How to Navigate Conversations on COVID-19 & Racism With Your Children | B-Well Together | Salesforce

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the second edition of Be well Together Pandemic Parenting. We've created these sessions to provide support and resources for you as you are navigating the many challenges that we're experiencing in our climate right now. I'm Karen Schwarzbach. I am the benefits program manager for well being and Life Stages here at Salesforce, focusing on parent programs. And you know, last night I was thinking about just the many things that our children are experiencing. Social, emotional, psychological, and it's really something for us to pay attention to. In addition to navigating back to school. I am your host today and honored to introduce our pandemic parenting expert for the day, Dr. Allison Briscoe Smith. She is a child clinical psychologist who specializes in trauma and issues of race. She's also a professor and the director of diversity, equity and inclusion at the Wright Institute. She consults with nonprofits and schools on how to support trauma informed practices, cultural accountability. As a professor, she directs mental health programs for children experiencing trauma, homelessness and foster care. Today we're going to get some tips on how to navigate the conversations that you may be having or will be having with your children about COVID 19 and issues of racism. We'll also chat about how to support our kids as they navigate the stress during these current times. There will be time for Q and A at the end, so feel free to hop over to the Camp Be well chatter page and enter your questions there. Our Tableau employees can use the Quip doc in your calendar invite. And we decided to mix it up a little bit today and have a parent moderator. So I am delighted to introduce Kai Johnson, one of our Bold Force members, who is going to be asking Dr. Briscoe Smith some questions at the end. So feel free to post your questions there and we'll get to as many as we can. And so now, without further delay, Dr. Briscoe Smith, the stage is yours.

Thank you so much. Good morning, everybody. I hope folks are well or as well as can be in these times. I'm really excited to be with you all today. I'm just going to spend a couple of minutes trying to kind of think about some structure to help us engage in complicated conversations with our children about all the things that are going on in the world right now. So I'm going to begin actually, just by sharing my screen and giving a little bit of an option so that you can just have something to kind of follow along as we're going to go. So hopefully you all can see that. So as I was kind of introduced, I wanted to kind of highlight a couple of different things about my perspective and why I hope that it's helpful. As I've mentioned, I'm a child psychologist and I really focus on the intersections of trauma, really difficult experiences, and race and racism. And it means that I've been in relationship with lots of families and lots of schools to really hear about both the struggles and the opportunities for success and opportunities for resilience in this time. So what I'm hoping to do is I'm going to spend just a couple of minutes kind of talking about how we can think about navigating these complicated conversations. But I'd like for us to kind of begin with something that I've been using kind of a whole lot as I'm working clinically, as I'm working with families, and I'm also trying to work for myself. So in thinking about how are we managing difficult and challenging times, I think it's a great moment to remember this idea or to invoke this idea of grace. So I've got this image here of grace and those of you in the Bay Area, this is from In Richmond. There's a whole town like a little fairy tales. It's very small, very cute, and it's a little small notion, but I think it's a little small idea that we can kind of keep. And I love these kinds of definitions of grace. And the idea about grace is like a reprieve or a temporary exemption or this idea of like, unmerited favor. Like, what if I didn't have to be the perfect parent in order to have good things happen? What if I didn't have to, you know, work all the time to earn every single shred of favor, that sometimes there's some leniency and sometimes there's some grace. And I'd like to kind of invoke that idea because I'm working so much with parents who are completely overwhelmed by the demands of securing our families, managing our health, working from home, becoming homeschoolers. It's a lot. And I'm just wondering if we can invoke the idea of grace as we kind of approach this. And so what I think about that specifically is grace for myself as a parent. You know, I've never parented in a pandemic before. I didn't make a choice to home school my three children. So that's going to be different for me. I'm going to have to learn algebra again. I'm going to have to, you know, do different things. So just Some grace for myself. The next way is kind of thinking is about grace for my children, that my children haven't been through the circumstance either before. I have three children. I have an 11 year old, a 9 year old and a 3 year old. And each one of them developmentally is really different and it's a different place. But they've never been at home with me all day for six months in this kind of way. So their behavior is going to be different. The way that they relate to me is going to be different. And for me to think about, they get a little bit of grief. This is not to say that I don't have boundaries, this is not to say that we don't have rules. But this is the idea to say that some flexibility, that some understanding can go a really long way here. The next place that I try to offer grace is right now, especially, you know, as we are coming up on a, on a school year is grace for the school system, grace for our educators. This is a place again that this is not about not having accountability, but this is about, this is a tremendous job. How is it that we offer some grace and some compassion in this kind of moment? I do think that's going to be something that will take us far. So again the invitation is for us to think about where can we embody and invoke grace in these moments. Now what I want to move you to next is kind of the tips kind of part, which is again, I'm usually kind of asked to kind of help parents manage all kinds of questions. You know, my four year old daughter is having a hard time doing this. What do I do? My 7 year old son is afraid to go outside now because he's now scared of being treated differently because he's black. What do I do? All of those kinds of questions. So I want to take you through how I kind of manage those questions and hopefully help you all think about what you could do as well. So usually when I get those kinds of questions I have to kind of pause because I don't know the child right. And I'm not the expert on the child. You as a parent are. So the first thing I want to do is say that you all are equipped to answer these questions. You got to think about a couple different things, one of which is that there are kid factors. Who is your child? What are they like in terms of their temperament? What are they like in terms of their socialization? What's their age? So I'll give you kind of a quick kind of example in the context of talking about difficult things or talking about race. So as I mentioned, I've got three kids. My three children are very different in terms of how they present in the world. My son is red as black. My middle daughter is red more as Latina. We're a mixed race family. And my third child is red as white. Meaning that they interact in the world really differently and they're perceived really differently. So I have to have different messages for them also. I'll just take the two oldest. My son is a lot more like me in some ways, meaning that he's really anxious. Some of the consequences of having a psychotherapist as a mom. So he, you know, if we're talking about things, he's always going to the places, well, what will happen and are they okay? Kind of holds that worry. Right. My middle daughter is unlike me in these beautiful ways, which is that she is brave and she is courageous. And, you know, she volunteered to do a seven minute dance in front of the whole entire school, which I begged her not to do. But she did it right. So it means that when I give her information that's really hard, she takes it differently. I've got to calibrate those conversations. My conversation with my son, I have to have the lens on that. I need to manage this anxiety in a different way. My conversation with my eldest daughter is different because I've got to think about how is she taking it in in a different way. Those are kid factors, right? So first I want you to think about what are the kid factors at play? Next part, what are the parent factors? Who are you as a parent? Simple example here. As I mentioned, within my family, we're a mixed family. I'm black and my partner is mixed. He's white, Mexican. When my children have questions about experience of being mixed, my answer is very different. I didn't grow up being mixed, but my partner did. He can have that conversation in a very different way than I can. I have something different to offer them. We have parent factors that are there. As I mentioned, I'm a person that really struggles with anxiety in a particular way. So I have to be thoughtful about what do I give my children in terms of managing anxiety, where my partner can help me do something different. Kid factors, parent factors, Right. So this is. I frame this in the kind of context of managing maybe anxiety, the anxiety of COVID also race in terms of what do I have to offer my children and how I think about race. But all of this is situated within a family mission statement. So I get A chance typically to do this and see the faces of the audiences I work with. And I usually ask, you know, how many of you have a family mission statement? And there's always one tentative hand that kind of goes up. But I actually want to pause and say, you probably all have family mission statements. So I'd like you to think about family mission statements in this way. What is the thing that you say to your children all the time? Think about the things that you say to your children that begin with we. So they're often things like. And I was working with a family recently said, well, many of the things that we say that are we or we don't. Right? We don't hit each other. We don't talk to each other like that. We don't treat other people those ways. Okay, That's a place too. It's about kind of that containment. But you also have things that you say as well, like we are strong or we are lovers or we work hard. So I want you to just remember and think about or maybe even start noticing, what are the things that you say we do? What are the things that you invoke as a family and to kind of think about. Those are the things that you're teaching your children about who you are. And also that's the way that you can answer all these big, big questions. So one idea is like, what are the kind of family mottos you're going to start off with that and for you all to kind of think about that. I love doing this because I also get to, like, steal other people's mottos. So there's a motto that a family offered to me, which is that we leave places better than we found them, which started off from a really bad play date. So you could imagine it starts off in this kind of way, but then they kind of took it. And actually, that's how they think about their environmentalism. That's how they think about how they enter into space. It's beautiful. It's simple, something you can do. My personal favorite is when mama's happy. Everyone's happy like that. I can get by again. All these kinds of things that you get to kind of say, but they become organizing premises. They become the way in which you can answer things. So, you know, Mama, things are really hard right now, and I'm really stressed out. School's coming. What should I do? Well, remember, we are strong. And we are strong means that we're going to work hard and we're going to work together. We are kind. Which means that I'm going to work my best to make sure that you're treated well and that we're going to treat others. Brings us down to that kind of part. My big piece is that we don't have to create new or separate conversations. We don't have to come up with a separate race talk. You have been teaching about race and equity and fairness throughout your entire life. Now, whether or not you've been speaking it or not is the challenge. And again, my invitation is we can speak this out loud. We could actually say, well, who we are as a family is that we believe that people should be treated fairly. So that means that this is how I think about race, right in the midst of a pandemic, who we are as we're people that love each other. It means that I'm missing Grandma so much, and that's how I'm understanding what's going on. The next kind of piece up here is to kind of think about what's your family? That's the motto. But to broaden it, what's your family mission statement? So think about this, about your values. Who do you want your children to be, and how do you support them in doing this? I think there's a way, especially with the little kids, that we can be in a place of kind of directing some of this. But I want to also pay attention to kids can start telling us what they'd like to do, do as well. Who are they? Who do they want to be? But this is something simple, right? We can say, well, we are kind. Okay, so what does it mean to be kind? How could you tell if you're kind in your body? How could you tell if you're kind in your relationship? How could you tell if you are living this? And those are the ways that you help begin to kind of embody and to support that idea within young children all the way through. Now, to push the conversation just a little bit further, as so many folks are struggling with what do I say or how do I say say anything about what's going on in terms of race? I invite folks to go a little bit further. What is your vision of racial justice? What would it look like? So what would the world look like if this was a racially just place? But let's go smaller. If your family was racially just, what would you be doing? How could you tell? Where would it be in your bodies? Who would you be interacting with? Who would be in your home? What would it look like? And I really encourage you all to think about that and to get again, organized. In this time when we are so stressed out, parenting is already a challenge. The thing that I support people in doing is getting small, tangible, and concrete. Because right now, the decisions that we're facing are big and amorphous and never ending. So we got to figure out what's the smallest thing that we can kind of control. The smallest thing that we can control perhaps is even something as simple as our breath, that in this moment, I'm here, I'm going to breathe. Maybe we can control how I might interact with my child. Maybe we can control. What is it that I will say in this moment to get very, very small and concrete. And actually, these small, concrete things build up over time. They accumulate, and they can actually be something that helps us get organized and help us to manage. So these are some of the things that I'd like for us to kind of just begin to think about and offer. My whole kind of approach to this is that we don't need to learn new things. We just need to remember the things that we've already been using to survive. And I think that also goes to the next kind of piece, which is, I think this is an opportunity for us to really get rooted in our stories of resilience. You know, if you're here in this moment, you survived a thing. What did you do to survive it? How did those things work for you? What of those things would you like to offer your children? How do we speak it? How do we live it? How do we name it? And it's about maybe going back to those hard places. I'm a trauma therapist, so it might be going back to those places that are hard for you or hard for your family. And again, thinking about having an opportunity, attempt to kind of think about what from that experience, do I want to offer my children that thoughtfulness, that grace, that time to kind of think about this all requires that we as parents are well and to go all the way back to that idea. That means that we've got to offer self. Whether it's called self compassion or self love or grace, that we need to be able to offer that to ourselves and also hopefully have our community offer that to us as well. The smallest concrete thing that I can say here is that all of this. I know that lots of folks are probably thinking, oh, my God, I don't have time to do all of this. Who's got time to come up with a mission statement now? I got to buy a book or do a thing. I'm saying, can you begin with five minutes for yourself. My best friend the other day called me from a closet. She's got three kids. She's like, I just needed five minutes for quiet and just to reach out. Start with five minutes. Five minutes just to see how you're doing. What do you need in this moment to try to quiet a little bit is a start. And that's what I'm talking about in terms of the care that is really needed. Five minutes to think about where can I offer myself grace today? And I think again, to build up on that will really show up and show up for you and show up for your children. And I hope that this is a space that actually will be, again, helpful. Just small, like this little tiny door, tiny fairy door. Just a small moment of grief might be. Might be helpful. So with that, I'm just going to go ahead and take a pause because I'd really like to see if there's a way that I can be helpful for any questions that might be available or clarify. So I'll just go ahead and pause. Great.

Thank you so much, Allison.

That was just.

I feel like you unpacked a lot and I just want to go in there with the remaining time that we have left here.

So.

Really I wanted to start the conversation around, obviously this is back to school time. I think a lot of different parts within the country have either gone back to school already or they're preparing to.

Go back to school, which for me.

I've got a two and a four year old, so we're still like daycare, pre K level. So as far as like virtual schooling, I don't know how people are doing this. I feel like I'm stressed out even just thinking about daycare, sending my kids to daycare. So, yeah, as we know, this can be a very stressful time right now with a lot of like school districts, superintendents, don't really know with offering, like, how can you keep your children safe at school? So what can we do as parents? I guess just to really kind of help manage the anxiety of our children around returning to school, if that's what.

They have to do. Yeah, I mean, there's so much that's in there that I think is probably a lot of folks like myself that are nodding like, yeah, it's just so big. And I'm having all of these conversations.

Right.

There's so much. I think this is an opportunity to get really, really small. Right. We don't. I don't even know my kids are going to school on Monday or going. They're, you know, Sitting downstairs, turn on a computer, but I don't know what time. I don't know who they're meeting. I have all of these things that I don't know to become. That is anxiety. So then I got to get small with what do I know and what can I control? And we're organizing in this time that is so overwhelming. Whether it's the racialized violence, whether it's the pandemic, whether it's work, it's all of this stuff is overwhelming. So try to get really small. And that's why the vision is really important. Right. So it's an opportunity to think about. As I think about my children, what is my vision for them? My vision is their health. What does health mean to me? Does health mean social, emotional health? Does health mean health in terms of COVID or not? Do I have. We got to scale it back to get very, very clear about what is it that we are prioritizing because we've got too much information on too many channels. The other thing I'd like to offer is. Or that I'm thinking about is our world's attention, and rightly so, is on one very bad thing. Now, as an anxious person that does trauma work, I'm constantly aware of other bad things, that there are other decisions. Right. But our whole energy is focusing on one decision and one decision around Covid. But there are other decisions to be made. Are our children. You know, again, if my child is a person that really has no other health risk and is really struggling with the social, emotional, then I need to prioritize and think about that. If my child is a child that has some health vulnerabilities, I've got to prioritize that we gotta hone it down in terms of what is there and how that's related to where we want to go. I think the challenge in this moment is it's hard to have any. Well, let me give you an analogy like this. I'm a terrible bicycle rider. I didn't learn how to ride a bicycle until I was like, 17, 18. I'm the type of bicycle rider that in the open field, if there's a tree, I'm going to worry about that tree, which means I will just aim at that tree and hit that tree. That's kind of what we're all doing. We all are focusing on the one really bad tree. Not to say that we shouldn't avoid it, but there's a whole field that's open, available to us that if we actually got focused on, I'm Riding my bike and where is my destination and how do I get there and how do I navigate as opposed to veering towards this one terrible thing. I don't know if that analogy kind of makes sense, but again, my attempt is to scale it down, to think about what is the one decision that I can make in this moment today that will help give me some security and help my child to be secure. And that's also you asked the question, Kai, about how do we help our children manage their anxiety? Get very small. Get very small. So today this is what will happen when we go to school. If you're entering into daycare, this is what will happen there. You will be safe as much as possible because we will do this when they're taking your temperature. This is why, when you put on the mask, this is why get very, very small. And that's what little kids can really tolerate. And what they want is they want assured safety as much as possible in the one tiny thing that you have to offer.

Okay, that's all great advice. And actually this brings me to, I just had a coffee chat with a couple of my colleagues yesterday, right. And they've got school age children who were sent home earlier in the spring. So opposite of my last question for those kids who were actually wanting to get back into school, but parents are holding them back to do like more of the virtual or homeschooling approach, I guess, what can we be talking or how can we have that conversation with our kids to not feel like we're being the bad guys of keeping them back from like participating in sports or going to school with their friends.

So this is going to be a place that we might be in conflict with our children, but we get to say because we're the parents, you know, as much as I offer kind of grace and flexibility, we also are the ones that are responsible. So we have an opportunity to narrate. I understand this is a choice that you don't like and I'm in charge of your safety and your well being in this moment. And it's a choice that I have to make. I want to hear from you, I want to think with you, I want to give you information as possible. And that may be different, right? That's different for a 6 year old than for a 14 year old. How do you kind of have engage in those kind of conversations? You know, the 11, 12, 13 year old can participate a bit more, but again it's the holding, Right? But all of this is around providing some level of kind of containment and safety. Which are challenging this moment. Like, what does safety really mean and when and how? Is it because I'm brown and going outside, am I safe? Is it because someone breathes on me? So containment and safety. So containment means boundaries. Right. So a boundary that we have in this family is that we are strong and we love each other. And we love each other so much that we cannot take this risk right now to try to kind of pull it there. That doesn't mean, by the way, that just because you've got the beautiful things to say that our children aren't going to be upset about it. And that's the grace that we offer them. Right. I told you all the perfect things about why I'm making this decision. And I see that it's hard for you and to give them that space too. Right. That our children are supposed to be acting a little differently now. This is different, this is new. So we should anticipate that.

Okay, great, great advice.

Yeah.

And so I know when you were speaking just a few minutes ago, which.

I wanted to touch on this as.

Well, is you know, you're challenging a lot of the people that are might be listening to this call right now as far as like maybe think back to your childhood or your upbringing on maybe some of those more pivotal moments that kind of help shape your own biases into that have transpired into adulthood. So for the allies on the call, I guess what advice would you have to the allies on raising their children so that they're not having those same type of biases as they're growing up and into adulthood?

Yeah, I mean, I think that really starts with the idea of like it's a term that we've heard a lot like this personal kind of reckoning. And so I think about reckoning as re knowing it's kind of coming back. You've got to spend the time to think about what your own experiences were. And so that takes time. Right. And I think you can do it by yourself. You can start thinking, but I think it's even better when you're in relationship. So, you know, if you have a sibling or if you had someone that grew up with you or if you have a partner or friend to kind of think about. You know, I'm not really aware of what I was told or taught about race and I wonder how that impacts me or typically when I do this, I ask people to just think about a very concrete thing. What's your first race related memory? The first time you remember encountering a race, thinking about race, noticing race and what was that like? What were you taught about that? Where did that go? So that's a simple place to kind of begin. And that's something that I think everybody can do. I think folks of color in this world have had to negotiate that a little bit differently. Folks of color, I'll say specifically within the United States, where the ability to kind of forget your first race related memory isn't really there in some ways because it's constantly with us. But so the invitation, I guess, for allies is think about it. And then to kind of go back to that part, I really want to invite us to think about what are the things that have worked really well for us and what are the things that haven't? What do we want to keep? I'm in the place of trying to think about. We're often parenting in unconscious ways, automatic ways, and that's the place that gets us frustrated.

I didn't.

How many of you all have said, oh, I didn't mean to sound just like my mom, that it means, oh, I'm just like my dad. Right. That means it's unconscious. Right. Sometimes that's a great blessing and something that we have. And sometimes for us, you're like, that's not what I wanted to do. So we've got to be able to have a spaciousness to even think about how we want to parent and what is it that we're doing, which is hard to have spaciousness in this moment. This doesn't feel particularly spacious. So again, five minutes, 10 minutes, something small to reflect.

Great, great. And actually continuing on to that conversation as well, just because, like, I know I've been getting a lot of questions just from my friends on how can parents have these open conversations just about.

The racial injustice that's happening in this.

Country and actually around the world right now. How can we have these conversations to blend, keep them informed? And this is if parents are even doing that with some of their kids. I mean, I know for me, my.

Kids are a little bit younger at.

2 and 4, but I guess, like, how can parents have that dialogue or that discussion and conversation with their kids to have kind of open dialogue and conversation about how people can be better allies towards one another? We'd love your insights on that.

Yeah, I mean, the same thing that I kind of come back down to is to if you've articulated a family mission statement that is about justice or love or kindness, then you should be talking about race and you are, or you are communicating about it. So I don't want to necessarily let folks off the hook to say, well, we teach about fairness so that I don't have to talk about it, but to actually say, well, I teach about fairness so I am able to talk about it. The other kind of big piece is that there is robust and consistent evidence that children start noticing race starting at three to six months. So the other kind of place for us to think about is that if you aren't narrating, talking about teaching your children about race, then they're learning about it on their own, or they're learning about it from the world around them, or they're learning about it from other kids. So the question that I have to ask parents is, is that what you want? Do you want your children to learn about what race means to you and how you want to think about race from you or from somebody else? So it's not a matter of like, if you don't have the conversation, your children are still going to learn about it. And what they're going to learn if you're not talking about narrating and struggling with race out loud, is that this is a terrible thing or it's a non speakable thing or it's something that I can't come to my parents about. And typically when I sit with parents, they want to be part of the dialogue and you know, in terms of questions about how to start, start with books, start narrating. There's great research that shows that people read books and narrate, gender, color, all types of stuff all the time, but aren't narrating race. So it's something as simple as did you see when you read A Snowy Day? Did you see that Peter is brown? When you're reading any book, you know, to kind of notice, who is they? What do they look like on their face? Do you know anybody? Are they just simple things like that which build into that? They're great resources for, for how to do so and it can be done with any book as well. So it's a place that you could start.

That's great. Yeah. And I know that as we've got, I think less than a minute left, I just want to obviously thank you for this time that you've shared with us. And I know this is all valuable information that I'm going to be taking back just for my own self and raising my own two children for sure. So with that, Karen, do you want.

To wrap us up?

Thank you. I'm so moved and I just feel like I have so much left to think about. And I think that you've raised so many questions, so many answers, so many conversations for all of us to have with our families and our children, whether they're toddlers or in their 20s. Like my own children, I feel like there's so many messages that I'm taking away. You have such an amazing way of making this information accessible. And I think I speak for everyone who's listening that we're so appreciative of your time with us today. I also want to thank Kai for being our wonderful guest moderator. And for all of you out there, be happy, be healthy, and be well. We'll see you next week.

Bye.

Bye. Sa.