Homeroom with Sal & Lisa Damour PhD - Tuesday, September 29

Hello everyone. I am Knoxel. Unfortunately, sounds a little bit under the weather today. I am Kristen, the Chief Learning Officer at Khan Academy, and I'm going to attempt to fill a little bit of his shoes today.

We are excited to have as our homeroom guest psychologist, New York Times best-selling author, and monthly columnist Lisa Da Moore, and she'll be talking to us about the emotional well-being of our students in these COVID times. So, we're looking forward to that.

Before we get started, I want to remind you that Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization and we do depend on donations to keep us all going. If you would like to donate, you can go to khanacademy.org/donate. I know that this is a tough time for folks, but ten dollars even helps contribute to keeping all of these resources up and going for folks that need it during this time. So thank you if you can do that.

I also want to recognize some corporate folks who have stepped up, particularly in these COVID times. They've been partners with us and really helped make sure we can keep things running. That includes Google.org, AT&T, Fastly, Bank of America, and Novartis. Thank you to them for helping to contribute to keep everyone learning as we're going through these times.

So, with that, let me introduce Dr. Lisa Del Mar. Thanks for being with us today!

Thanks for having me! I’m delighted to be here!

Excellent! So, just this morning, you published a column that speaks to teenagers with your advice about how to navigate some of this time we’re living in. Can you share with us some of the advice that you have?

Sure! So, in my September column for the New York Times, I had written a—oh, actually it was my August column—I had written a back-to-school well-being checklist for parents with regard to their adolescence mental health. In the comments, several teenagers said, “Why don’t you just write to us about what we need to know about ourselves?”

And I thought, as usual, the teenagers are right! As usual, they’re like totally on the money! So, my editor, who's wonderful, was in agreement that I could write this column to them. So, this one is called “Dear Teenagers: Here’s what you can do to manage your own emotional well-being.” I talk through what we know in psychology about how adolescents in particular operate when it comes to their feelings. Some of the superpowers they have, for example, is they feel things more intensely.

Which we know means they feel difficult and painful things more intensely; it also means they feel pleasures and joys more intensely. So, at this time when we are all at this point kind of limited to small delights, that pumpkin spice latte goes further for a 16-year-old than it does for a 30-year-old, and that’s a good thing that they can take advantage of.

I talked with them about basic mental health maintenance, what to do when they're worried, and how psychological defenses work. But I will say, I've written that column for five years. I've written for the Times for seven, and I think this was my favorite column I've ever gotten to write.

That is great! I am sure that the teenagers appreciate you talking to them because knowing teenagers, they’re thinking, “I can do this myself; I don’t need the help of my parents to navigate all of this.”

So, thinking about parents, though, what kinds of things should parents be looking out for in terms of signs that their kids might be struggling or need some extra help?

This is such a hard time, and the baseline we’re starting from is one of kids being pretty upset and pretty distressed, and rightly so. We are also starting from a baseline of parents being pretty worn thin and pretty tired and dealing with their own stresses and anxieties.

In that context, it can be very hard to know when it's time to worry. Is the kid overreacting? Is the parent overreacting? To start at the extremes and then to walk it back, we worry when a kid’s mood gets stuck in a rut. So we fully expect the normal adolescent mood will go up and down; you know, that they’ll be really salty one day and then perfectly fine later that day or the next day. That’s normal development.

We worry if a young person becomes down and stays down—sad, lethargic, unhappy, low for days at a time—that’s grounds for concern. Or irritable at every opportunity. I take it to let people know that one of the forms that depression can take in teenagers is irritability. It’s sort of unique to adolescents and sometimes it’s easy to miss that they’re depressed because an irritable teenager is, you know, we can just dismiss it as a snarky teenager.

But any teenager who is annoyed with their parents, annoyed with their teachers, annoyed with their coaches, can't stand any of their peers—that is something that should be considered a possible depression. We worry about anxiety that is too big, meaning out of proportion to what's going on, or persistent even when things are okay or okay enough. So that's when to worry.

What I would want parents to do is to reach out to a mental health clinician or call their pediatrician even just to check in and sort of get a take on things. But then there’s a lot below that, a lot that’s less concerning than that, that’s much more in the garden variety of day-to-day raising teenagers or pandemic raising teenagers.

Can you tell us some of the strategies that parents of kids who haven't probably reached that threshold yet but are just struggling a little bit? What are some things that they can do?

Well, a lot of it means just allowing teenagers to vent. So one thing that is true about teenagers is that they complain about school, and they complained about all of last year's school year—not just the school year.

It’s part of how teenagers do school, and what I mean is they’re wonderful at school. Teenagers hold it together all school day long, put up with all sorts of hassles and annoyances, are charming through the whole thing, and part of how they do it is they collect what I call their emotional trash over the course of the day, and then they get home and they dump it on their parents.

This is a normal and expectable transaction that works really well for the teenager because they tend to feel greatly relieved after this transaction. It’s hard on the parents because they can sometimes feel burdened by it, but under normal conditions, and then pandemic conditions, one thing that’s really helpful for parents to say when kids are having a hard time or feeling full of complaints is to say, “Do you want my help with this or do you just need to vent?”

So often teenagers and tweens will say, “I just need to vent,” and then the parent can just let them vent and know that they’re serving basically a functional trash disposal service that lets the kiddo move forward.

The trick in the pandemic is to try to measure how much more they’re complaining this year than last year because they are. But what I think is important for parents to do is to think, “Okay, on September 29, 2019, how much was my kid complaining? How far above that increment are we?”

The other thing I want parents to be mindful of is that we’re hearing more complaints sometimes because we’re standing right there as school is happening. So, you know, under normal conditions, your kid has annoying group projects that happen during the school day that you don’t hear about. Because by the time they get home, they’re either over it or they’ve complained to their friends.

Under pandemic conditions, you can run into your teenager in the kitchen when they just finished an annoying group project, and you’re going to get the full download. So there’s complaining; there’s heightened complaining. But I don’t want parents to take all of the complaining as though it’s coming from a zero start. You know, it’s higher and higher for both pandemic reasons and also just logistics of the pandemic.

That totally makes sense! Your comment about asking “Do you need my help or not?” I think applies to emotional things, but also I know that learning itself is hard, and kids can get in a place just in working through what they’re supposed to be learning where they’re struggling.

In the educational psychology world, we talk about productive struggle and that that can actually help people learn, but if parents are seeing that, how should they react to that, and how do they figure out when to help and when not?

Well, for you to give parents the gift of the idea of productive struggle is such a good first step because as parents, we know our kids so well. And if they're doing school right over there next to you, you can sense—even if they’re not saying anything—you can sense when they are starting to feel tense or frustrated.

And as a parent, that makes the parent uncomfortable. I’m a parent who has a kid doing school at home. It makes me uncomfortable. And so then, of course, we want to step in and help—help! We think we’re stepping in to help the kid.

I will confess that I have sometimes felt compelled to do it because it’s bothering me. Like I want to make it stop so that I can focus on what I need to focus on, and my kid’s discomfort is a distraction for me, so I want to make it stop—not because I think my kiddo needs it, but because I sort of selfishly wanted to.

So the first step is to recognize that learning is grappling and that kids getting frustrated and struggling along is often when learning happens. And like you mentioned, teachers know this, and teachers develop the capacity to tolerate and in fact encourage struggle in the classroom.

So, that idea of taking the guidance around emotional well-being and transferring it over to academic well-being, to say, you know, give parents a language to say something like, “Are you doing okay with that struggle? Do you need any support around that struggle?” But not even to try to get rid of the struggle, but mostly just to bite our tongues until a kiddo maybe sends up a flag. But that’s hard; it’s really easy to say, hard to do.

Yeah, absolutely! And I know it’s hard too if you’re a parent who’s trying to work over here, and your kids are on the computer over here. You know, having them know when they can ask questions and when it’s okay to kind of jump in, as opposed to when you're in the middle of doing a homeroom session or whatever that may be, I think it’s another piece that I’ve talked about can be helpful for parents as well—to kind of give their kids a plan for what to do when they need help so that they know what to do.

Excellent! We are getting some—I’ve sometimes encouraged families under normal conditions to actually have a list of things kids can do when they feel stuck. Because for me, the big challenges in school are getting started and managing when stuck.

So it’s really helpful to—I’ve had kids put a post-it note next to their homework of all of the options for when they get stuck: move on to something else, ask the teacher for more instruction, phone a friend. You know, I mean, there’s lots of things that kids can do, and we can articulate those, give kids lots of options, brainstorm options when they're not doing their work, so that the first outlet isn’t necessarily the parent rescuing or the kid asking for parent help.

Fantastic! So we are getting some good questions in from Facebook and YouTube. Let me take one of those from Facebook. Rosa Bellinger asks, “How do you get your kid motivated when they’re not turning in assignments? What’s the best approach to handle that?”

Okay, so there are two pieces in there: one is motivation; the other is not turning in assignments. Those are two different topics. Let’s start with the not turning in assignments.

I think one of the real challenges in parenting is to tolerate kids having to sort it out with their teachers. In my experience, if parents don’t rescue kids, and kids have to face the music with their teachers—and I trust teachers by and large to handle this really well and really effectively—usually, kids don’t continue to make that mistake if they’ve had to really have it out with a teacher.

And so if the parent can’t stand it, they might email the teacher and say, “I am well aware that she’s behind on her work. I’m going to leave it to you to figure out what you think needs to be done here,” or to give her the consequence that is coming.

One thing when I have gotten to be with groups of kids in person is I’ll sometimes have them write notes of things they want me to tell their parents. So I visited schools and I’m like, “What do you want your parents to know?” And I am blown away by how often I’ve had young people write me a note saying, “Please tell them to just let me deal with the consequences of my choices. Don’t try to intervene.”

So kids can do that and benefit from that.

Okay, then there’s the motivation question, which for me right now in the pandemic is like the million-dollar question because motivation is low. And it’s not that motivation is high all the time under normal conditions; it’s that it’s lower now because kids are not caught up in the current of school.

They’re not alongside their friends doing work they might not really feel like doing; they’re not being pushed along by encouragement in person from their teachers in the same ways they might be used to. So, the challenges of motivation that are always present in education are now laid, I think, more bare by the pandemic.

And I think that it lets us have a conversation that’s probably long overdue about motivation in school. The short on that conversation—and then Kristen, I’ll let you ask me which direction you want to go with this—is that I don’t think we’re really honest with kids about the fact that a lot of really high-functioning students and high-functioning adults sometimes need rewards to get work done.

I think we’ve sort of made it seem like you shouldn’t need that or only, you know, sort of the lesser students require that kind of support.

Absolutely! I know for myself that sometimes when I have to write a piece, write an article, I say, “Okay, if I write this page, I can have this Hershey’s Kiss as a reward.” So how do you think about what are appropriate rewards and how can we best use them to help kids succeed?

Well, to let’s take it zoom out and then zoom back in. So the language we tend to use in education for rewards is extrinsic motivation—that you’re doing it because somebody’s giving you something. It’s a grade, or money, or chocolate. I’m right with you on the chocolate; for me, it is coffee!

You know, getting to take a lap around the block, walking—you know, I have a long list of rewards that I give myself to do work at times. So we call those extrinsic motivators, and they’re in contrast to intrinsic motivators, which is basically the kid does it because they love it, like they just are totally fascinated and drawn to the work.

So we have generally and understandably put intrinsic motivation on a pedestal—like that’s the ideal; that’s what we’re working toward—and I’m all for that idea. I think all students should come to all of their work open to the idea that they might find it fascinating.

I think all educators should do what they can to present work in a way that makes it as fascinating as possible to as many students as possible. So when you have intrinsic motivation on your side, what you have is effortless attention. There’s nothing to it, and that’s fantastic. It doesn’t always happen.

So then you still need a gear you can slip into to get it done— that’s the extrinsic motivation gear. There need not be any shame about having to sometimes use that gear. You use it; I use it.

We love our work—we’re doing our favorite subject, we’re getting paid—and we still need that gear. So the first step, I think, is to be honest with kids to say, “That’s okay that you’re not into the work; it still needs to get done. What’s the play? How are we gonna do it?”

And I have been blown away by the creativity students are sharing with me about how they’re getting work done. Students have been telling me about YouTube study videos that they pull up, where you can go on YouTube and find videos of very studious and thoughtful students who seem to be working in libraries, and they turn on the video and they work alongside the person in the video.

I had a fabulous student tell me that she makes time-lapse videos of herself studying, and she does it to keep herself focused because she wants to have a good time-lapse video. So she’ll work at a 25 to 50 minute unit of work uninterrupted so that she can have a really funny time-lapse video or a very complete time-lapse video to show her parents or her friends.

She said they’re very funny. You know, I love the faces I make when I’m—oh my gosh, really? Oh, yeah!

So there’s that. There’s also chocolate; there’s also getting to roll around on the floor with a dog; there’s getting to take a lap around the block with a parent. There is, you know, social media: right work really hard for 25 minutes, take five minutes to check everybody out on whatever social media platform you want.

It doesn’t matter to me so much what the reward is. I think it’s great when kids are creative. I think it’s great when we make space for them to come up with things we would have never thought of. What matters to me is we remove the shame from it—that there is no reason to feel embarrassed about the gimmicks or hacks if you need them to get the work done. The work has to get done.

That’s fantastic! And I love working with your kids to decide what’s rewarding to them so that it’s something that they value and is important for them. But yeah, that’s fantastic!

I had heard of people doing Zoom calls with each other and just turning the video on to work together, as they’re doing, as a way to, you know, just keep connected with each other. So all kinds of ideas—it just feels lonely.

So another option is for the parent to say, “Do you want me to come work alongside you?” You know, I can clear my email all day long; I can clear it next to you.

When I was in graduate school, I mean, I am—I have great discipline, and I love my subject, and I love what I do, and I am like the queen of hacks to get work done. When I was in graduate school, my best friend and I used to sit across a table from each other at a coffee shop when we had 40 undergraduate papers to grade.

We played this game where we could only speak to each other after we’d each graded five papers. So we would plow through five, talk for ten, plow through five. We got done in probably four hours what if I had been left to my own devices in my apartment would have taken me a whole weekend—those conversations that grown-ups are not having with kids and that we owe kids.

They’re left with this sense of, “Oh, the good students feel like doing it,” or “Someday my motivation will show up. I’m stuck till then.” That is not a helpful way to try to do school.

Absolutely fantastic! Let’s take another question from Facebook. We have Amaya Epleg—I’m going to kill this last name, and again, I apologize for that last name. She asks, “I have a 13-year-old son that is screen obsessed. I have struggled to set healthy boundaries; he’s seeing a psychologist, but I would love to hear your advice—what might be for setting healthy screen time boundaries?”

Okay, so these are my rules, and they are pandemic and also pre and post-pandemic. These are my general rules for kids and screens.

First rule, what really matters first and foremost in my mind is what's on the screen. What screens deliver is such a wide range. So school is fabulous; good for kids, fantastic educational TV—all for it! A banal TV if kids need a break and just a time to sort of relax and rest; happy socializing with their friends. Kids need to socialize; screens are where that’s at right now.

So there’s all sorts of good stuff that happens on screens; I’m okay with hours of good stuff on screens. That’s what a lot of kids are doing these days. I’m not okay with five seconds of porn, right? Or super violent, yucky stuff. So first and foremost, what’s on the screens can’t be yucky; it can’t be something that kids should not be seeing, and that doesn’t get articulated enough.

Okay, so that’s the first guardrail. The second guardrail is that screens cannot get in the way of what is necessary for healthy development in children. Okay, so here’s my list—this is my short list. We can add to this list.

First and foremost, sleep! Sleep! Sleep! Sleep! Elementary school kids need 11 hours a night; middle schoolers need 10 hours a night; high schoolers need 9 hours a night. This is actually happening more than it usually does because kids aren’t commuting or, unfortunately, doing after-school stuff, but sleep and screens are mortal enemies!

I don’t think screens should be in bedrooms. I totally get it that some families don’t have the space to do otherwise. I totally get it that some kids are having to do school in their bedrooms—understand completely—it should come out at night.

So, sleep, physical activity—kids should be up and moving around! We have to work harder to make that happen; it’s worth it! Face-to-face interactions, reading people’s faces—picking up social cues—screens should not get in the way of that. Screens should not get in the way of focused work; kids should not have screens interrupting their ability to read with focus, even do one thing on a screen with focus.

Sometimes kids are doing like schoolwork and then popping over to their phone to check their social media—not okay! And screens should not get in the way of being helpful around the house, around the community—all of the above.

So my advice to parents is decide what matters to you and then protect it from screens—not against screens. And then, the goal of course is to have so much activity and so much time helping out around the house and so much excellent sleep that the time left for screens is minimized. But then the time on screens is spent doing stuff that actually makes kids' lives better or gives them some relaxation; doesn’t do any harm.

That sounds very actionable and useful, thank you! I have another question coming in about prioritization light in that way. So, from Facebook, Catherine Terry says, “My son is really struggling to engage with virtual school and get his work done. I know he’s emotionally exhausted as we all are. I feel like beating up on him about academics is not as important as helping him navigate and take care of his mental health and would love to know your thoughts.”

I agree completely! My mantra for the pandemic is this: the goal is actually not to see how productive and disciplined everybody can be. The goal is for all of us to get to the other side of this emotionally intact. So, there may be moments where you feel like, “I’m going to choose my kid’s well-being over the perfection or even maybe the completion of that assignment.”

I think that is a fair call right now. The other thing, though, that’s a good half step is to just go ahead and empathize with him about how hard the school piece is. I think sometimes when parents feel like they can’t fix it, they feel like they’re helpless—you’re not! There is a space between fixing and doing nothing, and that is the empathy place where we just say, “Buddy, I get it! I, you know, cannot imagine how hard it must be to do school this way! This takes—it’s like school is all vegetables, no dessert! This is no fun! I totally get it!”

That will help your son out. The other thing that I think we cannot overdo right now is just admiring how well our kids are doing in spite of what's being asked. I think parents should be saying constantly to their kids, “You are doing a really good job with this! I see how hard you are trying! I am so impressed with how much attention you’re giving this given how kind of dry or distant or disconnected it feels—I see it! I’m impressed! Way to go!”

I mean, there is no limit on that right now!

Yeah, absolutely! And when we talked about motivation, we know that if you feel like you’re failing, you’re going to be even less motivated to do something. And if you feel like you’re having some success—even if it’s small successes—that gives you more motivation to keep trying and keep doing what you’re doing. So I think that positive reinforcement helps communicate that.

Alright, I’ve got another question that I know everyone is asking, thinking about how kids are struggling because they’re lacking all the social interaction that they usually have. Do you have any suggestions about how we can bring some of that experience to kids? How we can help them feel connected to their peers?

Well, most kids, a lot of kids are using social media to stay connected. It’s interesting how quickly we’ve sort of decided we’re okay with social media, which I actually—I’m on that train! Kids should see their friends; they should get to socialize in person.

What this means is that parents probably have to supervise, and that’s the challenge because parents’ plates are already so full. They’re trying to run homes, do jobs outside the home sometimes, and also sort of monitor school. Parents are down to their last minute; parents are spread very thin, and the idea of now having to, you know, make some sort of organized socializing happen where an adult can be available is just one more layer on top of that.

And yet kids do need to see their friends in person. What I would say to parents to make it easier is see if you can make a routine—have a standing play date with a kid that your kid gets along with; maybe trade off supervision duties with that parent. But don’t go week to week trying to figure this out because that just takes too much energy.

But what I would say—and this is important and helpful for kids to hear—when psychologists say everybody needs lots of social support, which we do right now! I think people often hear everybody needs a big and busy social life—which is not what we mean!

We actually mean something quite specific in terms of social support, and this is true at all ages—for kids and parents—we mean everybody needs somebody to tell their worries to; everybody needs somebody they can tell their secrets to; and everybody needs a person or a group who helps them to feel connected and accepted.

So some adults get this entirely from their partner; some kids get this from one best friend; some kids are getting the worries piece covered by telling their siblings, the secrets thing covered by telling their friends they go to camp with out of state, and the connected and accepted thing—one good friend, or they actually really like their folks. You know, they’ve got those bases covered.

So when I’m talking with kids about their worries about their social lives right now, I like to run down that list: worries, secrets, connected and accepted. See if they are checking all of those boxes. If they’re not, that’s something we want to get on. If they are, I then say to them, “That’s your cake. That’s what you really need! You’ve got those bases covered; everything else is icing!”

And it’s useful both in truly evaluating the scale of the problem, which is often smaller than it looked, and also in terms of reassuring kids that they’re doing it right because, of course, they’re looking on social media or they’re aware it feels like everybody else is hanging out all the time, and it’s greatly reassuring to them to get concrete guidance around what's really necessary here.

Your guidance has been so helpful and useful for folks that want to hear more of this. I know you have a book out in 2020. Can you tell us a little bit about that and what folks can expect from that?

So, I have two New York Times bestsellers—one published in 2016 and one in 2019. The one from 2016 is “Untangled,” which is about normal development in adolescent girls, though 80% of it applies to boys. The one from 2019 is about the epidemic of stress and anxiety in girls, which seems like way too timely now. Again, 80% of that applies to boys.

But I also just launched a podcast with my colleague Reena Nynon, and it’s called “Ask Lisa: The Psychology of Parenting.” It comes out every Tuesday morning; it’s 25 minutes long, and every week we take a question from a parent. You can also send questions to me. If you go to my website, there’s information about how to send in questions, and we tackle whatever is top of mind for parents right now.

Because what we’re finding is the pandemic moves so quickly; the pressures on parents change so rapidly that once a week lets us really be nimble in response to what is weighing on parents and heart at home right now.

That sounds great! Thank you so much for offering all the support to parents as we all try to get through this. We really appreciate your coming to join us today.

So, I will from here just close and let folks know that if they want more discussion about motivation topics, tomorrow we will have a webinar that is happening at 4:00 PM Pacific and 7:00 PM Eastern, and there’s a link there that you can sign up for that.

Of course, we will have a homeroom tomorrow; hopefully, Sal will have recovered and can join us. Our guest tomorrow is Dr. Austin Buettner, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, and so we’ll be talking about some of the challenges faced from the district perspective.

Thank you all for joining us and have a good day!