Yale child study center new york8/11/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() I mean, truly, it’s a question for any intimate relationship. How do you get that balance right, of showing your kids that you’re going to protect them, while also helping them learn to tolerate discomfort? And if you have adults telling you, “Hey, don't do this, you could get hurt, don't do this other thing.” You kind of have this, you know, you learn boundaries without being hurt by them.īut if you have adults telling you you can do anything you want, but it's gonna hurt, you do learn kind of where the real boundaries are but through pain, you're gonna go, you know, can you go off a 50 foot cliff? Can you go off a 60 foot cliff? Can you go off an 80 foot cliff? What does that feel like? And if I go 10 more feet, at what point is it breaking bones?Īfraid of nothing, but never feeling safe… I’ve thought back on that a lot.Įspecially as a parent. But I had never really kind of tied it to this idea that as a child when you're growing up, and this is how she sort of explained it to me, you know, you're gonna poke at the edges of things. Mike: Yeah, and I always just assumed it was, you know, my punk rock culture, uh, just having zero faith in humanity, right? Which is, I think, a reasonable stance to take. She was like, “Well, so it sounds like you're not really afraid of much of anything, but you never feel safe.” I have always kind of felt like, at some point the other shoe was gonna drop, right? Like that something was gonna go wrong or that things weren't gonna work out. As I was kind of describing my upbringing to her, you know, and sort of some of the contemporary manifestations of it. Yes.Īnna: I remember when we were sitting on my deck and the sun was setting and my memory of our conversation about the way your teenage years… we were talking about skate punk culture, and you were describing what it was like to come of age in that scene, and you described something a therapist said to you about it. He had an intellectual framework for being a lazy parent. So he had an intellectual framework for letting you figure stuff out on your own. I'd go jump on my bike and bike away and go wherever for the day and they'd have no idea where I was, and my parents were a little more extreme in that regard in that my dad was a research psychologist and behavioral psychologist at Montana State University and really believed in, what do you call it, natural consequences, right? Like that sort of learning where you learn by doing.Īnna: Interesting. But that behavior, a penchant for risk, started way, way younger. You know, they would drive us to skateboard contests, which in Montana is not a small undertaking. Mike: Well, nowhere, I mean, I would say nowhere nearby, but they were really supportive. Literally the first time and then, you know, just jumped up and was like, “Fuck yeah, I gotta do that again.” You know? I went down a hill and fell and scraped both my knees and my elbows and then, you know, I mean it was a real wipe out. Mike: I remember literally the first time I stepped on a skateboard. He moved to the Bay Area initially with his punk band, and before that, there was skateboarding. He’s always had a healthy skepticism of authority. He was not hovered over as a kid which suited his personality. I was riffing on some version of that with some neighbors on my deck in Berkeley a few months back and one of them, Mike Morasky, described growing up in the 70s in Montana. Many of us are questioning how to support our kids through their fears while also pushing them when they need it. I have two young kids and I also hear about this in conversations with other parents – in disrupted family routines, battles over going to school, or access to social media. We heard about this in our recent call-in series about mental health, called Hold On. (end of opening theme for Death, Sex & Money)ġ in 11 American children and adolescents has an anxiety disorder, a number that’s been increasing over the last 20 years. The show from WNYC about the things we think about a lot… ![]() Lebowitz: One message that I would want any parent of an anxious child to know is that, in all of mental health, in all of psychiatry and psychology, there is no problem more treatable than anxiety. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |