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What Kids Feel Entering a Third COVID School Year (And How to Help Them Through It)
Most kids are now in their third year of school during the pandemic. It's been a time of ups and downs; adjustments and re-adjustments. Some have flourished in online school and want to stay home — others have floundered and are excited to go back. NPR spoke to a group of kids ages 6 and up about what the pandemic has been like, and how they're feeling about the new school year. Two experts in childhood education and development explain how the pandemic has challenged kids and what we can do to help them: Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Education; and Katie McLaughlin, a psychologist at Harvard University. ...
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Why A Good Scare Is Sometimes The Right Call
This week is our last with Maddie as a host, so we're spending it with a trip down memory lane. The first episode Maddie invites us to relive and enjoy is our first listener question episode on the science behind thrill-seeking. She talks to psychologist Ken Carter about why some people love to get scared. ...
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How Virtual Reality Therapy Can Help Make Bad Memories More Manageable
Jonathan Tissue, 35, returned home from combat missions in Afghanistan and Iraq with invisible wounds. He had been injured twice but was physically mobile. It was his anger at home that made him seem like a different person to his friends and family. Every time he drove by a garbage truck, he became tense, recalling the vehicle-borne improvised explosive device that hit his convoy while overseas. The doctors at Veterans Affairs prescribed traditional talk therapy for his combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder. For five years, he met with psychotherapists but nothing improved. He became more difficult, irritable, anxious, depressed, with occasional angry outbursts.
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What an Enormous Global Study Can Tell Us About Feeling Better During the Pandemic
During the pandemic, I’ve spent a lot of time alone. I live by myself. I work from home. At times, I experienced fits of fidgetiness and restlessness, contributing to feelings of burnout. Here’s what helped: reappraising the situation. What I was feeling was isolation, and the loneliness that comes with it. Instead of letting it gnaw at me, I tried to remember: Loneliness is normal, sometimes even useful. I remembered that sadness existed in part to remind me of something I really value, the company of other people. I knew, when the opportunity arose, I’d reorient myself to immersion with others.
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The Secret to a Fight-Free Relationship
For decades, when Liz Cutler’s husband, Tom Kreutz, did something that bothered her, Cutler would sometimes pull out a scrap of paper from the back of her desk drawer. On it she would scribble down her grievances: maybe Kreutz had stayed late at work without giving her a heads-up, or maybe he’d allowed their kids to do something she considered risky. The list was Cutler’s way of honoring a promise she and her husband had made. They would talk about their frustrations only in scheduled meetings—which they held once a year for a time, and later, every three months. It’s a system they’ve adhered to for more than 40 years.
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The Data Is In — Trigger Warnings Don’t Work
The original proponents of trigger warnings on campus argued that they would empower students suffering from trauma to delve into difficult material. “The point is not to enable — let alone encourage — students to skip readings or our subsequent class discussion,” the philosopher Kate Manne wrote in The New York Times. “It’s about enabling everyone’s rational engagement.” Now, about a decade after trigger warnings arrived on college campuses, it’s clear that an avoidance rationale is officiallycompeting with the original lean-in logic. A recent Inside Higher Ed piece by Michael Bugeja, an Iowa State journalism professor, is emblematic of this shift.
