Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Could exposing kids to their fears help them thrive later on in life? In my house, we talk a lot about trying new things, trying things that scare us, because it helps us learn to be brave.
In this talk, pediatric psychologist Catherine Hecht shows that parenting for confidence by encouraging children to handle discomfort with some support builds resilience, courage, and lasting self-belief. Through personal stories and practical strategies, she shares the secret playbook for raising children ready to meet life's challenges.
I've walked a lot in these shoes today. These soles have ground into the pavement of downtown Minneapolis, the rubber mats of my car, the linoleum of a gas station bathroom, and the Play-Doh-crusted carpet of a daycare. Embedded in the tread? Smear a toddler booger? Yeah, a little leftover norovirus, maybe? Maybe if I'm really lucky, a little fleck of dog poop.
Makes you sick just thinking about it, right?
Hey, y'all, Elise here. That shock and awe you just heard from the audience is because Catherine, who until this moment was holding her shoe in her hand, had just licked the bottom of her dirty shoe and then put it back on.
So, yeah, that happened. And while you may not have tasted what I just tasted, you felt what I felt. Your sympathetic nervous system activated, increasing your heart rate and tensing your muscles. Your anterior insula flared, creating a feeling of disgust, a little nausea, a slight gag reflex. Am I going to get sick now? I don't know. But I do know this. I am so glad you're uncomfortable.
Congratulations, truly, because that discomfort, that is the first essential step to creating confident kids. And you can trust me on this one. I make kids uncomfortable for a living. This week, I had an eight-year-old stab me with a needle twice, took a kid into a basement on a spider safari, and played Uno on the bathroom floor with an understandably reluctant teen. It's only Wednesday.
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Chapter 2: What is the importance of exposing kids to their fears?
His brain appreciated bees, vital pollinators. His body, however, reacted like they were flying yellow needles with some anger issues. As soon as those leaves turned green, Sammy would initiate his own personal bee safety protocol. No sweets outside, social distancing from the flowers, even staying inside during his family's cabin trips.
When Sammy got to me, he and his parents had tried everything to get rid of this anxiety. Deep breathing, distraction, no luck. They had also debated the fear endlessly. His parents would reassure him, "'You won't get stung.' Sammy reminded his parents they were not fortune-telling wizards in four words. How do you know? This phobia was stealing Sammy's childhood, one sunny summer day at a time.
When I sing happy birthday with a cringing 12-year-old as loudly as possible in the grocery store produce section, when I rank order photos of vomit by chunk level, Or, yes, when I lick my own dirty shoes. I don't just do it for fun. Although, believe it or not, sometimes it's very fun. I do it for kids like Sammy, because there is a method to this madness.
And after a decade of clinical practice helping kids be brave, it's become clear to me that the method, exposure therapy, isn't just the gold standard treatment for child anxiety and OCD. It is a secret parenting playbook for raising kids that thrive. I want to share that secret playbook with you today. But before we talk about what to do, we need to talk about what we are up against.
It's a wild, worried world out there, folks. According to the National Survey of Children's Health, pediatric anxiety diagnoses rose by nearly 30 percent from 2016 to 2019. And that was before COVID. But you don't need stats or lists. You have felt this, because thanks to evolutionary biology, when kids get anxious, adults get anxious too.
Now, I have two girls, and home is the hardest clinic that I have to work in. When one of my little gals looks up at me with the big, teary eyes, aka the mommy bat signal, my nervous system does the same thing that yours does. It responds as though I have discovered that the kitchen is on fire.
The amygdala, the watchdog in our brain, starts barking, and the fight-or-flight system kicks in, and adrenaline surges, and there is this instant, magical transfer of distress. Her emergency becomes my emergency. And in an emergency, what do you do? You rescue the child. Now, I am proof that professional degrees do not make you immune to this.
In my eldest daughter's four short years of life, I have become a one-woman emotional SWAT team more times than I can count. I've answered questions for my daughter when she clams up with a new adult. I've sacrificed my sleep and allowed our little human space heater into the big bed for the night. I have forfeited all privacy while peeing.
because even that closed bathroom door feels too far away. Now, all of this is what I call parenting for comfort, and it is the single most natural and well-meaning and deeply flawed thing that we do. In the anxiety treatment world, parenting for comfort has another name, accommodation. In my office, it looks like the parents who removed everything green from the house, because green meant vomit.
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