Meltdown as Teaching Moment: Journalist Katherine Lewis Discusses Her Research into Children's Behavior

This podcast explores essential principals in childhood emotional development as researched by journalist Katherine Lewis. She discusses her book on this subject by explaining: Her discovery process that leads to combing the ideas of experts, observations, and studies together in her book. Unique behaviors children exhibit today such as lack of self-regulation, which was less common 30 years ago. Practical ways we can engage with children to help them learn better self-regulation skills. Katherine Lewis had been a journalist for 20 years covering business and policy issues when she became concerned by her own children's challenging behavior. She began intensive researching that led to a popular article and eventually a book: The Good News about Bad Behavior discusses parent's misguided attempts to correct behavior rather than offer behavioral skills. She found that the current generation of young people has fewer self-regulation skills than past generations. This means younger people have difficulty managing their behavior, thoughts, and emotions in a way that is unmanageable. We see high rates of anxiety, addiction, and suicide by teens as a result. Katherine Lewis explains that there are ways parents can address this to ease the gap between children's behavior then and now, from that meltdown moment and beyond, that will make space for these self-regulating skills to grow. She covers impediments to this from technology to social strata extremes and how connection, communication, and emotional capability building are key principals toward stronger emotional development. For more information, see her web site at https://www.katherinerlewis.com/