What's the Big Idea?
A podcast about big ideas in education. Tune in to listen and think, then respond on Instagram @_dankearney_ and Bluesky @dankearney
What's the Big Idea?
Finding that "Beautiful, Magical Thing" in Girls with Donna Jackson Nakazawa
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In which Dan talks about the challenges facing girls today--and reasons for optimism--with Donna Jackson Nakazawa. Donna is the author of seven books, most recently Girls on the Brink: Helping Our Daughters Thrive in an Era of Increased Anxiety, Depression, and Social Media. Dan and Donna talk about the multitude of stressors facing girls today and how their biology uniquely interacts with that stress. Then they talk about some of the implications for schools before turning to what Donna calls "antidotes", strategies and mindsets for the adults in girls' lives to help them thrive.
As always I welcome comments and questions on Instagram, Threads, and X @BigIdeaEd
Mentioned in the show:
Girls on the Brink: Helping Our Daughters Thrive in an Era of Increased Anxiety, Depression, and Social Media by Donna Jackson Nakazawa
Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, and How You Can Heal by Donna Jackson Nakazawa
The Angel and the Assassin: The Tiny Brain Cell That Changed the Course of Medicine by Donna Jackson Nakazawa
Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents Show, Wall Street Journal, Sept 2021
Social media is driving teen mental health crisis, surgeon general warns, NBC News, May 2023
Conference to Restore Humanity 2024 from Human Restoration Project
Music by Stars in LA
The same ways that people parented 30 years ago, they are not enough. They are not sufficient to the times we live in. I cannot underscore that enough. Girls feel that we as parents are simply do not care about their intrinsic well-being. We have them on a train to success. And that train looks like acting and behaving and being in certain ways. So does their social life. And they girls will say to me, I just want to hear a simple good morning, instead of, did you get your homework done?
SPEAKER_01Welcome to What's the Big Idea? I'm your host, Dan Carney. I'm looking at some Instagram posts showing fluorescent, creased post-it notes scribbled with lines like, quote, things I want to hear. I'm ready to listen. I'm here for you, close quote. On another blue one, quote, for adults, you might not always be right, perfect, or understand us completely, and neither can we, so it's helpful to share mistakes with us too. Close quote. These post-its and many, many more, were written by teenage girls during listening sessions and workshops with today's guest.
SPEAKER_00I'm Donna Jackson Nakazawa, and I'm a science journalist and author of seven books, most recently Girls on the Brink. And I write about the intersection of neuroscience and our really lived emotion.
SPEAKER_01I came to Donna's most recent book, Girls on the Brink: Helping Our Daughters Thrive in an Era of Increased Anxiety, Depression, and social media, as a middle school teacher and the dad of a soon-to-be middle school girl, and I found it very compelling, urgent, and relatable. As she mentioned, Donna is knee deep in the science of our brains, and she writes lucidly about the intersection of neuroscience, hormones, and stress. More than anything, I found it to be a book for this moment. Girls are facing incredible and increasing stressors, home life, their environment, school, social media, and we're now beginning to understand the unique effects of those stressors on them. Whether you are a parent, teacher, coach, or any adult in the life of girls, I hope this conversation, than the book, gives you a better understanding of the challenges facing girls and why we should be proactive and hopeful. I began by asking Donna about that title, Girls on the Brink. What exactly are girls on the brink of?
SPEAKER_00Well, I was hoping, you know, being a writer, we like double entendres. And my hope is that it really speaks to two things. Girls are on the brink of that essential passage from childhood to adulthood and walking into their identity as young women in the world, hopefully with their voices intact and their belief in their self-strong and ready to go, positioned to go. And number two, they're also on the brink of, and now obviously we know a terrible mental health crisis. And you as a teacher know this better than anybody. Um, we're on the brink of a real crisis. We're in the crisis, the rates of female um depression and anxiety, I think you'd have to be living under a rock not to have heard the CDC report that came out in 2023 showing that 57% of our girls report feeling persistently sad and hopeless. Um, what people might not know is that uh I know as a researcher in 2019, a big study that I reported on in Girls on the Brink came out showing that a third of girls felt that way. Now that's a tremendous increase, 24% in just four years. And this was well underway before the pandemic. The pandemic kind of poured gasoline on a fire that was already growing. So um, they're on the brink of all those things. But I like to also add that we have the potential to step in and make it the brink of something incredibly beautiful and sort of bring in that inherent promise that is part of those in-between years between childhood and adolescence, and certainly comes into play throughout adolescence as we hope kids as we help kids grow into who they can become.
SPEAKER_01I read somewhere you quoted that you sort of realized you want to be a writer at that age. Um, and you've been writing since then, you've written seven books, as you just said. Was there a moment or an event or something that convinced you it was the time to write this book, Girls on the Brink?
SPEAKER_00Well, what I do when I'm writing a new book is the file for that book starts long before the public sees anything. Really, the germs of that idea start often four or five years earlier. And I had been wrapping up a book called The Angel and the Assassin, which is a really kind of fun title. And people wonder if it's a bodice ripper, but it's not. It's really, it's about a little cell in the brain called microglia that a couple of female researchers uh kicked over lots of things in the research community in neuroscience to take a closer look at this cell. And they found out that this cell is really responsible for a lot of different things going on in neural pruning. And we had overlooked it, and it offers an enormous amount of promise and ability for us to take self-agency in our own help, because it turns out that our brain is responding to all those emotional stressors and threats in our environment that we know our body responds to. So set that aside for a minute. So at that crucial time in development, so much is happening in the brain. As I was researching the angel and the assassin, I started following the science on how the brain is really shaped by our experience and how these little cells in the brain called microglia begin to respond to different threats in our environment and social stressors in powerful ways that shape our mental health. And this process is a really big deal, obviously, around puberty. But I also discovered something else, and that is that it was only in 2016 that the NIH asked neuroscientists to look at the intersection of stress on mental health in females. So here I am, we talked about earlier. I've written seven books. I've written about this intersection of emotion and neuroscience, and I've written a lot about trauma in the experience of growing up, both um personal trauma and societal trauma. And it just hit me in a really big way that I had been writing about neuroscience that had only looked at the male brain. I'm talking about research in the lab, which looks at what happens on a biological level when stress is chronic and long-lasting, and how this begins to affect how we process stress and how the brain changes in ways that can make individuals more susceptible and vulnerable to mental health issues. So that kind of like got me, and I put it in a file and I put it away. Well, not really. I called three or four really well-known neuroscientists. I said, is this for real? And they're like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's just a request from the NIH. We still don't have to do it, but we try to do it. I said, well, why? Why would you, it's like heart disease. Why would you not look at how heart disease is different in the female body versus the male body? Well, we had to keep those hormones out of it, those pesky hormones out of it. They get in the way of those experiments that we're doing in the lab when we're trying to see how do these rats do when we expose them to chronic unpredictable toxic stress. You know, we don't have to worry about hormones. So that kind of combined with the research that you and I talked about as we started about how girls are doing. I wanted to like run around to a bunch of the top thinkers and thought leaders in the country who are in their labs looking at these issues and ask them what's going on here and why does it matter?
SPEAKER_01It's so fascinating this lack of research where it comes when it comes to girls and women. I remember speaking with Karen Natterson and Vanessa Bennett. They host the puberty podcast, which I know you were on. And in their book, they talk about dearth of puberty research on girls. It's almost all boys, and it's just this recurring thing. One thing I love about Girls on the Brink is it's this really cool discussion of what to me felt like the collision of ancient um biology and modern society and and what happens. And I think if I could make a word cloud of the book, you know, take all the words in the book and you know, one of these things that's these-I think stressors is one of the big words. That word probably appears a lot. Can you talk a bit about stressors, what you mean by that word, and what are the most impactful stressors facing girls today?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so we when we look at stress, we used to look at three categories developmentally, and they were community stressors, things happening in your community, right? Like um, you know, school shootings, inability to um, you know, walk safely down the street, home stressors or what we call household stressors, like growing up with a parent with a mental health disorder or a substance use disorder, or your parents divorce, or a parent dies. Um, and then also environmental stressors. And certainly we have those now with climate change and all kinds of other things happening. And in community stressors, we also want to make sure that people understand we're talking about systemic racism, like an inability to get to a good school, you know, lack of good housing, lead in your pipes. So researchers added a fourth category, and you'll know why as soon as I say it's social stressors. Two reasons. One, there's been a movement in neuroscience, largely um read by led by George Slavicata at UCLA, of whom I am a big fan, uh, to look at the biological effects of stressors on the immune system that are social in nature. And this is called social safety theory. And I think it matters a lot in schools, it matters a lot for teachers. Of course, you guys have always been right smack dab in the middle of social stressors. You can see when that kid is being left out or clicks change going from eighth grade to ninth grade, and suddenly you see that kid who was popular, who seems to not have any friends. You see the new kid coming in who's not um, you know, not embraced in the cafeteria. And so those social stressors have always been around. I live through them, you live through them, we all live through them. But they were sort of contained to maybe time in the cafeteria or being on the school bus. None of it was fun, none of it was easy, but there was a time capsule around it. And hopefully you had adults to whom you could go and deal with these stressors, which had were in a time capsule. They occurred at lunch or on the bus or wherever. But there is no time anymore. There is no time frame around it. It's 24-7. We've all seen the new research out the past few weeks showing that girls are almost constantly on their phones. I've been talking at schools all over the country, and they don't want to be on their phones like this. I know that always surprises people, but when you get them away from other kids, they will tell you, look, we don't, I don't want to be doing this 24-7, but it is the new cafeteria. It is the only way to fit in, it is the only way to have friends. You just can't have friends without being on your phone for endless group chats and you know, all the other um the apps that, you know, whatever it is, Instagram, Snapchat, whatever they're on, TikTok. So those social stressors that we've always faced affect us in a really powerful way. And social safety theory shows us that going back across evolutionary time, there's a good reason for this. Way back when, and I'm talking way back when, if you were sitting around the communal fire and everybody just started laughing and looking at you or rolling their eyes at you, or you were excluded in any way, dissed or dismissed, your immune system pricked up as if you were facing the potential for physical harm. And why did it do this? Well, because across evolutionary time, being part of and cooperating with a society was essential to your physical survival and to the survival of your gene pool. If you were not part of the big social group, you might not get the best meat off the fire. You might not get to go dig for tubers when everybody went to dig for them. Your kids would have less nutrition. And eventually, if you were ostracized and left outside of the tribe, you didn't have shelter, you didn't have food, you were open to predators. Our immune systems are wicked smart. I write a lot about our immune systems, and they evolved across millennia with social threats, so that in the face of social threats, your immune system amps up in a big way, kind of like if you know you saw a car coming at you and you knew you were going to be hit, because it is preparing to fight off the future situation of not having food and shelter and being exposed to the elements. It sounds wild, right? Like, come on, aren't they smarter than that? But you have to remember your immune system was super smart over your ancestors' many, many different um generations to come up with this level of protection. They're wired, our immune systems are wired up to our brains in a way that meets that ancient biological requirement, but in a way that is an evolutionary mismatch for the world our kids are living in right now, which I don't really have to get into because you and I both see it all day, every day, where they are glued to their phones, where they're getting messages 24-7 about whether they are liked or disliked, whether they belong or not.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you you write in the book. The more time a teenage girl spends on social media platforms, the more likely she is to develop depressive symptoms, poor body image, and lower self-esteem. Is the genie out of the bottle on this stressor? I I mean you even write about Meta. They know full well what they're doing with Instagram, but they're not going to change anything. Um and I do want to get to the latter part of your book, The Antidotes, which is optimistic uh ideas, but on the point of social media, I are you optimistic?
SPEAKER_00Well, I'm optimistic after I meet with girls, right? If I when I'm reading the newspaper or I'm looking at any kind of news and I see the rates of depression, and I I think about the biology behind this and how we're just putting it together after the horse has already left the stable, um, I feel a little bit of despair. But after I work with girls and talk to girls, they are so smart, they are so savvy. They some girls sure want to be on social media, but a lot of girls really don't want to be living their lives this way. And one thing that helps them a lot. Well, I can run through a bunch of things. One is parent, I hear this a lot from girls. Their parents are on their phones all the time. Phones have crept into our lives in a way that it's like if your parents were smoking, you know, all the time and telling you not to smoke. It's gonna be a lot harder to convince your kids not to smoke if you've always got a cigarette hanging out of your mouth. It's just gonna be harder to do that. I hear from kids when they write me their confidential post-it notes about what they wish was different in their lives, what they wish the adults knew. Get my dad off his phone, you know. Or as one girl said, you know, she's trying on clothes for prom. And every time she came out of the dressing room, she wanted to tell her mom, I don't feel very good and, you know, about my body. But her mom was, you know, working on her phone and catching up. We all want, we all have to do that. But the first thing is they want to have a conversation with the family about phone use for everybody, not just them. They don't want this conversation to be focused only on them. Number two, they're so smart. And just like you're a teacher, you know that when you first help kids to understand literary criticism or how to figure out um, you know, what's really happening in the narrative of a novel, or what are the different forces at play and when they're reading something or looking at history, they have a wonderful capacity to do this and dig in and take the side of the oppressed and the underdog, right? That's a big part of literary criticism at that age. And when we can help them to ask those questions for themselves with agency and autonomy, like, how do you feel after you've been scrolling? What are your bodily sensations? Drop in. What are other times in your life where you've had those sensations? Oh, when my dog died, you know, or when, you know, uh something happened, my dad lost his job, you know, or whatever. Number three, who's getting paid every time you click on this? Number four, how do these algorithms work? Like let's let's really break them down. How do they work? Oh, did you know that they up the most distressed responses or the most perfect ones? Algorithms work to put the most perfect situation forward or the most difficult and painful and victim narrative. So it's either perfection or victim, it's black and white. And once girls start to go through these series of questions and feel autonomy, which is what's in common between having a conversation with parents about phones, that gives them autonomy and also figuring out for themselves how this has gone off track for a whole generation. They can start to look at it differently. And that is when you start to see girls say, look, you know, my four best friends and I, we're just we're not doing it. We're not playing the game.
SPEAKER_01I know someone who paid his daughter to stay off social media all through high school. It's like her job, but I think your point is probably a bit stronger. The internal motivation.
SPEAKER_00Internal motivation, because if you think about it, what is social media doing to them? It's just all external evaluation. And everything we know with kids at this age goes better when we get them. I'm sure as a teacher, you know this. You could like be up there at the at the chalkboard saying, I'm giving away bagels tomorrow morning to anybody who studies, or you can get their internal motivation going, and that's gonna win every single day. But I don't really blame that dad because it's so scary out there, right?
SPEAKER_01It in that scenario, it worked, I have to say. It's uh I don't know, maybe a policy prescription, but it worked in his family. Um turning a bit to school now, as you mentioned, I am a teacher and I came at this book both as a dad and a teacher. You have some criticism of schools in your book, um, the way school is organized, the way schools prioritize, the way society sees the purpose of schooling. Um, I want to read a quote to you from a favorite education organization of mine. Um, their leader, Chris McNutt, writes Every day, millions of young people are ushered through classrooms, told to listen, complete assignments, and score well on tests. All of this to successfully graduate to high ranking colleges and well paying careers. Despite the ever growing workload and stress, most students grin and bear each day, hoping it will pay off. Off in the long run. What's the price for girls to grin and bear it at school, especially because girls are more likely to be perfectionist with their studies?
SPEAKER_00I think when you put it together with everything else that's happening in the girl environment, everything that we've talked about with social media, this whole idea that every time they pick up their phone, their phones are in their hands eight hours a day. They're being evaluated extra for extrinsic accomplishments, right? So when you think about that and then you add eight hours a day at school, and then I just want to pose to the listeners if for 16 hours a day you were being evaluated, you get to join the group or not, you're included in the chat with your friends or you're left out. You got an A at work for something you did for the last half hour or you didn't. If you went out on the sports field and you were evaluated and put on, you know, put on the field, taken off the field. If you got the writing award, but you were, or you were second, you know, um all of these different evaluations stack up a kind of allostatic load. If listeners know it's just a stress load. And none of them are really going into that intrinsic sense of who am I? What really matters to me? Who do I want to be? How am I developing my voice? I'm all for school. And by the way, I I teachers saved my life after we had a family tragedy when I was little. And today, school, and I've watched my two kids go through a very, very competitive school environment, taking way too many AP classes because that was the only way. And you know, trying to get them to drop them and pull them out and just learn. So this environment of evaluation is at to me its peak, at its peak, where there is an hour of homework a day for every class you take. Now, I do know recently there's been some move away from that, which I think is really wonderful. But that also is repeated on the sports field. It's also repeated on social media, and there's no getting away from it. So that worries me a lot for girls. High school is kind of middle school, is kind of the new high school. You know what I mean? Like the pressures that you faced in in middle school. Do you remember them? They were about friendships, period.
SPEAKER_01Joy is such an important part of teaching, and joy is what drives this podcast, My Passion Project. Wandering around school trying to find a quiet place to record is all part of the joy of putting this together. And Human Restoration Project is doing some of the most important work in progressive education, and their annual summer conference, held virtually, is not to be missed. The conference to restore humanity is July 22nd to 25th, and I'm so excited that Dr. Helen Immordino Yang has just been announced as a keynote speaker. She's fabulous. She's the author of Emotions, Learning and the Brain. And much like today's guest, Donna Jackson Nakazawa, she writes and speaks about neuroscience in a way that we can all relate to and use. Check the link in the show notes to register for the conference to restore humanity happening this July. And I wonder too about that connected with the point you make that puberty is hitting a lot earlier. And maybe you could talk a bit about that and why that's important, this conversation.
SPEAKER_00Sure. So we know that puberty is happening a lot earlier than it used to. And this gets back a little bit into the deep weeds of brain science, which I'll try to keep very, very simple. But puberty is when the brain is sort of um renovated. Let's put it that way. It's like a house, you know, the wiring gets redone and the plumbing gets redone. And that has to do with those little cells that we talked about earlier, which are responsible for neural pruning based on how much stress they're facing. So the house gets renovated and the brain gets renovated at puberty based on how much stress that particular young person has faced and is facing. But one of the reasons puberty is happening earlier is an increase in adversity in the environment. Like we have really good evidence that the more stress a kid is under, the more likely they are to go through puberty earlier. At the same time, what you just said, Dan, more and more stressors coming from school. At an earlier age, you're, you know, nine and you're about to go, you know, into those in-between years. You're then in middle school, you're going through puberty, and you also are starting to have to think, am I in the honors classes or not? And that's like the track for college. Like that's it. You know, I either get on this train or I don't. But your brain is still wiring up based on how much stress and adversity you feel. And if puberty is happening earlier, then the brain is getting remodeled at a critical time before you have had the life experience and the support and develop the ability to even understand how to ask for help when you're super distressed and worried. Those things happen during adolescence. Now that puberty is happening before adolescence, we have put the biological remodeling before the life experience. So it's one thing if you go through a lot of different social situations and you figure out what to do if one day Jane doesn't talk to you on the bus, and you have had enough life experience, and your brain is already wired up to handle that kind of distress. It's another thing if Jane doesn't talk to you on the bus, and then nobody talks to you on the bus, and you're going through puberty earlier, and your brain is being remodeled before you have had a chance to understand how to handle that kind of distress. Here's what that looks like. I don't know if this is a big deal or not. I don't know. How can I tell? Is it a big deal? Should I tell mom about it? I don't know. I'm not sure. I just feel overwhelmed with emotion. And so that is sort of a perfect storm of factors where early puberty means the brain hasn't really wired and fired up to handle the normal difficulties of adolescence. And we're piling more stressors on the brain at that time.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and the school role in that is year 10, welcome to middle school. Okay, be thinking about what math class you need to get into. How many extracurriculars do you oh do you want to do theater and you want to do this club? And it can become a very busy life very early on. But there are also some upsides to school. And switching to the antidote section of the book, the one that always stands out to me, and you make this point that um having at least two non-parent adults take genuine interest in them can be um a positive childhood experience at a PCE. Is that uh why why is that so important to young people, girls especially?
SPEAKER_00So it's essential that um girls know that there's someone other than a parent. And we have really good research to back this up out of Johns Hopkins, that one of the critical factors for flourishing is having two non-parent adults who see you, know you, take an interest in you. What does that look like? It's the school counselor who says, You're really good at poetry. Did you know that we have this local poet, Mrs. So-and-so? I bet she would love to have coffee with you, you know, and suddenly they're having coffee every Sunday and writing poetry together. It looks like, um, I'll be personal, uh, when I was 12, my father died in a medical accident overnight. And I went uh temporarily mute. I couldn't speak. And I had been a very, very strong student. And one day, my seventh-grade English teacher said, Come see me after class. I thought, oh, I'm in trouble because I couldn't stand up and deliver my oral report. And yeah, I just had no voice. And my father had died right before school started, a few days before school started. And she, I went up and she took a little key and she pressed it in my palm and folded my hand around it. And she said, This is key to the teacher's library. You're a really great reader. You can go there anytime, read whatever you want. It's your key. We're giving it to you. And I spent a good part of that next year in between classes and my lunch hour on a very lumpy brown sofa, you know, um, reading the books. And and Mrs. Lindau changed my life. So those stories I hear from girls all the time, every day. And I often ask them, write down on a post-it note and send me the names of the people who see you, who are changing your sense of who you are, your sense that you matter, your sense that you belong, with whom you feel seen and safe and known. And they will write down teachers' names and send them to me. It is inevitable, whenever I'm working with um an audience, if I asked them to raise their hands, who saw you? Who were your adults? I would tell you 70% of the time it's a teacher. 70% of the time. And to be personal for one more minute, it was my art history teacher in high school who took me on a college tour. My teacher thought I should look at good colleges and took me, like imagine that level, how that changed what I thought I was worth. That's what teachers do every day. And I'm not saying you have to take kids on a college tour, but yeah.
SPEAKER_01And that Mrs. Lindell, she showed you trust and autonomy. You talk about the the importance of letting girls wobble, not fall, but wobble. And and as teachers, we we are constantly finding that balance, giving students enough autonomy where they can make mistakes and find their way without letting them fail. And there's a number of antidotes and solutions you offer that I think you target towards the home, but felt very much in the school as well. For example, making the home a safe space, the classroom. Empathetic validation, such an important part of the way we communicate with our students. And I think that um, and I really appreciate the way you write about how adults can just be with young people. And I think a lot of adults could see themselves in that role, not just parents.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so that's been one of the most moving things about asking these thousands of girls around the country to write me these post-it notes. You know, I'll be up there talking and we're talking about neuroscience and we're talking about social pressures and we're talking about social safety theory. They're super smart. They want to know these things. Like, what are these forces on upon me? But they also will number one thing that they write to me is the way the adults are talking to them. It is not working for them. And what I tell the adults I work with, because often you'll work with the the girls and then you'll work later with the parents, right? And sometimes you read the post-it notes that this same group of girls have written, and they cannot recognize themselves as the parents of girls who are feeling that disenfranchised and distressed. They cannot. And so one of the biggest things that I found is that as these great psychological stressors have mounted on our girls, everything that we've talked about, earlier puberty, you know, uh, middle school is the new high school, being evaluated on social media, all of it. These psychological stressors have mounted at a time when the brain is not ready to handle them. But we as parents have not mounted a bigger game and a better game to help them feel safe and seen and known in the face of it. The same ways that people parented 30 years ago, they are not enough. They are not sufficient to the times we live in. I cannot underscore that enough. Girls feel that we as parents are simply do not care about their intrinsic well-being. We have them on a train to success. And that train looks like acting and behaving and being in certain ways. So does their social life. And they, girls will say to me, I just want to hear a simple good morning, instead of, did you get your homework done? I just want to hear, woo-hoo, or you did amazing instead of and are you listening to me? I can I have thousands of these. I would turn my camera around, but my office is too messy, just to show you this stack. I could go on all day long about the thing, and they all have the same thing. They want to feel that we have non-contingent regard for who they are intrinsically and on a deep inner level. They do not feel that. Girls do not feel that all over the country, different types of schools. And we have to change our language to offer them that. And I think it is so moving when you see parents start to do this because girls feel something shift inside. And we know that one of the most important things for girls flourishing is feeling you can go to a trusted adult with anything. Sometimes it's a mom, sometimes it's a dad, sometimes it's a teacher. But having somebody you can go to is something no matter how difficult. But the lack of this non-contingent regard for their intrinsic being keeps them from doing that.
SPEAKER_01You've posted a number of these post-its on social media and Instagram, and they are devastating in their depth and their simplicities. Girls writing things like, I wish you could admit your mistakes to me, or writing, I wish you would ask if I want a snack.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_01And and they're really beautiful. Do you why do you think parents are so unprepared? Is as the technological evolution just come on us so quickly that we, those of us in our 30s, 40s, 50s, we just grew up in a different world and we don't know what that modeling of parenting should look like.
SPEAKER_00Well, the first thing I want to say is don't beat yourself up because we know that moms beat themselves up a lot. They ruminate a lot about what they're doing wrong as parents. And so, first know that a tsunami of forces has overtaken this generation of girls. We know that this despair that we see in girls is in girls 28 and younger. We have great evidence on that, right? And that aligns with the time that social media began to be this bigger force. But a lot of other things, like we talked about, changes in how schools look at success. Don't beat yourself up. This, this, yes, it's happening on your watch, but you are not the cause of everything. Nevertheless, step outside of that sense of what have I done wrong, which can be kind of overwhelming, speaking as a parent of two, and into that sense of, all right, times have really shifted and we need new skills to do this. So that can be very, very helpful for parents, but also recognizing that if you can begin to shift that dialogue with your child, you're building something that's just gold in that relationship bank. And let's not forget that life as a parent, let me just take up the cause of parents everywhere, please, is incredibly overwhelming and hard right now. Not only were you your child's teacher and um confidant and chauffeur and cook and parent for a three-year pandemic, you know, largely both parents are rushing to do more with less work harder for less money, and maintain a household where they deliver on the promise that their child can have and do anything, right? The pressures are enormous for success. So, yes, technologically, our brains are being turned to mush, j right along with our kids, you know, by getting on these, getting on social media and these algorithms are there to smush your mind. But put that aside, the pressures to try to um raise kids and bring them to a place where they're going to succeed, we know those spots for success are really far and few between. It's really hard for your kid to be that one who gets that award, that spot. And I would argue that we shouldn't be putting ourselves through that kind of pressure to give them an external sense of success. Our job isn't for them to go to Harvard, it's to raise them to know that they are a good person and to be a good person. So we are ill-equipped as parents, and I wouldn't be doing this question justice if I didn't also add that we have a really discreet understanding now that when we have our own history of adversity and trauma that we have not acknowledged and addressed for ourselves, we are going to be less regulated as parents. And when you look at all the post-it notes the kids are writing to me, they are begging us to be better regulated. They'll write things like, getting mad at me for my mistakes is not a really good strategy. Things like that. You know, um, I'm afraid to tell you when I, you know, when I failed at something because you'll tell me I'm weak, right? They feel judged. And why would we be so reactive? Why would we be jumping in to fix things or be the detective or be all judgy about what they did? Often because we have something in our own history, in it a time growing up, due to the different types of stressors we talked about in the home or our community or environmentally, where we did not feel safe and seen, where maybe we felt put down when we really needed help, or we didn't feel that people had our back. And so we learned these reflexive responses. One last thing, I know I'm going on here. We get very distressed in the face of our kids' distress. That is part of modern parenting, partially for all the forces we talk, because of all the forces we talked about, right? Like it's very hard to get your kid in a place where they're gonna succeed today. That is harder than it's ever been. Doing more on less with less sleep. But we we also have that peace in us where we get so anxious. And so distressed, especially if we haven't faced our own history of trauma, that we cannot be present with them, we cannot offer them non-contingent regard for who they are. When we are too distressed in the face of their distress, and girls are begging us in the messages they send me to manage our own stuff better.
SPEAKER_01We're often told as teachers are reminded of the importance of leaving our own baggage at the door when we have our classroom. Um, I want to wrap up just with one more and bring it back to schools. One last question. You used a great term earlier. You talked about the train to success. And it's a great metaphor because trains just kind of go in one direction on the track. There's only that one option. And for a teacher listening to this, and you've I know you've touched on a lot of this already, but if if we could kind of boil this down to one question for teachers listening, what is something they could do, small or big, in their classroom to help their students, their girls especially, navigate this environment they're in where it often does feel like the trains left the station, you better jump on and stay on because that's the only way you're gonna get to a successful life.
SPEAKER_00I think the thing that matters most is taking those pauses to notice something that's unique and deeply intrinsic and valuable in girls at this age. And to somehow, and this seems a little unfair because, as teachers, when I talk to groups of teachers, you guys are the first line of defense for is there a mental health problem? You are you know handling so many different things at the same time, and you held the world together during a pandemic. So thank you for that. So, but that to look at those young faces in front of you and find that thing, that beautiful, magical thing in each girl and boy. I'm the mother of a son and a daughter, and teachers did this for my son as well, and it was pivotal. And as one teacher put it, I'm quoting a teacher here I want to be like a frog trying to catch flies, where I'm trying, I've got my tongue, and I'm trying really hard to catch every fly, and and this is a weird metaphor, but just let them know that they really matter, that I see them. Like I don't want to miss a single one. Kids aren't flies, obviously, and that might be a gross metaphor, but whatever, it worked for me. But but the idea is see something, kids this age can be very challenging, you know that better than anybody. But to see something in them, imagine them as their future self. Who might they become? Just the other, I was doing an event at a school and I went early and I sat on the playground and I just sat there and I thought, I wonder what she's gonna be doing. I wonder what this one is gonna be doing. Well, look at her, you know, getting her friends together to go run and put their hockey, you know, things on before their next class, whatever. And and then let them know. Let them know that you see that beautiful spark, whatever it is, let them know. You don't have to do it all in one day. But over the course of that term, let every single one of them know what beautiful spark you see in them. They will never forget it, and you will love your job more.
SPEAKER_01Donna, you're a very eloquent writer and speaker on these issues, and I have for parents and teachers listening. You've given them a lot of hope and things to think about. The book is Girls on the Brink, and you lay out the challenges facing girls today, but um, you end with some really um poignant and powerful antidotes or solutions to helping our girls get through this. And I want to thank you so much for joining me today.
SPEAKER_00Thank you for having me, and thank you for the work every one of you does. It really makes a difference, made a difference in my life, my kids' lives, and and every kid who comes in front of you. So thank you. You're doing the real work.
SPEAKER_01Huge thanks to Donna Jackson Nakazawa for taking time from her busy schedule, touring schedule, family life to talk about girls on the brink. I can't recommend this book enough. It is so readable, so relatable. And as Donna talked about, the power of language really comes through in this book. And that's I think what makes the book so hopeful and so powerful is it gives parents and teachers and adults in the lives of girls the tools to turn around so many of these challenges, to alleviate so many of these pressures using language to reach out to girls and let them know we are there for them. As always, I'm on Instagram and X and Threads at BigIdea Ed. I'd love to hear from you if you read the book or if you do read the book. Thanks for checking out what's the big idea. Happy almost spring teachers. We're getting there this school year. I hope you're staying well, hope you're staying safe. Hope your students are as well. Check us out next time.
