The Pomp Podcast - #1080 Kimberly Ho Misiasek On How To Raise Intelligent Children

Episode Date: August 23, 2022

Kimberly Ho Misiasek is a Clinical Child Psychologist and a Professor at The University Of Miami In this conversation we talk about nature vs. nurture, the exposure to adults, the impact of Covid lockdown & mask mandates, how the digital age effects children growing up today, and how to avoid raising a spoiled kid. ======================= BCB Group is the leading payment services partner for the digital assets industry. BCB Group provides payment services in 30+ currencies, FX, cryptocurrency liquidity, digital asset custody and BLINC, which is BCB’s free, instant settlements network for the BCB client ecosystem. Find out more by visiting bcbgroup.com/pomp ======================= If you’re trying to grow and preserve your crypto-wealth, optimizing your taxes is just as lucrative as trying to find the next hidden gem.Alto IRA can help you invest in crypto in tax-advantaged ways to help you preserve your hard earned money.   Ready to take your investments to the next level? Diversify like the pros and trade without tax headaches. Open an Alto CryptoIRA to invest in crypto tax-free. Just go to https://altoira.com/pomp ======================= Bullish is a powerful new exchange for digital assets that offers deep liquidity, automated market making, and industry-leading security. Combining the innovations of DeFi with the regulated environment of traditional finance, Bullish empowers users to trade with certainty and earn passively at scale across variable market conditions, in an environment backed by multibillion-dollar liquidity contributions from the Bullish Treasury. Visit bullish.com/pomp today to learn more.   Note: Bullish is licensed by the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission. Virtual assets and related products are high risk. Consult your investment advisor and trade responsibly. Bullish is available in select locations only and not to U.S persons. Visit bullish.com/legal for important information and risk warnings. ======================= Compass Mining is the world's first online marketplace for bitcoin mining hardware and hosting. Compass was founded with the goal of making it easy for everyone to mine bitcoin. Visit https://compassmining.io/ to start mining bitcoin today! ======================= Don't miss Mainnet, the most anticipated crypto event of the year, September 21-23 in New York City. Join 4000+ crypto builders and thought leaders for 3-days of can't-be-missed keynotes, fireside chats, demos, networking, and more. Get $300 off of your pass today by visiting https://mainnet.events and entering promo code "POMP" at check out. See you this fall at Mainnet 2022! =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Dr. Kimberly Ho-Mishashak is a clinical child psychologist and a professor at the University of Miami. In this conversation, we talk about how to raise an intelligent child, including how child psychology develops, nature versus nurture, the importance of exposure to adults versus other children, what the impact of COVID lockdowns, mask mandates, and school shutdowns has been, and how growing up in a digital age changes the way that we should think about children, including their exposure to violence, trauma, and many other topics. We end the conversation

with one of the most popular questions I hear people talking about at private dinners, which is how do you raise children without spoiling them? Everything in this episode is simply personal opinion. None of this should be taken as professional advice from Dr. Misha Shek, neither from me either. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope that you enjoy it as well. It opens up a lot of things to think about, and hopefully it will be valuable for each of you that is a parent starting to raise children. Let me know after you listen to the episode what you think, and enjoy this one. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Dr. Misha Shek here with me, which I hopefully pronounced that correctly.

You did. First place I'm going to start is child psychology. Everyone knows that brains don't end up getting developed for at least males 25 years old or so. And there's a 25-year period from birth to that point. How should we think about the development of the child's brain and kind of psychologically how they develop through their infant years into childhood and then teenage years?

Is there a good framework that parents or people could think about that development process? That's a great question, Anthony. Development is a child development is a time of, you know, rapid brain development. As you mentioned, it's a long process. You know, the prefrontal cortex part of our brain, which is a thinking, planning, organizing, multitasking, creative thinking, problem solving part of our brain does not develop until we are about in our mid 20s. that said though there are specific critical periods of a child's development that um it's if if they don't have uh an environment that nurtures um that that brain development it can be very uh it can can go haywire so some of those critical periods are the early infancy childhood years from

zero to five um but let me let me pause here and say so you asked about different frameworks to think about development right so then there's ages and stages infancy uh toddlerhood early childhood uh school age latency age adolescence um then there's different ways of that they can develop in different domains so there are um there is cognitive development right they're thinking capacities um there is also physical maturation um they can um socio-emotional development personality development so what would be helpful um to start with given this so broad let's start from really young ages right so maybe like the zero to five okay uh kind of early birth um one of the things that i think becomes big debate is like nature versus nurture right uh and as with

most things in society like the black and white is probably not the right framework there's probably a lot of gray yes um but just given your experience and a lot of the research that's out there like how do we think about if a parent has a child between the ages of zero and five like what are the things they can do to uh increase the cognitive development or accelerate it um and then maybe one of the things like avoid that we know for sure like hey this screws up kids if they're you know either exposed to certain environments or the parents are doing certain types of things okay great so that's a great place to start so zero to five um so thinking about um development in that area you know in terms of cognitive development when you're you know infant zero to one there's

a lot of you take in the world with a lot of your senses you know so you see like sucking um you know there's a lot of there's breastfeeding that goes on there's like a lot of attachment building um and the kids infants start to learn what's called object permanence for example is a hallmark um between zero to one that you know if ma then an object will still exist even if it disappears you know that an object is still there so if you know if you're you know dropping your child at daycare they know that mom or dad will come back so that's one concept that unfolds over time from zero to one and then you know two toddler hoods you hear about the terrible twos a time when their their their will and their control and you know I want to do it my way

you know sort of comes online and that is so as a parent to help support that you'd want to help them you know not be too over controlling kind of of course you have to control if they're going to run onto the street or something like that but you want to give them choices like what would you like to wear this or this today finding ways to build in some of their unique um interests that are coming online to support that um and there was a second part of the question that you had asked so like when you think of what to do i generally look at it you know uh most people know i've got a a young nine-month-old daughter and uh i already can tell a couple of things the first is um allowing for the exploration and all of this uh it just you can tell like she's figuring things out

yes and uh the first time she like going to pick something up and put it down and like like it's like cool right cause and effect yeah a friend told me he's like you're gonna rediscover the world through the eyes of a child yes and so i see that um but also there's probably things that parents should not do between the ages of like zero to five. And some of it, um, I categorize as like the overly ambitious parent of like, uh, you're trying to push your kid too much to do things. So like, are there things there? And then also just like things that could just be detrimental to their development as well. What are some of those things? Okay, great. And I think I just recalled, you mentioned the nature versus nurture debate. So I want to also make sure I

answer that. Um, and so, you know, as you know, for nature though, we're referring to things like are genes right and the thought was that once those genes are there from that you've inherited from your parents that is set in stone and that's what you're going to become and dictate who you are and then the nurture uh the nurture side of things is the environment experiences right and fortunately this debate has been put to rest we know as you said that things are not black and white that it's a combination of nature versus nurture nature and nurture and it's a field called epigenetics okay which looks at how the environment shapes which genes and when are expressed um so this can be easily um as an example in the field of toxic stress for example

or when children face prolonged periods of of stress um constantly are you know bombarded with domestic violence for example in the home or food insecurity and things like that and they don't have the buffer of a parent of a caregiver to buffer that stress that's when we know things the brain architecture the development of our brain and our neurons and the pathways can then you know lead to poor outcomes what happens in that situation you've done a lot of work here on children and kind of being exposed to various stressful situations especially in development like if a child is unfortunately exposed to these stresses what is is it literally the chemistry in their brain is changing yes yes the physiological profiles of chemistry in their brain

because when a when when you're stressed right um you have the fight or flight or freeze coming online and so your body is pumping cortisol is pumping adrenaline and those hormones um makes the blood vessels send send uh blood to your muscles your extremities and takes away from the brain so your brain is not really developing and forming as it should um kids who have been exposed to toxic stress their amygdala is always in looking out for danger that's the amygdala looks for threat for fear is the fear part of our brain and the prefrontal cortex that we talked about earlier is not coming online and it's not sending back messages saying i'm safe calm down you can rest you can digest everything so everything from physical health you know um diabetes heart disease

it's like your if you if your body was a car it would be like it's constantly revving that car engine and there's a lot of wear and tear and stress in the body so not just physically but mentally emotionally cognitively all those things that's why it's so critical yeah for the early period what's fascinating is uh immediately jumps to mind um i have somebody that i met uh and they were explaining to me that um babies uh could be born uh obviously to parents who are addicted to certain types of drugs and the woman who was telling me this um her parents had actually adopted a child, uh, who was addicted to meth because the parents had, had been, uh, or the mother had been on meth. And what she said to me, which was fascinating was, uh, there are a number

of examples where, uh, actually physically these children are, uh, what society would deem as like ripped, right. And, and their, their physiological structure appears to be different from a cosmetic standpoint. And it's because actually while they're in the womb, they're so stressed out 24 seven that there's almost this like a flexing that's happening. And so again, understanding that that's not my specialty and I'll take that at face value that there's some directional truth to that. Is the same thing happening with the brain as well, both in the womb if the mother is stressed and then also in the early years if the child itself is stressed? Yeah, absolutely. when we look at things from prenatal, how the mother was during pregnancy, you know, if she

was involved in a stressful, interpersonally violent relationship, we look at that, all those things, you know, because the fetus is developing and, you know, all the, you know, the heartbeat, all those things. And also when you're born, you know, I think, I think the research says that by age three, 80% of the brain is already the size it's going to be as an adult. So it's a very, very critical period. And you had mentioned with the meth example, it's similar with alcohol, fetal alcohol syndrome. And are there things that moms can do? So if there's mothers or fathers that are listening to this that are about to have a child or they are pregnant today, are there things that the mother can do to have less stress, which then will have a positive impact on the

cognitive development of the baby? Or is it cognitive development is really only affected post birth? Oh, yes. Great question. I think just even from, you know, the condition and the mental state, the emotional state of the family, um, of, of the parental relationship, the stability of that as well as something to look at. Um, and of course there's also intergenerational things to look at as well. Um, but you know, trying to, yes, you are your, you have to keep that instrument in tune right and take care of yourself so as much as you can take care of your yourself um kind of stay less stressed you'll be more able to be able to in tune to separate sort of what is my sort of anxieties and uncertainties from my child's and not project that onto the child for

example um and i'll stop there and say maybe if there's any like when we talk about things that parents can do are there maybe certain certain distinctions that we could talk about maybe well and you know when my wife was pregnant one of the things we kept hearing is like hey if the mom is not stressed then the baby will be calmer and to some degree you're like ah that sounds a little like woo like sure maybe you know hindsight bias makes you feel better about it uh but it does feel like uh if you know i don't know all of my friends who have been pregnant uh some of them were really really stressed out not necessarily just because of the pregnancy because of work or other situations and some were very calm and it does feel like the experiences were different to

some degree. And I do wonder, you know, how much of an impact on the child does it have? Yeah. Yeah. I think it's, we're talking about the stress when I talked to earlier about like the prefrontal cortex and the McDowell is firing. I think that is when it's like prolonged unbuffered chronic type of stress when you have those changes, but say a little bit of work stress that the mother had, you know, but the child is born healthy and fine and there is minimal sort some stress is good you know children develop through these conflicts that they have to resolve at each stage so some stress and a certain level of anxiety is good it pushes us to go to get to the next developmental stage right um so it's i think what the distinction is when you have that

prolonged um unbuffered you don't have a stable supportive caregiver relationship caregiving relationship to help you process things and um kind of understand the world that's when things can go awry. And so when we look at this like nature versus nurture like what are the parts that genetically people agree in the scientific community like okay these are the genetic things and whether they're kind of turned on or exposed or expressed you know early on versus later like this is genetic versus like are there specific things that are nurtures specific and not necessarily relying on genes? That's a great question and I know researchers are studying things that at the gene level or the cellular level for example like telomeres for example

um you know in kids who have been exposed to chronic stress and trauma those become shorter and those things those then you know shorter telomeres mean shorter length of life right um and then as far as nurture um on the other side of things that again it's that supportive I know I'm repeating myself a lot but it's that supportive caregiver relationship with attachment relationship with you and your child um that that will help them sort of get that resiliency to bounce back from things one of the pieces of advice that i've heard repeated over and over again is just like the best thing you do for your kid is love them and it it's kind of this weird thing it's not very quantitative right it's not like a prescriptive okay i do a b and c every

day and like we're good um how important is that and are there ways that maybe a kid who's you know zero to five years old versus like a teenager kind of feels that differently or is it pretty much the same thing of like literally just care and you should be okay yeah such a great question and love is a great concept and um you know there's different ways to describe love and and I you know speaking here as a parent myself with two kids and and then also then I could speak from a psychological perspective and you know when you think of love and you're thinking about attachment which is about you know the relationship and bonds with a significant caregiver or romantic partner. Um, and you think about attachment again, uh, there's a study, you know, the Harlow

monkey, the rhesus monkeys study where they had, uh, they took some rhesus monkeys, infant ones that were just born and put them with, um, wire monkeys, a wire monkey with a bottle and then a wire monkey with a terrycloth, a soft kind of cuddly terrycloth. And, uh, the, the baby monkeys, whenever they were scared or frightened, well, first of all, they spent more significant time cuddling up with the terrycloth monkey um but even though they had the other one had food so they would just get the food and then head back to the other monkey so that attachment that love is is is important and then sort of speaking from a personal uh hat a person of faith for example um you know uh love loving your kid loving your spouse that parental love that you you know model

in the home um that love and self-sacrifice that self-donate donative love is is a good context and foundation that children can then develop socially and pro-socially in like where where are kids first educators um in that yeah speaking of education uh there's a million toys and software and all kinds of crazy stuff uh that i've seen some uh friends have you know they swear by others or ads that you see on Instagram or whatever. But they all promise something similar, which is like, we can accelerate the child's cognitive development.

We can keep them on track. Is this all real? Is it bullshit? Like, how should parents think about a lot of these like supplemental things? And, you know, I don't know if I asked my dad, he's like, back in the day, no one had any of this stuff, right?

And like, everyone turned out okay. Like, how do you think about that from like a psychological development standpoint? Yeah, another great question. And again, I'm not a person that throws like the baby out with the bathwater. I like kind of moderation and balance. And I think technology can harness a lot of great learning opportunities. It can hasten learning, for example, in some ways. But those same, you know, it can it can create contact with, you know, with people around the world that you wouldn't have had the opportunity back in the day to have. And so those I think some of those same those same characteristics that that that make technology so great can also be its downfall as well. Just the instantaneous, instant gratification. Right. Social media. You know, you have kids, as you said, spending more time on their tablets and their phones than being out with friends, having face to face conversations. But as far as the toys question, I think you had mentioned for especially young kids, when you think about like an iPad and you think about a young two year old just passively sitting there kind of watching what's being fed to them.

You want to look at toys that you as a parent can have what's called the serve and return type of building that reciprocity. You have joint attention. You have the eye contact. You're saying, I see you. I see the things that, you know, oh, you heard the bird in the sky. that just flew overhead I see it too you're labeling them you know the things that they can see in the world you're having them

with you narrating the things you're doing washing the dishes so toys you know that like puzzles building blocks those types of things are they still have a good place yeah and so really it almost feels like active versus passive becomes like a big differentiator between the things

that the kids do and it sounds like maybe it's not the extremes of like it has to be 100% active or 100% passive instead there may be a time and a place I think everyone's gone to a restaurant and seen their parents I need to eat here's the phone I swore I wouldn't be that parent

here's the phone kid it feels like that doesn't necessarily destroy all of the progress that's made elsewhere but maybe the majority of time you want more of an active learning experience and talk a little bit about you mentioned describing the things

that you're doing or kind of labeling these pieces like what is going on with the child especially kind of five or under like what is going on with the cognitive development as to like why it's important to almost talk to them in that way yeah so you know talking with them you know they don't have the language yet so kind of hearing modeling um is from these continued structure and routine and playing with them that they end up then building up um the capacity to do these things so i was talking about the um the stages in the beginning like zero to one that sensory motor stage and then the next stage um would be you know their minds is child's mind is so different than an adult's mind um so you know

when they're like two to about six um they have for example what's called like magical thinking like they think that because they wish something it's going to happen and they're very egocentric in their thinking so they don't take the perspective of another person for example it's like why when um i'm playing um hide and seek with my my my daughter and she thinks that when just because she puts the blanket over her head means that i can't see her or she hides and she's hiding in plain sight and she doesn't know that i i can see you know i can see her so um and that's because she can't see you yes so she thinks that i can yeah or it's like if i have a boo or something and she's like oh here's take this stuffy toy it's gonna make you feel better you know like

the way that would comfort her is the way that would comfort me as an adult um so they're very egocentric um i see you have a question yeah yeah well and i guess part of that is uh there's this famous study that says uh lower income children will actually hear 30 million less words than their higher income peers uh by the time they reach kindergarten and we don't think you know if we sat here and already counted how many words we've spoken in this conversation alone it'd be a lot more than we probably would guess um but 30 million words seems so drastic of a swing between high and low income children it sounds like a huge piece of this is like talking to the kid right and engaging with them right and then reading to them um providing you know opportunities for

them to to i think i think though a lot though is that interactive piece because you can talk around them you could talk like they could be hearing you peripherally talking like say we had a child here and but i think again like it's that interactive piece of talking with them talking to them and also trying to avoid the the motherese kind of babbly like like talking talking regular sentences as you would so that they they don't kind of end up with that baby kind of talk you know you want to speak in regular words um so that they can hear how the regular word would sound and is this like you treat the kid maybe not like an adult but you treat them like a human that you would have a regular conversation with and and then they will develop faster or not so much and

maybe something else you're optimizing for yeah no not so much i think though i mean there's a place for like the the big expressions and then like the eye contact i i think i think it's when they're starting to to learn to speak at a at some point you just want to make sure that you're just you're able to say words that um that won't then um they will learn that are that are the regular ways of our language our english language yeah and then what about multiple languages uh either at home or um you know at school or or whatever i know uh some folks who uh the parents both speak english they're native english speakers and they have an aspiration for their kid to learn another language they put them into specific school settings i know the opposite in this spectrum

which is uh english as a second language uh in the home and so the parents will say hey you'll learn English at school and you'll learn whatever the native language is here at home. How does multiple languages and the exposure to that at an early age develop the like cognitive abilities of the child as they get older? Yeah, that's a great question. And I know researchers do study sort of the effects of learning two languages and when a child begins to talk or even IQ and academic achievement. The one thing I remember taking away from some of that literature is that you know those who are bilingual or trilingual or learn many different languages uh they have greater cognitive flexibility as you can imagine you know they're

switching between two languages um in their brain and two types of maybe cultural contexts as well um you know if you know you're from say where i'm from in jamaica for example or in the u.s you know there's a different sort of context as well that comes comes online so there's a there's the benefit of having cognitive flexibility when you speak multiple languages yeah Yeah. And something like cognitive flexibility, like if you walked out on the street and you asked a random person, like, what is that? They'd be like, I have no clue. It sounds like a smart person thing, right? It was kind of like the general reaction that you'd get. How much of a parent's kind of activities can be dictated around like, I want my kid to be high IQ. I want

my kid to have cognitive flexibility. And it's like almost intentional versus some of these things are just merely the result of a great loving environment that's stable without a lot of stress and it's not so much prescriptive like can parents uh specifically say like i want my kid to have a high iq and so let's do a b and c or is that wishful thinking and maybe parents are over optimizing so that's one thing when you mention iq um that is something kind of determined a little bit by like endowment kind of what you're born with a little bit of an innate thing although you know intelligence itself it's a hot you know it's a very hotly debated um construct but if you Think about the definition of intelligence as the reason, the capacity to think, to reason, to solve problems, to to be able to put together knowledge in novel ways.

You know, things like that. Those things can be obviously fostered. But when you think of IQ specifically, as it is in a psychological sense to be measured and through tests, that is something that is sort of more endowment. This episode is brought to you by FTX US. They're the safe, regulated way to buy and sell Bitcoin and other digital assets. Trade crypto with up to 85% lower fees than the top competitors. There are no fixed minimums, no ACH transaction fees, and no withdrawal fees. Download the FTX app today and use referral code POMP to earn free crypto on every trade over $10. The more you trade, the more you earn.

Go download the FTX app today and use referral code POMP. This episode is brought to you by BCB Group. With a dedicated focus on institutional payment services, BCB Group provides business banking, cryptocurrency, and foreign exchange market liquidity for many of the world's largest crypto-engaged financial institutions. The BCB business accounts allow businesses to load fiat currency and cryptocurrencies for payments, operations, and trading purposes. BCB's Blink Network is the European crypto industry's first instant settlements network

and one of the first real-time payment networks of its kind to allow free real-time transactions across fiat and digital currencies. BCB's vision is to empower the global financial revolution through sustainable and innovative banking. Find out more by visiting bcbgroup.com slash pomp today. bcbgroup.com slash pomp. Somebody recently was on the show

and they basically were like, look, people don't like to hear it, but like intelligence is very much genetically driven and kind of inherited in all these things. Now you can do things to kind of move within some band around the starting point, which does mean that you have some control. You should do the right things, whatever. But unfortunately, you know, that's just one of those things that you're not going to jump from 100 to 160, right? Right.

And so the dark side of this conversation, I think, is like if you look at the numbers in the United States specifically, but probably globally as well, but I'm more familiar with the U.S. numbers, the decline of like the nuclear family is pretty well documented. Yes. Is it, although unfortunate, fair to say, hey, as we see that decline, there will be changes to cognitive development and childhood development in the families where there isn't two parents with the kind of loving, supportive, stable relationship that you're describing? That's something I think about, you know, a lot having gone through parenthood myself and having to work at the same time and just coming from, you know, exposure to other countries and knowing what their sort of parental leave policies are, for example. And there's that saying that the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that will change the world or move the world. And, you know, it feels like, at least in this country, that there's just nobody has time to rock who's in the cradle, who is growing up the babies, you know, in the cradle right now. And like you said, the digital age with technology, there's kind of babysitting with the iPad and things like that. So I definitely think about that.

And just, you know, just thinking about policies in place, even as one thing as parental leave and just having time, you know, to adjust, you know, in Canada, it could be up to a year or two of paid parental leave. that you can get but here I think it's six weeks or something it feels like uh there's a spectrum of like we'll call it again just for lack of better descriptive word like the traditional two-parent household right with um one of uh the parents going to work and the other staying at home happens to be usually the wife was staying home and the husband was going to work but could be uh in any form or fashion um that next step or evolution of that is both parents working right and maybe less time with the kids or whatever. But then there's this very extreme version,

which is, again, I think unfortunate but quintessential example of the single mother who's raising three kids and works two jobs. And unfortunately, politicians on both sides of the aisle like to point to that as that's who we're trying to help. But it feels like that environment is different and distinct from like, oh, both parents work, right?

There's still two parents in the household. And yes, maybe they're not spending as much time as kind of the traditional model. but it's a very different situation when it's you know a single mother working two jobs and has three kids how do you think about the development of the children in these different scenarios and is it almost like a trajectory change in their cognitive development or is there a different way to think about it i mean i mean you can think of examples of people right who grew up with a single parent right who still go on to have academic success or music success um i'm thinking

about though in the third example that you gave um you know and if it lends itself to more opportunities for children to children's issues right to be to go unnoticed right um or you know you're less in the care of of of your your your parent your caregiver um and so I know it takes a village though to raise children right there's the role of aunts and uncles and grandparents of course a lot of grandparents in these cases and you know I think if it does take a village but we want to make sure that there's somebody at least that they're connected to somebody that has an eye on you know you just don't want them to be alone with um unhelpful for example if they faced abuse or something like that you don't want them to be alone with that you want to have an eye

and you know be able to to say hey what's going on hey what's wrong notice changes but when everybody's so busy everybody's so busy working things go unidentified and then you have long term, um, poor psychiatric outcomes. Yeah. What's fascinating about, uh, the scenario. And if you kind of use hindsight as a crutch here, um, there are people who are successful based on a bunch of different aspects, uh, who come from, you know, the traditional two parents, you know, one stays at home, uh, model to single mother or father with multiple kids and multiple jobs. Uh, and so I don't think that it necessarily, uh, uh, prevents the outliers, right. In either one of those scenarios I think the conversation that I see people having is more so like what's the average

right and if you go back to whether it's you know a kid hears 30 million less words before kindergarten or you look at certain family structures or kind of childhood experiences it just makes it harder yes and I think the people who end up being the outlier they actually point back and like that's why I'm successful right because I experienced this early on and it drove me it motivated me it did whatever yeah is there a way for the parents in those situations can they do certain things to help with the cognitive development, even though maybe they don't have the kind of supportive, stable environment that you're saying is like, okay, that's option one, right? And kind of the ideal scenario. But are there certain things that either research or

people have come across where it's like, if you're a single parent, here's some things that you can do. It may not be time. It may not be the ability to sit for two hours and talk to the kid, but there are certain things you can do that can at least have some impact. yeah i think so that question it makes me think you know i mean that you know you ensure that you know they're going to school they're taken care of like medically and then at a certain point sometimes you know like school when they reach adolescent age you know the peer group becomes a very big part of their world um and so just so if i'm getting it right you're asking me if in each in the middle ground of these two situations is there a way that parents can foster optimal

cognitive development such that some of these people can also reach to the heights of say somebody who said that well it was this environment that made me who i'm i have great i have determination i have the capacity to some extract the good things from my environment and then enact those is that kind of if you think so there's many stories where people have been successful coming from, uh, less than ideal scenarios. And, uh, what I've always found fascinating is usually, uh, the way they tell the story. And again, you know, hindsight, you want to make it seem, you know, like this heroic journey. Uh, but there's somebody, whether it was, uh, Hey, I had a single mother and, um, they always told me that I would be successful or they instilled

a certain level of confidence or they explained, Hey, we don't have what everyone else has, but like we have the ability to work hard to eventually get that. Or there's always something that seems to come from that environment where they're able to latch onto it. And fortunately or unfortunately, there may not be one answer, right? It may just be, hey, you're dealt the cards that you're dealt and you have to help the kid develop as much as possible. But it sounds like what you're saying is it's not just the family, right? There's also school. There's also friend groups. Like there's other pieces that help to influence the development of the child as well right right yeah there's different there's it's it's it's actually a good it's why

I went into the field of traumatic stress because I was you know growing up in Jamaica and seeing children you sort of begging on the streets but then you hear the heights of music fame for example with Bob Marley or the Usain Bolt like sprinters and you know great thinkers and you're like what is it in that environment that that still you know despite not having all the means that still allows them to thrive and I think those are that's that's why I went into the field to study like what are the the the resilient is it spirituality is it like just a belief that you know you know even though that you know hardships are always going to be there but i can still succeed if i you know if i just give my all or or is it you know your plus your talent you know i

just i think there's i think that question is to be answered to be answered um how do you evaluate it today like you've already been studying it for some time i don't think you'll ever say like okay finally i figured it out let me go to a different field yeah but how do you evaluate what what you've least learned so far about resilience especially in childhood i mean again i sound like a broken record here uh but it is really that strong sort of parental um buffering helping you sort of make sense of um unexplainable for example events that happen in our world but firstly i mean as a parent if you're a child you know you do go through some something catastrophic as a school shooting right the first thing as a parent should do is to listen they need don't assume that you know

what they know what is distressing to them or what is even the most distressing thing about the school shooting to them you want to be able to listen with an open ear and appreciate you know their experience um and their feelings and not just rush to try to put a band-aid and solve it and say everything is going to be okay you want to sort of validate and appreciate their experience and hear what it is that really impacts them or and you know you can ask that through like what are your friends saying kind of open up the conversation what what so that it's not as personal you know sometimes they don't want to feel like they're out of control they're like no I'm fine um but you want to say what are your friends saying what are they talking about about

this so kind of being a good listener kind of getting to know what's on their mind um also taking you know your own um temperature on on on the event um and getting support if you need it whether that's from a spouse or your parents or a church person kind of getting your sort of um stability back. And so that you'll then be able to then listen and understand and help them make sense of what's going on. So if we move from like the zero to five to now kind of what I'll call school age, I'm sure that there's a much more scientific description. So kind of elementary into middle school. Um, the things that immediately popped to mind are obviously there's, you know, bullying that goes on and things that I would categorize as like they've been going on for a

long time at that age um what is the research their show in terms of things parents can do to help kind of their kids navigate it and how much of it is just like hey you're going to deal with this and it's better just to listen versus be prescriptive in some way you're right you know bullying has gone on for a while or roasting or however you want to call it and then it feels like the online way of it has just you know can be 10 times 100 fold worse um and the question you know you know, social media, thinking about a social media account for a school age child. I mean, well, obviously, well, 13 and under because of the Children's Online Privacy and Protection Act, they shouldn't have an account. They don't allow you to have an account. But thinking of, you know,

understanding. So what are my child's friendships like right now? Right. Is it filled with drama? Well, then imagine that online is going to be even worse. So, you know, I guess I'm getting at the question like when can they have these digital tools to use responsibly are they able to commit to you so i would i would imagine that family sort of technology plan to develop with you know your teenager or your adolescent um on what are the expectations of the use how long can you have it for what are the consequences if you you know you break the boundaries of this plan um what are the hours that you're able to use it from can they can they follow that um contract um with you and will they be responsible enough to to use that and have an account

so with this family technology plan uh is this like a parent sits down with their kids and it's like a negotiation kind of like yeah i mean although you probably would want to have more of the structure of it but you can make them feel to have some empowerment we we call it a dictatorship masquerading as a democracy right that is that is definitely what that conversation seems to be like um but but when you when you do that you mentioned a couple of things what are the types of uh things that are the most important there is it just like hey here's what you can do with these tools whether it's social media a cell phone or whatever and here's what you can't is it more a focus on like the punishment like if you had to pick one or two key components of that

technology plan for a family what goes into that definitely not the punishments you know even with punishment with kids it doesn't teach them what they're supposed to do right so you want to lay out more of here are the things that you can go on but in terms of what you can't do I would say just more in terms of like I'm thinking of like location sharing and just things that would put you in put their child in danger but it's more of the expectations around use you know you can use it maybe for two hours before dinner time none during dinner time what sites you agree that you can visit things more more so of what what your expectations around the use are unless on the punishment but they do need to know what the consequences of it are in advance so that you can

so then you don't have to like in the moment be like ah i think well you'll just you know you're grounded forever or you're gonna take it away for 10 years you know kind of thing you want to have it just right that you can just say it and you know that you know the consequence we agreed to this yeah and that goes back a little bit to treating them like a human how about uh their friends having access to certain things and them not right so when i think of uh elementary school and middle school one of the like biggest areas of people being bullying it's like what clothes they wear you know who's cool who's not type stuff uh but also i remember being in high school and cell phones started to become popular and my parents maybe

wait just one year right but like a lot of my friends got cell phones i think maybe freshman in high school or something and i had to wait till i was like a sophomore and i remember this is like this is the worst punishment in the world it's like look at that cool thing they have high school is probably a little bit different than if you're in second or third grade or whatever it is so like how should parents think about uh not just like hey should my kid have this technology or not but are there things to be considered of where maybe other parents are actually giving their kids technology whether it's cell phones or social media accounts and if your kid doesn't have it does that open up any sort of uh issues or things to be aware of yeah well good for your parents i

know there is research to suggest that the longer you wait it is better you know like they had a study I think between nine and like 12 year olds nine it was too early 12 the longer you wait a little bit the better but I hear what you're saying it sounds like the concern is if all their friends have a phone and they're connecting over you know texting or having a group chat and you're I mean from your personal springs did you like were you left out of some things or did you, I think it was more so the phones back then you could play snake, like you could play snake and there was T9 texting. So you tried to do it as efficiently as possible. Uh, but, but to the degree, uh, yeah, it was like a, you definitely were like, Hey, I want one of those. And you know,

you come with all the nonsense excuses, like mom, you know, don't you want me to be able to call you after school and make sure I'm safe. And she's like, no, but, but I think that today part of this is you know the communication of kids obviously you you see you know instagram snapchat you know twitter all these different things tiktok whatever uh but also just texting like like that is a way that kids communicate in um uh kind of their everyday life that yes adults do it as well but if we had text mess text message groups at nine years old like i actually am glad i didn't grow up with that as an option right because i don't think that that would have been probably a good thing in hindsight uh but a kid obviously doesn't know that today and they want to

participate so how do parents deal with that yeah no it's you know like you said the social media people have instagram tiktok and it's all sort of ego based it's like your highlight reel of your life and then you will you know you'll be scrolling for ages comparing yourself to people's highlight reel and that can cause obviously anxiety depression i mean suicide is the second leading cause of death in adolescents 10 to 14 in this country really yes i did not know that the first one is accidents accidents and then suicides suicides and it's growing in the nine and under population and what is driving that is it the social media is it that i'm not sure of i'd have to do some more digging um but it is growing and for adolescents is the second leading cause of

death so really you know you're asking good questions right because you can really get into very serious waters here with our children and you know i think yeah just the online space there's a lot, a lot to unpack. Um, and I think if you can, you know, have that full first strong attachment with your, with your child, be a good listener, have them develop that relationship with you to communicate, to tell, you know, what's going on. You have a kind of pulse, um, navigating then the technology years in adolescence will be a little bit easier. How important is it, uh, to teach your kid that being different is good or like okay like to some degree i i just think of it as uh if you reinforce do what everyone else does uh uh follow what they're doing uh in some ways you're

exasperating the if you're different or if you're left out like it feels like it's more uh severe like the feeling whereas if you've taught your kid from an early age like being different is usually a good thing right if everyone goes right sometimes going left actually can be valuable or if everyone is thinking one thing no actually thinking for yourself could be valuable um it feels like that just maybe dulls some of the the problems where like actually if everyone else has a phone and i don't you know what's the opportunity that i have versus feeling like i'm left out yeah it's almost sounding like you're doing what we call like a cognitive reframe about the situation which is which is great you know and like being different you know there could be upsides to that

right you know you're thinking differently and it's it's about how you yeah you think about your situation and not get too one-sided or extreme um and so like even as a person myself of like mixed races you know thinking about being different yes you feel a little bit like okay I cannot relate to everything that everybody you know who maybe are more like homogenous um but then I have, you know, I can draw from different cultural worlds and that's, that's okay too. You know, there's a place for that as well. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Alto IRA. They can help you invest in Bitcoin and crypto in a tax advantage way that helps you preserve your hard earned money. Alto's crypto IRA lets you invest in Bitcoin and over 200 other different

coins and tokens. And it has all the same tax advantages of your traditional IRA. There's no setup or account fees, and it's all you need to do invest in crypto tax-free. Let me repeat that again. You can invest in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies tax-free. So are you ready to take your investments to the next level? Diversify like the pros and trade without tax headaches. Open an Alto Crypto IRA to invest in Bitcoin and crypto tax-free. Go to altoira.com slash pomp. That's A-L-T-O-I-R-A dot com slash pomp. Start investing today. This episode is brought to you by Bullish. They've reinvented the digital asset exchange. They give you access to DeFi features like automated market making and liquidity pools in a regulated environment it's a whole new way to

generate alpha bullish's total trading volumes have exceeded 25 billion dollars just in the seven months since it launched and the industry leading order depth means you can trade confidently when you want at scale with better pricing and lower risk all within a regulated market environment good reason to be bullish learn more at bullish.com slash pomp and follow at bullish on twitter today another thing that comes to mind in kind of this like elementary into middle school uh kids can start to read right thankfully um but everything's so digital today and uh i don't know if you've ever seen uh there's like uh almost like comics uh or uh uh hey you know 50 100 years from now the human evolution like we're all just gonna be these huge eyed things from staring at screens

all the time right and our necks will be slumped over and kind of the the very uh dystopian view of of the future human race um but today is there a difference like if you have a kid who sits down and reads a physical book versus reads on a cell phone or on a laptop uh with the digital screen like are there studies or research that shows like no actually the physical book is better or maybe the digital kind of consumption method is better or do we not yet have enough information to really know what the difference is that question i don't know the exact science um But I can think about ways where technology could be helpful for kids who who have trouble reading. They need those read aloud stories on the iPad, for example, that could be helpful.

But then, you know, obviously with the paper book, you have that tactile you have that tactile opportunity to touch the page, to turn the page just a little bit more fine motor than maybe swiping on the iPad. So those are some differences. But I guess it also just depends for who, you know, if you have special needs, maybe some help with the ipad and reading aloud programs would be would be beneficial yeah and along these lines of reading i think most people uh in the business finance technology world they're like i want my kid to be smart right which uh cool everyone has pipe dreams uh there's going to be a natural distribution of intelligence um but one thing that is definitely uh kind of intertwined in society society is uh people who read are smart and whether there's you know truth to that or not uh most people i know want their kids to be intelligent so they'd say hey you

should read you should read you should read are there things around the reading like if from a childhood psychological development should a kid spend more time with other kids or should they spend time reading and like if your kid is like the extreme and kind of like the quintessential nerd and just sits inside all day and reads like to me like maybe that's not actually that great because you actually do need this social interactions, but being 100% social and not reading at all. And so is this like a classic, just like everything in moderation

probably is the best strategy? Yeah, I think when you're saying when parents want their kids to be smart, you know, there's book smart. And then there are other aspects of life and functioning that outside the classroom, like if you're in a work environment, how good of a colleague or a team player can you be, right?

So there's these social skills that they need to develop that they can you know only develop with others right with their peers um taking turns knowing boundaries um you know empathizing with the feelings of others you'll get that from playing and then of course you know when you have time to to read and stretch your imagination um that there's a place for that too and there's a place for even adult uh adult scaffolding to help children accomplish more than what they're able to do without adult assistance um there's a researcher a russian a researcher called lev vygotsky who talks about the zone of proximal development so helping that what what it's basically that zone between what what i just

said what a child can do without assistance versus what they can do with a more learned caregiver or teacher um so yeah i think it's again having all these variety of opportunities to read to play to play to socialize to to to bond with an adult all these things one of the pieces that it feels like an adolescence that can really help with the maturity of everyone uh is being exposed to many different ideas many different cultures and so you'll hear all the time people will say uh oh uh kids who traveled a lot as a kid uh or as an adolescent maybe even in the college years they tend to have a more worldly view right and doesn't necessarily mean that they're more intelligent and just like they've been exposed to different

things that others haven't is that a similar phenomenon when you're a kid like you just want expose them to a lot of different things doesn't mean they're traveling but uh you want them to read you want them to play you want them to do all these different things and that kind of accelerates the cognitive development as well um i wouldn't say it accelerates the cognitive development but you just giving them opportunities to know that there's what with the traveling that there's a different way of doing things and there's the way of the country that i come from you know it just expands like you said their their worldview and that there's no you know cultures around the world develop in you know different norms and different values and that makes them

you know just a more informed citizen um and so yeah just having your child i think what you're talking about is maybe like a well-rounded sort of child when you give them these opportunities right to read or to play there's been a number of books that i've seen that are basically written about this idea of uh most people want their kid to be a specialist right so it's kind of one of the examples like tiger woods his dad was like you're gonna be a golfer at you know two months old, like watch golf, swing golf club, be good at golf. Right. Uh, and obviously went on as greatest golfer of all time, but actually that is the outlier story compared to most people who end up being great at something, take more of a generalist approach and then focus later on in

life. And so it sounds like from a childhood development standpoint, actually the generalization and general experiences may be a better path. Yeah. And then looking at, but I mean, you know, there are, there are prodigies, you know, there are things that you can observe in your child to see if they're that they're developing a talent and then you want to support that you know if they're great at art um or they they have a musical inclination just kind of seeing what they're good at and giving them the opportunity to to to to learn that master that and and take that yeah what about the role of sports and sports to me is always this like interesting thing where uh there's the parent who like my kid's gonna be in the nba you know yeah probably not but like

okay you know good nice dream and maybe there's some bonding between the child and the parent but it does feel like there's lessons learned from playing organized sports whether it's hard work or teamwork or persistence all these different things any thoughts about is there a certain age where that stuff is more important certain types of sports that end up being valuable

yeah that's a great question like you said sports you learn the teamwork you have to have discipline um to you know my sister was a swimmer you'd have to get up in the morning before school for practice and then after school again for another couple hours um and late yes there is ages that you know it would be beneficial to have kids start to do an after-school activity uh like 6 to 12 I'm thinking of that age that stage I'm sorry where uh they they need to start having mastery over over an activity or something that they can do you know to feel like they've you know they've

mastered something it's um you know they feel industrious you know they they've mastered like like you said and like a sport and like you said with sports there's that team aspect learning how to how to take losses you know also you know um not to i'm thinking of like when sports uh teams and they have this like big ego as well like can you can want to diminish that a little bit so yeah yeah it's great it's a great feeds into it yeah yeah and then what about spending time with kids your age versus spending time with adults like there are kids that i know who they're probably in the 10 to 14 range they're kids of friends of mine uh and you talk to them and you're like you are not attending like you just socially are able to communicate you shake my hand you look me in

the eye like there's very specific things uh the way that they have a command of the language the things they talk about you spend time with a lot of adults it seems like compared to another kid who is running around and again these are extreme examples but it feels like they spend way more time with kids than adults is there like a perfect formula or is it just again general

well-roundedness and you want them to spend time with adults, you want them to spend time with kids their age as well yeah I don't know if there's a perfect formula but you know equal, I think they're both equally important if you have an older adult who can have

stretch their thinking stress your abstract thinking and things like that that's very helpful you know and then if you you know you have your you know if you don't like you said if you don't have a peer group and you sort of feel like left out isolated disconnected that's going to burden you as well and so you want to make sure that you also balance that with peers your age and in that um it feels like when kids hang out with each other there's like many different settings that they can do it so obviously school is a huge one um there's things like sports or whatever how important is it for them to hang out with each other outside of like the organized you know school is very much especially in today's

day and age like sit in the classroom be quiet we're going to teach you uh and maybe there's recess or lunch or something um but almost like free form hanging out like how how important is that i think that's good too you know to have some unstructured free time um with your friends of course you know also at that age you're also doing after-school activities like if you were involved in violin you'd probably be continuing to do that but you don't want to over schedule your kids uh you know in so many activities that they just don't have time to be and be who they are with the friends you know you want to have a balance it's always a balance yeah if we go into the school uh all kinds of crazy stuff happening there's seems like it's getting politicized

there's people from all different angles who think they know what's best for all kids and so like the first thing i always caveat the conversation with is like all the kids aren't the same and so there's probably different ways that certain kids develop or or what would be quote-unquote good for them um but maybe the first thing is just like when i think of traditional school today uh i always think of it in a sense of like it's prison for kids and what i mean by that it sounds bombastic but it's like, we tell the kids to go somewhere, be quiet, sit down. And it's usually a very one way kind of lecture. And again, as you get older, it becomes even more and more kind of the teacher is teaching you and you're there to sit and learn. Um, but that's not really what the kids want to

do. That's not how kids act. They've got tons of energy. They want to run around. And if there wasn't this like mandated school, they would probably not be doing any of that. They wouldn't be sitting down quiet anyway right and so in some way like school is very counter to what almost feels like their innate you know desires does that help the kids does that hurt the kids again is it just balance and like maybe the ideal thing would be like they go to school for three days and they're out of school for four days or like how do you think about that yeah you know i think that it always depends on the type of kid and what they need okay so in the traditional schooling system you were mentioning you know it's very structured um so for some kids like a very

unstructured day you know someone you know with adhd for example it could be very overwhelming for example um and maybe the traditional schooling model lends itself to certain the the mastery of certain subjects a little bit better but like you were saying the shortcomings of a traditional school doesn't teach you sort of how to and this is again I don't want to be too extreme but maybe it's less likely then to help you to you know think for yourself and and have that initiative right to take charge of what you're learning and does it apply to me and kind of ask those questions and develop the skills to become sort of a leader in that type of way I don't think like you said that the traditional school is sort of like you know you sit you absorb type of thing

type of knowledge. And I think in some ways, you know, that structure, that routine is necessary in childhood because, you know, children develop off of that. And then from there, then they develop it as their adults, right? We need that sort of routine structure predictability in our world. But I think that, I think it, but I think at the end of the day, it boils down to what the kids need. If you have special needs, if you're a gifted child, for example, you might need a different environment. Yeah. One of the most popular kind of education models in the tech industry is the monastery schools. Some of that's because there's people who've built very large companies and they went to monastery schools. Everyone's like, well, if I want my kid to do

that, then let's go to a monastery school. Some of it is, no, actually, I think that's a better learning environment. So there's all different reasons people do it. What are the pros and cons of, you know, kind of a more structured traditional system versus something that's more kind of the monastery school like hey uh you know the hallmarks of that type of education is like they address the teacher sometimes with their first name not the mr or mrs uh it may be more like what do you want to work on today versus do this worksheet like is there research or anything in terms of uh there's different outcomes for kids who go through the different models i'm not aware of the different model research but i think it just depends on the environment your child would thrive in if they're

like an independent sort of learner, thinker, self-starter, you know, they, they, they do well with that, then the Montessori education could benefit them, um, more. Uh, but say to you, to your family, you know, you want sort of, um, a religious education, you want a traditional school, like the values, like obedience, authority, respect, those things a little bit are more important to you, you know, then go with the traditional school. I think it's about finding the right fit. If you're not in the right environmental fit, that's when you can have problems yeah it's a fascinating way to think about like um it's kind of like company cultures yeah there is no good or bad culture as much as yeah you can go to a company and the culture is

the culture yeah and some employees are like i love it here and other employees like this is the worst place in the world that's right they usually quit right yeah and so it almost feels like it's similar to what you're saying actually for the kid they may enjoy one or the other or the parents may align their values with one or the other and then that's the better way to think about it yeah i think a fit is the best way to think about it when we talk about the schools you mentioned adhd earlier uh the joke between me and all my friends is we all had adhd no one just knew to tell us it right as kids we were rambunctious and we were constantly doing crazy things and uh kind of my fear would be if i was a kid today like they would have drugged the hell

out of us and been like oh you guys all just need to sit here and basically not move um it's a joke but like every great joke has a hint of truth in it and it does feel like uh there's been an explosion of awareness and diagnoses of adhd obviously things like ritalin and others uh seem to have drastically increased in usage whether it should be or should not how do you think about the childhood development of kids that now we're actually addressing something that maybe in the past was just looked at as oh they're creative or they're energetic or whatever and teachers kind of just dealt with it you know for lack of better way it seems like now there's like this pharmaceutical component that is pretty ingrained in school like what have you seen there

how do you think about that and um you know there are things that teachers can do in the classroom already to help kids with adhd that don't hurt the other kids as well um you know like having a daily schedule on the on the on the board um you can put that kid a little bit closer to the to the front or something giving them a little bit of extra time there are accommodations that you can make in the school that don't hurt the other kids as well that that benefit them too you know and you could also positive reinforcement at the end of the day like how here's the here's the thing here's the number of stars i got for each of the things that i accomplished that i was supposed to accomplish for today so um yeah that's what i i think i'll stop here and you can well it

is fascinating you mentioned like sitting in the front of the classroom uh and uh it's it's a dumb thing um when i was in college uh i was playing football and the coaches used to say everyone has to sit in the front row like this is dumb like it's not gonna like why does it matter if i sit in the front of the back like in hindsight it definitely mattered right and some of it may have been just like the teacher can see if you're like screwing around or whatever uh but also for whatever reason like you're just closer to the information yes and like you you don't feel like you're like hiding behind the rest of the class uh there's an element of like the classes behind you so they can see you if you're screwing around or whatever and so i do wonder how much of like

the school environment you know this idea that like almost every classroom in america for the most part in the traditional school system is built the same way there's a chalkboard or like a board right there's rows of seats and like how much of your academic progress and success is literally determined by like whether you chose to sit in the front or the last row oh geez that i don't i don't know i don't know that like well we might not have a right like a quantitative answer but like it does feel like there's there's something i would imagine that a child who chooses to sit in the front seat might be just more motivated and you know engaged and want to be closer to the teacher and absorb as much as they can so then it would kind of self-select

sort of the students that you know end up doing better because they choose to sit in the front um and then where i sit back you don't the teacher doesn't have as much control you know an oversight um over those at the back it's um it also uh it brings up this idea uh we recently were talking uh about this idea of uh founder volatility so people who start companies okay um if you almost think of uh volatility so um if you have very little volatility it's basically your behaviors and your outcomes are within kind of a very narrow band okay uh that's great if you want to start let's say a small business so you want to start a restaurant or you want to start some local business which traditionally the goal is just to make money right and you want to have

profit and kind of grow the business in a somewhat linear way in the technology industry you actually want exponential growth okay and so the the idea here is that there's a lot of outliers or you want the outliers okay so in order to get outliers you need volatility okay and so actually what happens is that uh the greater the volatility the greater the potential outcome but you can't take someone with very little volatility and get an outlier outcome for the most part, right? And so what that leads me to believe or think about is like when I was in high school and middle school,

there's always the teacher who would be like, I don't know what the outcome is going to be here, but like you're either going to be super successful or you're going to get in a lot of trouble. But like you always knew who those kids were and they used to be the class clowns, the people who cause problems, you know, who screwed around in the hallways or whatever.

But if you extrapolate it out, there was a lot of volatility in those people. Some of them ended up not doing anything and some of them ended up being highly successful. And so it almost feels like the school clamps down to some degree on the people who tend to have that volatility because they want everyone to be quiet, sit in the seat, not be disruptive to the school.

Should maybe we be encouraging more of that and saying to ourselves, no, that's actually where some of our best business people or scientists or whoever may come out of that bucket of kids rather than the other no yeah i think that's a great example and a great um question because as you said if you were to say like if i were to do a comprehensive assessment on you as a child and all your friends and you know everybody has strengths and weaknesses everybody so when it comes to like measuring cognition cognitive intelligence for example you know that's

that's a combination score basically, um, of your verbal capacities, your verbal reasoning, verbal concepts. That's, that's one. Um, then we have, um, processing speed, how fast or slow you, you process information. Um, we have visual spatial skills like puzzles, right? Um, we have things like fluid reasoning, how good at you, um, are at taking some novel concepts and just kind of making order out of just new information abstract information and so each of you or your profile each of your friends have different strengths and weaknesses and it's about harnessing that and finding out sort of you know like what careers and fields that will be good for what the way you learn best are you a sequential processor or are you able to take in information

simultaneously and then just kind of make something novel out of that so understanding how these kids learn understanding then how also their behavior sort of shapes you know if in chunk if you're learning chunks is better um those are things that a good psychological assessment could help you understand and figure out what fit then of a club of a school should benefit you would benefit you this episode is brought to you by compass mining the world's largest marketplace for mining hardware and hosting with compass everyone can mine bitcoin you can do it at home or in one of there are 23 hosting facilities around the world. All you need to do to start mining your own Bitcoin is go to compassmining.io today. Again, if you want to get into Bitcoin mining, go check

out compassmining.io today. We interrupt this podcast to tell you about the most anticipated crypto event of the year. Masari's Mainnet Conference 2022 is happening this year, September 21st to the 23rd in New York City. It's three days of can't be missed keynotes, fireside chats demos networking and more they'll have folks like Ryan Selkis of Masari interviewing Ripple's Brad Garlinghouse and that one is going to be absolute fireworks they also have keynotes from Balaji Srinivasan and OpenSea's Devin Finzer you can get $300 off if you go to mainnet.events again just type in www.mainnet.events use promo code POMP and you'll get $300 off I'll see you this fall at mainnet 2022 and we've been talking about school from a traditional sense of kids go

there's teachers the whole nine years uh over the last two and a half years there's been some big changes in schools so uh obviously there was the school shutdowns where kids couldn't go to school they were doing zoom or whatever uh i've seen screenshots on the internet where like kids were literally on their laptops in their bed while the teacher's teaching or whatever right which or not in school not logging in and missing a whole year of school and so like i guess just like let's start there with just the school shutdowns which largely seem to be over now but there are six months to some schools 18 months yeah where kids were not physically going to the school like what are we seeing now or how are you thinking about that from a development standpoint

yeah as you know as we said before we're beating a dead horse but the school is a place where you know it's a provisor routine you wake up in the morning eat your breakfast and then you go to school schools have that sense give students or children that sense of routine predictability and stability it also is a place where students would get some of their extra social services if needed right or free lunches sometimes you know if you qualified for that it was the place where you could identify teachers could identify for example if there's abuse going on in the in the home so when you have all these shutdowns and you have students not doing that less face-to-face time where there appears not like walking to class to class you know more sedentary lifestyle you know

now you know we're seeing you know this youth mental health crisis that we talked about um and it's just been it's been devastating I'm glad that schools have reopened and then I know and then there was a portion when it did reopen but then when there was an exposure in the class and you had to shut that or the people who are exposed for like 14 days stay home it's just so much instability and unpredictability so one you know 15 days you're at home then back in the school again and then for the poor parents who you know had to work and if you had kids under five during the pandemic uh you know having to work and take care of you it was just a special place in hell yes it's uh if you ever talk to like your grandparents or we're fortunate to talk to

your great-grandparents and like the quintessential uh like back during the war right i feel like you know 20 30 40 years from now people would be like back during the pandemic and the kids would be like shut up yeah but it is it was very traumatic for families yeah i was i was i was pregnant in the pandemic i had the baby in the pandemic and worked and had another way it's yeah and and it's just a a whole different experience right yeah different experience the the other piece of this is um when kids went back into the classroom and still to to this uh um uh to this day many schools still require kids to wear masks in the school and so at first i was like well you know whatever the local ordinances are or whatever, like, okay,

schools are just going to repeat that. But then I started to read about some of this and they were like, no, like a huge piece of learning to communicate with folks is like the facial expressions and seeing someone's mouth as they talk. And like all these things, if you're a kid and you're seven years old and two years of the seven years you've been alive, you haven't seen people's mouths. Like there could be development problems there. Right.

And so again, I don't think we have all the information to kind of really understand this. Yeah. But how big of a problem or how like alarm should parents be that, Hey, your kid went to school for, you know, years at this point, literally with something over their face. And so did all their classmates and their teachers. And like, is that something to worry about? Yeah, I know. I know.

As you say, we don't have all the answers. I'm not a medical doctor, so I can't really talk about like the breathing or the respiratory effects of wearing a mask for two years for kids two and above. But, you know, it does, you know, on the outset, it feels like, you know, you're not seeing the formation of the mouth the movement if you're learning to speak and i know there it there has been some increase in speech and language services since the pandemic they haven't directly related it yet to the masks um and i know there's also research to show that

schools that did require some of the mask mandates were able to stay open a bit longer um but and again you know as a parent you know and with a young child of two having you know having him not see his teacher's mouth and his, I mean, I guess you can, you can see the eyes and you can see smiles, but it's not the same. And we don't know. We just don't know. We have to, we have to better understand that as our, as our, as our field faces this, this new sort of issue. Yeah. And to me, we can't go back and change the past, right?

It is what it is. It happened. Whether you agree with it or not, that that's where we are. I think the bigger question is if this now becomes a, a crutch from a response standpoint to future issues, right? We've seen there is a monkey pox, right? That's, that's gone. And all of a sudden you see some States be like, Oh, state of emergency. And it just feels like once you've kind of breached it, it's just like, let's go back to that thing. Cause this is the playbook.

Like something happens, we go state of emergency, we do this. And if the part of the response be is, Hey, everyone in school put on masks. and then it's just like every year kids are putting on masks, now all of a sudden like the long-term impact of this could be very, very important to understand. Yeah, absolutely. And I think you were highlighting sort of a very reactionary response, a response sort of based out of fear.

And we know when we respond to something, when we're overwhelmed or based out of fear, our thinking gets very narrowed and we're not able to think flexibly and have a response that really requires what, you know you can't assess the problem as as good as you can if you're if you're reacting out of fear and so i think you know it's a time for for you know leaders to come together and think about what are the concerns here how and if this continues on a long term what should you know

the response be thinking um you know more so about children's development long term going through this yeah absolutely as we think about that development um i know that you've done some work on like children's exposure to violence in the united states um and violence can encompass a lot of things. There's obviously domestic violence. There's, um, Hey, I was at a place where I saw violence occur, you know, in my community. Uh, unfortunately there's violence at school, there's school shootings, things like that. Um, help me understand a little bit better in terms of like some of the research that you've done there. And like, what are we learning about children's exposure to violence in the U S uh, in light of their kind of cognitive development?

Oh, wow. Yeah. There, you know, I think two thirds of children, um, witness, um, violence in the U S Yeah. Growing up. And, um, well worldwide, 70% of people experience something traumatic. Fortunately, only about 15, 10%, I'm sorry, 15 to 20% go on to develop PTSD, post-traumatic stress, um, disorder. So yeah, I've done some work, um, in the trauma field, child, child and family traumatic stress. And like you said, a traumatic event could be something where, you know, you witness the loss of life of someone, or it could be a domestic violence incident or school shootings, um suicide um and so trauma is so it's this external sort of injury you know it's a greek word for injury trauma um and it sort of leaves the person um unable to cope overwhelmed helplessness

horror um but fortune and then there are certain signs and symptoms i would it be helpful to share some of them okay so um with the traumatic experience some of the the symptoms that we see is a lot of hyper arousal so exaggerated startle if you hear like a noise you immediately kind of like you're hyper aroused you startle easily um we have some of the re-experiencing symptoms like the nightmares and the flashbacks and intrusive thoughts and memories and then you have the negative alterations in cognition and mood so you'll see uh here are things like the world is a bad place all people are scary i can't trust other people i can't trust police um and then you have obviously some some changes in mood so depression isolation feeling unable to feel

positive feelings and then you have the hall one of the hallmarks of trauma is this avoidance piece so not wanting to see or remember or hear things related to the traumatic incident not wanting to go by you know if the school for example there's big avoidance cognitively and in person like not wanting to physically see. So you have those symptoms, um, that, that, that constitutes sort of, um, the, the clinical symptoms of PTSD of post-traumatic stress disorder. And again, not everybody who goes through a traumatic event will end up with, um, PTSD, but the earlier you can identify these signs and symptoms, um, the better and match them with evidence-based treatments that work, um, the better we can put kids back on the path to recovery and normal developmental

trajectory. What are some of the evidence-based treatments that, uh, kids can go through that? I don't know if it reverses or maybe just kind of dulls the effects of. Yeah, absolutely. Great question. So, so for, for say a kid was exposed, so there's different phases of the trauma exposure. So there's the acute phase, like that's the on scene sort of response when you see police show up. And then there is a phase in between into between that event up to 30 days, we call that peri-traumatic phase.

And then you have the longer term phase a month and after. And so, you know, having trained at the Yale child study center at the Yale center for trauma, stress and recovery they developed a treatment for that peritraumatic phase for example so right after an event and then the days and the weeks leading afterwards that actually children who go through that are 65 percent less likely to meet criteria for PTSD so it's preventing the onset of PTSD um so there's that treatment is called the child and family traumatic stress intervention also known as CFTSI but say it's been a longer time like six months um and out years um the other intervention for that the evidence-based treatment that children can get is called trauma focused

cognitive behavioral therapy tf cbt those two are great evidence-based treatments for these specific periods after the traumatic event 30 days right after like what is going on in that program or that intervention yeah so you know if you think about um the traumatic dysregulation right those symptoms that i hadn't explained kind of repeating the experience of sense of loss of control so it's not only the it's not only the experience of the traumatic event right that's traumatic but it's then symptoms you're feeling personally out of control you know your body your mind the way you think the feelings that intervention aims for it's for children ages 7 to 18 the aim is to help have a caregiver a supportive caregiver or parent through it's a family strengthening approach it's

basically to help turn the volume down on some of those symptoms identify the first identify those symptoms actually which ones are the most distressing turn the volume down on it and help the caregiver and the child communicate better about the experience so you don't go through actually the details of the event you don't have to relive and talk about and debrief what happened but really it's how to help them sort of um turn the volume down on those most distressing symptoms and how much of this is only addressable after the fact so you know let's go to the extreme and say a school shooting for example versus um in the military where ptsd is uh quite prevalent um they tend to do whether intentionally or not uh a ton of um what i'll call mental conditioning

that's a very unscientific uh term uh of uh during basic training and all these things like they put people in hard situations they seem to attempt to increase the mental toughness and all this stuff now a school shooting is not a sense of like hey my kids should have went and played sports and like develop mental toughness right that there's a super traumatic event that seems to be an outlier, um, which, uh, is more akin frankly to, uh, uh, combat or something like that. But then there's a whole bunch of stuff that doesn't seem as extreme, but still, uh, is traumatic or, or provide stress. And so is there an ability for parents to, uh, uh, hope for the best, right. And say, Hey, I hope my kid never deals with any sort of traumatic event or

anything, but they can do things to increase, whether it's like the mental toughness, uh, or, uh, do things to help them be prepared in case they ever do encounter one of these situations, whereas really the only thing that we know so far that works is like evidence-based treatments after the fact. And that's where we can have some impact. Oh, okay. So you're asking if there's anything to do to prepare the child's functioning, um, in the event of such a traumatic. So like in the most layman's way to think about it, right. There are parents who are like, I'm going to make my kid do hard shit because like the world is hard out there right and like uh learning that lesson today in this like somewhat controlled environment is much better than like let me

coddle them and then send them off into the world and like they get punched in the face you know metaphorically by like the world uh do we know like if people are put into those situations before a traumatic event do they tend to have more resilience and less of the ptsd um kind of impact afterwards or is it really just this like kind of 30 you know 30 or six month yeah no it's definitely not the 30 days after um thing that can that sets apart that can help uh recover someone recover from ptsd you know we look at um previous functioning right prior to an event happening and their sort of developmental um uh snapshot of their developmental sort of status like we want to know kind of what what their life was like prior to this event so we can know kind

of you know what was what was their normative functioning and how is it then disturbed or distressed after the traumatic event so you know if your child was you know you had a stable school life you had a caregiver who you could rely upon they were engaged in extracurricular activities that they felt um they felt masterful um that they you know they they were doing well in school already academically all these things and then after the event if you have then a supportive caregiver to help the child that most times they'll be they'll be all right so it's not about what you can really do to prepare i think i think what you're touching upon though is that when a traumatic events happen their world is sort of shaken and their thinking gets a little bit

shaken as well right they're thinking kind of then they start to over accommodate they're thinking to like oh my gosh like the world is unsafe and very scary and so it's kind of helping them get back to a more realistic and helpful statement if their world is safe you want to remind them that the world is safe it's um it's this weird conversation in society today because i think that uh it gets politicized but if you kind of strip away all the emotional components and the politicalization of it uh to some degree there is this undertone where a large portion of society feels like oh kids today are coddled and uh whether it's in the school system or by their parents or whatever um and there's like less mental toughness right now i say that

from the sense of i grew up in a family with five boys and like a lot of disagreements got settled with our fists right and so like naturally that's a very different environment um but if you just kind of revert to the mean right it's like you don't want a society where everyone is coddled And like basically somebody says, you know, mean words to you and your whole life gets derailed. But you also don't want, you know, I don't know, like ancient Rome warriors where everyone's walking around ready to kill each other. So like there's some middle ground that I think as a society, we're like, cool, we want people to have some degree of resilience and kind of mental toughness. But also we want to be very cognizant of the fact that like the kid who is sitting in a classroom, all of a sudden gunshots go off and somebody comes to the school, start shooting. Like they are going to have to deal with shit, right?

And not only the kids, like the parents probably as well. And so when we think about this, it feels, again, it gets politicized. And so it gets over-rotated on both sides. But a common theme of our conversation today just feels like it's like the moderation. It's like, no, listen, you can in some ways be, I heard the phrase recently, demanding but supportive. and so you want to have the the demanding aspect of like hey there is a real world and you want to be prepared for it but also don't forget the supportive part yeah it's like an authoritative parent you know you have the authoritarian who's a very demanding but the authoritative i'm sorry

is one who you do have expectations but they're also very warm at the same time so you're kind of giving that both balanced authoritative parent yes versus authoritarian interesting explain this more about uh an authoritative parent yeah you know you're just very warm you're you're very you're loving you have an attachment with your child but you also have expectations as well and you're firm and consistent in the rules of the family and the consequences you don't you're not overly permissive which is the opposite of authoritarian just the kind of laissez-faire you can do whatever you want kind of yeah if you want a car i'll buy you one kind of thing um so the authoritative is the balanced um one that's we found is linked to better outcomes for

kids. Yeah. So it, it has this element of like, there's an expectation and to some degree discipline or something is kind of laced into that, but also you're still the parent and you still care about the kids. Yeah. Yeah. It, um, uh, it's very similar to management. Yes. I guess if you're a good boss, then you make a good parent. Hopefully, uh, identity is another thing that, uh, you've spent a lot of time looking at, uh, you have a very unique uh background uh in that you are Jamaican and Chinese uh descent um how does identity play into a child's uh kind of cognitive development and like is that something that the parent kind of dictates to the kid like you are x and then they internalize it it's a great question

or is it something that they just like so great question implicitly get yeah there's so many ways to go with this okay um well to answer the latter question about uh does parents play a role into a kids identity um i'm thinking about um james marcia's theory on identity development which talks a little which uses two sort of constructs on exploration and commitment and when you cross the two you get four outcomes so i'm thinking of uh you said they're like if a parent said like hey like we're you know italian or something this is the this is the cultural identity you need to adhere to and so you as a kid then to just accept that um you would be called in that's in that um marcia's four outcomes you would be what's called uh in the foreclosed identity so you didn't want

you didn't do any extra exploration you're already committed to this italian identity um and then if you but if you did like high exploration so you're high you know you looked around a little bit about we've talked about careers for example right you looked around um and then you committed to this highly you would be what's called um the achieved sort of integrated identity however there's another identity status that could be very diffuse like you you haven't committed to anything and you haven't done an exploration you kind of just kind of aimlessly there in society you don't really have meaningful friendships you know you're easily swayed by different things you don't really have a sense of self um and then this and then the third the fourth and final one um is identity

moratorium which is you um haven't committed yet to anything but you're still searching you're searching searching a lot so there's four types of sort of identity statuses on somebody's identity development journey based on exploration and commitment um and then forgetting the first part of your question so like just take that as an example uh there's four of these identity buckets is any of them better than the others like is there like a design like hey we want kids to end up in bucket four or yeah bucket four you know the one about high high um exploration and high commitment you know you kind of feel like this integrated and okay i did some you know research i looked around um i didn't just kind of take my parents word for it type of thing can i earned it

yeah like i earned it i i explored things and i feel comfortable with this final resolution kind of thing um it's probably feel more comfortable in my decision and it's an informed decision like i made an informed decision i didn't just like sort of take what was like given to me um and then you know of course some can be more anxiety provoking than others so like if And if you're in a state of moratorium and you're searching on, you can probably feel some level of anxiety, like looking for who you are. So then I guess if you then move into the achieved identity, you feel a little bit more, a bit more, just some more relief. Yeah. What's fascinating about this is I can think of two different aspects of like identity, right?

So let's take religion and maybe ethnicity. Yeah. And to me, my family's Italian, right? So big Italian family, like there's all of every single thing that is a generalization, pretty much like. well it's just and by the way every other large italian family for the most part like yeah they eat a lot of pasta they get pretty loud right like all these things but what's fascinating about it is uh you're told as a kid like you know we're italian but it's not like hey when we get in a disagreement everyone raised their voices right or uh that is almost like a learned behavior to

some degree and every single other person i knew that was italian i would go to their house it was the same thing like it wasn't a it wasn't a thing where i was like oh that's weird like it was like yeah of course it's how families operate and you only notice it once then you would go to a friend's house who's not italian you're like everyone's so quiet around here so like to me that's like almost like uh uh you're in an environment you pick up certain things and you know i have experience uh with an italian family but if you went to an irish family or you went to you know a chinese family or whatever like there's certain things culturally that that are are unique to that culture they pick up religion feels much more like you are told things where uh i have friends

who are muslims jews christians the whole gamut none of their parents were ever like you should go out in the world and explore all these other religions right like that was not a thing it was like we are x you will follow x rules like whatever the religion was uh and it feels much more kind of authoritative like yeah top down yeah i'm going to take you on sunday to church right or i'm going to take you to the synagogue or whatever like is there different parts of an identity that have these different interactions or is that just like us trying to make sense of the world that maybe we grew up in or or experienced when you say interactions what do you mean one's like explicit like like we are x religion and we've got and as x religion we do a b

and c yes the other is more implicit because no one sits you down and is like we do a b and c it's just you kind of like learn the behavior a little bit right as a child does it matter which one or is it actually better to get both types of learning okay well i'm thinking of with with religion for example like you're right like our parents i mean my parents didn't give me any choice either being catholic um but they're like yeah you know what you're the jewish people you should go hang out with them right yeah and i think it's a decision that i think that as parents they have that authority to make um now when you get older at least they've given you that experience in education that you can choose then okay do i want to still continue this because

you are an adult um but i think if you didn't have that because we i'm thinking from just some of the the psychological benefits that people who are religious and spiritual um can can you know can get out of um kind of learning about duty you know caring for the vulnerable um and i have this thing with psychology i feel like it's divorced its self if you think of the word psychology the study of the soul the spirit and in an effort to i think be more like hard science physics scientifics it's really tried to to separate itself from some things that are a little bit more like theistic um but when you're looking at who we're studying like the human experience and the fact that many people in the world are are religious you know or belong to a practicing

religion um we are missing a big part of the picture with that all right i have one big last topic to talk about this is uh a huge open secret which is whenever i sit down with other couples my wife and I, uh, and we are at dinner or at lunch or, or, uh, we're hanging out with them, whatever. The number one topic that everyone always talks about, but no one wants to admit publicly is they're all deathly afraid of raising kids that are spoiled. And this is everything from friends who, uh, they are teachers to super wealthy, to immigrants, to people who are born in America. I mean, just like across the board, it seems like it is a deep seated fear of parents where they say to themselves, my child is going to have a different childhood than I had. That's

almost every parent's dream, right? Is I want my kid to live a better life than I had, or I want my kid to be happier than I had or have things that I didn't have, whatever. And there are the extreme examples right i'll use a celebrity in um jay-z right and i think he's openly talked about he has kids now and he's like my kids are living a little bit differently than i did uh and that's a good thing he accomplished that as a parent but then also that same story is very true right i have a lot of friends who are immigrants and they're like look like my i was literally born in another country and i came here my kid already just being born in the united states i feel like they have a leg up and they're gonna have this different experience what can parents do to

increase the probability not guarantee but increase the probability that their kids don't end up spoiled if they just are having a different childhood like what do you see there from a development standpoint uh and an environment standpoint that's a great question and i think the way to answer it is to sort of understand what you think your friends mean by spoiled what do you think they mean by like i don't want to spoil my kid when they say spoil every single one of them is uh is different obviously um but if i had to in the most crude way outline what they mean they don't want their kid to be fucked up right like and i think what the fear again people just naturally go to the extreme is uh you see a an actor or an actress's kid they're you know

this young kid and they become a teenager and next thing you know you read about them in like tmz because they're addicted to drugs or, you know, like, like the, the very, very extreme. I don't think that's necessarily, they're like, oh my God, I'm so worried that my kid's going to grow up like in the spotlight. Cause many people aren't public figures or anything. They're more so worried about like, will my kid work hard? Will my kid actually understand the importance of learning? Will they, you know, be ambitious? Like all these things that I think society generally puts value on, how do they make sure that their kid gets those instead is it doesn't just become kind of a you know shithead kid who's like oh you know my parents will take care of me yeah so it sounds

like you know being spoiled and and it's true i was thinking about that i was thinking about the one the parents that give their kids anything that they ask for at any time they don't expect much of them it's the low sort of expectations to give back to their family or to give back to society so you know you i think to prevent that spoiled uh ness is to make sure that they have you know those opportunities to to to contribute to to the society to their family because otherwise when you you know you just give them things give them things you have no expectation of them to do anything to give back um i think you can then quickly get to that route that you painted so it's almost like uh setting the expectation expectation setting may be the single most

important thing of uh making sure that the kid understands what those are and also almost holding them accountable to some degree to try to meet the expectations yeah holding them accountable getting them involved in volunteering or just what they do for you know chores at at home sometimes kids grow up with no chores because you know you resented doing that um as a kid it's important not to do anything like reactively like oh you know to be conscious and think about the your parenting sort of strategy and your expectations for your kids, not just as a reaction to what I don't want to do as I had experienced growing up.

I think every parent would be the world's best parent if their kid didn't have to make their bed. That is the bane of many kids' existence. Like, I got to make my bed. And then I guess as a part of that, like my dad used to say this to me. He wouldn't say it directly to me, but he would say it in front of me to people.

He would always say, my kids don't need another friend. They need a parent. and it sounds very similar to what you're saying in terms of there's expectations this like authoritative parent uh this like um almost demanding but supportive exactly type thing fits very similar yes and kind of weaves itself together where the parent should be the parent and if you do that with any degree of success like your kid should be okay yeah yeah it should be okay i mean like you said it's that balance of having having expectations you know you being

in control at a certain, you know, for certain things. Um, and then, but you're also warm, supportive listener, you know, you're there for them to, to hear things out. If something's going awry, um, you're just not, and it's, it's just, it's just that combat. It's just not being that extreme sort of helicopter. I'm going to control everything you do because, you know, you have to ask yourself what, what is driving that anxiety and fear? Is it because, you know, you don't want anything bad to happen to them? Well, you know, you have to prepare them that bad things will happen right bad things can happen to good people um good things happen to bad people um bad people do good things bad people do bad things you know there's just as long as they're not like having

sort of an you're trying to control their whole world um and you know sort of shelter them from every sort of um possible thing that could imagine they're not going to learn the skills to manage it when it does happen and the world is going to be shattered yeah it um it feels uh scary i think to parents to kind of put their kid out in the world but at the same time it's going to happen can't slow down time alright my last question for you is you are a

trained child psychologist or a clinical psychologist you have two kids what do you do with your kids that may surprise people or something that you do with your kids that you feel is

really important that if you could tell all of your friends who had kids like hey this is the thing I feel like is so important okay great question and I will yeah I you know a lot of the questions we talked about today was how to set our kids up for success how to ensure optimal cognitive development across domains and you know you know how to set that up with you know their activities or with their friends um how do we you know provide enough to set them in to provide enough to pay for like the best education that they can have and you know as a working parent to you know and as well thinking about all those questions that you asked me having worries and concerns about those things when I

really what I really think parents um you know what I do with my kids or what also helps me is to really play with them let's sit on the carpet and play with them and just be with them be with them play with them you know there's all that good oxytocin is flowing through everybody that bonding and you know it takes you away from the worries of you know making money or being the best you know researcher you can be and you know they're also getting a lot of learning opportunities from you as that again attentive nurturing supportive caregivers just to play to play play play you know peekaboo hide and seek sing be silly have a balloonify pillify jump on the couch for a little bit, you know, play with them. That's it. Yeah. It's, uh, uh, no matter how much

we analyze all of this, it always goes back to the simplest, the basics, right? Like literally just love your kid and hang out with them, but not be their friend. Exactly. Um, where can we send people to find you on the internet or find some of your research? Uh, if somebody wants to follow up, uh, based on some of the stuff we talked about today. Um, I think the only social media platform. I have a Twitter. I came off of Instagram and Facebook. So I'm at Dr. Holmish Nashek and I have a practice website, khmpsychology.com. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for your time today. I know that a lot of people are really looking forward to this and we'll definitely have to have you back in the future. Thank you. It was great being here, Anthony.

Thanks for having me. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to transition into a brand new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to thecryptoacademy.io. My team and I have been working with the top HR teams in the industry to develop an intensive three-week training program with over 50 live events. We teach you exactly what you need to know to break into the industry, including live interview prep and resume review. Our students have been hired at over 75 of the world's best Bitcoin and crypto companies. Go to thecryptoacademy.io

to learn more. Again, that's thecryptoacademy.io. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with your friends, and I'll see you all for the next episode. you you you you you you

all right guys bang bang i've got dr lee me shah shick here with me which i uh hopefully pronounced that correctly. Um, first place I'm going to start is child psychology. Uh, everyone knows that brains don't end up getting developed, uh, for at least males, 25 years old or so. Um, and there's a 25 year period from birth to that point. How should we think about the development of the child's brain and kind of psychologically how they develop through, you know, their, their infant years into childhood and then teenage years like is there a good framework that parents or people could think about that development process that's a great question um anthony development is a child development is a time of you know rapid brain development as you

mentioned it's a long process you know the prefrontal cortex part of our brain which is a thinking planning organizing multitasking um creative thinking problem solving part of our brain does not develop until we are about in our mid twenties. Um, that said though, there are specific critical periods of a child's development that, um, it's, if, if they don't have, uh, an environment that nurtures, um, that, that brain development, it can be very, uh, it can, can go haywire. So some of those critical periods are the early infancy childhood years from zero to five. Um, but let me, let me pause here and say, so you asked about different frameworks to think about development right so then there's ages and stages infancy uh toddlerhood early childhood

uh school age latency age adolescence um then there's different ways of that they can develop in different domains so there are um there is cognitive development right their thinking capacities um there is also physical maturation um they can um socio-emotional development personality development so what would be helpful um to start with given this so broad let's start from really young ages right so maybe like the zero to five okay uh kind of early birth um one of the things that i think becomes big debate is like nature versus nurture right uh and as with most things in society like the black and white is probably not the right framework there's probably a lot of gray yes um but just given your experience and a lot of the research that's out there like

how do we think about if a parent has a child between the ages of zero and five like what are the things they can do to uh increase the cognitive development or accelerate it um and then maybe what are the things like avoid that we know for sure like hey this screws up kids if they're you know either exposed to certain environments or the parents are doing certain types of things okay great so that's a great place to start so zero to five um so thinking about um development in that area you know in terms of cognitive development when you're you know infant zero to one there's a lot of you take in the world with a lot of your senses you know so you see like sucking um you know there's a lot of there's breastfeeding that goes on there's like a lot of attachment

building um and the kids infants start to learn what's called object permanence for example is a hallmark um between zero to one that you know if ma then an object will still exist even if it disappears you know that an object is still there so if you you know if you're you know dropping your child at daycare they know that mom or dad will come back um so that's one concept that unfolds um over time from zero to one um and then you know two toddler hoods you hear about the terrible twos um a time when their their their will and their control and you know i i want to do it my way you know sort of comes online and that is so as a parent to help support that you'd want to help them you know not be too over controlling kind of of course you have to

control if they're going to run out onto the street or something like that but you want to give them choices like what would you like to wear this or this today finding ways to build in some of their unique um interests that are coming online to support that um and there was a second part of the question that you had asked so like when you think of what to do i generally look at it you know uh most people know i've got a a young nine month old daughter and uh i already can tell a couple of things the first is um allowing for the exploration and all of this uh it just you can tell like she's figuring things out yes and uh the first time she like going to pick something up and put it down and like like it's like cool right cause and effect yeah a friend told me he's

like you're gonna rediscover the world through the eyes of a child yes and so i see that um um but also there's probably things that parents should not do between the ages of like zero to five and some of it um i categorize as like the overly ambitious parent of like uh you're trying to push your kid too much to do things yeah so like are there things there and then also just like things that could just be detrimental to their development okay as well okay what are some of those things okay great and i think i just recalled you mentioned the nature versus nurture debate so i want to also make sure i answer that um and so you know as you know for nature though we're referring to things like our genes right and the thought was that once those genes are there

from that you've inherited from your parents that is set in stone and that's what you're going to become and dictate who you are and then the nurture uh the nurture side of things is the environment experiences right and fortunately this debate has been put to rest we know as you said that things are not black and white that it's a combination of nature versus nurture nature and and it's a field called epigenetics which looks at how the environment shapes which genes and when are expressed so this can be easily as an example in the field of toxic stress for example or when children face prolonged periods of of stress constantly are you know bombarded with domestic violence for example in the home or food insecurity and things like that and they don't

have the buffer of a parent of a caregiver to buffer that stress that's when we know things the brain architecture the development of our brain and our neurons and the pathways can then you know lead to poor outcomes what happens in that situation you've done a lot of work here on children and kind of being exposed to various stressful situations especially in development If a child is unfortunately exposed to these stresses, is it literally the chemistry in their brain is changing? Yes, the physiological profiles, the chemistry in their brain. Because when you're stressed, right, you have the fight or flight or freeze coming online. And so your body is pumping cortisol, it's pumping adrenaline.

And those hormones make the blood vessels send blood to your muscles, your extremities, and it takes away from the brain. So your brain is not really developing and forming as it should. Kids who have been exposed to toxic stress, their amygdala is always in looking out for danger. That's the amygdala looks for threats for fear is the fear part of our brain. And the prefrontal cortex that we talked about earlier is not coming online and it's not sending back messages saying, I'm safe, calm down. You can rest, you can digest everything.

So everything from physical health, you know, diabetes, heart disease. It's like if your body was a car, it would be like it's constantly revving that car engine and there's a lot of wear and tear and stress in the body. So not just physically, but mentally, emotionally, cognitively, all those things. That's why it's so critical for the early period. What's fascinating is, it immediately jumps to mind, I have somebody that I met and they were explaining to me that babies could be born, obviously to parents who are addicted to certain types of drugs. And the woman who was telling me this, her parents had actually adopted a child who was addicted to meth because the parents had been – or the mother had been on meth. And what she said to me, which was fascinating, was there are a number of examples where actually physically these children are what society would deem as like ripped, right? And their physiological structure appears to be different from a cosmetic standpoint.

And it's because actually while they're in the womb, they're so stressed out 24-7 that there's almost this like a flexing that's happening. And so, again, understanding that that's not my specialty and I'll take that at face value that there's some directional truth to that. Is the same thing happening with the brain as well, both in the womb if the mother is stressed and then also in the early years if the child itself is stressed? Yeah, absolutely. When we look at things from prenatal, how the mother was during pregnancy, you know, if she was involved in a stressful, interpersonally violent relationship, we look at that, all those things, you know, because the fetus is developing and, you know, all the, you know, the heartbeat, all those things. And also when you're born, you know, I think, I think the research says that by age three, 80% of the brain is already the size it's going to be as an adult. So it's a very, very critical period. And you had mentioned with the meth examples, similar with alcohol, fetal alcohol syndrome, like the structure of the children with the larger heads and things like that, it affects how, you know, even physically that they appear.

Yeah. And are there things that moms can do? So if there's mothers or fathers that are listening to this that are about to have a child or they are pregnant today, are there things that the mother can do to have less stress, which then will have a positive impact on the cognitive development of the baby? Or is it cognitive development is really only affected post birth? Oh, yes. Great question. I think just even from, you know, the condition and the mental state, the emotional state of the family, of the parental relationship, the stability of that as well is something to look at. And of course, there's also intergenerational things to look at as well. But, you know, trying to, yes, you are your, you have to keep that instrument in tune, right?

And take care of yourself. So as much as you can take care of yourself, kind of stay less stressed, you'll be more able to be able to tune to separate sort of what is my sort of anxieties and uncertainties from my child's and not project that onto the child, for example. And I'll stop there and say maybe if there's any like when we talk about things that parents can do, are there maybe certain certain distinctions that we could talk about maybe? well and you know when my wife was pregnant one of the things we kept hearing is like hey if the mom is not stressed then the baby will be calmer and to some degree you're like ah that sounds a little like woo like sure maybe you know hindsight bias makes you feel better about it uh but it does feel like uh if you know i don't know all of my friends who have been pregnant uh some of them were really really stressed out not necessarily just because of the pregnancy because of work or

other situations and some were very calm and it does feel like the experiences were different to some degree. And I do wonder, you know, how much of an impact on the child does it have? Yeah. Yeah. I think it's, we're talking about the stress when I talked to earlier about like the prefrontal cortex and the McDowell is firing. I think that is when it's like prolonged unbuffered chronic type of stress when you have those changes, but say a little bit of work stress that the mother had, you know but the child is born healthy and fine and there is minimal sort some stress is good you know children develop through these conflicts that they have to resolve at each stage so some stress and a certain level of anxiety is good it pushes us to go to get to

the next developmental stage right um so it's i think what the distinction is when you have that prolonged um unbuffered you don't have a stable supportive caregiver relationship caregiving relationship to help you process things and um kind of understand the world that's when things can go awry. And so when we look at this like nature versus nurture like what are the parts that genetically people agree in the scientific community like okay these are the genetic things and whether they're kind of turned on or exposed or expressed you know early on versus later like this is genetic versus like are there specific things that are nurtures specific and not necessarily relying on genes? That's a great question and I know researchers are studying

things that at the gene level or the cellular level for example like telomeres for example um you know in kids who have been exposed to chronic stress and trauma those become shorter and those things those then you know shorter telomeres mean shorter length of life right um and then as far as nurture um on the other side of things that again it's that supportive i know i'm repeating myself a lot but it's that supportive caregiver relationship with attachment relationship with you and your child um that that will help them sort of get that resiliency to bounce back from things one of the pieces of advice that i've heard repeated over and over again is just like the best thing you do for your kid is love them and it it's kind of this

weird thing it's not very quantitative right it's not like a prescriptive okay i do a b and c every day and like we're good um how important is that and are there ways that maybe a kid who's you know zero to five years old versus like a teenager kind of feels that differently or is it pretty much the same thing of like literally just care and you should be okay yeah such a great question and love is a great concept and um you know there's different ways to describe love and and I you know speaking here as a parent myself with two kids and and then also then I could speak from a psychological perspective and you know when you think of love and you're thinking about attachment which is about you know the relationship and bonds with a significant caregiver or romantic

partner. Um, and you think about attachment again, uh, there's a study, you know, the Harlow monkey, the rhesus monkeys study where they had, uh, they took some rhesus monkeys, infant ones that were just born and put them with, um, wire monkeys, a wire monkey with a bottle and then a wire monkey with a terrycloth, a soft kind of cuddly terrycloth. And, uh, the, the baby monkeys, whenever they were scared or frightened, well, first of all, they spent more significant time cuddling up with the terrycloth monkey um but even though they had the other one had food so they would just get the food and then head back to the other monkey so that attachment that love is is is important and then sort of speaking from a personal uh hat a person of faith for example

um you know uh love loving your kid loving your spouse that parental love that you you know model in the home um that love and self-sacrifice that self-donate donative love is is a good context and foundation that children can then develop socially and pro-socially in like where where are kids first educators um in that yeah speaking of education uh there's a million toys and software and all kinds of crazy stuff uh that i've seen some uh friends have you know they swear by others or ads that you see on Instagram or whatever. But they all promise something similar, which is like, we can accelerate

the child's cognitive development. We can keep them on track. Is this all real? Is it bullshit? How should parents think about a lot of these supplemental things? And I don't know, if I ask my dad, he's like, back in the day,

no one had any of this stuff, right? And everyone turned out okay. How do you think about that from a psychological development standpoint? Yeah, another great question. And again, I'm not a person that throws like the baby out with the bathwater. I like kind of moderation and balance. And I think technology can harness a lot of great learning opportunities. It can hasten learning, for example, in some ways. But those same, you know, it can it can create contact with, you know, with people around the world that you wouldn't have had the opportunity back in the day to have. And so those I think some of those same those same characteristics that that that make technology so great can also be its downfall as well. Just the instantaneous, instant gratification. Right. Social media. You know, you have kids, as you said, spending more time on their tablets and their phones than being out with friends, having face to face conversations.

But as far as the toys question, I think you had mentioned for especially young kids, when you think about like an iPad and you think about a young two year old just passively sitting there kind of watching what's being fed to them. You want to look at toys that you as a parent can have what's called the serve and return type of building that reciprocity. You have joint attention. You have the eye contact. You're saying, I see you. I see the things that, you know, oh, you heard the bird in the sky. that just flew overhead I see it too you're labeling them you know the things

that they can see in the world you're having them with you narrating the things you're doing washing the dishes so toys you know that like puzzles building blocks those types of things are they still have a good place yeah and so really it almost feels like active versus passive

becomes like a big differentiator between the things that the kids do and it sounds like maybe it's not the extremes of like it has to be 100% active or 100% passive instead there may be a time and a place I think everyone's gone to a restaurant and seen their parents I need to eat here's the phone

I swore I wouldn't be that parent here's the phone kid it feels like that doesn't necessarily destroy all of the progress that's made elsewhere but maybe the majority of time you want more of an active learning experience and talk a little bit about

you mentioned describing the things that you're doing or kind of labeling these pieces like what is going on with the child especially kind of five or under like what is going on with the cognitive development as to like why it's important to almost talk to them in that way yeah so you know talking with them you know they don't have the language yet so kind of hearing modeling um is from these continued structure and routine and playing with them that they end up then building up um the capacity to do these things so i was talking about the um the stages in the beginning like zero to one that sensory motor stage and then the next stage um would be

you know their minds is child's mind is so different than an adult's mind um so you know when they're like two to about six um they have for example what's called like magical thinking like they think that because they wish something it's going to happen and they're very egocentric in their thinking so they don't take the perspective of another person for example it's like why when um i'm playing um hide and seek with my my my daughter and she thinks that when just because she puts the blanket over her head means that i can't see her or she hides and she's hiding in plain sight and she doesn't know that i i can see you know i can see her so um and that's because she can't see you yes so she thinks that i can yeah or it's like if i have a boo or something

and she's like oh here's take this stuffy toy it's gonna make you feel better you know like the way that would comfort her is the way that would comfort me as an adult. So they're very egocentric. I see you have a question. Yeah, well, and I guess part of that is there's this famous study that says lower income children

will actually hear 30 million less words than their higher income peers by the time they reach kindergarten. And we don't think, you know, if we sat here and already counted how many words we've spoken in this conversation alone, it'd be a lot more than we probably would guess um but 30 million words seems so drastic of a swing between high and low income children it sounds like a huge piece of this just like talking

to the kid right and and engaging with them right and then reading to them um providing you know opportunities for them to to i think i think though a lot though is that interactive piece because you can talk around them you could talk like they could be hearing you peripherally talking like say we had a child here and but i think again like it's that interactive piece of talking with them talking to them and also trying to avoid the the mother is kind of babbly like like talking talking regular sentences as you would so that they they don't kind of end up with that baby kind of talk you know you want to speak in regular words um so that they can hear how the regular word would sound and is this like you treat the kid maybe not like an adult but you

treat them like a human that you would have a regular conversation with and and then they will develop faster or not so much and maybe something else you're optimizing for yeah no not so much i think though i mean there's a place for like the the big expressions and then like the eye contact i i think i think it's when they're starting to to learn to speak at a at some point you just want to make sure that you're just you're able to say words that um that won't then um they will learn that are that are the regular ways of our language or english language yeah and then what What about multiple languages, either at home or, you know, at school or whatever? I know some folks who the parents both speak English, they're native English speakers,

and they have an aspiration for their kid to learn another language. They put them into specific school settings. I know the opposite in this spectrum, which is English as a second language in the home. And so the parents will say, hey, you'll learn English at school and you'll learn whatever the native language is here at home. how does multiple languages and the exposure to that at an early age develop the like cognitive abilities of the child as they get older? Yeah, that's a great question. And I know researchers do study sort of the effects of learning two languages and when a child begins to talk or even IQ and academic achievement. The one thing I remember taking away from some of that

literature is that, you know, those who are bilingual or trilingual or learn many different languages uh they have greater cognitive flexibility as you can imagine you know they're switching between two languages um in their brain and two types of maybe cultural contexts as well um you know if you know you're from say where i'm from in jamaica for example or in the u.s you know there's a different sort of context as well that comes comes online so there's a there's the benefit of having cognitive flexibility when you speak multiple languages yeah and and something like cognitive flexibility like if you walked out on the street yes a random person like what is that they'd be like i have no clue right it sounds like a smart person thing

right it's kind of like the general reaction that you'd get how much of a parent's kind of activities can be dictated around like i want my kid to be high iq i want my kid to have cognitive flexibility and it's like almost intentional versus some of these things are just merely the result of a great loving environment that's stable without a lot of stress and it's not so much prescriptive like can parents uh specifically say like i want my kid to have a high iq and so let's do a b and c or is that wishful thinking and maybe parents are over optimizing so that's one thing when you mention iq um that is something kind of determined a little bit by like endowment kind of what you're born with a little bit of an innate thing although you know intelligence itself it's

a hot you know it's a very hotly debated um construct but if you think about um the definition of intelligence as reason the the capacity to think to reason um to solve problems um to to be able to put together knowledge in novel ways you know things like that those things can be obviously fostered um but when you think of iq specifically as it is in a psychological sense to be measured and yeah through tests um that is something that is sort of more endowment yeah somebody recently was on the show and they basically were like, look, people don't like to hear it, but like intelligence is very much genetically driven and kind of inherited in all these things. Now you can do things to kind of move within some band around the starting point, which

does mean that you have some control, you should do the right things, whatever. But unfortunately, you know, that's just one of those things that you're not going to jump from 100 to 160, right? And so what are the things that you see parents optimizing for? if IQ is something that, you know, is much more inherent or due to, you know, the genetic component, is it like cognitive flexibility? Is it emotional kind of stability? Like what do you see parents doing in, again, this kind of zero to five range that they're really obsessed with ensuring that their child is set up for success? Yeah, that's a good question. And, you know,

I think parenting just raises so much uncertainties in you as a parent, because we don't have our user manual for our kid which would be so nice um and you know there's so many things that we also examine in our own you know on our own childhood through our own parents that we say okay we'll never do um the same thing with our with our kids um i think just the critical message early on you know from zero to five is you know just your presence um your supportive loving presence um uh you know if there's an if you see early signs of you know thing of development sort of not coming on if they're not speaking you know trying to there's you know there's knowing that there's services that can help um help that critical period because zero to three you know

things go online pretty fast um and so yeah i i think i think to answer that question though it's just so fast multifaceted um i just can't stress enough i guess the support the role of a supportive present at a caregiver that you have an attachment to the the dark side of this conversation i think is like if you look at the numbers in the United States specifically, but probably globally as well, but I'm more familiar with the U.S. numbers, the decline of like the nuclear family is pretty well documented. Is it, although unfortunate, fair to say, hey, as we see that decline, there will be changes to cognitive development and childhood development

in the families where there isn't two parents with the kind of loving, supportive, stable relationship that you're describing? That's something I think about, you know, a lot having gone through parenthood myself and having to work at the same time and just coming from, you know, exposure to other countries and knowing what their sort of parental leave policies are, for example. And there's that saying that the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that will change the world or move the world. And, you know, it feels like, at least in this country, that there's just nobody has time to rock who's in the cradle, who is growing up the babies, you know, in the cradle right now. And like you said, the digital age with technology, there's kind of babysitting with the iPad and things like that. So I definitely think about that. And just, you know, just thinking about policies in place, even as one thing as parental leave and just having time, you know, to adjust, you know, in Canada, it could be up to a year or two of paid parental leave.

that you can get but here I think it's six weeks or something it feels like uh there's a spectrum of like we'll call it again just for lack of better descriptive word like the traditional two-parent household right with um one of uh the parents going to work and the other staying at home happens to be usually the wife was staying home and the husband was going to work but could be uh in any form or fashion um that next step or evolution of that is both parents working right and maybe less time with the kids or whatever. But then there's this very extreme version, which is, again, I think unfortunate

but quintessential example of the single mother who's raising three kids and works two jobs. And unfortunately, politicians on both sides of the aisle like to point to that as that's who we're trying to help. But it feels like that environment is different and distinct from like, oh, both parents work. There's still two parents in the household

and yes, maybe they're not spending as much time as kind of the traditional model. but it's a very different situation when it's, you know, a single mother working two jobs and has three kids. How do you think about the development of the children in these different scenarios? And is it almost like a trajectory change in their cognitive development or is there a different way to think about it? you I mean, you can think of examples of people, right,

Who grew up with a single parent, right? Who still go on to have academic success or music success. I'm thinking about though, in the third example that you gave, you know, and if it lends itself to more opportunities for children to children's issues, right? To be, to go unnoticed, right? Or, you know, you're less in the care of your parent, your caregiver. and so I know it takes a village though to raise children right there's the role of aunts and uncles and grandparents of course a lot of grandparents in these cases and you know I think

if it does take a village but we want to make sure that there's somebody at least that they're connected to somebody that has an eye on you know you just don't want them to be alone with unhelpful for example if they faced abuse or something like that you don't want them to be alone with that you want to have an eye and you know be able to to say hey what's going on hey what's wrong notice changes but when everybody's so busy everybody's so busy working things go unidentified and then you have long-term um poor psychiatric outcomes yeah what's fascinating about uh the scenario and if you kind of use hindsight as a crutch here um there are people who are successful based on a bunch of different aspects uh who come from you know the traditional two

parents you know one stays at home uh model to single mother or father with multiple kids and multiple jobs. And so I don't think that it necessarily prevents the outliers, right? In either one of those scenarios. I think the conversation that I see people having is more so like, what's the average, right? And if you go back to whether it's, you know, a kid hears 30 million less words before kindergarten, or you look at certain family structures or kind of childhood experiences, it just makes it harder. And I think the people who end up being the outlier, they actually point back and like, that's why I'm successful. It's because I experienced this early on and it drove me it motivated me it did whatever yeah is there a way for the parents

in those situations can they do certain things to help with the cognitive development even though maybe they don't have the kind of supportive stable environment that you're saying is like okay that's option one right in kind of the ideal scenario but are there certain things that either research or people have come across where it's like if you're a single parent here's some things that you can do it may not be time it may not be the ability to sit for two hours and talk to the kid but there are certain things you can do that can at least have some impact yeah I think so that question it makes me think you know I mean that you know you ensure that you know they're going to school they're taken care of like medically and then at a certain point sometimes you know

like school when they reach adolescent age you know the peer group becomes a very big part of their world um and so just so if I'm getting it right you're asking me if in each in the middle ground of these two situations is there a way that parents can foster optimal cognitive development such that some of these people can also reach to the heights of say somebody who said that well it was this environment that made me who i am i have grit i have determination i have the capacity to some extract the good things from my environment and then enact those is that if you think so there's many stories where people have been successful coming from uh less than ideal scenarios. And, uh, what I've always found fascinating is usually, uh, the way they tell

the story. And again, you know, hindsight, you want to make it seem, you know, like this heroic journey. Uh, but there's somebody, whether it was, uh, Hey, I had a single mother and, um, they always told me that I would be successful or they instilled a certain level of confidence or they explained, Hey, we don't have what everyone else has, but like we have the ability to work hard to eventually get that or there's always something that seems to come from that environment where they're able to latch on to it and fortunately or unfortunately there may not be one answer right it may just be hey uh you're dealt the cards that you're dealt you have to help the kid develop as much as possible but it sounds like what you're saying is it's not just

the family right there's also school there's also friend groups like there's other pieces that help to influence the development of the child as well right right yeah there's different there's it's it's it's actually a good it's why I went into the field of traumatic stress because I was you know growing up in Jamaica and seeing children you sort of begging on the streets but then you hear the heights of music fame for example with Bob Marley or the Usain Bolt like sprinters and you know great thinkers and you're like what is it in that environment that that's still you know despite not having all the means that still allows them to thrive and I think those are that's that's why I went into the field to study like what are the the the resilient is it

spirituality is it like a just a belief that you know you know even though that you know hardships are always going to be there but I can still succeed if I you know if I just give my all or or is it you know your plus your talent you know I just I think there's I think that question is to be answered to be answered um how do you evaluate it today like you've already been studying it for some time I don't think you'll ever say like okay finally I figured it out let me go to a different field yeah but how do you evaluate what what you've at least learned so far About resilience, especially in childhood. I mean, again, I sound like a broken record here, but it is really that strong sort of parental buffering, helping you sort of make sense of unexplainable, for example, events that happen in our world. But firstly, I mean, as a parent, if you're a child, you know, you do go through some something catastrophic as a school shooting.

Right. The first thing as a parent should do is to listen. They need don't assume that, you know, what they know, what is distressing to them or what is even the most distressing thing about the school shooting to them. You want to be able to listen with an open ear and appreciate, you know, their experience and their feelings and not just rush to try to put a bandaid on and solve it and say everything is going to be OK. You want to sort of validate and appreciate their experience and hear what it is that really impacts them. And, you know, you can ask that through, like, what are your friends saying? Kind of open up the conversation so that it's not as personal. You know, sometimes they don't want to feel like they're out of control. They're like, no, I'm fine.

But you want to say, what are your friends saying? What are they talking about about this? So kind of being a good listener, kind of getting to know what's on their mind. Also taking, you know, your own temperature on the event and getting support if you need it, whether that's from a spouse or your parents or a church person, kind of getting your sort of stability back and so that you'll then be able to then listen

and understand and help them make sense of what's going on. So if we move from like the zero to five to now kind of what I'll call school age, I'm sure that there's a much more scientific description. So kind of elementary into middle school. The things that immediately popped to mind are obviously there's bullying that goes on And things that I would categorize as like they've been going on for a long time at that age.

What is the research their show in terms of things parents can do to help kind of their kids navigate it? And how much of it is just like, hey, you're going to deal with this and it's better just to listen versus be prescriptive in some way? You're right. You know, bullying has gone on for a while or roasting or however you want to call it. And then it feels like the online way of it has just, you know, can be 10 times, 100 fold worse. um and the question you know you know social media thinking about a social media account for a school age child i mean well obviously well 13 and under because of the children's online privacy and protect privacy and protection act they shouldn't have an account they don't allow

you to have an account um but thinking of you know understanding so where what are my child's friendships like right now right is it filled with drama well then imagine that online it's going to be even worse so you know i guess i'm getting at the question like when can they have these digital tools to use responsibly? Are they able to commit to you? So I would, I would imagine that family sort of technology plan to develop with, you know, your, your teenager or your adolescent, um, on what are the expectations of the use? How long can you have it for? What are the consequences if you, you know, you break the boundaries of this plan? Um, what are the hours that you're able to use it from? Can they, can they follow that, um, contract, um, with you and

will they be responsible enough to to use that and have an account so with this family technology plan uh is this like a parent sits down with their kids and it's like a negotiation kind of like i mean although you probably would want to have more of the structure of it but you can make them feel to have some empowerment we we call it a dictatorship masquerading as a democracy right that is that is definitely what that conversation seems to be like um but but when you when you do that you mentioned a couple of things what are the types of uh things that are the most important there is it just like hey here's what you can do with these tools whether it's social media cell phone or whatever and here's what you can't is it more a focus on like the punishment like

if you had to pick one or two key components of that technology plan for a family what goes into that definitely not the punishments you know even with punishment with kids it doesn't teach them what they're supposed to do right so you want to lay out more of here the the things that you can go on but in terms of what you can't do i would say just more in terms of like i'm thinking of like location sharing and just things that would put you in put their child in danger but it's more of the expectations around use you know you can use it maybe for two hours before dinner time non-during dinner time what sites you agree that you can visit things more more so of what what your expectations around the use are unless on the on the punishment but they do need to know

what the consequences of it are in advance so that you can so then you don't have to like in the moment be like ah i think well you'll just you know you're grounded forever or you're gonna take it away for 10 years you know kind of thing you want to have it just right that you can just say it and you know that you know the consequence we agreed to this yeah and that goes back a little bit to treating them like a human like an adult to some degree um how about uh their friends having access to certain things and them not right so when i think of uh elementary school and middle school, one of the like biggest areas of people being bullying, it's like what clothes they wear, you know, who's cool, who's not type stuff. Uh, but also I remember being in high school and

cell phones started to become popular and my parents maybe wait just one year. Right. But like a lot of my friends got cell phones, maybe freshmen in high school or something. And I had to wait until I was like a sophomore. And I remember this is like, this is the worst punishment in the world. It's like, look at that cool thing they have. High school is probably a little bit different than if you're in second or third grade or whatever it is so like how should parents think about uh not just like hey should my kid have this technology or not but are there things to be considered of where maybe other parents are actually giving their kids technology whether it's cell phones or social media accounts and if your kid doesn't have it does that open up any

sort of uh issues or things to be aware of yeah well good for your parents i know there is research to suggest that the longer you wait it is better you know like they had a study I think between nine and like 12 year olds nine it was too early 12 the longer you wait a little bit the better but I hear what you're saying it sounds like the concern is if all their friends have a phone and they're connecting over you know texting or having a group chat and you're I mean from your personal springs did you like were you left out of some things or did you I think it was more so the phones back then you could play snake you could play snake there was t9 texting so you tried to do it as efficiently as possible yeah that's true but but to the degree uh yeah it was like a you

definitely were like hey i want one of those and you know you come with all the nonsense excuses like mom you know well don't you want me to be able to call you after school and make sure i'm safe right and she's like no but but i think that today part of this is you know the communication of kids obviously you you see you know instagram snapchat you know twitter all these different things tiktok whatever uh but also just texting like that is a way that kids communicate in um kind of their everyday life that yes adults do it as well but if we had text mess text message groups at nine years old like i actually am glad i didn't grow up with that as an option right because i don't think that that would have been probably a good thing in hindsight uh but a kid

obviously doesn't know that today and they want to participate so how do parents deal with that yeah no it's you know like you said the social media people have instagram tiktok and it's all sort of ego based it's like your highlight reel of your life and then you will you know you'll be scrolling for ages comparing yourself to people's highlight reel and that can cause obviously anxiety depression i mean suicide is the second leading cause of death in adolescents 10 to 14 in this country really yes i did not know that the first one is accidents accidents and then suicides suicides and it's growing in the nine and under population and what is driving that is it the social media is it that i'm not sure of i'd have to do some more digging um but

it is growing and for adolescents is the second leading cause of death so really you know you're asking good questions right because you can really get into very serious waters here with our children and you know I think yeah just the online space there's a lot a lot to unpack um and I think if you can you know have that full first strong attachment with your with your child be a good listener have them develop that relationship with you to communicate to tell you know what's going on you have a kind of pulse navigating then the technology years in adolescence will be a little bit easier. How important is it, uh, to teach your kid that being different is good or like, okay. Like to some degree, I just think of it as, uh, if you reinforce, do what everyone else does,

uh, uh, follow what they're doing. Uh, in some ways you're exasperating the, if you're different or if you're left out, like it feels like it's more, uh, severe, like the feeling. Whereas if you've taught your kid from an early age like being different is usually a good thing right if everyone goes right sometimes going left actually can be valuable or if everyone is thinking one thing no actually thinking for yourself could be valuable um it feels like that just maybe dulls some of the the problems where like actually if everyone else has a phone and i don't you know what's the opportunity that i have versus feeling like i'm left out yeah it's almost sounding like you're doing what we call like a cognitive reframe about the situation which is which is great you

know and like being different you know there could be upsides to that right you know you're thinking differently and it's it's about how you yeah you think about your situation and not get too one-sided or extreme um and so like even as a person myself of like mixed races you know thinking about being different yes you feel a little bit like okay i cannot relate to everything that everybody, you know, who maybe are more like homogenous. Um, but then I have, you know, I can draw from different cultural worlds and that's, that's okay too. You know, there's a place for that as well. Yeah. And another thing that comes to mind in kind of this like elementary into middle school, uh, kids can start to read, right. Thankfully. Um,

but everything's so digital today. And, uh, I don't know if you've ever seen, uh, there's like, uh, almost like comics, uh, or, uh, uh, Hey, you know, 50, a hundred years from now, the human evolution. Like we're all going to, it's going to be these huge eyed things from staring at screens all the time. Right. And our, and our necks will be slumped over kind of the, the, the very dystopian view of, of the future human race. Um, but today, is there a difference? Like if you have a kid who sits down and reads a physical book versus reads on a cell phone or on a laptop, uh, with the digital screen, like are there studies or research that shows like, know actually the physical book is better or maybe the digital kind of consumption method is better

or do we not yet have enough information to really know what the difference is that question i don't know the exact science um but i can think about ways where technology could be helpful for kids who um who have trouble reading they need those read aloud stories on the ipad for example that could be helpful um but then you know obviously with the paper book you have that tactile um you have that tactile opportunity to touch the page, to turn the page, just a little bit more fine motor than maybe swiping on the iPad. So those are some differences, but I guess it also just depends for who, you know, if you have special needs, maybe some help with the iPad and reading aloud programs would be, would be beneficial. Yeah. And along these lines of

reading, I think most people, uh, in the business finance technology world, they're like, I want my kid to be smart. Right. Which, uh, cool. Everyone has pipe dreams. Uh, there's going to be a natural distribution of intelligence um but one thing that is definitely uh kind of intertwined in society society is uh people who read are smart and whether there's you know truth to that or not uh most people i know want their kids to be intelligent so they'd say hey you should read you should read you should read are there things around the reading like if from a childhood good psychological development. Should a kid spend more time with other kids or should they spend time reading? And like, if your kid is like the extreme and kind of like the quintessential

nerd and just sits inside all day and reads, like to me, like maybe that's not actually that great because you actually do need this social interactions, but being a hundred percent social and not reading at all. And so is this like a classic, just like everything in moderation probably is the best strategy. Yeah. I think when you're seeing, when parents want their kids to be smart you know there's book smart and then there are other aspects of life and functioning that outside the classroom like if you're in a work environment how good of a colleague or a team player can you be right so there's these social skills that they need to develop that they can you know only develop with others right with their peers taking turns knowing boundaries

you know empathizing with the feelings of others you'll get that from playing and then of course you know when you have time to to read and stretch your imagination um that there's a place for that too and there's a place for even adult uh adult scaffolding to help children accomplish more than what they're able to do without adult assistance um there's a researcher a russian a researcher called levigotsky who talks about the zone of proximal development so helping that what what it's basically that zone between what what i just said what a child can do without assistance versus what they can do with a more learned caregiver or teacher um so yeah i think it's again having all these variety of opportunities to read to play to play to socialize to to to bond with an adult

all these things one of the pieces that it feels like an adolescence that can really help with the maturity of everyone uh is being exposed to many different ideas many different cultures and so you'll hear all the time, people will say, oh, kids who traveled a lot as a kid or as an adolescent, maybe even in the college years, they tend to have a more worldly view, right? And doesn't necessarily mean that they're more intelligent. It's just like, they've been exposed to different things that others haven't. Is that a similar phenomenon when you're a kid, like you just want to expose them to a lot of different things. It doesn't mean they're traveling, but you want them to read, you want them to play, you want them to do all these

different things and that kind of accelerates the cognitive development as well? Um, I wouldn't say it accelerates a cognitive development, but you just given them opportunities to know that there's what with the traveling, that there's a different way of doing things. And there's the way of the country that I come from, you know, it just expands, like you said, their, their worldview and that there's no, you know, cultures around the world develop in, you know, different norms and different values and that makes them you know just a more informed citizen um and so yeah just having your child i think what you're talking about is maybe like a well-rounded sort of child when you give them these opportunities right to read or to play there's been a number of books

that i've seen that are basically written about this idea of uh most people want their kid to be a specialist right so it's kind of one of the examples like tiger woods his dad was like you're going to be a golfer at you know two months old like watch golf swing golf club be good at golf right uh and obviously went on this greatest golfer of all time but actually that is the outlier story compared to most people who end up being great at something take more of a generalist approach and then focus later on in life and so it sounds like from a childhood development standpoint actually the generalization and general experience is maybe a better path yeah and then looking at, but I mean, you know, there are, there are prodigies, you know, there are things that you

can observe in your child to see if they're, that they're developing a talent and then you want to support that, you know, if they're great at art, um, or they, they have a musical inclination, just kind of seeing what they're good at and giving them the opportunity to, to, to, to, to learn that and master that and take that. Yeah. What about the role of sports and sports to me is always this like interesting thing where, uh, there's the parent who like my kid's going to be the nba you're like yeah probably not but like okay you know good nice dream and maybe there's some bonding between the child and the parent um but it does feel like there's lessons learned from playing organized sports whether it's hard work or teamwork or persistence you know all these

different things any thoughts about like is there a certain age where that stuff is more important should you know uh certain types of sports that end up being uh valuable yeah that's a great question like you said sports you learn the teamwork you have to have discipline um to you know my sister was a swimmer you'd have to get up in the morning before school for practice and then after school again for another couple hours um and late yes there is ages that you know it would be beneficial to have kids start to do an after-school activity uh like six to twelve I'm thinking of that age uh that stage I'm sorry where uh they they need to start having mastery over over an activity or something that they can do you know to feel like they've you know they've mastered

something it's um you know they feel industrious you know they they they've mastered like a like you said and like a sport and like you said with sports there's that team aspect learning how to how to take losses you know also you know um not to i'm thinking of like when sports uh teams and they have this like big ego as well like can you can want to diminish that a little bit so yeah yeah it's great it's a great feeds into it yeah yeah and then what about spending time with kids your age versus spending time with adults like there are kids that i know who i don't know they're probably in the 10 to 14 range they're kids of friends of mine uh and you talk to them and you're like you are not attending like you just socially are able to communicate you shake

my hand you look me in the eye like there's very specific things uh the way that they have a command of the language the things they talk about you spend time with a lot of adults it seems like compared to another kid who you know is running around and and again these are extreme examples but it feels like they spent way more time with kids than adults is there like a perfect formula or is it just again general well-roundedness and you want them to spend time with adults you want them to spend time with kids their age as well yeah i don't i don't know if there's a perfect formula um but you know equal i think they're both equally important if you have you know an older adult who can have stretch their thinking stretch their abstract thinking and things like

that that's very helpful you know and then if you you know you have your you know if you don't like you said if you don't have a peer group and you sort of feel like left out isolated disconnected that's going to burden you as well and so you want to make sure that you also balance that with peers your age and in that um it feels like when kids hang out with each other there's like many different settings that they can do it so obviously school is a huge one um there's things like sports or whatever how important is it for them to hang out with each other outside of like the organ you know school is very much especially in today's day and age like sit in the classroom be quiet we're going to teach you uh and maybe there's recess or lunch or something um but almost

like free form hanging out like how how important is that i think that's good too you know to have some unstructured free time with your friends. Of course, you know, also at that age, you're also doing after school activities. Like if you were involved in violin, you'd probably be continuing to do that, but you don't want to overschedule your kids, you know, in so many activities that they just don't have time to be and be who they are with the friends. You know, you want to have a balance. It's always a balance. you you

if we go into the school uh all kinds of crazy stuff happening there's seems like it's getting politicized there's people from all different angles who think they know what's best for all kids and so like the first thing i always caveat the conversation with is like all the kids aren't the same and so there's probably different ways that certain kids develop or or what would be quote unquote, good for them. But maybe the first thing is just like, when I think of traditional school today, I always think of it in a sense of like, it's prison for kids. And what I mean by that, it sounds bombastic, but it's like, we tell the kids to go somewhere, be quiet, sit down. And it's usually a very one way kind of lecture. And again, as you get older, it becomes even more

and more kind of the teacher is teaching you and you're there to sit and learn. But that's not really what the kids want to do. That's not how kids act. They've got tons of energy. They want to run around. And if there wasn't this like mandated school, they would probably not be doing anything. They wouldn't be sitting down quiet anywhere. And so in some way, like school is very counter to what almost feels like their innate, you know, desires. Does that help the kids? Does that hurt the kids again? Is it just balance? And like, maybe the ideal thing would be like, they go to school for three days and they're out of school for four days or like, how do you think about that? Yeah. You know, I think that it always depends on the type of kid

and what they need. So in the traditional schooling system you were mentioning, you know, it's very structured. Um, so for some kids, like a very unstructured day, you know, someone, you know with ADHD for example it could be very overwhelming for example um and maybe the traditional schooling model lends itself to certain the the mastery of certain subjects a little bit better um but like you were saying the shortcomings of a traditional school doesn't teach you sort of how to and this is again I don't want to be too extreme but maybe it's less likely then to help you to you know think for yourself and and have that initiative right to take charge of what you're learning and does it apply to me and kind of ask those questions and develop the skills to become

sort of a leader and that type of way i don't think like you said that the traditional school is sort of like you know you sit you absorb type of thing type of knowledge and i i think in some ways you know that structure that routine uh is necessary in childhood because you know children develop off of that and then from there then then they develop it as their adults right we need that sort of routine structure predictability in our world um but i think that i think it but i think at the end of the day it boils down to what the kids need if you have special needs if you're a gifted child for example you might need a different environment yeah one of the most popular uh kind of education models uh in the tech industry is the monastery schools uh some of that's because

there's people who've built very large companies and they went to monastery schools everyone's It's like, well, if I want my kid to do that, then let's go put him in a Montessori school. Some of it is, no, actually, I think that's a better learning environment. So there's all different reasons people do it. What are the pros and cons of, you know, kind of a more structured traditional system

versus something that's more kind of the Montessori school, like, hey, you know, the hallmarks of that type of education is like they address the teacher sometimes with their first name, not the Mr. or Mrs. It may be more like, what do you want to work on today versus do this worksheet. like is there research or anything in terms of uh there's different outcomes for kids who go

through the different models i'm not aware of the different model research but i think it just depends on the environment your child would thrive in if they're like an independent sort of learner thinker self-starter you know they they they do well with that then the montessori education could benefit them um more but say to you to your family you know you want sort of a religious education, you want a traditional school, like the values, like obedience, authority, respect, those things a little bit are more important to you, you know, then go with the traditional school. I think it's about finding the right fit. If you're not in the right environmental fit, that's when you can have problems. Yeah. It's a fascinating way to think

about like, um, it's kind of like company cultures. There is no good or bad culture as much as you can go to a company and the culture is the culture. And some employees are like, I love it here. And other employers like this is the worst place in the world that's right they usually quit right yeah and so it almost feels like similar to what you're saying actually for the kid they may enjoy one or the other or the parents may align their values with one or the other and then that's the better way to think about it yeah i think a fit is the best way to think about it when we talk about the schools you mentioned adhd earlier uh the joke between me and all my friends is we all had adhd no one just knew to tell us it right as kids we were rambunctious and we were constantly

doing crazy things. And, uh, kind of my fear would be if I was a kid today, like they would have drugged the hell out of us and been like, Oh, you guys all just need to sit here and basically not move. Um, it's a joke, but like every great joke has a hint of truth in it. And it does feel like, uh, there's been an explosion of, uh, awareness and diagnoses of ADHD, obviously things like Ritalin and others seem to have drastically increased in usage whether it should be or should not how do you think about the childhood development of kids that now we're actually addressing something that maybe in the past was just looked at as oh they're creative or they're energetic or whatever and teachers kind of just dealt with it you know for lack of better

way it seems like now there's like this pharmaceutical component that is pretty ingrained in school like what have you seen there how do you think about that and and is there a world where like actually some of the pharmaceutical stuff could be deemed as like external stress on the child because now you're changing the way that they you know normally would function great questions very great questions and thoughts i told you i got a lot we'll sit here until i'm done you know i think you know with adhd it is one of the most like thrown out diagnosis there is sometimes by people who shouldn't be sort of diagnosing someone with ADHD who, you know, didn't do, for example, you know, a proper assessment on them to figure out because

symptoms all can look, you know, the same. But what is the diagnosis that's driving these symptoms? You can have a cough, but, you know, it doesn't tell me what diagnosis you have, if it's like lung cancer or asthma or something right so kind of looking using just the symptoms alone and not doing a proper investigation like is this adhd or is this really somebody who's traumatized um it needs to to be done first of all and the second thing i wanted to share about adhd is that we now know that drugs pharmaceuticals pills medication shouldn't be the first line of treatment for kids with adhd you need to try the behavioral environmental structures and strategies first before then uh putting them on kids so i i'm not a fan of sort of jumping to pills first

uh for adhd um you know there are things that teachers can do in the classroom already to help kids with adhd that don't hurt the other kids as well um you know like having a daily schedule on the on the on the board um you can put that kid a little bit closer to the to the front or something giving them a little bit of extra time there are accommodations that you can make in the school that don't hurt the other kids as well that that benefit them too you know and you could also positive reinforcement at the end of the day like how here's the here's the thing here's the number of stars i got for each of the things that i accomplished that i was supposed to accomplish for today so um yeah that's what i i think i'll stop here and you can well it's fascinating you

mentioned like sitting in the front of the classroom uh and uh it's it's a dumb thing um when i was in college uh i was playing football and the coaches used to say everyone has to sit in the front row like this is so dumb like it's not gonna like why does it matter if i sit in the front of the back like in hindsight it definitely mattered right and some of it may have been just like the teacher can see if you're like screwing around or whatever uh but also for whatever reason like you're just closer to the information yes and like you you don't feel like you're like hiding behind the rest of the class uh there's an element of like the classes behind you so they can see you if you're screwing around or whatever and so i do wonder how much of like the school

environment you know this idea that like almost every classroom in america for the most part in the traditional school system is built the same way there's a chalkboard or like a board right there's rows of seats and like how much of your academic progress and success is literally determined by like whether you chose to sit in the front or the last row oh geez that i don't i don't know i don't know that like well we might not have a right like a quantitative answer but like it does feel like there's there's something i would imagine that a child who chooses to sit in the front seat might be just more motivated and you know engaged and want to be closer to the teacher and absorb as much as they can so then it would kind of self-select sort of the students

that you know end up doing better because they choose to sit in the front um and then where i the back, you don't, the teacher doesn't have as much control, you know, an oversight over those at the back. It's, um, it also, uh, it brings up this idea. Uh, we recently were talking, uh, about this idea of a founder volatility. So people who start companies, um, if you almost think of a volatility. So, um, if you have very little volatility, it's basically, uh, your behaviors and your outcomes are within kind of a very narrow band. Uh, that's great. If you want to start, let's say a small business. So you want to start a restaurant or you want to start, some local business, which traditionally the goal is just to make money, right? And you want to have

profit and kind of grow the business in a somewhat linear way. In the technology industry, you actually want exponential growth. And so the idea here is that there's a lot of outliers, or you want the outliers. So in order to get outliers, you need volatility. And so actually what happens is that the greater the volatility, the greater the potential outcome. But you can't take someone with very little volatility and get an outlier outcome for the most part. Right. And so what that leads me to believe or think about is like when I was in high school and middle school,

there's always the teacher who would be like, I don't know what the outcome is going to be here, but like you are either going to be super successful or you're going to get in a lot of trouble. But like you always knew who those kids were and they used to be the class clowns, the people who cause problems, you know,

who, uh, uh, screwed around in the hallways or whatever. But if you extrapolate it out, there was a lot of volatility in those people. Some of them ended up not doing anything and some of them ended up being highly successful.

And so it almost feels like the school clamps down to some degree on the people who tend to have that volatility because they want everyone to be quiet, sit in the seat, not be disruptive to the school. Should maybe we be encouraging more of that and saying to ourselves, no, that's actually where some of our best business people or scientists or whoever may come out of that bucket of kids

rather than the other no yeah i think that's a great example and a great um question because as you said if you were to say like if i were to do a comprehensive assessment on you as a child and all your friends and you know everybody has strengths and weaknesses everybody so when it comes to like measuring cognition cognitive intelligence for example you know that's that's a combination score basically, um, of your verbal capacities, your verbal reasoning, verbal concepts. That's, that's one. Um, then we have, um, processing speed, how fast or slow you, you process information. Um, we have visual spatial skills like puzzles, right? Um, we have things like fluid reasoning, how good at you, um, are at taking some novel concepts and just

kind of making order out of just new information abstract information um and so each of you or your profile each of your friends have different strengths and weaknesses and it's about harnessing that and finding out sort of you know like what careers and fields that will be good for what the way you learn best are you a sequential processor or are you able to take in information simultaneously and then just kind of make something novel out of that so understanding how these kids learn understanding then how also their behavior sort of shapes you know if in chunk if you're learning chunks is better um those are things that a good psychological assessment could help you understand and figure out what fit then of a club of a school should benefit you would benefit

you yeah it's fascinating to think about and we've been talking about school from a traditional sense of kids go there's teachers the whole nine years over the last two and a half years there's been some big changes in schools so uh obviously there was the school shutdowns where kids couldn't go to school they were doing zoom or whatever uh i've seen screenshots on the internet where like kids were literally on their laptops in their bed while the teacher's teaching or whatever right which are not in school not logging in and missing a whole year of school and so like i guess just like let's start there with just the school shutdowns which largely seem to be over now but there are six months to some schools 18 months yeah where kids were not physically going to the

school like what are we seeing now or how are you thinking about that from a development standpoint yeah as you know as we said before we're beating a dead horse but the school is a place where you know it's a provisor routine you wake up in the morning eat your breakfast and then you go to school schools have that sense give students or children that sense of routine predictability and stability it also is a place where students would get some of their extra social services if needed right or free lunches sometimes you know if you qualified for that it was the place where you could identify teachers could identify for example if there's abuse going on in the in the home so when you have um all these shutdowns and you have students not doing that less face-to-face time

with their peers not like walking to class to class you know more sedentary lifestyle you know now you know we're seeing you know this youth mental health crisis that we talked about um and it's just been it's been devastating I'm glad that schools have reopened and then I know and then there was a portion when it did reopen but then when there was an exposure in the class and you had to shut that or the people who are exposed for like 14 days stay home it's just so much instability and unpredictability so one you know 15 days you're at home then back in the school again and then for the poor parents who you know had to work and if you had kids under five during the pandemic uh you know having to work and take care of you it was just a special place in hell

yes it's uh if you ever talk to like your grandparents or we're fortunate to talk to your great grandparents and like the quintessential, uh, like back during the war, right. I feel like, you know, 20, 30, 40 years from now, people would be like back during the pandemic and the kids would be like, shut up. But it is, it was very traumatic for parents. I was pregnant in the pandemic. I had the baby in the pandemic and worked and had another way. It's yeah. And it's just a whole different experience, right? Yeah. Different experience. The, the other piece of this is, um, when kids went back into the classroom and still to, to this, uh, um, uh, to this day, many schools still require kids to wear masks in the school. And so at first I was

like, well, you know, whatever the local ordinances are or whatever, like, okay, schools are just going to repeat that. But then I started to read about some of this and they were like, no, like a huge piece of learning to communicate with folks is like the facial expressions and seeing someone's mouth as they talk and like all these things if you're a kid and you're seven years old and two years of the seven years you've been alive you haven't seen people's mouths like there could be development problems there right and so again i don't think we have all the information to kind of really understand this yeah but how big of a problem or how like alarm should parents be that hey your kid went to school for you know years at this point literally with something over their

face and so did all their classmates and their teachers and like is that something to worry about yeah i know i know as you say we don't have all the answers i'm not a medical doctor so i can't really talk about like the breathing or the respiratory um effects of wearing a mask for two years for kids two and above um but you know it does you know on the outset it feels like you know you're not seeing the formation of the mouth the movement if you're learning to speak and i know there it there has been some increase in speech and language services since the pandemic They haven't directly related it yet to the masks. And I know there's also research to show that schools that did require some of the mask mandates were able to stay open a bit longer.

But and again, you know, as a parent, you know, and with a young child of two, having, you know, having him not see his teacher's mouth and his. I mean, I guess you can see the eyes and you can see smiles, but it's not the same. And we don't know. We just don't know. we have to, we have to better understand that as our, as our, as our field faces this, this new sort of issue. Yeah. And to me, we can't go back and change the past, right? It is what it is. It happened. Whether you agree with it or not, that that's where we are. I think the bigger question is if this now becomes a, a crutch from a response standpoint to future issues, right? We've seen there is a monkey pox, right? That's gone. And all of a sudden you see some states

being like oh state of emergency yeah and it just feels like once you've kind of breached it it's just like let's go back to that thing because this is the playbook like something happens we go state of emergency we do this and if the part of the response be is hey everyone in school put on masks and then it's just like every year right kids are putting on masks right now all of a sudden like the long-term impact of this could be very very important to understand yeah absolutely and i think you were highlighting sort of a very reactionary response a response sort of based out of fear. And we know when we respond to something, when we're overwhelmed or based out of fear, our thinking gets very narrowed and we're not able to think, you know, flexibly and have a

response to that really requires what, you know, you can't assess the problem as good as you can if you're, if you're reacting out of fear. And so I think, you know, it's a time for, for, you know, leaders to come together and think about what are the concerns here? How can, if this continues in a long-term what should you know the response be thinking um you know more so about children's development long-term going through this absolutely as we think about that development um i know that you've done some work on like children's exposure to violence in the united states um and violence can encompass a lot of things obviously domestic uh violence there's um hey i was at a place where i saw violence occur you know in my community yeah uh unfortunately there's violence at school

there's school shootings things like that yeah um help me understand a little bit better in terms of like some of the research that you've done there and like what are we learning about children's exposure to violence in the u.s uh in light of their kind of cognitive development oh wow yeah they're you know i think two-thirds of children um witness um violence in the u.s yeah growing up and um well worldwide 70 of people experience something traumatic fortunately only about 15 10%, I'm sorry, 15 to 20% going to develop PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. So yeah, I've done some work in the trauma field, child and family traumatic stress. And like you said, a traumatic event could be something where, you know, you witness the loss of life of someone, or it could

be a domestic violence incident or school shootings, suicide. And so trauma is, so it's this external sort of injury, you know, it's a Greek word for injury, trauma. Um, and it sort of leaves the person, um, unable to cope, overwhelmed, helplessness, horror. Um, um, but fortune, and then there are certain signs and symptoms. Would it be helpful to share some of them? Okay. So, um, with the traumatic experience, some of the symptoms that we see is a lot of hyper arousal. So exaggerated startle, if you hear like a noise, you immediately kind of like you're hyper aroused you startle easily um we have some of the re-experiencing symptoms like the nightmares and the flashbacks and intrusive thoughts and memories and then you have the

negative alterations in cognition and mood so you'll see uh here are things like the world is a bad place all people are scary i can't trust other people i can't trust police um and then you have the obviously some some changes in mood so um depression uh isolation feeling unable to feel positive feelings um and then you have the hall one of the hallmarks of trauma is this avoidance piece so not wanting to see or remember or hear things related to the traumatic incident not wanting to go by you know if the school for example there's big avoidance cognitively and in person like not wanting to physically see so you have those symptoms um that that that constitutes sort of um the clinical symptoms of ptsd of post-traumatic stress disorder and again not

everybody who goes through a traumatic event will end up with um ptsd but the earlier you can identify these signs and symptoms um the better and match them with evidence-based treatments that work um the better we can put kids back on the path to recovery and normal developmental trajectory what are some of the evidence-based treatments that uh kids can go through that i don't know if it reverses or maybe just kind of dulls the effects of yeah absolutely great question so so for for say a kid was exposed so there's different phases of the trauma exposure So there's the acute phase like that's the on scene sort of response when you see police show up. And then there is a phase in between into between that event up to 30 days.

We call that peritraumatic phase. And then you have the longer term phase a month and after. And so, you know, having trained at the Yale Child Study Center at the Yale Center for Trauma Traumatic Stress and Recovery, they developed a treatment for that peritraumatic phase, for example. So right after an event and then the days and the weeks leading afterwards, that actually children who go through that are 65 percent less likely to meet criteria for PTSD. So it's preventing the onset of PTSD. So that treatment is called the Child and Family Traumatic Stress Intervention, also known as CFTSI. But say it's been a longer time, like six months and out years. The other intervention for that, the evidence based treatment that children can get is called Trauma Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, TF-CBT.

Those two are great evidence-based treatments for these specific periods after the traumatic event. And then the 30 days right after, like, what is going on in that program or that intervention? Yeah. So, you know, if you think about the traumatic dysregulation, right, those symptoms that I hadn't explained, kind of repeating the experience of sense of loss of control. So it's not only the experience of the traumatic event, right, that's traumatic, but it's your symptoms, your feeling personally out of control, you know, your body, your mind, the way you think, the feelings. that intervention aims for is for children ages 7 to 18 the aim is to help have a caregiver a supportive caregiver or parent through it's a family strengthening approach it's basically to help turn the volume down on some of those symptoms identify the first identify those

symptoms actually which ones are the most distressing turn the volume down on it and help the caregiver and the child communicate better about the experience you don't go through actually the details of the event you don't have to relive and talk about and debrief what happened but really it's how to help them sort of turn the volume down on those most distressing symptoms. you How much of this is only addressable after the fact? So let's go to the extreme and say a school shooting, for example, versus in the military where PTSD is quite prevalent. They tend to do, whether intentionally or not, a ton of what I'll call mental conditioning.

that's a very unscientific uh term uh of uh during basic training and all these things like they put people in hard situations they seem to attempt to increase the mental toughness and all this stuff now a school shooting is not a sense of like hey my kids should have went and played sports and like develop mental toughness right that there's a super traumatic event that seems to be an outlier um which uh is more akin frankly to uh combat or something like that but then there's a whole bunch of stuff that doesn't seem as extreme but still uh is traumatic or provides stress and so is there an ability for parents to uh hope for the best right and say hey i hope my kid never deals with any sort of traumatic event or anything but they can do things to increase

whether it's like the mental toughness uh or uh do things to help them be prepared in case they ever do encounter one of these situations or is really the only thing that we know so far that works is like evidence-based treatments after the fact and that's where we can have some impact okay so you're asking if there's anything to do to prepare the child's functioning um in the event of such a traumatic so like in the in the most layman's way to think about it right there are parents who are like i'm gonna make my kid do hard shit because like the world is hard out there right and like uh learning that lesson today in this like somewhat controlled environment is much better than like, let me coddle them

and then send them off into the world and like they get punched in the face, you know, metaphorically by like the world. Do we know, like if people are put into those situations before a traumatic event, do they tend to have more resilience and less of the PTSD kind of impact afterwards? Or is it really just this like kind of 30,

you know, 30 or six month? Yeah, no, it's definitely not the 30 days after um thing that can that sets apart that can help uh recover someone recover from ptsd you know we look at um previous functioning right prior to an event happening and their sort of developmental um uh snapshot of their developmental sort of status like we want to know kind of what what their life was like prior to this event so we can know kind of you know what was what was their normative functioning and how is it then disturbed or distressed after the traumatic event so you know if your child was you know you had a stable um school life you had a

caregiver who you could rely upon they were engaged in extracurricular activities that they felt um they felt masterful um that they you know they they were doing well in school already academically all these things and then after the event if you have then a supportive caregiver to help the child that most times they'll be they'll be all right so it's not about what you can really do to prepare i think i think what you're touching upon though is that when a traumatic events happen their world is sort of shaken and their thinking gets a little bit shaken as well right they're thinking kind of then they start to over accommodate their thinking to like oh my gosh like the world is unsafe and very scary and so it's kind of helping them get back to a more

realistic and helpful statement if their world is safe you want to remind them that the world is safe i it's um it's this weird conversation in society today because i think that uh it gets politicized but if you kind of strip away all the emotional components and the politicalization of it uh to some degree there is this undertone where a large portion of society feels like oh kids today are coddled and uh whether it's in the school system or by their parents or whatever um and there's like less mental toughness right now i say that from the sense of i grew up in a family with five boys and like a lot of disagreements got settled with our fists right and so like naturally that's a very different environment um but if you just kind of revert to the mean right

it's like you don't want a society where everyone is coddled and like basically somebody says you know mean words to you and your whole life gets derailed uh but you also don't want you know i don't know like uh ancient rome warriors where everyone's walking around ready to like kill each other right so like there's some middle ground that i think as a society we're like cool we want people to have some degree of uh resilience and kind of mental toughness but also we want to be very cognizant of the fact that like the kid who is sitting in a classroom all of a sudden gunshots go off and somebody comes to the school start shooting like they are going to have to deal with shit right and not only the kids like the parents probably as well and so when we think

about this it feels again it gets politicized and so it gets over rotated on both sides but you know a common theme of our conversation today just feels like it's like the moderation it's like no listen you you can uh in some ways be uh i heard the phrase recently uh demanding but supportive and so you want to have the the demanding aspect of like hey there is a real world and you want to be prepared for it but also don't forget the supportive part yeah it's like an authoritative parent you know you have the authoritarian who's a very demanding but the authoritative i'm sorry is one who you do have expectations but they're also very warm at the same time so you're kind of giving that both balanced authoritative parent yes versus authoritarian interesting

explain this more about uh an authoritative parent yeah you know you're just very warm you're you're very you're loving you have an attachment with your child but you also have expectations as well and you're firm and consistent in the rules of the family and the consequences you don't you're not overly permissive which is the opposite of authoritarian just the kind of laissez-faire you can do whatever you want kind of yeah if you want a car i'll buy you one kind of thing um so the authoritative is the balanced um one that's we found is linked to better outcomes for kids yeah so it has this element of like there's an expectation and to some degree discipline or something is kind of laced into that,

but also you're still the parent and you still care about the kids. Yes. Yeah. It's very similar to management. I'm sure there's a term in management, right? Yes. What is the term?

Yes, I guess if you're a good boss, then you make a good parent, hopefully. Identity is another thing that you've spent a lot of time looking at. You have a very unique background in that you are Jamaican and Chinese descent. um how does identity play into a child's uh kind of cognitive development and like is that something that the parent kind of dictates to the kid like you are x and then they internalize it it's a

great question or is it something that they just like so great question implicitly get yeah there's so many ways to go with this okay um well to answer the latter question about uh does parents play a role into a kid's identity um i'm thinking about um james marcia's theory on identity development which talks a little which uses two sort of constructs on exploration and commitment and when you cross the two you get four outcomes so i'm thinking of uh you said there like if a parent said like hey like we're you know italian or something this is the this is the cultural identity you need to adhere to and so you as a kid then to just accept that um you would be called in that's in that um marcia's um four outcomes you would be what's called uh in the foreclosed

identity so you didn't want you didn't do any extra exploration you're already committed to this italian identity um and then if you but if you did like high exploration so you're high you know you looked around a little bit about we've talked about careers for example right you looked around um and then you committed to this highly you would be what's called um the achieved sort of integrated identity however there's another identity status that could be very diffuse like you you haven't committed to anything and you haven't done an exploration you kind of just kind of aimlessly there in society you don't really have meaningful friendships you know you're easily swayed by different things you don't really have a sense of self um and then

and then the third the fourth and final one um is identity moratorium which is you um haven't committed yet to anything but you're still searching you're searching searching a lot so there's four types of sort of identity statuses on somebody's identity development journey based on exploration and commitment um and then forgetting the first part of your question so like just take that as an example uh there's four of these identity buckets uh is any of them better than the others like is there like a design like hey we want kids to end up in bucket four or yeah bucket four you know the one about high high um exploration and high commitment you know you kind of feel like this integrated and okay i did some you know research

i looked around um i didn't just kind of take my parents word for it type of thing can i earned it yeah like i earned it i i explored things and i feel comfortable with this final resolution kind of thing um it was probably more comfortable in my decision and it's an informed decision like i made an informed decision i didn't just like sort of take what was like given to me um and then you know of course some can be more anxiety provoking than others so like if you're in a state of moratorium when you're searching on you probably feel some level of anxiety like looking for who you are um so then i guess if you then move into the um achieved identity you feel a little bit more bit more just some more relief yeah um what's fascinating about this is um i can think of two

different aspects of like identity right so like let's take religion and maybe ethnicity yeah and to me uh my family's italian right so big italian family like there's all of every single thing that as a generalization pretty much like well it's just and by the way every other large italian family for the most part like yeah they eat a lot of pasta they get pretty loud right like all these things but what's fascinating about it is uh you're told as a kid like you know we're italian but it's not like hey when we get in a disagreement everyone raised their voices right or uh that is almost like a learned behavior to some degree and every single other person i knew that was italian i would go to their house it was the same thing like it wasn't a it wasn't

a thing where i was like oh that's weird like it was like yeah of course it's how families operate and you only notice it once then you would go to a friend's house who's not italian you're like everyone's so quiet around here so like to me that's like almost like uh uh you're in an environment you pick up certain things and you know i have experience uh with an italian family but if you went to an irish family or you went to you know a chinese family or whatever like there's certain things culturally that that are are unique to that culture they pick up religion feels much more like you are told things where uh i have friends who are muslims jews christians the whole gamut none of their parents were ever like you should go out in the world

and explore all these other religions right like that was not a thing it was like we are x you will follow x rules like whatever the religion was uh and it feels much more kind of authoritative like top down yeah i'm going to take you on sunday to church right or i'm going to take you to the synagogue or whatever like is there different parts of an identity that have these different interactions or is that just like us trying to make sense of the world that maybe we grew up in or or experienced when you say interactions what do you mean like explicit like like we are x religion and we've got and as x religion we do a b and c yes the other is more implicit because no one sits you down and is like we do a b and c it's just you kind of like learn the behavior a

little bit right as a child does it matter which one or is it actually better to get both types of learning okay well i'm thinking of with with religion for example like you're right like our parents i mean my parents didn't give me any choice either being catholic um but they're like yeah you know what you're the jewish people you should go hang out with them right yeah and i think it's a decision that i think that as parents they have that authority to make um now when you get older at least they've given you that experience in education that you can choose then okay do i want to still continue this because you are an adult um but i think if you didn't have that because we i'm thinking from just some of the the psychological benefits that people who are

religious and spiritual um can can you know can get out of um kind of learning about duty you know caring for the vulnerable um and i have this thing with psychology i feel like it's divorced its self if you think of the word psychology the study of the soul the spirit and in an effort to i think be more like hard science physics scientifics it's really tried to to separate itself from some things that are a little bit more like theistic. Um, but when you're looking at who we're studying, like the human experience and the fact that many people in the world are a religious, you know, or belong to a practicing religion, um, we are missing a big part of the picture with that. All right. I have one big last topic to talk about. This is a huge

open secret, which is whenever I sit down with other couples, my wife and I, uh, and we are at dinner or at lunch or, or, uh, we're hanging out with them, whatever the number one topic that everyone always talks about, but no one wants to admit publicly is they're all deathly afraid of raising kids that are spoiled. And this is everything from friends who, uh, they are teachers to super wealthy, to immigrants, to people who are born in America. I mean, just like across the board, it seems like it is a deep seated fear of parents where they say to themselves, my child is going to have a different childhood than I had. That's almost every parent's dream, right? Is I want my kid to live a better life than I had, or I want my kid to be happier than I had, or have

things that I didn't have, whatever. And there are the extreme examples, right? I'll use a celebrity in Jay-Z, right? And I think he's openly talked about it. He has kids now and he's like, my kids are living a little bit differently than I did. And that's a good thing. He accomplished that as a parent. But then also that same story is very true, right? I have a lot of friends who are immigrants and they're like, look, like my, I was literally born in another country and I came here, my kid already just being born in the United States. I feel like they have a leg up and they're gonna have this different experience what can parents do to increase the probability not guarantee but increase the probability that their kids don't end up spoiled if they just are

having a different childhood like what do you see there from a development standpoint uh and an environment standpoint that's a great question and i think the way to answer it is to sort of understand what you think your friends mean by spoiled what do you think they mean by like i don't want to spoil my kid when they say spoil every single one of them is uh is different obviously um but if i had to in the most crude way outline what they mean they don't want their kid to be fucked up right like and i think what the fear again people just naturally go to the extreme is uh you see a an actor or an actress's kid they're you know this young kid and they become a teenager and next thing you know you read about them in like tmz because they're addicted

to drugs or, you know, like the very, very extreme. I don't think that's necessarily they're like, oh my God, I'm so worried that my kid's going to grow up like in the spotlight because many people aren't public figures or anything. They're more so worried about like, will my kid work hard? Will my kid actually understand the importance of learning? Will they, you know, be ambitious? Like all these things that I think society generally puts value on how do they make sure that their kid gets those instead is it doesn't just become kind of a you know shithead kid who's like oh you know my parents will take care of me yeah so it sounds like you know being spoiled and and it's true i was thinking about that i was thinking about the

one the parents that give their kids anything that they ask for at any time they don't expect much of them it's the low sort of expectations to give back to their family or to give back to society so you know you i think to prevent that spoiled uh ness is to make sure that they have you know those opportunities to to to contribute to to the society to their family because otherwise when you you know you just give them things give them things you have no expectation of them to do anything to give back um i think you can then quickly get to that route that you painted so it's almost like uh setting the expectation setting may be the single most important thing of uh making sure that the kid understands what those are and also almost holding them accountable

to some degree to try to meet the expectations yeah holding them accountable getting them involved in volunteering or just what they do for you know chores at at home sometimes kids grow up with no chores because you know you resented doing that um as a kid it's important not to do anything like reactively like oh you know to be conscious and think about the your parenting sort of strategy and your expectations for your kids not as just as a reaction to what i don't want to do as you know as i had experienced growing up i think every parent would be the world's best parent if their kid didn't have to make their bed right like that is the bane of many kids existence like i gotta make my bed um and then i guess as a part of that like

my dad used to say this all to me he wouldn't say directly to me but he would say it in front of me to people is he would always say uh my kids don't need another friend they need a parent and it sounds very similar to what you're saying in terms of there's expectations this like authoritative parent uh this like um almost demanding but supportive exactly type thing fits very similar and kind of weaves itself together where the parent should be the parent and if you do that with any degree of success like your kid should be okay yeah yeah it should be okay i mean like you said it's that balance of having having expectations you know you being in control at a certain you know for certain things um and then but you're also warm supportive

listener you know you're there for them to hear things out if something's going awry um you're just not and it's just it's that it's just not being that extreme sort of helicopter I'm going to control everything you do because you know you have to ask yourself what what is driving that anxiety and fear is it because you know you don't want anything bad to happen to them well you know you have to prepare them that bad things will happen right bad things can happen to good people good things happen to bad people bad people do good things bad people do bad things you know there's just as long as they're not like having sort of an you're trying to control their whole world um and you know sort of shelter them from every sort of um possible thing that could imagine

they're not going to learn the skills to manage it when it does happen and the world is going to be shattered yeah it um it feels uh scary i think the parents to kind of put their kid out in the world yeah time is going to happen yes can't slow down time yes all right my my last question for you is you are a trained child psychologist or a clinical psychologist. You have two kids. What do you do with your kids that may surprise people or something that you do with your kids that you feel is really important that if you could tell all of your friends who had kids, like, hey, this is the thing I feel like is so important. Okay. Great question. And I will, Well, yeah, I, you know, a lot of the questions we talked about today was how to set our kids up for success, how to ensure optimal cognitive development across domains and, you know, you know, how to set that up with, you know, their activities or with their friends.

How do we, you know, provide enough to set them in to provide enough to pay for like the best education that they can have? and you know as a working parent too you know and as well thinking about all those questions that you asked me having worries and concerns about those things when I really what I really think parents um you know what I do with my kids or what also helps me is to really play with them let's sit on the carpet and play with them and just be with them be with them play with them you know there's all that good oxytocin is flowing through everybody that bonding and you know it takes you away from the worries of you know making money or being the best you know researcher you can be and you know they're also getting a lot of learning opportunities from

you as that again attentive nurturing supportive caregivers just to play to play play play you know peekaboo hide and seek sing be silly have a balutify pillify jump on the couch for a little bit, you know, play with them. That's it. Yeah. It's, uh, uh, no matter how much we analyze all of this, it always goes back to the simplest, the basics, right? Like literally just love your kid and hang out with them, but not be their friend. Exactly. Um, where can we send people to find you on the internet or find some of your research? Uh, if somebody wants to follow up, uh, based on some of the stuff we talked about today. Um, I think the only social media platform I have is Twitter. I came off of Instagram and Facebook. So I'm at Dr. Holmichasek and I have a practice

website, khmpsychology.com. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for your time today. I know that a lot of people are really looking forward to this and we'll definitely have to have you back in the future. Thank you. It was great being here, Anthony. Thanks for having me.