year in terms of coming up with ways to talk to kids about things that you really picture yourself having to talk to them about and including not to make it too political but no matter what side of the political spectrum one lands there were some hard discussions to be had and interesting you know you talk about the election i was i grew up in kansas city where despite the fact that a lot of folks around here and again i'm not going to say i voted although you except with guns that's the main difference it's like belmont with guns and my friends were like celebrating for the first time in eight years so it's sort of how we walk that tightrope with our kids and help them to remain civil i think that's kind of going to be super teaches class in horror films in sometimes it freaks people out that i that i do that i grew up loving horror films i have always loved them i've written i have a side career as a novelist and have written a couple of horror novels and a bunch of or short stories that get published two of them have gotten some notoriety and made their way to film or film production which is cool so sometimes people look me up when they get home and they see really gross gory pictures and i just want to assure you that i'm a real doctor means that there is a gargantuan difference between fourteen and sixteen certainly between my kids were sixteen and eleven right now and that trajectory as we also know levels out for adults right that's just way brain development works so  if sophie my daughter who's sixteen wanted to date in one thousand year old i would be angry and i would talk to that eighteen year old and i would also talk my daughter and say no having said that my wife is three years older than me but we met when i was twenty seven she's thirty so the reason i point that out is these differences are so stark during growing up that we as adults sometimes forget that and that means we adopt the same mode of talking to our kids regardless of age and we don't do it on purpose because we're all good parents and that's what we're going to do today we're going to sort of tell each other what we've done so today's agenda is to talk about development going to use some popular culture film clips because i love pop culture some of this will date me some of it won't you guys will if you don't recognize i'll tell you what scenes they are from that i'm going to ask you what observations you make from these film clips i'd love for you to then answer and then rather than my sort of trying to guess what are the difficult issues you've had to talk about with your kids i'd love to hear what they are from you guys and then rather than my telling you what you have to say we can have a discussion about it good ok so those are my kids not all of them w napal which counts as food the real train that is set that to me and you guys have had this experience to those who are parents this feels like yesterday and they change so there's my daughters last year not even this year that was two thousand and fourteen fifteen first day of school sophia and naomi and then this picture totally freaks me out this is their sophie right there that's just for the record that's water not wine that they're drinking that was that and right there that gal's sixteenth birthday party so massive changes happen in ways that are actually you know everybody says this it's all a cliche they grow up so fast a lot but when you said sixteen you said she's a junior in college and i freaked out it's like because it's going to be like like yesterday it'll be she'll be in college so so these changes happen really really fast and we have to try and make sense of them so i told your idea and let's let's do a little pop culture right now little kids grow up fast i'm going to show you some pictures of very famous people when they were little when you may have seen them on t v and when they got older and when you may have seen them on t v and to see the differences you seen both of these pictures many of you but to see them up close actually the boss in the show and then as we know neil patrick harris has gone on to have this amazing career and has changed markedly which makes other since i have a you know i've changed markedly too but to see these things right next to each other sort of illustrates a so let's let's break it down to that three year gap which we talked about earlier and this will be a show that many of you if you have older kids and especially daughters will have watched the better what movies that you know and you know it's quick quick so that it's cool rock that's you know the actresses name i mean because grove but you deliberately mispronounced it just so you know it's one of my favorite like movies period and it's also a fantastic family movie i think it is a few knotty words but you can get past that so that's where to cause when she's ten years old and here's miranda cosgrove at age thirteen and i carly that's a huge change ok so that's from ten to thirteen she looks like nearly grown up there and this is an issue especially in middle school because you have to consider the girls compared to the poor boys right because the boys really don't change that much so that age twelve for fred savage in what show you know one two years which is a great show and brian lee available with the original soundtrack and here's fred savage at age nine in what movie princess bride right he looks exactly the same so for miranda cosgrove that was a massive change from ten to thirteen but from nine to twelve here they look so similar and this is actually part of the problem for those of you who have kids or teach in middle school this is a nightmare  for the boys that this is why the school dances are awkward this is why nothing makes any sense in middle school because if they look this different you can bet that their brains are at different stages too and yet we shove them in the same classroom because almost for convenience sake but th capacity for what kids can do in middle schools probably more disparate despair and different than any other time in their educational experience in part because of the time at which pretty kicks in so the difference between fred savage in nine to twelve is massively different than the difference between fred miranda cosgrove from ten to thirteen so making generalizations about the sage that's a really hard to do in part because gender plays a huge wall we know that the average age  for girls is somewhere with the average age is fifteen down to finally leveled off at around eleven it was fourteen or fifteen when i was growing up now the data suggests it's around eleven to thirteen there's all sorts of different theories for that which we can talk about if you want to  still hasn't changed much for guys in the painting out somewhere around thirteen fourteen so when we present onset actually it's actually that's why i just sort of a side when you talk about football which is a game i adore and love and played most of the advice is to have kids start playing football some around age thirteen or fourteen and the reason for that is that's when the onset of puberty allows the neck to be strong enough to absorb the blows he don't get these contra coup lesions for the brain sloshes around inside the skull that talk a heiresses face as well so you journals asians are hard one little anecdote about fred savage's i'm older than him but he was an undergraduate at the same university in which he went to stanford i would stanford so i had buddies who were there teaching when he was there and if anybody watched the wonder years you know it's all narrated i think by ron howard actually you know see i like it and that's the point when i finally realized so every now and then fred would raise his hand in college and these are the stories my friends would say and he would ask a question and the professor to answer it and he'd say oh that makes sense and inevitably something the class would say and that's when fred finally realized and then he would get really mad and say it was a t v show was his real real person so having all that there is some predictability to development toddlers when we show you clip of this have what's called associate of logic that means that a doesn't go to be doesn't go to see doesn't go to d a goes to q goes back to be goes to l goes to  toddlers don't know that we know that's what we think it's so hilarious to watch them in circle time because they swear to you that they're having a conversation and you swear that they're psychotic they seem to not make any sense in their conversation what they're doing if you study what's going on in terms of the association cortex of the brain is one idea that triggers another idea and they just go to it automatically they actually reason it sounds psychotic is that's what happens in psychosis where you actually have these free associations or this flight of ideas is what it's called sometimes so you'll see a toddlers in circle group in circle time and one will say i went to grandma's house last week in the next one will say i like ducks and they'll think that how does that having to do with grandma's house except the second one grandma  took from the feed ducks and you can tease it out if you talk to him but there's no need to this is the way talers are sort of making sense of their world as you get older you get to school age kids are the kids you'd find at burbank these are kids who are incredibly rolled by and as we know when as they get older they become more willing to be flexible with the rules but younger kids kindergarten first second third fourth and out every single time in kickball don't in fact they want to get around to the game because they spend forever making the rules of the game  and that's part of sort of learning how to create order from from what feels like chaos to them in a lot of studies of moral development if you ask little kids where rules come from when they're little like kindergarten first grade they look at you kind of funny and they say what do you mean they've always been there there's always been rules and then around first second third grade they'll say well the rules were made by adults for smarter people so that we could have fun by fourth fifth grade they say well the rules are there so that the game is better it's like more fun that way to play this game and then by sixth seventh eighth grade they say screw the rules we don't need rules and that's actually beginning about a lessons where you start to i'm sorry to this group and he sorry  curriculum to meet these growing developmental steps and just so you know as you progress out of early adolescence and middle lessons to late adolescence to early adulthood you move towards this kind of desire you go from figuring out who you are which has to do with all these abstract thoughts to figure out who you can love so one of the and then this is you can there's a neurobiology to this too so base the thinking is that you figure out a sense of identity in high school that's where you have people sort of coming in looking different almost every single day like dressing different having different ways of speaking different music that they listen to changing what they listen to from like ninth tenth grade and then around eleven for twelfth grade that stuff starts to get kind of more solidified and you start to see kids who get comfortable with who they are and that makes them also if it's healthy development comfortable moving among groups so if you remember in mean girls and see that movie then when they draw the picture of the cafeteria and they like each person at the table that they sit at it's actually not healthy development as that's kind of what that movie was about healthy development is the guy in the wrestling team who can sing in the choir and be comfortable with both of those things and actually good schools make that more possible than actually my extremes with almost schools of they've been really really good at that at all levels which has been pretty cool so one way to look at this is through language and reasoning on average kids get five new words  day by first grade which is going to read what's on my slides twelve new words a day from first to third grade they get ten thousand words by first grades you can imagine the brain development going on there to go from that relatively small vocabulary to this massively increase teach new languages that younger ages because they pick it up so automatically in a way that our adult brains just aren't so wired to do twenty thousand words by third grade you should be able to understand the pronunciation by preschool but by seven mature seven they're going to start telling stories by preschool and part of what you work on in preschool curricula is sequencing and that has a lot to do with how we talk to kids about scary things because you want to help them put into order things that happen so that they don't think that it goes from i saw the twin towers fall of an old commercial and that means it's going to happen when i'm in downtown boston so you're going to stablish sequence in that happened ten years ago but it's ten years ago to me ten years ago is when mommy and me first met before you were born so that then helps to sort of place it in time for them because they need those reference points otherwise their mind can't help but to associate by grade school you start having kids talk to complicated stories and then by high school i always joke that you start having this i think the sound should work on this and let's just watch it we get over here and what i want you to keep in mind as you're watching it all get out the way but once i tell it to start is what you notice about how these kids are interacting with each other to translate they're having an argument about whether it's raining outside or sprinkling outside and they get pretty upset about it because because what you say actually exists by definition so if you're a toddler when you say it it must be true which is a weird way of thinking about the world and we sometimes forget that that's about the world but think about the toddlers view toddlers are egocentric by definition which is not a bad thing that's just the way toddlers are that's why i have your toddlers in the backseat of your car where they should be obviously and they're reading a book they say look at what's on page you know on this page mommy is driving mommy can't possibly see what's on that book but they get really mad that you can't see it because what they figure is whatever they can see through your eyes is what the whole world sees at that point and once you realize that you some stories start to explain them well i can't see the book because i'm not looking at it i'm looking out this window do you see the window i'm looking out so that's where that not real comes from what else you kno yes because even more real than what you say what your parents say and that's actually where a lot of cognitive dissonance comes in among preschool kids and older kids especially as to happen this year during the election where  it actually happened in this town last year with the vote for the budget override for the school where some parents understandably wanted it some parents understand we didn't want it and each one was kids were quoting their parents about this and i were getting seen patients about this but also hearing about this and if your mom says it it must be true who are you to say what my mom said isn't true as opposed to the idea that well parents feel differently about things and have different opinions so again this sort of idea that what's said must absolutely be real yeah the so there's no there's no in between right like it's either this or that i hope that doesn't forecast our next four years but that idea that that the term i'm using has to be the term that accurate and part of that just has to do with vocabulary development right like sprinkling might mean something different than rain so you have to if you're the parent there you might say well spring clean means lightly rain but it's lightly raining will heavy rain it's like when you're in the shower and light rain is what you just turn the challenge to a little bit so then you're going to get into a reference point but they know these are ways that you can help toddlers to sort of make sense of what to them is otherwise a pretty straightforward world like if i say that's true it's real if mom says it it's especially real or dad says it and then when somebody contradicts me it's really really scariest what i would do is poke you in the hard right and then the boy what does he do when he gets poked him because he's really fine and he hasn't been hurt in a sort of major way but now he's gotten up right because she's done her thing so he can sort of go into a behavior that he knows is going to have a predicted response which and this does have to do with road rage when you watch people adults kind of be compensate healthy adults to compensate getting release of which we all do we tend not to use different words we just use the same words would say more loudly right you cut me off you cut me off you know you come and it just gets worse and worse and worse which is why benchley ends of being violent sometimes where you just roll the window and drive away if you're if you're smart so that actually those regressed moments have to do with high stress times when the lower reach in the brain the firefight region in the middle which is great for all men shapes just as allman shaped part of the brain it's all there is to crocodiles brain it's screaming really loud the higher brain is trying to get in on it but the louder the mcgillis screams the less the higher brain can be part of that conversation so you just raise your voice over and over again until you finally just do what i  say i'm sorry you're not old enough to appreciate the fact that it's raining out sprinkling yet but someday you will be old enough to get that all of these things you'll see among tyldesley says as you guys know and we'll get to how we talk t toddlers how we use what you just gleaned about normal development these are perfectly healthy kids about you know potentially more scary things like the boston marathon bombing let's look at the next clip he's the one who's really in charge but he's a teenager too and so he's able to solve the problems abstract thought status is huge and you see that on the playground here all the time that's why you know we sort of try to fight it and don't bully and all that which we should but also kids we're pack animals we set up these pecking orders and it's it's hard to get in the way of what's a ball over two hundred thousand years what else like i don't know if you did that like school age kids love books about secret codes love you know writing stuff and then putting the lemon juice right in with lemon juice and then putting the flame under it to sort of see the words come out it's all about knowing how stuff works r high school where they become more willing to play with different ways of doing things but the interest in things like that rube goldberg device they had their own opening the door that's starts in grade school it's why we all love those ok go music videos if you've watched them where  they create one step goes to the next go to the next of the next and it's actually they have a rube goldberg exercise as the first thing they do in fifth grade at for those you have parents there and they film and the kids love it and we have dominoes all that stuff set up that's something that particularly appeal a higher level so older school age kids brains right before the onset of puberty so rules matter a huge amount of hierarchy pecking order and the idea that that you've got your  charms that's actually it was called back in the fifty's was for not the chairmanship where you have certain ways of talking to each other better particular only to your group and that's super super important because that allows you to separate a little bit from your parents and tolerate the possibility of the world might not be so safe so there you're going to find out if you're talking to your kids about the marathon for example you might find out what their friends have told them about it first because they're hanging out more with their friends at that point they're not looking to their parents as quickly as they're looking to their friends but they're still looking to their parents to one listen to you different from teenagers you have to kind of sneak it in so the next clip is a teenage little bit soft it's hard to hear  from juno which is a great like one of my fairy favorite movies about adolescence in the scene ellen page is character is very pregnant she's also in high school she's talking to her dad because she's worried that maybe people can't ever really fall and need to know that it's possible that two people can stay happy together forever and that's not easy that's for sure and i want to just track record in the world i know but in my opinion the best thing you can do is find a person who loves you for exactly what you are if you have at first yeah yeah she's worried in that scene just you know because she's seen the dissolution of the two parents who she had planned on giving this child to who were going to adopt this baby that she's decided to give birth to and it's freaked her out actually because she thought they were the perfect couple because on paper they look like the perfect and yet they're not so great and they're certainly not great together and that's freaking her out so she goes to her dad to about yeah how do you have kids now when you have eighteen when when you get around to making one or adopting one and you have teenagers the sort of teen asking for advice is just even psychiatrist i got no idea what i'm doing as a parent and when sophie who's my teenager comes and asks for advice it's almost funny because you can see her sort of like it's almost like a what's going on in their world but there is this reticence to go for and you may remember that from when you were a kid well you know  yeah he's pretty sure it's not dating problems are he but this is his way of sort of helping her and if you teach high school or we work with teenagers or you have teenagers it doesn't always work but it's not a bad try to try and get them to laugh a little bit make make light of the situation because remember everything that happens when you're in high school is drama it's like the end of the world i mean actually the most common reason kids feel suicidal is in the mood disorder it's  dissolution of a breakup usually in the scituate in the setting of a mood disorder like depression but it's because a breakup feels horrific and the worst thing you can do as a parent to say like you know what don't worry about it this other keep people out there you'll meet other people because when you're always have couples work exactly like it's amazing that couple stay together it really is and i always tell you know people at the hardest thing like i don't patients the hardest the only harder thing than being married is maybe not being married and i love being married but it's hard work and so he sort of says you find someone who loves you for what you are and then you just kind of you got to hope for hope for it to work out and he is now the best track record he acknowledges that  the idea that she's thinking at all about whether people can stay together for a long time is actually fairly advanced for an adolescent in a part of that's related to the fact that she you know carrying a baby and part of that's really the fact that she's looking at this other couple who aren't doing so well so she's sort of ahead of the game developmentally but most teenagers don't progress along a kind of steady course they do this then they come back down in this so you have these moments of profound insight and then these moments of unbelievable poor judgment that is characteristic of you know like the the water tower behind the high school that i went to which had the name of my high school like written on it was this thing that you would climb from time to time which was incredibly stupid because it was super high and you could easily die and this i remember dating this girl named sarah i'm totally over this now by the way this girl named sarah forsyth who dumped me for wade wilkerson because he was on the wrestling team and a girl of sixty eight mustang and they the rumor was that they had climbed the water tower together so i figured the best way to get sarah back was to climb the water tower which of course makes no sense right so despite the fact that was a pretty smart kid in a junior in high school that had my buddies been there they want to do a clean water tower just going to go play basketball but i drove there better you got to go inside everything's ok incredible lapses of judgment which have to do with these massively impulsive decisions in the setting of high emotional valence which is why kids do dumb things basically despite having more neurons in their brain then they'll ever have any other time more than anybody in this room house by definition so now when talk about the brain development piece then we'll talk about the difficult things that's me at the trial film festival surrounded by water not real zombies for the record that was at the premiere of survival the dead because the guy who made that movie was me dave the dad and donna dad and bought the book that i wrote and so we wrote that's can play together so there are neurobiological that made me go from this to this and sort of not freak out about it so how's the human brain change some folks used to say well their brains get bigger but that's just not the case and so i don't have to go through all this data i'm just going to tell you it's not the case for many many years we thought it was the case despite being faced with evidence massively to the contrary if anybody has dogs you know this we have one hundred ten pound dog we have a seven pound dog and one hundred ten pound dog is dumb as a box of nails and our seven pound dog is super smart his brain can't be bigger than this the dog's a good sized brains huge school and we know the brain usually expands to fit the school so it has less to do with the size of the brain and more to do with something else which we'll talk about a second and there's been a number of studies looking at this this is one of the definitive ones because it had such a large and twenty thousand autopsies of people with all sorts of different ages the brain barely grows at all from three to eight thousand it kind of has its largest increase from four times so teenagers microscope the little dots there are neurons the spaces in between his white matter those neurons the grain matter that's the content carrying material in your brain that actually dissipates actually quite radically so exponentially as you get older so the material that holds on to information actually starts to disappear at the neurons die through something called a pop whosis they do that so that you can have room for connections that's what correlates with intelligence it's not the size of the brain and it's not the number of neurons it's the number of connections in between the neurons which is pretty cool when you think about it sort of gray matter the neurons go down white matter goes up and so just to show you a picture of that the white matter goes up so that each of these little stretches here those connections either axons or dendrites whether they're going away from the cell or towards a cell those are the white matter connections and you need the neurons the cells that carry content to disappear so they have more space in between the cells that can talk to each other so one neuron can talk to six can talk to thirty can talk to fifty that's what how a brain network works that's actually why if you think about it from an evolutionary perspective you're much more likely to remember lyrics to songs that you knew in high because for most of human history we've died around age thirty so at age sixteen years which we fighting to make to reproduce and our brains are wired to hold on to material then what really good teachers teach to that feeling in the room that sort of tension that's in the room in less you can make a p government sexy it's awfully hard for kids to hold onto it so and the reason that the neurons start to disappear if you have more white matter connections the changes that happen lead to these rapid  physical changes where you get distill approx one growth which is a fancy way just saying every looks like puppies with a long lengthy arms and little torsos especially in middle school and you get these psychological corresponding changes which we talked about and then the increase in which are things like testosterone and estrogen lead to the increased tanner stages which are different stages for boys and girls so neil patrick harris can go from looking like that to looking like dr horrible there those changes interestingly enough are associated with some really interesting findings which i'll tell you about tori going to the slide it turns out that boys who have earlier onset adolescence puberty do better across the board so boys who earlier and you would think would be the same because their brains are equally more developed than are their cohort who have been in are pretty early they actually do worse across the board so they do worse academically they do worse socially they do and these are generalizations but it's been found over and over and over again so let's just take a second to get to the difficult conversation thing all of this could be difficult one why would that be why would it be that boys internet lessons earlier is a leg up girls are now less earlier actually tends to be something so so one of the the thoughts are that you get this unwanted attention and this is very culturally driven right so i don't we need to get into a discussion of sort of cultural construct not to do things but for boys still in our culture you see this in our t v shows in our movies i was watching  noon is when he was an old westerns the hierarchy is very severe for boys and the pecking order gets established pretty early on it dissipates as we talk about as you get into high school or people sort of become confident their groups but early on being bigger and stronger and smarter gives you a leg up whereas early on if you're a girl especially in a coed setting and this effect has dissipated over the years to be gotten better at sort of the how being both genders to get along with each other better but still it's the case that even though you're better able to make sense of the world the unwanted attention tends to make those girls withdraw and that's it again a gargantuan generalization but the data just continues to show that which is interesting and just worth keeping in mind because sometimes people make assumptions that if a girl especially looks older she must be able to do better and she certainly is able to do better but that doesn't mean she will do better because of the cultural constraints least that's the theory that holding back that makes sense so he's are some general rules about difficult questions safety reassurance is absolute key no matter what age remember these kids live under our roofs they need to know that the world is a safe place most of the time they're not thinking about it not being safe at all about it sort of in these bursts of anxiety we our house was very anxious during the manhunt after the boston marathon bombing i keep thinking of that one because that was that beautiful spring day and we're all trapped inside her on lockdown and all that stuff and having to sort of make sense of that so she was terrified i was thinking i'm going to clean up this mess for the next like six months the next day she was fine she's totally fine so these things come in kind of these spurts and bursts but during that time you reassure and you let them know that they're safe that's actually the that's your leading point you ask them are you worried and if they are worried you say let me tell you why  safe let me tell you what we've done to make sure you're safe let me tell you how you can reach me even need to reach me if you're worried that you're not safe and we'll talk about how that differs developmentally you want to ask questions before you make assumptions that you know what it is they're worried about they might not be worried at all about what you think so they might see something on t v and you might see the same thing on t v and they might be worried about something entirely different when i was this is two thousand that like that was when rumsfeld was the sector a defense he said we will bring you osama bin laden's head on a stick that was the line he used and i had a younger kids in my practice who heard that on public radio because their parents were driving and they heard this quote from rumsfeld and they pictured it literally on a stick so they were freaking out i had one killer member who's freaking out there's already an anxious kid and then he had this image of someone's head actually sitting on a stick something that actually wouldn't get under the skin so much of a seventeen year old in part because they know that it's a hopefully is a metaphor so the parent thought that the kid was upset because the parent was so angry at what rumsfeld had said whether or not you grew up with th sort of a point here that was what the kid was upset at all that he was literally picturing the head on a stick and so once you could sort of reassure him there will be no heads on the sticks there will not be this country will not be filled with had sitting on sticks that's not going to happen i promise you that won't happen when you say it softly we will do everything to make that not happen and we know that we can stop that from happening and that kid sort of came down a notch so you want to ask questions you don't ever want to force conversation so you would never want to say i had a parent ask me last week do you think it's a good idea that i make my kid go see patriots day because i don't they weren't old enough to appreciate how scary it was and i want them to see how how well we going to force a lesson in this kind of way now if you see them looking worried and they say i don't want to talk about it you might say i know you want to talk about but i feel like i need to tell you this things are ok you're safe that's a different kind of conversation and then you want to keep in mind the developmental stages so what you're going to say to a little kid associative logic is going to be really different than what you'll say to school age could use concrete logic to a teenager or use abstraction so to take an older example and keep using sort of terrorism examples the twin towers falling many many little kids who saw that on t v thought that that was their backyard because they don't really get it what they see on t v is what is so you say that's happening in new york city new york city it's very far away how far away as far as it takes us to drive to grandma's house wow that is far so then they sort of you put it into some sort of reference point as they get older you might say ok that's happened in new york why'd they do it they are not nice people you're allowed to say that whether it's obviously massively oversimplifying things probably aren't nice people but you're able to massively oversimplify it because not nice and nice makes sense and that sort of either or a world that we saw  school age kids for the time you get to high school you might have to help them to entertain both sides of that courting even if you don't think there's both sides of it because remember teenagers as much as they might be afraid of something like another twin towers they're going to want to argue with you so if you take the position that you know this was a horrible horrific god awful terrible thing which it obviously was don't be surprised were teenagers as well they had reasons and then you might rather than say there's no good reason  which person have a hard time they're not a good reason you would say what would those reasons be what's on your mind and you don't want to say it in an angry judge went away because and then you lose or say what do you think could make somebody do something like that and these are by the way the very discussions there had been in you know my daughters taking world history right now they're having these very discussions about past complex in the world there's no reason that you shouldn't have about current conflicts if they can tolerate th that's the that's the didactic portion rather than my i guess one of the difficult things this is what i would ask you guys and i'm going to sort of hear one of the one of the things that come to your mind that parents have been asked by their kids and that have been maybe that's a great example we see it if i do almost every day on the transplant service so so we think about safety and reassurance first the first thing you're going to say to the other six year old not the one with cancer but the one who doesn't have cancer is you're going to say you're ok you don't have cancer because you worry like you're you've just got to the stage at age six where you feel like you could leave the house safely and come back home safely you can leave your parents come back home separation anxiety if you're healthy is sort of gone and now this kid gets this disease it seems like this monster that's come out from under the bed and you don't know whether it's can come out from under your bed and all that you say you're fine or before you do that you wanted a second thing what are your worries about it see to make assumptions so i'm worried that how do i know i don't have cancer which is usually we're six year olds go at this or they'll say is sally going to die that would be the other place they'll go with it you'll say i don't know if sally's going to die you know right away it's not really the time to say well we all die someday that's not a very useful thing to say so it is six but you would say we don't really know she is sick she has really good doctors who are taking the best care of her her parents are looking after her are you worried about her and then you hear what she has to well i worry i might have cancer and say you don't have cancer how do you know because we took you to the doctor and the doctor did a check up and there were no there was nothing that worried us there are no signs nothing whatever it's there and the doctor just didn't find it that's all you got to say you don't have to like say well how do you know because i'm telling you it's not parents actually you can get away with that six seven eight nine ten eleven you start to have to say well it's not there because they ran tests and there are certain signs of it and to be in it how kind of analytic your kid is but it five six seven you just have to say it's not i know i'm your parent and i know i promise i tell you and then there's a line you can use with kids which is useful for everything from going little kids going to the dentist to worrying that they might someday get cancer which is i'm i'll tell you when to worry because kids you'll find sometimes start to worry about going to the dentist like six to eight weeks before the appointment or they don't they're not so great having a conceptualization that much time but a long time before say i promise to give you time to worry about it and then you got to follow through on that it's not fair to say we're going to come out in the car when the dentist now you can worry that's not fair and they totally freak out if the say you have your dentist appointment tomorrow then you know i know i know let's figure out what you can do after the appointment that'll make it you know worth your while and bribes are wholly farming like we bribe ourselves you give yourself some nice i'll have a nice craft beer at the end of a hard day that's a bride then i stop at the little craft beer store in belmont center and buy it and drink it at home that's a bribe i've given myself to sort of reward myself for having made it through a hard day little kids can't bribe themselves because they don't have the pass to give themselves anything so you give it to him there's a huge we're going to stop  yes it's a great question because you know that wasn't even a topic that came up in my training and i didn't train that long ago i finished my trials and fellowship it was from ninety eight to two thousand so one that long ago and yet it's now so much a part of our lexicon and we're there is some worry right now that we run the risk of making too big a deal out of this stuff and somehow box kids into certain identities because remember adolescence all about shifting identities and if you become there's nothing wrong with being transgendered but if you decide that's how you're going to identify yourself then everybody box you wonder that you don't have a lot of room to shift out of the because there's too much at stake and i just got an e mail from a medical student at a different medical school who did something in the signature line i've never seen before where he had his name he had you know the medical school he went to and then it said pronoun call and he slash him and i never seen that and i brought it up with sophie for my daughter says oh yeah we that's what they at high school they've all asked as so it's tends not to be such an issue in high school where kids are much more willing to sort of be unless you box them in much more fluid but in school age it's where precisely because of this sort of rule bound view of the world right you are a boy or you are a girl we have this dichotomous view of the world that kids have a really hard time accepting that and what you i think have to say is what's been shown to be useful is  people sometimes are making up their mind about this and this is what's happening with la well they shouldn't do that but up to you to decide that it's up to them and their parents and you know what what their particular beliefs are but sometimes it takes people a while but figure this out and that's what's happening here so you're going to normalize it you're not going to raise your voice you're not going to look scared if you can avoid it and you and the other thing which kids very much into is you might say well let's wait till your father gets home and then we'll talk about this then they keep right in because they know this is serious and it is serious but it's not like the interests are scary so they're going to say the other thing i think you should do is ask them what happened at school so because there's a big difference between having a hard time accepting it and actually actively pushing somebody down bullying them it would kind of make sense to have a hard time accepting that only because school age kids think in that way that there's this or there's that well as we saw that video so helping them to understand that there's some space in between is actually super super important and then of we've seen especially with school age kids was first with teenagers flat like i don't know how many times my mom had me listen they're free to be you and me when i was growing up which was awesome i love all the music but the boys are people people with children like that never got me anywhere like i knew boys were people and people like the idea that that like i sort of got that it's that that grey area that's more charged for kids the other thing is there's nothing that says especially if you're friends with the person who's experiencing some you know gender fluidity so he says that the friend can ask the other friend what's you know what's going on yeah yeah because the thing that that's not talked about actually becomes much more scary you can so you would say i can see how you would think that i can tell you it's actually not as weird as you think there's a lot of people who feel this way yeah and we've just given permission for it that you know have more of a voice it strange because it annoys me ok you can't do that because that you just did this back said the same thing twice does it annoy you because you don't like the idea that you might you know you are you thinking that you're worried about your own gender like you want to sort of think out loud with them about that and also you want to say to them being you know annoyed is the way a lot of people responded but it's usually not a very useful response not because there's anything scary about having a transgender person it's scary because it threatens your own sense of kind of this sort of that i think that's where you get such such stocks reactions from people because most of our world is about kind of close centric circles and whether you're inside or outside and the idea that there's space in between which is something that teenagers are fine with but that little kids have a really hard time with because they're just trying to make sense of the world and then the world suddenly throws in this curve ball and you can say why does it hurt you well it just doesn't make any sense to me and then you can say you might even say i don't know but makes sense to me either in the same way that it does to this person but that's because i'm not that person and everybody has their reasons for doing things is it hurting you in some way you said it hurts how is it hurting you and you're not you're not preachy you're just saying no no he's actually following her she's fine yeah so it's the that's a kid who's temperamentally which is a normal state of temperaments a description of a normal state of personality temperamentally sensitive kid who might by the way grow up to love scary movies and there's a lot of literature about the people who grew up to really like scary movies or terran type films actually start out when they're little really hating those kinds of conflicts and then in the sort of attempt to address the conflict had on feel like getting up the courage to ride the roller coaster than loving riding the roller coasters could tell you what happens in my own words rather than reading it so now it's coming from mom and not from the book and then do you want me to read it and then the piece says no no no no don't read it if he says yes then you read it and then you got the forty five him back into their room sit down and you talk about what it is that they're worried about in that scene what are they worried that they is it a kind of loop where they just keep replaying the scene over and over again that's that's one kind of issue and then there are techniques you can use to help them get rid of that that have to do with things you can do on your own versus things that a therapist can do and there's medications that can help for that and it makes its way towards o c d which is actually what early o c d looks like sometimes as if your child is o c d but because a lot more actually right and well this will pass too from eight nine ten is actually where it's usually most sensitive and usually the the kind of concern over is perceived conflict avoidance that usually gets more tolerable the kids around ten and eleven and twelve years their brain gets big enough to sort of handle two opposing ideas at once at this age it's just too scary to think that the conflict that happened i remember being up all night with my parents after watching boys town and which is hardly like a scary movie but the idea that the kid the delinquent was going to go to jail just freaked me out i just couldn't stand it my dad's like those were my favorite movies when i was growing up i want you to watch this with me and my dad when he was home alone my back it's hard for me to see it let alone to sort of have my kids see it now i'm going to talk to them about it and yet i want my kids to know my dad even though you know he's less and less my dad would have a go see him what  person as they as they were now i mean there's nothing wrong with getting older people get old and you say this is what happens people the older but let me tell you about grandpa when he was fifteen when he was sixty  yeah yeah here so you found a reference point that they could relate to right like the toys with the batteries running now and then it was easier for them to sort of compare that to something that they couldn't really tell at first was really insulting so the problem with that approach and i understand it comes from a really good place it's what i was trained to think was an air of kindness basically or an air of compassion error of compassion is once the person does pass away once the bad thing does happen the kid then wonders what else you're going to keep from them going forward so it's better to sort of couch it in the most developmentally appropriate way batteries are running now getting sick or daddy's very sick daddy's batteries are running out just like your toys batteries or any now if you're religious daddies preparing to go to have it mean whatever works for your particular cultural value and it's not incredibly difficult thing to talk about but kids almost always in fact always do better if you're straight up about it especially that they know if you don't tell them straight away and this actually is borne out by lots of data and studies because it used to be the thinking in the fifty's sixty's was that you don't tell kids about this and actually kids were substantially more traumatized there was more nightmares there were more development of  usually anxiety disorders whereas if you are straight up with kids about it they go on and then the other thing that you do in those circumstances so sleep it's in your family which i hope it's not but it's the way life works is you you do your very best to keep things as normal as possible so soccer practice they still go to soccer practice when they can they do my wife had breast cancer issues of my telling this in two thousand and nine and it was about the best prognosis you could have cancer and it was scary and the only one normal to appreciate it but sophie was in the most important thing was to keep her with you know i'm just doing things that she does go to school go to after school we let her teachers do and before i can even finish the send she screamed i don't want to see a therapist and she was like she was like nine you know like i don't know if the floppy you know there are not going to happen everything's cool people in this room we've had the same questions sophie my six year old was sobbing at like four am in the election not because she's particularly political she knew how my wife and i thought but we weren't super loud were political but we were super loud but she just said how can i grow up and be a woman in this country with elected official that the country's elected who talked like this about women it just it just bunder for all sorts of good reasons and well i want to hear when you go back to say step one for me was sort of getting control my own anger and also my own hysteria because i just so these are my politics i'm i can't stand the guy and yet he is elected he's my president i'm going to respect him for that and nevertheless it infuriates me that he's for some people including people i grew up with gotten a pass on these things and i know that stuff leaks out so i actually have to take a deep breath and try my very to not let that stuff leak out as much with my kids so if he's old enough she just says i don't want to hear any more about it just stop whereas naomi's she still sees me get really upset and angry about it so what other people do exactly right we're going to developmentally appropriate way see don't take in the marches necessarily right away where they might experience some fairly ugly things before they're sort of ready to see it like people yelling and screaming saying not nice things but they can write letters right you can have your kids write letters send them to elected officials send them to these organizations you can say i'm doing this organization here is why i've joined it those are ways to make the girls recognize that that you know there are something can be done about something which is really important and this thing you can say is there are plenty of men as you've seen this here who and women for that matter who have not talked nicely about women because actually plenty who have remind them of that as well so you know sort of let them know that there are two sides to this to this coin and point out that you know as the president the current president himself of the sun will come up the next day like we're going to get through  this but it has been it's been trying as a father of daughters i mean that's just the truth and that's a nationwide finding even among families who have been you know very supportive of the president elect right now  so that's when you have to do this kind of reframing with your kid because we all do that right and i can remember right when i was my kids were still willing to watch sports with me which they're not anymore and so he would say like or know me would say what team are we rooting for and i'd say the team in red and she'd say so the bad guys the other team and they're just the other team so they but you say you hate them you hate the cowboys i'm like no i admit i don't hate him the way i like hate you know murder i was fun to hate the cowboys so why is it funny you know this was when she was like seven or eight seed sort of refrain is say in sports we sometimes say this we don't really hate them but this is the way we sort of get into the experience and have fun with it in the same way that you might you know enjoy a bill and in a in a movie or something like that with the election we all did that i think part of the fallout of this election has been the loss of gray area in even though i've told you that kids who are school age have a hard time appreciating gray area our goal as parents is the adults in the room is to help them to reach up developmentally know and understand that their his grey area i worry that we lost sight of that regardless of what side of the political spectrum we sit on story so the paper still got to sell so they look for the sexy headline so it's awesome that they have you doing that despite the fact that you're wearing a steelers shirt and all that so funny because that's who my chiefs are playing on sunday and i'm anxious for good reason i know about out of time i'm happy to stick around and answer questions afterwards but thanks for