Episode 78: The Affluenza Tradeoff

Suniya S. Luthar is Foundation Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University, and Professor Emerita, Columbia University’s Teachers College.  Her research has involved understanding pathways to resilience in diverse populations, and developing interventions to address these.

Website:

• www.suniyaluthar.org
• www.authenticconnectionsgroups.org

Todd: And welcome back to Full PreFrontal where we are exposing the mysteries of executive function. I am here with our host Sucheta Kamath. Good morning, Sucheta. As usual, really, really good to be with you. I’m very much looking forward to this conversation.

Sucheta: Me too and thank you so much for welcoming me to get started with this very important topic today. We’ve had a range of topics. We have covered different ranges of children to young adulthood and today’s topic specifically applies to this readiness for young adulthood. What does that look like and what are the factors that influence them? So pressure to get into a good college is enormous and not just any school, but Ivy school seems to be top of mind for parents who particularly come from affluent backgrounds. These schools, it’s the school ranking and the kind of program ranking and their status becomes a very important thing. Just the way ultimately is the parents, privilege to put a sticker on their car, I like to call it. I was looking for some stats about last year’s applications and it was a shock. It was probably not shocking, but I guess the highest number was Cornell, which got 43,000 applications, and the rate of acceptance was 14% and Brown was the lowest number. No, I guess Columbia was the lowest number, which was 7% and even Yale I guess was 6.3 but their applications that they got was 32,000 people. What all this is telling you is people are putting a lot of money and they’re putting all kinds of force behind getting their children ready for these an Ivy schools and not just… I’m not limiting myself to these Ivy schools, but there’s certain amount of pressure.

Parents are a recruiting SAT prep tutors, private tutors who teach how to write. In fact, one of my friend’s sons was very innovative and came up with this services that he began to offer too, write college essays and for the cost of, for a student which was not his own essay. Finally, I’ll just tell you my child’s little predicament was one of the things that got me worried is a lot of these colleges, the questions were related to, “What kind of incidents in your life shaped your belief system or shook you out of your comfort zone?”  No, my kid had not had any radical thing happen to him so that was pretty sad. With that in mind, I’m so delighted to invite Dr. Suniya Luthar who is a foundation professor of psychology at Arizona State University and she is a Professor Emerita from Columbia University Teacher’s College. Her research has involved understanding pathways to resilience in deep diverse population and developing interventions to address these. She recently wrote a very powerful essay which we will link in our post-show notes about the scandal that we all came to know in Hollywood with college admissions. She is a mother of two grown children herself and her recent scientific focus has been on motherhood, studies aimed to illuminate what best helps women negotiate the challenges of this life-transforming role. What a beautiful way to capture that life transforming role. I can’t wait to get started. Welcome, Suniya, to the podcast.

Dr. Suniya: Well, thanks for the tip. Pleasure to be here. I have been asking this question of a lot of my guests.

Sucheta: I have been asking this question off a lot of my guests. This podcast is about executive function, which entails how children master their skills that allow them to form goals, stay intentionally focused, adopt flexibility, and manage behaviors and emotions with great resilience throughout the transitional phases of their lives. Because you are a researcher, a psychologist yourself, how would you describe your own executive function? Secondly, somebody whose researches are resilience parenting and an impact of affluence on long-term outcomes. How did that research influence your own parenting and how did your children benefit from those insights, if you don’t mind?

Dr. Suniya:   I think looking over my lifespan, I just turned 16. It was at the age of 15 that I decided I was going to be a child psychologist. I was in India at the time at my grandmother’s kitchen just finished reading this book called, “I’m okay, you’re okay.”

Sucheta: It’s my favorite book. I did read at the same time.

Dr. Suniya:   It was at that time that I decided this is what I was going to be. Fast forward to, I got a Bachelor’s in Child Development and then a Masters at Lady Hellen College in India, Delhi. Then a few years later, I applied to do a PhD here in the U.S. and went to Yale, finished that, about 1990 and up. That’s the course, studying kids and the questions on resilience and how best we can help them. That’s the overarching goal that I’ve had. If you’re willing, what I want to do with my life in terms of my handle, my work and my career. In terms of being organized, I don’t think I was quite as organized as a youngster.

You had a structure built around. You got homework assignments and exams and so on too. To some degree I guess you kept moving whether you like it or not. Ever since I was in academia, which was starting in 1990, I think it needs a lot more self-motivation. You have to push yourself to be writing papers and grant applications. There’s much more openness in your schedule. That did require change and about how I did my work. I think you fall into a pattern and that’s what pretty much continues. Working regularly on weekdays and occasionally, a little bit on the weekends, but that kind of pattern seems to have worked for me so far.

Sucheta: You became… What’s so fascinating to me, I’ve been asking these questions of experts and many of them did not begin to think about their skills or they can go as far as their own college days. What’s so fascinating about your trajectory is you had a lot of clarity about your personal goal or the big picture and I think you took advantage of the building structure around you but eventually also managed successfully the openness and schedule with some imposing structure. So fabulous. Now, how did your own research inform your parentings and the way you supported or inoculated them, so to speak, bout what we are about to talk about? 

Dr. Suniya: It’s an interesting… The research informed my parenting and my parenting and informed the research. It’s almost like they were going in tandem. I started my research work with a focus on adolescence. That was always my favorite developmental period. By the time my own kids were in adolescence, I was also beginning then to focus on motherhood. Basically, I used to test my questionnaires with them even when they were in middle school and high school. It was a very two way kind of thing. My parenting influenced the questions I was asking and the way I was setting of adolescence. Now, how did my research affect my parenting? I think I have less to say on that.

As a mother, I tend to go more from my gut. I think we all know some things as whether you’re a researcher or a lit person. Some things one shouldn’t do as far as possible. Don’t be kind, don’t be mean and don’t say hurtful things. As far as possible, keep fair and consistent limits and have open communication. As opposed to having child development early on from my college days, these were all things that one us knew were givens as folk, but for parents, they must have seeped in at some level make they were, as I said, they will givens. They were not something to be questioned.

Sucheta: Beautiful. Thank you for that. Let’s jump in. Your research has a very peculiar origin story. Before I get to that, I wanted to set the stage up for this discussion. Can we talk about this idea of wellbeing? Even I would make it larger than that with this beautiful concept of human flourishing, which often falls by the wayside. So the two questions I have, could you define wellbeing for us and what are some of the threats to wellbeing for students in general? Then we’ll talk about the high-achieving schools later, but can we start with that?

Dr. Suniya: Normally questions which have a muscle. My advisor in graduate school was a gentleman called EDD Ziglar. He was one of the founders of head start in this country. EDD was often was fond of speaking about the, “Whole child”, so that we didn’t speak about one aspect of development but it was cognition or language or psychosocial or behavioral but thinking about the child as a whole. When I think about wellbeing, my focus is centrally on the aspects of psychological, emotional, social, behavioral wellbeing with academics and so on as in the picture but certainly not at the center. I would think off.

Sucheta: I love that.

 Dr. Suniya: Yes. Wellbeing is really a person’s functioning. Academic grades and so on is aspects of our performance, right? It’s not so much necessarily how I’m doing as an individual. There’s a huge portion of what I put out. That fits in with the academic structure that I’m in, whether it’s high school or college or so on. I’m not sure I would put grades and wellbeing centrally, but as certainly I would put your mental health, the quality of your relationships, very, very important, not just with family but with peers and investment in something that is larger than yourself and other people. Investment in your own wellbeing, that of your friends and family, but something larger than yourself.

Sucheta: I love that. We just had Bill Damon on our podcast and with the topic of purpose, something larger than oneself is critical. He also emphasized that. With that, thank you for opening up that larger idea of that it’s a human flourishing and so many factors that are going into it. What are the threats to human flourishing?

Dr. Suniya: Biggest threat to human flourishing, Sucheta, is exposure to unkindness, maltreatment, wherever that comes from. There’s no question in psychological research. The number one thing is whether it’s comes from your primary caregivers and your mother, your father, your family, your peers in the form of bullying, teachers at school, who you feel humiliated or suited by. Of course, when you get to the community and society level, just grinding about your physical safety sometimes. When we think about what do we need to do to foster the wellbeing of children, the first answer, maybe somewhat counterintuitive because one wants to think about promoting the positive, but in reality, the first most important thing is to remove them. This very powerful set of negative influences, which are destructive to the soul and being of the child.

Sucheta: Oh my God, we could talk for hours about this and as soon as you are describing this, I hope our listeners are taking notes because I think the social media, one of the things it has done is that it has opened the floodgates exposure to unkindness. We are much better modulated or regulated in face to face interactions and we let that faucet go when we are in social media. Yes, children are getting exposed to that far sooner. With that now, can we talk about the research where you started? You have a beginning origin story. Would you share with our listeners about that? How did you come to discover the nature of social emotional adjustment in affluent children who came from affluence?

Dr. Suniya: All right. My dissertation work with abs when I was at Yale was focused on inner city kids and poverty. As I mentioned, I’ve been interested in this notion of resilience, which is basically doing well in spite of exposure to adversity. I’ve been interested in this topic for a long time. My dissertation was on kids in harsh conditions of poverty of high school kids and how some of them manage to do well on multiple fronts.

I continue this line of research working with the same general population for several years and then at one point, I had an undergrad sitting in my office with me and we were discussing some patterns we’d say and in our most recent data, and I said, “I wonder if this is an inner city phenomenon or an adolescent phenomenon that way that we’re saying.” He said, “Well, maybe I can help us get into a school that’s not an inner city school.

We did and we assessed those kids and found much to my surprise at the time that the relatively affluent suburban kids actually were doing more poorly than their inner city counterparts on multiple fronts, especially drug and alcohol use, but also a serious levels off depressive symptoms and just some degree anxiety symptoms. I wish I could say, well, this was in the epiphany I had and realized this was important and went back pursuing again. It happened quite for tuition. It was quite by accident that I discovered this.

Sucheta: I would thank God you did because I think flipped the issue on its head. I don’t think anybody was expecting it or you yourself were not expecting it, right?

Dr. Suniya: No, I was not. In the early years of our research with this population. I did our first study and then word sort of got around. I was on the faculty at Yale substance abuse treatment unit at the time. Word got around that I worked with adolescence and I knew a little bit about substance use and people then from a community surrounding where I was at the time in Connecticut started asking me to come and drop with their parent communities about issues of drug and alcohol use among their students, even as young as middle schoolers. That’s where I got started on the pathway with one study after another, eventually two longitudinal studies, multiple schools across the country. That’s basically how the whole pathway developed in this whole line of research.

Sucheta: Can we dive deep into these findings? What do they look like and can we define affluent communities and what are the markers of the students’ ability to adjust or psychosocial emotional adjustment. Let’s start there first. Let’s start there because we’re asking a couple of very important questions. Let’s start with the first one. How do I define the population that we’re referring to here?

Dr. Suniya: In my early years, I used to call the kids privileged and affluent and so on. But a few years ago we stopped doing that and for a couple of reasons and we started calling them instead kids, students at high achieving schools, even using the acronym HAS. Why? Because that really is a common denominator across all the schools that we have assessed in this category. Sure. There is generally upper middle class families, but not all kids in those schools are from, well educated, white collar professional families. There are some that are low income, there are some on scholarships, but beyond the there is some diversity. Not everyone is affluent. Really, the most obvious thing that unites all of these 20, 30, 40 odd schools that we started, is their high levels of achievement. The SFU scores are high. They offer multiple EP courses, rich extracurricular. Websites will tell you about the colleges that their graduates go to. That really is a defining feature. We study kids who are in high achieving schools. That’s the definition.

Sucheta: Got you. The schools are high achieving by default. That means the parents have money to send them to such specialized experiences. There may be very few handful of kids who were on scholarships, but a majority of them come from certain bracket of income bracket. Correct?

Dr. Suniya: Yes, that is correct.

Sucheta: There’s a certain class of children we are talking about.

Dr. Suniya: It’s an important distinction? I’ll tell you why. Because I have found over the years when I use the word affluence, most parents tend to switch off and say, well that’s not me. They must be talking about some billionaires somewhere but when I tell them, “Listen, this is what we were talking about. Kids at these schools that have this kind of profile, it’s much easier for parents to identify with, this could be my kid’s school as opposed to say no, that’s not a group to which I belong. Does that make sense?

Sucheta: Yes. I think one of the things people quickly want to get away is because the affluence also implies that we have general disregard or we are so, you know, high mighty and everybody wants to be, I don’t want to use the fakely humble, but they want to distinguish themselves as we are just middle-class. No. This is doctors and lawyers and some professors and accountants, right? We’re talking about,

Dr. Suniya: Yes, you’re absolutely right. That’s why I’m saying. Most of us are a little bit uneasy about saying, well, I’m a rich person. Fine. My task, Sucheta, is to help parents understand the magnitude of the risks that our kids are experiencing. That’s the second part of your question. If I’m going to help parents understand that I have to reach out to people and say, yes, this is you to whom I’m speaking. This is me, this is you, this is my sister. This is my family, this is your family. Unless I can convey this message in a way that is palatable enough for people to say, “This could really apply to my family and my home.” Unless I can do that, I’m not going to be able to help parents, schools and communities change things so that our kids are not in the kind of dire trouble that they are in right now. Which is a second part of your question. What’s the deal? What’s going on? Am I remembering this correctly?

Sucheta: Right? Yes. We can still go back to the question because the issue itself is so vast. If I can quickly ask you to clarify this, that I think you pointed out that there is a general uneasiness about being rich and at the afforded the luxuries and experiences and opportunities parents are making available and they are embarrassed about it. They want to underplay their role because they say, “Oh, I’m just another parent who will do anything for their children and they are misguided about that. I really would you to explain that and if you have some insights about that, because I think as you said, how do we make parents lower their guard so they can be receptive to the magnitude of problems that is about to come.

Dr. Suniya: The embarrassment issue or humility issue is one part of it, Sucheta, but there’s another very powerful factor of force that’s at play here, which is fearfulness and a sense of denial. Just think about it. The thing that most terrifies most mothers is being told that your child is in danger and serious danger, an immortal danger. That level of fear, we know there’s some psychological research, often puts us into a position of denial and what’s there. One part of this may be around, I don’t want to acknowledge that I’m rich, but the other part is saying, please don’t tell me this. I had worked so hard to get my own degrees to work, you know, to get a decent job, to get my kids into these schools that are so good and give them these opportunities.

Are you really telling me that after all of this, my child might be in serious danger? That’s a very hard message for parents to, to absorb and unless we are able to that aided with the scientific data, but be with some compassion and in my case… Listen, I’ve been through this. I’m a mom and I’ve experienced that so no sense of judgment whatsoever unless we can present these data both with the science behind it and that level of compassion, as I said, parents are not going to be able to listen. We’re not going to be able to affect any meaningful levels of change.

Sucheta: That’s what got me attracted to your work. All my readings about your blogs and your interviews have been obsessing over it. Primarily because in my practice that is one particular crowd or group of children I serve and they are afraid when children have executive dysfunction for example, because of ADHD or whatever the reason may be and so they are so desperate to remove this obstacle so that they have experience of success and any factors that influence their future success. If I bring it up, I had never thought really deeply about this if why there’s pushback. I think you just unfolded this for me that this sense of fearfulness that you know, how can you accuse me of having done wrong, which was done in good faith effort. So thank you for helping me with that.

Dr. Suniya: There’s another even more possibly charitable way of thinking about if you will. Which parent doesn’t want the best for his or her child. We all want the best. Now that things have shifted over time so that when you and I applied to suddenly when I applied to a college or graduate school, there was far less competition to get into the top notch places than there is now. You rattled off a bunch of very scary numbers at the start of our conversation. What I’m getting at is each of us wants the best for our kids that we possibly can get. The reality is we want them to not get the kind of educations that we were fortunate enough to get. That’s not a bad thing.

It’s not a bad thing for parents to want their kids to have a high quality, especially if they had the good fortune of experiencing it, being gratified by it and living with it. That’s yet another way to think about, rather than judging parents, like, Oh my goodness, they’re entitled and arrogant and this, and that is to say, yes, perhaps some are but overall, let’s take a step back and acknowledge the fact that literally every single parent would want the best of opportunities that they could get for that kids. Is that a fair statement?

Sucheta: I love that and I think that you really are making this a topic, a as an invitational topic, an invitation to engage and not get put off by the idea or suggestions that you have not only done a disservice by gathering wealth, but you, you are incompetent in the way you’re parenting. I love this setup. With that in mind, can you talk a little bit about, define competition for us because this whole research is about them surviving or trying to survive in this competitive world. Then we will talk about the psychosocial deficits that this is leading. So how do you define competition and what are good and healthy skills needed for survival? I think before we got started with our recording, you were talking about this idea of resiliency versus resilience. I, in my mind, was not being very careful with the two. Maybe that you can tie all this together.

Dr. Suniya: I will make an effort. Let’s do competition first. It is literally you’re striving for a certain level of, you referred to them as Ivy’s but at the top two years I could be in small liberal arts schools that are very well-reputed. It’s really in terms of the tier of a high level of institutions of higher learning that parents want the kids to get to and the competition has got to be not three or four or five or six times would probably be by factors of 10 that much higher to get into one of those.

What’s happening now is the kids are sitting around, let’s say in the same classroom, AP, algebra, calculus or on the sports field, playing hockey or soccer and say, “I know the scout just here for one soccer player, which one of us is that going to be from that college. Same with as a debate team or Bastiaan, whichever one of us is going to make it that tier or that particular… into Stanford which sets up such a high level of competition among the kids and it is a reality. It is that much harder to get into these schools. What we need to be… I remember telling my own son this when he first was in this process of applying to college. I said, My darling, you will get an education. Don’t worry about it. I went to Delhi university. It’s not even on the map. If you have a passion for something and you have a basically good high school education, you will get to it. That is not…

Sucheta: By the way, a sidebar here. You are Indian, I’m Indian and you know that is probably the most unusual message an Indian parent has given to their child and I am in your campus, by the way.

Dr. Suniya: Yes. Well, thank you for saying that. My son told me in no uncertain times, “Mom, you are the only person I would ever imagine saying something like that in the community that we lived in at the time.” Does that answer your question about competition, Sucheta?

Sucheta: Very much so, but from the research point of view, it is directly related to the tier of higher, the institution of higher learning getting into those is what the measure of success was in this context, right?

Dr. Suniya: Yes. That is the more immediate short number, of course, the longer time it is getting into the best careers. It’s getting to the best colleges seen as a fast way to getting into the most high-status, lucrative careers. The bottom line is be at the top, be at the top levels, the top tier. That’s where we want kids to be and there’s a fear, Sucheta, among to well-educated parents. College degrees, that if my kid doesn’t get to one of those top-level of schools, somehow he or she is going to be left behind and kids are into this as this level of fear in these high achieving schools where the overall, the ethos generally to strive for the best as you see in sweater today or the hangup banners or the schools where the graduates head to. So that becomes the overall ambition, if you will of the whole institution. Does that make sense?

Sucheta: Absolutely. And what’s so interesting about this is that the message is coming from parents exclusively.

Dr. Suniya: No.

Sucheta: Correct?

Dr. Suniya: No.

Sucheta: No?

Dr. Suniya: No, no.

Sucheta: So where is the message coming from?

Dr. Suniya: Yeah. So people ask me Professor Luthar, where does this pressure come from? And I ask them back, where does this pressure not come from? Okay. So of course parents are one factor. Then you look at teachers and how early are you told, in middle school, first year, freshman year, this is the course that your child is going to be taking. I would recommend X and Y APS and X and Y honors courses. So teachers want their, administrators want their students to shine and have the best marks and published in the newspaper. This is our standardized test scores and so on. And by the way, real estate prices vary with standardized test scores on the local public schools. So now we have towns, we have teachers, we have administrators, I mentioned sports coaches earlier. We are the real estate markets. That’s also dependent on the test scores. You have the university system that buys into a certain kind of resume. So you tell me where is it not coming from?

Sucheta: Wow, these kids are poor babies. They are just drowning in this pressure that are coming from all places. And so I think what’s another lovely connection that you just made for our listeners is that it is really much longer trajectory. This competition is ultimately landing in a high status jobs, which will become ultimate symbolic representation of your success. But with that success comes power, that comes freedom. And that’s what this pursuit is all about.

Dr. Suniya: And there’s such a fantasy that it may have bring power, it may bring status and may bring a lot of money, but do not assume that that will be brand new freedom and equanimity of spirit. Because think about it, the higher the status of job, the more you’re tied to it. People don’t give you a lot of money towards in and out of your office, when you feel like it. So these high status jobs I pay you very well, also demand a great deal of you from your personal life. There are always tradeoffs. So I think what we are not focusing quite enough off is what are the tradeoffs, whether it’s being in a high achieving school or in top tier college or job. As you’re talking about tradeoffs as a recent paper that I have to mention to you. It’s a longitudinal study comparing those who were in high achieving schools with those in middle achieving schools and actually found that decades later, the ones who were in high achieving schools actually were doing less well. They’re doing more poorly than those who are in high school that were not quite as high achiever overall. And the authors suggested why? Because of the constant social comparison. So one thing, who’s ahead? Who’s behind? Think of like survival of the fittest. Who’s getting in and who’s getting left behind. That is such an unhealthy way for adolescents or children to be living.

Sucheta: Yeah. And the research in contemplative studies talks a lot about this social comparison having incredible impact on general state of happiness. And this state of equanimity you were talking about that so eludes those who are in the grasps of this sense of competition, right?

Dr. Suniya: Yeah. You use the phrase these poor babies, and I have to be candid with you in the last couple of talks I’ve done, I talked to parent communities all over the country to schools and I have found myself making this analogy in a very heartfelt way that I think of our kids today as almost like having lives of those in the pre-industrial era. They don’t have a childhood. They work constantly. Think about even something like in a second grade, they’re playing for a travel team, the whole town shows up to see, oh my goodness, he had a bad day today or she was off her game today. They’re being evaluated and scrutinized. And doing regular practices and so on. Where are you and I, I played cricket with the kids in the neighborhood and we squabbled and just you’re out. No I’m not. And we came back the next, end of the same thing again. These children are working and performing right from the get go by the time they’re in middle and high school. To my mind, it is just unfathomable. The amount of work that we’re making these kids do.

Sucheta: Oh my God, my heart just aches. as you are describing this. There’s two thoughts come to me, which are distant spots in this whole galaxy that you’re creating, how issues are interconnected. Jennifer, a history has written a book is All Joy and No Fun. Are you familiar with the work?

Dr. Suniya: Yes.

Sucheta: And so I thought the transformation in the way suburban lives have become that families have become isolated and majority of mothers are spending times in their cars driving children from one event or activity to another. And they’re eating in their cars. The only interaction they have is with their mothers, which may or may not be healthy, as you know. And then the second thought comes to my mind is Dr. Stuart Brown’s work with play and how play is a single marker of helping you develop the entire adaptive abilities and children growing up in these highly competitive, highly performance centric lives are not getting to play. That unstructured, sort of at surface looking like purposeless activity that we used to call play. He’s absent.

Dr. Suniya: Yeah. And by the way, you have as you mentioned mom’s, us. There is also now recent research that has shown that college educated mothers are the most stretched thin. So that over time when you see the sheer number of us that are devoted to child related activities, the increases have been much greater for college educated moms as compared to college educated dads or less well educated moms or dads. So there is some truth that it’s not just about letting our kids around which we are to multiple performances and practices and so on. But, a colleague of mine, she and I rewrote the step around invisible labor of motherhood and basically have documented just the sheer number of things that contemporary mothers, suburban are living in cities, but in basically college educated onwards or aspiring that high aspirations for their kid, high number of chores, responsibilities that are in our heads that we are trying to coordinate. So it’s not just the sheer hours of doing things but the mental exhaustion of keeping track, of multitasking about not just the dances and the performance and the sports, but overall psychological health. And how’s the teacher doing with X child and do what? Do you see where I’m going with this?

Sucheta: Oh yeah. You have so much compassion in your heart and it just comes through you with your work. Talk to us about this idea now that you’re currently focused on, which is who’s mothers, mommy. I think that this research, these findings about highly stretched, highly stressed mothers are becoming the parents of these children and none of their responsibilities have gone down. And then, we are reading all the research about inequality in pay and the working mothers are carrying guilt of having to work and parent. So what is all this? How do we try and understand this?

Dr. Suniya: Yeah. So you asked earlier about the influence of my personal life and my work and I think it was around the time that my kids were getting into middle school when I first started becoming conscious. My goodness, this is a hard job. This is a very, very hard job. And I was only focused on, and not just focused on the time and management, but truthfulness of this, on the huge emotional, I don’t want to call it burden, but it is to some degree, you’re tied to your child, you feel your child’s pain 10 times more deeply than your child’s pain. So as I started reflecting on all of this, the emotional issues, psychological, the sense of loyalty, that you cannot shrug off even if you wanted to or try to. That along with the hours and the inequality of pay. All this put together got me to ask this question. What about mother’s wellbeing? So developmental scientists have told us for years, this is what you should do, we shouldn’t do, what you do. That’s bad. Good. But nobody thought to say what about mothers. How do they even do this job? How do mothers even do this job? And that’s what got me started on this, which has now become another 10, 15 year long.

Sucheta: Well, thank God for you for studying. So tell us, what are you insights, what about mother’s mental health? In what ways there are heading towards crisis versus what are some of the ways to inoculate or build bridges? So stop this avalanche from moving further down the road of crisis.

Dr. Suniya: Yeah. So yeah, this one, happily I can come to with a positive fact. Well, of course, assuming you’re not in the, God forbid abusive relationship or we always, that’s a given. The toxicity has to be removed if there is some in your lives. But beyond that, the single most important thing is embodied in this statement. I feel seen and loved for the person I am at my core.

Sucheta: That that’s the Dante principle. That’s the spiritual principles of all living. Right?

Dr. Suniya: Right. It’s also what you call unconditional love. It’s also worked with in resilience research. Everybody knows this is what we want our kids to feel unconditional love. So guess what? The same thing that is the single most powerful protective factor for our kids is exactly the single most powerful protective factor for us who must give it to the kids.

Sucheta: So can you elaborate a little bit about this? So when the mother feels seen and loved for who she is, there is a sense of groundedness in her and is it external to her? Is it the way people behave and act or is there something within her too that confirms her belief that I am seen for who I am.

Dr. Suniya: This is like a looking glass. Start as a looking glass. Mostly, sense of feeling seen and loved does come from the degree to which we are connected with people on this in the authentic ways. So I really would say this is the degree to which women, mothers or men for that matter feel like there are people in their lives who do see them and do accept them and even love them, once and all for the human beings that they are at their course.

Sucheta: And this brings me back that your work that you have started the mommy clubs, is that how we would describe it, which is such a great effort. And so would you talk about the work that you’re doing to provide the guidance and structure where they actually learn how to be in that situation?

Dr. Suniya: Yeah. So just going to go back for a second to your question about what help. So that was one, feeling unconditionally loved. Second one was knowing that if you’re really upset or distress, that conflict will be forthcoming. Someone will be their satisfaction with friendships and feeling real, authentic in your everyday life. So hanging onto these for general, what I call the big four attributes, what we developed basically was a thing called authentic connections groups. And there are groups where women who have similar lives. So we started for example with a group of healthcare providers at the Mayo Clinic, physicians, PAs and nurse practitioners all in the hospital setting on the premises once a week to match for three months around and spoke about issues that were real issues that are not sort of not intellectual, things like obstacles to reaching out or connecting or feelings of shame or appreciating each other, real things, things around relationships. So essentially what happens is when you make those connections happen in the room right there and through the three months period, also help the women develop what we call in the program, your go-to committees outside of the groups as well. These are people to whom you reach out that you would normally not have, had the time to do or made the time to do. Now you’re accountable to the group cause every week you have to ask so what did you do with your go tos this week. And what would this whole process does is then set up this tapestry and some of the women even call it like this blanket of love, not just within the group but the moms had it now in their own everyday life so that the group itself can be there or that they have their own connections outside as well. Some of our groups after the three months period, a year later they’re talking to each other on Skype. So we moved from the in-person format to doing groups virtually, which makes it a lot easier for busy professional moms. And the virtual group said no, we did five of them. We just published up or publishing a paper on that. So these groups are continuing, well after the three months pave in the road is over. And that is my goal. When they say it takes a village? It takes a village to support the mother.

Sucheta: Yeah. As you explain these ideas, first of all, I’m just realizing that these things used to be organic part of culture, a hundred years ago or even to me, even if you’re bickering with your family and loved ones, that is a sense of connection through which you can sort emotions out and find a solution and all that is missed out for single families where the interactions, and you don’t even talk to neighbors because you’re busy taking your children to ballet. Recently an interesting thing happened to me in May where friends of mine, my kids are in college now, so they’re older and, but I love, love, love kids and so friends of mine from Houston, they’re twins and their daughter, they had all come to Atlanta. So I decided to have a little, cookie making party for them. And so I had these bunch of kids and it was kind of a little shocking to me the way the children were having issues but not getting the guidance. And parents were talking to me. They’re very good friends of mine too. Is there any better way to interact? And so I started appointing a class for my friend’s children and their friends. So I’m doing a class where we’re doing a get together for the kids. They range from 8 to 13, and then the parents and including dads. So which I’m going to come to talk to you about. And so we meet twice a month and I’m guiding them these ideas about how to really define your parenting and who you are as a person. And where are you finding what is nurturing you and what kind of nurturing are you bringing into your parenting? Not parenting because these people are really good with laws and a structure and, rules. But this compassionate of bonding, of seeing their children with the eyes of innocence that requires a lot of help.

Dr. Suniya: Yeah. So I think what you’re doing is marvelous and it’s wonderful that you’re bringing both the emotional, psychological and the everyday practical to do aspects of parenting together. But I think the connections are focused really but different. We really are taking care of the moms for their own sakes.

Sucheta: Oh wow. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I see that.

Dr. Suniya: I cared about you not just because you’re Emily’s mom or so and so. I care about you because you are a mother and you do very hard work and you need to be loved. You need to be cared for in the best ways that you can for your children. And the very best you make, the best kind of mothering is what we want to give you in authentic connections.

Sucheta: Oh, so you are really giving this a hug of unconditional love. Embrace that. That’s like you’re creating an envelope or this blanket of love that you were talking about earlier. So let’s not forget about dads. What’s happening with dads in all this conversation about resilience? Are they around or are they not part of this? Are they not the ones putting the pressure? What’s going on?

Dr. Suniya: Yeah, so in our original study where we asked moms, feeling seen and loved, it’s often the dads who provide that comfort and in good marriages. So dads have a huge role in the wellbeing of moms simply by being loving to mothers in addition to, of course, being parents that are directly with the children. So that’s one part of it. Dads do not typically, at least so far, have not typically signed up for groups such as this over a long term. I mean, they may come in for drop in groups and so on, but imagine trying to imagine a male surgeon coming to a group called authentic connections. It’s just not what men…

Sucheta: He doesn’t have time Suniya. Remember.

Dr. Suniya: He doesn’t pull it then in the same way that does a woman. So in the field of child development and prevention science more broadly speaking, this is something that we’re grappling with is how do we get dads to engage, what do we need to do that’s different? We cannot assume that what works for moms is the same thing that’s going to work for dads. Any more than we can then consume that. early drug trials used to be with white men and then NIH made this rule that you have to have women in minorities because you cannot assume that things that work for men, work for women in the same way, in much the same way we in prevention, science and child development and those are less concerned with parenting. This is something we really need to be thinking about. How do we get to the dads, what can we do to engage them, that they need it, that they want it. Even I can tell you it is a given. My son knows about authentic connections. He knows the ins and outs. He’s 28. He said I’d go get just such a group, if I could. Yeah, it’s not what you got set up. I don’t think for a bunch of 30 year old young men or 35 year old young fathers in quite the same way as you can for the mothers.

Sucheta: Absolutely. So I know we are at the end of our discussion, but I wanted to circle back to one issue which we didn’t quite fully address in depth with these. Would you describe these psychosocial difficulties that adults face who come from, I mean young adults who enter college phase when they have had this a highly pressure, some environments from where they come where they’re, the only motto is to be prepared to compete. What happens to their psychology, what goes wrong with them? And then maybe if you have some suggestions how to do it better.

Dr. Suniya: I have two responses. One is in our own longitudinal work, we had followed kids to their middle to late twenties and when those kids who would respond in this pressure cooker environments as high schoolers and middle schoolers with elevated levels of substance use tend to be at much higher risk for diagnosis of addiction when they’re in their twenties so there is continuity. When you have a serious problem with it’s depression or substance use early on in life, there is a greater risk for relapses. So that’s one on longitudinally. We’ve seen some of that in our own research, but the other thing is all that you hear now about counseling services at universities being so overloaded and basically they don’t have the staff to be able to meet the needs of the number of mental health issues that the students are displaying. One of our participants said this very clearly what we’ve been secure. We’ve been, had our parents helping us with so much and suddenly we’re in this environment where there’s so much we have to do that that’s on our own.

Sucheta: That’s so true.

Dr. Suniya: It’s a big shot.

Sucheta: So odd too because it has always been a collaboration and suddenly young adults who enter, it’s the only lifeline is to these counselors, which are not adequate. And that also the suicide rates also have gone up on campuses. Right?

Dr. Suniya: There’s a new study that I’ve cited in on our recent papers, which has also shown over time that the increases and suicidal ideation and severe depression are among the highest income adolescence and among women. So high income people are showing particularly stop increases in depression according to this particular paper overtime.

Sucheta: God. So there’s a cost to gaining all these like, really striving and competing for the best jobs that pay well. But ultimately it comes at a psychological cost is what you’re saying.

Dr. Suniya: Do you remember the Simon and Garfunkel song? Richard Cory?

Sucheta: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dr. Suniya: Had a yacht and is always in the papers. Liked him very much and he ended up putting a bullet through his head. So was a very, I mean it’s all, that song has always stayed with me. And when I think about this is what we’re striving to work, this is the level of wealth and power and status and prestige I want to achieve and my kids to achieve this, take a step back and say what other costs. The single most important thing, such as relationships, always resilience rests on relationships first. Never put that at stake.

Sucheta: Wow. I think as you’re saying this, which has again opened my eyes towards this idea that when you are competing, you’re so to speak, preparing to compete, you’re always competing for some sort of gain or measurable gains. So you’re either preparing for exams or tests you’re taking or competing for competitions. All these pursuits are isolating and those isolating, ultimately, and then you have to sleep early or you have to eat on time or you have to, if you’re a wrestler for example, or if you are, whatever. So ultimately you are living a very solitary life in pursuit of excellence. And that can become quite depressing.

Dr. Suniya: There’s something paradoxically that adds to this, which is our, how’s your focus on mindfulness paradoxically is another. So you’re saying this is supposedly for my wellbeing, but it’s also isolating. But that’s the whole point, take by yourself and not doing this.

Sucheta: It’s so true.

Dr. Suniya: So even when you think about wellbeing initiatives and human relations often in the big companies and so on. What we tell kids, be mindful. Once again rippling into something that enhances isolation rather than good, solid, strong, supportive relationships.

Sucheta: Wow. Fabulous. I mean, I’m so excited to get to hear you and explain these complex matters and give us the message of hope. And also this paradox really struck me because yeah, I think that there’s a new movement to bring yoga and meditation to the classrooms, but really like, I’m a communication expert. And in last two and a half years, I’ve been doing a communication training program for people who are homeless and literally my communication curriculum for these men who have come out of prison, getting off addiction and drug alcohol recovery and going back to earning through jobs is how to teach them to do conflict resolution, how to form bonds using language and communication skills. And what is so interesting, I finished the class and I come back to life. And every person or majority of people do not have the best, most efficient or most meaningful yielding communication style. You know, they are either aggressive, passive, aggressive passive or they have mixed communication and all that leads to disgruntle interactions with each other. And so that’s why people don’t know how to be partners, how to form these human relationships. Well, so that could be something you need to study their own abilities to engage in communication with intentions.

Dr. Suniya: And that’s very much part of what authentic connections groups is about. But it is also about the fears of intimacy. So conflict resolution is one part, but the other is many of us are a little afraid to show our true selves and connect because once you are really that close to somebody, you need them. And those fears of abandonment and all this good stuff. So you’re right. Are there conflict issues of fuel, issues of embarrassment and we address all of these head on. One of the women said, where women get too after that second glass of wine, we get there right away in authentic connections group.

Sucheta: And you’re sober so you’re actually going to retain everything you’ve learned. Well it has been nothing but pure joy talking with you. And I will link up some of these articles we are talking about and thank you for coming on the show and sharing your brilliant ideas and thoughts and helping us all become better parents. And at least for me a better mom. Thank you.

Dr. Suniya: Thank you. It is my pleasure to talk with you.

Todd: All right. That’s all the time we have for today. Wow. Sucheta, my hand hurts from all the notes I took. What a great conversation. If you know of someone who might benefit from listening to today’s conversation, we would be most grateful if you would kindly forward it to them. So, on behalf of our hosts who Sucheta, today’s guest, Dr. Sonia Luthar and all of us at cerebral matters, thanks for listening today and we look forward to seeing you again right here next week on Full Prefrontal.