The Art of Manliness - #621： The Causes and Cures of Childhood Anxiety

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.300 Everyone feels under greater psychic pressure these days. We adults hope that children who

00:00:15.820 have always been seen as naturally resilient have been spared the stress. Fortunately,

00:00:19.380 kids are increasingly experiencing mental health problems like anxiety at younger and

00:00:23.040 younger ages. This trend has been going on for years. My guest today wrote a cover article

00:00:26.920 for The Atlantic on the causes and cures of this phenomenon. Her name is Kate Julian.

00:00:30.740 We'll begin our conversation today by describing the extent to which problems like depression,

00:00:34.520 anxiety, and even suicide have been on the rise among children and how these issues correlate

00:00:38.800 with continued problems later in life. We then talk about the possible causes behind the increase

00:00:43.120 in childhood anxiety and whether technology and social media are to blame. We then delve

00:00:47.260 into the idea of how parents are perpetuating their children's anxiety through their own

00:00:50.780 anxiety and their willingness to make accommodations to keep their kids calm and happy. We then get

00:00:55.220 into the idea that getting your children comfortable with being uncomfortable can inoculate them

00:00:59.260 against anxiety. And we enter a conversation with a discussion of whether more exposure to the

00:01:03.460 news of a tumultuous world might actually make kids more resilient. After the show's over,

00:01:07.760 check out our show notes at aom.is slash childhood anxiety.

00:01:18.260 Kate Julian, welcome back to the show.

00:01:20.340 Thank you so much for having me back.

00:01:21.940 So we had you on about a year and a half ago to talk about an Atlantic cover article you wrote

00:01:26.340 called The Sex Recession. That's episode 464 for those who want to check that out. You got another

00:01:31.280 Atlantic cover story that came out in May called The Anxious Child. And it's all about

00:01:36.180 this increasing rate of childhood anxiety, depression that we're seeing in the West and the United States.

00:01:43.280 What kicked off your research into this topic?

00:01:45.840 So this is actually a very personal issue for me. I have two kids who are six and 10 and their family

00:01:55.160 history, my family history includes way more than its share of mental illness. Over the past 15 years,

00:02:01.920 I've lost a family member to suicide and another one I've watched struggle with profound psychiatric

00:02:08.800 disability and addiction issues. And so leaving aside journalism for a second, as a parent, like I

00:02:16.120 really have no greater or deeper wish than that my kids not be afflicted with some of those problems.

00:02:22.340 When my editors at The Atlantic asked me if I'd like to do something about childhood mental health,

00:02:27.200 I was very excited for those personal reasons. And they were alarmed, as you sort of just mentioned,

00:02:34.640 by these numbers about suicide rates and depression rates and anxiety rates in kids really going up.

00:02:42.240 And I think the numbers about adolescents are more familiar. But as I started digging into this and

00:02:48.400 trying to figure out where I would focus the piece, what surprised me the most was, first of all,

00:02:54.260 that some of these really troubling markers are actually extending down to younger ages. So there's been

00:03:00.540 a doubling of the suicide rate among 5 to 11-year-olds. I mean, that's a group of kids that we thought

00:03:06.600 didn't have predisposition to that problem. What was more exciting, though, to me was that the people

00:03:14.760 I spoke to all said, you know, a lot of this is actually really preventable. So if we look at how

00:03:21.180 various mental health problems start, it's anxiety disorders. And those start a lot earlier than we used

00:03:28.660 to think. They start in childhood, like in elementary school age kids. And there's something

00:03:33.160 that we can do about it. So that was sort of the genesis for the piece.

00:03:37.040 So let's talk about what childhood anxiety and depression look like. Because you're right,

00:03:41.040 we typically, when we think about childhood mental health issues, we think about adolescence,

00:03:45.700 you don't think about 5-year-olds having depression or even contemplating suicide. I mean,

00:03:50.620 that statistic on suicide, that was probably the most gut-wrenching thing that I read in your

00:03:55.400 articles, like the 5-year-olds. They would even think that that's a thing. I would never think

00:04:01.160 that a 5-year-old would know that you can just kill yourself if you're feeling so terrible.

00:04:05.460 So what does it look like? How does it usually manifest itself in young childhood anxiety and

00:04:10.480 depression? So the first thing I want to say is that we do have to bear in mind that some of this

00:04:15.020 is about increased awareness, right? So it may be, a friend of mine, a good friend of mine who's a

00:04:20.940 child psychiatrist cautioned me on this. You know, some of these numbers with kids and with

00:04:26.080 kids showing up at the ER may be a result of parents or teachers who are more likely to take

00:04:32.480 something a kid says really seriously and maybe even overreact. So I do want to take that with a

00:04:37.580 grain of salt. That being said, of the two things that we just talked about, depression and anxiety,

00:04:43.040 depression remains among kids much less common than anxiety. It doesn't mean that kids don't suffer

00:04:49.460 from depression and some of the symptoms that they might manifest are not necessarily so different

00:04:55.040 than those that adults might. So, you know, just all the usual things like lack of appetite,

00:05:00.460 difficulty sleeping, sleeping too much, poor concentration, irritability, intense sensitivity,

00:05:07.020 all those kinds of things. And I think as a parent where you would sort of start to worry about whether

00:05:10.960 there's a problem is if it's really starting to interfere with the kid's life. And then you would want

00:05:14.900 to probably talk to somebody about it. Anxiety, which is much more common in kids, we should sort

00:05:21.200 of pause here too to say what we're talking about because anxiety itself is not the problem. Everybody

00:05:27.740 experiences anxiety. Anxiety is a normal universal human response to stress and worry. The problem

00:05:35.060 becomes when, again, as with the depression, it starts to get in the way of your life. And that's when

00:05:40.240 professionals would say that it rises to the level of something that would be called a disorder.

00:05:44.900 So where the kid is so anxious about something that they really can't participate in normal

00:05:48.980 activities, where they can't go to school or they refuse to go to school or they don't want to be

00:05:54.020 separated from their parent and so forth. And what they've found in the past 20 or so years when

00:06:00.440 they've done some sort of longitudinal studies of mental health issues, and they take adults who

00:06:04.940 suffer from depression, addiction, other issues, and they go back and they say sort of what was the

00:06:09.980 first sign of a problem here, they find that it was the type of anxiety more often than not that I

00:06:15.680 just mentioned. And that's pretty striking.

00:06:20.820 And something that you point out too in the article is that childhood anxiety often goes away

00:06:25.700 on its own, but sometimes it doesn't. And when it doesn't, how does it continue to affect individuals

00:06:30.740 into adulthood?

00:06:31.400 So, you know, I think what we're talking about, again, is something where if you don't learn to

00:06:37.800 deal with something that's causing you a lot of worry, your effort to avoid that worry or that

00:06:44.800 feeling of anxiety kind of starts to run your life. So an example that's often used is like fear of dogs,

00:06:52.440 right? So lots of kids are afraid of dogs. That's not in itself necessarily such a big deal,

00:06:59.680 but let's say the kid's really, really afraid of dogs. And let's say furthermore that the kid

00:07:04.000 doesn't ever learn to deal with that fear. And then that fear kind of snowballs and becomes one

00:07:09.140 of several things the kid's really scared of. The kid may not learn to tolerate those feelings of

00:07:15.620 like intense worry and anxiety. And so they may start to, again, avoid things, whether it be

00:07:20.900 social, sort of normal social relationships, they may later in life start doing things like self-medicating.

00:07:27.460 And we know also that there's a really strong, close relationship between depression and anxiety.

00:07:32.560 The anxiety tends over time in adolescence and adulthood to swing into depression.

00:07:38.560 And so we know that childhood anxiety is increasing the past 20 years. I mean,

00:07:42.540 do we have any like rates, like statistics on percentage of children?

00:07:45.860 Yeah. So I think in adolescence, we see that about a third of them suffer from

00:07:51.600 anxiety that would be classified as like an, as a disorder over the course of adolescence.

00:07:57.080 I think in terms of the rate of increase, it's about a 17% increase in the past five years at

00:08:05.380 last count. So I think that study was published in 2018. So it's a pretty short period of time to see

00:08:10.080 that type of increase. And I think the other thing that I would note is the age of onset that's

00:08:15.740 recently been determined. The median age of onset for anxiety disorders is 11. That's really young.

00:08:24.020 And for some anxiety disorders, such as phobia, which I was talking about, which is typically one

00:08:28.100 of the first things to pop up, it could be even earlier. That median age is seven.

00:08:33.380 And I mean, I think we've all seen these articles published talking about the increasing rates of

00:08:39.640 childhood anxiety. And we always want like, why? What's going on? Why is this happening? So like,

00:08:44.160 what factors are, do we know that are contributing to the rise of mental illness amongst children?

00:08:50.340 So I think that a lot of the discussion has been focused recently on the question of whether it's

00:08:55.960 technology and phones and social media. The Atlantic a few years ago ran a piece by Gene Twenge,

00:09:02.480 who's a psychologist at San Diego State, sort of it was called, have smartphones destroyed a

00:09:07.620 generation? And there is something very appealing about that narrative or that answer.

00:09:14.160 Because if you look at when some of these rates started to really tick up,

00:09:18.660 it's right around the time that smartphones came out in 2008. And also around the time that social

00:09:23.680 media like Facebook became common and available to teenagers. The problem with that narrative is that

00:09:31.400 we haven't seen the same upticks in other countries that also have smartphones and social media

00:09:37.280 across the board. And the more studies that have been done on this, the more it started to look like

00:09:43.260 when you look at everybody together, the effect size is pretty small. So the best we can say is

00:09:50.380 that when you look at all these studies together, it does look like there is probably a role of social

00:09:54.780 media and smartphone use. It probably depends a lot on how much you're using of these things and how

00:10:01.100 you're using them. And the effect seems to be most pronounced for girls, for people who use a lot of social

00:10:08.040 media as opposed to gaming, which seems to be less problematic, and people who have underlying issues

00:10:13.500 with anxiety. There are a couple of other theories that I'd like to throw in here. One is that this

00:10:20.280 stuff also coincides with pretty big changes in our school system. And there's been some interesting

00:10:25.080 research that have looked at the rollout of school reform in the 2000s and tied that to ADHD diagnoses,

00:10:33.960 like looking at it county by county and seeing a connection there. And another really interesting

00:10:39.160 fact to my mind is that suicide rates and attempts in teens seem to be spiking now in the fall when

00:10:47.000 school starts up again, whereas historically that used to be the case in the summer. So that's sort of

00:10:52.780 interesting clue that there might be something else going on beyond just the phones. And then the sort of

00:10:58.160 final thing I would throw out there is this question of how we're responding to things. Like,

00:11:01.580 are we making them better? Are we making them worse by the way that we're responding to our

00:11:04.840 concerns about kids' mental health?

00:11:06.740 And that's what you devote, the lion's share of your article. But on that idea of technology,

00:11:10.420 I mean, I've been one of those people who's like, oh yeah, it's technology. But I mean,

00:11:15.120 as the research comes out, as you said, it's showing that people who are kids who are already

00:11:19.880 predisposed to anxiety or depression, they tend to use social media or technology in a way that's

00:11:26.480 not healthy. But kids who are doing fine, like social media doesn't seem to have an effect.

00:11:30.560 And it's weird, there's other statistics show that kids who have no technology or access to

00:11:34.420 social media, like they're actually, they do worse too, because they're cut off from all

00:11:38.440 social connection with their peers.

00:11:40.080 That is such a fascinating and good point. I'm so glad you raised that because I forgot to.

00:11:44.800 So yeah, it's very tempting to say like, oh, well, I should just take the phone away from the kid or

00:11:49.240 not give the phone to the kid. And the problem with that is, first of all, if all the other kids have

00:11:54.180 phones, you're just going to make your kid a pariah. Because the truth is, like, that is how kids are

00:11:58.860 transacting their social life. And we're not really going to change that. And there are also

00:12:02.340 some really interesting studies showing, as you suggest, like kids who actually text more do better

00:12:07.940 in terms of depression and anxiety rates. I mean, that kind of makes sense. They have like, you know,

00:12:12.140 more ready social support.

00:12:15.020 So let's talk about that third factor of how we're responding. And you quote a therapist in the article

00:12:20.380 that mental health crisis in children can be self-perpetuating. In what way? What's going on there?

00:12:25.920 So I think there's been a lot of awareness and concern about these things. But I think a lot of

00:12:33.160 us, and certainly I would be in this category until very recently, don't actually know sort of

00:12:38.720 what anxiety is. And so we hear that word and we think anxiety, bad. Kids are having problems with

00:12:44.120 anxiety, must shield child from anxiety. And what that tends to translate into is stuff that actually

00:12:50.020 makes the problem worse. So as I was saying before, if what we know from a huge body of research,

00:12:55.620 and I would pause here to say anxiety turns out to be like the topic that is the most understood in

00:13:01.340 mental health at this point. I mean, there is a ton of research on it and it's really solid.

00:13:06.280 So if we know that anxiety is, the hallmark of anxiety is avoidance of the thing that's freaking

00:13:13.060 you out. And that the way to treat that, which we can get into more detail about is to expose yourself

00:13:19.860 to that thing and essentially build up resilience to it. What happens if your parents are instead

00:13:25.280 trying to shelter you from feelings of discomfort or from difficult experiences, the very things that

00:13:31.180 would sort of allow you to build up the emotional muscle that you need to tolerate life's difficulties.

00:13:36.580 So if you're a kid who's really shy and you have a lot of anxiety around being called on by the teacher

00:13:44.260 and your mom has heard that anxiety is a bad thing and that there's a big problem with anxiety,

00:13:49.600 maybe your mom is going to do something like call the teacher, email the teacher and say, 0.97

00:13:53.400 please don't call on Lila. It's really upsetting her. So that seems like a good short-term solution,

00:13:59.780 but it doesn't help Lila in the long-term. A bunch of people I talked to kept saying versions of the

00:14:04.620 same thing, which was, you know, we need to think about how short-term gains

00:14:10.200 are leading to long-term pain. Okay. In therapy, they often like to say the reversed short-term pain

00:14:18.080 can lead to long-term gains. In other words, like dealing with something unpleasant in the here and

00:14:22.340 now can help you deal with it better in the long-term. And it seems like we've kind of flipped

00:14:26.960 that logic on its head and we're doing something with the best of intentions that's keeping kids from

00:14:32.340 having to kind of grapple with stuff that they need to learn.

00:14:35.340 Well, yeah. Something that stuck out for me when you were talking about this idea of

00:14:39.380 the childhood mental health sort of self-perpetuates, it sounds like, like parents' anxiety about their

00:14:46.700 kids is perpetuating their kids' anxiety in a weird way. So it's like the parents, like they're,

00:14:52.500 they're really anxious about their kids. Are they going to do well in college? Are they going to

00:14:55.180 get to the college they need? Are they feeling all right? And because of that, they start to over-parent

00:14:59.180 and it can, the kids feel that, it rubs off on the kids.

00:15:04.060 So I have so many things to say about this. I don't know where to start exactly. I mean,

00:15:08.420 one thing I'll note just quickly, we know that anxiety tends to travel in families and there's

00:15:14.160 a genetic component to that, but there's also, as you say, a parenting style component to that,

00:15:19.000 right? And certainly some of the culture that we're living in for some families right now,

00:15:24.120 where academic achievement seems to have really high stakes in terms of your long-term

00:15:28.500 prospects is part of it. I also think though, that there's something more fundamental going on.

00:15:36.540 I recently had a conversation with Perry Klass, who's a prominent pediatrician who also writes

00:15:42.380 about sort of the history of kids and mental health. And she made a really interesting point.

00:15:48.280 She talked about how she'd been thinking herself about this mystery and how sort of looking back

00:15:53.980 to her grandmother's era. She sort of said to me, look, my grandmother as a parent had so much more

00:16:00.320 to be anxious about than we do, right? Like in her time, if you went around a room of parents,

00:16:05.020 most people would have either had the experience of having lost a child or having lost a sibling.

00:16:10.440 And yet, you know, as child has become so much safer, as we've really made strides on things like

00:16:16.240 child mortality, parents are more fearful. And she was like, why is that? You know, why at this

00:16:22.340 moment, you know, my grandmother, if there was a sore throat, like had to worry that that could be

00:16:26.720 scarlet fever and that that could kill her kid. We don't live with that level of threat in our day-to-day

00:16:31.540 life. And yet we seem to be more anxious. And she said, you know, I think that as things got safer,

00:16:39.860 we kept kind of raising the safety bar and we kept looking for the next thing and the next thing

00:16:43.920 that we could do to keep kids safer. And that's all great. But, you know, first it's SIDS, then it's

00:16:50.480 bike helmets, then it's car seats. And this all leads to this kind of tricky worldview that if

00:16:57.540 something bad happens, it's your fault, right? As a parent, in her grandmother's age, she was saying,

00:17:03.080 you know, if a kid got hurt in the street, nobody said, you know, that's the parent's fault.

00:17:07.560 But now if a kid gets hurt, we tend to say, you know, was she wearing a helmet? Was she in a car seat?

00:17:13.120 We want everything to be preventable. And that kind of adds up to this, if you're a parent,

00:17:18.480 kind of view that it's all on you. And I think that's part of this too.

00:17:22.520 No, yeah. I mean, what's tough too is like parents, I think, are aware of this idea of

00:17:26.760 helicopter parenting. They don't, that's not good. It's not healthy for their kids,

00:17:30.680 but they still struggle with stop doing it. Like they, it's hard not to helicopter parent.

00:17:37.300 Yeah. I mean, I think there's a part of this guilt factor too, and this is a bit hard to talk

00:17:43.840 about, but in, in one of the programs that I look at a lot in the piece, it seemed like

00:17:50.300 I'm going to perhaps regret saying this. It did seem like it was something that moms

00:17:55.960 tended to do more than dads. And I think as a working mom and other people that I spoke to

00:18:02.860 sounded similar notes, that if you have relatively limited time with your kid on a day-to-day basis,

00:18:08.900 you don't necessarily want at bedtime, at dinnertime, at these other times when conflicts

00:18:15.320 and, and issues come up to be, you know, having a knock down, drag out fight about whether the kid

00:18:21.680 can go to sleep by themselves. You just want to make it work.

00:18:24.900 Yeah. You want it to be pleasant because you only have that limited time. You want it to be,

00:18:28.300 right. And I mean, but you, you kind of highlighted some accommodations. We talked about one,

00:18:33.040 if a kid's shy, you tell the teacher, don't call on the kid, but then you also got, you got pretty

00:18:37.720 personal with some people and talking about some of the really, I mean, it was, some would say extreme

00:18:41.700 accommodations about not letting their, their kids only eat a certain type of food and that's the

00:18:46.220 only food they're ever going to eat.

00:18:48.180 Yeah. So let me explain this word accommodation, which was new to me at least. This is a word that

00:18:54.200 this guy, Ellie Leibowitz particularly, who I, who I profile on the piece. He's a psychologist at

00:19:01.140 Yale's Child Study Center who started a program that is working to help kid anxiety by treating or

00:19:08.940 working with the parents directly rather than the kid. And it's super successful. And he likes to use

00:19:14.760 this concept of accommodations. Accommodations are, like you said, the kind of behavior I was talking

00:19:19.720 about with the colleague on in school, sort of preventing the kid from having to deal with something.

00:19:24.200 And it's a nice term because it kind of presupposes that whatever the parent is doing is in response

00:19:29.200 to something that already exists. The anxiety is already there. The parent didn't cause the anxiety.

00:19:34.780 They're just making it worse by trying to kind of cushion or bubble wrap the kid.

00:19:39.700 You know, I'll, I'll, I'll mention a couple of examples that seems sort of especially vivid.

00:19:45.080 One had to do with a kid who had eating issues that were so intense that they rose to the level of an

00:19:52.220 anxiety disorder. This child who was five or six, when he started to get treatment at the Yale Child

00:19:58.240 Study Center, had his parents calculated over three years, eaten literally thousands of turkey loaf

00:20:07.020 meals. This kid basically ate nothing but dry Cheerios for breakfast and turkey loaf for lunch and dinner.

00:20:15.000 And his parents were so down to earth and nice and lovely. I, I really enjoyed talking to them.

00:20:22.100 You would have too. They had a great sense of humor. They had gotten into this really weird situation

00:20:27.600 where, you know, the kid was in the NICU to begin with and had some feeding issues. And by the time he

00:20:33.860 started eating solid food, they, they were very, very concerned about keeping him nourished. And so when he

00:20:40.480 expressed a preference for this food and then a real distaste that later sort of morphed into fear

00:20:46.660 of other foods, they just kept indulging it and kept indulging it. And it got so bad that they

00:20:52.520 actually like needed somebody to help walk them through kind of how to get out of this trap.

00:20:57.400 And in their case, going back to the point about sort of rushed mealtimes and, and sort of busy piece

00:21:02.960 of everybody's lives. Part of the solution was that they needed to start eating dinner with their

00:21:07.380 kids so that he was being exposed to a pretty normal range of food. Because I think the point

00:21:12.300 is like they, if they'd had to eat turkey loaf themselves 3000 times or whatever it was,

00:21:17.220 this never would have happened, but we get into these funny patterns just to get through the day.

00:21:22.540 Right. So, I mean, you're, you're accommodating your kids so you can kind of just get through the day.

00:21:26.260 But as you, as you said, the research shows, as you do that, you just make the anxiety worse because

00:21:30.960 the way you overcome the anxiety is confronting and sort of learning how to manage the feelings of

00:21:35.520 discomfort. Yeah. And, and the research on this idea, this accommodation idea is really pretty

00:21:40.980 clear and overwhelming. Like almost all parents of anxious kids engage in this kind of behavior.

00:21:47.440 It's universal virtually. And the more they do it, the worse the anxiety tends to be and the longer

00:21:54.280 it tends to last. And, you know, the results they're having with this program that they've

00:21:59.400 developed just called space are really pretty remarkable. It actually seems to be as effective

00:22:05.060 as any other treatment for anxiety and maybe more so. And they've published some, some good solid

00:22:10.280 studies on this. We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.

00:22:17.260 And now back to the show. Another thing you highlight this, you know, the way we parent and

00:22:22.320 wanting to accommodate, make sure kids feel, you know, comfortable and they're not, they're not

00:22:27.020 feeling any discomfort, but also at the same time we're, we got this thing where we also want them to

00:22:31.980 mature faster than normal. Like we want them to be able to read when they're in preschool,

00:22:36.740 but we still, we accommodate them and kind of want to keep them innocent. I mean, what are some

00:22:41.520 examples of that where you, you have kids who are both mature, more mature and more infantile

00:22:46.960 than children in previous generations?

00:22:49.200 Yeah, this is something that I just have noticed as a parent. I think I mentioned that at the beginning,

00:22:53.740 I've got a six-year-old and a 10-year-old and there's been a fair amount of attention to like

00:22:58.320 how preschool in a lot of places has gotten more academic in, in recent years. And this is part of

00:23:04.480 sort of the downward sort of trend following like kindergarten becoming the new first grade

00:23:09.660 or the new second grade. And so there is all this like sort of early literacy, pretty academic

00:23:15.540 content in a lot of preschools now where, like you said, four-year-olds are being taught to read.

00:23:20.200 And leaving aside the question of whether that's developmentally appropriate, I don't think that it is.

00:23:24.860 It's a really weird contrast with the fact that, for example, kids are being toilet trained like

00:23:31.260 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

00:25:54.560 that's good.

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.

00:37:12.060 Yeah.

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, 0.98

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 1.00

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

00:43:17.140 for Anxious Child, it should come right up.

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

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00:44:21.960 to the AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - June 22, 2020

#621： The Causes and Cures of Childhood Anxiety

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