Cynthia Wong

And what that's trying to manage is the emotion itself.

It's, hey, I'm going to manage my fear.

And that's not necessarily helpful to the child.

Thank you.

It's a pleasure to be here.

Yeah.

And that's a great question.

In terms of a lot of the research I do, it's about how do people react to uncertainty and a loss of control?

And so when we see these threats in the environment, whether it's these games or these comic books or things that are unknown, and psychologically what happens to parents is that when they are in a situation of threat, they look to see patterns in the environment that can help explain things.

And on top of that, they use oversimplified explanations to try to regain agency.

So in parenting, what this can mean is that they're clinging on to what they view as the right ways of parenting, things that will prevent anything bad from happening.

And what's the best way to prevent bad things from happening?

Well, let's take it away.

Let's get rid of it.

Rather than, hey, let's unpack this.

Let's unpack our feelings of fear and why it's driving it.

You're focusing on the object of fear and trying to take it away.

Yeah, and what we're seeing now is also that...

When this fear perpetuates and it grows, things are becoming more polarized.

There's a black and a white now.