How To Build Resilience in Our Teens and Tweens

My guest today is Dr. Robyne Hanley-Defoe. Dr. Robyne is a psychology and education instructor who specializes in resiliency, navigating stress, and change. Today, we talk about how to help foster resiliency in our teens and tweens. So many teens are hurting and this interview will help you meet your tweens and teens where they are. You’ll find this interview very powerful. Let’s dive in!

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What You Will Learn:

How kids from solid, good families can end up losing their way as teenagers.
How we can use the “Five Pillars of Resilience” to help our tweens and teens.
The difference between fitting in and belonging and why belonging is so crucial for our teens.
Roadblocks that get in the way of our kids developing resilience.
The difference between supporting our kids or constantly rescuing them?
Identifying our kid’s strengths and the interpersonal dynamics in a family.
Why connection before correction is so vital for healthy relationships.
Why you should let your child pull away from a hug first.

Where To Find Dr. Robyne Hanley-Defoe:

Website
Twitter: @RHanleyDafoe
Instagram: @dr_robynehd
LinkedIn: ca.linkedin.com/in/drrobynehd
Book: The Calm Within the Storm: A Pathway to Everyday Resiliency

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And here is the episode typed out!

Welcome to the Moms of Tweens and Teens Podcast. If some days you doubt yourself and you don’t know what you’re doing. If you’ve ugly cried alone in your bedroom because you felt like you’re failing. Well, I just want to let you know you are not alone and you have come to the right place.

Raising tweens and teens in today’s world is not easy. And I’m on a mission to equip you to love well, and to raise emotionally healthy, happy tweens and teens that thrive.

I believe that moms are heroes, and we have the power to transform our family and to impact future generations. If you are looking for answers, encouragement, and to become more of the mom and the woman that you want to be welcome. I am Sheryl Gould. And I am so glad that you’re here.

SHERYL: Dr. Robyne, welcome to the show. I am so excited to talk to you and have you on.

DR. ROBYNE: Well, thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here today.

SHERYL: I have been reading your latest book. And I’m just amazed by your story and how it led you to do what you’re doing today. So can you share your story with our listeners?

DR. ROBYNE: Of course, so thank you for asking. I’m somebody who works in the field of resiliency and wellness. And I support families and groups and organizations trying to find strategies on how to manage their comebacks how to manage through difficult seasons or setbacks. I’ve been teaching at the university now for almost 20 years.

I really appreciate this opportunity to be able to connect with people to talk about some practical ways how we can support our family systems or teenagers. The reason why this area of supporting teenagers is so important to me is, that I was somebody who went through a very tumultuous season as teenagerhood, I struggled in school right from my early years. I was identified as somebody who had some learning difficulties and learning differences, and I struggled with some behavioral issues.

The reality is back then, they just didn’t know what to do with a girl like me in class, and they didn’t know how to find support. At the time, my family wasn’t even quite sure what I needed. So it was left in this kind of not talked about, but we knew Robyne was struggling type way.

Unfortunately, I started to develop a lot of maladaptive behaviors, which often happen when our needs aren’t being met one way or another academically and emotionally. I ended up getting myself into a pretty challenging season, especially 15 and 16 years old, where I was hanging out with not the ideal crowd my family would want me to be associating with. I was making some pretty dark choices.

What I think is so interesting is that it seemed as if it was a very quiet sudden onset from the outside. If you were to look at me from the outside of my family system, you’d think, “Oh, she was a relatively happy-go-lucky girl. But in teenagerhood, it seemed she lost her way.”

The reality is I was losing my way right from probably early elementary school. But that’s when the behaviors became just more obvious on the outside. And unfortunately, in my situation, it led to me dropping out of high school in grade 10, managing some pretty major mental health challenges and some episodes, and that risk-taking behavior got really out of hand.

My family loved me hard but quite helplessly. They really struggled to know what are we supposed to do here. One of their, I guess you could say an attempt at an intervention, our family moved. We moved from the big bustling city to a small community. I did start to get better; I started to heal and learn and did a lot of relationship repair, which comes when we start going into our recoveries.

One of the things that were quite remarkable for me was getting my driver’s license; when I had the responsibility of having my driver’s license, we knew I was on the right course. And in my particular situation, I had my license for one week, and I was a brand new driver early into my recovery.

I was driving home late at night by myself on a lonely stretch of road. And a snowstorm rolled in very quickly. And I lost control of my vehicle. And the vehicle went off the road and down an embankment. My vehicle crashed through the ice and sank into the river. I was trapped in a sinking car. I was drowning.

What was so remarkable at that moment, I leaned deeply into words my mother had shared with me since I was a little girl, which was that “Robyne can do hard things. Robyne finds a way to get out of situations. Robyne is able to problem solve.”

My mother had this steadfast belief in me that I was that kid who could always figure it out. That gave me that steadfast confidence and energy I needed to be able to escape, and I escaped through the window, and I was able to make my way to the surface.

I was about 20 feet underwater by the time I got out of the car. And despite the ice in that situation, I was able to get myself to at least above water. And that night, there was a gentleman named Joseph. This gentleman is in his mid-30s, driving home from shift work. Joseph just happened to see my car tracks in the snow. He just happened to drive all along the side of that road to see if you could see anyone. And he did see my body out on the ice, and he pulled his truck over.

He grabbed wood and chains from his pickup truck. Joseph actually crawled it onto the ice and threw out that chain, wrapped it around my body, and he dragged me to shore. He was awarded the Governor General’s Award for Bravery, which is the highest honor that civilians are given for risking their lives to save a stranger.

I recall waking up in the hospital, and my mother was there. And my mother asked me, “How was I able to get through that?” I said to my mother it was very much because she had told me I could do hard things. And my mother said that wasn’t quite what she ever meant, but she told me that she was glad it worked in my favor.

That became the second comeback of me devoting my life to getting well to healthy but also personally and professionally learning about human resiliency and what we can do for our teenagers. So that way, they didn’t have to go through the same things I did.

SHERYL: Such a powerful story. I know you say in the book people have said it’s a miracle. And I agree with the timing of it all. That he actually took the time to even see that there were tire tracks in the snow and right when he came. It really is unbelievable. You said you had some questioning “Why did I survive? “Was that difficult for you to recover from that?

DR. ROBYNE: Oh, absolutely. And it’s interesting; it’s a phenomenon. I’ve talked to other persons who have gone through – whether it’s survivor’s guilt or not really understanding how something so substantive or sensational can actually happen to someone and what that means, and where do we go from here?

I have talked to others who have had similar, in their own right, catastrophic events. I’ve learned that it’s quite normal to question how does this make sense? For the first week, what was so challenging for me was, given how off track I was before my car accident, it was really hard for me to feel as though I was somebody that was worthy of a miracle.

I look around at other people who are going through so much more than I had gone through. I wanted them to have miracles, and I didn’t feel worthy or deserving of it. So one of the strategies that I started to work upon, and some of that hard work that sometimes we have to do, is recognizing that things happen.

This was my story. My life was unfolding into trust the process, that for whatever reason it might be, I’m still learning that myself, but figuring out what comes next and accepting my miracle for what it was.

SHERYL: After this happened, were you immediately drawn to resilience? Or how did that happen?

DR. ROBYNE: Great question. We sometimes think that these recoveries are almost like turning points. Where all of a sudden, it’s like this person had this event, and now they’re on the right track, and they’re good to go. My recovery was anything but linear.

So the first step in my recovery was starting to do that relationship repair with my family and my community too. I needed to do some work there to establish trust and learn about who I was and who I was no longer, and who I didn’t want to become. There was a lot of work that happened in those early months after my accident.

One of the really significant components was for me to get back into school. I knew that school was going to be that structure that I needed. I understood the value of education. I needed to realize that I never really had developed the skills to learn.

I spent a lot of time doing those learning to learn skills, almost kind of going back to kind of figuring out from square one, how do I do this work? I started through core respondents to learn some of those skills, especially some of those key milestones that I had missed in my earlier education. Then it started to be the slow, steady steps in the right direction.

I finished high school and was able to go on to college. I was able to pass the university and finish multiple degrees. And the whole time, I always had this curiosity about psychology and resiliency and wellness. About development, like how teenagers kind of get there, especially when they grow up in such solid, loving families.

I grew up in an amazing family system that, on paper, any child should have a really bright trajectory if they grow up with all of that opportunity and privilege, yet, somehow, I still got off course. So it was definitely a curiosity that I carried all the way through my education. The whole time, I was doing that work to learn about my experience, but I also wanted to be of service, wanting to find a way to then share this with others. So that way, we can I could pass on that knowledge and that wisdom.

SHERYL: I can’t help but think how much your story gives hope to moms that are listening because their kids have been struggling so much, especially since the pandemic. It’s been tough on kids struggling with school and not wanting to get out of bed and not wanting to go to school and wanting to drop out of school, and feeling anxious and depressed.

I thought this would be such a good topic to talk about with you about the Five Pillars of Resilience. What are they? And how can we use the tools and the pillars to help our kids, especially right now?

DR. ROBYNE: Yeah, absolutely. Right now, I’ve worked with families worldwide where the teenager is having a very hard season right now.

I think what’s important is that context of why this is so hard for our tweens and teenagers is because teenagerhood is such a short season. You might get four or five years, maybe six years, and because of recent global events, they’ve lost half of that.

Now, as an adult in our adulthood, with more than 40 years, for us to lose a few years in our adulthood it’s probably not as big of a deal. But to our teenagers, they have missed so many rites of passage that we promised them as a society, and we promise them great birthdays, graduations and proms, and all of the things about getting ready. And that has just come to a halt.

I think that children, especially teenagers, are reeling from a lot of these losses, not to mention the grief and the sadness of the fact that they’ve seen firsthand the impact of a global health pandemic. They’ve never seen this before, and we, as grownups, hadn’t seen this before. So you’re absolutely right. Our teenagers are hurting, and how can we meet them where they are? And that’s when that piece of that resiliency comes in.

The first pillar is belonging: helping them see that they have a place in space. And they have a very important role in our family systems. For children to feel safe and to be able to be resilient, they need a home team, and they need that constant caring person in their world that’s going to see them and accept them for who they are. So that home team and that psychological safety are so important.

The second that we talk about is perspective and helping our children to have their perspective grow. Because our perspective grows in relation to our lived experience. And our teenagers don’t have as much experience yet. So we need to do our job to help them make their way in the world and help them figure out our values. What matters most and what attitudes and mindsets are going to set them up for success, how to manage those big emotions and feelings.

The third one we talk about in this work is acceptance. And acceptance is hard. Because there are some things in the world, we don’t like how it’s unfolding. I recall, personally, when I was a wee bit older and going through my schooling, realizing that I was diagnosed with learning disabilities and ADHD. I remember sitting there at the time being like, “I didn’t sign up for this. I didn’t want this.”

I had envisioned my recovery, and having more challenges thrown in, that wasn’t what I was expecting or wanted to accept. One of the lessons we’ve learned in this research is that helping people to find the tools to really accept or at least coexist with some of the hard parts is extremely important.

And the last two pillars, we talk about our hope. Having someone help us cultivate a sense of living hope-filled. That’s what we can do as parents and supporters, and caregivers are to help them realize, “yes, there’s a lot of noise and negativity in this world. And there’s a lot of joy. There’s a lot of beauty. There are positives out there. We just need to know where to find them.”

And the last pillar we talked about is humor. This idea that lightheartedness and joy and merriment and play and laughter are so important for our ability to weather difficult seasons. So help them know you’re still allowed to have a good day, even in an unwell world.

SHERYL: Yeah, those are so good. Thank you. I’m struck by belonging, that sense of belonging has been so difficult as they’ve been isolated, and then they’re on their phones, but that’s not really giving them that sense of belonging.

I relate to this a lot because I have learning differences as well, and I have ADHD. I was a daydreamer and attentive type. But I always felt out of it.

I always thought, what’s wrong with me? Why don’t I understand this? Why is everybody else getting it, but I’m not getting it, which I don’t really think was true? I think there are probably quite a few kids that were not getting it. I felt like I was the only one. I remember feeling like the weird kid that was a little different.

Moving was actually good for me, and I felt like I got a fresh start. When I moved, I could leave that person behind, even though I was struggling. But that sense of belonging when you feel like you’re different. I’m struck that your mom gave you hope. Because she was always telling you you could do hard things.

I think gosh if I was in that situation, would I have had that resiliency to get out of that car, but you had that message that she kept telling you that you can do hard things. I think we have to believe that about our kids when they’re struggling, and we have to believe in them.

DR. ROBYNE: 100% Absolutely. That belonging pillar is so fundamental to how we are able to show up in our lives. We need that ability to know that there is a safe place where people are going to welcome us, even if we’re the ones that sometimes screwed up or even brought some of these negative experiences into our lives.

We have to have someone in the world that says, “I’m going to stand by you, and I’m going to fight for you. I’m going to fight with you. And I’m going to stand by you as this is unfolding.” So yes, that belonging is so key.

I feel so often we have this biological underpinning to find community. We’re social creatures. And our adolescents, where you see them just so desperate to fit in, they just want to be included, they want to be part of it. And even if sometimes, maybe you just show a sense of resistance to it. They’re like, “No, I don’t want to be part of that, or that’s silly, or I don’t want to be included.” Deep down, they have this biological yearning to be included.

Unfortunately, when that true belonging and this authentic, wholehearted way isn’t met, that’s when we start struggling with fitting in. Because there’s such a marked difference between fitting in and belonging. When you belong to someone, we have this deep empathetic attunement.

For my children, I have three teenagers myself. They know I have their back. And they also know that I’m gonna hold them to a very high standard of our family values. I grew up with that as well. Even though I did go off track. I think one of the reasons I was able to have a comeback and get back on course was because I knew what direction mattered. All roads lead home, and those homes are where those key messages that my mother shared with me.

SHERYL: Wow. So what do you think are some of the roadblocks that get in the way of our kids developing that resilience?

DR. ROBYNE: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think one of the things in my research, and when I’m working with families, is this pull for grownups and supporters and parents, between being a supporter and being a rescuer. One of the things that I see often is we do a lot of rescuing.

We don’t want our children to have bad experiences or bad days. We want to protect them from all of the horrible things that can happen in the world. Almost like they’re too safe for their own good. We’re not teaching them and allowing them to experience natural consequences.

I often talk about the difference between risk and danger. If our children are in danger, of course, you have to rescue them. That’s a non-negotiable. But it understands that there’s a bit of risk that children need to be able to develop. And when they’re younger, the risks have lower stakes. But when they’re bigger, the stakes are bigger.

I don’t want the first time, for example, our daughter to try to do critical thinking when she’s off at college; I want her to be able to learn it when she’s little and has the opportunity for feedback. But again, I appreciate that’s not easy to do. But I think that where we’re getting our children, unfortunately, in these positions where we’re not instilling in them the confidence that we think they can do hard things without us, and we’re rescuing them from situations that they can problem-solve their way through.

SHERYL: Yeah, that’s good. It’s almost like we have to tell ourselves that my kid can do hard things. Your mom was telling you, but she believed you could do hard things. And then you’re able to.

DR. ROBYNE: I think what’s so important is that we model that every single day. And my mother modeled that. I tried to do that with my children as well. For example, when they’re saying, “oh, this math problem is so hard.” The response is, “Well, good thing, Jackson can do hard things.” It’s this constant message that I believe in you. I’m going to stand here as this witness, that’s going to trust that you can go as far as you can. And when it’s time, I’ll intervene. If there’s that skill gap or that knowledge gap, I’ll intervene. And you don’t have to do this alone, but I’m not going to rescue you from it.

SHERYL: So good. So so, explain to the listeners and to me what are some interpersonal dynamics? Do you talk about the interpersonal dynamics in a family and why that matters?

DR. ROBYNE: I think what’s so important to instill with this sense of belonging is recognizing the individual within the family system. I often talk about the fact that I look at our three children, and they’re so markedly different, they’re only two years apart, but they are their own entities. If I take our oldest, for example, Hunter, he had a mom with no experience. And if I look at Ava, two years later, she had a mom who had another child and two years of experience. And when you look at Jack, I had four years of experience at this point, and he had two other siblings.

So recognizing that they grow up differently because they’re different. But also, we’re different with our expertise and those hard lessons learned through the parenting process and season. So one of the things we often talk about is that we have a tendency to group people together. So it’s like grownups and children or siblings and be helping them to be able to form their identity and knowing their skills, their gifts, their talents, and helping them see that and having an important role in the family system can really help do that work. That’s something that can start that conversation.

SHERYL: Where would you encourage parents to start?

DR. ROBYNE: So I love having conversations with children and families around. What are some of the skills that we’ve learned? Do it even just kind of chit-chatting in the carpool or just sitting around having some quiet time. So what are some of the skills? What are some of the things that are actually our talents? Then think about what are the gifts I can share with you?

An example, our daughter, who’s now 16, Ava, ever since she was a toddler, just has this deep compassion for animals. She just loves animals in the way that she’s able to tend to our pets in our house. She does it in this natural, intuitive way. It isn’t a gendered issue. It’s not because she’s a girl, and it’s caretaking. She just so relates to animals. So we talk about that as Ava has this gift. It doesn’t bother her at all to wake up and let a dog out or take a dog for a walk, or to feed the cats because she always wants to. She’s attuned to them.

So we talk openly about how we all have these gifts. And Jack’s I can share with you, our youngest. He is the funniest human I have ever met in my entire life. And he has this gift of joy and laughter, and he shares it so generously. So helping our children see their traits and their characteristics and their gifts and their talents. Beyond things like doing well in school, beyond things like, Oh, you’re an athlete. Of course, those are good things as well.

But really helping them embody this beautiful mosaic that makes up who they are. And when we start talking about those ideas of everyone having skills and talents and gifts, what that does is broadens the conversation of what we are able to become, versus, I’m good at this. It just really helps them see that this multi-dimensionless that comes with us, and it serves the children well as they grow up.

SHERYL: We have to be curious to really slow down and notice what our kid’s strengths are. You might have a kid that doesn’t want to do their homework and is saying, I’ve done my homework, and they haven’t handed me assignments. Only to find out that they weren’t handed in. There’s a strength that you can point out that is encouraging to them, and you’re seeing who they are and helping them to cultivate that. Have you found in your research that when parents do that, it helps kids excel in other areas as well?

DR. ROBYNE: Yes, absolutely. One of the things we definitely see is when children have this predictability and this structure that is actually quite firm at times – which I know is so hard for us to do as moms because we want them to be warm and affectionate. And we just want them to be okay, no matter what. The children that grow up with that deep sense of, “I know, I’m okay, this is my boundaries, this is my parameters, I have skills and gifts and talents within it. And I’m held to a high level of ideals or standards” Those are the children that thrive.

So it’s the children that aren’t living in fear that have their needs met, obviously, but there’s so often how many of us are approaching the parenting practices that we’re actually cultivating compliance. We’re setting our children upon this trajectory for this disease to please, where they’re just trying to please people all the time, versus recognizing that sometimes we rock the boat, we have difficult conversations, we’re willing to go there.

Because keeping the peace isn’t always what it’s cracked out to be. Sometimes we have to have difficult conversations and set firm boundaries. And again, those are the children that really strive especially going into adulthood, the ones that know how to work within those systems.

SHERYL: That’s such a great point. Because I do think that it’s so important that our kids develop where they can say no. And what I see is that kids so often now, with social media, they’re looking outside of themselves for that approval. It’s not internalized.

I was a people pleaser, and that is a real bind. Before I really started that “hurt work,” as you put it, I was always looking for it outside myself, but it is such an unstable place to be because then if you’re not feeling like you’re getting it outside yourself, then it’s very rocky and we depend on our self-esteem and our sense of who we are from other people.

How would you encourage moms because this is a tough thing to do- to balance not to overwhelm, not to rescue, and to let them be independent, and yet at the same time, have high expectations? I think that’s a really difficult balance. What does that look like with your kids?

DR. ROBYNE: I can tell you from my experience that there was a season when I was a single mother, so I was on my own. A season and that was even more complex because I was doing all of it. I was trying to be the soft place and the disciplinarian and the person providing for our family.

I just really want to acknowledge that when we’re in different seasons, some of this actually is even more challenging than when we’re in steady seasons. I do believe, though, that one of the things I give thanks for was that season when I was doing it alone. That season very much bred this necessity that we had to work as a team. So we had to have very clear expectations of who’s doing what and how we do this. And we got really clear. We would over-communicate what those expectations were and what that was going to look like.

So to make that more practical versus abstract, it’s this idea of starting with knowing what are the family values, what are the characteristics or values that you want to have? Almost like your family code.

I can share with you from the children when they were toddlers, we talk about respect, and you respect me. I am also going to respect you. It has to go both ways to really forge that bond that we know that we have one another’s back, that we know we’re in it together, and we’re able to have those difficult conversations, we’re able to let people be individuals when we actually allow them to be respected.

Now, again, I appreciate it’s challenging to do this. But one of the things that we saw is that the children will then start to rise to that occasion. They’re going to be like, “I am a child who carries myself with self-respect.”

I remember a family member wanting to give the children a big hug. And I stopped and said, You need to ask them for consent. You need to ask them whether or not they’re comfortable giving having a hug. And of course, at the time, that was radical, and I’m a feminist, caused this big uproar.

But teaching the children from when they were young, you get to say whether or not somebody gives you a hug, somebody touches you like, those are fundamentally important things that children have to learn. This idea is about honoring their self, honoring who they are in these interactions in these relationships. Something as simple as how often we see people say, “Go give them a hug.” If we want our children to respect themselves, we have to model that. And that’s one of those strategies.

One of the things that we saw in our family system and as the children have grown up, the other part that I think is so important, and the “hurt work” for moms, we have to check our ego at the door. My daughter and my sons, their success is not my success. They’re their own people.

I appreciate it’s fun, especially on social media, to put up pictures of your child as the valedictorian or your child being accepted into the schools. I get that’s very much something that we almost want the world to say you did good, and you did well. Look at your healthy, functional, contributing teenagers. And if we really want to set our children up for success, I think we have to recognize when our ego in it is? And when are we doing things? Because we think that’s going to look better to the outside world? Versus is this what’s actually better for our family? In that true sense of what’s best for our family?

SHERYL: Yes. Check the ego at the door. And this is a reflection of me as a parent that goes both ways. Specifically, I’m struggling, and we can feel like we’re failing. Or if we’re doing well. They’re going to go through different seasons of struggle and challenge. And it’s supporting them through that. Can you think of anything else that I haven’t asked you that you would want to share?

DR. ROBYNE: I can share my two favorite kinds of parenting support ideas. The first one I want to share is one of the strategies I found to have worked extremely well with families and also my own family. When you have to do corrections, because we do have to correct children’s behavior, we have to give feedback. My gentle invitation here is to connect before you correct.

So often, we are so quick to correct. And my invitation is if you can just pause ever so slightly and just take a few minutes to connect and see how did their day go? Or how are they feeling? Or what’s top of mind for them? Or what’s something that they’re curious about before we remind them that they didn’t do their chores, or before we kind of get into the correction that we have to give them.

I find there’s such a difference when we hold that space for one another to connect with them first and then offer the correction. It goes so much smoother versus if we just try to jump in and do the correction. So that would be one little takeaway I can share with your group.

And the last one and this is my favorite, and this one’s so close to my heart. When people ask me, “how do we cultivate resilient kids, and how do we know our kids are okay, and we’re worried about our children?” One of the wisdom that was imparted to me is that when you hug your child, it doesn’t matter if their toddlers are grownups.

When you hug your child, let them pull away first. Let your child pull away first. And sometimes you’re gonna get these quick little Snuggles. And other times, you might notice that your teenager lingers for an extra minute or two. And that really is so important because sometimes it’s hard to put into words that we need help. And that can give us that little bit of data that says, “oh, somebody needs just a little bit of extra support right now.”

So they are the ones that are kind of holding that barometer. My oldest now is 18 years old, six foot five. He’s a big boy. And there’ll be times when he’ll still come home, and I get the quick little hug or the pat on the head. And there are other times where when he gives me a hug. I just noticed he just stays there for a few extra seconds. And that’s when I know that we’re in alignment. And we’re on the same team. And he knows that this is a safe place. Because, again, all roads lead to home, and home needs to be our safe place.

SHERYL: Yeah, home needs to be our safe place. Yeah. Wow, really good. We are so quick to point out what to fix or what we see as not quite the way it should be or correct them. I love that connect before you correct. And then they’ll be able to hear it so much more if we’re just putting that relationship first.

So thank you, Dr. Robyne, so much. Tell everybody where to get your book and where to find all your amazing resources. And you have great downloads and videos on your website, too, that they can watch because I subscribed, and I got one of your downloads, and I found it very inspiring.

DR. ROBYNE: Oh, that’s awesome. Thank you. It’s robynehd.ca and Dr. Robyne on socials. It’s quite easy to find. Thank you for the opportunity. An honor to be able to connect today. I love what you are doing and this powerful voice in such a complex season of childhood and adolescent development. Thank you for all that you’re doing. I’m just honored to be able to connect with you today. So thank you for having me.

SHERYL: Thank you so much. Honored to have you on.