[00:00:15] Amy H-L: I’m Amy Halpern-Laff.
[00:00:17] Jon M: And I’m Jon Moscow. Welcome to Ethical Schools. Today we speak with Dr. Tovah P. Klein. Dr. Klein is a psychology professor at Barnard College and the director of the Center for Toddler Development. Her latest book, which we’ll discuss, is “Raising Resilience: How to Help Our Children Thrive in Times of Uncertainty.” Welcome, Tovah.
[00:00:35] Tovah K: Hi. Thank you for having me.
[00:00:38] Jon M: You write that this book started to come together as you thought about the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic. We are in uncertain times now. You talk about the parent-child relationship as a kind of resilience incubator and say that parents can help children build resilience proactively, before the arrival of a crisis or traumatic experience. How can parents help their kids build this kind of resilience?
[00:01:03] Tovah K: Yeah, you know, something that parents are building every single day in their relationship with their child, and I know we don’t think of it this way. We tend to think of resilience as this trait or something that we have if you get through a crisis and somehow magically jump back and say, okay, got through that. But what resilience is truly is a foundation that every day when parents are interacting with their children and they’re saying, yeah, that was hard, I’m gonna help you with it, or you’re not alone, you’re gonna be okay. The routines parents set up every single day for their children to help them get out the door or to deal with the disappointments, big or little in life, are all saying to a child, you’re not alone. There’s somebody here whom you can trust and who’s gonna be here for you. Hopefully more than one person, but really, what you need is one. And that’s building a foundation that children then carry forward with them to the big crises or the big unknowns. But every single day for a child, there are plenty of unknowns.
[00:02:13] Amy H-L: Yeah. How can parents use your ideas when their kids are having traumatic situations at school?
[00:02:22] Tovah K: Yeah, so you know, when I think of resilience, I think of this long continuum, and let me go back to this idea of uncertainty. I began writing this book back in 2016. Kind of tabled it. But the reason I started was I had this kind of “aha moment” where I thought all the work I do, whether it’s helping parents with what we might consider a typical challenge like, you know, the math test wasn’t what I thought it was gonna be, or my friend wouldn’t play with me today. You know, the teacher was absent. Whatever unknowns, there are uncertainties. That’s part of my work, and part of my work is helping families face major crises, traumatic events, things that we hope won’t happen to us but will, because the world is uncertain. And what I realized about trauma or every day is that what parents do in the best way is help their child face uncertainty. We face it as parents and we help our children. So when we really give our children a sense of I am here for you and negative emotions are okay. You don’t have to like that. You can be upset. It’s building a foundation in them that we call resilience.
Now when something bad happens at school, it’s usually stressful. We tend to, you know, say trauma for a lot of things, but there’s lots of stressful moments at school or at home. But when something really bad happens, I mean, we hope that children don’t face school shootings, but sometimes they do, or some other altercation at school. When they come home and a parent says to them, I know something bad happened at your school today, or I know something bad happened to you today. I’m here. I wanna know what you know, or I’m just here to hold you or sit with you. That actually brings a child kind of system down and says, I’m not alone in this and I don’t have to blame myself for whatever just happened.
[00:04:22] Amy H-L: You name five Pillars of Children’s Resilience. Can you talk a little bit about that?
[00:04:26] Tovah K: Yeah. So when I really think about resilience, I think about what it means to help children learn to adapt, adjust and be flexible, right. So this is lifelong because we all need it.
And so the first pillar that I write about is this foundation of learning to trust, and that’s what we give our children in this relationship with them. You can think of it as the safety net. So it’s this idea that over time, you know, it starts in infancy, but it goes all the way through life, this idea that we’re building and then reinforcing a system that says, I’m gonna keep you safe. I’m gonna first feed you and shelter you and clothe you, and then also keep you safe even in a time of crisis. Whether that’s escaping a situation, but it really starts with comfort and care and nurturance that then becomes trust that the child has in themselves. Oh, I can trust myself and I can trust someone to be there for me, which feeds right into the biggest challenge for every human, which is emotions. And emotions are the main piece of relationships. And so I call it the balance principle because emotions is both understanding the child learning over time, it’s a slow path to understand those emotions, and then being able to handle them, or what we say regulate. So you’re allowed to be angry, you’re allowed to be upset. Can I also then learn how to name it and calm down first with the help of an adult, and then over time have methods to do that myself, which then feeds into equally what I call the freedom trail? So this is agency, you know, where do children feel like they can separate and move out in the world? It’s a long path to independence. And again, parents are helping with this all the time by giving children a little more freedom as they get older or as they’re capable. And as children get greater independence, they feel this really strong sense of, oh, I actually have an impact the world.
And you’re both from schools and education. We see this in children who feel like, oh, I figured out whether it’s a puzzle or how to write something that they had been struggling with and thinking about. They feel this sense of accomplishment, and that’s agency. This all goes together in this idea that children can’t be alone, people can’t be alone, and it’s the power of connection. So that’s both taking myself as a child into relationships with other people, adults. So that could be teachers, relatives, your clergy people, like other people, other adults in their lives. But equally important are peers. So children from a fairly young age get interested in being with peers. And it’s not easy. It’s not easy, depending on their temperament, but also on the group. So they learn to connect. They learn to work out problems. They also learn compassion. I struggle sometimes and so do my friends. And so that’s, you know, empathy and compassion. And it’s that primary relationship with parents that acts as this model of how they can interact with other people.
So we really do model. If I’m kind and compassionate to my child, even in their worst moment, even when I’m saying no, even when I’m putting up limits, you don’t have to do it and blame the child. They learn to go back and forth with other people, including their peers, and so limits become very important for children, for the parent to say, here’s the guideline, or here’s the guardrail. Now you can go, you know, they need those limits in order to get independent. Sometimes I think we as parents can forget that. And then the fifth pillar, and I just wanna say these are not linear. These all kind of go together, is the gift of acceptance. So how do we really, as parents come to see our children for who they are, appreciate them for who they are so that they, they know they don’t have to compare themselves to other people. They don’t have to feel less than others or better than others, but they are their own person and they’ve got good qualities. They’ve got challenging qualities. They’re all of it. But if they feel accepted by a parent who says, I love you for you and I’m gonna help you with the challenges, they come to accept themselves and that’s what gives them confidence to move out in life. That’s really the kind of bedrock of resilience.
[00:09:18] Amy H-L: What kinds of school environments support children in developing these aspects of resilience?
[00:09:25] Tovah K: The big question, right? You know , I mean, a school environment really has to be open to a wide range of humans, and not all children learn the same way. Not all children enter school in the morning with a smile on their face. They don’t have to be ridiculed for that. So we really do need environments that both have routines and have some structure within the environment, and equally are accepting and open to nurturing the child that they have, which is a huge challenge if you’ve got one teacher and many children. Mm-hmm. But the more that we can accept every child is different. That’s not just a cliche. Some children are easier to understand than others. Some children have an easier time in a group than others. Some children come to school grumpy, just like our children wake up that way. But that if we can have an environment that says this is a place for everybody. There’s some community rules, there’s some basic class rules, but I’m not gonna ridicule you or fault you for your challenges. That nurturing, caring environment is what allows children to truly discover who they are and feel okay about whatever their learning path is. It’s hard to come by, unfortunately.
[00:10:51] Amy H-L: Sometimes teachers may be triggered by students’ speech or action.
What are some ways teachers can prepare so they respond in a calm and productive manner?
[00:11:01] Tovah K: Yeah, that’s a great question. So, I run a center for very young children, but there’s a process that we use that is, I’m sure a parallel is used at some other schools. You know, we call it like reflective practice or reflective supervision, where we have our teachers. This is a program for two and three-year-olds where we have the teachers reflect after each session, you know: What was this like for you? What good moments were there? But most importantly, what challenging moments were there for you? And what happened and what did that feel like to you?
The reason I bring this up is because for teachers at any grade level, knowing themselves matters, and it matters a lot. What are the kinds of things that bother me? And then understanding why. And that’s the tricky piece. Those really rambunctious physical children in an elementary school classroom drive a teacher crazy. The teacher has to say, what is it about this? I hear this often. She’s rude. Maybe her words are not the kindest at the moment, but maybe she’s mad. If you know if a child’s language or what they say to you or kind of throw at you, you know, certainly for older children, the tweens and the high school kids, if that’s really pushing your buttons and triggering you for something, then it’s on the adults to figure out, okay, what’s going on with me? Why does that child either scare me or upset me? It’s really very much a reflective process and coming to this self-awareness of why is this piece so upsetting? It takes time. It takes time.
[00:12:48] Amy H-L: I think we’re gonna focus on parents for a while. How do you think parents should respond to the temptations of screens hour after hour? You know, both the preschoolers and then later on when they become tweens and teens?
Yeah.
[00:13:05] Tovah K: You know, I always have to start by saying I’m not an expert on this, but I honestly don’t think anybody is an expert on this because there’s so many opinions and there’s so many different personalities of children and adults when it comes to screens. But I think the big rubric ,that the way I think about this is this: Screens are part of our lives. They’re here to stay. I mean, I can’t imagine in any of our lifetimes that they’re just gonna suddenly disappear, right. We’re in an electronic world and maybe at a maximum. I don’t know, I hope at a maximum. So what children need is to be slowly introduced to it, and I always say to parents of young children, you have to start with yourself. If you’re carrying around your mobile device and you’re glancing at it, and you’re checking emails or texting or playing your games or whatever, your child sees that distraction. But importantly, they feel that distraction and the message to them is, this is a distraction, and then your child wants to be part of it.
But equally, I think when we introduce children to devices, we have to do it with very clear limits, and it’s on the parents to have the limits. So the easiest way to do that is the later you introduce it, the better, because children have more control, more impulse control, more abilities to understand that there’s gonna be limits. So, you know, if you watch a TV, it can’t go into other rooms with you. I would say start with the TV because it’s just set and you can turn it off and your child can be upset. That’s part of the learning process. It doesn’t always feel good.
I don’t like when the TV goes off, but with portable devices, you know, there’s all kinds of movements. The “wait until eighth” movement has been around for quite a while now. You know where schools get together and they say we’re not, and families, we’re not gonna have our children on phones until at least eighth grade. There are other schools where the children deposit their phone into some kinda lockbox when they get to school. It clearly cuts down on distraction.
But parents need to do something similar, which is rules. And so as soon as you introduce devices, we have to be the ones, we as the adults, the parents, have to say, this is gonna be a really fun, interesting device. We’re gonna have to have some rules around it. Maybe you give your child some say in that, but it’s really up to the adults to have those rules. Have a basket where your child puts their phone when they come into the house. Have rules about not having it in their bedroom. Certainly at those earlier ages, you know, the middle school years.
It’s harder as they get to high school. But those, those rules have to come from adults. And one of the problems is nobody, no child, no teenager, likes rules around their devices. And so you have to be ready for both the pushback and give your child a chance to make their case. I mean, negotiation, to some extent, is part of the teenage years. So allow them to make their case.
Or you may have a child who’s particularly on the younger side, you know, your elementary school age or junior high middle school children who are just fixated on a game. You have to find out what is that game, what’s interesting about it to them, take some interest in their world rather than trying to totally shut it off, right. What is Minecraft? What do you like about it? So to live in their world a little more, so we’re not just closing them down. Because I think it’s impossible to just close them down and I’m not sure it’s healthy when at some point they’re gonna be in that digital world.
[00:16:52] Amy H-L: You write about the dangers of keeping secrets within families….. How do you recommend dealing with situations where we need to keep secrets, like immigration status, for example?
[00:17:04] Tovah K: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a tough one because large rubrics almost never work, but for the most part keeping secrets, as I see them, are when you’re withholding information intentionally that your child’s probably well aware of. Maybe they don’t know what that thing is. In my book, I have this example of a family coming to me and saying, this was during the pandemic, the child’s having a very hard time. I think she’a about nine or 10 at the time. She’s the oldest of several children, and they’re absolutely sure that nothing has changed other than the fact that we’re all living in a pandemic. But I finally get to that. There’s a lot of conflict and tension in the family. They’re absolutely sure that she’s unaware. For a very aware child, she’s unaware. And when I talk to them about telling her that mommy and daddy are having a hard time . Now, that they are arguing, sometimes. They still love each other. And free her up from feeling like it’s her fault that they’re fighting, that she would feel better. And it took some convincing. And they did. And you know, as I write in Raising Resilience, she’s very, very relieved. So often, children know that something’s happening or something’s going on, and the adults aren’t saying anything, which is very scary. A grandparent is sick, and everybody’s tiptoeing around. The child’s like, why is everyone quiet? Why is everyone worried? So in most cases, when we come to the child and either ask them, what do you know about a situation? Or I have something to tell you that might be upsetting, and we tell them at their age level, it’s a relief. Okay, this is what’s going on, and I’m gonna be okay. But there are certain facts, and certainly in this era, that children can’t know or le t adult bad behavior. Sometimes it’s not for the children to know the details. Maybe mommy and daddy are getting divorced. They don’t need to know what led to that breakup, right. At a certain age, maybe they do later.
So when it comes to something like immigration status, which is gonna risk potentially the parents and the children’s lives. You really have to think about what does my child need to know to keep them safe? What can I tell them and … what information are they capable of having? Because once we say to a child of any age or a teenager, here’s something for you to know, but you can’t tell anybody else, it’s actually scary to the child because they sort of ruminate. Okay? I . can’t tell anybody. And then if they do, because many children do, because they can’t hold onto that information, they will feel awful.
And so I think these are very nuanced situations and I’ve certainly worked with families over time, particularly adults who say, as a child, I carried the information. I was the oldest one in my family. I can think of a family I worked with. “I was the oldest in my family. I’m the only one who knew my parents were undocumented.” The child really didn’t know what that was, but the parents basically gave her the plan, should she come home from school and the parents weren’t there. And then she was responsible for siblings, but she couldn’t tell her siblings. It was a huge burden, right? It causes stress, it causes anxiety, and yet it was survival for the family.
So I really do think it’s about thinking through what are the safety issues? What are the emergency issues? And does this child need to know this right now? And is the child capable of having this information? It’s kind of all of the above.
[00:20:56] Jon M: So following up on that, what about situations where, especially with with older child, older children, or if just ’cause it’s in the atmosphere, how can parents help their children cope with their fears. About parents or family members being arrested by ICE? Because theyre gonna hear it one way or another, whether they understand it. And you know, in some cases, older children will know that there may be more risk than just what’s in the atmosphere.
[00:21:27] Tovah K: So yeah, it’s a real risk, and it’s very scary. It’s scary to children about their parents. I think it’s also scary to other children in classrooms who may not be in that situation with immigrant parents, but they’re worried that their friends might be, and they often don’t know. So I think for all parents to think about talking about some of these issues with their children, I mean, I can remember a number of years ago, one of my children worrying about a classmate whose parents didn’t speak English. There was all this talk about ICE, and he came home and he said, what’s gonna happen to my friend? Is he gonna just be taken away? And of course, I didn’t know the child’s immigration status, but it made me aware that many children need to know about this. And then children whose parents are undocumented, or if the child is, and there’s worry about it. Then it really, I think, is a matter of bringing it out into the open with the children and having a safety plan to say, you’re hearing about ICE, or we’re concerned about ICE.
Again, this is not about a family secret, but bringing out into the open something that they already are hearing about, and when nobody says anything, the child goes uh oh. Is this so bad that we can’t even talk about it? And the family comes up with some kind of safety plan. Like, if you ever came home from school and I wasn’t here and you couldn’t find me, here’s who you’re supposed to call. You know, maybe they’ve gotten a neighbor or a relative or somebody that they’ve let in on the situation in their community. That could be a church member. And they give the child some efficacy around you’ll have someone to take care of you if this should happen. And then reassuring them, we’re doing everything we can and we hope this won’t happen, but we just can’t be sure. And then going back to whatever the routine is of their day. Because children like to, when they hear hard, bad, scary information, they’re like, so can we have dinner now? You know, they wanna do something that they’re used to and that feels safe. And as much as parents can’t assure them genuinely that this isn’t gonna happen, I do believe children need assurance that today we’re okay and we’re gonna hope that we stay okay. But if something happens, here’s what we do. You know, it’s emergency preparedness like we all did after 9-11, like we all should be doing if we’re worried about hurricanes or earthquakes. These are very special circumstances, and yet the child needs to know the parents are putting something in place to keep them safe. It always gets back to, I’m gonna try to keep you safe even if I’m not home.
[00:24:20] Amy H-L: What should schools be doing?
[00:24:23] Tovah K: Oh, you are asking me this question. That’s a big question. I mean, I don’t know the details about what schools can and can’t say. I do keep hearing about trainings for the administrators at schools, but I think there needs to be some way for schools, again, depending on the age of the child, to talk about history, is a great way to talk about immigrants coming to America and what it means to be new in this country and what it means to not speak this language. I think doing ancestral studies across ages, you know, in any class in many places in America, but certainly in our cities and in New York City where I am right now, to have children find out their family stories. I think they’re often surprised, and families where maybe they didn’t know if it wasn’t their parents who immigrated here, if it was their grandparents or great grandparents, they may find out something new. But it’s also like, oh, we were immigrants, too. That’s how we got here. And where did we come from. I think having that kind of cultural base within a classroom and sharing those stories broadens this from just “this is scary right now” to “what is your story?” as well. Then I think for, for schools to keep their values front and center, and hopefully, in caring communities, school communities, they say we want to keep everybody safe. And that includes people who are new here. That includes the children in the class who are learning English, and to put that in the environment, oh, you’re helping your friend learn how to speak English. Oh, she’s teaching you Spanish, right. It connects them to other humans. And that allows children to ask questions like I heard that people coming from – you name the country – are dangerous. And that for teachers to have, even if they need to be scripted, something to say about why that’s not true. I would imagine that teachers in school right now are scared about what they can and can’t say, but I think the administrations need to think about so what can we help teachers know? They can tell children about, whether it’s the history of immigration or misinformation, or helping children look up, you know, again, depending on their age, some of the information. You know, every time I see some statement about the level of crime amongst immigrants. And I’ve already read the data, and that’s not true. I think to myself, is somebody helping children navigate that too? Like some people commit crimes. No, it’s not more from people who are new to this country. It’s something that happens, right, from different people. But how do we counter those narratives in a way that teachers don’t have to feel scared about what they’re saying?
[00:27:22] Amy H-L: Especially when some of those narratives may come from parents of children in the class.
[00:27:27] Tovah K: Yeah, for sure. In communities. They can hear it on the street. They can hear it at home, yeah.
[00:27:36] Jon M: Is there something that we haven’t asked about that you’d particularly like to talk about?
[00:27:42] Tovah K: I think you’ve asked such important questions and we’re living in a time where there’s so many fears. I mean, genuinely, right. We’re not like making up fears. I think what it sort of begs is this question of how do we help children at school and at home? Because the two go literally hand in hand, feel like they can ask questions because so often we wanna tell, tell, tell, or maybe on purpose, but often inadvertently silence children. You know, we give a message like. Don’t ask about that. In fact, what helps children feel safe and then develop compassion is when they feel like they can ask questions. They can say what they’re worrying about. They can say what they heard and ask the teacher a question like my friend isn’t here today. I’m worried about him. And for a teacher to be able to say, yeah, you know what? His parents called this morning and he has the flu now. What are they gonna do if that child’s deported or missing suddenly? I think that’s a harder one, but to say to the children, yes, he’s out right now. We’re not sure when he’s coming back, but we’re gonna try to find out. So that they’re not saying to children don’t ask that. I am remembering once years ago, one of my children’s teachers suddenly died, one of the teachers in the school, and it was a very tight community. Actually this happened also when one of my children was in high school. So outta respect for the family, out of respect for the confidentiality, they said nothing other than this teacher. First they said the teacher wasn’t coming back, and then they said the teacher had died. But I finally went to the school and said, you have to come up with more than that because the kids are a) worried, like what happened? Do adults that I trust suddenly disappear like that? Drop dead. But also they’re making things up. And that’s a danger when children fill in their own gaps, particularly when it’s in a group. They’re talking to each other. And so I said, is there a way to say, you know, we don’t always know what happened to somebody. And I basically told my children, we don’t always know what happened to somebody, and medical information is private. So that teacher, even though he didn’t seem unhealthy, might have had like trouble with his heart or he might have had some other disease. And then I said to them, if we’re sick, we’ll tell you. Because children go from, if that teacher just suddenly disappeared, are my parents gonna disappear? Which then gets more complicated if you’re an immigrant family or if you’re a separated, a divorced family and you’re not seeing one of the parents. Like all of this stuff gets mixed up. So I think this idea of listening to children and asking them what they’re thinking about or asking them what they’re worried about, and then being able to address it as best we can, gives them a sense of security, but also like efficacy. I’m being listened to. I have someone I can go to when I’m worried.
[00:30:50] Jon M: Thank you, Dr. Tovah P. Klein of Barnard College and the Center for Toddler Development, and author of “Raising Resilience: How to Help our Children Thrive in Times of Uncertainty.”
[00:31:01] Amy H-L: And thank you, listeners. If you found this podcast worthwhile, please share it with friends and colleagues. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and give us a rating or review. This helps others to find the show. Check out our website for more episodes and videos and to subscribe to our monthly emails. We post annotated transcripts of our interviews to make them easy to use in workshops or classes.
Contact us at [email protected]. We’re on BlueSky, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and LinkedIn. Our editor and social media manager is Amanda Denti. Until next week.