[00:00:12.280] – Speaker 2
Hey there, everyone. I’m Chris Tompkins. Welcome to the Shaping Our World podcast. My goal is to invite you into a conversation that will leave you more confident in understanding and inspiring the young people in your life. Each episode, we talk with leading experts and offer relevant resources to dive deeper into the world of our youth today. Today, we have Dr. Eran Magen on the show. Eran earned his MA in Education and PhD in Psychology from Stanford University, completed postdoctoral training in child psychology and population health, and now serves as an assistant clinical Professor at the Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry. He’s the founder of parentingforhumans.com and divorcingdads.org, both dedicated to helping parents build strong, collaborative, and joyful relationships with their children, no matter what their family structure looks like. Eran is also the creator of Early Alert, a programme that prevents suicide among students and veterans by offering timely, personalized support when it matters most. I’m really looking forward to this conversation because Eran gives actionable strategies parents can start using right now. From navigating co-parenting after divorce to spotting early warning signs of emotional distress, whether you’re raising toddlers, tweens, teens, this episode is full of his stories, his practical insights, and so much gold.
[00:01:35.340] – Speaker 2
There’s so much to this conversation as we cover a lot of difficult but important topics. Without further ado, let’s dive into the show. Great to have you.
[00:01:49.800] – Speaker 1
It’s great to be here.
[00:01:50.990] – Speaker 2
Thanks for joining us in this conversation. Really looking forward to hearing from you today. You do some pretty fascinating things, and I think our listeners are really going to resonate with some of the work you do and your insights, and I’m really looking forward to it. But before we get in there, I just want to help get to know you a little bit better. What shaped your world when you were growing up? Tell us about the influences in your life when you were a child, a teenager, Well, there’s the stuff that I thought at the time was shaping my life, and then the stuff that I realized afterwards was shaping my life, and they’re actually pretty different.
[00:02:24.460] – Speaker 1
Growing up, I was reading a lot, and I think a lot of my philosophy, I guess, or my approach to life was informed by stuff that I read and that really stuck with me, mostly a bunch of fantasy and sci-fi-ish type stuff. I really came out of it with a fairly congealed worldview, I would say. That was a lot of what I grew up on. In hindsight, what I realized, there were some enormous events that at the time I thought I was totally fine with or got over. My parents got divorced when I was about three in My dad moved far, far away. Then when I was 12, my older sister went through a very bad car crash and sustained really significant brain injury as a result. That totally altered the trajectory of our family’s life. Again, at the time, for both of these very big events, I thought it was okay and got over it and congratulated myself for being resilient. I don’t know if I had the word then, but felt good about it. But in hindsight, I realized just how much it shaped me for better and for I would say these are the three things: books, divorce, and car crash.
[00:03:36.200] – Speaker 2
Yeah, it is very interesting as you get to adult age and you reflect back and realise some of the things that at the time you didn’t think shaped you as much really did. I’m sure that’s going to, the last two particularly, have informed your work. I’m really interested to hear the background as we weave into your story. But before we get to your official work stuff, tell us a little bit about what shaped shaping your world today, personally. What’s something unique and interesting about what you do in your free time or are really interested in your world?
[00:04:10.840] – Speaker 1
I can divide it into the same two categories, things that I think shape my world and things that actually shape my world. The thing that actually shapes my world the most, it turns out, is how much sleep I get every night. If I get less than a certain number of hours, the world is a bad, horrible place. If I get more than enough hours, then the world is just wonderful, and it can be objectively identical to the world it was before I slept enough. There are a few things that I’ve learned, really, just make a major impact on my life experience, and they’re just boring things, like getting enough sleep and getting enough exercise. But in terms of my actual life content, I guess a big part of it is community and contact with people that I love and people who care about me as well. I learn so much all the time from people around me, and I’ve learned to talk a lot more than I used to when I was a kid and when I was a young adult. I took pride in being able to figure things out on my own, and I realized that was a big mistake.
[00:05:17.380] – Speaker 1
I can figure things out much faster and better with other people. Then I love moving. Movement is such a big source of joy for me. One time, I started listing my hobbies It turns out almost all of them had to do with some movement. It was surprising to me because I don’t think of myself as being primarily physical. But it turns out I really love moving. It feels good. It feels good to acquire physical skills. I really enjoy it. So that’s a big part of how I spend my recharge time as well.
[00:05:50.860] – Speaker 2
I’m just curious, are books still… I know you’ve got a very extensive professional life, but do books still shape you? They’re important as a kid. Are you still finding interesting sci-fi books to read and things like that?
[00:06:04.800] – Speaker 1
I am, and they do. It’s funny how I keep finding good books and I read them and I enjoy them tremendously. As I got older, I started feeling a little guiltier about not spending time reading more stuff that makes me smarter. But whenever I try, I fall asleep. I’ve been very consistent over the years, but I discovered maybe three, four years ago that I can listen to books. Oh, yeah. It makes me smarter, and I fall asleep. I learned a whole lot about the Russian monarchy in the past few years, and I really enjoy listening to that stuff. But as far as stories go, that’s my main form of escape. I don’t really do video anymore. I realized that it doesn’t actually do good things to me to watch a lot of shows and movies and whatnot. I’m a social TV watcher, but not individually, not by myself. I still read a bunch of books that I really enjoy, and they do actually continue to inform my worldview. There’s a lot of wisdom there and sometimes really interesting questions, and sometimes things just click into place when I read them. But I think it’s almost back to that.
[00:07:14.480] – Speaker 1
There’s an old saying that we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with. I think there’s a lot of truth to that, and I think that means we should be very selective about who we spend a lot of time with and open ourselves up to. But books, if you’re somebody that reads a lot, then the characters in the books become people that you spend a lot of time with. I can see how they can influence my way of thinking or perceiving or processing. It’s definitely still a big part of what shapes my life now.
[00:07:44.220] – Speaker 2
Fascinating. Just not the contrast, but being able to spend time intellectually reading, learning that way, and then in relationship, balancing those out quite nicely, I’m sure, is an important part of shaping your life and all of our lives. I can totally resonate with what you’re saying about community. I think the older I get, the more I realise how important the people that are around me are. There’s so much research, and I know you would probably be able to point to way more studies, but there’s so much research about even recovering from surgeries, the visitors and the people that you have to care and support you, just how important it is for so many facets of our life, including our health. I love hearing that. Tell us a little bit about the work you’re doing that the world of young people and families right now.
[00:08:32.780] – Speaker 1
I do a few different things at work, and at some point, I realized that they all intersect, not surprisingly. I would divide my work into two main parts. One is work that I do on a company that I started a few years ago that works with large organisations, universities and schools, and now the US Department of Veterans Affairs on Suicide Prevention. We check in with people once a week through text messaging and ask them how they’re doing, basically. If they’re not doing so well or if they’re starting to do less well than before, then we start connecting them with resources. The goal is to do early identification of distress and early intervention. Then there’s a separate line of work that I do working with parents. The parents can either be general population parents or specifically, fathers going through divorce. In both of those cases, my goal is to give parents tools to stay connected or strengthen their connexion with their kids and have just a happy, collaborative, low stress relationship with their kids. In particular, this is true for divorcing dads who often end up drifting away from their kids, which I think is just tragic for everybody involved, for the kids and for the parents.
[00:09:54.280] – Speaker 1
My goal there is to help them stay connected and stay well and have a life that they themselves enjoy while staying connected to their kids. It’s in the work with the parents, whether the divorcing dads or the parents in general, that I think I have the most broad reaching impact on kids. When I decided to start doing the work and decided to put more and more time and energy into it, I realized that this is the place where I feel like I personally, relative to all the other things that I can do, that’s the place where I feel like I can have the most impact in anything because I think that the parent-child relationship is just so important for the parents and certainly for the kids. It has such enormous ripple effects later on. Kids that grew up with a good relationship with their parents as opposed to kids that grew up with a tense or a nonexistent relationship with their parents, the whole life trajectory changes as a result in the way they connect with other people and the way that they take care of themselves. It’s such an enormous impact. In my mind, at least, this is the closest I get to helping as much of the world as possible is by helping make sure that as many kids as possible have the best possible relationships with their parents.
[00:11:09.800] – Speaker 2
Well, and that’s amazing because if people are on listening to this podcast I’m sure they’re resonating with that, and they believe that in their heart, and so they’ve come to the right place. I’m really looking forward to hearing more about all of this work under the umbrella of work you do. I want to start with Parenting for Humans, which is the umbrella of some of the work you do, which is a really interesting name. Can you tell us what’s behind Parenting for Humans, and maybe even let us know a little bit more about what trauma-informed parenting is?
[00:11:43.560] – Speaker 1
The name Parenting for humans, it’s a little bit tongue in cheek, but also very directly reflecting this idea that we’re humans, we’re not perfect. We have a lot of stuff going on, and we need to also do good parenting along the way. We want to do good parenting along the way. It aims to be realistic, not idealistic. This is not about sitting down and doing meditation for 26 hours a day before approaching our child and having some a super mindful conversation. But while still fitting into life, also making sure that we are just doing good parenting. The humans in the story are not just the parents, of course. We are parenting humans. We’re not parenting robots, we’re not parenting animals, we’re parenting humans. It’s important, for me at least, to keep this awareness on both sides of the equation, that the parents are humans, the kids are humans, and we just want to create something that we want to parent in a way that works for everybody and honours everybody’s humanity. The trauma-informed parenting tagline that goes with parenting for humans, this is a little more technical, but I think also very deeply true. The idea behind trauma-informed anything, I’m sure you’ve heard about it a lot and probably discussed it as well.
[00:13:08.300] – Speaker 1
There’s trauma-informed education and trauma-informed justice system practises and trauma-informed almost everything that you can think of. So trauma. Trauma in a psychological sense, not in a physical medical sense, but in a psychological sense, trauma is the experience of witnessing something very bad happening and having no power to stop it. And this very bad thing can be happening to us or to other people that we care about very much. And the no power to stop it is our perception, but also our experience of it. We would have loved to stop it, but we didn’t. These kinds of events are considered traumatic or traumatising in psychology. It doesn’t mean that if we experience a traumatic event, we’ll We don’t necessarily have post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s not automatic, just like not every time that we get a cut, we get an infection. But it’s an event that could potentially lead to that. The hallmark of A traumatising event or a traumatic event is lack of control, just not being able to stop this bad thing that’s happening. When you are offering trauma-informed care, the hallmark The spark of that is that you’re always offering control. It’s always done not just with consent, but ideally with active participation and even ownership or leadership of the person receiving the care.
[00:14:44.320] – Speaker 1
In parenting, one of the core issues that we’re dealing with is the kids experience of not having power. It’s a defining feature of being a kid. You don’t have power. Everybody else is bigger, stronger, smarter, has more money, other people believe them more. We just don’t have power when we’re kids. A lot of the challenges that happen in parent-child relationships happen because kids are trying to assert some power and end up in power struggles with the parents. I believe that if we as parents are mindful of the fact that kids experience their lives as lacking in power, lacking in autonomy, and then as parents, we start orienting to that and offer a lot of opportunities to have power, to share power, then a lot of the tension goes away. A lot of the fighting isn’t there. If we’re sharing power, then they don’t need to fight us for it. When I say trauma Informed parenting, I mean both the realisation that there’s an enormous power differential and specifically a sense of lack of power for kids. We want to give them as much power as possible, and that makes them feel better and smooths the relationship relationship out really quickly.
[00:16:01.880] – Speaker 1
Also, it’s quite possible that our kids do experience some actual trauma from time to time, hopefully a lower case T trauma. These are also really important moments to orient to and to connect around because that’s when trust builds in the relationship is when we’re there and we’re able to be helpful and supportive.
[00:16:21.240] – Speaker 2
I would imagine that this approach, the principles of trauma-informed parenting are really significant for a child that’s gone through trauma. But I would I imagine that that extends to just parenting in general. A lot of this approach can just apply because as parents, we might not know some of the trauma. We might have a clear understanding of the trauma our kids have gone through. But sometimes these things, As you even talked about in the intro, you reflect later back on life and see how many of these, maybe even smaller T traumas, impacted us. Does this trauma-informed parenting, is this just good practise for parenting in general and the tenets and perspective that you could bring to helping parenting just apply generally, or is this really focused on how trauma impacts kids?
[00:17:10.600] – Speaker 1
It turns out that trauma-informed anything is usually the best practise for anything. It’s one of those things where in hindsight, it’s an obvious forehead slap. It’s trauma-informed medical care. Of course, you want to ask people if it’s okay to do this or that to them and not just do it to them and then later let them know that it happened. Trauma-informed education. Of course, it’s great to have students participate as much as possible in selecting the content and sequence and maybe type of activities that they do. A big part of why this is so helpful is because it strengthens and protects the relationships that are in place when this happens. For me, trauma-informed parenting, it’s not so much aiming for parents of kids who’ve experienced some trauma. It’s the idea of bringing this approach of sharing power and encouraging autonomy and acknowledging autonomy as much as possible in order to strengthen the relationship with the child.
[00:18:15.340] – Speaker 2
I want to dive into that in a minute. But before we do, I just want to go back to when you were talking about parenting for humans and this idea of the importance of the understanding as humans, we’re not perfect. I just want to dive into that a little bit. Your work focuses heavily on helping parents build collaborative and joyful relationships with their children, even when we’re in the chaos and conflict and stress. From your perspective, what’s one of the biggest misconceptions we have about what makes a good or effective parent? I love that we’re not perfect, but sometimes we feel like this is what a good parent is. Are there any misconceptions about trying to live into this model of being a great parent that you can help us unpack?
[00:19:00.520] – Speaker 1
The ones that I end up focusing on the most, maybe I’ll name a couple. One is that we need to figure things out and then do them to our kids. I’m a huge proponent of consulting with our kids and making joint decisions and making the decision, making process transparent at an age-appropriate level. Of course, we’re going to have a very different conversation with a two-year-old and with a 20-year-old. But it really is possible to offer choices and explain what we’re doing, not explain it to death, not have a five-hour soliloquy about why we’re doing oatmeal instead of Coco Puffs or whatever. But even a small thing, and certainly when it comes to slightly bigger decisions or even If we’re about to introduce a serious change into life, I’ll be a little more concrete. I’ll run a session with parents, and we talk about helping kids build good habits. Good habits can range from practising your clarinet daily to doing homework, to walking the dog, to clearing the dishes, to coming to tell the parents when your little sister is annoying you instead of starting a fight. There’s lots of little things that we want our kids to learn, maybe big things, too.
[00:20:19.800] – Speaker 1
One of the things that I suggest in a session like that, we talk about technically how to do it and how to encourage building the habit, but I also talk about making sure that we’re keeping the relationship good in the meantime, which means we don’t want to ask too much of the kid all at once. We’re draining the relationship of all the goodwill points that are in it. I talk about picking our battles. A question that comes up pretty Very often, is some variation on, there are lots of things that my kid is not doing that I keep telling my kid to do, and he always makes a big mess in the living room and leaves it there, and he’s shouting instead of talking and he paints on the walls or whatever it is. How do I get him to change all of it? I usually say, I suggest that you pick one thing that you can work on and pick the thing that is most likely to change, the thing that you think is easiest to change, not the thing that is most important in your mind or that is most aggravating to you, and start building a momentum of success, and then continue on to the next thing.
[00:21:27.860] – Speaker 1
But start the whole thing by sitting down with your kid and saying, Listen, I’ve been thinking about how… For the past while, we’ve been arguing a lot, and I don’t like it. I don’t want to argue with you. This is not what I want our interactions to be like. I love you very much, and I enjoy a lot of my time with you, and it’s just not pleasant for me to argue with you. I was talking about it with some friends, and I thought, I want to change this. I want to figure out a way that we can just enjoy each other’s company and not worry so much about arguing and just starting the conversation this way, very transparent, very open, and saying, later on, maybe saying, I know that I’ve been asking to do a lot of things here in the house, and it hasn’t worked, really. The only result is that we’re arguing, but you’re not really changing what you’re doing. But these things really do bother me, and I want to figure out a way for us to do things differently. One idea that I had was maybe we just focus on one of those things.
[00:22:29.760] – Speaker 1
What What do you think? Could we change just one of those things? If we do that, I’m not going to be on your case for these other things because I just want to have a more pleasant time here in the house. I think that these conversations make such an enormous difference. The kids are, I don’t know how to put it, they’re not exactly taken aback. For them, it’s very natural to have somebody just talk about actually what they feel and what they want because they do it all the time, especially when they’re younger. But it really changes the dynamic dramatically when a parent is able to clearly state what he or she wants and what he or she is hoping for, and then bring the child into the conversation and ask, How does this sound to you and what do you think we could do. Often the kids are very willing participants at that moment because the power struggle stopped. Nobody’s fighting for power. We’re now figuring this out together.
[00:23:23.720] – Speaker 2
One of the subtle benefits of that, and I’m sure you would add to this, is I think that also the way you’ve unpacked that for us and how to approach these types of conversations is it also increases the time we’re connecting and in relationship. It’s a lot easier to just tell a kid to do this, and that’s the rule, and move on, where what you’re suggesting to, yes, it changes the power dynamic and invites them into collaboration, but it also increases the time to connect and deepen our relationships as well. I know that that’s part of what you talk about in the difference between controlling our behaviour and having them buy in because that we actually align and connect with them. Parents who might feel they’re stuck in these struggles, is there a shift that they can make beyond what you just practically shared with us to move toward connexion and collaboration and the ebb and flow of their relationship with their kids?
[00:24:23.320] – Speaker 1
I think the core realisation that helps to start changing things significantly is that the relationship is everything. The strength of the relationship is everything. When the relationship is good, everything becomes easy. The kids collaborate and cooperate and will come along and go along, and everything becomes easy. When the relationship is tense or difficult, when there’s not a lot of goodwill in the relationship, everything becomes hard. Every single request we make is met with a frown, a groan. Maybe they’ll do it, maybe not. Takes a lot of reminding, and it’s just painful. To focus on the relationship rather than on compliance per se is super important and changes things very quickly. I don’t mean letting kids run wild and do whatever they want in the service of relationship. I don’t think that’s what makes for a good relationship. But I think at the core of it, we build goodwill with people when we show them that we care about them and when we show them that we respect them. If we are able to adopt these kinds of habits into our lives that show our kids that we care about them and that we respect them, the relationship will improve bit by bit.
[00:25:41.620] – Speaker 1
There’ll be more and more goodwill in the relationship and then collaboration becomes a default rather than struggles. Often I’ll recommend to parents to shift away from looking at the struggles and the areas and things that are not working. Instead of working a lot to improve their control of the kid and improve discipline or compliance or what have you, to instead, as long as these problems that are happening are not safety issues or are not absolutely driving the parents crazy. If they can hang on for a little more while while these things are happening, to instead focus on the relationships. Then very often these things start self-correcting. Once you pay attention in the relationship, it’s, again, to go back to a medical analogy, You can work really hard to control your blood pressure if you’re hypertensive and take all kinds of medication and consider surgeries and do all these things, or you can start looking at your nutrition. Start changing the way that you eat and maybe changing the way that you move or maybe changing the stress that’s in your life, the lifestyle changes that then obviate the need for all of these interventions. I think that’s the big thing.
[00:26:58.020] – Speaker 1
Parents often skip the relationship part because we… Well, for lots of reasons, but I think the biggest challenge with parenting is most of us have only been exposed to one model ever. Why would we know? Why would we know any different or any better? Unless we spend some time studying this or looking at this really seriously. We’ve only ever seen one model. People have a hard time imagining what a different model looks like, and instead We’ll then go on to figure out how to fix things given that this is the parenting model. Being able to go a little deeper and change the parenting model can have just such profound effects by focusing on the relationship, learning just how to have a stronger relationship with our kid.
[00:27:50.420] – Speaker 2
I love that. The practical example of that on a pretty relevant and pertinent topic has been shared by guest around making a cell phone contract with your kids. I think it’s really easy to either get a phone and then get stressed out about you need to be off your phone. You need to be off your phone. And one of our previous guests talked about how they would suggest sitting down with your kids and negotiating a cell phone contract that everybody signs. But they get to collaborate with you on what they think is appropriate, what you think is appropriate, coming up with some guidelines together so that there’s a clear understanding of what this tool or device is going to be used for and how it’s going to be used in the home. But also, it’s like you’re doing it together, too. See this shared agreement when things are not going the way they would. It was like, Hey, we agreed on this together, and it wasn’t just mum or dad saying, This is exactly what’s going to happen. I love that idea. I think that’s a very practical and something that I know a lot parents and families wrestle with around devices and social media and cell phone usage, et cetera.
[00:29:06.740] – Speaker 2
As you were talking, I remembered back to that episode when we were talking about that as a really practical example of what you’re suggesting lasting.
[00:29:15.940] – Speaker 1
I’ll push the point maybe a little further, too, which is I think the agreements are very important and are very helpful to have them explicit because when there are two parties to an agreement, basically it says when I’m staying within the bounds of the agreement, you will, too. So we respect each other’s boundaries. We acknowledge each other’s right to choose. We’ve negotiated successfully. All this, I think, is really good. And underneath that, there’s a question of, does my child trust me to have his or her best interests in mind? I think that changes the dynamic drastically. If my child knows that when I suggest or request or require things, the main reason is in order to take care of my child. My child trusts me to not only be benevolent, but also competent. These are the two things we need to believe about other people in order to basically listen to what they say. There are lots of benevolent people there who are completely incompetent and they’re very dangerous. Obviously, a lot of competent people who are not benevolent and we want nothing to do with them. But if I believe that my parent cares about me and knows what he or she is saying, I’m very likely to be paying close attention.
[00:30:35.980] – Speaker 1
With my son, when he was very, very young, it wasn’t a single conversation, but we talked a few times about candy and about how much candy is a good idea to eat versus not. I was saying in very simple terms, he was like, this is between the time that he was one and three, basically. I was saying how candy is delicious and makes us happy, and it’s wonderful. And if we eat too much of it, it can make us feel bad. Sometimes we might get a belly ache or a headache or even get in a bad mood. That’s something that he noticed after a while, a friend who would get in a bad mood after eating too much candy. And he got it, and he started essentially self-regulating how much sweets he has. But this idea of this is good as long as there’s not too much got into his head, and that was a great start. And some years later, we reached that moment that I’ve been worried about for a long time, which is he discovered video games. I was worried about video games because I have a very hard time stopping with video games because I enjoy it so much.
[00:31:39.340] – Speaker 1
So I don’t have them in the house because it would be very hard for me to turn away from. And so we were at a friend’s place. We’re on vacation. Actually, at a friend’s place, that friend introduced video games, and my son asked if he can play. And I said, Sure, but can we talk for a couple of minutes before? And he said, Yeah, what’s up? And I said, Do you remember that conversation we had about candy? I think he was maybe six at the time of the video game introduction. I said, Do you remember the conversation we had about Candy and how too much? And he’s like, Yeah, I remember. And I said, You’ve been amazing about that. I’ve been very impressed at how you just cut yourself off or you decide in advance how much you’ll have. And I think that’s really smart. And he said, Yeah. And I said, Video games are a lot like that. They feel so good, at least for me. They’re so much fun to play, and it’s really easy to just do too much of it. So I kept on explaining this, and I tried not to go on for too long.
[00:32:35.800] – Speaker 1
He got it, and then he asked, Well, how long do you think is okay? At that point, I realized everything’s going to be fine. If he’s asking me what I think, about this, we are clearly on the same team here. We could have this discussion. The time extended as he got older and as he’s playing. Part of it is, I mean, sometimes we play together, although outside of the house, because I still don’t want it in the house for my benefit. But we are on the same team here. When it comes to cell phones or really any other thing, it’s ideal if our child realises that we’re doing this in order to help him or her, not because we have our own interests and our kid has his or her own interests and we’re negotiating a place where everybody’s interests are met. No, I have only one interest, which is for him to have the best life possible, but I We have some different thoughts about how to achieve that. But if he trusts me, then he will at least take them into consideration. That’s maybe an added layer to this idea of a contract.
[00:33:42.420] – Speaker 1
We’re not just trading benefits like, I’ll give you this if you’ll give me that. But I actually very much want to make sure that you know that it’s really for your benefit, and I’ll take time to explain it, as much time as it takes and as much as you’re willing to tolerate me explaining it, because once it’s based on trust, again, it’s just easy.
[00:34:05.440] – Speaker 2
I want to move a little bit to some of the work you do with other parents. Many of the parents you support are navigating divorce or separation, including the community of dads who are part of divorcingdads. Org. I love that you support dads who are going through divorce because as I saw in one of your videos, divorce dads are eight times more likely than divorce moms to die by suicide, which is just shocking statistics. Why did you start divorcing dads specifically? I know you referred to your own story earlier. Can you give us a little bit behind how this got going?
[00:34:42.960] – Speaker 1
At a very basic level, I went through just a very painful and difficult separation myself from my kid’s mum. At the time, it was just awful, awful. Like, really, by far, in a way, the worst years of my life. I was extremely lucky to have some good friends that I could lean on very, very hard. Very, very hard. I remember phone calls walking around aisle 3 in a supermarket at 2: 00 AM in the morning with a friend who was just fine with me calling him whenever. It took me some years, really, to recover fully and heal fully from that. At the end of that, I thought, a lot of people may not be as lucky as I am to have such dedicated friends who are also as helpful and wise as I’ve had. I mean, really, luck. It’s just luck. I started doing a little bit more research into it and discovered all these shocking statistics. Again, in hindsight, seemed pretty obvious, like the one that you mentioned about the suicide risk and about how often dads fade out of the lives of the kids, including dads, who really want to be involved but come to believe that maybe it’s better for the kid if they don’t or that it’s just an impossible battle or all kinds of reasons.
[00:36:10.510] – Speaker 1
There are just not a lot of resources out there for dads. I mean, it’s a feedback loop in a sense. Men are at very high risk for lots of stuff because they essentially don’t have good support networks. And because many men don’t have good support networks and are at big risk, then not a lot of resources get offered because not a lot of men use them. And it ends up being this very sad, bad cycle. I wanted to be part of a change for the better. My experience in general, in my experience, I’ve gone through a few tough things in life. Everybody has. I don’t think that makes me special. But the way that I deal with things like that is once I come out of it, sometimes even in the middle when I remember, but especially when I come out of it, I try to think, What did I learn? Can I make this learning available to other people just to make this easier for the next person tumbling down this particular mountainside? With the Divorcing Dad’s work, this was very much that. It was a way for me to make meaning of what I’ve gone through and organise what I’ve learned and then help other people.
[00:37:17.480] – Speaker 1
So part of it is helping the dads, but really a big part of it is helping the kids because as I mentioned, my dad up and left, basically, when I was pretty little, and it took me literally decades to realise just what a profound impact that had on me. It’s not obvious in real-time. It’s not obvious to the dad. The dad’s maybe thinking they’re doing a favour to the kids or to the mum or to somebody. It’s not obvious to the kids who don’t know when they’re two or six or 14, they don’t know, to tell the dad, your absence in my life is really changing my life’s trajectory in complicated ways. Obviously, they can’t say that. To be able to intervene there, I think, is part of that same motivation that I’ve had in doing the parenting work in general. I just think it changes trajectories of lives far, far down the road and with enormous ripple effects. I think the dad’s going through the divorce or separation are deserving of the support, and I think the kids are deserving of having a dad in their life. All this with a lot of sympathy also to the moms going through the process.
[00:38:25.140] – Speaker 1
It’s just that moms have a fair deal of resources at this point, and I in a better position to connect with the dads than with the moms for the most part.
[00:38:34.060] – Speaker 2
I’m sure a lot of our listeners can resonate with this story and either with their own parents or themselves walking through this. Are there some things you can offer from your work and experience for parents who are in that journey to continue to preserve a healthy and trusting relationship with their children as they’re walking through this difficult time?
[00:38:57.840] – Speaker 1
Yeah, there are a few really core principles that I think once we stick to them, we’re okay. One is we have to take good care of ourselves. If our battery is completely drained, we’re just not going to be the people we want to be. This has to do with sleep. Like I mentioned before, sleep is such an enormous factor in mental health. So making sure we get enough sleep, ideally moving around a little bit and getting some exercise that feels good, and very importantly, connecting with other people, whether it’s for a company or for support, or ideally both, but just involving more people in our lives and getting this support for ourselves. So that’s number one. We need to take care of ourselves. Number two, with the kids, be as fully present as possible with the kids. Zero distractions, put everything away, make sure that you have the time and the bandwidth available to just be with the kids and just focus on being their parent. Kids are essentially hardwired to love their parents. It’s very hard to break that bond. It’s easy to get threatened in a situation like that as a parent, to feel threatened by this, and what will this do to my relationship with my kid and so on.
[00:40:16.700] – Speaker 1
But the reality is that it’s very unlikely anything will hurt the relationship unless you check out, basically. As long as you’re there, as long as you’re attentive and present and just doing your best, you’re probably fine as far as the relationship with the kid goes. Then number three is the converse of number two, is just be very careful not to bring the kids into the conflict, if there is one, with the co-parent. It’s never the kid’s job to be the spy, the messenger, the judge, anything like that. They have one job only, which is to be a kid. As long as we It’ll leave them out of it. It’ll leave tension out of the relationship with the kids. As long as we can take good care of ourselves, that means that we are able to be in a positive frame of mind when we’re with the kids. They all work together. These are the top three, I would say take care of yourself, which includes also connecting with other people. Then number two is be as fully present as possible with the kids. Then number three is just make sure that you’re not dragging the kids into whatever conflict exists.
[00:41:27.850] – Speaker 1
Then if there’s a concern, if you have a concern about the kind or amount of connexion that you have with your kids, if you’re worried that you’re not allowed or not given enough time or time of the right kind to connect with your kids, Definitely be assertive about that, whether it’s in conversations with your co-parent or if there’s a total disconnect and you need to take it to court, just to not be afraid of that. This will be probably the most important task of your life and the one that have the biggest impact on your kids’ lives. This takes a lot of support and a lot of figuring out and talking with other people, but just don’t give up about it. You get to be a parent.
[00:42:10.260] – Speaker 2
You’ve tackled some pretty difficult topics in your work, and one of them, as you mentioned at the beginning, is around suicide prevention. You founded Early Alert, which focuses on prevention for different groups of students, from K to 12 to to law students, to medical residents. Why does early alert focus on students? Tell us a bit about the need for suicide prevention among young people today.
[00:42:41.020] – Speaker 1
The reason that early alert focuses on students is, let’s almost coincidental, honestly. It’s where it started. I was doing work with medical schools some years ago. I was helping them develop a curriculum for how to have better relationships with patients, very similar to what I do with parents and kids, essentially bedside manner training. In the process, learned a lot about the stressors that exist in medical school, and then learned about the shocking amount of suicide that happens in the course of medical training. Thought I wanted to help somehow. I initially created one type of service that taught family members how to support medical students. But then later on, as I became more and more familiar with medical schools, realized that there’s really nobody checking in on the students. It’s hard. You have a few hundred students in a medical school. Medical students are experts at looking great. They look like everything’s fine and they’re on top of it. Then every once in a while, one of them dies by suicide. The medical schools are terrified of this, and rightfully so. As I was talking with the medical school administrators about this, I asked, What if we check in with them regularly?
[00:43:54.080] – Speaker 1
They said, That sounds like a good idea, but how can we do that? I said, How about texting? They said, We can do that? I said, I think so. I went to check, and it turns out indeed, we were able to. It seems like an obvious solution to me to this day. I don’t know why the company doesn’t have a lot of competitors. It just seems like a very straightforward approach. Just ask people how they’re doing. People try to do a lot of clever stuff, check how much force people apply when they’re tapping their phone, when they’re texting, or how much they’re using certain words or whatnot. And I think I’m just a little more simple than that. I just like asking people how they’re doing. And it turns out to work, and they tell you when you ask them. And so then it started with med schools, and then it just expanded sideways from there to different professional programmes and then to entire campuses. And that’s just the system where it started. And then after maybe four years. Yeah, I think four years after we started work on early alert, the US Department of Veterans Affairs ran this innovation challenge for suicide reduction among veterans.
[00:44:57.100] – Speaker 1
And that’s a population I’ve been wanting to work with for a long time. And so we put our hat in the ring, as it were, and they selected 30 out of about 1,300 proposals, I think. And ours was one of the ones that got selected to go through their process and learn more about VA and how to work with them and work with veterans. And so we started working with them as well. And we keep testing different places where we could bring early alert and who would want to use it. It turns out people, by and large, aren’t interested in having themselves themselves paying for somebody to check in on them regularly. The place where early alert is commercially viable is a place where the institution is willing to pay to have somebody check in on the members of the community. Those turned out to be more paternalistic types of organisations. Schools were now starting to do work with hospitals to check in with patients, like women who are either pregnant or postpartum, just to have somebody check in on once a week and see how they’re doing, or people who were just discharged from the emergency department and so on, or the Department of Veterans Affairs, like I was saying before.
[00:46:07.800] – Speaker 1
There’s a certain type of organisation that is interested in doing this, organisations that experience a lot of responsibility toward their members or the people that they serve. I would love for early alert to be available for everybody in the world, but I don’t think everybody in the world wants to pay for it, and it just needs to survive to live somehow. That’s still stuff that we’re figuring out how to do. In terms of the needs for suicide prevention among young people, over the past few decades, there’s been an increase as far as we know, in suicide among more or less everybody, a little more so among younger people, although there’s been a globalisation in the past few years. It seems to have stopped going up. And then data are always delayed by a few years, unfortunately, so we don’t know exactly what’s happening right this moment. But the need is there and the need is growing. I think what’s been growing more than the need is the awareness of trouble. Which is a really positive thing. But everybody is always at some risk. And the risk really is a combination of two things. One is feeling really bad, and two is being completely disconnected from sources of hope and sources of support.
[00:47:33.230] – Speaker 1
This is where we try to fill the gap. We ask you regularly how you’re doing, and there’s a sense of connexion there, too. Then when things start going off, then we can connect to support. I think this translates into human relationships very readily. I think that just learning to check in with other people around us can be literally life-saving because it’s not always obvious when somebody’s feeling really bad. People generally try to appear like they’re well. But when you ask them, they’ll often tell you how they’re actually doing. And so checking in with people, especially people going through difficult events, the big events in life, somebody died, they lost their job, something bad happened to somebody that they care about, they had a major medical event, all of those things. Just learning to check in with people and to be that person who remembers and checks in. Just putting it on our calendar and saying, Okay, call Joe every two weeks and just see how he’s doing. I think it’s just so important and it’s easy to forget because, again, people just look good, where a lot of us are trained to look good all the time.
[00:48:42.420] – Speaker 1
That’s the thing that social media, I think, really exacerbated because everybody just looks awesome all the time.
[00:48:47.930] – Speaker 2
Yeah, exactly. I feel like this is one of those things that feels like it’s out there in the world. But until it really touches you or your loved ones, it feels like it’s one of these things that’s out there. I know with the statistics that I’m sure there’s probably some listeners who have experienced this in their own lives, at least maybe not completed suicide, but attempted or talked about it. This is just a thing that is prevalent in our world, unfortunately. I’m just wondering, too, for parents, without sounding a major alarm bell, what are some things that we can look for as early warning signs to pay attention to our own kids’ emotional well-being? And then even maybe extrapolate beyond that to friends, kids’ friends. You mentioned not doing well and disconnected. Are there some specific things we can look for as parents?
[00:49:55.160] – Speaker 1
Yeah. Maybe to speak to your first point about not being alarmants about this. I think that one of the few nice things about doing suicide prevention work is realising that so many things need to go wrong before someone decides to kill themselves. That if you’re taking care of someone and you’re doing it well, You’re not going to reach that point of suicidality. If you’re essentially taking good care of your kid and are aware of what’s going on with your kid, you’re going to be aware that something’s happening long before there’s any concern about suicidality. It doesn’t mean you’ll be able to stop It doesn’t mean that it’s something that is controllable necessarily. But you don’t need to look for suicide risk factors per se. If you’re looking at other reasonable things like happiness and unhappiness, you’re going to catch it along the way in the same way that you’re… To go back to a medical analogy, if you’re looking at… We might say, Oh, as a parent, what are warning signs that my kid is developing some fatal infection. We could spend our lives looking for that, but we could also spend our lives just making sure that they’re basically clean and healthy.
[00:51:10.960] – Speaker 1
When they stop being basically healthy, that’s when we maybe start thinking about warning signs of some fatal infection. But we don’t need to walk around every day checking if they’re fatally infected with something. Having said all this, there’s a very elegant theory about suicide that I really like as an explaining narrative, and it’s called a three-step theory of suicide. It basically says that people are at great risk of considering killing themselves when three conditions are met. One is they need to have some form of extreme pain, physical or psychological. Then number two is they need to believe that the pain will never stop, basically. Then three is they need to have no connexion to anything or anyone that would either make them feel better or make them feel committed to staying alive. It’s pain, hopelessness, and disconnection. Each of those is a point of intervention, and each of those is a warning sign, essentially. If we see somebody who’s in extreme pain of some kind, then of course, our antenna should be going up. Or if we see somebody who’s totally disconnected from anyone, even if they don’t look like they’re in extreme pain, our antenna should be going up.
[00:52:33.580] – Speaker 1
If we see somebody who talks about how things are never going to get better often, that’s a concerning signal. I really like this theory. Like I said, I think it’s very elegant but also very practical and offers things to be looking for. In concrete terms, typically, what the experts recommend when we’re looking for warning signs are, first and foremost, A sharp change in behaviour. If our kid used to always X and now our kid never X, that’s concerning. That means we want to look into it. It doesn’t mean that they’re going to kill themselves. It doesn’t mean that they’re even thinking about it. But sharp changes means something is going on. It’s tricky with kids because, of course, they do things. They experiment with being different people, certainly in their teens. But when we see major changes, we want to make sure that we’re checking in with their kids, especially if these changes are more toward things like social withdrawal or if their mood really changes in a drastic way. These are all important signals. Definitely if they’re talking about killing themselves, if they’re talking about not wanting to be around anymore, those are important as well.
[00:53:50.660] – Speaker 1
I realise that for a lot of parents that don’t have clinical training around this, this can be a very scary thing, and it’s fine to be scared about it. It’s very reasonable. If something like this happens, you have resources that you can reach out to to consult. The resource that’s most available to you is 988 in the US. You just dial 988 from any phone, and there’s 24/7 counsellors that are available, and they’ll talk with anybody who has a concern, either about themselves or about somebody else. You can just say, I’ve seen this thing, and what do you think, and how does it sound? If you’re connected with a school, then of course, you can talk with the school psychologist or nurse, or social worker, or whoever is the relevant person there.
[00:54:37.720] – Speaker 2
It is also in Canada, 988.
[00:54:40.240] – Speaker 1
It works as well. It’s all north? Okay.
[00:54:42.140] – Speaker 2
It works as well in Canada, yeah.
[00:54:44.060] – Speaker 1
If you’re seeing Something like this, so sharp changes in, behaviours, hopelessness, talking about it, check in with your kid, or if you’re not sure what to do, call 988 or talk to the school and check about it. But also just if something feels off in In your gut, as a parent, you know your kid. If you’re worried about your kid, it’s okay to believe that concern that you have. A good step one is just to check in with your kid. A nice way to check in is not to raise any big alarms and not to be dramatic, but just to state clearly and cleanly what you noticed. Just see what your kid says. You might say, Hey, Melissa, I noticed that the past couple of weeks, none of your friends came over. Before, they used to come over almost every day. You had one or two or three friends over in the past couple of weeks. You just come home from school and just went straight into your room. So that just seems really different. And then just sit back. You don’t even have to ask a question. Just say you noticed it. That in itself actually can often make kids feel good.
[00:55:44.640] – Speaker 1
They’re heard, they’re seen, somebody cares about them. And then they’ll say something in response, and then the conversation will continue from there. But it’s okay to check in with your kids, and maybe your concerns will be allayed and maybe not.
[00:56:00.000] – Speaker 2
Just as you said, we talked about some of the warning signs to look for, and I think you really eloquently unpacked that on many levels. I was going to finish with, which you did as well, just to encourage parents. If you are walking through this right now, it can be pretty overwhelming and scary. Like you said, there are people to support. Back to your perfect parenting, right? I think it’s having the courage to reach out, to get support ourselves, to not just to fix some of these things on our own. There are a lot of people out there that are open and orientated to really help us navigate this. You’re better off to call a number and ask for help long before you really do need it. I think that’s really good advice in that. You have spent so much of your work helping parents and other people navigate really difficult topics, things that can overwhelming and really difficult. I really want to thank you for your work and the insight you brought to our conversation. As we wrap up, I just would love maybe two quick answers or brief answers to put a bow on our conversation today.
[00:57:16.550] – Speaker 2
I know there’s a lot of parents who are listening who might feel exhausted, overwhelmed, stuck on any of the topics you talked about today. What’s one compassionate next step that they can take to begin reshaping their relationship with their kid? One word of encouragement, one charge for them today from your perspective.
[00:57:36.740] – Speaker 1
One, and this is maybe a little countercultural at this point, but keep in mind that they’re probably going to be fine. As parents, we get worried about all these things. Parents of young kids are very worried about kids using pacifiers and having a hard time giving them up. I have yet to see a high school student with a pacifier stuck in his mouth. It gets worked out. Some things are extreme, of course, and some things aren’t. But by and large, they’re going to be okay. A lot of parenting is about figuring out how to do it well enough in a way that is tolerable for the parents. You count as parents, you matter. Make sure that you’re doing things in a way that’s okay for you as well. Keep in mind that they’re probably going to be okay, big picture. If you really think that they might not, then talk to somebody again. But don’t ring the alarm bells super early. Then in terms of the kids, back to the one thing to do, back to what I said before, focus on the relationship, not on any particular behaviour or any particular issue or whatnot.
[00:58:39.820] – Speaker 1
Ask, What can I do to make the relationship better? How can I show my kids that I care about them or that I respect them? How can I lead the relationship to a better place? Because remember that as adults, it’s our job to set the tone of the relationship. If our kids say something nasty When we say something nasty back, we just abdicated our adulthood. It’s our job to make the relationship what it needs to be. Just focus on the relationship. Focus on making it good and strong. It can be as simple as saying to your kid, Here’s something that I appreciate that you did, and just resetting the tone of the interaction.
[00:59:24.060] – Speaker 2
As we wrap up the conversation, I would love for you to maybe recommend some resources. I’m going to Just people, parents who are looking for trauma-informed parenting. You have workshops and blogs on your website, parentingforhumans. Com. Divorcindads. Org is a great place for parents and dads, particularly, who are journeying through that that you talked about earlier. I loved this early alert idea. I’m sure there are a lot of teachers and administrators and people that are in the education or work with students that should actually check out early alert, which is earlyalert. Me, even to bring it in. I love that simplicity of that idea, Ron, as far as just checking in and creating a simple way to do that. I think that’s so profound and I love that. So any other resources around those topics, recommendations for people to dive deeper into the topics we’ve talked about today?
[01:00:25.840] – Speaker 1
One super nerdy recommendation that I have is to to read something by Carl Rogers, who I really find just incredibly inspiring. He’s dead by now, unfortunately, but he’s one of the fathers of humanistic psychology. And one of his books, he wrote a book called Freedom to Learn. At this point, the language is a little bit archaic, and so it can be a little bit dense to go through, but if you can, as much as you’re able to read of it, I think it can be just life-changing. It’s what got me started on this road a long, long time ago. I remember I had just moved to the United States, and I talked with a friend on the phone, and neither of us had kids. We were both very young, and he thought that the basis for cooperation, basically the basis for discipline, is fear at some level. I thought that the basis for cooperation is mutual respect and affection. I just needed to go and find… Like every good scientist, I need to go and find resources that supported my position. I ended up finding this freedom to learn in Reddit, and boy, it just started me on a decades long path afterwards.
[01:01:38.540] – Speaker 1
That was amazing for me.
[01:01:40.560] – Speaker 2
Amazing.
[01:01:41.180] – Speaker 1
But he wrote lots of other really Fantastic stuff. I recommend highly. Anything by Carl Rogers, specifically around suicide prevention for young people, if people are interested, the JED Foundation, J-E-D. The JED Foundation has a lot of good materials. I’m on their advisory board. I don’t have any financial arrangement with them. I’m on their advisory board because I think they do good work. They have a lot of resources that they developed around that that I think are really great. There’s work that now is considered a classic on non-violent communication, and I think that’s worth checking out. It’s good for communication between everybody and everybody. And has some really just excellent principles. It’s like it’s bordering on templates that people can use in interactions with important people, including with their kids. Then the last thing, and again, this is maybe a little bit on the nerdy side, but I think super important is learning a little bit about attachment styles. I spent a few good intense years studying psychology for my PhD, and I feel like I walked away with one main skill and three pieces of information. And one of those pieces of information is attachment theory.
[01:03:08.520] – Speaker 1
It’s just so practical and applicable. And so read on it, even on Wikipedia or get a book if you want and read about that. But understanding what are our relational triggers is so important. What are the things that scare us and then make us lose our mind and start reacting really emotionally to what’s happening instead of being able to stop and relate in ways that are more considered and closer to the way we want to be. A lot of that is triggered because of our attachment styles and the things that scare us in close relationships. I think it’s such good self-knowledge to have as we come into what can be extremely intense relationships, which are the relationships with our kids in which we often find ourselves acting like our parents and not understanding why. It’s just so good to unpack that stuff and be able to slow it down.
[01:03:59.620] – Speaker 2
Those are really great for our listeners. Carl Rogers is with a C and without a D in Rogers, if you’re wanting to Google and look him up. One thing I would just add to some of the resources you shared for our listeners, I love the idea of how just checking in on people on a regular basis and being present and journeying. We had a guest on a show from an organization in Canada called jack.org, which really helps young people be there for their friends who are struggling with mental health stuff. They actually have a certificate programme called Be There. You can find them on jack.org, which is just a programme that just helps you walk through what it’s like to be there for someone who is navigating, whether it’s kids or young adults, just to be present and to show up and to be available. It’s pretty simple, similar to early alert, just being present. That’s another great resource for parents and for us to to be there for other people who are wrestling with really difficult and challenging times in their life. Aaron, thank you so much for the work you’re doing, the way you are shaping so many people’s lives.
[01:05:14.120] – Speaker 2
I know our listeners will be hugely encouraged as I have been today from just hearing your stories and the work you’re doing. Sobering topics, but really important for us as humans to journey alongside these young humans we care about so much. And so thank you for what you do and for your time today.
[01:05:33.800] – Speaker 1
My great pleasure. Thank you as well. Thanks for this opportunity to think together about these things. It’s really a pleasure.
[01:05:42.760] – Speaker 2
Well, that’s it for today’s episode. If you found Eran’s insights on building connected parent-child relationships and supporting kids’ mental health helpful, make sure you check out all the resources we shared in this episode. If you want to explore more conversations like this, visit muskokawoods.com. There you’ll find a blog post for every episode of Shaping Our World, packed with highlights, key takeaways, and a link to listen again. While you’re there, explore how Muskoka Woods is creating life-changing experiences that help young people grow in confidence, character, and connexion. Don’t forget to subscribe and share this episode with someone you think needs to hear it.
