Using Positive Childhood Experiences to Help Our Kids Heal

Can our kids heal from all the hard things they've experienced? Is there something we can do to help? Join us today to learn about the power of positive childhood experiences with Dr. Robert Sege, the director of the HOPE National Resource Center at Tufts Medical Center. He holds a MD degree from Harvard Medical School and a PhD degree in biology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In this episode, we cover:

• What are some of the benefits to kids from having positive childhood experiences?
• You have identified four building blocks for positive childhood experiences. What are they and give us specific examples of what parents and caregivers can do in each block to promote these experiences? 
• How do these positive childhood experiences differ by age of the child? 
• Can positive childhood experiences mitigate the impact of adverse childhood experiences? 
• How can we help our kids be more resilient?
• Are all stress and negative experiences in childhood bad for our kids?
• Are there particular ages where kids are more receptive to the healing impact of positive childhood experiences?
• Our audience includes foster, adoptive, and kinship parents. While adoptive parents have a lifetime with the kids (and kinship caregivers may also have the same), foster parents are usually a temporary landing place for a child while their parents work on getting them back. How much impact can you have if you only have the child for a few months or a year?

Resources:

• HOPE National Resource Center 

Transcript

Please pardon any errors, this is an automated transcript.
Dawn Davenport  0:00  
Welcome everyone to Creating a Family. I'm Dawn Davenport. I am both the director of the nonprofit creating a family as well as the host of this show. Today we're going to be talking about positive childhood experiences. We will be talking with Dr Robert Sege. He is the founder and director of the Hope National Resource Center at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, and Hope H, O, P, E stands for healthy outcomes from positive experiences. Dr Sege holds a MD degree from Harvard Medical School, a PhD degree in Biology from MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a BS degree in Biology from Yale University. Wow, that is a lot, and we are so happy to have you here with us. Dr Sege, to be talking about positive childhood experiences.

Unknown Speaker  0:52  
It's delightful to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me

Dawn Davenport  0:54  
so positive childhood experiences encourage healthy child development and lessen the lifelong effects of adverse childhood experiences are what a lot in our audience might know as aces. We're acronym heavy here. So positive childhood experiences help kids build resilience, and we hope grow into thriving, healthy adults. I mean, it seems intuitive to say, of course, positive things are good, negative things are bad. Is there anything else you want us to know about just before we go into talking about the specifics of positive childhood experiences? Anything else you want us to know about benefits to kids from having positive childhood experiences? Sure,

Speaker 1  1:35  
I think that positive childhood experiences are just what children need to thrive so children who have more positive childhood experiences are curious. They explore the world, they interact with others. They're able to form relationships. And we now know that these positive childhood experiences set them up for lifelong health. But don before we start, I want to ask the listeners to do something really odd, I guess, holding your hearts or your mind someone you know, an adult who had a really difficult childhood and is now thriving as an adult. Because as Don and I speak, we're going to talk about adverse childhood experiences and positive childhood experiences. And I find that if I think of a particular person, in my case, one of my cousins, and think about her life, then this all kind of snaps into place, that the balance between the different things we experience and how they help us be the adults we are. So think of someone, and you can have that person in mind. So as Don and I speak, you can refer back to someone. You know, it could be yourself, it could be a public figure, friend or family member, and that will help ground this conversation. So we don't go all up in the 30,000 foot level, but we're actually feeling it right here. Yeah, exactly.

Dawn Davenport  2:52  
This is not well, there is theory and there's research on it, but we'll talk about all that. There's a lot of that. But specifically, I agree with you. We want this to be practical, because our audience is going to be parents, foster, adoptive and kin, primarily. Okay, so you and your team at the hope Resource Center have identified four building blocks for positive childhood experiences. So what are they? And also, let's give us some specific examples of what parents and caregivers can do in each block to promote these experiences.

Speaker 1  3:25  
Well, first, I'll just tell you what the four building blocks are, and then let's go back and talk about each of them. So the first building block, the foundational building block, are relationships. And children need safe, secure, nurturing relationships. The second one are environments children need safe and equitable environments in which to live, learn and play. The third building block is engagement. And being engaged with your family, with your community, is what gives children a sense that they matter in this world, and a sense of belonging. And finally, emotional growth, opportunities for emotional growth, and we'll talk about how parents can help provide those. So those are the four building blocks. And you know, as a scientist, whatever we try to make them, but you'll see as we talk, they really overlap. So if you think about them, it's important to think about them conceptually. That's what we do, but also to understand that they're not actually like blocks, where one stops and the other one starts.

Dawn Davenport  4:27  
That makes sense. Human beings don't lend themselves to silos very well.

Speaker 1  4:32  
No, not at all. The first one is relationships. And each of us our first relationship is with the person who gave birth to us. And there we are. When we're born, we open our eyes, and there's somebody, and then that first year of life, those close caretakers, our parents, maybe grandparents, whoever it is who's with us every day, holding us. And we cry, holding us, and we don't cry celebrating. We first smile. That's our first relationship. And. That's the relationship that forms kind of the background or the template for our later close adult relationships. And soon, children begin to understand their other kids, their toddlers are already aware of their friends. So peers are important, peer relationships, and those, of course, become more important for teenagers, they're a little bit embarrassed that they have parents, and it's their teen relationships that are so important. The other thing we found is that relationships with other adults who are not your parents are also important, so that children who adults who can recall two or more people who cared about them when they were growing up, are likely to do better. And those people can be extended family. They can be coaches, neighbors, teachers, foster parents, yeah, oh, totally, foster parents. And and foster parents have such an important role, because they if you think about it, we'll go through the building blocks. But foster parents form those relationships, and children who enter foster care often have fraught relationships with their parents. There may be some deficits there, but the children can heal from that.

Dawn Davenport  6:11  
Let me ask you a question before we move on. So many of the children that our audience are raising have had difficult relationships within that first year. Not all, but many, have had challenging relationships with their birth parent. Their birth parent may be struggling with substance abuse disorder, the birth parent may be struggling with poverty and is, you know, it's just not there a lot, because they're trying to, you know, basically cope. How foundational. I mean, you've mentioned that that relationship with either the one who birthed you, or if you were adopted immediately with your adoptive parent, what if that foundation is not there? What if the person did not come when you cried? What if your diapers weren't changed, that type of thing? Don

Speaker 1  6:58  
that's such an important question, and this is the beauty of human life, and that is that our brains are constantly changing, and they change in response to experience. So if I dent my car, it just stays dented. But if there's trauma, and there's a lot of science that shows that our brains are capable of forming new connections into literally rewiring so that with repair in those relationships, or with the child understanding that they are worthy of love and getting that love, it doesn't make that deep, difficult kernel go away, but it protects the child from the adverse consequences from that, and that's really what the hope framework is all about, is identifying those healing experiences that can help kids who've been through real difficulty. And while we're talking about relationships, one thing about foster parents, it's a very emotionally difficult thing to do to be a foster parent, because you're with the child, you're loving the child, and for most children, they will eventually go back to their biological families. So I think the situations that you mentioned where someone is suffering from poverty or substance use disorder or mental illness, in the best of all worlds, they get treated, they get better, they recover from their substance abuse disorder, and they get reunited. So one of the tricks for a foster parent is being careful not to project negative things about the parents, assuming that the trajectory is for family reunification. I know it's a really difficult thing, because the children end up in foster care, because bad things happened,

Dawn Davenport  8:44  
right? Yeah, we have no child enter foster care when things are going well, yes,

Speaker 1  8:48  
oh no, not at all. It's like, I think I'm going to go to Atlantic City for the weekend. I'll send my child to the Department of Children and Families. No, not, not at all. And so I think that for foster parents that that's part of the tightrope walk of loving a child in being safe and secure and there, but knowing in the back of your of your mind that it's temporary, and knowing that most foster children get reunited with their biological families. So this relationship thing is really important in the moment, and also in constantly monitoring ourselves to understand that while there's a reason why the child's in foster care, we want them to be able to eventually reform and rebuild those relationships with their bio families. Okay,

Dawn Davenport  9:32  
excellent. Thank you. All right, so we've talked some about relationship. Go ahead,

Speaker 1  9:37  
the next one's environment, and children need a safe, secure environment in which to live, learn and play, and some of that is physical. Should be a roof over your head, food in your belly, all of those things that are sort of the fundamental basic needs that particularly for kids who are in the system, either for neglect or poverty, whatever, even those were lacking. But the other one that. We can all do for our children is make a safe environment at home. And this is a little bit complicated. So a lot of the literature comes from schools where we now know that a positive school environment promotes learning. And if you think about that, when you learn something, you start out knowing nothing, and you have to feel safe like with your ignorance and struggling to learn it, and know that someone knows you can do it and you can learn at home it may be involved for different child, different disposition, a quiet place to be, a place where their young toddler getting into everything, there's a space where there's nothing dangerous. You're not always telling them no, either dangerous to themselves, or your grandmother fine china waiting there for them to pull down. So creating a place where they can explore curiously, but not really hurt themselves, or the environment for older kids, a safe environment is more complicated, but it really involves having a space where children can relax, be themselves, collapse at the end of the day, whatever, but a safe place where they can just be who they are,

Dawn Davenport  11:07  
okay? That makes sense. And then moving on to engagement, I'm curious about this one.

Speaker 1  11:13  
Sure, so you and I and everybody wants to feel we matter in the world, right? That's one of the reasons why we're here today. And children learn that through engagement, and engagement simply means being engaged with people beyond yourself, with your family, with your community. It's easy to think about for for teenagers, so whether they're part of a athletic team or a part of a group making murals or art or singing in a choir, or doing politics or part of a church, synagogue or mosque youth group. If they don't show up, people notice if they do show up, they're part of a team that's doing something together. And that level of engagement creates in kids a sense that they matter. And of course, this goes younger, young children can have chores and help out at home and be praised for that. Don't know what I would do without you setting the table. Thank you so much. You've been really helpful. And it was learning all about hope that I finally figured out why Miss Ross, my second grade teacher had classroom chores. Because initially, when I was in second grade, I thought that the poor lady, she was old, she must have been over 30, couldn't possibly clean the Blackboard herself at the end of the day, which was one of the chores that we all really liked for the classroom. And then I realized that what she was doing was she was making each of us feel like this was our classroom, and we participated in creating that space that all of those things that adults create for children and youth so they're engaged really matter. That's what engagement is all about. I

Dawn Davenport  12:49  
am so glad you raised the issue and included giving to others. Engagement can be being on a sports team or being in the choir or whatever, but I sometimes think that we adults think we have to make life so easy for our kids, and that that's our responsibility as a parent is to knock all the road blocks out of the way and not expect much of our kids, not expect them to set the table, help with clean up, wash the car on Saturday, or reach out help in a soup kitchen things that go beyond themselves. And just from my personal experience of having worked for a long time with youth, I think kids thrive when things are expected of them.

Speaker 1  13:34  
No, absolutely, because they got the sense they matter. Yes, so when my when my daughter was in high school, she and a friend brought groceries to an older person living in elderly housing. And they did it for more than a year every every weekend. And at first, this lady was a little suspicious, and she would say, you know, leave it at the doorstep. And then by the end, they met her, they chatted, but they know that they mattered to her because she was someone who wasn't able physically to get to the grocery store, and so they were able to bring things, and they realized they matter into that one person's life. And think about all the turmoil that goes on when you're a teenager. There's drama, there are relationships your baseball team loses, your parents are terrible. But under that you know that every weekend, Mrs. So and so is getting fed because you're there. So think about that. It's really important.

Dawn Davenport  14:26  
Yeah, how important that is? Yes, yep. Okay, so our last building block is emotional growth.

Speaker 1  14:33  
And Don this. This goes right to your comment that emotional growth is not necessarily beautiful. So if you watch a group of kindergartners and first graders playing in the playground, it seems like they're squabbling. That's not fair. That ball's in. It's out, my turn, your turn, whatever, what they're doing is they're actually learning the other person has a point of view. They're learning how to express themselves. Because they're learning that sometimes you win, and you probably should do it graciously if you want to have friends, and sometimes you lose, all of those things are part of emotional growth. So playing with other children is part of emotional growth, and hidden in there goes back to your comment that you got to deal with this appointment. I mean, the way we deal with this appointment is we deal with it, and we know that, yeah, I had a bad day yesterday, but then the end of the day, it was fine. And today, things aren't going great, but I know that I can do it. And if parents interfere too much with that process, the message, which they do not intend to send to their children is, you can't cope. You're not able to deal with this. You have to have mommy or daddy intervene. So what I suggest for parents for emotional growth is, when stuff happens and their children are upset, don't interfere, but coach them, maybe even let them practice with you. What are they going to say, or what are they going to do, or have them come up with things, and it was not beautiful. They're likely to cry and run away and say, you don't get it, but that's how it all works. And the other part of emotional growth, if there's increasing evidence for which also makes sense, is being outside in nature, whether it's a park in the city or somewhere else, because nature has both unpredictable things which are good for our brains to cope with that on the moment, and also for most kids, opportunities to test themselves physically jumping over the brook or getting near where the bees are and running away before you get stung, whatever it is, all of those things that you do see, develop that confidence, that you can deal with that, and that's what emotional growth is really about. How

Dawn Davenport  16:48  
do these positive childhood experiences differ by age of the child? I mean, obviously a toddler is going to be quite different from a 17 year old. As far as how these are going to look, sure?

Speaker 1  17:00  
Well, let's look at them a little bit, one at a time. So for relationships, for infants, obviously it's with their primary caregivers, and it's normal for a child around nine months to have a huge amount of Stranger anxiety, and that's because now they know who their parents are, and other people are not sure about that that's normal. And then as children grow up, those relationships with peers, with other adults, with their teachers, become more important. And for teens, the relationship building block is so important because that's when they're beginning to form adult friendships romance. It's also a time when they look around for adult role models, for people who notice they exist, care about them, and the children begin to try on. What would it be like if I grew up to be just like Don and that's also really interesting. So those relationships just move through life. For foster parents and adoptive parents, that you are the primary relationship for those children. Children live a lot in the present, so being there for them, if you're raising a teenager and they get into trouble, the message needs to be, I know you and I know you can do better. Let's talk about what happened and what you might do differently next time, not necessarily in those words, but the emotional message that I know you and you can do better is sort of the primary thing that we can deal with, because teenagers always get in trouble, with the possible exception of me and you right.

Dawn Davenport  18:36  
Oh no, I would not be included in that.

Speaker 1  18:39  
Me neither, actually, but if you have someone who knows you and loves you and has confidence in you, you can get through the stuff that happens. And so those change, right? And those relationships are so important. Okay,

Dawn Davenport  18:52  
let's talk then about how environment changes, what a healthy, positive environment, how that differs with very young versus our teens? Well, for

Speaker 1  19:03  
very young kids, the babies, right? A safe sleep environment, a place where they have all their needs met. They get fed, the diapers are changed, they get cuddled. I think cuddling is an important thing in part of the environment, but all of those things, and then as they grow up, a safe environment becomes a little more complicated still, those basic needs need to be met. But in addition to that, a family environment at home where there's not strife, not that there shouldn't be disagreements there always are, but that they shouldn't lead to an environment where the children feel free. So that emotional environment is important an environment that's safe, so there are places where they can play, and they're not always being told, No, there's nothing fragile in the bottom cabinets in the kitchen, or you put grandma's China away, or the electric cords are tucked out of the way, whatever it is, so that your child can play and explore and do their natural curiosity. City, and they're not going to get in danger, either for themselves or for the stuff we have in our homes. As children grow up, the environment becomes more complicated. Neighborhood playgrounds, a home that feels safe, where children can come home and just, you know, schools can be stressful, they can come home and just chill, is really important. And of course, for teenagers. Teenagers are always taking risks, so the environment needs to be a place where they can both leave from and feel confident, but also go back to when they need to. And again, the basic needs need to be met, but beyond that, it needs to be a place that's their own and they can have their autonomy safely. Okay,

Dawn Davenport  20:40  
so now let's talk about the third of the building blocks, and that's engagement. Now that's going to differ pretty significantly, I would think, by age of the child.

Speaker 1  20:49  
Yeah, sure, there's not much you need to do if you're a baby. But having said that, Mother Nature made us all learn to smile at about between six and 10 weeks, you have that first real social smile. And we know instinctively that that level of engagement is really important, because that just brings the parents right in. It does. Engagement is innate, right

Dawn Davenport  21:13  
about when you're so tired and you're just and you're getting nothing back all of a sudden, I think it's, I think it's evolutionary or survival technique that is built in that when they start smiling, you go, Oh, all right, they are adorable. I could go another night with a no sleep and and during the day, when they have colic or whatever, and that just instinctually, adults smile back, right?

Speaker 1  21:37  
And that's what the kids need. Is engagement. Is just what the scientists call serve and return, and you just said, smile back. It's hard not to do that. But for adults, the key is not be looking at your cell phone. Oh, it's

Dawn Davenport  21:50  
such a good point. When

Speaker 1  21:52  
the child's smiling at you, they want you to smile back, and that teaches them engagement,

Dawn Davenport  21:56  
yeah, just looking in their eyes and returning that smile. Oh, that's such a good point. Yes, and

Speaker 1  22:03  
if you engage with them, that happens now, no, but I don't want to set up an impossible standard. There is no one in the world who can catch every smile from a baby every moment. That would be ridiculous. But just to think about that and to be paying attention at those moments and as children grow up. A safe, secure environment for many children, engagement can start on a high quality daycare, because if you look in a childcare center, the kids are helping clean up the toys, they're bringing their things to lunch, they're taking out the trash, they're doing all those things. They're just part of the daily routine and a high quality childcare. So that kind of engagement just happens because they're there with other children and adults who create an environment where engagement is not only expected, but it's easy, and they just do what they do, what the other kids do, older kids activities, we think a lot about what happens after school. After school time is when kids get to explore their interests and make friends with people who are similarly interested, whether it's soccer or drama or art or spiritual life, whatever it is. And in teenage life, that becomes really important, as we talked about earlier, just to feel that you matter in the world. When there's something you're doing that's giving back or you're part of a team, and you really actually matter, engagement, I think changes the most dramatically across the years. Yeah,

Dawn Davenport  23:28  
that one feels like it. You know, emotional growth seems like it's going to happen regardless of what we do. I mean, that isn't that kind of the nature of human development is growth, and including emotional growth. So what do we parents have to do with that?

Speaker 1  23:43  
I think we parents have to understand just what you said, that this happens, and also deeply that emotional growth is not always beautiful. Most of us had teen romances that didn't end up working out, and we survived that there are playground Spats. There's being cut from the team. There's your art project that doesn't work and it doesn't look like what you had in your mind's eye. But emotional growth happens from learning from those things, as well as your successes, and parents and foster parents, adopted parents, other adults can just help the child process those things, celebrate their victories, but also be there as they're sorting out the other stuff that happens,

Dawn Davenport  24:26  
and putting it into perspective as much as you can, right? And part of their perspective

Speaker 1  24:31  
is reminding them about their own strength, right? Yeah, I know this art project doesn't work, but you know, that's the way it is. Sometimes you do things that are beautiful, sometimes they don't. And good for you for trying new things,

Dawn Davenport  24:45  
yeah? And, and you probably learned something from this, and the next time it will look different, yeah.

Speaker 1  24:51  
And you've now learned that if you mix red and green, you get ugly brown. Yeah,

Dawn Davenport  24:57  
right. Yes, exactly. Yeah. As you guys can tell, I am loving this interview and this topic, so I really hate to interrupt, but I wanted to make sure that you knew about our weekend wisdom podcast, and specifically that you can send in questions for us to answer on that podcast, we have two podcasts now, one, of course, is this one, which is a long form but we also have a short Forum Podcast, usually about five minutes, sometimes I get wordy, so it goes to 10 minutes, but we answer your questions, so please send us your questions. You can either send it through a link in our show notes, or you can just email them to info at creating a family.org Now back to the show. So our audience, I would assume all of them have heard of adverse childhood experiences. That is something that is, it's been, it's actually in the zeitgeist, and it's commonly, we commonly hear about ACEs adverse childhood experiences. Can positive childhood experience mitigate the impact of these adverse childhood experiences, absolutely,

Speaker 1  26:04  
and that's the beauty of the work we're doing, is we now we learned from aces and aces science how responsive children's brains are to their experiences. And aces got right about the effects of trauma, but they stopped a little bit too early, because these positive experiences also change the way our brains are wired, change our psychology, and can mitigate the effects. So we now know from a number of studies done, the United States, Australia, other places, that even people who have high aces scores, if they also have positive childhood experiences, they're protected from the mental and physical health consequences of aces, and maybe that's because positive experiences make them resilient, but we also know that people can recover. So there are just so many studies. Can I tell you about one study that was done in Japan really illustrates this. Oh, police,

Dawn Davenport  27:02  
I love research. Yes, please tell me about studies. So

Speaker 1  27:06  
Japan, as we all know, has these big, awful earthquakes. And there was an earthquake in Northwest Japan that was very destructive. People were killed. It was awful, and the surviving people were traumatized, and what they found was that many people recovered and had something that they call post traumatic brain growth. And if you think about this, and you may think about the person you're holding in your heart and mind after trauma, when you survive it, it's common to feel close to people who went through the same experience with you, to feel a little humbled that maybe the world isn't entirely in our control. All kinds of things that go on and enable us to continue to function that have changed us, but we're still okay. But what they found was that individuals who had post traumatic brain growth, if you did MRI scans of their brain, you could see changes in the frontal cortex, the part of our brain that controls both emotions and executive function, that that had grown, and there were more pathways and connections there associated with recovery from trauma. So these were old people. They were adults. Many of them were over 20, and they still were capable of this brain growth, and we see that psychologically. We see it in older adults who have a stroke, and after therapy, different parts of their brain rewire to take over the functions of the part of the brain that was damaged during the stroke. All those things we now know that the brain isn't just this inanimate thing. It's constantly, constantly being remodeled and having opportunities for growth. So what we know is epidemiologically, people who have aces and positive childhood experiences are protected from the mental and physical health consequences of aces, and that if you look scientifically at their brains, things change with positive experiences. And here's the key to brain change. It happens through repetition. So it's not enough to kiss someone after they experience trauma, they may need to experience a year of love to overcome that. Oh, that's beautiful. And it's that repetition that causes us to rewire. So I think that that is one of the major discoveries of all the work we're doing with positive childhood experiences, is that aces are risk factors. But as the late great Carl Bell said, risk factors are not predictive factors, because other things happen.

Dawn Davenport  29:39  
Yeah, I Yeah. The the quote that I heard it was risk factors are not predictive factors because of protective factors. I love the alliteration there.

Speaker 1  29:49  
Yeah, he was, he was wonderful and really great with things that you and I both remember, right?

Dawn Davenport  29:53  
Yeah, exactly. And it's a hopeful message, because if we feel like our kids are doomed and. They will feel that if we think that, they will think that, because we will send that message to them. You mentioned just a moment ago about resilience, I'm fascinated by some kids I think are temperamentally just more resilient. But how does childhood positive experiences? Can we use those to encourage our kids resilience Absolutely,

Speaker 1  30:22  
and that's sort of where resilience comes from. Is from knowing that we have relationships, people are behind us, that there's a safe place where we can explore and, frankly, goof. But you know, modern playground has surfaces. You don't break an arm when you fall. It's not that kids don't fall is that the environment is more forgiving, and that's the kind of thing that we do. So resilience comes from our belief in ourselves, that we can bounce back, and it always, often starts with doubt, right? And you break up with your eighth grade Sweetheart, you feel like the world is ending. But then when you're older, you say, you know, oh, dodged that bullet. And so if your relationship goes south, you feel really bad, but not even consciously, but you know deep down that life goes on, and it's that sort of thing. It's the experiences that we have, knowing that we have relationships, people we can talk with, that there's a safe environment in which to deal with all these things. We're doing, things that are completely separate from whatever emotional stuff is going on, that we're still helping in the world in some way. All of those things make us resilient. It's not it's not like rocket science. These are things that we have studied, and we use computers, and we analyze data, we take pictures of people's brains, but if you look back at history and religious teachings, all those things, it's all been around for a long time, and it's really part of the human condition. How do we develop resilience and how do we promote it? And something

Dawn Davenport  31:58  
that I had alluded to at the beginning, when we were talking about engagement, is lack of expecting things of our kids. But I also think that parents, and I certainly know I felt this too, as a parent and you want to protect your kids from stress, you want to make their life as easy and as smooth as possible with the idea that we are helping them. But is all stress and negative experience in childhood bad for our kids?

Unknown Speaker  32:27  
No, you want more of an answer than that? Sure.

Dawn Davenport  32:32  
Well, I like succinct, but maybe not quite that succinct.

Speaker 1  32:37  
There are several kinds of stress, and I think what you're talking about is what people like showing cough, call you stress or positive stress. So for example, you're taking a spelling test and you're stressed out, but you know you can get by it. You'll learn your spelling words that doesn't cause any damage, that actually potentially helps you grow. So that kind of stress the way you feel the beginning of a race where you're stressed out, all those things really matter. That's really important for us to have that. And the thing that characterizes positive stress is it's temporary. It's important at the time, but it goes on a background of recovery or where you're feeling okay. The problem with chronic stress, or toxic stress is it's unrelenting. So if you live in a home, and this is relevant to you know, parents who have adopted or fostering a child, if you live in a home where it's unpredictable and the adults who should love you occasionally hurt you, you're always going to be living on the edge, right? And your heart's going to be going a little faster, and you'd be looking around for danger. That's the kind of stress that's bad, but the stress that we all feel when something temporary happens, when we're sick or anything else, all those things are really fine, and our bodies are completely adapted to experience that. And if you think about it, right? Our ancestors who did not get stressed out when the mastodon was charging at the cave, they didn't produce offspring. Yeah,

Dawn Davenport  34:10  
yeah, exactly. Are there particular ages when kids are more receptive to the healing impact of positive childhood experiences?

Speaker 1  34:18  
Absolutely. And this is this, again, is a little bit of common sense, right? So for out our lives until we pass away, our brains are constantly remodeling and rebuilding and responding to experience. So there's never a time in life when it doesn't matter. But within that background, we humans go through rapid brain growth during two periods of our life, from zero to three and during adolescence, and those are the times we seem particularly sensitive to experiences. So we talked earlier about from zero to three is when you learn attachment, you learn about relationships, you learn you're capable of giving and receiving love. All those. Things happen at a very early age. And teen years are more complicated, but certainly, if you look at a 12 year old and a 20 year old, while one's a kid, one's an adult, and a lot of things happen. There's very rapid brain growth during that period. So if you think back to your own life, many of us can think back about events during our youth that we can remember with a crystal clear memory of when this happened, or I went there, did that, or whatever it was, whereas something that happened to us when we were old, like 28 or 30, not so much. And it's not because our memories are so bad. It's because our brains are really, really learning what it is to be an adult, what it means to not be a child anymore. So these periods are sensitive to the experiences we have. So we need to, and we do, as parents and as a society, invest, for example, in teenagers. That's why there are so many programs for kids after school, programs, school programs, this and that, because we've known for a long time that what happens to you in that age has a lifelong effect.

Dawn Davenport  36:09  
Let me take a moment to remind you that you can subscribe to our monthly free e newsletter at creating a family.org/newsletter we curate the best of the resources we have found that month for you, it is a terrific resource. It's easy to unsubscribe if it doesn't fit your needs. I highly encourage you to check it out at creating a family.org/newsletter you know our audience includes foster adoptive and kinship parents, and while adoptive parents have a lifetime with the child, and many kinship caregivers may also have the same foster parents are usually a temporary landing place, as you mentioned at the beginning, for for a child, while their parents work on getting them back and being able to create a safe environment, How much impact can you have if you only have a child for a few months, or maybe, you know, a year at the max, or, you know, maybe two years, but then, of course, then that's disruptive, you know, for the child at that point. But anyway, how much impact can foster parents really have? Kind

Speaker 1  37:16  
of an enormous impact. Because if you think about it, when the child enters foster care, their whole life is a mess, right? And they got there through trauma. And I'm going to say that with almost without exception, exactly

Dawn Davenport  37:30  
well, and just the act of being removed from your family is traumatic, even though we adults might think this is not a safe environment for a child, there are very few children. There are some. There are definitely some who are thankful to be removed. But for many children, this is a life they know, and being removed is traumatic,

Speaker 1  37:49  
right? And they are removed, not just from their dangerous parents, but from the bed they slept in, from the friends they had, the school they went to. So there's a lot of loss that goes into them, but what foster parents can do is create a predictable, safe environment where the children can assimilate what happened relationships where they feel loved and understood, even if they're not really going to talk necessarily about what happened if they're old enough to talk, but they can still know that they're worthy of Love and being taken care of, they can be helped to make friends, go to school, do whatever, all those things. And children carry those experiences with them forever, because what it does is it helps them understand, not at a necessarily at a conscious level, but at a deeper level, that they're worthy of love. They're capable of love, there are routines in the world. They bring something innate to themselves. They always like Cheerios. They still like Cheerios. They were a gymnast, and now there's a new school and a new gymnastics team. And they bring that skill whatever it is they have that they learn, that they're okay, even though this horrible trauma happened in just being stable, and children will often act out when they enter foster care, because for the most part, the whole world has changed and wasn't necessarily their decision, but foster parents, who can weather that and still have their children feel Safe and Okay, make an enormous difference in stabilizing that child's life. And foster parents, in my mind, are saints, because they're taking on this really emotionally difficult task in doing something that's so so so important. So if you think about someone who you had in your mind, who had difficult childhood, some of the people I have in mind spent a part of their life in the foster system, and are okay. And part of that may be what happened, and often it's not perfect, and the children are going to be resentful because they were taken from where they were. That's part of why being a foster parent, you need to feel and know what you're. Doing is so important for the children in providing the safe environment for them to explore their sorrow, to explore their abilities and to continue to grow.

Dawn Davenport  40:09  
And something you said earlier about the repetitive nature, that even if you've just got the child for three months, you can provide repetition of you matter. You can provide repetition of you are good at this, or whatever the things you are. You can be that one. I think it's the Harvard Center for the developing child has a quote. It's probably not from them, but they, I think it's on their site that says, All the child needs is one caring adult. I often think of the folks in our audience, be they a grandmom who steps up, or be they a parent who adopts or a foster parent, that you can be that one for that child, even if your time with that child is limited. I

Speaker 1  40:59  
remember I had a patient who was immigrant from a war experience and was a refugee, long story short, ended up in a foster family for a little while. When he came here, he was messed up

Dawn Davenport  41:11  
because a lot of bad things, extra medical diagnosis, some medical diagnosis. Yeah, messed up.

Speaker 1  41:17  
But as a 20 something, what he remembered is every morning when he woke up his foster parents gave him a kiss and said, You're okay. And he remembered that a decade later, because at a time when he wasn't sure he was okay, just that those little things, it's not necessarily like this big thing with the brass band and everything, but every day he woke up knowing he was loved was really important for him, and he carried it with him, and it helped him recover from honestly, to me, an unimaginable situation he had been in before, and

Dawn Davenport  41:52  
I am thinking of a foster child who had a really positive first experience with a foster parent, and it's been a number of years, and to this day, he still remembers and talks about and feels connected to that family, and he was only there, I don't remember, but maybe less than six months. Well, thank you so much, Dr Robert Segi, for being with us. Today, I'm going to direct our audience to the hope National Resource Center at Tufts, and it is a great thank you for this URL. I love it because it's easy to give up on audio. And that is www.positiveexperience.org It has a lot of resources for you, and I strongly encourage our audience to check it out. Positiveexperience.org. Thank you for being with us today. Dr sege, I truly appreciate it

Speaker 1  42:47  
absolutely, and thank you for inviting me, and I hope this is helpful to the audience who are listening.

Dawn Davenport  42:54  
And before you leave, let me remind you that this show is brought to you by the generous support of the jockey being Family Foundation. They have been supporting this podcast almost from the beginning, and we've been we've been doing this podcast for almost 17 years. They've been here for a long time, and we so appreciate their support, and we appreciate their mission of providing post adoption support and post fostering support for families, one of the things they do is provide free courses that we can offer to you through their support, and you can get CE credit if you need them, you may not need them, so you don't have to get CE credit. But they are on our website. You can find them at Bitly slash, JBf support. That's B, I T, dot, l, y, slash, j, b, f, support, music.