Emily Fletcher discusses why suicide rates have quadrupled in five decades and how parents can help. She presents meditation as a stress remedy, describing a new course that makes mindfulness feel like play rather than a chore, so kids learn emotional tools without knowing they're meditating.
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The numbers for kids are pretty shocking. You know, the suicide rate has quadrupled over the last 50 or so years. Only a third of seventh graders. This is something that you posted would agree with the statement, I'm happy with my life. Do you think parents should actually ask your kids, hey, are you happy with your life? Is that a, that a good opener? And they're like, no, I'm not. Will they even tell you the truth?
Well, I feel like it could be an opener. Like if, if you have permission to have that conversation with your child, it could be a question, but you certainly want to. Wouldn't want to end there. You know, you would want to say, okay, well, what, what are you enjoying about your life? What is challenging about your life? So that you can get to specific pain points and specific things that they feel inspired to shift. But you're right, like, so I was speaking to a child psychologist because we got a real dream team of folks to help us with this. Dr. Shefali, who's Oprah's go to parenting expert, Dr. Christina Cohen, who's a double PhD in child psychology, a Harvard child psychologist named Haley, and then folks from Sesame Street. So we had like a real wide range of experts helping us with this. But one of the psychiatrists said, you know, when I was doing my. What is it called? When they're like rotations, when the, like lab. What is it? Doctors of training, residency. When she was doing her residency 15 years ago, they didn't even talk about teen suicide. It wasn't even part of the conversation. And now she's having to do like whole courses on it every year on continuing education because the numbers have gone up so dramatically. And that was even pre pandemic. And so this is the thing that I want people to realize is that even before we dealt with sort of isolation and uncertainty that our children are dealing with now, I think just social media, the digital world that we're living in, you know, zoom, like all of this, it has an impact on our happiness. And, and social media is not, it's not a joke. Like, you think about, like, face to face bullying, and then you see it like people are so much braver behind a computer screen. Now take that sort of like teenage tribal thing that happens physiologically. Well, where am I in the pecking order? And then add on a barrier of anonymity of social media, and you can really do some damage. And I, and I, I don't like to harp on all of the ailments and all of the potential pitfalls because I don't want to stress parents out more. But I do think that it's important that we were honest about where we are and know that there is a way forward, that there are tools. Turns out stress is a curable disease. There is a cure for it. It's called meditation. It's been around for thousands of years. The reason why people aren't doing it is they feel like they don't have time and with kids they think it's boring. And. And this is where I've spent my 10 year career on Broadway and worked with puppeteers and writers and puppet builders from Sesame street to make this thing so dang entertaining that your kids aren't even going to really know they're meditating. It's like, wait, hang on. I just had a lot of fun for 15 minutes and I happen to learn about my emotions and these tools I can take with me for the rest of my life. So that's what I'm really proud of in this course.
