As part of the “Garrison Talks at the JCC” event series on raising resilient kids, meditation teacher and author Sharon Salzberg spoke with Dr. Chris Willard, a psychologist and educational consultant, and Dr. Mark Bertin, a developmental pediatrician and mindfulness teacher, about how to cultivate the quality of resilience in children.
Sharon Salzberg: Do you think it’s harder for kids these days? That’s sort of the common understanding or feeling.
Mark Bertin: I would say it’s a mixed bag. I think some of what we’re living with as a culture makes it feel like it’s harder for kids. It makes it really frightening to be a parent in some ways and frightening to be a kid in some ways that aren’t necessarily real. I think part of it is a lot of the information being fed and the pace at which we’re being fed the information make the perception of it seem different.
Then the flipside of that is, certainly, it is obviously a really unsettled, difficult world we’re living in. I think there is a reality to the sorts of conversations we need to be having, to the impact of technology and the internet on kids. It’s a little bit of both, I think.
