Why Community and Connection Matter in Raising Resilient Kids with Doug Bolton

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How are parents potentially contributing to the unprecedented level of anxiety, depression and stress affecting kids and youth today? Welcome to Where Parents Talk. My name is Leanne Castellino. Our guest today is a clinical psychologist and an author.

Doug Bolton was the principal of a public therapeutic school in the United States for 14 years. He's also an educator and a father of three.

His first book is called Creating Connected Families, Schools and Communities to Raise a Resilient Generation. Doug joins us today from Evanston, Illinois. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Thank you so much for having me.

Looking forward to this conversation because we are talking about communities at the end of the day and maybe more so than the average parent would think about. Your debut book, Untethered has been described as eye opening. Can you take us through why you think it has earned that descriptor?

Yeah, I think for a couple of reasons. As we've gotten deeper and deeper into this childhood mental health crisis, I think we've tried to find all sorts of solutions to it.

In some ways, Untethered brings us back to our roots really as a species. We were meant to be in community. That's how we've always survived as a species. We would never have survived if we weren't in community.

In some ways, I think this is a looking back to get to re establish our roots as opposed to trying to create something new to address these concerns. And in particular, I think that it means rethinking a lot of the things that we have believed are the foundations of our parenting.

Thinking about kids behavior through the lens of motivation, for instance, as opposed to through the lens of connection and emotional regulation.

That when we begin to take a look at the use of incentives and punishments, which is often our first go to strategy for kids who are struggling behaviorally when their mental health issues show up as behavior, our first response is to fall back on incentives and punishments. Those have been debunked in many ways for supporting children's development for the last 70 years or so.

I think it's a little bit more of how do we reestablish who we are are as opposed to how do we create something new to address this crisis.

So let's unpack the different strands of themes that you've outlined there.

I want to start Though first with the idea that the pandemic really exacerbated what was already an emerging crisis, or in some experts view, a crisis already. When we talk about youth mental health challenges from your perspective, what. What are some of the root causes of this ongoing crisis?

Great question. You know, I think that there's a. One of the things that Covid did was I think it took an epidemic and then it turbocharged it.

And so when we talk about the power of community, that's one of the main things that we lost during COVID was this ability to be in community.

But the things that there was a mental health crisis before COVID I think that there's a lot written about social media and I think that certainly that's been a big part of it, but it's not the only piece of it. And I think we want a lot of people will throw all their eggs in that basket.

But I think that there's a number of things that have been stressful for children.

I think that the increased pressure we have in schools to achieve, and I think this started in some ways from the government's perspective, we created in the United States, no Child Left behind. But across the world, we began really measuring kids and schools through test scores. As we do that, then our focus becomes on test scores.

Universities have become more and more selective intentionally so that they can become higher rated because of their selectivity. There's a lot of different ways that we've created scarcity for our kids. We have travel teams now, and you've got it.

And everybody is fighting for these few positions. And instead of being together, oftentimes we are competing against one another.

So I think that academically and socially, we are creating situations where kids need to achieve and we've put achievement at the forefront rather than children's development. And they aren't. They can coexist. But what we want to make sure of is that in order to achieve our best, we've got to have connected relationships.

We need to have a sense of belonging in order to achieve.

So it's not that achievement itself is bad, it's just that how can we create the conditions where kids are going to be able to fully develop as they engage in activities and hopefully experience some achievement. Then the other piece that I'll try and mention more briefly is as parents, we focused on self esteem.

We believe that distress when our children experience distress, that somehow we are. That's counter to a child's developing self esteem. And so we've been protecting our children from distress.

And we experience distress when we see our children in distress.

And in fact, it is experiencing distress and getting through it that's essential for us to develop healthy coping skills and resilience as opposed to not experiencing distress.

I think children's distress tolerance has gone down because as parents, we've been jumping in and rescuing them rather than having them experience it and finding their way through it.

I want to go back to your earlier point before we talk about the distress piece, but when you talk about creating the conditions favorable for achievement, that is healthy achievement, what do those conditions entail? What does that look like?

Yeah, you know, the research on belonging is really very, very powerful. And, and so the, the. My. I've got all sorts of ideas about this, so let me just, let me figure out how I can do this succinctly.

One of the things that we know is that in order to really learn and to have our brains fully developed, we need to be emotionally regulated and we need to be connected in relationship. And those things come first. Right. And then we can learn. And that's been the case.

We've known this about learning since the beginning of time, that these two things are essential. As we focus more and more on test scores and achievement, we take less and less time to regulate and to connect.

And so classrooms now teach bell to bell.

Instead of having some times to connect and quiet, we have kids going home and having three hours of homework every night after a sports practice, meaning that they're not able to connect and regulate following the school day with their family. We've got kids and multiple teams.

And so families, instead of having family dinners, we are juggling schedules and trying to figure out who's got to get the snack for which kid, for which team.

In many ways, we're unraveling in our efforts to have kids on achieve in sports, to have them achieve academically, to have them achieve in the orchestra and whatever it may be, we are undermining the things that actually drive that achievement, which is being connected and being emotionally regulated.

So I guess it begs the question, if you are a parent who finds yourself in one of those situations that you just outlined, how do you dial that back?

Yeah, you know, it's. We need to be really intentional about it.

At some level, we're all drinking from the same water. As parents, we want our kids to be high achievers. Our kids want to be high achievers.

And the way we define that is not just excellence across a number of different areas. And so from very early on, we begin pushing kids towards.

I remember when my kids were young, we had Baby Einstein and this was our way to get their brains going so that they could then really engage in preschool. That we started a very early age with this idea that the more we achieve, the more and the higher we achieve, the better.

And what we know is that life doesn't work that way. That life. In order to be successful, we need to have a rhythm to our lives.

That in order to be our best when we are in class or on a sports team or our best at home with family, we need to rest first. Right? We need to have downtime before we can fully engage. It's the way the rhythms of our lives.

We sleep during the night so that we can have a good productive day. If we don't get a good night's sleep, if we don't have that downtime, we can't fully engage. What's happening is we are taking away the downtime.

We're taking away the downtime in classrooms because we're teaching bell to bell and we have very short passing periods. Teachers don't get a chance to have their mind quiet and re engage. Kids don't have that opportunity.

Then they go straight from school to home where they have homework or practice and then homework. And so we've taken away that very, very important rhythm in our lives.

And I think that the work is to put the rhythm in first and then figure out do they need to be on three travel teams, right. And we would never say to somebody, I know you like ice cream sundae, so why don't you have four of them today?

Right there, there is, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. And I think that we need to be aware of that to be able to say, everybody can, you know, we've got.

You put the values of taking the time, the downtime, maybe dinner time is a, is a value. And so we're going to make sure we have dinner together four nights a week. And then we work our schedules around that.

It may be there are families who, you know, who have to be working during that time. So, but let's, let's put the time to connect and the time to be regulated in first.

The amount of time we sleep has to be put in first before we figure out how are we going to add a play onto the varsity soccer team, onto the orchestra. I guess it does mean making hard choices and making our kids unhappy because too much is too much.

Well, I think part of getting that message across perhaps is painting a picture of what happens when a child, or what could happen when a child is exposed to, you know, toxic achievement, academic pressure, etc. In what specific ways could that affect their emotional well being and their development?

Yeah, so it's another great question when our, you know, when, when I talk about these rhythms, I'm in many ways I'm talking about the rhythms of our nervous system. And our nervous system is meant to be activated and then to go back to homeostasis. It's meant to have a rhythm to it.

It's also meant to respond when there's a crisis. Right. To, to. And there's all sorts of hormonal and neurological activity that, that get triggered in order for us to rise to a certain occasion.

But when we're activating all of those systems in our bodies, they're meant to be activated and then quiet so they can recover. When they don't have the time to recover.

That's when we begin to notice problems related to dysregulation, which could be anything from irritability, temper tantrums to avoidance and high levels of anxiety. There are also physical outcomes, and maybe not when we're kids, but when we've worked, when we've exhausted those resources, they shut down more.

When we're adults, we often see health outcomes a couple decades after kids have experienced significant high levels of stress as children. And then there are a number of behavioral outcomes.

The likelihood kids who, who are in just attending a high achieving school puts kids at risk 3, 7 times other kids for substance abuse, for anxiety and for depression. And so I think that the data on this is really clear and it's really hard for us to say, well, I become anxious when I take.

If my child's not going to achieve, if my child's not going to get into a selective school, if my child's not going to, if my child gets a C on a test. It's hard to sit with that because we're in a culture where everybody believes that this level of achievement is essential for success.

And that's just a house of cards because it's not.

It'S so interesting because it's so the norm, right, that to hear you kind of talk about why it potentially shouldn't be the norm is just going against what we see and hear and live every day.

What.

What made you decide to write Untethered, your first book on this topic at this time?

Yeah. So, you know, I was the principal of a therapeutic school. And so it's a school. We had 150 kids, K through 12, coming into our buildings every day.

And these are kids who couldn't.

Who were with us precisely because they struggled to be successful and navigate the emotional demands, social emotional and behavioral demands of general education school. And I was continually inspired by the kids and families at North Shore Academy.

And I realized I've got to start writing these stories down because I'm going to forget them. And I don't want to forget them, kicking myself, because I started doing that just in the last couple years.

And then after I left North Shore Academy, I was doing professional development for schools on how to support kids. Social, emotional, behavioral development. And people would say, well, do you have a book? And I said, no, I don't have a book.

But I had 18 hours of workshops. And so when Covid hit, I found that I had some time and I just decided, okay, I'm gonna. I'm gonna write all this.

I'm gonna write out what these workshops, what I was saying in these workshops. And it became about a 400 page book. And I didn't think it was. I wasn't sure if it would ever get read, but I just knew I had to write it.

And then I had a. Teresa Barker, who's a writer, said, let me take a look at it. And so I showed it to her and she said. I said, is it a book and am I a writer?

And she said, yes, it's both. And she hooked me up with an agent and then it. It became a book, but I really didn't. I had no idea that it would be.

That it would be published in this way. And. But I think I'm. I'm really happy that the stories that this all began with that fill the book.

The stories of the students and families and staff that I was lucky enough to work with are a part of are in print now, and I'm happy about that.

In the course of putting that together, you know, writing down your thoughts, looking at the evidence, including the science, was there anything that in particular struck you?

Even though you're an educator and a former principal and a father, and all of these things that when you came across this science as it relates to this topic that, you know, it gave you pause.

Yeah, it was actually. It was remarkable. You know, as a therapeutic school principal, we were very behavioral in our. In our work, and we were successful.

Don't get me wrong, we were successful, but I think that we believe that we were successful because we had so many incentives and punishments. And what I began to realize as I dove into the research was that we were successful in spite of that.

And Dan Pink's work drive helped me really take a look at how do we understand motivation when it's. When we're not seeing it, when we're not seeing it through the lens of incentives and punishments.

And so he was able to say really what motivation is, is about mastery, autonomy, and purpose. Right. And. And that was fitting with the. That with broader themes. I would.

I would watch the people who are most successful with kids, and I started seeing that it was also really consistent with the research. I was learning about emotional regulation from writers and speakers like Bruce Perry, like Stuart Shanker.

And so I think that that was the biggest shift is that when what Stuart Shanker says is misbehavior is stress behavior. I think, to paraphrase something Bruce Perry would say is misbehavior is trauma behavior. Of course, trauma is just toxic levels of stress.

Rather than when a child or a student is misbehaving, we say, okay, what are the incentives and punishments we can do to change that? The thought then is, I wonder what the stress is that's causing it. And I wonder how we can help the student address the stress instead of.

Instead of trying to punish the behavior. This was a big shift for us, and it fits with Ross Green and Stuart Ablon's collaborative problem solving work. Collaborative and proactive solutions.

They've got different titles for their work, but again, kids do well if they can. It's not about the motivation. It's about skill. And so also taking a look, do they have the skills to tolerate the stresses in their lives right now?

So as we began to dive into these concepts, it became really clear that we were successful because we were nurturing those aspects of kids development, not because we had, you know, you had two periods in the quiet room if you swore to teacher. It was what we did. Once they got to the quiet room, we had the most regulated and connected people in the quiet room to work with them.

And of course, then they were able to find their best selves and get back to class. It wasn't the fact that they had this magic formula of incentives and punishments.

It's interesting because you talk about the skills that the kids would require, but what about the skills that a parent should optimally be armed with in order to not use rewards and punishments and do what you described, especially given all the stresses of their lives, whether they have other children, et cetera, et cetera? Like, what are the key skills that you think parents need to have in order to practice this type of, I guess, parenting?

Yeah. So I think the first step in this is to be regulated ourselves. We make the worst. Our worst decisions when we are emotionally dysregulated.

I think our dysregulation catches us off guard. And when I think about dysregulation, one of the things for students, for kids, but also for us, is there are two real qualities to this.

The first is we have a sense of urgency. We've got to deal with this right now, and almost never do we have to deal with it right now. And the other is an exaggeration.

If my child lied to me, if I don't come down hard now, they're going to be liars when they're 25, and they'll never be able to hold down a job. Who knows what's going to happen? So that's the urgency and then the exaggeration.

The other thing that happens when we are dysregulated is we lose our most important skills to be able to resolve problems. We're not as good at listening. When you think about that, I'm sure you've never melted down, Leanne, but other people may have.

But if we think back to the times that we've melted down, think about the skills that we just can't access in those moments. We're not as good at listening. We're not as good at being able to be creative. We become remarkably inflexible.

We lose empathy, even though we love our kid, we lose empathy for them. We lose language, we yell. Or sometimes we can't even find the words right. And so these are the skills that we really need. And if we're bringing.

If we're engaging with our kids without these skills and they don't have these skills, no wonder small problems can become big problems really quickly.

So the first step is to be aware of our own dysregulation and aware of the fact that in these moments, you are going to feel a need for control, which is going to lead us down the path towards punishments, really. And this happens, still happens for me, even though I know all this stuff, but.

But now I can coach myself a little better to be able to say, let's wait before you make a decision on this. Let's wait until your. Your full brain comes back online so that we can.

So that I can be more collaborative in trying to figure out how to navigate this issue with my child. And I don't. I'm not panicking because I've got this exaggerated sense about what might happen if.

If this behavior continues forever, which it almost never does, of course. But that's our worry in the moment. So I would say the biggest skill that we can have is to take care of our own regulation first.

You know, it's interesting, as I hear you describe, that what comes to mind is what a lot of parents tell their kids. You know, before you react to something, count to three in your head. Take that.

That's right. That's right. Yes.

And we dispense that advice to our children, but it sounds like we should be taking it more as parents.

Yeah. And I think that the cues that I try and have for myself when I'm in that place is what I'll notice.

The things that I notice the most is this lack of flexibility. Right. And I also notice a lack of empathy.

And so when I take a walk to try and get myself more regulated, it doesn't have to even have to happen that day oftentimes. Let's talk about this tomorrow when we both have our best brains about us.

But what I'll find is that once I can reestablish empathy and begin to have the ability to take perspective of what's happening for my child or my spouse, and I can find myself in a more flexible place. Well, we don't have to do it my way. There's a lot of different ways we can do this.

That's when I start knowing that my brain is coming back to home, my nervous system is coming back to homeostasis, I can reestablish my best thinking. I can reestablish relationship, and then we can talk about what we should do from here together.

One of the things that Untethered talks about, and you alluded to it at the beginning of the conversation, is the importance of community. We live in a world where that seems to be changing largely because of the virtual world, certainly the in influence and impact of the pandemic.

It still does, depending on who you talk to take a village to raise a child. But I'm curious in terms of, you know, why. Why should parents consider or reconsider the importance of community?

Can you characterize why Community is important in raising kids today.

Yeah, there's so many reasons.

So, so if we take a look, you know, the, there's the evolutionary biology perspective that really speaks to the fact that, that in order to survive, I couldn't, you or I would, would not do well even if we had a fire and a spear against the woolly mammoths that were, you know, running the world at the time. Right.

The only way we could survive all of the conditions across the entire globe, really, is because we had people who could hunt, people who could gather, people who could protect us and make, and make weapons, people who could cook, people who could care for families. You know, we were gathered in groups of somewhere between 40 and 150 people. And that's how we've always survived.

And if we were to get kicked out of that group, we would be, surely we would die. There's no way we could survive.

And so this is where this idea of fomo, there's an evolutionary biology basis to this, that being excluded at our very roots as people can trigger that level of anxiety. So we exist in these communities. So then what is it that these communities do? If you take a look.

And Jeffrey Cohen's work on belonging is very, very powerful. And he talks about all of the impacts of when we feel a sense of belonging, we.

Our mental health improves, our physical health improves, our social skills improve, our behavior improves. We're able to achieve more just about on every indice. And it buffers us from the impact of stress and trauma.

For some people, that's all we need is to be embedded in communities like this for other kids who have more significant trauma challenges. It's necessary, but maybe not sufficient.

Maybe we do need to have a therapist or other psychiatric or psychological or social work interventions to be able to support that. But it's really at the core of our being is to belong. And when we don't belong, our bodies. Tell us very quickly.

What do you want readers of Untethered to leave and take away from this book?

So I want them to leave with some skills, right. Some strategies and skills that can be helpful for them in their hardest moments.

I think mental health issues can feel scary because it's such a broad and it feels like you've got to have your PhD to be able to, to help your child. And I don't believe that. I really believe that when we can show up and focus on how do we connect, how can we be emotionally regulated?

That's when we do. That takes care of a ton of mental health concerns for kids.

So I think that there's, so my hope is it gives people tools that are accessible and I think rethinking how our parenting, rethinking parenting.

I think that as a society, I think we need to have a broader conversation about the ways that many of the things that we rely on are harming our kids instead of helping them. So I hope that there's that broader conversation. But I guess the biggest piece for me is I want them to feel a sense of hope.

And the stories from North Shore Academy where, where kids have kids and families have really felt very, very lost. But the power of community to help them find their path to a life that they never thought was available to them.

My hope is that people, if they're seeing, if they're feeling stuck, that they will know that, that there's, that this is a very hopeful message, that, that they will develop and grow. And if we can embed kids in healthy communities, who knows where they will go.

What one small step could you suggest that parents and educators could potentially take right away to embrace the approach that you have outlined in Untethered?

Yeah, so one, that's tricky. So I'll tell you where my brain went first with that and, and then I'll tell you where it went second, if that makes sense.

I think the first step is to, to make sure to take a look at our, our lives and our kids lives and see if we're pausing enough. So what you know, we talked before about this ability to, to pause. Mary Jo Barrett, a social worker, talks about pausing and pondering.

And I'd say pausing and connecting. Do we have enough pause time? Do you have enough connecting time? That's not just rushing off somewhere, going somewhere.

Do we have enough time where we are regulating and relating? And then I think the second one is taking a look and doing an inventory.

Susie Wise has a book, I can't remember the title of it, but it's, it's a book on belonging. And what she, she talks about is creating belonging maps. And where in your day do you have a sense of belonging?

And where in your day do you not have a sense of belonging? And to begin to take a look at how, where do those, where do those places show up? Is there enough belonging in our lives?

And if there's not, where can we add some, how can we create greater sense of belonging in different places? So I think those are the thoughts that I've got as you ask that.

Certainly lots of important food for thought for parents, educators and kids as well. DOUG Bolton Author, of creating connected families, schools and communities to raise a resilient generation.

Thank you so much for your time and your insight today.

Leanne, thank you so much. It was really an honor to speak with you today.

Thank you.

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