[E238] Replay Understanding the Brain, Body, Behavior Connection with Mona Delahooke

[00:00:04] Speaker A: Welcome to the Empowered to Connect podcast where we come together to discuss a healing centered approach to engagement and well being for ourselves, our families and our communities. Hey everyone, I want to give you a quick note about today's episode. This is actually a replay of episode 49. It originally aired in September of 2021, so it's been a while since we've heard. It is also our most listened to episode of all time. And after you hear it, that's not going to surprise you. Our guest is Mona De La Hook, a pediatric psychologist and author of Beyond Behaviors. And in this episode she sits down with our former host, J.D. wilson and with Tana Oettinger. And they talk about the brain body behavior connection, why our kids most confusing behaviors are actually signals, not problems to eliminate, and what we can do about it as caregivers. One quick note for you all. Toward the end of this episode, you're going to hear a giveaway for Mona's then upcoming book, Brain, Body Parenting. That book is out now, so skip the giveaway details, but absolutely go grab it if you haven't. It's so good. Okay, that's all this one's worth, every minute. And we hope you enjoy. [00:01:25] Speaker B: All right, well, as we said in the opening, we're here with the one only, Mona De La Hook. And we're so glad that you have joined us today, Mona Tana Ottinger is also here with us. And so we're going to jump right into Mona's work. And we talked a little bit about your work and your first book and all that in the intro. And so I'll skip over the lengthy bio that I could read about you, Mona, and why don't we just start for people who are unfamiliar with your work and just you sharing about kind of who you are and how you got into this line of work. [00:01:55] Speaker C: Okay, for sure. Thank you for having me. First of all, I love talking about how I got into this work and who I am. And so who am I? First of all, I'm a mom. And now I'm a grandmother. So I've been doing the parenting thing a long time and wow. Like if you're a parent, we're in a kind of a community, right? Heroes and the stuff that we go through and the love that we feel for our kids and the heartache that we feel when we watch them suffer. So first and foremost, I'm a mom. But the way I got into this is that I, at a very early age, I became a psychologist. I just kind of went from high school to college, to graduate school, you know, all in 22 years. And by the time I was 26, I was a doctoral psychologist. And, you know, at 26, you don't know a whole lot, you know, you know, what you learned in school. But yeah, my real schooling came from being a parent and my work. So, you know, one of my children was born prematurely, so that right off the bat, I had a child with what we call individual differences in how they were in the world. So that was kind of a schooling right there. But my main shift came about a decade after I was working in the field and my specialty, that was around the time when the diagnosis of autism was very prevalent. And so I went to some different postdoctoral training programs and I became a specialist in neuro atypical development in things like autism and trauma and DSM diagnoses and persistent behavioral challenges. And that's where I found that the stuff that I learned in my retraining that was more about the brain and the body than the mind, was the game changer. And so everything I learned in graduate school got tipped on its head. I started using a new body and brain based technique and tools and a whole new way of seeing trauma and seeing children and autism treatment. So I went off the beaten path in my field. And that was a journey in and of itself. It was a lonely journey for about 20 years. But after about 20 years, I decided I had enough data, both in my clinical work and in the stories, the hundreds and hundreds of stories of folks I help to start writing about it. And that's how Beyond Behaviors was born. It's a paradigm shift in not focusing on the symptom or the behavior or the signal, but focusing on the person, on the child, and on the parent, and on how vulnerable human beings are. [00:04:59] Speaker B: Yeah, gosh, okay. I have a thousand questions about that in particular, but I want to hold off on some of those until later on. One of the things that you talked about before is there is a boy named Matteo that you worked with in one of the school settings. And I feel like that might be the perfect sort of segue into this conversation. Would you mind telling the story about Mateo? And it's sort of signaling one of a kind of watershed moment for you. [00:05:28] Speaker C: Absolutely. Seared into my memory was this story of a child who I knew in my private practice, but that I was. I went to observe in his school setting and he had special needs. And I discovered, like, what a different. What a different lens. Everyone saw him both at school and the way I and his parents saw Him. But anyway, what I saw was the child. It was like circle time. And they were being asked. He was being asked by his aide. He was sitting near him to be quiet and to listen. And the aide was trying to support him according to his IEP at school, which was to focus on his behaviors and to help him be compliant and not disturb the other kids. And I saw his body as she moved away from him, which was the idea is if you reinforce the bad behavior, the child is going to do more of it. So the bad behavior was his moving his body. So the more he moved his body, the more she moved away from him. First it was her eye contact, then it was her physical body. And when she moved away so that he couldn't see her, he tipped back in his chair and fell over. And that was viewed again as sort of this behavior that they wanted to extinguish. At which point they asked the aide to bring him to the calm down room in the back of this classroom. And I saw, I looked inside the window. The aide went in with him. And again, per her instructions, this is a very well meaning, wonderful person. But per her instructions, she sat there trying to, you know, keep him safe and ignore him, but he started banging his head against the wall. Out of. Out of this. This is what happens to human beings when you take them away from human contact, when what their body is needing is human contact, they go into a stress response. But the watershed moment for me was when I looked around the room and I was like, going, like, is anyone watching this? Like, look at this, folks. And all the teachers and everything. Again, well meaning, excellent special ed teachers. But they're going about their business as if nothing horrible was happening. And I saw a human being that had degraded into stress due to his treatment plan. And that's the moment this shy psychologist who loved being in her office and who was very much not wanting to be in the public eye, decided. I decided I'm gonna start blogging. So I started to blog and I started that got. Parents listened, and then I wrote a couple books. And that's where I am now. Like, more on the advocacy side and training than anything else. [00:08:30] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's powerful. [00:08:35] Speaker D: So you were seeing something in that moment, Mona, that made you wish that they were doing a different kind of intervention. So what have you come to sort of understand and would dream about happening for him in that moment instead of what was happening there? [00:08:52] Speaker C: Oh, such a great question, Tana. What I had studied up until this point for about a decade was again, not behaviors, but Actually, the autonomic nervous system, which is kind of one of our systems that connects the brain and the body together. So we're never just a brain and body, we're always both. So in my work, I was so fortunate to meet Dr. Stephen Porges, who had a theory of the autonomic nervous system called the polyvagal theory. It just, it's basically a theory about how it, how it developed over, over our evolutionary history. And my mentors, Dr. Stanley Greenspan and Serena Weider, were also pioneers in the infant mental health movement that prioritized what we call regulation or physiological state. Regulation, which basically means how humans maintain a calm body. That was ground zero in every piece of my work. When I saw him starting to move his body, I knew that his, what we call the physiological state, his platform that launches behaviors in your nervous systems, was what was causing him to dysregulate and to move. And so in that moment when he started looking at the teacher and frantically trying to touch her, what I would have wanted her, I mean, the aid, what I would have wanted her to know is, ah, here we go. A stress response, A stress reaction. He's trying to signal you, aide. He's trying to signal you. If I was in my office, I'd be saying, oh, sweet boy, this is hard. What? Okay, let's see. What do you need? By my calm voice, my face, my body posture, be saying, I see you, buddy. Something's happening. Your nervous system is changing and how can I help you? So the lens shift is looking from looking at behaviors to looking at the physiology of safety of the nervous system. Feeling safe, that is the key for our neurodivergent children and for our children who have been exposed to trauma, and our teenagers and ourselves, us adults who've been exposed to trauma, I would put myself in that category that we have to understand how adaptive our behaviors are. My field has been vilifying behaviors and turning them into DSM diagnoses. [00:11:38] Speaker B: Right. Okay, so that's. Yeah, go ahead, Tana. [00:11:41] Speaker C: Well, I was gonna say one of [00:11:42] Speaker D: the things you say in your book, Beyond Behaviors, which is fantastic, by the way. So just a quick shout out if you're listening and haven't read it. Like maybe hit pause, go order, come back, keep listening. It's that it's really unbelievably revolutionary. It's one of my all time, like Hallmark books for just recommending to all people. You say one thing in there that I love and I wonder if it sort of encapsulates the story that oftentimes when we think about behavior, one of the first things, maybe even behavior that we see as adaptive or unacceptable, what is sort of our natural reaction is how do we get rid of it? And maybe doing that paradigm shift, you say, what does it tell us about the child? And I feel like the story maybe is a good example of that. Do you want to expound on that anymore? Sort of that paradigm shift between trying to rid the behavior versus being curious about it. [00:12:31] Speaker C: Yeah. And let me just say that it's, it's in our cultural DNA. [00:12:36] Speaker D: It is. I would agree. [00:12:38] Speaker C: I do it now. I did it before my training, my training retraining after my psychology doctorate. It's instinctual. So can I just say, that's why I always say that my talks are no shame, no blame zone and self compassion has to rule. Because if you're listening to this and you're like, oh no, I've been dealing with my child's behaviors from day one. Please, of course you have been. We all do. And it's natural to think of it that way. So please be gentle on yourself. Please, please be very gentle on yourself because it's in our cultural DNA. But the paradigm shift, the lens shift I'm suggesting is that we don't look at a behavior again, as I did, and like, oh my gosh, I need to take care of this, because if I don't, my child's not going to learn how to be polite or to be social or they will do really bad in school. So instead of doing that, we ask what is this behavior telling us about what the child needs in their mind, in their body, in their relationship with us? And it's a lens shift that provides us different answers than if we're going for behavior management. [00:13:58] Speaker B: Yeah. So I think, and let's, let's talk to the next step of that because often. So, you know, if you came from the, the, I guess the background that I came from, very traditional parenting, you know, just behavior, like behavior was the king in our family. So like if you were behaving well, you were in good graces if you weren't, like you needed to be corrected. And obviously that's, you know, it's not shaming. That's just that was where we were at. So still none of us are advocating for us to say, look, when bad behaviors happen, we just have to let them happen and let them run rampant and let them run their course and let kids be kids. Like, we're not saying that. So why don't we talk about some of those Next steps after we are starting to identify the behavior, what are some of those, whether it's the calming techniques or the color system you talk about in the book, what are some of those next steps for? Then beginning to wrap your hands around what's happening. [00:14:52] Speaker C: I'm so glad you mentioned that idea of is this like free range parenting or is this coddling? Because I think it's a good question and I'm anticipating that it's some of the pushback that I may get. Even though it's funny, I haven't gotten that pushback very much on beyond behaviors yet. Probably because it's laced with self compassion and also saying, no, we're not talking about being permissive parents. Can you just say that if you're a laissez faire permissive parent and the child doesn't have any boundaries, little children and even teenagers, they don't raise themselves. Humans need to be raised by their parents or their guardians or their communities. So it's anything but permissive parenting or coddling. But what it is is personalized parenting. It's personalizing what you're doing to your child's nervous system. And what does that mean? It means understanding if you are viewing a top down behavior or a body up behavior. In the book, I talk about the two different types of behaviors. A top down behavior is a premeditated, purposeful, willful, oftentimes a little scientist. If it's a toddler who is going over to the cabinet and taking out one of those Tide detergent pods, right, that are very poisonous and thinking they want to play with it or put it in their mouth, okay, that's a kind of a purposeful behavior, right? They're, they're being a scientist. Toddlers are scientists. In that case, we have to teach the child. No, no, sweetheart. Or better yet, put a child protective lock on the cupboard with the poison stuff. First of all, childproof your home. But let's just say it was a cookie and the toddlers had five cookies and you don't want them to eat the cookie. Those are little scientist behaviors and we have to provide loving limits. Juxtapose that to a 5 year old or even a 3 year old or a 10 year old who all of a sudden you ask them to pick up the room for the fifth time and they're not doing it. But all of a sudden their face turns red, you see sweat on their nose and they're screaming at you, ready to kick the door in. That is a stress response. That's when the physiology has Shifted to a body up or bottom up behavior that's no longer in the top down behavior arena, but is in a nervous system that is in a state of vulnerability and in a state of needing calming, loving interactions in order to be able to regulate enough to be thoughtful about what to do next. So we have to figure out the difference between top down and bottom up behaviors and we have to also understand the difference between a top down and a bottom up intervention. As a parent. Yes. Does this child need me to talk to them right now, to reason with them, to give them a consequence, or do they need me to rock them or hum or do whatever or move away or move closer? It all depends on the child's individual physiology, on what helps them calm down. [00:18:35] Speaker D: I think one of the things I most appreciate, Mona, about just the work and even the way you lay it out of the book is taking you give so much respect and ask us as parents and caregivers to respect just developmental trajectory and child development and social emotional development and the role that that plays in. I think you maybe even call it like our expectation gap of what we expect our kids to be able to do versus what they're actually capable of doing in the moment and how to personalize that to them and then even how to just honor their individual biological wiring is so incredibly important and so incredibly hard to do as a parent. [00:19:20] Speaker C: Right. Let's just be honest. We want to do it. [00:19:23] Speaker D: It's important. We know it, we can buy in, we can see its value. And it is tricky. So do you have any, like, I don't know, just what comes to your mind, practical steps of, like, how do you. How do we train ourselves to see our kids this way or practicing them, you know, and just determining between top down and body up behaviors, you know, so we can respond in a way that is good for our kids and helps us stay calm. [00:19:53] Speaker C: Yes. So we can give a little more, we can have a little better chance at hitting it right. Than the constant game of whack a mole. Because it feels like, you know that game whack a mole where you hit something and then another one pops up? Right. Parenting is a constant game of whack a mole. It feels like we just throw things at it, our child's behaviors, because it's so confusing, it's so hard and it shifts in real time. So how do we move away from this frenzied kind of, I'll throw something, I'll throw a technique at my child and see if it sticks. This is what blows my Mind we are not taught about basic child development. I wasn't taught about it after a PhD in clinical frickin psychology. Yes, I learned about it as an infant mental health specialist, which is this tiny little three year. It took me three years to do a subspecialty. Who has time to do that? And why isn't it in the education field? So one reason I wrote my first book which is called Social and Emotional Development in Early Intervention. It's a short little book, it's a primer on the house of social emotional development that I think every pediatrician and every parent should have this basic knowledge that will reduce our expectation gap because we first of all need to know developmentally and it's not by age, it's not by chronological age, it's by each child's development. So. So I don't stick ages on them necessarily because you could have a traumatized child or a neurodivergent child who is hitting a milestone at age 10 that is typically maybe many other kids might acquire at around age 5. So we have to be aware of it. So I guess I'll get to the practical ideas. But the first practical idea is learn about, learn the basics of social emotional development from birth to five because that is your basic template. And I'll just say that it starts with regulation. It starts with physiological state regulation, which is a baby needs us to regulate their physiology. We need to burp them, feed them, clothe them, help them feel safe. We have to regulate the baby. So that is the biggest milestone, not milestone, but the biggest job of a caregiver is to do something called co regulation of physiology of the body of this little baby. And then we go on through toddlerhood. Our job is to co regulate affect, which means co regulate big feelings that come in through the body. This co regulation is the first step step, a real active step. And we can talk about what that looks like. But it's the first active step in building social emotional competency which leads to nonverbal communication, which is a big third big category is that you can communicate with someone without words if you're a parent, if your child has that ability to communicate without words, through their sign language, through their bodies, through their facial expressions, pointing, et cetera, that builds up from being regulated with somebody else. And then finally the launch after that is social problem solving where you understand that what you do with your body to communicate to someone else can lead to sign language, to words, to this ability to navigate my world. So what is the expectation gap? The expectation gap is that we believe that a toddler or a 5 year old or a 10 year old neurodivergent child can be a good social problem solver when they are still missing the requisite co regulation on the ground level. That's one example of the expectation gap. I see it all the time in school. That's what they were trying to do to Mateo. He needed CO regulation. He needed a loving adult helping him regulate his body state, which one day will lead to social problem solving. But this can take years. And our traumatized foster children, the statistics on our foster children in terms of their behavioral regulation and even their ability to do well in school are dismal. And I believe it's because we're asking too much too soon. And we're forgetting the foundation of social emotional development. [00:24:52] Speaker B: That's so good. And that kind of goes right into what I was going to ask you next. Will you talk about the color system? Color coding with behavior and just sort of. That is a practical tool for parents and helping to kind of start out here? Yeah. [00:25:06] Speaker C: Thank you. I love the. I use colors. And the polyvagal theory was the most user friendly theory I could find that explains the autonomic nervous system. Now it's a theory. Theories will change. But the basics of this theory are holding so strongly for my clinical work and in working with and being a parent and grandparent, I just love it. So. Okay. It's dense. Believe me, it's really dense if you read the science. So my colleague Connie Lillis actually came up with the colors and I used them. So here there are three main states. They're blended pieces that are also happening. But the three main states that parents can remember of the autonomic nervous system, three pathways essentially of that vagal nerve that goes from the brain stem to the organs and back up are number one, the green pathway, which is the ventral vagal. But all you have to think of it is the green path where you're calm regulated in this neural pathway. Your social engagement system is working well. You're not under threat, your body's feeling safe. It's when you can play, you can talk, you can remember things, you can problem solve if you're there developmentally. So the green is you're cool, you're good. It's like how we kind of love it when our kids are green and they're eating dinner with us and laughing and playing with us and cool cooperating. So that's green. When we're not green. Because we're humans and not robots, we have to always stay in the green, right? Something happens, something happens. And in a millisecond, you may feel threatened, either inside your body or something from outside your body. You may hear a crashing sound outside, really close. Or you may feel a. A pang of a strong emotion or a fear. And your body shifts into the sympathetic nervous system, which is the red pathway. So when you go into the red or your child goes into the red, your state shifts practically. What do you see? You can see a child hitting, kicking, screaming, pinching if it's in yourself. You can feel yourself start to sweat. Your hands might get sweaty, your heart accelerates. It's an actual thing. It's your. What's called allostasis shifting. Your actual physiological load is shifting to run away and to protect yourself or to move parts of your body when a child is in the red. Again, this is where our disciplinary techniques go off the rails, because we tend to use harsher discipline when our child is in the red pathway. And when they're in the red pathway, that's your signal. Oh, the child's in distress. So what do you do when a child's in distress? You use those things that you have found before the child goes into distress. That works for them. For some children, it will be using a quieter voice. For other children, it'll be saying nothing. For some children, it might be a hand on the shoulder. For others, that might trigger them even more. So you move away and you say, mommy's here. Daddy's here. This is rough. This is tough. So in the book, I describe how we have to make a new roadmap for each child, because every child will have their own calming keys to unlock their door. That's why I'm not in favor of generic advice, because we have to tailor it to the child's nervous system. So in the red pathway, we really tailor it. We find out what calms that kiddo. And then we go from thinking, I have to stop the behavior, to I have to find out what this behavior is meaning to. Okay, first step, calm the nervous system really quick. I know we're moving along the third path. Main pathway is the dorsal vagal pathway, which we call the blue. And in the blue, an individual starts to shut down and immobilize. So we see this in children under extreme states of traumatic activation, where you may freeze. Actually, your body is in such a state of threat or experiencing such a state of threat that you actually start to dissociate, freeze. In milder levels, you may just pull back and lose hope and not want to talk. And of course, we all go here once in a while for a little bit of time. But what I'm talking about here is if your child seems to persistently be there for days or weeks at a time, this is a very important signal that the child needs a lot of support and maybe professional consultation as well. Because we really want to get the hope system going. We really would prefer to see aggressive behaviors than complete shutdown, because it means that nervous system is fighting for the child. [00:30:24] Speaker B: Yes. [00:30:26] Speaker C: To feel safe, struggling to feel safe. So it's a whole paradigm shift in how we can use these colors, red, blue, and green, understanding that we cycle through them throughout the day. But you really don't want your child to be in the red 70% of the day. [00:30:40] Speaker B: Right. [00:30:42] Speaker C: You want them to be in the other pathways maybe 30% of the day, and in the green 70% of the day. I'm just pulling that out of just kind of common sense, clinical. Yeah, yeah. [00:30:54] Speaker D: So when you think about those pathways, that is that bottom up behavior that we were talking about. Right. Versus the top down. So that's really thinking about that body brain connection. [00:31:06] Speaker C: That's right. And we understand that the child's not [00:31:10] Speaker D: choosing to get into a stress place. Right. So can you respond to that real quick? This is not willful. [00:31:17] Speaker C: Right. So when we understand the. The colors, the pathways launch the behaviors, and that's the body launching them, not the child's thinking about it and doing it willfully. Because they're instinctual stress responses rather than planned, cognitively mediated behaviors. Yeah. So this is a little bit of a shift from thinking about the brain to thinking about the body bottom up versus top down. Yeah. And that impacts. [00:31:58] Speaker D: Yeah, that impacts how we support them in that moment and how we respond and meet those needs. Yeah. [00:32:06] Speaker C: It gives us a roadmap. Because if a child is in the red, we have a certain roadmap. That is combiphysiology. If the child is in the blue, we have a roadmap. We need to get hope going, get some joy going. We need to do everything we can to reinvigorate hope in that nervous system. And if a child is in the green, this is a great time to teach them something new, try a new activity, push their limits a little bit, stretch out their tolerance. Because we also want to raise gritty, resilient kids. [00:32:41] Speaker D: Right? [00:32:41] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:32:42] Speaker B: Okay, last question before we. Before we wrap up. Speaking of gritty, resilient kids, we are now raising, against their wishes, a whole generation of gritty, resilient kids. Because of them, Kind of having early childhood years during a global pandemic. And so as parents everywhere are getting ready to shut down homeschool that they never intended on having in the beginning and now send their kids back to school. Any advice for parents based on kind of what kids have been through in the past year and maybe ways that they can be mindful that the isolation and kind of the effects of COVID may have had on their kids bodies, behaviors and all that. [00:33:23] Speaker C: Oh, it's just kind of boggles my mind. And this is going to be studied by researchers for decades, believe me. This is. What do you say other than right now? My heart and soul goes out to teachers and parents who actively are raising young children during this global pandemic. And who would have ever thought it would have lasted this long that you would have been like you said, jdl, like a teacher without signing up for it? Right? I didn't sign up for this. I just, it's wow, you know. Okay, so how do we make sense of it? First of all, what I'd like to say is in keeping with everything I say and that is we have to remember two words, individual differences. You may have a child who actually did a little better mental health wise during the pandemic because their physiology preferred home environment learning rather than being with a bunch of kids. So I have a select group of clients and families whose children actually are going to have more trouble going back to school because they were physiologically speaking a little more. Okay, a little more connected and a little less challenged from a sensory standpoint. And they got the mothership. So till now, you know, they've got the mothership. They were, they got that co regulation and now they have to transition to a teacher and a bunch of students who may not co regulate as well as the parents did. So be aware of that and what you can do with that is start playing with them about school. Play is the best way to get a child prepared, especially if they're under 10. Use those action figures, get on the floor, play with your child, maybe pretend play school and get their nervous system ready for that taxing environment again. So okay, so that's one group of kids. Another group of kids is going to do really well because they are so starved for that action and they are so happy to be with their friends again, you know, and just like hallelujah, they'll probably do really well except for parents and teachers prepare for more challenging behaviors. And either way, because children are going to be less regulated because their prediction system is off, we need a Predictable environment. Children's predictions are now going to be completely shifted. They're going to be predicting what you did as a teacher at home and projecting that onto the teacher and to the real environment. And guess what? It's going to be messy. Sometimes teachers, parents have compassion on the kids, have a big bandwidth on their behaviors. Don't freak out because they are going to struggle only because you are resetting their prediction system in their brain. So the more flexible you can be, the more set good limits, have a loving attitude. You can set a firm limit and then also empathize at the same time. Like, oh, I know you, this is hard doing it this way and this is hard and I get it. But you know what, I'm right here with you, buddy. Let's try again. So those kids are going to all kids I think are going to need a lot of compassion. And getting the predictions in, you can use visual schedules, you can let them know what's going to happen this week or this day or this hour depending on the child's needs. Get to know the teacher, go to the school ahead of time, drive by the school, walk around the playground if you can, do meet and greets. Start to warm up everyone's nervous systems around this idea that we're going back to a completely new world. And please ask your school to take care of the teacher's mental health. Give those teachers some in trainings. I'm doing quite a few in training for teachers coming in on their own trauma reactions. Teachers have been stretched their budgets and their in their brain and body are shot. Let's take care of our teachers so they can be there for our kids. [00:37:43] Speaker D: I love that. [00:37:44] Speaker B: Lastly, before you go, Mona, you're working on a new book and you can't tell us the title yet but do you want to talk about briefly kind of what the idea of it is? [00:37:54] Speaker C: Oh, I am so excited about this new book actually. Okay, I'm going to give you guys a. I can't say the title but I'm actually going to tell you that it's actually up on Amazon for pre order. That's under the wraps. So it's not the exact title but it's the basic. The main title is there. It's not the subtitle is going to change but okay. This book, I Hope I pray is going to finally set out what every parent needs to know about social and emotional development and individual differences, which are my two platforms to create resilience, which is the third leg of the three legged stool. So you're going to. I'm teaching what I want everyone to know when they come to see me. I think this information should be out there for every single parent in the world. I can't wait for it to be out there. It'll be a guide on these are the basics we know so far that build resilience in children. And resilience basically means flexibility, hope in the body and the ability to deal with change. Because if the pandemic has taught us anything, it's that we need to build flexibility into ourselves and into our children. Because who knows what the future holds. [00:39:20] Speaker B: Mona, we are so excited. I know we both will go pre order the book right now. I should everybody who is going to be listening to this now. And then we'll have to thank you. We'll have to have you back on after it's published, which I mean, you know, we just have to have you back on. [00:39:36] Speaker C: It's March. March 15, 2022 is our pub date or anticipated pub date. I will come back. Can't wait to talk to you about the details of it because I do have how tos, like actual techniques and how tos and I can't wait to talk to you about it. So thank you and thank you for all the great work y' all are doing to support families and children. I am with you every step of the way. Thank you, thank you, thank you for all you do and for this podcast. [00:40:05] Speaker B: Well, thank you, Mona. We will talk to you soon. Yes, thank you so much. [00:40:10] Speaker C: Great. Take care now. All right, bye bye bye. [00:40:19] Speaker A: We hope you enjoyed the episode. If you're interested in learning more, head to empoweredtoconnect.org for our library of resources. Thank you to Kyle Wright, who edits and engineers all of our audio, and Tad Jewett, the creator of our music. On behalf of everyone at etc, thanks for listening and we'll see you next time on the Empowered to Connect podcast. In the meantime, let's hold on to hope together.