If you’re raising your child, hypothetically speaking, to be trilingual in Spanish, English, and ; play a musical instrument; make varsity track by their freshman year in high school; secure admission to a top-flight college; and publish a peer-reviewed article by graduation … you’ve got a lot to worry about. And you’re all but guaranteeing that you’re going to feel terrible about yourself — and maybe about your kid. 

But that’s the sort of insight that’s appropriate to a time of relative normalcy, a time when families can count on some basic social stability and standard functioning of things. It’s not as helpful in a moment when families are coming off a punishing global health catastrophe in a country with worsening political dysfunction. 

Families in 2023 are juggling post-pandemic about their kids’ academic progress and their social and emotional well-being, health and safety. That’s more than most of us can carry with easy equanimity. 

Now, instead of worrying about the various projects we’ve chosen for our parenting, we’re grinding ourselves just to get our kids back on some kind of recognizable track. As author Stephanie Malia Krauss puts it in her new book, , families are asking, “Will the kids be ok? What do they need? What can I do?”

I sat down with Krauss because I need answers to all three of those questions. 

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length. 

First of all, I have three kids, which makes five kids between us, right? 

Yes!

OK. So we know what we’re talking about. I’ll put it plain: It’s a really, really hard time to be raising kids. I think we — individually and collectively — need to say that out loud until more people realize it. How are you doing now, as a human in this moment, as we dig out from the worst of the pandemic?

​�ċParenting is extremely tricky right now, I think in large part because our kids are facing an onslaught of challenges and stresses and pressures that are either historic, but now feel intensified, or are legitimately new. 

Right now, the livability and lovability of young people’s lives are more on the line than we have seen in recent history. There is a level of volatility and uncertainty that has been building over the past 20 years in the U.S. that we really saw come to a head during the pandemic — from global health issues, but also racial violence and economic recession. I would bring in increasingly extreme weather as another thing to think about. 

Young people are living in the midst of so much unpredictability and it just feels deeply insecure, and it feels like their lives are on the line. 

So how is this parenting experiment going? I’m trying to figure out ways to protect childhood while empowering my kids to be resourceful and skilled and capable in the world as it is and also giving them the kinds of resources and opportunities where it’s possible to thrive, including being able to thrive when times are really challenging. 

I think you’re right. It’s a combination of old pressures that we’re maybe only sort of now attending to more thoroughly or noticing even … and this feeling of new challenges with heightened stakes. It drives more attention to how systems do or don’t meet kids’ usual — and new, in these stressful times — needs, right?

That’s also a conflict in the parenting experiment: I’m constantly aware of when I am complicit in signing my kid up for something that was designed for him to be a part of, but not designed with his learning and well-being in mind. 

Some of this is simple. For example, as kids get older, they go to sleep later, and they need to sleep longer. When the school year comes around, I’m going to be waking my middle-schooler up every day at 5:30 a.m., when I know it’s bad for his brain and it’s bad for his body. He needs more sleep.

And he’s gonna struggle to go to bed at night when I know he really needs to sleep for his mental and physical health. And I’m going to do that every single morning, knowing that’s actually not good for him, but because it’s just a part of how he needs to go to school. So I think that there are so many moments like that, and you think, ‘Oh, in an ideal world, this is what you could do to support the development and the well-being of my kid.’

So it’s about figuring out how to negotiate and live in that mess.

Is that where Whole Child, Whole Life came from? 

About 10 years ago, when my younger son was born, I left school leadership, where I had a number of questions about what young people actually need to be ready for the real world versus completing high school. So I go into national work, and soon realized that there are really smart people who are talking about these questions, they’re just not including a lot of people in the field.

So I decided to write a book as my love letter back to people raising and working with kids: Here’s what readiness really requires.

at the height of the pandemic, just right in the middle. I’m doing a pandemic book tour from my basement, talking to educators, counselors, parents, social workers, anyone. I’m talking all about how the future is changing, what young people need to be ready for the world as it is, what they need to be ready for the future.

But every single time, somebody would ask the same version of this question at the end: ‘We really need to know what our kids need to be ready, but they are not well, and we are afraid that they could give up or burn out before they get to this future you’re talking about. What do our kids need to be well right now?’

 I felt that question in the deepest parts of my bones. It was the question I was asking myself as a mom. So I put together this concept for what became Whole Child, Whole Life: 10 Ways to Help Kids Live, Learn, and Thrive. 

Any concrete tips for staying sane? 

Whole Child, Whole Life aims to explain what we need to know about young people’s physical, mental, cognitive, social, emotional, and even spiritual development. It tries to explain the practices that promote thriving, and why they matter, and puts it together in a way that is accessible and actionable. 

There’s a set of practices that make up the bulk of the book. These 10 practices we need to practice as adults for kids. And eventually, as they get older, we need to practice it with them.

Eventually, kids internalize these 10 practices as self-care strategies, which means we, the adults, need to practice these things, too. We need to build community and belonging. We need to nurture healthy relationships. We need to attend to our past and present circumstances — all the same practices apply to us that apply to them. 

When kids are with us, regardless of our title, we have a responsibility for them. They are in our care. And I tend to think about it as like: What is lifesaving? What is life extending and what is life giving for kids? What are my responsibilities at this particular moment? 

Our kids are growing up in so many situations where danger is implicit. Imagine being a child, showing up to school every single day knowing that you might get shot, or you might get Covid and pass it to somebody vulnerable, like your grandmother, who lives in your house. And yet you just keep doing that every day and it’s normalized. It’s a part of what today’s kids are incorporating into their childhoods. So we have to think of the lifesaving techniques that kids need now.

And then there are the big questions that I think young people grapple with from a practical level all the way to an existential level. Am I going to live a long life? Is there a future for me? Can I even imagine what this world is going to look like? Are we all going to make it? Am I going to make it? Is my family going to make it?

How do we support them with life-extending techniques that help them imagine a long life and a good life. What do they need to imagine and secure that?

And then the life-giving pieces: How do we make sure that kids can actually enjoy their childhoods without constantly feeling like they’re at risk of something bad happening? A lot of them go through life with just a real and pending sense of doom that has been brought on by their lived experience and is totally reasonable to me. 

What does it look like for us structurally and systemically to help kids get back to well? 

First, we should do a very honest appraisal of what the risks and realities truly are for our kids so that we understand. We can then get about the business of figuring out: OK, so then what? Then what will it take for them to learn, to grow, to thrive? And what does that require then, of me, perhaps that I may not have been prepared to do before? 

But we also have to look bigger. Our kids have the potential to live longer than anybody else with the right resources and opportunities. Science has advanced enough that we can keep people alive for a much longer time. Some people are projecting that our kids, as an expectation rather than an exception, could live a 100-year life. 

Put that in the context of work. You and I were raised in a generation where hustle culture and putting in the hours and putting in the work was a matter of pride. It was what you did. But the idea of my children having to do that level of work over a 60- or 70- or even 80-year working life — that is not the life that I want for them, and I don’t think they could sustain it. 

When I think about the prospect, the possibility of my kids having a 100-plus year life and then I think about the likelihood that in that 100 years there will continue to be volatility and uncertainty, acceleration, innovation, change, AI, and other advances and disruptions, it changes my view about what is important and why. 

A first credential might matter less in the context of a longer life. We know that a degree is going to get you a better-paying job, that there are real economic benefits. But in the potential of a 100-year life, that is one step of many in a working journey.

What are some tangible ways we could refocus schools on children’s needs and development? 

One of the things that I was so hopeful about as I wrote the book was that there are these 10 timeless practices that will always, no matter what is happening, support the health and well-being of young people. We know that learning is highly social and emotional. and that when young people are well, not only are they healthy, happy and whole, but they’re better learners and one day, workers. 

In schools, we have all of these frameworks and prescriptive programs. We have tiered interventions. We have positive behavioral interventions and supports. We have discipline strategies, we have academic remediation. We have skills to prepare for the future. We have all of these pieces and requirements. 

But we don’t actually have explicit, named frameworks for the art and science of taking care of children and human development. Schools need policies and practices that explicitly name and prioritize child well-being and development. I would love to see our schools commit to the whole child with a whole life orientation. Imagine schools answering the question: How do we help young people build lives and futures that they love? 

We can focus on the everyday interactions that teachers and principals have full agency and decision-making power over. How are we building consideration of children’s development into the decisions that we’re making in the school culture, the commitments and the discipline decisions that we make? Our content and curricular choices? How are we setting up classroom learning? There are things like project-based learning and experiential learning that can light up all of the aspects of a kid’s well-being.

I would love for readers to look at Whole Child, Whole Life as kind of a sifter they can take their practices and policies through, and ask each time: What lights of well-being and thriving come on when we do this practice, when we implement this policy at home or at school? Is this helpful, or is this actually harmful to a young person’s well-being?’

Equally concerning and more deeply entrenched is the chronic stress associated with poverty — and that, too, affects millions of U.S. children. According to U.S. Census data in 2019, nearly one in six U.S. infants, toddlers and preschoolers lived in poverty, which in itself represents a form of chronic stress. Almost half that number are living in extreme poverty, which is an annual income of around $13,200 for a family of four. Children of color in the U.S. have been particularly vulnerable to child poverty, with Black and Hispanic children experiencing some of the highest poverty rates in the country.

Families in poverty deal with a cascade of stressful circumstances — unstable housing, financial insecurity, mental health issues, substance abuse and other forms of adversity — that add up and often don’t let up, hence “chronic.” The body’s automatic response in trying to adapt to this ongoing adversity means that even small children can experience changes in their brain chemistry that dramatically affect their attention and behavior.

Dr. Liliana J. Lengua, child clinical psychologist and University of Washington professor of psychology, says the stress experienced by children in poverty can disrupt the neurobiological systems that are the foundation of children’s social, emotional and cognitive development, including executive control and hormone stress responses. Executive control is the brain function that helps people plan, focus, learn and manage daily life. Adversity can also disrupt stress hormones like cortisol, which Lengua describes as a system that helps us “get up and go” and allows us to rise to the challenges we face.

A typical daily pattern of cortisol is one in which the level of cortisol rises on awakening, with the highest levels in the morning. The cortisol level declines through the day to its lowest levels in the evening. With those experiencing chronic stress, the body “downregulates” the hormone eventually after pouring out fight-or-flight cortisol for an extended period, which suppresses the energy, focus and oomph needed to tackle life.

A University of Washington longitudinal evaluated 306 children over more than 12 years, beginning when the participants were around 3. The children came from various racial, ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, with 57% considered low income. Lengua’s team of researchers surveyed the children’s mothers about various risk factors that have been linked to poor health and children’s behavioral outcomes, such as family transitions, abuse or having an incarcerated parent. Then they tested the children’s executive function skills with preschool-friendly activities that measured their ability to follow directions, pay attention and follow instructions that ran opposite their impulses. For example, the children interacted with two puppets, a dragon and a monkey, but the researchers told them only to follow the instructions the monkey gave.

The children who did well on the tasks tended to have more typical stress hormone levels (measured via saliva samples), while children in families dealing with high adversity tended to have lower executive function and more disrupted hormone patterns. Preschoolers the researchers observed from lower-income households didn’t show cortisol elevations in the morning but had “blunted” levels throughout the day. These effects directly related to more behavior and social adjustment issues later when the children started kindergarten, the researchers found.

“What struck me in this study,” Lengua says, “was finding that our 3-year-olds were already showing income- and stress-related differences in their executive functioning and cortisol regulation. That finding was steady and it was persistent from 3 to 6. Those differences go on to predict later adjustment problems when the kids are 8 and 12. I just didn’t expect it to be so set when the kids were so young.

“The more financial insecurity, the more housing instability they have, the more stress the mothers experience, the greater the impact on their babies from a really early stage. We see that impact through the baby’s physiology and their emotional regulation,” Lengua says of her latest research with infants.

Past research has noted the effects of adversity and stress hormones on executive function, but Lengua says this newer study shows the “snowball effect” of low income and adversity on children, which increases their parents’ and family stress, which increases the children’s stress and their difficulties with self-control, which then affects how they interact with the world and how the world interacts with them. Being distractable, disruptive, impulsive, having trouble concentrating, having difficulty forming relationships with peers equal a recipe for continuing challenges in life.

The implications of this much stress on this many babies — and what that means for their lives, their families and our society — can be dismaying. But Lengua’s research also has identified factors that can mitigate these effects.

Other than systemic changes — making certain all children’s basic needs are met and that families have shelter, sufficient food and adequate health care — the intervention that makes the biggest difference is how parents, particularly mothers, interact with their babies, she says. Mothers’ sensitive interactions with infants and preschoolers can help the child build core competencies that strengthen their executive function.

But that effect comes with a chicken-or-egg paradox. For a mother to be able to interact with her baby in ways that mitigate adversity, her mental health must be sufficient to the task. Many low-income mothers, who often have a family history of adversity, suffer from the very effects Lengua’s team observed in infants born into poverty — an intergenerational effect by which chronic stress keeps shaping childhoods from decade to decade.

, Lengua’s research team looked at specific parenting practices that fostered the behaviors that can mediate the effects of chronic stress, specifically practices that promote executive function and well-regulated cortisol responses. Their research indicates that children whose mothers demonstrated scaffolding — providing the child with the right mix of support and autonomy — and who encouraged their child’s ability to defer gratification saw the greatest growth in their capacity to cope.

“What this suggests,” Lengua says, “is that supporting mothers’ mental health and their parenting during pregnancy, particularly moms who have experienced or are experiencing significant adversity, can make a big difference in infants’ self-regulation and emotional development. Particularly during pregnancy and in the postnatal period, supporting moms’ ability to manage stress and build their own strength and ability to regulate their emotions can have a powerful effect.”

Providing the right balance of support and autonomy — “stepping in and stepping back” — is one of the most challenging parenting behaviors of all, she says. Parents, regardless of their socioeconomic background, are challenged by the idea of how much support to provide and when to let the child work it out on their own. But, she says, doing so is essential for children to develop their capacity for self-regulation.

The encouraging aspect of these findings, Lengua says, is that scaffolding and other behaviors characteristic of sensitive parenting can be taught and improved on.

“We’re seeking funding now for a randomized control trial of two different interventions,” Lengua says. “One is a mindfulness-based parenting program for parents with preschool kids and the other is a mindfulness-based prenatal and postnatal program for moms. The idea is that if we can help moms with their stress management and mental health during pregnancy, we may be able to impact the cortisol mechanism that affects kids’ social-emotional competence later.”

Though the team’s research is ongoing, it points the way to science-based interventions that can help break the intergenerational legacy of chronic stress, and prepare babies and preschoolers with tools for success.

In the late 1990s when the term “toxic stress” entered our cultural conversation, the term was a game-changer in getting educators and policymakers to grasp the profound and potentially lasting impacts adverse childhood experiences such as crime, poverty and abuse can have on a child’s developing brain and body. But by the early 2000s, Ellen Galinsky, chief science officer of the Bezos Family Foundation, began to see that, though the term was useful in a number of contexts, it was actually harmful in others.

“It was a brilliant concept to reach policymakers, who react to words like ‘toxic,’ but I began to worry about the impact on families,” Galinsky says. “Our team at — now a program of the Bezos Family Foundation — was conducting a training program for educators. We were talking about the distinctions between ‘toxic,’ ‘tolerable’ and ‘positive’ stress and one educator said she would never use the word ‘toxic’ with anyone because it sounds fatal. ‘Toxic sounds like it will kill you.’”

The conversation around trauma-informed care was beneficial in getting teachers and others to see that children who act out are not being willful or bad but are possibly dealing with minds and bodies that have been overwhelmed by prolonged adversity. Still, many of the people Galinsky and her colleagues were talking to out in communities — parents, families, teachers and others — had experienced these adverse events in their own lives, and the conversation felt very different to them. It felt hopeless.

“We switched to the term ‘severe,’ because it didn’t sound so poisonous and fatal, it sounded as if there were things you could do about it,” Galinsky says. However, she continued to feel unsettled about the term and a second experience in 2016 drove home to her the need to come up with new way to speak about the issue.

“It was a meeting of researchers and community people and one of the speakers gave a talk on the effects of adverse childhood experiences and some of the statistics in terms of increased substance abuse, depression, health problems and attempted suicide in people who have experienced these experiences,” Galinsky says. “The speaker left, and the room absolutely erupted. Community leader after community leader told stories about how children were being stereotyped if they lived in poverty, if there was divorce in their families, if someone in their family had been incarcerated. The absolute worst was assumed of these children.

“And that assumption could become self-defining. Stereotyping people in any way is pernicious, and there is research that shows that it actually has negative biological effects on people. Words and assumptions matter. Some of older kids got the message and it began to define the way they saw themselves.” Why bother, and why try if you’re destined to be a victim of trauma all your life?

At a number of conferences where Galinsky spoke, she said she noticed that school personnel might be behaving better toward the children but some of the educators were still seeing the young people as damaged.

“I feel that particularly deeply because I grew up in West Virginia,” she says. “And one of my first jobs was to work for a research project where many outsiders came to my state to see what they could do to improve Appalachian poverty. As a member of staff, I heard again and again the awful things that these professionals were saying about my neighbors, my friends, my fellow citizens — just the worst kind of stereotyping and assuming.

“The researchers might drive by a house in West Virginia and see that it was made of packing crates and that the kids didn’t have any toys, and they would assume their lives were terrible.  But they never saw the inventiveness with which the children were playing and how courageous the people were.”

An article Galinsky read further influenced her thinking on the need for a shift in language around the issue. on transforming the conversation from trauma-informed care to healing-centered engagement told of working with a group of African American young men. One of them said, “Yes, trauma has happened to me, but I do not want to be defined by it.”

That, for Galinsky, is the crux of the issue. Rather than labeling people’s life experiences as toxic and trying to change them, she advocates looking at what people are doing right and using that as a foundation for building strength and resilience, which she is calling “asset-informed care.”

“The fact that those families in West Virginia were impoverished and had few materials resources was a huge problem,” she says, “but the fact that the children had no store-bought toys was not the end of the story. They had a family support system that doesn’t exist in much of the world and that should have been seen as a strength.”

It’s important not to shy away from the fact of adversity and the feelings associated with it, she says, quoting Fred Rogers (Mister Rogers) in saying that, “What is mentionable is manageable.”

“But you don’t just start with what’s wrong. You assume the person is active in wanting a better life and go from there. A lot of this has to do with mindset, the explicit assumptions we have about ourselves and others that affect how we behave. If you change the mindset, you can change what matters.”

Galinsky says her mantra has become “Adversity is not destiny.” Trauma should be a starting point, not the finish line, an access to finding the strengths and resources to grow beyond the circumstances that life has thrown in the way. Successful, asset-informed interventions begin with what all parties are doing right. Catch them in the act of doing something that works and lift that up rather than perpetuating the idea that a damaged child is always and only damaged.

Galinsky acknowledges that shifting the narrative from trauma-informed care to asset-informed care will take time. Since the idea of toxic stress was introduced two decades ago, it has become a widely accepted concept with a great deal of cultural currency. The challenge is to hold onto the important knowledge and insights of that trauma research while broadening our understanding of the bigger picture: People can be strong and able, and with the right support and advocacy, they can grow beyond the worst things that have happened to them.

The Bezos Family Foundation provides financial support to Early Learning Nation.

Chris Riback: Phil, thanks for coming by to the ELN studio.

Phil Fisher: My pleasure.

Chris Riback: We appreciate your time.

Phil Fisher: Glad to be here.

Chris Riback: Much of your work focuses on stress that can occur in infancy and childhood.

Phil Fisher: Correct.

Chris Riback: Now I am a practicing parent, and I’ve gone through three of those situations.

Phil Fisher: So you’re an expert.

Chris Riback: No, I’m failing! This is why I want to talk with you. I need the help, but I’m assuming it’s not my stress that you’re focused on, it’s the events around the kids. So talk to me about that. How do you define stressful experiences for children and infants?

Phil Fisher: I think one of the most useful ways to define stress in children has to do with the extent to which people talk about it getting under the skin. That is, there are lots of things in the environment or in the world of the child that can affect the child’s wellbeing. Some of them are things that are outside of the family. Things like poverty and lack of access to resources and neighborhood violence and crime.

Phil Fisher: So we think about stress as the chronic activation of these systems in the absence of the kind of supportive relationships that I’m sure you provide to your children, and that others … It doesn’t have to just be parents, but that meaningful adults in children’s lives can provide. Because especially very early in life, children don’t have the capacity to bring those systems back into line themselves.

Chris Riback: That’s what I was going to ask, “Are children’s and infants’ brains able to adapt to stress? Are there changes that occur in the brain when they experience persistent stress? What’s the biology?” You just mentioned it.

Phil Fisher: One way to think about it is that the systems that exist, and they’re not just in the brain, they’re also bodily systems that have to do with immune system functioning and metabolizing energy in order to help mobilize responses to stress, that those things are all very effective at dealing with short term kinds of situations in which those kinds of responses are necessary.

Phil Fisher: The challenge becomes when those systems are activated really on a continuous basis. We’re not very well set up by evolution to be able to deal with very long term, chronic stress.

Chris Riback: I assume you talk as well with parents and teachers?

Phil Fisher: Of course. Yes.

Chris Riback: What do you talk with parents about? Is there anything practical-

Phil Fisher: Absolutely.

Chris Riback: … so tell me.

Phil Fisher: Again, the activation of these systems is one piece of the puzzle, right? And certainly under conditions where stress is ongoing, which occurs in many people’s lives, and is certainly distributed across the economic spectrum. It’s not just in economic conditions of poverty. Lots of people have stress in their lives.

Phil Fisher: But the other side of the equation is the extent to which adults in the child’s life by being supportive and responsive and available for the child in nurturing, really do help to buffer the child against those kinds of experiences. And what the research is showing consistently is that where you see elevations in things like stress hormones, where you see brain changes that are the result of chronic stress, the presence of supportive, responsive caregiving is the single biggest thing that brings those bodily systems back more into balance.

Chris Riback: Tell me about the FIND video coaching intervention.

Phil Fisher: I would love to. We spend a lot of time developing programs to support adults including parents, but also other caregivers in children’s lives. People don’t love to be told what they’re doing wrong, and new skills are hard to lay out in terms of, “This is what you should be doing.”

Phil Fisher: What we found when we started videotaping families … We’re doing this now for many years and with thousands of families … is that the seeds of this kind of supportive buffering interaction are present almost in all situations including what would be traditionally considered very concerning contacts. Like parents who have significant substance abuse problems and addictions, parents who’ve had their children removed and placed in foster care. Even when we videotape those families we see that there are many instances in which parents are actually engaged in this kind of buffering care.

Phil Fisher: So the video coaching films adults and children interacting in real world settings like home or childcare, and then extracts out these brief moments where magical things are happening that naturally occur. And we have great results from some of the research we’ve done on this including that it does actually increase this kind of responsive parenting.

Phil Fisher: But we’ve also done some really interesting work looking at parental brain activity before and after the coaching. And we find that parents get better at just general self control on tasks that are kind of these button pushing tasks where they have to withhold responses, and that after the coaching we also see changes in the areas of the brain involved in self control. Just from showing them things that they’re doing with their children and encouraging them to wait to see what the child does and respond.

Chris Riback: Are these video interactions, are they accessible at scale for people? How do people get to them?

Phil Fisher: Yes. One of the main goals in engineering this particular approach was to make it readily available in community settings. For instance, we have a statewide implementation of this program in Washington State in the Childcare Improvement System there.

Phil Fisher: And we have a number of other really large scale projects including right now we’re just getting started in New York City’s Homeless Shelter System. Part of the idea is that showing people instances in which they’re doing supportive things is fairly straightforward which means that community members are able to deliver the coaching once the information has been extracted and put into these specially edited films. It’s really easily available.

Chris Riback: Are these local and state policymakers who are working with you to bring the capabilities into the centers and into the New York centers?

Phil Fisher: That’s right. It’s a combination of private philanthropy that’s paying for some of the initial implementation, and then state agencies that are really interested in providing supports in these contacts.

Phil Fisher: I should point out though, one of the things that I think is really exciting about this work is we started this as a parent support program, and it was people who work in childcare who said, “This would be as useful for coaching childcare providers as it is for parents.” So it’s something that goes across these different contexts, but is the same content in all of those contexts which means it’s getting at really these kind of core processes that are most important for reducing stress and supporting families.

Chris Riback: It’s terrific work. Thank you for doing it, and thank you for stopping by the studio to talk to us about it.

Phil Fisher: My pleasure. Thanks for asking.