#621： The Causes and Cures of Childhood Anxiety
Episode Stats
Summary
Kate Julian, a journalist at The Atlantic, wrote a cover article on the increasing rates of childhood anxiety and depression in the United States. She argues that parents are perpetuating their children s anxiety through their own anxiety and their willingness to make accommodations to keep them calm and happy.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Everyone feels under greater psychic pressure these days. We adults hope that children who
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have always been seen as naturally resilient have been spared the stress. Fortunately,
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kids are increasingly experiencing mental health problems like anxiety at younger and
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younger ages. This trend has been going on for years. My guest today wrote a cover article
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for The Atlantic on the causes and cures of this phenomenon. Her name is Kate Julian.
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We'll begin our conversation today by describing the extent to which problems like depression,
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anxiety, and even suicide have been on the rise among children and how these issues correlate
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with continued problems later in life. We then talk about the possible causes behind the increase
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in childhood anxiety and whether technology and social media are to blame. We then delve
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into the idea of how parents are perpetuating their children's anxiety through their own
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anxiety and their willingness to make accommodations to keep their kids calm and happy. We then get
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into the idea that getting your children comfortable with being uncomfortable can inoculate them
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against anxiety. And we enter a conversation with a discussion of whether more exposure to the
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news of a tumultuous world might actually make kids more resilient. After the show's over,
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check out our show notes at aom.is slash childhood anxiety.
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So we had you on about a year and a half ago to talk about an Atlantic cover article you wrote
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called The Sex Recession. That's episode 464 for those who want to check that out. You got another
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Atlantic cover story that came out in May called The Anxious Child. And it's all about
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this increasing rate of childhood anxiety, depression that we're seeing in the West and the United States.
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So this is actually a very personal issue for me. I have two kids who are six and 10 and their family
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history, my family history includes way more than its share of mental illness. Over the past 15 years,
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I've lost a family member to suicide and another one I've watched struggle with profound psychiatric
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disability and addiction issues. And so leaving aside journalism for a second, as a parent, like I
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really have no greater or deeper wish than that my kids not be afflicted with some of those problems.
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When my editors at The Atlantic asked me if I'd like to do something about childhood mental health,
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I was very excited for those personal reasons. And they were alarmed, as you sort of just mentioned,
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by these numbers about suicide rates and depression rates and anxiety rates in kids really going up.
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And I think the numbers about adolescents are more familiar. But as I started digging into this and
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trying to figure out where I would focus the piece, what surprised me the most was, first of all,
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that some of these really troubling markers are actually extending down to younger ages. So there's been
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a doubling of the suicide rate among 5 to 11-year-olds. I mean, that's a group of kids that we thought
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didn't have predisposition to that problem. What was more exciting, though, to me was that the people
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I spoke to all said, you know, a lot of this is actually really preventable. So if we look at how
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various mental health problems start, it's anxiety disorders. And those start a lot earlier than we used
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to think. They start in childhood, like in elementary school age kids. And there's something
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that we can do about it. So that was sort of the genesis for the piece.
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So let's talk about what childhood anxiety and depression look like. Because you're right,
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we typically, when we think about childhood mental health issues, we think about adolescence,
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you don't think about 5-year-olds having depression or even contemplating suicide. I mean,
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that statistic on suicide, that was probably the most gut-wrenching thing that I read in your
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articles, like the 5-year-olds. They would even think that that's a thing. I would never think
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that a 5-year-old would know that you can just kill yourself if you're feeling so terrible.
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So what does it look like? How does it usually manifest itself in young childhood anxiety and
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depression? So the first thing I want to say is that we do have to bear in mind that some of this
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is about increased awareness, right? So it may be, a friend of mine, a good friend of mine who's a
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child psychiatrist cautioned me on this. You know, some of these numbers with kids and with
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kids showing up at the ER may be a result of parents or teachers who are more likely to take
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something a kid says really seriously and maybe even overreact. So I do want to take that with a
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grain of salt. That being said, of the two things that we just talked about, depression and anxiety,
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depression remains among kids much less common than anxiety. It doesn't mean that kids don't suffer
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from depression and some of the symptoms that they might manifest are not necessarily so different
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than those that adults might. So, you know, just all the usual things like lack of appetite,
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difficulty sleeping, sleeping too much, poor concentration, irritability, intense sensitivity,
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all those kinds of things. And I think as a parent where you would sort of start to worry about whether
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there's a problem is if it's really starting to interfere with the kid's life. And then you would want
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to probably talk to somebody about it. Anxiety, which is much more common in kids, we should sort
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of pause here too to say what we're talking about because anxiety itself is not the problem. Everybody
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experiences anxiety. Anxiety is a normal universal human response to stress and worry. The problem
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becomes when, again, as with the depression, it starts to get in the way of your life. And that's when
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professionals would say that it rises to the level of something that would be called a disorder.
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So where the kid is so anxious about something that they really can't participate in normal
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activities, where they can't go to school or they refuse to go to school or they don't want to be
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separated from their parent and so forth. And what they've found in the past 20 or so years when
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they've done some sort of longitudinal studies of mental health issues, and they take adults who
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suffer from depression, addiction, other issues, and they go back and they say sort of what was the
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first sign of a problem here, they find that it was the type of anxiety more often than not that I
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And something that you point out too in the article is that childhood anxiety often goes away
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on its own, but sometimes it doesn't. And when it doesn't, how does it continue to affect individuals
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So, you know, I think what we're talking about, again, is something where if you don't learn to
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deal with something that's causing you a lot of worry, your effort to avoid that worry or that
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feeling of anxiety kind of starts to run your life. So an example that's often used is like fear of dogs,
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right? So lots of kids are afraid of dogs. That's not in itself necessarily such a big deal,
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but let's say the kid's really, really afraid of dogs. And let's say furthermore that the kid
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doesn't ever learn to deal with that fear. And then that fear kind of snowballs and becomes one
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of several things the kid's really scared of. The kid may not learn to tolerate those feelings of
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like intense worry and anxiety. And so they may start to, again, avoid things, whether it be
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social, sort of normal social relationships, they may later in life start doing things like self-medicating.
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And we know also that there's a really strong, close relationship between depression and anxiety.
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The anxiety tends over time in adolescence and adulthood to swing into depression.
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And so we know that childhood anxiety is increasing the past 20 years. I mean,
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do we have any like rates, like statistics on percentage of children?
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Yeah. So I think in adolescence, we see that about a third of them suffer from
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anxiety that would be classified as like an, as a disorder over the course of adolescence.
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I think in terms of the rate of increase, it's about a 17% increase in the past five years at
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last count. So I think that study was published in 2018. So it's a pretty short period of time to see
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that type of increase. And I think the other thing that I would note is the age of onset that's
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recently been determined. The median age of onset for anxiety disorders is 11. That's really young.
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And for some anxiety disorders, such as phobia, which I was talking about, which is typically one
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of the first things to pop up, it could be even earlier. That median age is seven.
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And I mean, I think we've all seen these articles published talking about the increasing rates of
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childhood anxiety. And we always want like, why? What's going on? Why is this happening? So like,
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what factors are, do we know that are contributing to the rise of mental illness amongst children?
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So I think that a lot of the discussion has been focused recently on the question of whether it's
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technology and phones and social media. The Atlantic a few years ago ran a piece by Gene Twenge,
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who's a psychologist at San Diego State, sort of it was called, have smartphones destroyed a
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generation? And there is something very appealing about that narrative or that answer.
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Because if you look at when some of these rates started to really tick up,
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it's right around the time that smartphones came out in 2008. And also around the time that social
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media like Facebook became common and available to teenagers. The problem with that narrative is that
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we haven't seen the same upticks in other countries that also have smartphones and social media
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across the board. And the more studies that have been done on this, the more it started to look like
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when you look at everybody together, the effect size is pretty small. So the best we can say is
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that when you look at all these studies together, it does look like there is probably a role of social
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media and smartphone use. It probably depends a lot on how much you're using of these things and how
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you're using them. And the effect seems to be most pronounced for girls, for people who use a lot of social
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media as opposed to gaming, which seems to be less problematic, and people who have underlying issues
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with anxiety. There are a couple of other theories that I'd like to throw in here. One is that this
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stuff also coincides with pretty big changes in our school system. And there's been some interesting
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research that have looked at the rollout of school reform in the 2000s and tied that to ADHD diagnoses,
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like looking at it county by county and seeing a connection there. And another really interesting
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fact to my mind is that suicide rates and attempts in teens seem to be spiking now in the fall when
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school starts up again, whereas historically that used to be the case in the summer. So that's sort of
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interesting clue that there might be something else going on beyond just the phones. And then the sort of
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final thing I would throw out there is this question of how we're responding to things. Like,
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are we making them better? Are we making them worse by the way that we're responding to our
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And that's what you devote, the lion's share of your article. But on that idea of technology,
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I mean, I've been one of those people who's like, oh yeah, it's technology. But I mean,
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as the research comes out, as you said, it's showing that people who are kids who are already
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predisposed to anxiety or depression, they tend to use social media or technology in a way that's
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not healthy. But kids who are doing fine, like social media doesn't seem to have an effect.
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And it's weird, there's other statistics show that kids who have no technology or access to
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social media, like they're actually, they do worse too, because they're cut off from all
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That is such a fascinating and good point. I'm so glad you raised that because I forgot to.
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So yeah, it's very tempting to say like, oh, well, I should just take the phone away from the kid or
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not give the phone to the kid. And the problem with that is, first of all, if all the other kids have
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phones, you're just going to make your kid a pariah. Because the truth is, like, that is how kids are
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transacting their social life. And we're not really going to change that. And there are also
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some really interesting studies showing, as you suggest, like kids who actually text more do better
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in terms of depression and anxiety rates. I mean, that kind of makes sense. They have like, you know,
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So let's talk about that third factor of how we're responding. And you quote a therapist in the article
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that mental health crisis in children can be self-perpetuating. In what way? What's going on there?
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So I think there's been a lot of awareness and concern about these things. But I think a lot of
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us, and certainly I would be in this category until very recently, don't actually know sort of
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what anxiety is. And so we hear that word and we think anxiety, bad. Kids are having problems with
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anxiety, must shield child from anxiety. And what that tends to translate into is stuff that actually
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makes the problem worse. So as I was saying before, if what we know from a huge body of research,
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and I would pause here to say anxiety turns out to be like the topic that is the most understood in
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mental health at this point. I mean, there is a ton of research on it and it's really solid.
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So if we know that anxiety is, the hallmark of anxiety is avoidance of the thing that's freaking
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you out. And that the way to treat that, which we can get into more detail about is to expose yourself
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to that thing and essentially build up resilience to it. What happens if your parents are instead
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trying to shelter you from feelings of discomfort or from difficult experiences, the very things that
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would sort of allow you to build up the emotional muscle that you need to tolerate life's difficulties.
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So if you're a kid who's really shy and you have a lot of anxiety around being called on by the teacher
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and your mom has heard that anxiety is a bad thing and that there's a big problem with anxiety,
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maybe your mom is going to do something like call the teacher, email the teacher and say,
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please don't call on Lila. It's really upsetting her. So that seems like a good short-term solution,
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but it doesn't help Lila in the long-term. A bunch of people I talked to kept saying versions of the
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same thing, which was, you know, we need to think about how short-term gains
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are leading to long-term pain. Okay. In therapy, they often like to say the reversed short-term pain
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can lead to long-term gains. In other words, like dealing with something unpleasant in the here and
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now can help you deal with it better in the long-term. And it seems like we've kind of flipped
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that logic on its head and we're doing something with the best of intentions that's keeping kids from
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having to kind of grapple with stuff that they need to learn.
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Well, yeah. Something that stuck out for me when you were talking about this idea of
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the childhood mental health sort of self-perpetuates, it sounds like, like parents' anxiety about their
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kids is perpetuating their kids' anxiety in a weird way. So it's like the parents, like they're,
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they're really anxious about their kids. Are they going to do well in college? Are they going to
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get to the college they need? Are they feeling all right? And because of that, they start to over-parent
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and it can, the kids feel that, it rubs off on the kids.
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So I have so many things to say about this. I don't know where to start exactly. I mean,
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one thing I'll note just quickly, we know that anxiety tends to travel in families and there's
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a genetic component to that, but there's also, as you say, a parenting style component to that,
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right? And certainly some of the culture that we're living in for some families right now,
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where academic achievement seems to have really high stakes in terms of your long-term
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prospects is part of it. I also think though, that there's something more fundamental going on.
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I recently had a conversation with Perry Klass, who's a prominent pediatrician who also writes
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about sort of the history of kids and mental health. And she made a really interesting point.
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She talked about how she'd been thinking herself about this mystery and how sort of looking back
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to her grandmother's era. She sort of said to me, look, my grandmother as a parent had so much more
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to be anxious about than we do, right? Like in her time, if you went around a room of parents,
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most people would have either had the experience of having lost a child or having lost a sibling.
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And yet, you know, as child has become so much safer, as we've really made strides on things like
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child mortality, parents are more fearful. And she was like, why is that? You know, why at this
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moment, you know, my grandmother, if there was a sore throat, like had to worry that that could be
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scarlet fever and that that could kill her kid. We don't live with that level of threat in our day-to-day
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life. And yet we seem to be more anxious. And she said, you know, I think that as things got safer,
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we kept kind of raising the safety bar and we kept looking for the next thing and the next thing
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that we could do to keep kids safer. And that's all great. But, you know, first it's SIDS, then it's
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bike helmets, then it's car seats. And this all leads to this kind of tricky worldview that if
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something bad happens, it's your fault, right? As a parent, in her grandmother's age, she was saying,
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you know, if a kid got hurt in the street, nobody said, you know, that's the parent's fault.
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But now if a kid gets hurt, we tend to say, you know, was she wearing a helmet? Was she in a car seat?
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We want everything to be preventable. And that kind of adds up to this, if you're a parent,
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kind of view that it's all on you. And I think that's part of this too.
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No, yeah. I mean, what's tough too is like parents, I think, are aware of this idea of
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helicopter parenting. They don't, that's not good. It's not healthy for their kids,
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but they still struggle with stop doing it. Like they, it's hard not to helicopter parent.
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Yeah. I mean, I think there's a part of this guilt factor too, and this is a bit hard to talk
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about, but in, in one of the programs that I look at a lot in the piece, it seemed like
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I'm going to perhaps regret saying this. It did seem like it was something that moms
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tended to do more than dads. And I think as a working mom and other people that I spoke to
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sounded similar notes, that if you have relatively limited time with your kid on a day-to-day basis,
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you don't necessarily want at bedtime, at dinnertime, at these other times when conflicts
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and, and issues come up to be, you know, having a knock down, drag out fight about whether the kid
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can go to sleep by themselves. You just want to make it work.
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Yeah. You want it to be pleasant because you only have that limited time. You want it to be,
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right. And I mean, but you, you kind of highlighted some accommodations. We talked about one,
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if a kid's shy, you tell the teacher, don't call on the kid, but then you also got, you got pretty
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personal with some people and talking about some of the really, I mean, it was, some would say extreme
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accommodations about not letting their, their kids only eat a certain type of food and that's the
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Yeah. So let me explain this word accommodation, which was new to me at least. This is a word that
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this guy, Ellie Leibowitz particularly, who I, who I profile on the piece. He's a psychologist at
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Yale's Child Study Center who started a program that is working to help kid anxiety by treating or
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working with the parents directly rather than the kid. And it's super successful. And he likes to use
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this concept of accommodations. Accommodations are, like you said, the kind of behavior I was talking
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about with the colleague on in school, sort of preventing the kid from having to deal with something.
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And it's a nice term because it kind of presupposes that whatever the parent is doing is in response
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to something that already exists. The anxiety is already there. The parent didn't cause the anxiety.
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They're just making it worse by trying to kind of cushion or bubble wrap the kid.
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You know, I'll, I'll, I'll mention a couple of examples that seems sort of especially vivid.
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One had to do with a kid who had eating issues that were so intense that they rose to the level of an
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anxiety disorder. This child who was five or six, when he started to get treatment at the Yale Child
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Study Center, had his parents calculated over three years, eaten literally thousands of turkey loaf
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meals. This kid basically ate nothing but dry Cheerios for breakfast and turkey loaf for lunch and dinner.
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And his parents were so down to earth and nice and lovely. I, I really enjoyed talking to them.
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You would have too. They had a great sense of humor. They had gotten into this really weird situation
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where, you know, the kid was in the NICU to begin with and had some feeding issues. And by the time he
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started eating solid food, they, they were very, very concerned about keeping him nourished. And so when he
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expressed a preference for this food and then a real distaste that later sort of morphed into fear
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of other foods, they just kept indulging it and kept indulging it. And it got so bad that they
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actually like needed somebody to help walk them through kind of how to get out of this trap.
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And in their case, going back to the point about sort of rushed mealtimes and, and sort of busy piece
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of everybody's lives. Part of the solution was that they needed to start eating dinner with their
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kids so that he was being exposed to a pretty normal range of food. Because I think the point
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is like they, if they'd had to eat turkey loaf themselves 3000 times or whatever it was,
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this never would have happened, but we get into these funny patterns just to get through the day.
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Right. So, I mean, you're, you're accommodating your kids so you can kind of just get through the day.
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But as you, as you said, the research shows, as you do that, you just make the anxiety worse because
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the way you overcome the anxiety is confronting and sort of learning how to manage the feelings of
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discomfort. Yeah. And, and the research on this idea, this accommodation idea is really pretty
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clear and overwhelming. Like almost all parents of anxious kids engage in this kind of behavior.
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It's universal virtually. And the more they do it, the worse the anxiety tends to be and the longer
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it tends to last. And, you know, the results they're having with this program that they've
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developed just called space are really pretty remarkable. It actually seems to be as effective
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as any other treatment for anxiety and maybe more so. And they've published some, some good solid
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studies on this. We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.
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And now back to the show. Another thing you highlight this, you know, the way we parent and
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wanting to accommodate, make sure kids feel, you know, comfortable and they're not, they're not
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feeling any discomfort, but also at the same time we're, we got this thing where we also want them to
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mature faster than normal. Like we want them to be able to read when they're in preschool,
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but we still, we accommodate them and kind of want to keep them innocent. I mean, what are some
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examples of that where you, you have kids who are both mature, more mature and more infantile
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Yeah, this is something that I just have noticed as a parent. I think I mentioned that at the beginning,
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I've got a six-year-old and a 10-year-old and there's been a fair amount of attention to like
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how preschool in a lot of places has gotten more academic in, in recent years. And this is part of
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sort of the downward sort of trend following like kindergarten becoming the new first grade
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or the new second grade. And so there is all this like sort of early literacy, pretty academic
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content in a lot of preschools now where, like you said, four-year-olds are being taught to read.
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And leaving aside the question of whether that's developmentally appropriate, I don't think that it is.
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It's a really weird contrast with the fact that, for example, kids are being toilet trained like
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later and later. Like it's really not uncommon at this point to see a four-year-old who's still
00:23:35.340
wearing pull-ups. And I don't remember the numbers off the top of my head. I have them in
00:23:40.320
the piece. But if you look at toilet training trends over the past several decades, it's pretty
00:23:44.900
remarkable. It used to be that almost all kids were toilet trained around the age of two.
00:23:49.520
And now that's ticked up by something like a year. And I think it's an example of one of these
00:23:55.720
things that seems like it's friendly to the kid, right? To sort of just sort of not push things.
00:24:02.740
I know as a parent that it's an example of something that seems friendly to the parent,
00:24:07.400
right? It's just like one of those things that nobody wants to deal with. We're all rushing.
00:24:11.600
I think I mentioned in the piece that in my case, we had done one of these like potty training
00:24:16.340
boot camps where you're supposed to like spend a whole weekend on the thing. And a bunch of my
00:24:20.920
friends were like, that's insane. How am I ever going to clear a weekend to do nothing but this?
00:24:26.180
But over time, it adds up to be more time for the parents, of course. And it does give you this
00:24:31.860
funny situation where we're sort of asking our kids to do sort of too much and sort of not enough
00:24:37.940
at the same time. Another example of this that has occurred to me as I watched the sort of
00:24:44.260
downward trend in age of smartphone adoption or the age at which we're giving kids smartphones,
00:24:48.960
which has continued to trend downward, is that we've got this situation where a lot of fourth
00:24:53.160
graders have smartphones. My daughter's a fourth grader. And yet a lot of fourth graders, according
00:25:00.720
to parents I know, and according to kids in her class, still believe in Santa Claus. And there's just
00:25:07.900
a very weird contradiction here, right? Like we're babying our kids so much on the one hand,
00:25:13.360
and then we're giving them a tool that we know, you know, has good sides, like we were saying before
00:25:18.800
with regard to the texting, but it also has some kind of intense sides. Like you're giving your kid
00:25:24.480
a tool with which they could like be watching Pornhub. You know, you're giving their kid a tool by which
00:25:31.380
they can be cyber bullied in a pretty intense way that never lets up. I don't exactly know what to
00:25:37.940
make of that contradiction. But I do know that by the time kids get to high school, it seems like
00:25:42.640
it's a really bad combination, right? Where you have kids who just haven't learned certain basic
00:25:48.280
life skills, and yet they have to deal with this really intense academic pressure. I don't think
00:25:56.320
No, yeah. So, I mean, we talked about, so the way the research shows that you can treat this anxiety
00:26:01.520
early by just exposing kids to their discomforts. And this idea of you have to let the kids fail and
00:26:06.640
struggle in the short term for things to be better in the long term. A lot of the experts you talk to,
00:26:11.420
it's important for kids to feel uncomfortable. What are some healthy ways that you can get your
00:26:16.620
kids to feel or, you know, get your kids to be comfortable with being uncomfortable?
00:26:21.640
Yeah. And I worry sometimes when I'm talking about this and when I wrote about this, that I sound like
00:26:26.460
I'm being completely sadistic. And I really, I hope that's not the case. It was certainly my impression
00:26:32.640
when I was talking to some of these people at the beginning that I thought like, why are you talking
00:26:36.120
about discomfort so much? One of the therapists I spoke to very memorably said, look, when I start
00:26:42.120
dealing with a parent of a kid who's got big anxiety issues, this is one of the first things
00:26:46.640
I ask them. Like, how does your kid do with like being uncomfortably hot? How does your kid do with
00:26:53.760
being uncomfortably cold? How does your kid do with being really hungry? And this is not to suggest
00:26:59.580
that we need to like, you know, subject our kids to extreme heat or hunger or anything like that.
00:27:04.180
But when you start to kind of step back and think, well, huh, like why are kids having more trouble
00:27:09.540
with these things? If you look at some differences between say my childhood and the childhood of most
00:27:17.060
kids today, there are some kind of intriguing clues, things that could factor in here. You know,
00:27:22.620
a couple of generations ago, almost all kids got themselves to school, whether walking or biking.
00:27:29.520
Now, almost none do. There are a variety of reasons for that. But I can definitely remember as a kid
00:27:35.380
that like walking to school in uncomfortably warm and cold weather taught you something.
00:27:40.520
It wasn't necessarily very pleasant, but you learn feelings. There's been a really striking number
00:27:47.160
decline in the number of kids who have chores to do. One study I looked at said something like
00:27:53.300
72% of parents today say they had chores growing up and 27% are giving their kids chores now.
00:28:01.960
There's been a similar decline in jobs, like among adolescents, you know, whether it's
00:28:08.360
after school jobs or summer jobs. I think, you know, what to me unites all of these things is not
00:28:14.580
necessarily, oh, like these things are inherently virtuous. I mean, we can debate that. But they do all
00:28:22.380
give you some experience doing unpleasant and sometimes uncomfortable things. And so with my
00:28:28.580
own kids, I've started to kind of double down on the chores and tried to slow down on being so,
00:28:37.380
so quick to jump in and prevent very minor physical discomfort. Yeah.
00:28:44.040
Yeah. No, I experienced that with my sons. They finally started baseball here in Oklahoma. They've
00:28:50.080
opened that up. But now usually baseball is in the spring where it's like pleasant. Now in Oklahoma,
00:28:54.280
it's like, it was like 97 degrees and he was in having practice and he's like, oh, it's so hot.
00:29:00.100
And I'm like, I know just drink lots of water. You'll be okay. And he seemed to do fine. And I
00:29:06.200
was like, this is, this is good for him. I mean, the other bit you talked about where parents try to
00:29:10.220
like alleviate the discomfort of kids is like, whenever your kid has like a leg ache or an arm ache,
00:29:15.340
it's like, I want Tylenol. Give him acetophenamine right away.
00:29:20.400
Yeah. I am so guilty of this. Yeah. No. Like so guilty of this. I mean, this was one of the,
00:29:24.920
this was one of the things I thought about when I was working on this is I looked in the medicine
00:29:28.560
cabinet and I'm like, oh my God, I have kids Advil and kids Tylenol in like three different
00:29:34.380
flavors. So not only am I like, oh, your leg hurts. Let's give you some medicine, but which flavor
00:29:39.120
would you like? Right. No. Yeah. I want that flavor. Now we've had that. I've had that debate in
00:29:43.840
our household as well. But it's like, you know, when I was a kid, my mom was just like,
00:29:48.700
I think what she did was like, oh yeah, like here, I'll break up some aspirin and put it in
00:29:52.780
some water and in a spoon and it tasted disgusting. Yes. So I never, I never did that. I was like,
00:29:57.940
all right, I'll just, I'll suffer the leg. I'll tough this one out. So, I mean, yeah, I mean,
00:30:03.300
this is something there's comfort. There's ways that parents can have their kids be uncomfortable
00:30:07.100
in healthy, safe ways. It doesn't mean you have to like take your kid through bootcamp or whatever,
00:30:11.080
right. But just let them get comfortable with being uncomfortable.
00:30:15.300
Yeah. Look, I mean, in our house, we've been doing more hikes, for example. I mean,
00:30:18.500
that's partially just the fact that the six-year-old is now six and is at a more practical
00:30:22.720
age for doing that. But like, yeah, getting your feet like good and tired, like that's not a bad
00:30:26.940
thing. Right. Yeah. And then when they start complaining, just like, oh, sorry, you're going
00:30:32.060
to be fine. You're going to be okay. Yeah. But another way was talking about how we preserve our
00:30:37.980
child's innocence is that we often keep them from hard topics, media, news, et cetera. And it comes
00:30:45.780
from like a good place. You want your children to like have their childhood. But do you think that
00:30:51.160
sort of sheltering them from what's going on in the world can actually help increase the feelings of
00:30:57.000
anxiety? Yeah, I think that it can. So in the article, I dealt with this question really briefly near
00:31:05.940
the end. I talked about some research that I'd come across as I was working on the piece about
00:31:12.340
how kids responded to the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in the San Francisco area. And this
00:31:18.380
research caught my eye because I was 11 and lived in that area at the time and was super shaken up by
00:31:23.940
the earthquake. I remember it happened the same year that my parents split up and the combination of
00:31:29.280
those two things, their marriage breaking up and like the realization that on a random Tuesday
00:31:33.400
afternoon, the ground could start shaking really, really hard with no warning and kill a lot of
00:31:38.260
people was pretty destabilizing. And what this guy, this pediatrician who looked into kids' responses to
00:31:46.800
the earthquake found, and he sort of studied this a bunch of different ways, but one of the more vivid
00:31:51.580
ways is by having kids draw pictures afterwards of the earthquake. He found that the ones weirdly,
00:31:58.420
kind of counterintuitively, who drew darker pictures of the earthquake, ones that featured,
00:32:04.360
you know, death and destruction, actually did better in the months ahead in terms of their health,
00:32:11.080
their physical health, signs that their body was under stress and inflammation were lower than the
00:32:16.540
kids who drew like really happy, sunny, like all's good pictures. And I started to wonder why this might
00:32:22.800
be. And I looked into this some more actually after my article came out because the COVID landscape
00:32:27.760
made me really curious about how we should be talking to kids about what's going on right now.
00:32:33.600
And there are a few things that were really striking. First, there's a ton of research that's
00:32:40.940
come out in the past like 20 years, basically since 9-11, looking at what kids know and notice about
00:32:48.500
what's going on with regard to disasters, emergencies, really big traumatic things that may happen in the
00:32:54.640
world around them. Sort of the upshot of all of this is, one, like media exposure is not really a great way
00:33:01.620
for them to get information. That's probably like, not a surprise, right? That sitting around watching
00:33:06.940
24-7 cable news about this or that disaster freaks kids out in an unhelpful way. What was more surprising
00:33:14.640
and more interesting to me, though, was that the opposite extreme was also true. That is, kids whose parents
00:33:20.380
tried to totally shield them from what was going on and didn't talk to them about it and didn't tell
00:33:25.080
them what was going on, also did really badly. A specific example, this is in the Boston Marathon
00:33:32.140
bombing in the Boston area right after that. Kids were on lockdown for, I think, the better part of a
00:33:36.780
week and school was canceled. And there was sort of similar to COVID, the sense that like going outside
00:33:41.680
of the house was unsafe. And the kids whose parents didn't talk to them had the worst mental health
00:33:47.760
health outcomes. So, you know, I could go on and on about this because it's fascinating stuff. But the upshot
00:33:53.680
of that and some other research that's looked at kids whose parents have terminal illnesses or kids who have
00:33:59.120
terminal illnesses and how talking to them or not talking to them affects them, the bottom line is kids
00:34:07.040
notice a ton. Like, whether or not we tell them what's going on, they know that something is wrong. And what also
00:34:14.960
emerges that if we don't talk to them, they come up with explanations for what's going on, especially when
00:34:20.740
they're younger and they're very egocentric and they're prone to like what they call magical thinking. They
00:34:25.560
come up with explanations for what's going on. They're a lot worse than reality. So, in the case of like mom
00:34:31.200
is sick and mom isn't telling you that she's sick, the kid thinks like there's something wrong with mom that
00:34:35.880
I caused. Literally, like there's a ton of evidence for this. So, you know, I think we have to talk to
00:34:43.580
kids. I'm curious though, like if I may ask you a question, like how are you dealing with that with
00:34:49.040
your kids in this time? Yeah. I mean, so we've, we've been talking to them about, you know, the COVID
00:34:54.120
thing and then also what's going on right now with the, the protest and the social unrest, what's going
00:34:59.840
on and what's going on. We had a conversation, like we had a family, we had every week of a family
00:35:04.060
meeting and we sat down with the kids. They're seeing the stuff on the news, picking it up. And
00:35:09.020
we had to talk to them like, and yeah, I mean, you can't get too deep with the kids with a six
00:35:13.180
year old about the racial history of the United States. Cause I mean, we asked like, do you guys
00:35:17.700
know what race is? And my daughter's like, you mean like running? And we're like, she's six. And
00:35:22.620
you're like, oh man, I'm like, I'm just, I'm about to spoil. I'm about to like take her out of the
00:35:26.900
garden, give her the fruit of knowledge of good and evil. But yeah, I mean, that's, we're trying
00:35:31.780
to have that conversation and like, what's going on, how it's complicated and it's, it's, it's hard
00:35:36.100
and, and they seem to get it, but then they, they kind of, I don't know, they don't seem too keyed in
00:35:40.240
on it. Like she's like, okay. And then just move on and do something else. I mean, it's so tricky
00:35:44.920
with this age because with my six year old, at the beginning of the COVID stuff, I tried to have him
00:35:49.760
watch some kid video that I, that was supposed to be good online, sort of explaining what COVID was and why
00:35:54.900
should wash your hands and this, that, and the other. And he acted completely bored and not
00:35:59.860
interested. And I kept after that sort of saying, do you want to talk about it? Like, do you have
00:36:03.880
any questions? Like, this is pretty weird. Like we're not going to school. We're not going to work.
00:36:08.880
And he would always say, no, no, no. And then we had him keep a little, I had him give, keep a little
00:36:15.340
diary for the first few weeks when our distance learning wasn't up and running. And I was just trying
00:36:19.860
to get him to work on his handwriting a little bit. And I was like, write a sentence every day about what you
00:36:24.020
did that day. So you can remember this strange time. And at first the sentences were so just kind
00:36:31.760
of banal. Like I had a ham sandwich today. Like I played touch football with Clara today. And then
00:36:38.740
one of the days he wrote today, I'm alive. And, you know, I use that as an opening to talk to him some
00:36:45.800
more. And he was very kind of shy about it, but clearly he actually was worried about what was going
00:36:52.320
on to a much more profound extent than I had realized. So that, that was interesting to me.
00:36:58.060
You know, one of the tricky things though, about all this research is like with a slightly older
00:37:01.700
kid, like my 10 year old, you're like, well, they're not supposed to be watching TV,
00:37:05.460
but you're supposed to be talking to them about it. And that puts a lot of burden on parents.
00:37:12.500
It does. So, you know, that's, that's a tricky thing.
00:37:15.300
No, I mean, I was looking at, like, look at my childhood, like, you know, my dad, when he came
00:37:20.660
home from work, he just like, he was, he worked all day. So he'd sit and you watch the, you watch
00:37:25.860
the nightly news with Dan Rather. And then you'd watch whatever, I don't know, Miami Vice. And so,
00:37:32.140
I mean, it's cop shows. And so like, as a kid, like that's, you only had one TV now. So you had to
00:37:36.160
watch that too, if you wanted to watch TV. And so I, I feel like, I don't know, maybe I'm just sort
00:37:39.860
of remembering my childhood that I was more mature than like my kids are, but maybe I am.
00:37:44.360
Cause like my kids with the way their media consumption is like, they just watch
00:37:48.400
their favorite YouTube channel. That's it. And they're never exposed to anything else.
00:37:53.080
I think that is such an interesting point. And I haven't, I mean, I keep wondering about this,
00:37:59.640
right? I mean, part of it is that we do have, I mean, it's like a family version of like
00:38:04.400
filter bubbles at large, right? I mean, we're all watching and reading different things
00:38:10.480
and I don't know exactly what to make of it. Is it a good thing or a bad thing, but there has been
00:38:15.820
this sort of uptick in news that's aimed specifically at kids recently. Some of it
00:38:23.380
post COVID. So like Lester Holt has like an NBC news for kids thing that I watched recently that was
00:38:30.120
pretty good. Some newspapers, you know, if anybody still gets a newspaper are producing kids sections.
00:38:35.940
There were a couple of other examples that occurred to me that I'm forgetting right now of things that
00:38:40.400
I'd seen recently, this idea that there should be special news just for kids. And I have kind of
00:38:44.160
mixed feelings about it. I mean, I think it's definitely better than kids not consuming any
00:38:47.840
news, but I do kind of feel like watching, you know, having the news in the background,
00:38:54.440
Dan Rather style was kind of a good thing in some ways. In other words, you know, the parents and the
00:38:59.360
kids are kind of both consuming stuff, even passively. And they kind of know there's just
00:39:04.660
an opportunity for chatting there. I think, you know, you also mentioned talking to them about
00:39:10.860
George Floyd and protests and police violence and this whole sort of series of things. And I think
00:39:19.320
that's really tricky too. I watched Sesame Street did like a CNN town hall on Saturday. And I tried to
00:39:25.260
watch that with my six-year-old and, you know, it wasn't as great as I wanted it to be. It's just
00:39:32.240
tricky. I will say though, and this just sort of underscores what I was mentioning before, again,
00:39:37.380
there's sort of research on what happens when kids, when white parents specifically don't talk
00:39:41.720
to their kids about race. And it just goes back to this point that kids pick stuff, pick up on stuff
00:39:47.380
and they may draw their own conclusions. There was a study out of University of Texas that was written
00:39:52.380
about in this book, Nurture Shock by Poe Bronson and Ashley Merriman, maybe like 10 or 12 years ago.
00:39:58.220
And these parents of sort of similar age kids to your six-year-old and my six-year-old all said,
00:40:04.220
like, we don't ever talk about race because we want to promote colorblindness and we want to
00:40:08.200
promote the idea that everybody's the same. We don't want to even introduce that as a category.
00:40:13.080
What they found with the kids though, was that that's not what the kids took away from it. The kids
00:40:18.400
took away from it something else, which is like, huh, you know, when the researchers asked them,
00:40:23.520
like, what do you, what do you, your parents think of black people? Like, are black people nice?
00:40:27.740
They kind of had come to the conclusion that because their parents didn't have black friends,
00:40:32.760
that black people must not be nice. So it's tricky, you know, it's tricky. And I haven't by any
00:40:37.500
means figured out the answer, but I'm struggling with it.
00:40:40.240
I mean, so you mentioned some ways that your own parenting has changed after
00:40:43.900
researching, writing this article, like there's more chores, taking more hikes. Any other ways
00:40:48.880
your own parenting has changed as a result of this article?
00:40:51.720
Yeah. So going back to that one program that I was talking to, talking about rather out of Yale,
00:40:57.680
the space program that works with the parents to get them to stop doing these accommodations.
00:41:02.240
There's an aspect of that program that I didn't highlight, which has been
00:41:05.880
really key to how I've changed things. That this, the program's acronym space stands for like
00:41:12.720
supportive parenting, anxiety, something or other, something or other. And the supportive
00:41:17.320
part is really key. What they have found and observed is that parents kind of tend to sort of
00:41:23.620
swing between one extreme and the other. And often even within a family, like one parent will be the
00:41:29.840
super accommodating one, often the mom and one parent, maybe more often the dad, if there's dad,
00:41:35.640
will be like more of the kind of tough love guy. And what tends to work best is kind of something in
00:41:43.780
the middle where you're not accommodating, but you are providing comfort to the kid and expressing
00:41:48.780
empathy and all of that. And it sounds kind of basic, but I think sometimes we just, we do tend to
00:41:55.400
go to one extreme or the other. So I personally have been trying to sort of think, okay, I'm going to
00:42:00.320
stop trying to prevent discomfort so much. Right. But I might be more proactive about like
00:42:08.260
just old fashioned comfort. And it sounds so sort of silly when I say it, but you know, again,
00:42:14.440
a child psychiatrist friend I was talking to made the same point. And I thought it was really profound.
00:42:18.880
Like we don't somehow at this moment, always think that just providing comfort is enough.
00:42:25.060
Like we think we got to fix the problem, answer the question, know the answers, have a solution.
00:42:30.940
And she's like, that's really not what parenting used to be. And it's really not what parenting
00:42:35.260
probably should be. Like, sometimes it's just enough to say like, I'm sorry, that bad thing
00:42:40.580
happened. Like that stinks. Like, you know, depending on the age of the kid and the kid, like, let's just
00:42:45.660
cuddle for a while or, you know, let's just talk about it and just agree that it sucks what happened.
00:42:51.760
And so I've been trying to sort of do more of that as opposed to like, let me charge in and fix it,
00:42:57.500
not prevent the discomfort, but provide some comfort.
00:43:01.300
Well, Kate, where can people go to learn more about the article and your work?
00:43:05.100
Yeah. So if you want to check out the article, you can find it by looking at my Twitter handle,
00:43:10.840
which is Kate, Kate Julian, just at Kate Julian. Or if you go to the Atlantic's website and search
00:43:19.780
Fantastic. Well, Kate Julian, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:43:22.040
It's been so nice talking to you. Thanks again for having me back.
00:43:25.140
My guest today was Kate Julian. She's a writer at the Atlantic. We talked about her cover article
00:43:29.040
at the Atlantic called What Happened to American Childhood. Check it out. It's available at
00:43:32.880
theatlantic.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash childhood anxiety.
00:43:37.120
You can find links to resources. We can delve deeper into this topic.
00:43:47.060
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website at
00:43:50.480
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