Jessica Lahey

This week on What’s Her Story, we’re joined by educator and New York Times bestselling author Jessica Lahey. We talk about her path from sobriety to writing her just released book, The Addiction Innoculation, on preventing childhood substance abuse. We chat about how her research has changed her parenting style, the dangers of helicopter parenting, and how a text chain with her best friends anchors her days.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Sam Edis and I'm Amy Nelson. Welcome to
What's Her Story? With Sam and Amy. This is a
show about the world's most remarkable women, their professional and
personal journeys. Together, we'll hear from Gold medalists, best selling authors,
and leaders of the world's most iconic brands. Today, we're

(00:24):
so excited to welcome Jessica Lahy to the show. Jess
as a teacher in New York Times bestselling author. Okay,
so I want to start with the question, So I'm
a lawyer. You went to school, yes, exactly, but you
didn't practice. So what led you to law school? So?
I went to law school. I had been working for
the Duke University Child Protection Team, which assesses kids usually

(00:47):
just for sort of evidence of sexual, physical and sexual abuse.
It's a team of physicians and social workers. Through that
I met this incredible attorney, now a judge named Marcia
Moory who works in dur I'm County District Court in
North Carolina, and she just became my mentor and I
became just so excited by the idea of working in
juvenile court and especially in North Carolina. They had bridged

(01:11):
sort of the gap between you know, the best interests
of the community, the best interests of the kids, and
it was just a really collaborative place, and I was
really excited. I was positive that's what I was going
to do. Absolutely positive. And then over the summer at
law school at U n C, I was asked to
teach a class at the Duke Talent Identification Program. I

(01:31):
taught law in the Democratic Society for sort of gifted
middle school kids, and that was it. I joke all
the time that I came home from that first day
of teaching. My husband took one look at me and
he said, are you even going to finish law school?
Because I was glowing. I was absolutely glowing. So I
did finish, but I went straight into teaching. I started

(01:51):
teaching even before I finished law school. So yeah, that
was it for me. So let's talk about your teaching career.
And you obviously had so much invested in the kids
when you were a teacher, and I love to hear
a little bit about what made you able to click
with so many different kinds of kids when a lot

(02:14):
of teachers struggle with that. So I started with that
group of sort of gifted middle school students and that
was really fun. I mean it was really really lovely.
But then I started teaching high school, and I you know,
really fell in love with that. And I still had
that sort of that bias that I needed to teach
the older kids because that's the serious stuff, like you know,

(02:34):
teaching college. You know, the closer you can get to college,
the better I must be, the smarter I must be
because I'm teaching the harder stuff. And that was a
bias I held for a really long time until I
was offered to apply. Someone emailed me and said, will
you please apply for this job teaching middle school? And
I'm like, no, why would I teach middle school? I

(02:55):
mean middle school? And she said the headmaster said, well,
you just come and meet the kids. Just come, just
come it'll you know, just come see. And that was it.
I went. I fell so in love that I withdrew
my application at another high school teaching position that I was.
I was sort of hoping to use that middle school offer,

(03:15):
you know, loose offer to apply as like a bargaining
chip for the high school job, and I just withdrew
my application and that was it. I was sunk um
for so I taught middle school for a while and
then I sold The Gift of Failure in two thousand
and thirteen, also got sober in two thousand and thirteen,
had a head injury in two thousand and thirteen. The
students are still a part of this story because then

(03:36):
I started teaching in an impatient drug and alcohol rehab
for adolescent So now I'm back teaching middle school and
high school level kids. But kids who really have been
alienated from learning, who have been told that they're stupid,
have been told that there's no expectations of them, have
been told that, you know, why even bother, you're just
going to end up in prison like the rest of
the men and your family, that kind of stuff. So,

(03:59):
you know, I don't think it ever has been for
me about finding it's it's hard to explain middle school
is magic because they're these people in a transition that
I just love there. I call them my pupil people
because they're still sweet and cute and they want to
hug and they still need their morning hug. I had

(04:20):
a couple of students who would come to my home,
come to home room every morning just for their morning hug.
They're still not jaded there and they're in this incredible
process of becoming. Like, the difference between sixth grade and
eighth grade is massive, and I taught all three grades
at the same time, and there was just something magical
about getting to teach a kid for three years straight
and watch them make that transition. And the other thing

(04:43):
about middle school that's amazing is it's, as I mentioned
in Gift to Failure, it's a big set up. Their
brains are not yet capable of handling everything that we
throw with them from an executive function standpoint in middle school,
and yet we ask it of them anyway, with the
expectation that they're going to screw up all over the play.
And then my job is to watch all this grew

(05:03):
up happen and find the learning moments for those kids.
And that's you know, those stories is sort of where
Gift of Failure was born. Teaching the kids and the rehab.
Mainly kids that were the youngest we taught was just
barely thirteen, So mainly those kids were like between fifteen
and eighteen, and my expectations of what a good teaching

(05:23):
day really shifted teaching those kids because for some of
those kids, they you know, just getting them to pick
up a book was a big win in a day,
just getting them excited about learning anything, just getting to
the point where I could make any kind of connection
with them at all, when many of them were highly
distrustful of adults because so many adults had let them down.

(05:45):
So I'm very much a fan of the you have
to teach the kids in front of you, as opposed
to like the imaginary high achieving kids that you kind
of wish were in front of you. You teach the
kids in front of you, and as long as you're
seeing them and hearing them and getting to know them
and understanding where they're coming from, then you're going to
be in there in good shape. And that's for me.

(06:05):
The challenge every day is figuring out who's in front
of me, even kids I know really really well. I mean,
their guinea pig could have died the night before. In fact,
that happened once his name was Squeaky. Squeaky the guinea
pig died, and Squeaky's mom was incapable of learning that day.
And so you have to be able to recognize those
you know when your students are available to learn and

(06:26):
when they're not, and then protect them as much as
possible to make it so that learning can happen. How
are adults failing children? You know, it really depends on
who we're talking about. I think if I were to
clump it all together into one big claim, one thing
I hear from students a lot. One of the things
I get to do when I speak in schools as

(06:49):
I get to talk to the kids during the day,
and then I talked to the teachers doing professional development
in the afternoon, and then I talked to the parents
in the evening. So I give all of the kids
my email, and I say, I'm going to be talking
to your parents tonight. What do you want me to
tell your parents tonight? What do they maybe need to
hear from me that they're not hearing from you? What it?

(07:09):
What is it you want me to tell them? And
the thing I get most often is in some iteration
that they don't feel known, heard, seen, understood, because in
some iteration they say something like, I am not my brother,
I am not my sister, I'm not you when you
were my age. I am not some imaginary kid you

(07:31):
think you're raising. I am me, and you are not seeing, hearing,
understanding who I am because we only talk about what
you want to talk about because um, you have such
expectations of who you want me to be that you're
not actually seeing who I am. So, by far, that's
the biggest thing kids tell me, by far. So I
think you know, whether kids are you know, highly privileged

(07:54):
in some high falutint you know, a private school where
they have every advantage and every resource and all the
supports possible. Those kids are telling me that they don't
feel seen or heard or known for who they are.
And then the kids who I was teaching, um in
the rehab that you know, maybe had very little support
and very high adverse childhood experiences, scores who kids who

(08:15):
really needed just one adult to love and support them
and understand them, Those kids are saying the same thing.
You know. There's this one kid I was teaching and
we were writing about someone at school that has been
a good influence on you. And this kid actually had
been kicked out of high school. If he finished rehab,
he was going to be allowed to possibly go back,

(08:36):
and he was trying to decide whether he was going
to finish high school or not. And so I was
trying to get him thinking I was trying to be
sneaky with my writing and get him thinking about the
benefits of going back and you know, the people who
believe in him and stuff like that. And essentially what
he told me was there was no one he had
at his school who understood or cared, or that was

(08:56):
it had been. I was asking them to write about
someone at their school who had been a good example,
or who had cared about them or had been offered
a positive experience, and he said, I can't do that.
And I said, well, it doesn't have to be a teacher,
and he said, oh, I can do that then. And
it turns out that it was this guy who sort
of babysat the kids in the rubber room, the room
where the kids get sent when they do something bad,

(09:19):
and he said that, He said, if I go back
to high school, it's going to be because of that guy,
because he's the only one who will notice if I
don't show up, or who will care. And you know,
research shows that if we have no matter what a
kid has gone through, if we if that kid has
one person who cares, supports, knows the kid for who
they are, um that they're a heck of a lot

(09:41):
more likely to do okay in their life. Do you
think this idea of not hearing children of kind of
pointing them in one direction. Is something new to recent
generations or is it something that has always existed. You know,
I think it's always existed in one form or another,
you know, like carrying on the family business or you know,
doing what mom and dad did. That's you know, that's

(10:02):
something that I remember when my and it's really interesting,
my dad told me that, um, he was he went
to college and not a lot of people in his
family had gone to college, and then he decided to
go to graduate school. And his father told him that
that was the dumbest thing he'd ever heard, because his father,
you know, worked, it was a you know, worked in

(10:22):
manual labor and blue well blue collar stuff, and you know,
he just couldn't even imagine what, I'm going to graduate school.
So there was this and that sort of negative expectation
I think is a thing as well. But I think
the difference now is that, you know, everyone, because of
the media, because of sort of what we do to
each other as parents, the stakes feel so high that

(10:45):
our understanding of what success is has gotten so narrowed
that there are only a few paths possible. I had
a kid email me a week and a half ago
because I was speaking to the parents at this school
that I and he said, please tell my parents that
I'm going to need them to be there for me

(11:07):
even if this college thing doesn't work out, because I'm
going to need them to reassure me that I can
be happy anyway. Oh my gosh, these stories make me cry. No,
I mean the idea was and I'm paraphrasing, but essentially
that was very close to what it said. And the
essentially the message there is if the college is that
he you know, and this has been a wonky year
for college acceptance, it's been kind of crazy. Um, but

(11:30):
his message was, you know, if this college thing doesn't
work out the way they wanted to, can I still
be happy? I mean, he really needed someone for him
and he didn't feel like he had that, so that
was what he desperately wanted. So when I'm saying this
is so sad, I'm really not saying, oh, that's so sad.
Those parents are doing something wrong, because as the parents
of you know, three kids to teenagers, I'm always worried

(11:53):
that they might feel not seen for who they are,
or that I'm you know, somehow guiding their path in
a direction that's not feeling authentic to that. And one
of the things I loved about your latest book, but
also your first book, is sort of the vulnerability you
show as a parent as well. Right, so you you

(12:13):
approach this not just as an educator but also as
a parent yourself. So how has your experience impacted your parenting.
I have the best job in the world, which is
essentially that I get to get curious about things that
matter to me and that are important to my family
or my students and research the heck out of them.

(12:33):
I'm a big research geek. I love it so much.
I'm about to start book three and I have like
a summer of dorking out around the research ahead of me,
and I'm I couldn't be happier. So my job is
to go do that. You know. For the Addiction Inoculation,
I spent a year researching before the proposal even was finished,
because in order to write a proposal you need to,
you know, be at a certain place with the research.

(12:54):
And so I've changed there. A lot has changed. I mean,
after Gift to Failure, I changed the way I and
I changed the way I parented, mainly because the research
for gift to failure was around the benefits of autonomy,
supportive parenting and teaching, giving kids more choice, giving kids,
helping kids feel competent instead of just confidence. So that
changed a lot about teaching and parenting. You know, We've

(13:17):
been talking a lot in our house lately about the
fact that the way we parent around substances has changed
between my two kids, because my older kid now is
twenty two, my younger kid is seventeen. And I raised
my twenty two year old in a house where he
was allowed to have SIPs of alcohol, and he was
allowed to I say in the in the book that

(13:38):
I actually put wine on his tongue when he was
an infant. It was a really nice bottle of wine though,
And uh I, you know, we had this sort of
more permissive attitude around drinking. And now my seventeen year
old is being Now that I've read all of this research,
and I've digested all the researched and really looked at
the research in the context of you know, causation and
correlation and confounding you know, factors, and the research. Our

(14:02):
seventeen year old is being raised in a home now
with a consistent message of no, not until you're twenty one,
not until it's legal, not just because of the law,
but because of your brain and what's happening to your
brain and adolescence. And he thinks that's completely unfair, which
you know, from one perspective it is. But on the
other hand, I'm modeling exactly what I want to see

(14:23):
from my children, which is, we do the best we
can based on the evidence that we have, the learning
we've done. If that changes because we learned something new,
we don't pretend like the way we've done it all
along is fine. We you know, change what we're doing
in order to do the best we can do given
what we've learned. And being humble about what we've been

(14:45):
doing wrong has worked out pretty well for me because
I have to say a lot of really difficult things
to parents, and the fact that I've done a lot
of stuff wrong um sort of helps me break through
that and and be heard. But you know, I want
him to do that. I want him to say, oh,
you know, I thought I was doing this pretty well
based on what I understood, but I just learned all

(15:06):
this stuff and so now I have to change what
I'm doing. In order to do better. And so you know,
I'm sorry that you don't like my approach to alcohol
in our home now and pot we're in Vermont, so
it's legal here. But if I didn't change what I
was doing, that would not make me the best possible parent.
I can't do the best that I can do if

(15:26):
I'm ignoring the evidence. And the evidence shows is that
families who have a consistent and clear message of no,
not until you're twenty one or whatever the legal ages
have kids with lower incidents of substance used disorder over
their lifetime. And ps, my kids came into this world
with an increased risk because of their genetics. So I

(15:48):
you know, I ignore all that research at my and
their peril, right because fifty six of the picture for
risk is genetics, and they're kind of screwed where that's concerned.
As your husband give the same message, Are you on
the same page around that? In fact, we got tested
on that just the other night. My husband had ordered
we've been ordering i'll take out. My husband's an infectious

(16:10):
diseases physicians, so we have not eaten in a restaurant
and all that kind of stuff. So we ordered take
out and they gave him a cocktail in a can
that was not what he actually ordered, and it was
something new, and it was something that my son wanted
a sip of, and my husband said, no, it was
alcohol in it, whereas with my older son we would
have given him a taste. So and he well, it
was funny. Is he was testing us. He was absolutely

(16:32):
testing us. And he looked us in the face when
it was happening, and he's like, you know, he and
his brother make fun of us all the time, but
you know, we're doing the best we can do. And
now for a quick break. One of the things that
really stood out to me in reading the Addiction Inoculation

(16:52):
is that the legalization of marijuana. I mean, I live
in California. We see billboards. We we just took a
big road trip. My kids must have seen twenty billboards
for how accessible marijuana is, how wonderful it is. They
make it look so appealing, And in reading your book,
I thought, oh, my gosh, this is really one of
the worst things that happened to kids, the legalization of marijuana.

(17:13):
Can you talk a little bit about what's happened and
the impact on kids. Sure, I will say, by the way,
I was in l A doing interviews a couple of
years ago, and I took Finn with me, my now
seventeen year old with me, and I think then he
was like fifteen or something, fourteen, and we were in
Studio City for an interview, and he looked around. He said, so,

(17:34):
this is the sushi and weed part of town. And
I said, yeah, pretty much, this is the sushi. Um.
So yeah, we moved to Vermont where it is legal
and um. What's really interesting is that for the past
decade or so, adolescent drug and alcohol use has been declining.

(17:56):
Over the past decade, steadily declining. Right before the pandemic,
it's kind of plateaued a little bit, which is a
little worrisome, and there's been there's often a novelty bump
for um, for marijuana, simply because it's suddenly they're my kids.
Have made it very clear to me it would be
much easier for them to get pot than to get
a tobacco cigarette, that that would just be a much

(18:19):
easier get for them, which was surprising to me but
also makes sense just given just given I don't know
a place like Vermont. So but I actually they said
that when we lived in New Hampshire too, so it
would just you know, it's much easier for them to
get a tobacco cigarette, which was really interesting to me.
So vaping is the one area where there has been
actually a rise, and it's unclear. So there's there's three

(18:42):
different kinds of vaping. There's sort of well more than that,
but there's basically vaping flavors, vaping nicotine, and vaping marijuana
or THHC. And all three of those have sort of
had a bit of a rise and definitely actually among adults.
What's been really interesting that you know, obviously alcohol consumption
during the pandemic has gone way up, but also marijuana

(19:02):
use and psychedelic use have gone up in adults over
the past couple of years, which makes sense. I mean,
Michael Paullen's out there talking about psychedelic use, and Dr
Carl Hart just wrote a book called Drug Use for
Grown Ups. And I always like to frame for people
that keep in mind that the stuff that I'm writing
about is about drug and alcohol use in adolescence, not adults,

(19:25):
because the things that may have very low or no
risk in adulthood have so much more risk to the
adolescent brain. Do you think there should be a lot
that may be over twenty one. It's legal, well that's
what it is in most states, so yeah, just certain
states like California, Vermont. Well, and what's so crazy is

(19:46):
that I'm so much more worried about I mean, alcohol
is so much more dangerous on so many fronts in
terms of terrible healthy care outcomes and drunk driving and suicide.
I mean, suicides take place in presence of alcohol most
of the time. I mean, it's you know, alcohol is
just so dangerous. It's just that it's normal to us

(20:07):
because it's it's legal, and it's been a part of
our you know, culture for so long. But and I'm
never in a million years am I going to say, oh, prohibition, yeah,
because that doesn't work either. But you know, let's not
get all worried about marijuana when actually, you know, alcohol
is a much more dangerous um drug, not only on
the front end with use, but you know, alcohol is

(20:28):
the one one of the only drugs that you can
die from during detox. So let's keep some perspective here. People.
You mentioned rural Vermont and New Hampshire, and I remember
when I first saw your friendship. I guess live you
and kJ together, and I thought, oh, my gosh, I'm

(20:49):
talking about j 'al antonia and and you just had
this incredible friendship. I couldn't get over the fact that
we're both from this tiny town in New Hampshire, and
I was so jealous of that partnership you had. I mean, now,
Amy's like my kJ, but it was really cool. It
was like Gail and Oprah. So can you talk to
us about the role that that friendship has played in

(21:09):
your life? It's been so important. So kJ and I
met through a friend who were still both really really
close with and she said, hey, you want to make
this writing thing work out, and kJ is sort of
making this writing thing work out. You should, guy, should
talk And so that was the beginning of our relationship.
kJ at the time was writing for Slate and was
just piecing together a bit of a freelance career, and

(21:32):
she had been an attorney. She actually was a prosecutor
in um in Manhattan, and she moved to New Hampshire
because her husband took a job in New Hampshire and
I was there because my husband had taken a job
at Dartmouth. And it was just it and we both
had kids and it just worked out really well. Now,
actually that friendship the two of us has turned into

(21:52):
a little triumvirate because we host a podcast called the
Hashtag and Writing Podcast with another so. kJ is a
bestselling author. Her book, The Chicken Sisters was Reese Witherspoon's
pick for December. Our other podcast co host is Serena Bowen,
and Serena when we first met her, Um had written
her first novel and it flopped, and she's she will

(22:13):
not be upset with me for saying that, she says
it all the time. It absolutely flopped, and she started
self publishing her own romance, Contemporary Romance, and she's now
a many times over best selling author of contemporary romance.
She's also she also has a degree in economics from Yale.
She used to be on Wall Street and so she's
taken all of that knowledge and applied it to the

(22:34):
book business. And so if we ever need a data
breakdown on something, she's our gal. She's the spreadsheet queen.
She loves to dig around in my royalty statements and
just sort of she likes to analyze the book business.
So the three of us together, I think make a
really We text each other all day long, and that's
what really is at the core of every day for me.

(22:58):
All day long, we text each other about out how
the writing is going, all day long. We text about
right now, we're texting a lot about college admissions because
one of them has a kid who's, um, you know,
sort of trying to figure all that out. And it's
the one. It's one. If I lost that, I would
be so adrift. Um. These two women are essential to

(23:20):
me in terms of not just having someone to talk
to about the craft of writing, but having someone to
talk to about the money, about the kids, about marriage,
about everything, and moving two hours away from them because
my house was actually in between Serena and kj's house,
and I used to be able to walk through the
woods to walk to kj's house. I would walk through

(23:40):
some woods and up through a meadow and then a
little patch of woods and then into the meadow above
kj's house and then dropped down into her yard and
that's how I would get to her house. And I
missed that. But you know, we're two hours away from
each other. We make it work. Do you talk to
your boys about the importance of friendship? Yeah, especially sincere
adding the addiction inoculation, mainly because friendships peer relationships are

(24:04):
so important in looking at um. It used to be
the thing that people used to The thing that I
used to say is that peer cohort. You know, if
a kid's friends are doing drugs, your kid is going
to do drugs. And it is nowhere near that clear.
In fact, the entire peer chapter in the book is
based on a relationship my older child had with a

(24:25):
boy named Brian. And by the way, Brian and Georgia
I try to give a shout out in every interview
I do because Georgia and Brian those are their real names,
and they were adamant that I use their real names
because both of them have been through hell and the
fact that they are now in a position to help
other people make some of that hell worth it for

(24:47):
them is what they have told me. And that's definitely
how I feel about this book myself. So Ben's relationship
with Brian, you know, it scared me to death that
Brian was getting kicked out of high school because of
his substance use, and that my son wanted to remain
loyal and go visit him and rehab and all that stuff.
And my first instinct was to say absolutely not. You
may not be friends with him. We all know how

(25:09):
that goes. You may not be friends with him, and
you know, no way, no how, it's too dangerous. That
relationship with Brian I think ended up not only being
incredibly protective for Ben and educational, it was one of
the things that saved Brian. I think his his core
group of friends that included Ben at school was one
of the reasons that it finally clicked for him and

(25:32):
he said, oh, oh, this is what I stand to lose,
and that's why I love my job is being able
to look at the data and say, is that sort
of that commonly held belief? Is that a myth? Or
is that a mis misconception of a misunderstanding of the data,
or is there just more gray area than anyone's willing
to admit to. Because it's easier to say, you know,

(25:55):
if your kids friends do drugs, your kids going to
do drugs. I think that's just easier to say. So
it's a much more complicated picture. But yeah, we talked
to them a lot because it really does make a
difference who your kids friends are and why they're friends
with them. And we talk a lot for example, I UM.
One of the things kJ did for me once that
just always sticks with me is we were going somewhere

(26:16):
and she called ahead to make sure that there were
going to be non alcoholic things for me there. And
she always makes efforts to have really interesting non alcoholic
stuff at her dinner functions at her house, so I
always have options. That's what a good friend does for you.
A good friend, you know, keeps you safe and supports

(26:36):
your decisions and your health. And I talk about that
because I want my kids. I want to model for
my kids what supportive good relationships are, so that if
my kid is in a position where they're you know,
they're coming home anxious, so they're coming home feeling depressed.
I was talking to a kid just recently who has
a friend who's really struggling with drugs, and she's trying
to figure out how to help her. And there are

(26:58):
moments when sometimes you have to say, is this friendship,
as much as I want to help this person, is
this friendship pulling me down or pulling me in a
dangerous direction? Because that's not what good friends do. Good
friends don't want you to be in a position of
risk because they're in a position of risk. They want
you and you know, to help you out of positions
of risks. So, yeah, it's really important to talk to

(27:20):
kids about and model positive relationships, which can be tough
because it forces us to have to look at our
own relationships. But they watch, they know what we're up to,
so they they see if we're friends with people who
are toxic and we let those toxic people pull us down,
they see that and then they assume that that's acceptable. Absolutely.
One of my favorite stories in the book was your

(27:43):
concern about moving because you knew that relocating was one
of the risk factors right divorce, were locating all these
changes in teens lives and how Daniel Segal gave you
this great advice, which was that teens love novelty. So
it's how you're framing it that's the problem. Can you
talk a bit about that. Yeah. So I wrote an

(28:03):
article just recently actually for the Boston Globe about one
of the best things we can do for kids during
the pandemic to help them come out of it with
resilience is to help reframe for kids. Help kids see
when things feel hopeless, helpless, um, when they feel like
they're coming when they're coming down hard on themselves and saying, Oh,
I'm so dumb, I can't blah blah blah, or oh

(28:23):
I'm just bad or whatever. To help them reframe that
in terms of make it more specific and help them
maybe see stress in a different way. And the way
we do that is by starting with ourselves. And thank
goodness for Dr Seagull, because I was just beating myself
up over the move, because I moved Finn between middle
school and high school, a really precarious transition time for kids.

(28:46):
It's when kids tend to experiment with drugs summers or
precarious time. My son had great friends with amazing parents
that I loved and knew really well and trusted. You know,
we moved to this new place with a big school
district where you know, families could be literally from one
end of the district to the other an hour away.
And I don't know their parents. I don't know any

(29:07):
of them. But I was telling Dan Siegel about this
on the phone and he said, you know, I think
you're just thinking about this wrong. Kids adolescents, as you
well know, need novelty, and you know, actually, and people
tend to oversimplify and say kids are wired for risk,
and that's not quite right, And anytime I've said that
in the past, I wish i could take it back,

(29:28):
because it's not that they're wired for risk, it's that
they're wired for novelty. And often novelty includes risk, and
they should be because that's the function of adolescence. And
so if I approach this move as an opportunity to
guide my kid towards all kinds of positive risks, like
exploring a new environment, making new friends, trying out for

(29:49):
new things, trying a new club, trying a new activity,
trying something he's never done before, those are all positive
risks that can fulfill a kid's need for that. Because
keep in mind, adolescents have lower levels of dopamine than
young children or adults. So when kids say they feel bored,
as they so often do, it's not because they have

(30:11):
a lack of imagination. It's because they really do feel bored.
Life feels less exciting when you have lower dopamine levels,
and so of course they're going to look for excitement
and novelty and a little bit of risk. So anytime
we can give them opportunities for positive risk um risk,
that's a little safer, a little less harmful than we

(30:32):
should be doing that, and these are adolescents in particular.
Is a moment when you need to say, wait a second,
am I freaking out over this because it's truly risky
or because it just feels risky to me? And as
much as we can sort of pull back and say, wait,
let me get a bigger view on this. Is this
a risk I should let him take because I don't
want them to default to some other riskier behavior like

(30:55):
premature sex or jumping off of a garage into a pool,
or doing drugs or alcohol. So yeah, reframe, let them
and reframe yourself first, and then help your kid reframes
so that they can understand the opportunities available to them
even when things seem pretty dire. My kids are really young.
But you know, we're talking a lot about adolescence, and
I know when we talk about the book, it's such

(31:16):
a big piece of it. But what's it like parenting
a year old? What's different about that? It's great, I mean, honestly,
from my kids are both hilarious and fascinating, and they
think very differently. They think very differently from each other,
and they think very differently from me, it's been really
fun to watch them become their own people and to

(31:39):
have interests that are so different than mine and so
different from what I expected from them when they were little. So,
you know, from my perspective, every age is really cool
for some reason, and you know, for whether it's because
you know, little babies are cute, or toddlers are cute
or whatever, and middle school kids are just hilarious. But
you know, older teens, it's it's pretty amazing, and especially

(32:01):
I have five years between my kids, so there was
a period where they just had nothing in common, and
the pandemic happened to coincide with a period where they
were starting to have things in common again and the
younger one could start to talk to the older one
on his level. So the pandemic presented us with whatever
five six months of time together that they wouldn't have

(32:24):
had otherwise, and it has been an invaluable period for
them for bonding, and I'm really grateful for that. It's
been really fun. But back to your point, you know,
preventing substance abuse really does start in preschool, so you know,
the conversations start really really young, and they start about
things like I know this isn't what you asked me,
but you know, starting with little kids, you start with

(32:46):
conversations like, you know, why do you spit out the
toothpaste instead of swallowing it? Why do you wash your
why do we wash our hands? Why do we wear
a mask? Why do we um? See this bottle of
medicine on the counter? Can you I'm the letters of
mommy's name on that label? And you know what, what
if you needed the same medicine, could you just take

(33:07):
the medicine that has Mommy's name on it? Why? Or
why not? And those conversations lead pretty naturally into harder
conversations about prescription drugs or tobacco use or whatever later on,
but starting really young with conversations that have to do
with sort of health and safety and what we put
in our bodies and why those are really really important
to have. And now for a quick break. The Gift

(33:30):
of Failure was one of my favorite books. I bought
it in balt and gave it to so many people,
by the way, which meant the world to me because
I so trust your opinion and value your judgment, and
I was so grateful for that. That meant a lot
to me. Thanks, Jas, I really loved it. And I
Amy and I were just talking today about the idea

(33:50):
of over parenting, and I was telling her that we
have a college professor friend who said that six of
his students parents contact him regular really, and I hear
from those professors all the time. When we were in college,
our parents didn't know the names of our professors. So yeah, yeah,

(34:11):
I got in trouble a little while ago. And I'm
going to be very careful and how I tell the
story to not get in trouble the same way I
got in trouble before. But I go and speak at
a couple of colleges, one in particular, every well pre pandemic.
Every year, I talked to the parents of freshman in
college to help them, you know, just just help them
sort of separate a little bit from their college freshman.

(34:33):
And you know, I was talking to this one parent
whose daughter had a chronic illness and the daughter had
never ever learned to manage her chronic illness on her
own because the mom just was worried that she wouldn't
think of everything. And the mother now lived a couple
of hours away from the daughter, and I asked her

(34:55):
and she was talking to me about it, and I
asked her, I said, so, what's your exit strategy here,
Like where where is the weaning going to happen? Because
you don't live close enough to your daughter to save
her life if something goes wrong. And she said, honestly,
she didn't know when that was going to happen, because
it just made her too nervous to let her daughter
be a you know, in charge of that. And and

(35:17):
I see that a lot. You know, when I taught
middle school, we often would have parents who wanted us
to do make a lot of accommodations for their kid.
Luckily they were at an independent school, and you know,
we could, we could make a lot of accommodations for
a very small number of students. But we would always
get to a place where we'd start to say, Okay,
so they're going to go to a much bigger high
school next year. We need to start weaning off some

(35:39):
of these accommodations because they're not going to have a
plan that's going to allow for those accommodations in high school.
So let's start weaning. And I've had parents tell me no,
we want every accommodation until the very last minute. No, weaning,
and that puts a kid or a young adult in
such a precarious place because that's just doing so much

(36:00):
harm to a kid. It's making them feel like not
only is it is it rendering the kid incompetent about life,
it's also telling the kid, on a repeated basis, that
we don't trust them to be able to handle these
things on their own. And you know that's really whether
that's you know, your kid. And I did this with
my own, you know, tying my own kids shoes for
too long. Essentially, I was tying his shoes because it

(36:22):
took less time if I did it, and I hated
seeing him upset or frustrated, and he didn't have the
manual dexterity day to handle it. But as I continued
to do it, what I was telling him was that
I didn't think he had the competence to handle it
on his own. So, you know, I did that to him.
I turned my kid into a helpless individual, this thing
called learned helplessness. I impose that on him because I
didn't want to feel bad about him feeling bad. Can

(36:44):
you talk about sort of what we consider addiction right now,
which is the screen addiction? What are your thoughts on that,
because that affects both kids, Amy's kids ages and my
kids and yours. Yeah, so using the word addiction around
screens is really like, well, first of all, we're not
even supposed to be using the word addiction. We're supposed
to be using the word substance use disorder when it

(37:05):
comes to substances. So you can see the issue if
we're getting rid of the word addiction because some people
have said, well, you know, it's being overused. There's all
kinds of quote addiction that isn't really addiction. Screens are
This is a really tough one because screens aren't a
chemical that we're putting into our body that's getting locked
into you know, receptors for that chemical, but it's activating

(37:30):
a chemical dopamine that is then getting locked in. But
it's our our bodies owned dopamine. But gamers, people who
sorry not gamers, people who create games, are incredibly good
at and you know, even at Netflix, you know, now
it used to be that, you know, the interval between
going onto the next episode was much longer, but you

(37:50):
know now if you it's just like it's twelve seconds
or something crazy like that. You know, it'll just go
right to the next one. People who create games absolutely
understand how to keep kids playing and how to keep
kids going. And you know that is also using manipulating dopamine,
but at least it's our own naturally occurring dopamines. So

(38:11):
using the word addiction with screens is a really fraught thing.
So when we're talking about quote addiction or what we
should be calling substance used disorder, because we're supposed to
use that person first language, and in fact that's been
changed in you know, the AP, the style guide for
the AP. Now you're not supposed to use the word addiction.
You're supposed to use substance used disorder. You're not even

(38:33):
supposed to say substance abuse because that puts the onus
back on the person who's misusing the substance. So we're
supposed to say person of a substance used disorder, which
obviously makes it so that suddenly now using addiction with
things that don't aren't substances is problematic. I will tell
you that. So that screen time and managing screen time

(38:57):
so often is tied into other things, like parents will
say you can't use your screen until your homework is done,
or you can't use your screen until you've done your
household chore sort of thing. I ask people to sort
of keep it separate, so that screen time and the
screen limits and things like that are not tied to

(39:17):
school work or not tied to you know, whether or
not they're contributing in the household. That it's a completely
separate sort of part of the deal. I will say
also that this isn't my wheelhouse. Screen time and the
way it manipulates our brain, we're now squarely in. For example,
Divora Heightner's Divora Heightner wrote this great book called screen Wise,

(39:38):
and she runs an organization called Raising Digital Natives, and
she's brilliant. Can you talk about your experience overcoming alcohol addiction? Sure?
Or alcohol? I should say your experience substance use disorder
as it relates to alcohol. Now, see, here's the problem,

(39:59):
as we know, sometimes times the language that we're supposed
to use that you know, the word is addiction in
the title of my book, because a lot of people
that's what they understand, and you know, you try coming
up with a title that uses substance use disorder in
the title. Anyway, So I was raised in a family
as was my husband, where on both sides of our
family there's a lot of substance use disorder. And I

(40:22):
was raised in a family where a parent had alcoholism,
and we weren't allowed to talk about it full stop.
In fact, if we talked about it or brought it up,
we got in trouble. So and there was a lot
of gas lighting, like, no, that's not what's going on.
You're not really seeing that, it's something else. And as
we know, gas lighting is so emotionally manipulative, and it's

(40:45):
so damaging, especially to a kid. To tell a kid
that what they are perceiving is not what they are perceiving,
you know, from a trusted grown up that you love,
makes a kid question so many things, and in turn
makes the kid question the adult and say, well, where
your judgment then, because this is what I'm seeing. And
so anyway, I didn't talk about it for a very
long time because I really wasn't allowed to. And then

(41:08):
when my sister and I were finally allowed to talk
about it because we were adults, you know, I ran
to the other end of the spectrum. I didn't really
drink during college. I didn't really drink in my twenties
I had kids, and then it snuck up on me.
I just I thought, I, you know, you're watching something
so carefully. And I even had my husband watching because

(41:30):
we know for each other that it's in our genes
and so we need to keep an eye on things.
And it just snuck up on me. And by the
time I hit my forties, I'm fifty now, and by
the time I hit my forties, I just, um, I
was drinking too much. And even before I was drinking
too much, I was thinking about it too much. It
was just there all the time, and I started to

(41:51):
feel uncomfortable about it when it was just an intrusive
thought all of the time. And then, you know, as
the drinking ramped up, I had to. It came to
a I said, when I sold the Gift of Failure,
and I was drinking way too much. I was drinking
about a bottle of wine a day at least, and
hiding it and all of the things you do. I
had to. I revealed all this stuff in the book

(42:12):
that my husband had never heard and didn't know about.
He didn't know about my wine slushies and the freezer
and all that sort of stuff, so and he didn't
know why I always had to be the one to
do the recycling and all that sort of stuff, So
that was interesting. But my last drunk was at my
mom's birthday party at my parents house, and there were
a lot of people there that I loved and I've
known my whole life, and I don't remember what happened

(42:35):
because I just don't remember. I was in a blackout,
and I'm glad I don't remember, because I heard it
wasn't very good. So the next morning, my dad came
up to the sat at the end of the bed
and said, I know what an alcoholic looks like, and
you are an alcoholic. And I had no excuses. I
was ready, and I went to my first twelve step

(42:58):
meeting that night, and I went to a place far
away from my house because I didn't want anyone who
knew me to see me, not of course, realizing that
if they're there, they probably are there for their own reasons.
I really didn't want the parents of my students to
see me, and one one finally did. Actually, I ran
into a parent of one of my students at a
meeting and she looked at me, she said, You're my

(43:20):
worst nightmare. And I looked at her and I said, no,
you're my worst nightmare. And once we laughed over that,
we realized, okay, so our worst nightmares have come true
and it wasn't that bad. Um. You know, we're both
there for the reasons were there. So Um, it's been
over seven and a half years. It'll be eight years
on July seven, or no, sorry, June seventh. Thank you,

(43:42):
thank you. It's been great. It's the stress level, boy,
it's I was spending so much energy on on all
of the worrying and the maintaining my right to drink
and hiding things and not sleeping, and it was exhausting.
So it was a bit of a relief when I
finally got called on it. Well, all right, lightning round,
that's amazing. Thank you for sharing that, Jazz. Okay, go ahead, Na,

(44:05):
what are you reading? I am reading my actually my
co hosts book right now. Serena Bowen has a brand
new book out in her Brooklyn Brewiser series. She invented
a hockey team in Brooklyn and it's called this one
is called the are called Bombshells, and it's her part
of her Brooklyn Bruiser series and it's just delightful. What
is your favorite beverage these days? That's easy. Actually, I

(44:26):
take Geryl Steiner's fizzy water Hound. We drink cases of it,
and I mix it with either cherry juice or blueberry juice,
like the really that Knudsen really concentrated cherry juice or
blueberry juice, and I put Seltzer in. That makes sort
of my own soda sounds delicious. I read that you
sleep a lot, I do. What What is your nighttime routine?

(44:48):
My nighttime routine is my husband has to get up
really early, so we um and Oh, this is gonna
make me sound like such an ass and I've never
told it. I've never said this out loud in an interview,
but I'll go for it. When we first moved here
to this house, we act actually put a We put
a sauna in our basement because our neighborhood had one
and we got to use hers, and we realized how
much we missed it, so we saved up and got

(45:09):
a sauna, and it's downstairs. So every night we have dinner,
my husband and I get in a sauna together for
probably about forty five minutes total, and then we shower off,
and then we get in bed and we're usually in
bed at the latest by nine thirty, and then we
both read or scroll TikTok or doom, scroll Twitter or
whatever for a little while and then go to sleep
with our three dogs on the bed with us. I

(45:31):
love that, all right. I think that's that's a perfect ending.
I love it. Lou with our male perspective is here
and he's been listening to this entire interview, and I
imagine he has a ton of thoughts hit us. Lou,
I have a lot of questions around alcoholism. Me being

(45:51):
in recovery also excellent. I had no idea. Most people don't.
That's the transformation of God. Yeah, it's also you know,
the more people talk about it, the more people talk
about it, there's another question right there. No. I mean
every single time I'm on stage now, I make it
a point to mention that I'm in recovery, because every
single time I do that, someone emails me because they're scared,

(46:14):
they're worried, they're worried about this person, they're worried about themselves.
And the more I talk about it, the more other
people open up about it. And so that's part of
my job now. I think, Yes, yeah, my question is
is in regards to the young kids who are exploring
right now, because he used the word precarious. When I
was sixteen years old, I was introduced to cocaine and

(46:35):
I had a firm resolution that I was going to
use it to the day I die. And I'm sure
as that's probably going to be an adult having what
my mom was experiencing, what my sister was experiencing with me.
How does a parent deal with their chow now being
introduced to drugs and alcohol or any type of other substance. Yeah,

(46:56):
I think the most important thing is a lot of
parents have that idea that like, oh, well, my kid
has tried something, that's it. It's over. They've tried it.
They're exposed to substances. Um, there's no going back. And
you know, the recovery world does a little bit of
disservice that way too. You know, if I were to relapse,
if I were to slip and have a beer tonight,
there I have to start at day zero again. And

(47:16):
while you know, counting days does keep me sober, I
think it's you know, I'm really proud of the time
I have. I think it can be really hard when
we sort of presented to kids as a binary you've
done it or you haven't done it scenario. And if
you've done it, then you're somehow used up and it's
bad and you're now bad. Um. So I think making
it clear that when and this is some gift to

(47:37):
failure stuff, that if kids try stuff, you know they
tried it, thank you so much for confiding in me
about it. Or if you find out about it, you know,
thank you so much for being able to talk with
me about it. So here's why that's a risk for you.
Here's why what it can do to your brain. Here's
why it's my job to make sure that your brain
is protected until you're old enough to protect it yourself.

(47:58):
And it's done growing. And let's move forward from a
place of trying not to duplicate our mistakes and figuring
out what went wrong. Did you not have an exit strategy?
Did you feel like you had to do it to
impress someone else? And why did you feel like you
had to impress someone else? What was it about you
that made you feel like you weren't enough in that
moment that you needed to do drink that thing or

(48:18):
take that thing so that you would feel more than
what was it that cocaine gave you that you didn't
have just being who you were, And let's address that
so that you don't feel like you need to be
more than who you are. And essentially that's you know,
that's my job in a nutshell as a teacher is
to help kids feel like they're enough so that they

(48:39):
don't have to try to be more um than their
authentic selves. So on one one more question in regards
to that conversation, when and in what environment should it
take place when people are calm and have had a
snack and are feeling receptive. Earlier in this conversation, I
was talking about, you know, needing to have those learning moments,

(49:03):
those moments when everyone can hear you. And it's really
hard to find those moments, but they're most often when
everyone is sort of calm and everyone is hydrated and
fed and not coming from a place of emotion, but
coming from a place of looking at the big picture
and so dealing with it right in that moment when
a kid is high or you know, like trying to

(49:24):
tell me I have a problem with alcohol while I'm
drunk would have been just so that's when my dad
did it. The next morning when I was sober. So
try to find the learning moment. And most parents get
to the place where they know where their kid is
receptive and when their kid is not receptive, and the
more we can approach them without judgment, the better. And
from a place of let's do better next time, both

(49:45):
me as a parent and both you as a kid.
How can I help you and how can you move
forward from a place of I want to be better,
whether that's you know, as a human being, as a friend,
as a kid, as a you know, a student, whatever
that that source is for you. Hey, where did you

(50:06):
guys find Jess? So? Jess and I met at a
mom conference years ago. I think that's when we first met.
And then we've kind of been in the same circle
of moms and writers and have always supported each other,
you know, in this like loose kind of group of
people in the mom's space, and I've always just so
admired her the way she thinks and the way she writes.

(50:27):
It was interesting for me, even as a parent of
young kids, and my kids are between one and six,
to hear her talk about how the conversations around substance
used disorder should start when they're in preschool. And then
the example she provided was so great because when she
first said it, I was like, how am I supposed
to start talking about that when they're this little? But
to talk about like, oh, this is mommy's medicine, you

(50:50):
can't take this. I know. I love that, right because
me me, like having jenia, like I know what to
talk about in regards to like alcohol, a marijuana, cocaine,
but I never want to think about like prescription drugs,
which is like the thing that like, it's such a
big problem. Now that wasn't probably when I didn't see
it when we were growing up. I don't know if

(51:11):
you did, but it's not. It's part of her book. Yeah,
it's a big part of her book. And I think
what's so incredible about the information in her book is
it's not just like the research of this is what
it does to your brain, but it's also like, this
is how you talk to your kid. In fact, one
of the things she said just now, I was like,
that's such a brilliant way to share with a kid, Like,
my job is to protect your brain until you're old

(51:33):
enough and developed enough to protect it yourself. And that's
like the job of parents right, Like, we're supposed to
be able to protect our kids until they are old
enough to protect themselves. Yeah, it's such a nice way
to say it. She just has such a way of
connecting with people and really getting into the heart of
the issue. One other takeaway that is completely different, but
that was really meaningful to me was her discussion of

(51:56):
her female friendship with kJ and Arena. And you know, Sam,
we talked about this a lot because our friendship is
really important to us, both personally and professionally. It's something
that works on both of us. But I just like,
I just can't get over how important it is for
us to be teaching young women and I think young
men that your friendships can be central to your success

(52:18):
in life, you know. And we just don't talk about
adult friendship enough. And I think it's so yeah you,
I mean, Amy, I don't think it's an accident that
you know, Kj's book was just became one of Riese.
Weathersmith's book picks. Like, I really think that those women
have propelled each other's careers in the same way that
Gail and Oprah have. I mean, I think that we
don't talk enough about having that core team around you

(52:41):
that you can talk to. And of course, like you know,
when your mom you have mom friends, and your dad
you have dad friends when you're in college of culture.
But I think it's so great to be able to
find someone that you can talk to you about. What
did she say? She said, money, marriage, her books, like everything,
her kids, college admissions. Like she has these people, and
I think that is critical to you know, to really

(53:05):
she's obviously invested so much in those friendships completely. I
mean you look at like and like, I don't know,
Like I remember reading once about the PayPal mafia, the
guys that started PayPal. So they started PayPal, they all
became obscenely wealthy because of it, and then they all
invested in each other's future businesses and kept it going right,
And like that's what those you know, in addition to
talking about the personal parts of life, those friendships can

(53:26):
just move you a million miles forward in terms of
making money. Thanks for listening to What's Her Story with
Sam and Amy. We would so appreciate if you would
leave a review wherever you get your podcasts, and of
course connect with us on social media at What's Her
Story podcast. What's Her Story with Sam and Amy is
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(53:48):
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perspective blue Birds