Read: Burnout, The Secret To Unlocking The Stress Cycle

I can think of no better suggestion to kick off the New Year and new decade than this book! I know I am making two Emily Nagoski suggestions back to back but consider me an official fangirl!

This time of year we will all be bombarded by messages telling us to reinvent the wheel of our lives in a multitude of ways. For many of us, this is the last message we need. So instead, let me offer you some wisdom from this book and suggest instead, that the wheel does not need reinventing, it needs a break! Emily co-authored this book with her sister and the two of them explore the various components of burnout which they define as a combination of emotional exhaustion, depletion of empathy and feelings of futility.

They discuss the various social constructs that have lead to what they coined, “Human Giver Syndrome,” something that predominantly impacts women in our culture but certainly not exclusively, “At the heart of Human Giver Syndrome lies the deeply buried, unspoken assumption that women should give everything, every moment of their lives, every drop of energy, to the care of others.” She explains how this imbedded cultural assumption leads to perpetual feelings of guilt around self-care. This is something I see in the women I work with in my practice all the time. It’s not exclusive to adult women, I see it in teenagers who have incredible difficulty saying no to plans or commitments despite massive amounts of overwhelm or who have intense guilt going to sleep before exams when they feel every moment should be spent on “productive” studying late into the night. This book tackles the general concept of how we define productivity in our culture, something I have long taken issue with in my own clinical work.

The heart of the book is the explanation of the importance of completing the stress-response cycle and the many dangers of failing to do so, emotionally and physiologically. While they lay the science out clearly and inarguably, they also nod to the ways our culture has made completion of this cycle challenging when emotional expression of hardship has been largely considered taboo and a sign of weakness. However, they offer a range of ways to address this through emotional and physical outlets both independent and social. Couple all of this with the social pressures around body image which they endearingly coin, “The Bikini Industrial Complex.” While the address the ways in which this particular complex leads to disordered eating, they also explore the more general psychological toll that captures a wider pool of victims.

Overall, the book reads like a deeply validating friend, pointing to all the ways our society sets women up for burnout from all angles. But we are not doomed! For each component of burnout there are numerous ways to combat that harmful influence and complete the stress-response cycle to prevent things piling up and leading to burnout. So this January, I highly suggest getting a copy of this book, questioning your definition of productivity for a little while and curling up for a beneficial and delightful read.

Read: Motherhood In The Age of Fear by Kim Brooks

Summer break is upon us! All of my teenage clients are officially in countdown mode, some desperately white-knuckling to keep their focus in school and others who have already succumbed to the end of the year summer trance. While this is a time of much anticipated relief and excitement for kids and teens, it is one that is often mixed for parents. There is excitement for more time spent together as a family, the possibility of travel to new places and/or the comforting repetition of summer traditions spent outdoors in the backyard. However, there is also an increase in parental anxiety with summer being a time that begs for freedom, to stay out late with no school-day curfew in sight and to go on spontaneous adventures with friends, the final locations of which couldn’t be named in advance when asking for parental permission. Parents navigate the desire to give their kids independence and freedom while holding back their own fear when they do or their guilt when they don’t. While this article focusses on the mother’s perspective, parental fear and guilt is certainly not gender specific. In my practice I work with kids ages 13 and up, but these articles touch on the importance of freedom and independence beginning in earlier childhood as well.

This article by Kim Brooks, “Motherhood in the Age of Fear,” does a wonderful job illustrating the pain and power of going against the motherhood grain in today’s culture. The article examines the unique cultural context of raising kids today in the United States, and the mass amounts of fear that parents face daily. The article examines the history of how parents became so fearful, how childhood became so sanitized and the costs of the smooth-edged playgrounds of today’s youth on overall development. The author also illuminates the challenges of raising kids in a culture where parents often feel under surveillance by other parents, or even by the law, to parent according to the same fear-based rules and structures. It also beautifully touches on where the rigidly hands-on approaches rooted in hypervigilance can foster legal injustices and fear within lower socio-economic circles, where parental responsibilities may not allow for this mandated ever-watchful eye.

Ultimately, it begs the question, who benefits from this fear-driven approach? It certainly isn’t parents, and if you’re looking for more exploration on the impact on children, I highly suggest the book, “How To Raise An Adult,” which I reviewed in the previous post. Spoiler alert- kids don’t benefit either.

Another New York Times, article that pairs nicely on this theme is, “From Tokyo to Paris, Parents Tell Americans to Chill,” by Lela Moore. It compiles a range of different parenting comments from all over the world that help to illustrate just how culturally unique the fearful American parenting approach truly is and how we may benefit from getting out of our myopic cultural bubble when it comes to the theme of freedom in childhood.

“What really struck me was when I started to notice groups of mothers having coffees together: The Anglophone mothers sat next to each other facing outward, watching their children the whole time. The Swiss mothers sat facing each other around a table having a nice chat, with their backs to the children playing around them.” - Wrike, Switzerland

I can bet that the mothers who were able to turn towards their friends and give full attention to their adult relationships in those few hours then returned to their children substantially more emotionally fueled. Yet, for so many American parents, guilt would prohibit even this slight shift. As a culture, we let the guilt of turning away for a brief moment inhibit the enormous value of what is brought when we then turn back towards our children with a more filled self.

I hope parents read these articles, take a deep breath, and send their kids outside this summer on their own to have a grand adventure, even if it’s just down the block. I hope that when we see parents at the playground reading their books rather than supervising their children’s play, we give them a gentle nod of solidarity and encouragement. I hope parents can begin to challenge their moment to moment guilt for the bigger long-term gains for both their own senses of self and the independence and self-efficacy of their children.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/27/opinion/sunday/motherhood-in-the-age-of-fear.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/02/reader-center/free-range-parenting-outside-united-states.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article

Read: How To Raise An Adult by Julie Lythcott-Haims

While the millenial generation is already at the tail end and moving quickly into adulthood, they have brought up a lot of parenting questions around what it means to be a teenager today. The current youth generation of millennials has gotten a real rotten reputation, millennials are often described as entitled, lazy, self-indulgent and vain. However, they also struggle with record high rates of anxiety, depression and suicide. How can it be that such a “cush,” generation is also in such dire mental health territory?

In her wonderfully well-rounded and insightful book, Julie Lythcott-Haims, walks the reader through the various societal influences that have lead to the development of the millennial generation. She touches on a range of subjects, including the prolific news coverage of child disappearances in the 80’s, the current perceived scarcity around higher education access, and most interestingly in my opinion, the unique parenting style seamlessly adopted by the baby boomer generation. In regards to that last element, she writes, “Maybe those champions of self-actualization, the Boomers, did so much for their kids that their kids have been robbed of a chance to develop the belief in their own selves.” What the book tackles at the core is why the newest generation, despite having substantially more privilege than the previous, struggles with some of the highest rates of depression and anxiety and lowest rates of self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is a term coined by famous psychologist Albert Bandura and is defined in the book as, “the belief in one’s capacity to organize and execute the courses of action required to manage prospective situations.”

However, this book does not just dissect the etiology of this generation’s challenges and the parenting behind it, it serves as a guide towards shifting these dynamics that are arguably harmful, despite the very best of intentions.  The author refers to a conversation had with psychology professor Martin Seligman, “…it’s crucial that humans experience contingency which means, ‘learning that your actions matter, that they control outcomes that are important.’ Young children who experience noncontingency between actions and outcomes will experience ‘passivity, depression and poor physical health.’” This means not only learning that positive steps lead to positive outcomes, but perhaps even more critically, that negative steps lead to negative outcomes. It is the latter that parents often struggle with allowing space for, jumping in to finish homework assignments or call college admissions offices to prevent those deeply critical fumbles from being felt.

Another favorite simple change the book offered to parents is to shift from naming static attributes. The author notes that children who are praised for being smart, tend to choose less challenging opportunities in order to secure success and preserve that title. However, when children are praised for efforts, they become more daring and willing to push themselves and have higher resilience when the desired outcome may not have been reached. Praise in general is not the enemy, but the kind of praise makes a big difference.

As a therapist, I often work with my teenage clients around building resilience and self-efficacy to combat depression and anxiety. But ultimately, when I can get parents in the room and offer them these tools, the work is all the more impactful. I highly recommend this book to anyone in a parental role or anyone working with parents, kids or teenagers.

Read: Cinderella Ate My Daughter by Peggy Orenstein

On the heels of Halloween, with the multitude of princess costumes that surely flooded the streets in all corners of this country, I can think of no better book to reference than this one.

Let me say first,  I loved this book and my copy is almost entirely underlined. To paint a brief picture, I’ll choose one of those powerful snippets, “even as new educational and professional opportunities unfurl before my daughter, and her peers, so does the path that encourages them to equate identity with image, self-expression with appearance, femininity with performance, pleasure with pleasing, and sexuality with sexualization.”

Orenstein examines a specific niche of the many challenges of raising a girl in the modern, capitalist driven American culture we live in today. She tracks developmental stages alongside of marketing campaigns targeted at them and their long-term outcomes on esteem and self-concept. She explains how the sexualization of toys and the culture directed at young girls, leads to a fixation on appearing somewhere on the desirable/approved–sexy spectrum, and simultaneously disconnects girls from their own emotional exploration around desire and self-satisfaction. In this way, the goal becomes external approval and external satisfaction. This is the beginning of a series of trap doors that follow young women throughout their development, often leading to high levels of anxiety, depression and certainly eating disorders to name a few.

 All of that and not to mention really murky territory when it comes to development of sexual empowerment later in life. Here is another choice snippet by Deborah Tolman to illustrate the risk, “they [teenage girls] respond to questions about how their bodies feel- questions about sexuality and arousal- by describing how they think they should look. I have to remind them that looking good is not a feeling.” That quote gives me chills. It is a frightening abdication from one’s sense of self to confuse internal feelings of one’s own experience with external assessments of how one appears to the outside lens (which we might add, is then ever changing).

Luckily, it’s not all gloom and doom. Along with bigger more radical steps, this book also illuminates many simple parenting approaches to help buffer these influences. One that may ring controversial, is that yes, it is okay to tell your daughter she is beautiful. The key is to tell her when she is crying, when she is sweaty after a soccer game, when she speaks up to a friend, when she has her first heartbreak. Orenstein says, “it is important to connect beauty and love…Everything about you is beautiful to me- you are beautiful to me. That way you are not just objectifying her body.”

Orenstein brings the reader along as she navigates her experience with her own daughter with humility and humor. This book is valuable to anyone helping to raise, influence, role model or connect with a young girl in today’s world.

*It should be noted that Orenstein writes in reference to the cisgender, straight, young female population.

View: Eighth Grade

As a therapist working with teenagers, I see the same phenomenon happen over and over in my initial sessions. I invite my client in with a parent for the first portion as we review paperwork and how therapy works and discuss the general reasons behind the visit, often from the parents’ perspective. My client typically has their gaze down at the floor, it might flicker up intermittently and is often accompanied by either a furrowed brow of disagreement with whatever the parent is sharing, or a solemn nod of resignation. Then, I excuse the parent for the rest of session, close the door, and almost instantly there is an entirely different energy in the room. My client relaxes, gazes up and starts to share their thoughts on why it is they have wound up in my office and where their side of the story (almost always) differs.

To be clear, I take absolutely zero credit in eliciting this response. My teenage clients tend to have a LOT on their minds to download and explore, but find it excruciatingly painful to even dip a toe in the water in the presence of a parent. I feel confident saying that it is simply my identity as NOT their parent, that allows this shift to take place. I am not attached to the results, sharing with me is low stakes. A lot of my work with teenagers ends up being helping parents to work on relaxing their attachments and simultaneously helping teenagers to empathize with why that is so challenging for parents to do.

The movie ‘Eighth Grade,’ did such a heartbreakingly beautiful job capturing the depth of these quintessentially adolescent silences, both between teenagers and parents and in so many other moments. The thing is, teenagers really get the idea of being attached to the results. They are attached to an invitation to a party, a reply on Snapchat, the number of likes on a post, whether a casual glance was reciprocated in the hall, getting that summer job at the pool, getting the 98% rather than the 95% on the test, the list is excruciatingly long. The challenge is that parents and their kids are often attached to different results and the lack of curiosity about one another’s positions is where the gap widens.

What the above moments of attachment all have in common, is that they are almost always conducted internally in those ‘awkward’ silences. There is a misunderstanding about teenagers that they are lacking, especially in these moments, it is assumed that they are lacking direction, lacking the language, lacking ideas, lacking drive etc. and this couldn’t be further from the truth. In these moments, they are brimming. As the movie illustrates, if parents can work to get more comfortable with silence and loosen their own attachments just a bit, their teens will become radically more willing to step forward out of their silence, even if it's awkward.