A mom in the tech industry wrote me this email: “Everywhere I go in Silicon Valley I see kids and adults less resilient.  In my workplace, we are constantly tangled up with issues that are kid stuff in adult clothing—who said what to whom, who likes and doesn’t like whom, who hurt who’s feelings.  These folks are 35-year-old children who can’t stand up for themselves, or when they do, they overreact.  To me, this is the other pandemic in our society.

“Sorry for venting, but where is the resilience?  Sure, if someone makes a racial or gender attack, we must come together to say No to that, but most of the stuff going on is not really about social justice—it’s just…stuff.  I think for thirty years we’ve experimented on kids in a lot of ways but lost some principles of healthy childhood.  We can’t have mature adults unless we raise them to be resilient—or do you disagree?”

 

I agree.   I think most parents, educators, and policymakers today would agree, as well.

 

What People Like You Are Saying

 

I was able to talk with this executive by phone.  “The problem,” she said, “at least in my opinion, is that most other things—comfort, material things, devices, an easy childhood—are bigger American priorities than resilience.  This creates a hole inside our children or, like I said before, a widespread and invisible virus that is harmful to kids and then the larger culture.”

In the first essay in this Resilience series, I looked at how a culture of fear constancy can negatively affect resilience-development in our children.  In the second essay, I looked at the science of resilience, including a nature-based approach to the resilience spectrum.  These previous essays are available on www.gurianinstitute.com.  In this third essay,  I will look at how we can nurture resilience in the context of a child’s psychological immune system.  This third essay, like the others, is longer than usual for blogs because I want to include analysis in the first half, then a number of useful tools in the second.  All of these essays are excerpted from my new book slated for publication next year.

People like the executive and perhaps like you are talking about the resilience a lot these days.  Most questions our Wonder of Parenting podcast receives deal with resilience-building in some way (www.wonderofparenting.com).  To my own website and the Gurian Institute’s websites similar questions and comments come almost daily.

“I am not exactly sure how to give my daughter ‘grit’,” a dad of a six-year-old, a middle school teacher wrote recently.  “I want her to have a voice, but I don’t want her to just whine and get what she wants.”

“I think my son has life too easy,” a mom of two children wrote to the podcast.  “He has everything he needs and every device he wants, but when I try to get him to do hard work he grumbles or refuses.  He just has no work ethic.”

A grandmother wrote about her grandchildren.  “They don’t hand in their homework, their grades are subpar, it’s sad.  I want to tell them, ‘Your parents have sacrificed a lot so you can have it easier than they did.  You are not using the gifts they gave you.’  But I don’t say anything.  It hurts me to see them like they are.”

A mom of three, who is a psychologist by profession, wrote:   “I think there is a crisis in resilience in children that these last two years have made worse, but this crisis began before Covid lock downs.  I have been seeing patients for 34 years, and I’ve seen it building throughout my career.”

 

Are We in a Resilience Crisis?

 

In the corporate executive’s comments, is the reference to addiction hyperbole?  While addiction to a substance can try to fill a hole in the psyche, and addiction is a disease that can kill, does lack of resilience fit this model?  Can it kill someone?  And the pandemic/virus metaphor:  given what we’ve faced from Covid 19 for two years, do we want to say that trends like coddling or “staying immature until 35” constitute a disease-level event?

Dramatic language might be hyperbolic, but when we see it against the background of immune system development, I think some of the hyperbole disappears.  The most recent Cigna Resilience study (a large and trustworthy research point), published in 2020 (https://cignaresilience.com.uploads.2020) provides evidence of significant risk:   “What we found was that resilience is at risk for 60 percent of Americans surveyed.  And low resilience has real consequences — it leads to poor performance in school and at work, the potential to be less healthy, as well as a higher likelihood of turnover and lower job satisfaction in the workplace.”

That 60% is a high number our culture must grapple with.  Our children and our adults are not as resilient as they can be.  More studies and resources on child resilience are here:

Angela Duckworth, Grit (2017)

Jean Twenge, Igen, (2018)

Leonard Sax, The Collapse of Parenting (2017).

Michael Gurian, Saving Our Sons and The Minds of Girls (2017 and 2018)

Dudek, Katarzyna A., et.al., “Neurobiology of Resilience in Depression,” August 2019, https://doi.org/10.1111/ejn.14547.

Richard Friedman, M.D. New York Times, May 4, 2021, “You Might Be Depressed Now, but Don’t Underestimate Your Resilience.” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/04/opinion/covid-brain-mental-health.html.

 

Resilience Building a Few Decades Ago

 

The executive referred to her own childhood as a time when resilience building was a sacrosanct parental duty.  Tim Wright, co-host of our podcast, remembers:  “On weekends, our parents made sure we ate breakfast, then they told us to go  out and play.  ‘Just be home for dinner’, they said, and off we went.  They made us get out of messes and work through things with real people ourselves.  They didn’t want us to come to them unless we got pretty badly injured.  We had no choice but to develop resilience.”

Tim and I both remember childhoods in which there was less intervention by parents.  While many mistakes were made in the past, parental messaging to children often involved the implicit nurture of resilience in comments such as, “Go work it out,” “you’re fine,” “you’ll figure it out,” “don’t come crying to me,” “you’re not done till you’re done,” “do it yourself, don’t whine for help,” “be aggressive, take the knocks, get back up again, that’s how you succeed.”

These sound harsh now, don’t they?  I hope we can all agree that when a child is depressed, injured, or ill we must come to their physical and social-emotional aid; the harshness won’t be helpful.  But in the majority of cases, the harshness might not be what we think.  Let’s go deeper into the messages to study how parenting has changed in a few decades, especially as regards prioritizing resilience development over constant attention to emotional detail.

“Go work it out.”  In the past, the child was trusted by the adult to develop grit and independence.   Life was something of a mess, parents knew, a mess each person had to journey through to gather strength.  “Go work it out” assumed that journey.  Today, isn’t a parent who uses this phrase seen as the defective?   In today’s parenting sphere, aren’t parents supposed to be super-involved with kids to help them work things out so they don’t fail?

“You’ll figure it out.”  This used to mean, “My child is not inherently fragile.”  And it meant, “Children need to be empowered via a push toward independence by which they will access their own internal assets.”  Today, isn’t child-fragility assumed?  Isn’t “you’ll figure it out,” like “go work it out,” considered rejection of the child, a potential abandonment of a child’s emotional life?

“Don’t come crying to me.”  This one no doubt got overused in the past, but wasn’t it also a way to make sure our children problem-solved on their own?  Didn’t it compel them to look at how to self-regulate their emotions without need of the parent?   Today, though, isn’t it seen as abusive?  Or if not that, then as a devaluing of the child’s feelings, a rejection of the child’s core-self, or a form of emotion-shaming?

Similar to “don’t come crying to me,” “it’s okay, you’re fine” used to distract the child from everyday pains and issues, a redirection, a milder version of the more stark “don’t come crying to me.”  It compelled the child to reconsider whether to whine and complain more, or push hard to be heard in a more effective way.  Parents of the past thought it was empowering for a child teetering on the edge of feeling weakened or confused to hear a parent or leader say, “it’s okay, you’re fine.”  But now, isn’t the gold standard of child development the idea that parents, teachers, and other adults should respond first and foremost to what a child is feeling?  In this context, “you’re fine” is seen, like some of the other comments, as child negligence.

“You’re not done till you’re done.”  In my counseling practice, I’ve noticed how wistful this statement feels to many parents today.  When children don’t finish important tasks like chores or schoolwork, they may also complain enough to parents that the parents are simply worn down from all the emotion.  A mom told me about her son:  “He says I’m being too hard on him, so I back off.”  A dad about his daughter:  “I’m divorced and I don’t want to lose her friendship, so I guess I just let her run the show.”   We’ve all likely been situations like these, but doesn’t every parent, at an inchoate level, know this truth:  each time a child does not complete an important task, a bit of resilience is left undeveloped?

“Stop whining, do it yourself.”  In some cases–e.g., if a child has a disability–the child needs help and whining might be a way to tell us that.  But in many more cases, whining is unhealthy.  Yet we worry that if we are unresponsiveness, we might be seen as not giving our kids enough encouragement, or not “hearing” our child’s feelings, or impeding our children in their development of their “voice.”

Finally, the multi-faceted “be aggressive, take the knocks, get back up again, that’s how you’ll succeed”:  isn’t aggressive now considered the same thing as violence, thus verboten?   And to some extent, don’t we now hope our children will succeed by “doing what they want to do” rather than by experiencing the constant pain of things not coming easily?

 

Should the Parent also Be the Therapist?

 

When a child is anxious, depressed, disabled, or otherwise distressed, we must focus on the hidden emotional life of that child.  We are wise to ask our children what they are feeling.  As we help them sort through emotions, we teach them to express their feelings in healthy empowerment.  This is what therapists do and parents are wise to try to imitate the therapeutic process at various times.  But on a daily basis, outside the bounds of significant emotional issue, isn’t there a downside to focusing constantly on feelings in our children to the detriment of other important foci?

In this essay and the next I will argue that there is.  The argument is counter-cultural enough that I want to start by stating it clearly (I can get misunderstood and its messenger considered an ogre!)  The argument:  While we should make our homes safe spaces, and while we should protect children from real harm, parental intervention in a child’s feeling-life (after the early childhood years) is not generally essential for the good of the child when that insertion and intervention effaces resilience development. 

That’s a mouthful, I know.

I am focusing here on different roles for therapist and parent.  The therapist is specifically tasked with helping a person explore emotional life in a safe space.  Parents, on the other hand (for the most part) are tasked with structurally nurturing children in a somewhat unsafe world, in the midst of life’s vagaries, with some attention to the restless variety of emotional life, but not complete attention to it like a therapist must have.  Parents nurture self-trust in children differently than therapists.  Self-trust is what will allow the child to survive and thrive later in adulthood without parental protection.

Please know:  I have seen therapy clients for 32 years and I am a parent of two grown daughters.  As I make my argument, you will not hear disrespect for either therapist or parent in it; both roles are crucial for child health.  But their core difference needs our attention.  Parents care about the child’s emotional life, of course, but the parent must also care about actions and thoughts that lead directly to character development.  In this way, the parent is not the temporary therapist but a permanent person in the child’s life teaching self-reliance through a complex, longitudinal prism.

 

Social Trends Parenting

 

Because our prism is so complex, we parents become susceptible to social trends.  Every parent has been susceptible, including me.  In Nurture the Nature (2007), I introduced the term “Social Trends Parenting” to mirror the post-modern phenomenon in which an expert or a small group of experts present reasons for altering a parenting trend that the media accept and then promote.  The Einstein math and music-in-the-womb trends are famous examples of social trends parenting.   Another trend emerged about twenty years ago that told parents that they are “safe objects” to their little children’s emotions (which they are) but then added:  it is important your children express all their feelings, so it’s okay if they hit you during a tantrum.  Hitting another human being should never be condoned, but the trend took hold and now parents are trying to dial back that trend.

Another social trend, quite subtle, positioned children’s emotions to lead family systems.  This is what the parents in the quotes above were hinting at, an inversion of family authority and structure that would, we were told by certain experts, “empower” our children.  Kids would become successful and respectable adults even if they treated their parents and other adults, especially in tween and teen years, with disrespect.  This is simply not true.  Children gain and give respect in adulthood in large part by practicing respect in childhood.  Arrogance in childhood, especially in practice against parents who have earned respect, leads to weakness and insecurity during adulthood.  But some parents had abused their authority in the past, so the social trend took over, and parents often worry that insisting on respect from their children will damage the child’s development of voice and “power.”

Social trends in parenting grab us and succeed by pulling at our heart strings.  Trend promoters tell us that our child will suffer emotional trauma and deficiency if we do not follow the trend.   Since all of us can potentially remember times in our childhoods when our parents “didn’t fully support us,” “didn’t care how we felt,” “bulldozed our feelings,” we go with new trend to become parents who do care about their children’s feelings.  Because we want to protect our child’s emotional life, and avoid guilt and shame if we don’t, we follow the trend.

The past was no golden age, and many new social trends in parenting have been essential to human progress:  teaching children tolerance for diverse peoples, altering strict sex and gender roles, allowing free choice in life and love have all liberated human beings to become soulful adults.   And supporting a child’s feelings is a good thing; we should be proud to have trended toward social emotional learning over the last decade.

But while a parent in the past did not allow children to stop doing chores no matter the “feelings” that the empowered child expressed about doing the chores, in the present, the parent experiences feeling fatigue and gives in (“Oh well, I’ll just do the chores myself”) because parental values regarding sacred work, personal responsibility, and family trust have been replaced on the hierarchy of family needs by the hyper-attention to feeling life of the child.   Inverse to many recent social trends in parenting, my argument in this essay asks for your consideration.  As we’ve trended parenting attention heavily into a child’s minutiae of feeling, we have lost crucial focus on what builds their psychological immune system, their resilience for the long term–for future safety, success, and emotional freedom.

 

Resilience Deficiency and Resilience Resistance

 

To fully make my argument I need two things from you:  trust in the science of resilience, which I hope I’ve gained in the previous two essays, and interest in the science of immunology we’ve all been hearing a lot about during our Covid years.

In the science of immunology, resilience comes from the Latin resiliere which means to rebound after a disturbance and/or attack by opposing force.   Deficiency comes from the Latin deficientia which means to weaken or fail in the face of disturbance or force.  Resistance comes from the Latin resistere which means to stand firm in the face of disturbance or attack by an opposing force. 

Resilience, then, reflects strength and purpose against obstacle; resilience deficiency reflects lack of the ability–or lack of trust in the ability–to rebound from obstacles, difficulties, opposing forces, and attacks.  In our fourth essay, I’ll use a definition for resilience resistance from climate science that is nuanced differently, but for the purposes of this essay, let’s stick with resistance, like resilience, involving our ability to stand firm against obstacles.

When we hear character development truisms like “suffering makes you stronger,” “pain builds character,” “I can take it, I’ll persevere,” “what’s important is how we get back up again,” we are hearing the interconnection of challenge and force with the organism that is resilient, has self-trust, and can resist dissolution or destruction.  In fact, the obstacles and suffering made that organism, that child, that person stronger not weaker.

Similarly, when we hear, “go work it out,” “stop whining,” “be aggressive,” “you’re fine” (messaged not abusively but in appropriate contexts), we see the same interconnections.  The phrases can be resilience-builders that help children resist opposing force and rebound after challenge or attack.   The Batman line from the Christopher Nolan movies, “It’s not that you fall, but how you get back up again,” provides a popular example of a child who rebounds after significant trauma, gaining purpose in life and the resilience to carry out that purpose.  When your children puts aside whatever are their feelings to rise again, their resilience feeds on itself:  the child shows adequacy and success which creates more resilience, more grit, in the moment, then more resistance to collapse later.

In parenting of the past, disturbance and challenge (up to a point) were welcomed by parents, teachers, and other caregivers.  Parental authority (not abusive but authoritative) wanted the child to transcend myriad emotions in the moment to focus and function more powerfully each time the moment of difficulty re-appeared in childhood and adulthood.   If now, we let whining rule the emotional life of the family, we remove obstacles the children should face and accept the child’s intimate feelings and emotions as substitutes or proxies for empowering action.  If I as a parent sigh (as we have perhaps all done!) “I’ll just do those chores myself,” the chores get done but the child is robbed of the resilience development that the chores–and respect for parent and family values–provide.

Similarly, “Oh well, I’ll let him slide tonight on homework, he seems happier playing video games…” the child’s feeling of happiness at playing the games is a joy for the parent no doubt, but the inadequacy of homework follow-through will likely lean the child toward more resilience deficiency in the social and educational sphere.  In watching this happen, we may join our children in being satisfied that the home is a safe place because it is safe for our child to express feelings in, but the child’s feelings about chores, video games, devices, whining, or other similar things, even if well expressed by the child, do not build the able, independent, responsible adult who has a strong psychological immune system on which the child’s future–and to some extent our own–depends.

 

Using Covid Science to Understand a Child’s Psychological Immune System

 

Ned Johnson, author of The Self-Driven Child writes, “If your kid has the sense that if something bad happens, Mom or Dad is going to fall out of the ceiling like Tom Cruise in ‘Mission Impossible’ and extricate them, that’s problematic.”  Competence and maturity, he points out, grow only somewhat from praise and from openness to the minutiae of children’s feelings; they grow even more from a child’s repeated face-to-face encounters with adversity and difficulty.  This is true because each of our children–like each of us–has a psychological immune system, an intersection of the brain’s limbic system (emotions, senses, memories) and frontal lobe (decision-making, designing action steps) that is amorphous because unlimited in its connecting pathways and parts.  While we can’t show a brain scan of a child “being resilient through obstacles,” or see a picture of the amorphous psychological immune system at work, we can understand how it works by tapping into epidemiological science.

Specifically, we can tap Covid science–e.g. the sciences of natural and acquired immunity and high and low viral loads–since we are all very familiar with this epidemiology today.  Our bodies and brains share the same cells.   If we can understand epidemiology in the body we can understand it in the brain.  Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Professor Marty Makary, author of The Price We Pay, updated the physiologic science in February 2022 (https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-high-cost-of-disparaging-natural-immunity-to-covid-vaccine-mandates-protests-fire-rehire-employment-11643214336).

“My Johns Hopkins colleagues and I conducted a 2021 study (in which) we found that among 295 unvaccinated people who previously had Covid, antibodies were present in 99% of them up to nearly two years after infection.  We also found that natural immunity developed from prior variants reduced the risk of infection with the Omicron variant.  A CDC study and ours confirm what more than 100 other studies on natural immunity have found: The immune system works.”  Dr. Makary is pro-vaccination so his findings also support the idea that we can acquire immunity via vaccines.   Both the pain of having Covid and/or of getting vaccinated lead to virus resistance that augments natural immunity and creates resilience in the face of the disease.

Now think about psychological resilience.  In recent parental nurturing trends, we have assumed that children can develop resistance, grit, and personal power by being protected (often by us) from emotional sufferings.  We have tried to take away children’s feelings of hurt, even if minor, in hopes the child will be better off from our social-emotional efforts.  We have also assumed that children’s expression of their feelings as much as possible was good for resilience building–if they can tell us what they feel, they will be stronger, we assume.  One reason we assume it is that therapists (like me, admittedly) have convinced us that parenting works like therapy works; by discussing their feelings in a therapy office, the child should become stronger, so we should emphasize the same method at home.

But the science of immunology shows us the transfer of therapeutic assumptions to the overall parenting paradigm is not necessarily a good thing.   Intervening when we sense a hurt or difficult feeling, including doing chores for the child or facilitating whining, often neglects the building, by our children themselves, of their own psychological immune system–that system needs some feeling, yes, but also action (respect for the parent, doing chores, working hard).  If we focus constantly on feeling and not on actions in the face of obstacles, neither natural nor acquired immunity may get built.  Our interventions will then have the effect opposite of our intention.

Covid “viral loads” can help us go deeper into this.   If a person with acquired and/or natural immunity gets Omicron, s/he gets a low viral load, i.e., this person does not tend to spread the disease to others who are vulnerable to hospitalization or death, because the load is too small to cause significant spread.  Most of our children carry low viral loads by nature; if they have natural or acquired immunity (from having had Covid, getting vaccinated, and/or having Covid-resistant genes) their loads are even more infinitesimally small.   These children are, in a sense, all of our children outside the therapy office.

When our children are truly abused, traumatized, or endangered, they will carry higher trauma loads.  The risks to their future bodies and brains are great from high trauma loads, with resilience among the casualties, this resilience deficiency revealing itself in greater early mortality rates, heart disease, family dysfunction, addiction, and mental illness.  We make it our duty to protect them from these high loads.  And we are smart to help any child with a high trauma load to go to therapy to get help with this load.

But when children experience normal stress loads from parental authority, for instance, or from life-obstacles, daily disturbances, hurt feelings, and most of what they experience, the child hits the sweet spot of natural and psychological immune system response.  This resilient child is more resistant to collapse in the future when outside of the parent’s sphere; the future, when suffering and disturbance will inevitably re-occur, because the child has experienced a helpful stress load as a child.  This child may go to therapy for a specific reason, and gain greatly from that therapy, but like all our children, even those who have experienced trauma, we will likely create resilience deficiency if we over-protect.

 

Antiseptic Parenting and the Psychological Immune System

 

Are we sure?  How can we be sure?

The science of stress I presented in earlier essays provided certainty, I believe, but we can also use more of the twin sciences of Covid immunology and epidemiology to confirm our conclusion by adding research on “antisepsis.”

Remember, you child’s body and brain all have the same cells.   The body/brain disconnect that we think of for purposes of metaphor (“my head and my heart”) is not a biological phenomenon.  What harms the body harms the brain; what nourishes the body nourishes the brain.   Antisepsis of body causes lack of resilience and resistance just as antisepsis of brain will do.

In February 2022, Dr. Eran Bendavid, professor of medicine at Stanford University (https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-hygiene-hypothesis-health-allergies-asthma-autoimmune-immune-omicron-children-kids-mask-social-distance-clean-11643729666) revealed how Covid-hygiene overreaction (antisepsis) negatively affected children’s immune system development.  Our American children were, in many cases, already too over-protected from germs before Covid, he points out, then Covid-response measures made things worse.  Like Dr. Makarty’s analysis, Dr. Bendavid’s Covid research comes on the heels of two years of data that confirm Dr. Makarty’s analysis then go further:

1. Unlike the 1918 and other previous similar pandemics, children are rarely in physiologic danger from the Covid virus.
2. Further, because children carry low viral loads of the virus, they are rarely perpetrators of danger to the elderly and/or health-compromised adults.
3. Significant and ongoing socialization of children is essential for healthy development of their physiologic and psychological immune systems.
4. Mental/psychological diseases co-morbid with lack of resilience such as depression and anxiety increase when children are treated antiseptically (over-protected from Covid and other germs and microbes).
5. The most dangerous antisepsis in child development is social isolation.

As we noted in our first essay, we are facing significant Covid and Covid Response losses in child psychological health marked by behavioral issues, cognitive decline and delay, and increased depression, anxiety, and suicide.  Because we isolated children during the pandemic, we damaged them.  We did this, Bendavid points out, because we falsely believed in an antisepsis paradigm for child development–that if we hyper-clean children’s environments, they will do better and protect others better–so we hyper-cleaned surfaces, put our young children behind masks, socially distanced and isolated them.

We operated out of the false assumption about how resilience resistance works.

Dr. Bendavid points out the false assumption:  “Excessive emphasis on antisepsis is actually implicated in mis-alignments of the immune system that risk disease.”  The more hyper-anti-septic our environments, the more damaging to immune systems.  When we don’t allow a child to eat dirt in the sandbox, the child is more likely to get diseases later.  When we make children avoid all germs, they become unhealthier teens and adults.  As Dr. Bendavid notes, they become healthier when antisepsis is removed.  “Allergic and autoimmune diseases are far less common in communities with less hygiene.”   Proclivities to illnesses increase from hyper-antiseptic practices.

Because healthy development of the psychological immune system requires mess, dirt, “germs,” and suffering.  Not abuse or violence–never those–but most of what parents do when they compel kids to grow up is not abuse, not violence; rather, it constitutes a normal stress load.   Cutting off whining, insisting on homework or video games without listening to “feelings” about them; requiring a work ethic no matter how the child feels:  these are a useful stress load.  Requiring a child to do independent problem-solving (when developmentally appropriate) without intervention (though this may not initially feel good to the child in the moment) is a good stress load.  Teaching a child to end rumination about feelings when the rumination becomes unhealthy is essential to helping the child develop a healthy psychological immune system.

All of these involve cutting out psychological antisepsis:  cutting out hyper-attention to the minutiae of a child’s feelings when action and work in the messy environment are better targets for our parental attention.

 

A Resilience/Family Self-Test

 

With all this science in tow, I hope you will take a moment to think about anti-sepsis-oriented social trends that have affected parenting in your part of the world.  And let’s not be too hard on ourselves as we do this.  We have all “sinned” toward antisepsis.  We live in a parenting culture that nurtures us–whether parents, teachers, or mentors–toward psychological antisepsis.

Eight I can think of are:

1. Helicopter and lawn mower parenting (parents over-involved in the child’s everyday life).
2. Cutting out most or all aggression from school hallways and playgrounds (punishing healthy aggression in school as if it were violence).
3. Hyper-rewarding children with praise even when little or nothing has been accomplished by the child (the child stops believing the praise but we don’t realize it).
4. Cutting out necessary critique of the child for fear we will hurt the child’s feelings.
5. Overreacting to fights children get into with one another as if all these entanglements will constitute dangerous trauma.
6. Condemning teachers/schools that don’t treat our child in the most “protective” way possible (in our eyes protective, in the school’s eyes, perhaps, overprotective).
7. Intervening in peer relationships quickly if anyone appears to begin to feel uncomfortable with something someone else did or said (not letting kids work things out, even their hurt feelings, themselves).
8. Isolating children from one another as a primary go-to response when social issues arise between children that might be solved by the children themselves.

I hope you will take a moment to open the journal you created for the first and second essays (or start a journal now); place the eight antiseptic social trends on separate pages, then study your own and your child’s life for at least thirty days.  Study life-situations, media use, family time, school time, time with friends; study chores, work life, sports life, chores time.  As you do this, you become a citizen scientist of resilience and resistance in your home.

Amy Grant, from the film Gone Baby Gone and TV’s The Office, recently talked about her childhood in the Wall Street Journal.  “Mom was pushy.  Her genius was she’d lay a challenge at my feet.  If I hesitated, she’s ask why I was afraid.”

Her father, Amy Grant said, was “the storyteller, coming home from work to spin stories about the day’s triumphs and challenges.”  Grant goes on to describe the opposite of a psychologically antiseptic childhood.  “I traveled  to the City (Manhattan) alone on the bus and subway, met talented kids from all over the city.  I was shy when I arrived.  I figured it was best to watch and learn…one of the teachers told me I wasn’t cut out to be an actor.  Looking back, I probably have that teacher to thank for how things turned out.  You try harder when you have something to fight against.”

Grant’s parents  and teachers chose against removing opposing elements from their daughter’s development.  They knew the child needed disturbance and opposition to grow up psychologically healthy.

Study social trends that have affected your own parenting?  Are your children developing a good work ethic?  Do they respect you as their parent?  Do they spend a lot of time with others (who are safe for them) unsupervised so they can live in life’s little messes and find their own way?  An important note:  If as you complete this exercise you notice that your child is mainly or largely socializing with others via screens and phones, your child is probably involved in relational antisepsis.  Overuse of devices for relationship impedes a child’s psychological immune system development because it is not in person.  The phone is okay for some relationship, but neuro-chemically incomplete overall.  You might see gradual lack of resilience developing as your screen-tied child gradually loses motivation, takes more and more things personally, whines a lot, flees into silences, accepts lowered achievement and performance standards, gradually loses work ethic and, in some cases, increases depression and anxiety.

 

The First Tool:  Using Both Coercive and Prosocial Nurturing

 

In the second essay, I provided a multi-layered sets of tools you can use to ascertain where your child is on the genetic resilience spectrum and thus to tailor resilience nurturance to fit your child.  I hope you will go back now to use those tools in the context of this third essay.   As you do, I hope you’ll find these three new tools helpful.  Resilience and the psychological immune system are built structurally.  These are structural tools to analyze and employ in your family system.

The first tool involves two different structures for parenting: coercive and prosocial.

“Coercion” has gotten a bad name recently because of its association with “coercive control” in domestic abuse situations and associated with tyranny and oppression, but in child development “coercive” is not a negative; rather, “coercive” and “prosocial” nurturance are two equally necessary approaches to child-rearing.   (If you prefer “challenge nurturance” to “coercive nurturance,” that could work linguistically, too).  For more in depth research on both kinds of nurturance please see my Saving Our Sons and The Minds of Girls and the work of Patricia Hawley at Texas Tech, e.g., www.patriciahawley.org, e.g., Hawley, P.H. (2003). “Prosocial and coercive configurations of resource control in early adolescence: A case for the well-adapted Machiavellian. “Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 49, 279-309.

To study both kinds of nurturing in your own parenting, try writing down “coercive” and “prosocial” on separate sheets of paper in your journal.  After reading the next few paragraphs in this essay, go back and rank yourself on a scale of 1 – 10 for both parenting styles (1 is lowest and 10 is highest).   While you and anyone can use both parenting styles, still, you should see yourself leaning toward one or the other at various phases of your life.

When you hold strong authority with your child, you are probably using coercive nurturance.   This healthy coercion is symmetrical to what the child expects of you because you’ve done it for awhile already.  Holding your authority compels clear standards of behavior in the child and provides immediate consequences/responses for behavior that is not symmetrical with the values and expectations.  As a coercive nurturer, you probably do not allow your child to be disrespectful to parents and other adults very much; your authority forces respect in the child for him/herself and others.  As a coercive nurturer, you are often ready to discuss your child’s feelings, but you likely do not want to hear a lot of whining.

Meanwhile, the more emotive conversation and feeling-expression you engage in with the child, the more prosocial parenting you are probably using.  This prosocial parenting is generally symmetrical in your family system because the child comes to expect it from you:  you are the parent your child usually comes to when s/he has feelings that need sorting through.  You might also be the parent who keeps greater focus on the child’s emotional life throughout childhood.  While you might hold your authority generally, you might forego authority in a given moment to help your child build aspects of his/her emotional structure.

Coercive nurturers tend to insist very hard (sometimes too hard) on respect of the child for the adult.  Prosocial nurturers tend to allow some disrespect for parents and others in order to “empower” the child because empowering the child’s emotional life is a first priority.

If you suddenly change to coercive from prosocial or vice versa you become asymmetrical, at least for a time, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  Think about the more coercive parent who must sometimes put coercion aside and just listens to the feeling-life of the child, or the more prosocial parent who “has had enough” and moves more toward coercive parenting for a time.  Children are sensitive to symmetry and asymmetry and learn to use both to their advantage; they also rely on the gifts that both nurturing styles give them, even when they aren’t conscious of those gifts.

I am a prosocial person in my role as a therapist, but I was the more coercive parent when Gail and I raised our children.  Gail, who can be coercive, was the more prosocial parent.  I score an 8 on coercive and a 5 on prosocial whereas Gail scores a 9 on prosocial and a 4 on coercive.  Over more than 2 decades of raising our children, sometimes she and I switched over, she more coercive and me the more prosocial, but our basic pattern held throughout.

What numbers do you show for yourself?  For your spouse or co-parent?

To fully use this measuring tool, talk to your spouse, children (if they are old enough), extended family members, trusted friends, therapists, mentors.  With help from everyone, study the last 30 days of parent child interactions.

Go deeper by asking: “When did I provide verbal encouragement and how much did I provide (more prosocial)?” and “”When did I provide critique and/or targeted challenge-encouragement (more coercive)?”  Overall, the prosocial approach tends to target the building of short-term self-esteem in the child that can accumulate and build resilience.  The more coercive approach tends to build more long-term self-respect which can also accumulate and build resilience.

Both styles can build up a child’s psychological immune system.

As you study yourself and your family through the lens of this tool, talk about what you are satisfied with and what you think could be changed in one or both of you.

And remember, the joy of parenting together is that you do not need to become the other parent.  I did not need to become Gail and Gail did not need to become me.   We had different parenting styles and our children gained symmetry and security via the differences.  Sameness would have been half an asset to our daughters.   Two different styles gave them a more holistic childhood.

 

The Second Tool:  Study Whether You Are an Authoritarian, Authoritative, or Permissive Parent

 

Permissive parenting (generally accompanied by some neglect of the child and/or hyper-use of prosocial style) and unbalanced by a partner who is more coercive is generally asymmetrical with healthy resilience-building.  The child is not being challenged enough to do the right thing or to build resilience because there are few or no rules, lots of chaos, very little structure, and the potential for constant immaturity in the child and, often, the adult.

On the other hand, if you overuse authoritarian parenting (generally accompanied by intense fear of you in the child), you are generally asymmetrical with long term resilience-building, as well.  The child experiences more trauma than is healthy via physical coercion and/or constant suppression of the child’s feelings.  Authoritarian parenting often presses up against child abuse, loss of child agency, and potential violence.

Authoritative parenting is neither too permissive nor too authoritarian.  Utilizing both coercive and prosocial nurturance, it requires children to understand the importance of parental authority and to meet standards set by parents and other responsible adults.  Simultaneously, it allows the child agency in decision-making and expression of his/her own social-emotional developmental milestones when appropriate.

The effects of different styles, especially authoritarian parenting, are analyzed well in Burt, S. Alexandra, et.al., “Twin Differences in Harsh Parenting Predict Youth’s Anti-Social Behavior, Psychological Science, 2021, Vol. 32(3) 395-409, DOI: 10.1177/0956797620968532).  Human resilience is nurtured and socialized in a variety of ways not a single best, “approved” parenting practice, but some parenting can be dangerous, and we must acknowledge that.  This study acknowledges and analyzes the dangers of creating the opposite of an antiseptic environment–a traumatic one.

To explore where you fit in the trinity of parenting styles, try studying these parenting traits over the next seven days.  Bring trusted family members, friends, and therapists into this exercise as needed.

1. Expectations.  Do I hold reasonable and high expectations for my children and expect them to do their best to meet those expectations?
2. Structure.  How much structure do I give my children?  Too much? Not enough?
3. Daily rituals.  Do my children fulfill daily rituals like family time, reading time, bedtime?
4. Screen time.  Do I put reasonable controls on screen time and on device use?
5. Chores.  Do I make it a crucial part of their childhood that my children do their chores (their sacred work) for service to the family?
6. Personal responsibility.  Do I make my children take responsibility for their lives, or do I do a lot of things for them that they should be doing themselves?
7. Hyper-control.  Is it important to me to control most of their childhoods, or do I give them a good amount of free range, too, especially as they grow up and become more independent?
8. Respect.  Do I act in respectful ways and simultaneously require my children to treat me and others with respect?
9. Praise and critique.  Do I praise and critique my child in equally useful quantities and with equally useful quality, or do I overemphasize either one too much for child resilience?
10. Feelings and problem-solving.  Do I blend talking with my children about what they are feeling with teaching them to move beyond feelings toward problem-solving when appropriate?

As you ponder your answers, you should get a picture of which kind of parenting you lean toward.  This can be a welcome self-assessment both to confirm that you like how you are parenting and to invite tweaks to your parenting style.  As you tweak your parenting style, don’t be surprised if you have to develop a kind of inner mantra that goes something like this:  “I am not actually hurting my children as much as I they say I am by doing _____________ or saying ___________ or insisting on _____________.”  While a primary job of a parent is keep children out of harm’s way, including out of the harm we ourselves could cause them, our definition of “harm” might need to change once we focus on resilience-building as a primary value in child-raising.

I’ve used these essential questions with my counseling clients over two decades.  Perhaps not surprisingly, I’ve found the same sex difference you might expect to find between women and men:  more moms tend to say they are more feeling-talk oriented and more dads tend to say they are more oriented toward action, but this is not an absolute.  A mom said, “My husband is the passive one, he’ll give those girls anything in the world and doesn’t give them any consequences.  I’m the one who has to make them behave.”  Her husband agreed.  As we worked together, he made the decision to be more balanced in his parenting, if not for the children’s sake, than to take the unfair child-raising burden off his wife.

Ethnicity and culture can also matter when the trinity of styles is studied.  In some ethnic groups, for instance, moms try to be coercive, prosocial, authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive–all at once.  The executive I featured at the beginning of this essay came from, as she described it, “a family of women.  For my brother and me–a black girl and boy whose father was incarcerated–the active parents were our mother and grandmother.  They tried to be everything to us in every way.  We didn’t really bond with other men until adolescence when we did a lot of sports.  For my brother, the father-wound has been especially hard.”

 

The Third Tool:  Deploy Bi-Strategic Parenting As Much As You Can 

 

“When Gil and I moved into a more male world, it was a shock,” she continued, “but a welcome shock.  Both of us got more attention, more challenge, more ‘force’ I guess, and a whole other way of seeing the world.”  She was describing a difference between maternal and paternal nurturance.   As research has shown for more than a century, fathers and mothers tend to parent differently.  This is a very good thing for resilience-building (See Saving Our Sons and The Minds of Girls for more).  As fatherhood research has shown for almost fifty years, children raised without significant father influence tend to be higher on the resilience-deficient scale, less resilient, and more resistant to resilience.

Because of male/female brain, biochemistry, and socialization differences, humanity has evolved two parenting styles that provide fail-safes:  if one partner is parenting in a way deleterious to resilience-development, the other parent is (hopefully) not parenting that way.  Fathers in the aggregate do tend to provide more coercive nurturance through development of healthy stoicism (“less feeling and more action”), rough and tumble play in early childhood, more risk-taking and increased aggression and independence training during adolescence.

On this bi-strategic parenting spectrum, aggression is not violence.  Aggression is a good thing, violence is where danger, bullying, or abuse come in.  Rough and tumble play and one-upping are healthy aggression.  They include coercive and authoritative nurturance.  They do not try to destroy the child; rather, they provide “disturbance,” “obstacle,” “challenge” that require resilient responses to develop in the child. 

Violence, on the other hand, tries to destroy the child physically (e.g. child abuse, whippings, beatings), or via verbal and/or emotional manipulation and violence.   We must be vigilant and remove violence when we see it in a child’s life because it can create more than healthy disturbance–it can create the kind of trauma that derails a child’s present health and future resilience, both.  Aggression builds long term resilience, violence can destroy it.

For both girls and boys lack of father attachment is often a violence to the psyche.   When the father (or male role models/father figures) are not active in a life–like the executive’s brother experienced–developmental trauma ensues especially for boys, the separation of child’s neurochemistry and brain development from the biological parent’s neurochemistry.   The trauma of the lost father often leads to resilience deficiency in the child and future adult.

With all this in mind, study “bi-strategic” for a moment by writing in your journal some ways you parent differently from your spouse.  Use the bullet points above if you like.  If you are in a “mom” and “dad” partnership, you can immediately apply your lists to woman and man.  If you are in a gay/lesbian marriage or other constellation, you can still apply answers by looking at the more masculine/male and more feminine/female partner.  If you are a single parent, answer the questions for yourself as primary parent who is trying to “do it all.”  Whenever possible, though, try including the other parent; even if distant and not actively parenting, this other person may still have some influence on the child, or there may be a new figure (stepparent, mentor) you can note as your bi-strategic parenting partner.

Your bi-strategic parenting will not necessarily fit absolute male/female types, nor will your parenting styles necessarily be “opposites,” nor will you or your co-parent be “perfect.”  In fact, that is part of the healthy childhood you give your children.  It is best to raise  children bi-strategically and multi-strategically so they lots of different nurture assets.  The child who is raised in multiple healthy ways gets all our best gifts even when the child dislikes the gifts of one parent for a time.

 

The Third Major Change We Must Make in American Childhood:  Choose Non-Intervention as a Go-To Parenting Goal

 

If a child is in danger, we must intervene, but the more we intervene when intervention is not needed, the more we endanger our child’s psychological immune system.  About the Native American vision quest, author Sandra Ingerman recently wrote, “If you thought you were going to survive it, it wouldn’t be initiation.”  To grow up, the child needs to experience being uncomfortable a lot of the time—not in terms of sexual consent, of course, nor experiencing child abuse, but the natural discomforts in life that are symmetrical with resilience building.

Because maturity is coerced and is pro-socially built.

It grows from free choice-making and from authoritative respect.

It adheres to problem-solving skills in our children that develop when they must get out of scrapes themselves–sometimes with care for their own feelings and sometimes with pure stoicism.

Unsupervised and under-nurtured, a child often does not develop the self-esteem and self-worth of a mature adult, but over-supervision too can crush a child’s growth.

When the tech mom talked about the Silicon Valley workplace within which she lived most of her life, she saw rampant immaturity, “adults” in their 30s who couldn’t handle being uncomfortable.  These 30 somethings, she said, wanted constant intervention from the “adults” or “parents” because that’s how they had been raised.  Their inability to take care of themselves came in part because parents had drifted away from maturation of the child into a resilient and independent adult as the major priority of child-raising.

Our present day resistance to resilience is, if not a crisis, problematic.  There is no school or community I visit in which someone (or multiple people) do not ask me about constant intervention (what we have looked at as unhealthy antisepsis in this essay).   Ironically, nearly everyone I speak with agrees that constant intervention by parents and others in childhood development has led to less maturity and strength in two generations of adults, yet social trends parenting still pushes for constant intervention, especially in a child’s emotional life.  Ironically, parents today often intervene as much as they can to protect their children’s emotional lives except in the sphere where the most damage might be done:  tech devices, overuse of screens, too much gaming and porn, and dangerous social media use.

We are challenged in the post-Covid era to make maturation of resilience our highest–or nearly highest–priority.   It may take time to shift away from parent-as-therapist to parent-as-parent, but it will not be a regressive shift (back to a “golden age”); rather, it will be a shift forward to what works today–symmetrical parenting styles, more authoritative parenting, more bi-strategic parenting, and less constant intervention.  It will give business executives relief as workplaces and the world become safer, richer places because the adults in them are strong and purposeful.

In the fourth essay in this series, we will look at culture-trends that create asymmetry in resilience building, and sociological concepts we need to confront if we are to place resilience-building at the forefront of an evolving American childhood.

Ideas from all these essays will instruct our Summer Training Institute in June.  To learn more and to register visit:  https://gurianinstitute.com/events/gurian-summer-institute-2022/.