#104 Dr. Dennis Charney: How To Raise Resilient Kids

NICK FIRCHAU: We get a lot of emails from first-time listeners and people who have been following this show for years about what topics we should cover on Paternal.

And in some cases it’s not should, but need to cover, because parents are looking for help or they’re looking for insight into how to solve a particular problem in their lives or their kids’ lives. We get some fun and more trivial ideas for episodes too and we have a few of those episodes coming up in the future, but more often than not we get emails about topics like how to deal with issues like divorce, or a kid’s addiction to screens, or dealing with loneliness, some of the more serious challenges people face in life.

But one of the requests we get the most is how do we teach our kids resilience, how can we ensure that they have some of the skills that will help them get through the challenges in their lives - the academic stuff, the sports stuff, or the social or family stuff. And as a parent, that inevitably leads to a question about my relationship to resilience, what skills do I have when it comes to facing the big challenges in my life, work, money, marriage, raising kids, and even at my age, what do I still have to learn about becoming more resilient, so I can teach my kids the same skills?

Dr. Dennis S. Charney is one of the leading voices in America on how to develop resilience in yourself and your kids. He is a world expert in the neurobiology of mood and anxiety disorders and he’s the Dean of the Icahn Medical School at Mount Sanai Hospital in New York City. He’s spent decades studying the causes of anxiety and fearm, and he is credited for discovering the connection between ketamine and the treatment of depression. 

He’s also the co-author of the book Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges, which he wrote in collaboration with his longtime friend and late colleague Dr. Steven Southwick, a professor of psychiatry, PTSD and resilience at Yale University before he passed away in 2022. 

Dr. Charney is also a father, he has five grown children and his ninth grandchild is on the way later this year, so outside of his clinical studies he knows a few things about teaching children resilience, and he knows that before we approach talking about resilience with our kids it’s essential to consider our own level of resilience as parents.

Now, resilience is something of an ominous word, it might feel like it can mean different things to different people and it’s difficult to wrap your arms around, so in this episode Dr. Charney is going to explain what resilience means to him and then we’ll discuss some of the tangible things you can do for yourself and for your kids to learn how to be more resilient, because it is something you can learn.

But first, I want to stress Dr. Charney’s credentials here, and I don’t mean his academic ones exclusively. After decades of speaking with some of the most resilient people in the world - prisoners of war, victims of rape and assualt, survivors of natural disasters, even front line healthcare workers placed in some of the most stressful medical circumstances imaginable - Dr. Charney had never been forced to personally test the theories of his academic work until 2016, when he was walking out of a cafe in his hometown of Chappaqua, New York, and his resilience was put to the test.

Here’s Dr. Dennis Charney, on Paternal.

DR. CHARNEY: I was what's called Vietnam-era. When the Vietnam war was happening, I was not drafted. I got deferred because I was in college and in medical school. So I never went to Vietnam. And, you know, after Vietnam, I did have a good life, great marriage, five kids, good profession. So I did not face major adversities. So I always wondered whether or not I was resilient because, you know, I was studying resilience.

And then something did happen.

Seven years ago, a little over seven years ago, I was the victim of a violent crime, of a shooting. I was shot at pretty close range with a shotgun by a disgruntled former faculty member. at Mount Sinai. So seven years before I was shot, I had terminated a faculty member for scientific misconduct. I'm the dean, so I have to make some fundamental decisions.

And even though I didn't know him that well, but the result of the investigation led to that termination. Seven years later, he tracked me down in my hometown. Obviously became obsessed with me and, uh, shot me a close range with a shotgun. Pretty serious, uh, shotgun blast that hit me. And I ended up being hospitalized at Mount Sinai.

Yeah, I was in the ICU for a little over five days. Then I said to myself, okay, now we're going to find out whether I was resilient and whether the techniques that we identified were valid in my own case. And a couple things happened. Um, you know, one, because I'm the Dean, my recovery was, was, uh, public, you know, all the med students and all the faculty were waiting to see how I was going to deal with it.

And really two general things happened. One, I did find that I was resilient. I'm a pretty tough guy, and the techniques that we had identified were valid in my case. I was a, I was a really good case study, and then subsequently when I talk about resilience, I can do what I just did and say, I'm with you.

You know, I know what can happen.

NICK FIRCHAU: Now you heard Dr. Charney mention near the end there the techniques he and his colleagues had identified in developing resilience, and that’s the key to this episode, because as I mentioned before the idea of resilience and how we can develop it in ourselves, that feels like significant challenge in part because we might not be sure what we’re aiming for or how we know we’re truly resilient.

Luckily, Dr. Charney and his colleagues have broken the idea of resilience down a bit and identified what they call the 10 factors to developing resilience. We won’t get to all 10 but I do want to focus on some of those that apply to kids but also apply to the kinds of men who have appeared on this show in the past, guys who are struggling with something in their lives - job loss, divorce, isolation - and can learn to lean on some of these ideas as a way to develop their resilience, and that’s a key idea here too, that resilience is not innate, it’s something that can be practiced, and learned. 

It’s also important to recognize that you don’t have to endure serious trauma to develop resilience, you don’t have to be a prisoner of war or the victim of a violent attack to have your resilience tested. In Dr. Charney’s opinion, no one escapes life unscathed, and we can all learn from trauma and adversity.

DR. CHARNEY: Resilience can be defined in a number of ways. Among the easiest is, if you face difficult challenges in your life, you know, the worst would be like a serious trauma, like war. Rape, assault, loss of loved ones. But there are minor traumas, you know, or minor events that can be difficult. Loss of a parent, disappointments in your career, disappointment in your love life, divorce, not reaching your goals. 

Almost everybody, literally everybody, faces adversity in their life. It's how you deal with those at, quote, the normal adversities of life, that you have the ability to bounce back, you know, to recover, to move on in your life, and in some cases even become stronger.

You may develop post traumatic stress disorder. You may develop depression, but that doesn't mean you're not resilient. It's how you recover from that, eventually, exhibits, uh, resilience.

I've been, uh, with, with my buddy, uh, Steve Southwick, who unfortunately passed away two years ago. We studied resilience going back, uh, 30 years. And, and the reason we started studying resilience is that we're both psychiatrists, neuroscientists. And, and we were treating and researching post traumatic stress disorder in veterans and  other people.

And we felt if we could study people who were resilient and, and why they were resilient and what techniques they used to be resilient, then we could develop better treatments for patients with post traumatic stress disorder and depression. And the way we were studying it over the years, we did initially pick individuals to learn from and study who did face serious trauma in their life. We thought that would be the best group. The prisoners of war from Vietnam who were heavily traumatized. They were held prisoner for five to seven years. You know, heavily tortured. And we thought, gee, if we could learn from them, that would really be amazing. And so we ended up interviewing 40 of them and that's how we came into the research is a blank slate.

You tell us, you know, how did you overcome that and become successful? And then we also studied, um, Different kinds of people, male, female, every ethnic group, every socioeconomic group over the years, people who were born with congenital illness, women who were sexually and physically abused, people who had overcome natural disasters.

One of our colleagues went to Pakistan after an earthquake that killed a quarter of a million people in remote Pakistan. And he came back and identified some of the same factors we had learned from the POWs. We studied the Navy SEALs and the special forces in the Army. So we, we studied so many different people and they taught us, uh, you know, how could you become more resilient?

And they identified the same issues. So, you know, that was reassuring too, that no matter what your trauma was, no what, no matter where you came from in life, the same things popped up.

NICK FIRCHAU: And that’s an interesting point and I want to talk about some of some of those commonalities that popped up in a second, but I should mention that in the beginning of your research into resilience, you and your colleagues believed that resilience was rare and reserved for a select group of individuals. But you learned that not only is resilience actually quite common, but that it can also be learned. How did it feel to come to that realization, that this is a skill people can learn just like anything else?

DR. CHARNEY: The best way to put it, I would say it was reassuring because as we said before, everybody does face adversity and you want to have tools to overcome adversity, trauma, that would help you become a better person, become stronger. Uh, that you could really work at it. And that was reassuring.

NICK FIRCHAU: Okay so let’s talk about a few of these ideas and you call these the Ten Factors for Resilience, I picked out a few that were the most compelling to me and I encourage folks to read more about the ones we don’t discuss if you want to learn more, the first is about fear, and I think this certainly applies to adults and kids. You write that the ability to confront one’s fears is a crucial step in developing resilience, can you elaborate on the connection between fear and resilience?

DR. CHARNEY: Yeah, so that's a good question. I'm going to give a little personal story there. To start, you know, when we were, we're studying the, uh, Navy SEALs and, and the special operations in the Army, and we would say, um, you're fearless, right? And they would say, no, we're not fearless. Fear is a guide. You do have to face, uh, your fears.

If actually, if you're not fearless, that could get you in trouble. Some of the, these, uh, These special forces and Navy SEALs individuals, you know, they would have to get into an airplane, go over enemy territory, and jump out of that plane at midnight. You can't do that from day one. And they would describe how they would go step by step in ultimately approaching having that ability to do that by facing their fears one step at a time.

So they could ultimately jump out of an airplane into enemy territory in the middle of the night. So facing fears is a stepwise process. In my own family, and I have permission to tell this story, so I, I have five children, uh, now they're adults with their own family. But when I was raising them, I wouldn't traumatize them, but I would put them out of their comfort zone in, in several different areas.

And we would go on, uh, adventure trips, and I would say, you know, I put them in semi-dangerous situations. And there was one time when we were up on top of a mountain and, and bad weather came in and there was some wildlife that was a little scary there. And one of my daughters, who was about 13 at the time, said she despised me.

And when she said it, it was like coming right out of her soul for putting her that in, in, you know, her in that situation. And she was a person at that point in her life that she, you know, it took her a while to get comfortable in new situations. But with her, I didn't stop at putting her into situations that made her a bit uncomfortable that so she could master it.[00:16:00] 

You know, she's now, you know, over 40, has her own family. And what does she do? Well, she goes to Yellowstone National Park in winter. She climbs Mount Katahdin in Maine. She's a total outdoors woman, but you know, if I had given into her back then, maybe that would have not happened. So my advice to parents is don't raise your children in total stress free environments, put them in situations that maybe is out of their comfort zone.

And then step wise, they master each situation. And before you know it, they have a lot of resilient skills in their toolbox.

NICK FIRCHAU: One of my kids, and he’s certainly not the only kid I know who faces this, is afraid of failure. He’s reluctant at times to try new things because he wants to succeed at things, sports, music, academics, and the idea of trying something new and being not good at it I think intimidates him. What’s your take on how to best face a fear of failure?

DR. CHARNEY: I would tell our scientists, for example, here that if you're not failing, you're not trying hard enough. You got to push the envelope and, uh, experience failure, learn from failure, and then move on. Now, what I do tell kids, and I tell this, uh, To my grandkids, you know, for example, that ultimately when you're trying to make decisions in what you do focus on as you grow up, and one of, one of my grandsons just remembered this, that I told him this about a year or so ago, I said, pick things that you're passionate about, pick things that you enjoy doing and pick something that you think you can eventually become good at, eventually. So if, you know, you enjoy it, you're passionate about it, and you can become good at it, that's it. Whether it's a sport, mathematics, or you want to be a scientist, a doctor, a lawyer, think about those three things.

NICK FIRCHAU: One of the other ten factors for resilience that I think I was surprised by is the idea of optimism - there are a number of studies that show that optimistic adults have lower risk of having a stroke or developing heart disease over time, and there is a connection between focusing on positive thoughts or optimism and developing resilience.

DR. CHARNEY: Yeah, optimism was one of the, what we call factors that related to resilience. Uh, but it's important to remember that, um, it has to be realistic optimism. not what has been called Pollyanna optimism, which is, oh yeah, I'm optimistic. I'm going to get through it. And you're not, you know, you're not prepared.

Whereas realistic optimism is, you know, I am prepared. Yeah, I can, I can do this. And, and, and that's the kind of optimism. you want. One of the most famous of the POWs, James Stockdale, who actually won the Medal of Honor based on the leadership he showed when he was a POW, said the worst kind of optimism is that kind of Pollyanna optimism, because if you're not prepared and you're a soldier, you could get killed.

A lot of the POWs kept saying, oh, we're gonna, they're gonna get us by, out by Christmas. And he would say, no, no, they're not. You know, we're 8,000 miles away in a prison in the middle of Hanoi. But then he would say, but we will prevail. We will prevail because we were trained to deal with this and we're together and we support each other. We will prevail. 

And that comes from prior experience in your life, in some cases how you were raised, and I, I should also mention that optimism, it is in part genetic, there is some research on that, but you can definitely make yourself a more optimistic person. It's super important.

NICK FIRCHAU: The next factor for resilience I wanted to ask about which was not a surprise to me is the idea of developing social groups or seeking and providing social support. We discuss this a lot on this show, about male friendships and about the challenge some men face in developing those, especially in mid-life. It makes sense that there is a connection between resilience and social groups, because if you are without those friends or those social connections during a time of crisis, you might be as resilient as you would be with them. Can you discuss the role that friendships and social groups play in developing resilience, both for adults and kids.

DR. CHARNEY: Yeah. Like in my case, when I was really, when I was hurt from the, uh, the shotgun, uh, blast, my friends, uh, played an enormous role in helping me get through that. Tough times. Getting support from people who care about you and who love you, and in my case that happened like within a few hours, all of a sudden people who fit into that category, you know, showed up and, you know, that made the recovery, uh, a bit easier.

The biology, which has been studied, there are certain chemicals in the brain, hormones, that are involved with attachment. They're called, you know, oxytocin and vasopressin. I didn't think about the biology. I'm thinking this person is, they're there for me in a real way, almost like a loving connection that you don't feel alone.

And that's what makes it so important in overcoming tough times. Although this is a little off topic, but you know, I'm a neuroscientist. You know, I know a lot about how the brain works and all that. And, and there, there are certain cognitive abilities that there's a certain limitation of what our brain can do just based on the biology of the brain.

But what about love? I think love's infinite. You know, it's, it's like, it's not like you only have a certain amount to give out. It's not true. And I don't know the biology of that, to me, it's almost spiritual. It's a good thing that there's not only a certain amount. And then when ultimately other things happen in your life, you To call upon those friendships. It's priceless.

NICK FIRCHAU: In a similar vein to some men’s struggles developing close friendships, some men struggle to reach out for guidance or help at points in their lives, and then they fail to teach that skill to their kids. You write that identifying role models is one of these ten key factors to developing resilience, both for children and adults, so not just something for kids when they’re young, this is something that people should continue doing in their adult life, and that makes sense if you’re trying to figure out how to run a business, how to navigate a divorce, how to raise teenagers, you can seek out people who have done it before and might serve as role model. Can you elaborate on what you’ve learned about resilience and the positive influences of role models?

DR. CHARNEY: A good point. Real role models are very important. I mean, where do you start without, you know, role models and you have role models in almost every dimension of your life, starting from when you're a kid. You look up to your parents, you hope, you know, you hope to have good parents to look up to. But yeah, you know, so many people say, well, most important person in my life growing up was my dad.

You know, I wanted to be like him and I learned from him, or my mother. Yeah. So role models are important at every stage of your life, you know, whether you're learning how to make friends, you're learning how to develop loving attachments, you're learning in your profession, and you have, you know, we call them mentors.

When you're challenged in life, you look back on, well, how did that other person do it? Certain social groups, Like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, you know, Alcohol Anonymous, uh, groups like that are really important because they provide you a roadmap to overcome tough times. So you have the positive role models, friendships, attachments, your career.

And then you have the role models that help you get through, uh, tough times. And generally you don't have one role model. You have lots of role models and you emulate certain aspects of their lives.

NICK FIRCHAU: I thought one of the most interesting topics you’ve written about is that oftentimes resilient people have an ability to identify core beliefs and values, and rely on a moral compass. My wife and I have talked about this but I don’t think we’ve done it with our kids yet, this is the idea that you should establish in yourself but in this case in your family what are your core beliefs and values, what’s important to you, what kind of people do you want to be. And if you and your kids can easily identify those parts of themselves, it will lead to resilience when things get tough, it’s something that you or they can call upon as a guide. How important is it for parents to identify these kinds of core values and beliefs in their family, and discuss these with their children as a way to develop resilience.

DR. CHARNEY: Well, I know what you're describing is you and your wife being role models for your children. Right? Because if you're saying to them, you know, this is what we all believe. This is the way we behave. And they're looking at you and saying, okay, is this the way you're doing it? And hopefully you are. They're role modeling you.

So there's a relationship between a moral compass and role modeling. So I, like I may have said, I have five children, now adults, and every one of them went through something, and as a parent, you got to be prepared for that. And guide them through it and have credibility with them when you're doing that.

And also with moral compass, it can relate to faith. Some people, faith is really important and they find their moral compass through standard religions and going to church or going to a synagogue. And there are other people who are not particularly religious, but they still have a moral compass about what's the right thing to do.

And I use a quote that guides my own decision making in life, in my career, and so forth. And it's actually from Mark Twain. And he said, you can't go wrong by doing the right thing. I love that quote, because a lot of times doing the right thing is hard, but you still got to do it. It's the most important job you have as a parent to set an example and raise your kids to be good people.

NICK FIRCHAU: So here’s one related to the idea of core values and who we are as a family. How important is it for children to understand their family history and in some cases to understand the adversity their ancestors overcame when it comes to developing that moral compass? How important is the family story to developing those core values and beliefs, do you think that matters?

DR. CHARNEY: I think it matters. Uh, you know, one of the, one of the reasons that by the way, I think New York is such a resilient city is because we're a city of immigrants and we all have stories. So the story in my family was on both sides. Uh, from my mother and my father, uh, they immigrated from Eastern Europe and when they came to New York, they were poor.

You know, my grandfather was a butcher and on one side and my other grandfather had a small grocery shop and, and then, you know, my father goes to college for free and becomes an engineer and then I become a dean of a med school, but my grandfather was a butcher. And, and that story goes through my family, that look what you can do if you, if you utilize the opportunities available to you.

So, you know, that builds the cohesion of the family. You feel something about your history and where you came from and what you can accomplish. And a couple of my kids actually really researched, you know, back, well, they came from Russia and Austria, you know, what, why were they there? You know, so you get that continuity of your family. It's very, very meaningful.

NICK FIRCHAU: This kind of dovetails with your answer about your family and how far you’ve come since your ancestors emigrated to the US, and that’s the idea of gratitude, which is another one of these 10 factors for developing resilience. What is the connection between showing gratitude in the wake of trauma or adversity and resilience, and how can people learn to show gratitude more often in their lives?

DR. CHARNEY: So you hope that's in you. I would, I would think of three kinds of words, concepts. There's gratitude, there's altruism and forgiveness. So, you know, gratitude is to thank the people that helped you. And that's very important to do. It builds connections. It makes you feel good about yourself. So you're thanking others. Gratitude. 

Altruism is giving back to others. You're giving back to others. You're helping others. That makes you feel good too. That enhances your self esteem, paying it forward, gratitude, altruism, and the other word I put in there. is forgiveness. To forgive is, is, it's healthful. You know, in my case, you know, there's this guy, the guy who shot me, obviously he was premeditated and he's, he's gone to prison for a long time.

But I, I have said to myself, if he feels some remorse about what he did to me, I forgive him. Makes me feel good. It's not good to carry hate around. It's not helpful. It almost drains your energy. So to your audience, I would think about these three concepts: gratitude, altruism, and forgiveness. It makes you feel good.

NICK FIRCHAU: What do you see parents getting wrong or misinterpreting when it comes to instilling resilience in their kids, where are some people missing the mark?

DR. CHARNEY: I think where they're missing the mark and, and even a more general way is that what you, you seek to have for your children is a stress free life, you know, and, and a lot of the sports that kids participate in, everybody gets a trophy, that's not life, you know, there are winners and there are people who don't win.

And you have to accept both and that's okay. You, your kid will be successful along the way as they learn what they're good at, as I was talking about before. And you want them to experience, you know, low levels of stress and, and disappointment, it won't be a disaster. You'll help them through it and they will learn from it.

They'll get better at things. So the next time there's disappointment, they can move forward from it. and become more resilient. Like in my family, and it didn't, it didn't happen, but I was worried about it. I didn't want my kids to have it too easy because then they wouldn't kind of continue with the, you know, tradition.

I want them to stand on my shoulders, but if I make life too easy for them, they won't know how to do that. So it's like I was saying before, it's to put them in situations that are out of their comfort zone and then they learn from that. And before they know it, they're incredibly talented and successful.

NICK FIRCHAU: You have five kids and eight grandchildren. When it comes to developing resilience in your own kids, what are you most proud of?

DR. CHARNEY: Okay. Sorry, I got to be careful here because I love them all the same. I'll give you one example of many. So my son, you know, who's now 40, is on the faculty here at Mount Sinai. First of all, he goes to med school at Mount Sinai. That's not easy. I'm the dean. Then he goes into psychiatry and I'm a psychiatrist and he goes into research on the brain.

To me, it's fantastic that he's doing that. He's got to show some level of confidence. But then one day he said to me, I'm going to make everybody forget about you. And then I'm thinking, that's great. That's what you want. You want your kids to stand on your shoulders. Then, you know, you may have done something right.

NICK FIRCHAU: That’s husband, father, grandfather, author and Dean of the Icahn Medical School at Mount Sanai Hospital in New York City, Dr. Dennis S. Charney. If you want to learn more about his work or the latest edition of Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges, will put a link in the notes for this episode where you can find more information.