in a strange way, the paradox, the opportunities of COVID is that we're learning now that life is curvy. We can't always predict what's gonna happen. We can try as hard as we might, but life throws us a curveball. One of the things we say about the book in the book is that life becomes so programmed for people that you're just going to doom, doom, doom, doom, doom, AP, extracurricular, music class, volunteer, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, no time for reflection, no time to think about why, what, how come? And so I do think the opportunity for people to develop introspection, self-reflection, discussion with others about those reflections, wondering together, what might I get better at? What might I master? And that's important because, you know, again, eventually this will, so let's say next fall is mostly online classes. How will I learn that way? How can I learn better through this interface of online? Or if I'm going off to school, how can I be ready for maintaining the safety kinds of behaviors they're expecting? But more importantly, and I guess this is where, is how can I learn to live with uncertainty? That's the name of the game. This really gets back at the fundamental, you know, the intolerance of uncertainty is people who have no, who have no tolerance for uncertainty are the ones who are the most stressed out right now. So flexibility, learning to roll with it, and improvising, improvising. Like, hey, I didn't, my plans didn't work out. What can I do instead? It's like, what can I control? What can I accept? What, how do I stop pressuring myself if I'm not in this constant striving mode? Maybe that I, you know, don't have any practice and not constantly striving, but now I do. And also just, how can I explore things that maybe I would not have explored because I didn't have the time before? And I think there's a value in finding some daily something that you enjoy. And sometimes it's just a distraction. I pull weeds as a distraction, you know? But, and I'm not recommending that for everyone, I'm just saying it, so you have to kind of say, well, I enjoy that. Or, so it's just a little bit like identifying the things that make us feel calmer and allow us to tolerate the uncertainty. I want to add one more theme here. And again, it's come up in our discussions with healthcare providers at my hospital. You know, many years ago, Victor Frankel wrote a book called Man's Search for Meaning in which he described how he survived the concentration camps and this utter horror of living and watching people murdered around him and starved to death. And what Frankel discovered at the time, he was a young physician, was that what got him through was the effort to make it like the world better for the people around him, to minister to their needs, to do his best to heal them and comfort them and to really give of himself as fully as he could to the entire groups struggle for survival. And even when people were dying, he said, what kept him going was the realization that he had done what he could to help them while they were alive. Now, if you listen to the narratives of the nurses in the ICUs and the doctors as tragic as it was to see their patients dying, what they felt most, what got them through this was the sense that they were there, they held their hand, they tried to calm them down, they made them feel they were not alone. Now, how does that translate to the daily life of the rest of the human race? Well, this is a time for all of us to ask the deepest question, what are we here on the planet for? How do we make our most important spiritual existential needs? How do we express those? And then how do we start to meet them together? Okay, because it's not gonna work to just sit and imagine a future or imagine a career. That it's too, the fog is still too thick. So what can you do today? You can pull weeds and help the earth be better or you can walk a dog and enjoy the moment with a dog or you can help other people and find a deeper meaning in everything you do. I believe that that's the deeper question that people have to face and it may end up being the silver lining in all this is that people are sort of realizing, it's not how many things I buy or how many toys I have or how many music events I've been to or parties I went to. It's really like, who am I? How do I become a better person? And I think that's a critical question for young people. The search for identity is the critical question of young people's that developmental stage. And I actually think parents are also going through the same question only, what's my identity now as a parent? How do I become the best possible parent for my child who is suffering along with me in a world that we never anticipated being in? And I think that to be open to that and to give it the reverence it deserves will allow us to be more compassionate, more forgiving and less intolerant, if you will, of our failings in the process because we're all imperfect and because really there is no straight, it goes back to the idea, life is not a straight line. And so the road suddenly took a turn. What do we do now? Now that the road suddenly became, it's no longer paved, it's bumpy and we can't go at the same speed. We have to slow down and we have to look around. That was great. Thank you very much. And I just want to ask you both if you'd like to bring anything current, because as I said, this was recorded a month ago. And since then we've had all kinds of other things happening as Dr. Hib said, sizing it shifts, so please. Yeah, I mean, obviously the murder of George Floyd and the uprisings that we're witnessing around the country, much of which is participating by people in the millennial and Gen Z groups who are saying, we don't want this, the world to be so unjust. We don't want so much inequality to want. We don't want violence. We want to come together and make a difference. So it seems to me that's a new feature of this conversation, which is that politically now there are lots of discussions going on that are reminiscent of the ones that I was part of when I was in high school and in college. So there's a kind of a reaching across generations now to look and see what can we do to make the planet a better place. And I'd like to piggyback on that because it coalesces with research that sociologists have done. So they studied large spans of time. And in 2020 years ago, a group of sociologists forecasted that we were at the end of an 80 year cycle in 2020. And if there were a seismic catastrophic event that was worldwide, like there was in World War II, that it was an opportunity for great structural change. And so it has been the hopeful part, even though some parents are very concerned about how does this affect adolescent development and brain and that sort of thing because the brain is sculpted by experience, especially zero to 25. The good news is that in that search for meaning, and certainly a lot of the meaning that Gen Z and the younger millennials are making out of the protest is that there's been such an exposure of the raw inequities that have happened across both education, higher education about health inequities and they're out on the streets. And I think a very brave kind of reminiscent to me of a Vietnam War protest in our country of saying, this is not right. And so to me, I'm hopeful in a very stressful time that it will be one of those 80 year cycles which is followed by great progressive and equitable change for underrepresented groups, for mental illness, for vulnerable groups that have not kind of taken center stage as we now applaud our frontline workers. Those are those frontline workers or service workers. And so I'm very grateful to them, but I'm also very mindful that our young people are now looking to this and they're looking to the parent generation to help support them make the changes that will shape their future. It's also interesting how they're the ones who have access to all kinds of information and they're making the culture now, okay? We're receiving it in a way, but they're out front. I mean, even this news about the TikTok kids buying tickets to go see Trump and all of that, there's a new kind of activism. It's not always visible on the street. And you think back to like the Parkland and all of the responses that young people had around gun violence back then and made us as adults think, yeah, we've kind of gotten used to some of these conditions. I mean, we've become inert at times to the realities that are really, really stark. And now it's staring everyone in the face. Now you can't look away. And I played the other night for some residents of mine. I played Blowing in the Wind by Bob Dylan and it was, I said, this is the song that we all sang that made us think about how we had to stop looking away, that we had to really face the world around us. And the other hopeful thing to me is that instead of people just hunkering in fearfully in their little caves, that people are trying to come out in some way, hopefully in a way that's not reckless vis-a-vis the virus, but saying, you know, we need each other. We really need each other. We need to connect. We need to be out there. We need to be saying what's on our minds and voicing this moral outrage, right? That even if we're materially okay, many of us, many of us are not materially okay. But even those that are materially okay, it's not okay if the world is broken and it needs to be fixed. So at another institutional level, this has actually accelerated important changes for educators and colleges. And part of what I'm seeing through really important voices in education is that they're recognizing that passive learning, which colleges used to benefit from in terms of like pack an auditorium with 300 kids. That's a lot of money in that hour lecture. But they're now recognizing that one of the things that we talk about this in the book in terms of what are the mindset barriers to college success. One of them is the feeling of not belonging. I can't make it. And so part of what happens in a 300 lecture hall is it's not, we didn't think of it as precious face-to-face time. We now think of face-to-face time as very precious. And part of what we're colleges are beginning to understand and accelerate. They've already understood it, but they're accelerating it now because of COVID is how can we individualize and support minority underrepresented students? How can we give kids even better access to mental health because there were barriers to mental health treatment, which could be, I called when I felt awful, but now it's a week later and I don't feel like going. And there's no shows. And the no shows happen more or even the lack of seeking help, which is another mindset barrier, happens more with men. It happens with minority students. It happens with first generation students and international or ethnic minority students. So there are many, I would say avenues that colleges re-examining in terms of how to, to put it crassly, monetize the experience but make it better. And that is really, I think a very hopeful thing because I think we, part of what we got as feedback when we were writing the book were the young millennials at that time saying, we are crushed by student debt. These are the kids who'd gone to college and finished and were either underemployed or, you know, or struggling with their employment opportunities. And so they felt very mad at, hey, like we worked so hard and this is it? We're gonna be, you know, debt surfs basically. So again, you can even see in the political kind of wins how much this has changed. This conversation has changed in the last five months in terms of college for all for like, okay, let's make it more affordable. So I think the funding and the public support of college I think will reach more citizens, I hope. But I'm also interested, of course, in talking with your audience today about at an individual, not just an institutional level, what are the questions that parents are concerned about in terms of how to support their kids? What are, you know, they're worried about how to help their kids kind of build on their social emotional maturity at this time, as well as, you know, trying to decide whether they should let their kids in on how worried they are. We have a question that just came in that's very much on all these points. It's what do you suggest for the stress of many families of very good ethical law enforcement officers that now feel their family members are in danger now, even though they have done all the right things? And what do you say to the many business owners, many members of minority communities who have lost their businesses? Yeah, I mean, talking honest, first of all, I think what Bea and I really believe is that kids need straight answers from parents, but they also need parents to listen. And when we don't have great answers, because they're really not obvious yet, to admit that there's a process that needs to be engaged in. Now, there is this defensiveness back and forth, right? If people have family members who are working in the police force of their communities, it's an interesting question, right? Which is here I am, I've been in law enforcement my whole life and I feel like I'm being made out to be a villain. And I think beneath the rage or the disdain, if you get down to the real questions, it's not like everybody is vilifying every single individual. There are clear examples of people who are really egregiously breaking the law. But there's also this other question of, is this inequality of distribution? Like police forces in the suburbs have a very different function than police forces in the city. And if you look at the history of policing, folks that are policing in the suburbs are tending to really be safeguarding everybody's safety. They're not out stopping people when their lights are broken in the back of their car. Whereas in the cities, police forces have become much more enforcers of certain kinds of standards of behavior that are often provocative. And I think there's a great dialogue going on now with, I happen to be working now in Camden and Camden's police chief, the former police chief, Scott Thompson was just in the New York Times yesterday talking about this with Emily Bazalon. And there are a number of other leaders talking about, what does the dialogue need to look like now to really change the character, the culture, the whole approach to people's roles rather than seeing it as, well, you're bad because you're a police officer or you're bad because you're black, you're suspicious. And that kind of, I think there's a lot of discussion now going on about implicit bias and B and I talk a little bit about, when we get at these mindset issues, those are implicit biases. When you say the word mental health problem or mental illness, what gets triggered? Usually it's stereotypes, it's oftentimes very negative. And similarly with what's a policeman or what's an African-American man and people's minds. So thinking about how do we start to talk to our kids about we all live in a racially divided society, we all carry in us these implicit biases. And rather than being afraid of them or calling people names, you have to really say, apart from the explicit hate filled speech and the kind of really trying to take down other people, which of course, there is enough of that to, we could spend another hour on that topic alone. But for most people, it's, how do I get over the fact that I'm afraid of people I don't know very well? I'm afraid of people who don't look like me. I'm afraid of people I've seen in movies or something who then suddenly that implicit bias gets reinforced in the behaviors you see on the street. I'll add with one more anecdote here, which is that I was driving home on the expressway when protesters walked onto the highway and were tear gassed because they wouldn't move when the police asked them to move. And so I witnessed the gas coming towards me and a friend of mine was actually there in the crowd and filmed a picture of it. Now you could say, well, were those policemen evil? No, they were carrying out instructions to control the crowd that happened to lead to a lot of tear gas. And it reminded me of what it was like for me when I was trying to stop a war and I got gassed and it's not a pleasant experience, by the way. But I don't blame the individual police officers. It's more the military, it's the militaristic mindset is what I would call it, that has to be questioned. Do we really need a military in our cities or is policing something else? And that's why the Camden police changed that whole mindset and have really created a different relationship between people who work in the police. I mean, I may be going on too much, but I would say for those individuals who have family members who are police officers, right now I know they're feeling threatened. I have a very close friend who's a police officer and she's really upset with the way that the police are being depicted. And I'm hoping that through these ongoing discussions, eventually there will come some way of dis... And she, by the way, hates, you know, officer Donovan for what he did in Minneapolis. She thinks he's a criminal. I'd like to come back to that idea of safety and fear around this, but we have two questions right now about screen time, which I think is a very important thing to get to. Is that all right to jump to that and we'll come back? Okay, so I'm reading from an anonymous questioner. My kids seem very content with the slower pace, so much so that I am worried that it will be hard for them to reengage. Part of the challenge is, of course, more screen time during the pandemic because they had less to do. Any tips to successfully cut back screen time for teens rising 10th and 12th graders now that it is summer and okay to get out more while at the same time, we are still restricting activities and interaction? My, I guess, word to parents is, talk with your children about it. Don't impose rules because dictatorships tend to fail, eventually. So talk with them about it. Talk about whether they think this is building resilience in coping with this first ever pandemic, but also recognize that part of what screen time gets kids is social bonding and they've been missing social bonding because most of them are online with their friends or playing games or they're doing things that allow them safely to relate. So most children get pretty bored after a while with being on screens too much, but you don't want to just oppose them. You want to talk about what do they think about it and then you also want to help them think about is there anything else that they could do since perhaps the family pod is opening in some ways in terms of where people can go or is there another family pod or a friend pod that the parents family feels like are pretty good kind of low risk people to hang out with. So those are the things that children need more options since screen time for sure, but it's also helping I think having a dialogue rather than a lecture about it. And I think the notion that moderating the usage itself is something that we talk about one of the skills, readiness skills that we talk about in the book, self-management includes that ability to say, okay, I've been on this long enough, now it's time to do something else. Now it would be good. And if you read all across the blogosphere right now, psychologists, psychiatrists say pretty much the same thing about getting through this whole COVID which is structure your time, have a plan for the day, have goals. And so yeah, I'm gonna spend my time some of it on screen, but then I'm also gonna go and go outside because it's beautiful out in terms of the weather. And it's important also to do non-screen activities, but just get off the screen isn't good enough. You have to, I think B is right. You have to say, okay, what else is there to do? And by the way, I have to comment because today I was walking out of my office and there's a little quiet lunch area near where my office is. And I saw someone doing something that I hadn't seen in a long time. He was sitting there eating his lunch and he was reading a book. And he was just this simple book on a table and I was waiting for the elevator and I just watched him and he seemed so calm and absorbed. Like the whole world was just, it didn't matter to him. He was just engaging in something called reading. I recommend that, I recommend that highly. Reading is something that really is underrated by many people. And I'm not talking about shifting through screens rapidly and reading little text messages. I'm talking about diving in, getting into the author's words and understanding some other consciousness of another viewpoint that you gain by reading. How does a man ask, may how does a parent know if their child is really struggling? You were talking about how some kids are really thriving during this and figuring out all kinds of really creative solutions. There are also, as Dr. Hibbs was mentioning, there are also those who are really struggling and struggling more even more so now. What do you do? How do you assess that? What are some strategies for parents? Should I start? I'll start. I would say you start, I'll add. Fine, perfect. Well, okay, a couple of thoughts. Number one, if your kid is isolating or withdrawing and not interacting with you or the rest of your family, that's a warning sign, something's up. If they seem to be not sleeping or staying up too late and not getting up the next day, if their mood is bad most of the time, not occasionally, but most of the time. If they're preoccupied and don't seem to be able to share what they're thinking about, suddenly they're somewhere else, like they seem to be not quite all there. And then of course, just them saying that they feel lousy physically, okay? Physical complaints are often a harbinger of something like depression. Problems with concentrating, problems with sustaining things. And most of all, and this is probably, apart from low mood, people will say, I'm feeling depressed, okay? How long have you been feeling? But if you can get your child to talk to you about this, that's really important because once they start to tell you, then at least they're not holding onto it by themselves. But the other thing that they'll often say, which is important as a sign that something's going, is that going wrong, is that they're no longer feeling any kind of joy in the things they do. Because being I say, nobody's happy all the time. That's impossible. People's moods fluctuate daily, weekly basis. Some weeks are better than others. But if you're no longer enjoying, if you no longer feel like you like the taste of the food or the music you're listening to or the things that have been before that, a source of pleasure or even more of joy, then that would to me be a big warning sign. And I'll keep quiet and let B take over. Most kids will tell their friends first. That's, you know, they're not looking forward to anything rather than telling their parents first. But it is important if they do tell their parents first that their parents listen, don't minimize it, don't bright side it. So we call that a positive bias against, you know, a mental health problem, which is like, no, not my kid. No, no, you're a happy kid. This can't happen to you. So that's, there's negative biases and there's positive biases that people have about, you know, mental illness, mental distress, problems that have gone from worry to an anxiety disorder or clinical depression. And part of what I would really encourage parents to know is first of all, family sports incredibly support, you know, important in getting through a hard time. If you're a kid feeling like your parents are there for you, I would also say that parents probably need to think for themselves and talk about what runs in the family. Because if you've never had, I'm gonna call it like a mental literacy talk with your kids, now's a good time because most people, you know, just a national survey came out with like 45% of all Americans are now saying they are more anxious and more depressed than they were prior to COVID-19. So good time to say, hey, you know what? Is this situational? Does this kind of run in the family? So that's something that parents would do well to just be able to talk about in a first self accepting way. Like, yes, this could happen to my kid. This could, it's not, it's not scary. There's treatment, there's help available. Many of the school and college counseling offices are running telemedicine. There's national groups and there's national organizations, go on their websites, you can join kind of in chat rooms. Nami is one, Jed on campus is another, Active Minds is another, there's many resources out there other than like call a therapist. So I would want, you know, parents and kids to know that. They're not alone, they don't have to be alone. I'd like to mention, by the way, in your book you have an amazing, amazing list of resources at the end of the book. So I suggest anyone who picks up that book makes sure to read all the way to the end. It's just fantastic. But you mentioned a little bit about this before, but how do parents separate their own anxiety from kids? And at the same time be able to have these open discussions. I mean, this goes on all the time. But how do you figure out, how do you stay in your own lane enough? And at the same time be open enough to what everyone else needs. Well parenting is always a balancing act between managing our own fears, our own anxieties, especially when they come into play around their children and wanting the best for our children. And certainly one of the things I would say is that part of it is being attuned to like, what's making you nervous? And what is troubling you? Or how are you managing your own distress? And how are you coping? Because not all coping is a good coping strategy. Just this morning in the recycling, as I was running around the city, it's like I saw a lot of bottles, alcohol bottles in the recycling bins. It's like, okay, that's how some people are really coping now. So not a great idea, but not long-term. But it's a little bit like for parents to assess how are they coping. But it's also to recognize that it doesn't, you can't bright side a kid. They'll just recognize, you know, you're like, you know, kind of not being honest because they're very intuitive. They read into how our parents doing. But it's also important to be able to say, what am I, what's motivating me? Whether I'm giving my kid advice, you should be doing this, you should be doing that. Hey, get off the screen time and do another lecture maybe. So it's like, but what's motivating you? So oftentimes we think, well, this is a child's best interest. And I think not always, you know, sometimes we're motivated because we're scared for our kids. We're scared they'll fall behind. We have not left the hyper-competitive world that was pre-COVID. We have not left the decades of having it drummed into us, parents and kids that like, you know, don't have a misstep. I've seen a few college students this spring and summer who have been devastated that they don't have the next internship, the next, you know, kind of, you know, fill in the blank for their, for their building their resume. And I'm thinking, wow, it's like they have never had downtime and they're scared about that it means somehow they're falling behind. So parents don't think about my kid is falling behind, you know, because that's not gonna necessarily help your kid think about, why am I anxious about this if I'm a parent? Well, look, I think just to piggyback on that, not only identifying what you as a parent are anxious about, but also to realize that there's a certain amount of anxiety that's just implicit in living right now with all this uncertainty, okay? And therefore acknowledging it, but then moving away from just feeding that anxiety to the point where it becomes an anxiety disorder or a panic attack or obsessing negativity. So anxiety to the extent that it makes us aware that there's something that's threatening us, that's fine. So if you're anxious about catching COVID and you wash your hands a lot and you physically distance and wear a mask, that's what I call an appropriate response to appropriate anxiety. But if you're so afraid that you can't sleep at night or that every minute of the day, you're like checking your temperature where threat scanning becomes constant, then you're not gonna be able to enjoy the day, right? Because you're gonna be, in essence, interrupting your stream of thought and of experience with these intrusive, anxious thoughts. And that's when we begin to say you gotta start practicing mindfulness. You gotta start focusing on the things you can control. You've gotta acknowledge your tense, but then you've gotta learn to ease the tension through whatever works. I mean, some people love yoga, other people love going for a run. I mean, Robert Sapolsky has written great books on the notion of stress is everywhere, but zebras don't get ulcers. Why? Because they're not fearing the future. So where we get stuck is where we project into the future, what we're afraid of in the moment is if this is gonna lead to a catastrophe. And so getting at the notion of your own catastrophic thinking and really trying to suspend it or challenge it and then being able to say whatever is uncertain isn't necessarily mean it's bad. Maybe something good will come of all this. Then when it comes to your kid, okay? Because of what your, what parents listening to this now are thinking is, well, I'm fine. It's just my kid who's worried. I question that, okay? Because anxiety flows like a virus. I always tell people that even more contagious than coronavirus is anxiety, okay? Because once you walk into a room, actually all emotions are contagious. If you're with someone who's kind of mirthful, you start to feel better. When you're with someone who's down, you start to feel down because we are, our brains are designed for this incredible implicit communication with one another. So if your kid is anxious and you're getting anxious, how do you get out? How do you get around it? Well, as B said, you start by saying, hey, you know, wondering what we can do about our anxiety here. I'm feeling some anxiety. I see you're feeling some anxiety, but let's talk about it in a non-anxious way. Because the anxious way of asking about it is, are you all right? Are you all right? Are you all right? Instead of saying, hey, you know what? I'm noticing I'm a little tense. I'm gonna stretch. I'm gonna take a walk. You wanna come for a walk with me. And then by getting outside and getting outside our heads tends to mean that we can begin to distance a little bit from the reacting mode into the more responding mode. And I can't say enough about what young people have access to now with these apps that allow you to learn how to really, you know, really explore mindfulness in fabulous ways. I mean, people would have to go, I mean, you yourself in this, I had to go way out to bed and other places to learn some of these techniques. You can travel there now. And here, wonderful lectures and guided meditations. And here the, and begin to learn to breathe, to slow it down and to start to change the very experience of the here and now. And suddenly by breathing and by getting in touch with the power and the rootedness of one's breath, you start to calm down. And I really think that that's something kids and parents can do together. And as B was saying, trying to learn new things together and taking the, you know, chill pill, so to speak, but doing something with that notion of, I'm gonna be chilling a little bit with these pursuits, you know, the being rather than the doing, the here and now rather than the future that I can't foresee. Well, that segues beautifully into face COVID, which I would love for you to talk about. And, you know, two of the strategies for me are nature, getting out into nature, whatever it is and exercise. But it's that whole idea of the mental health and the physical health being side by side as well. I'll do this very briefly because I think that I wanna make sure we get to other questions. But so Russell Harris is one of the, one principle exponent of acceptance and commitment, therapy, ACT. And he's got an acronym called face COVID. And it goes like this F stands for, you know, focus on what's into your control. Really think about things that you can do something about, okay? A is acknowledge the feelings you're having and especially where the feelings may even be physical. So therefore C is come into your body. Really get into where in your body are you feeling this tension? Start to get into your body with the breathing as well. And then engage, that's what E stands for. Engage in what you're doing. So if it's breathing or washing your hands or pulling weeds like he likes to do or chopping onions, get into it, get into it. And then the COVID, the C is for committed action. In other words, what am I doing now? And how can I make even the least, what seems to be the most trivial thing, how can I make that important? How can I do it really well? Okay, and then open up to your own experience of it all and to sort of be somewhat compassionate that, hey, I don't know what's gonna come tomorrow but I'm doing the best I can today. And by doing so, getting into our values, that's the V. What's really important about being alive? Why am I here? How can I make the most of the life I have? I is identifying resources, meaning looking around and within. You know, there are a lot of resources everywhere you look. You can find things that can help you through this journey. And then the D is for, well, it's for disinfecting and distancing, but right now, I would also use the D in a little bit different way. I'd say make sure you're going the distance because it's gonna be a distance to get to where we're going. And so thinking of it as a marathon, not a sprint. And if you need to slow down, just to make sure you're going, do that. We had a question specifically about some of this. Someone asked, are there any mindfulness, meditation, breathing apps you can specifically recommend? There's several that have been researched and that we can recommend. And some of them are free. One is breathe to relax with the two, the numeral, breathe to relax. And then there's, you can try different apps like Com or Headspace. Many colleges actually release their own versions of free apps that go along with some of the meditations. So to any of the others that you can think of. Insight timer, insight timer. Yeah, that's from the Insight Meditation Society. You know what I tell people is just look around, try them, see what you like, what works. Some of them are, you download them, you can just listen in your earbuds and close your eyes and just take off. I'm gonna say one that our friend, Sarah Arnell, came up with, it's called Karmic. And it's a plastic. What's it called? Karmic, Karmic. Karmic, great, okay I gotta look that one up, Karmic. Thank you. May I ask about, may I ask something else about that came up, is independence and freedom, is how, how does that work? How does it work for kids who are trying to be autonomous and grow up and be away? How does it work for parents? How's that, how's that whole, you know, dance going? So Tony, let me, if I may start. There's been an inverse relationship between a society being on the one hand well off, but parents exerting more, so much control that kids didn't have as many options to make mistakes and learn from them. And that is part of development, making our own choices, even if they're not great and learning from them and like, and so they inform us in that kind of brain sculpting way. So part of using this time, a lot of the discussions that parents and kids are having around safety and they're around risk taking and risk management, which by the way, I would also say when kids are in college, that's a huge part of will they be okay in college, is have they learned to assess and manage risk? But one of the things that we're now adding on to kind of that developmental tour list, I'd say, is moving from a me culture to a we culture. So the risk isn't simply, will I be okay? It's, will others also be okay with the risk that I'm taking? So part of the independence is again, having parents not tell kids what to do, but to ask them what are you thinking? If you move off campus or if you move in with a family pod or if you're gonna go hang out with this group or not, tell me your thoughts, what's your plan? Rather than assuming that kids have not thought about anything and you may or may not agree with your teen or young adult, they may make decisions that you don't like. And I've seen that have repercussions, especially now in family life where some parents were like, well, I'm sorry, you're now quarantined within our home because you took chances, we're not okay with. But it's again, that parent at least allowed the child to have logical consequences, it wasn't punishment, but it was like, yeah, I don't agree with your choice, but I let you make your choice. So those are things that help kids grow up. I couldn't agree more. I think that risk taking is part of being a young person, to figure out how far you can go or experimenting with all kinds of ways to get outside your parents' control, so to speak. But given that kids are now at home, all of those explorations have consequences for those around them. So it becomes a different equation. And I mean, there's no simple way to deal with it. Well, if the young person has gone off and violated, if you will, the rule of distancing, how does that become then a discussion for everyone in the family about the risk it poses? What Bea was talking about with the we focus, I'd say the biggest issue is, it may not even be the immediate family, but rather the older people in the family, the grandparents, and asking young people how important is it to you to be able to go at some point, to be able to spend time with others in the family down the road, and how do you make that happen so that people aren't just thinking about themselves? I do wonder, some kids really are so me focused that they're not ready to think in we terms. So that question of how does the pendulum swing between me and we is I think it's a ying and yang. And from some of the young people you've spoken with, how are they defining successful themselves right now? Is it that swing between risk and safety freedom? Well, of course, it's hard to generalize and I'll be the first to say that I've got one person for example, I'm working with, who has really been so pleased that he can do a lot for himself now, even at home. And his parents are letting him and he's doing it both through developing new skills around cooking and around going out for the, and doing the picking up of the orders and stuff. So he's kind of become the interface of the family with the rest of the world. And it's been great for him for others who are less comfortable and are missing their friends or who are really still in the kind of vulnerable stage, feeling vulnerable. I think parents need to give those, in other words, instead of saying, well, get up and do these chores right now. If they're still in the grieving stage or feeling sad about stuff, feeling like they're missed out, I mean, let's face it, you know, kids from college went home on their spring breaks and then boom, vanished, school was over. And that's like, that is a hard kind of ending, a fast, sudden abrupt. And for many, it felt like a traumatic loss, okay? Even if parents are going, well, what's the big deal? You know, you only had like eight weeks of left of school, but for kids who are feeling so connected in their own communities, that's the loss, not just of individual friendships, but of a whole sense of community. So those individuals, for them, what independence means is their connection to their social network, as began this whole conversation about. And I would say that, you know, helping them to figure out how they can get back and touch and connect other than through just the internet. So maybe, you know, if they're not driving on their own, maybe helping them meet up with others and go outdoors, having outdoor backyard, socially distanced, appropriate, you know, gatherings. In fact, one of my patients lives up near you, Vanessa, and he's starting to do that. He's starting to meet up with his friends in their backyards. And that's actually, for him, been a very big relief. I mean, it's high school friends, you know, he's gotten back in touch with them. That's great. That's great. Is there anything else that either one of you or both of you would like to say? Is there anything we've missed? I mean, I know you could talk for a week. Let's go. You know, I guess I'd really want to say both to parents and also to kids. There is no one size fits all. There is no one size fits all in terms of what colleges are gonna do or what high schools or even K to 12 schools are gonna do. So being flexible as a kind of value system within a family, but also for yourself. So you're not so harsh with yourself. And also really, I mean, you know, to go back to our life is curvy. And in the past we didn't feel that that was so consequential. You could step off what you were going to do and come back to it. And so I hope that people will rest a bit easier that like, yes, like, you know, as Tony's saying, the central core meaning is who am I? What's the meaning? What do I want for myself? And you know, and that, you know, having a break from this really harsh competitive world that young people have been in may help them. I hope so, as well as mobilize them to change our world for the better. Yeah, and I'd say both on the one hand, lighten up, you know, like take advantage of the pause in the rat race, so to speak. The fact that you have more options in some ways, not having to constantly measure your accomplishments to the 10th decimal point or 100th decimal point, you know, this kind of constant striving for an uncertain future that is, you know, might one of these best rates in my opinion, there is an, now we're all in an uncertain future. So let's make the moment different. And let's not strive so far ahead of ourselves. Let's make sure that it's the here and now and the steps that are right in front of us that we can guide ourselves through. And what are we learning as we do? What do we learn as we go with this different approach to life? It's not being on a conveyor belt or on an escalator or on a, you know, like a super fast acela train. It's more like walking and biking and slowing things down. I think the whole culture, if anything come, there are many good things that are coming of this, I believe the hardships are in no way easy. Those of us that have been most hurt or traumatized need a lot of healing, need a lot of support, need a lot of patience from the people around us and forbearance for whatever difficulties we are having collectively to move on. Because maybe this is the time to acknowledge the loss but at the same time to say, so now how do we make it better? Whether it's moving for social change or trying to learn to do something you never learned before or just to enjoy time with your parents playing, you know, gin rummy or doing jigsaw puzzles. It's to me, it's got, that's really the silver lining here is the scripts we had, they need to sort of be not thrown away because eventually this will, there will be a different moment in the COVID unfolding. We're, it's still early though and everybody's going, oh my God, how much longer it's gonna go on? And what I say is it's gonna go on as long as it's gonna go on. We just have to learn to make our lives meaningful in the process. I can't thank you enough because I think this has been incredibly valuable because it allows people to see that there are lots of different ways of looking at things, lots of ways to reevaluate and that it can be very positive. So thank you so much. And by the way, whoever doesn't out there, you 21 or 121 people on our call, buy the book, best years of their lives and look at the end for these incredibly valuable resources and all the stories and the way that they weave through so much material, statistics, people's lives, it's wonderful. So anyway, so thank you very much. I have two, I have two little, there are three little announcements. We hope that you're gonna come back and visit us for another segment. We're gonna be a virtual next time and or live next time, which would be fantastic. We can have popcorn and if you have, if our audience has any questions or ideas, you can email us at programming at bedfordplayhouse.org. And our next session is next Monday at 7.30 p.m. with Dr. Andrew Gerber from the president and medical director of Silver Hill Hospital, he's gonna talk about mental health policy and the broken state of affairs and how community involvement things can change. And I wanna thank Dan Friedman, who is the pillar of the Bedford Playhouse. He's the Bedford Playhouse right there. And again, I wanna thank our partner, Catherine Ferrara at Drug Abuse Prevention Council. And thank you all so much for coming. Thank you Vanessa. Thank you so much. You did a great job. Thank you guys, really enjoyed this. Thank you. Everyone be well, be well, be well. Thank you. Have a lot.