Midweek Bonus: This Helps: Connection Is The Cure

It's our deep and meaningful relationships that give us hope and healing

Hello friends.

As a special midweek bonus, I’m bringing you a conversation with a therapist—not my therapist, but it totally could have been!

Recently I got a chance to record an episode of the This Helps podcast with Marlon Morgan. Marlon is a school counselor who founded a nonprofit called Wellness Together, which improves access to mental health care in schools in several different ways.

Check out some other episodes with TherapyJeff and Dr. Anna Lembke.

The reason I wanted to bring you an edited version of this conversation in this space is that Marlon read my work so carefully, and asked such amazing questions, and listened so deeply, that the conversation helped me better understand the throughline in my own career, which is something I sometimes struggle with. It was a values-clarifying conversation, and I think it also has some good takeaways on the topics we talk about here every week.

The Art of Screen Time

ANYA: This is the first book I wrote after I had my kids. I had been covering education, really from the student perspective for a number of years.

My previous books were about cost, quality and access in higher education and how this new realm of ed tech innovators was bringing different solutions to all of these issues.

So, there was this one conversation going on around technology in the world of education that was bright and full of promise and excitement. And then when you took the tech home, there was so much fear, guilt, shame.

And I wanted to reconcile that for myself because I I felt like I could see both sides of it.

And so The Art of Screen Time really was my attempt to get through the research, parse it out and figure out, well, what do we really want for ourselves and for our kids? And I came up with the slogan, following Michael Pollan’s “food rules”:

Enjoy screens. Not too much, and mostly together.

You want to get clear first of all on what is the purpose of technology in your life, in your kid’s life. What are our shared purposes and values?

We all use technology to learn about things that we're curious about, to express ourselves in different ways, whether that's through the camera, drawing apps, or even choosing music we want to listen to. And to connect with other people.

And those are all great things.

I think that obviously the companies that make the technologies and the apps don't necessarily have our best interest in mind.

But once I digested the research, my contribution to the conversation was to say this is food, it's not cigarettes.

op-ed I wrote in 2018

You definitely have times that you need to say no, right?

There's such a thing as too much. There's such a thing as balance. There's healthy choices, less healthy choices.

You create a family culture around food. Ideally you are making food together.

You're got celebrations, special occasions—we have movie nights on Friday nights, right?

It resonated with a lot of people over the years to say that, you know, the we can drop the guilt and the shame. We can always make better choices. Kids need guidance. They need good modelling. And they need to be able to make better decisions on their own one day. That's what we're getting them to, right? We're raising adults.

Speaking of the modeling,

Charley Johnson

is a friend of mine who runs Data And Society and he talks about, it's never just technology. It's technology and society.

We know that we're living in this environment and this is the business motive of a lot of companies.

This is true with climate change too, right? Like this, yes, it's your individual choice, but also it's the whole environment that you're in.

These companies, they want to maximize engagement and engagement. That means they don't care what is happening in your body. They don't care about your cortisol levels or your sleeplessness. They care that you're still, you're still on the device.

MARLON In a system where there's VCs and 10X returns in two years, can they care? Tristan Harris in The Social Dilemma says in Silicon Valley, businesses are on a race to the bottom of the brainstem.

ANYA: And so then the question becomes, how do we assert our agency and our values?

MARLON: Every once in a while, I get to go to that corporate environment and do, like, a wellness training, to go talk to them about sort of how to be happier in life.

So, how to be happier in life?

Focus on deepening your relationships and making sure that you have someone to call to share life with because none of it means anything without that.

But when we go in and we talk about values, these are some of the smartest people in the world. And I'm having to say, no, that's a goal, that's an achievement. That's not a value.

Values are things like honesty, relationships, you value those things.

It sounds to me like you are pushing for exactly what we need.

Because really, the moments of connection in my life are when I really remember my truest self and being seen by another person.

It really is seen and known and loved.

The Stolen Year

When the pandemic hit, I was a national education correspondent for NPR.

My kids were three and eight. My husband was also working from home. I knew right away that school closures were going to be a really big deal. And that was for two reasons. One was that I'd covered education technology. I knew the shortcomings of remote learning intimately. I knew how it was a force multiplier for inequality. I also had covered the immediate aftermath of Katrina and then I'd covered it 10 years later as a reporter for NPR doing a deep dive on what had happened.

The End of Neighborhood Schools

And I knew the research there that those students who had been turned out of their homes, turned out of school, most of them were re enrolled in a different school within three weeks or so.

And then majority returned back to the city of New Orleans, but to totally different schools because the entire district was upended within let's say, six months. And there was a there was an educational and massive social and mental health impact on those kids that was measurable for 10 plus years.

I called up the researchers that I knew the best, not only from the New Orleans example, but from other places around the world that had closed schools because of wars, the Ebola epidemic, the Rwandan genocide.

And obviously these are all horrible, extreme social breakdown situations.S o is the pandemic.

I published this story in April 2020.

Article and interview on NPR

I went on Morning Edition, talked to Steve Inskeep and I said, this is what we can expect to see.

And he said, this is shocking. You're comparing this to Rwanda and Katrina. And I was like, yes, and we're going to see these things. We're going to see toxic stress on caregivers and on children.

We're going to see divergent responses, because rich parents are going to protect their kids at all costs and poor parents are not going to be able to. We're going to see college going and high school graduation rates take a hit. We're going to see possibly a remaking of school systems.

MARLON: You had this information that many of us try to ignore, honestly, because we had we're trying to get through the day or, or we heard it and it was sad and we did what we could or you know, but this is your job and you had this unfortunately sad but great vantage point of what happens.

ANYA: Plus I was living it. I had a kid out of preschool and a kid out of third grade. So my my editor called me up and he said this is a book.

And I was like, I can't write a book. I'm recording three times a week.

MARLON: That stressed me out to think about!

ANYA: I got very burnt out from it. But it was a huge moment of purpose I don't regret at all. It kept me going through the tough times, and it helped me process because my job was to call people up who were in a very similar situation to me.

Talking to the parents that became the characters in the book, the experts, the researchers. What is the history of this kind of situation. What is the big picture. And so many of those conversations ended in tears, because we're both processing it together.

Some of the most real reporting of my life occurred like on those Zooms.

The thing that I'm so grateful for, and this really goes back to the, the theme of this conversation, is because of the job that I had, it was my job was literally to listen to people.

MARLON: There were a few times in the book where I'm like, this feels like therapy, you know, a little bit. You had to probably feel in over your head a little bit with some of the sadness.

I'm saying that as a therapist who has felt in over their head in therapy, trying to do therapy.

ANYA: Yes. I did have to read into sort of trauma-informed journalism. Vicarious trauma. Moral injury, because you can't help them. You're just listening, witnessing and that does something, but it doesn't fix it.

That broke me up a little bit. It broke the glass because as a traditional journalist, there are lines that you don't cross and there's detachment and, that just became really impossible, especially since it's happening in my house where I am.

MARLON: So many times we we talk about false self and taking our false self to work or seeming like you have all the answers or being in control.

We were seeing, you know, really high up leaders, all kinds of people with someone walking by in the background, you know, trying to get some cereal or something.

That's a great point. The intimacy piece. Was there a point for you in the pandemic where you kind of felt like this, as horrible as all of this is, is are we learning something … kind of what we're missing?

ANYA: I think the biggest thing for me was not missing any bedtimes for three plus years because I didn't get on a plane. Since my babies were little, I took three- and four-month maternity leaves and I traveled a lot. My kids never held it against me, neither did my husband, but I felt that I felt the difference of being there together all the time.

Kids are resilient and there's lots of ways to be close to kids. But that's the thing I'm grateful for, yeah.

MARLON: is there like a difference in the way that you've come out of the pandemic with that?

ANYA I mean, I left NPR.

I am very proud of the work that I did there and the discipline that it required, but I needed to be able to live my values a little bit differently.

MARLON: And in the combination now of work, of advocacy work and more personal writing as well as some traditional journalism, you have.

The Golden Hour

ANYA: Covering COVID and its impact on kids lives led me into the work that I'm doing now in a surprising way, which is that I had, I mentioned I'm from New Orleans and was impacted by Katrina as a young adult and was very concerned about climate and the environment and had been also a reporter covering green technology.

But I was like, I have this groove and I write about young people and education. I'm not really sure where my crossover is.