How to raise kids who can handle hard things | Kathryn Hecht

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3:00This is TEDHealth, a podcast from TED, and I'm your host, Dr. Shoshana Ungerleiter. Let me start with something that many of us have experienced in some way. You're talking to someone you love, and they pause. They lose their train of thought, repeat a story they already told you yesterday. And you think to yourself, was that just a moment, or is it something more? The truth is that for people facing Alzheimer's, changes in memory didn't happen all at once. It happened quietly, gradually. A missed detail here, a repeated question there. Suddenly, something that used to feel automatic wasn't. And one of the hardest parts is this.

3:42By the time we notice those changes, they've been unfolding for years. So what if we could see some of this earlier? Early enough to actually do something with that information? And that's what caught my attention this week. A study published in JAMA Network Open from the Journal of the American Medical Association looked at a blood biomarker, something called plasma phosphorylated tau 217, or P-tau 217. And yeah, I know that sounds like something you just hear about in a lab, not in everyday life. But the idea behind it is surprisingly straightforward. researchers are asking whether a simple blood test could help identify who may be at higher risk for cognitive decline not next week not even necessarily next year but over the long arc of aging in this study nearly 2 800 women who were cognitively healthy at the start no dementia no mild cognitive impairment were followed for up to 25 years that kind of long-term data lets us look beyond what's happening right now and ask what might be quietly developing beneath the surface.

4:54And here's what they found. In women, higher levels of P-Tau-217 in the blood were associated with a greater risk of developing cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's later on. The risk wasn't the same for everyone. It was higher in certain groups, including older women and those with a known genetic risk factor. But the overall pattern held. This biomarker seemed to carry real information about long-term brain health.

5:23Now, it's important to pause here. This is not a crystal ball. It's not a diagnosis. It's not something that should cause panic. If tools like this become more widely used, the goal isn't to tell someone, this is going to happen to you. It's to better understand patterns of risk earlier on when there may still be time to respond and do something about it. Because for some people, having that information earlier could open a different kind of window. A window for prevention, for planning, for making changes while those changes can still make a difference. We already know there are ways to support brain health over time.

6:06It's managing blood pressure, staying physically active, maintaining social connection, prioritizing restorative sleep, addressing hearing loss, managing diabetes, and engaging in cognitively stimulating activities. But none of these are guarantees. They are levers. And those levers matter more the earlier we use them. There's also a practical side to this. Earlier insight could help people make more informed decisions about their health. participate in clinical trials, or simply approach aging with more intention. It shifts the conversation from reacting to decline to supporting function. And importantly, it reframes early information as an opportunity.

6:51At the same time, this study is also a reminder of how complex this space still is. The biomarker didn't behave exactly the same way in every group. The associations vary depending on age, genetics, and even across racial groups and certain outcomes. Which is often how science works. It sometimes doesn't hand us simple answers. It gives us better tools and then asks us to keep refining them. But zooming out, one idea really stands out. By the time we notice changes in memory or thinking, the underlying process has often been unfolding for years. And that idea shows up across so many areas of health.

7:33Heart disease, metabolic health, cancer prevention. But here's the other side of that. If risk can build over time, so can resilience. So can the ability to face something difficult and say, I can handle this. And that's where today's TED Talk comes in. If this research is about detecting early signals that shape brain health over time, Catherine Hex's work explores something just as fundamental, how confidence and resilience are built over time. She's a pediatric anxiety and OCD expert, and her message is both simple and powerful. Confidence doesn't come from eliminating discomfort. It comes from learning how to handle it.

8:16Not avoiding hard things, but practicing facing them. In other words, we don't get stronger by removing challenge. We can get stronger by moving through it. Here's Katherine Hecht on the TEDx stage. I make kids uncomfortable for a living. This week, I had an eight-year-old stab me with a needle, twice, took a kid into a basement on a spider safari, and played Uno on the bathroom floor with an understandably reluctant teen. It's only Wednesday. Now, I'm not doing this stuff because I'm an evil psychologist, I'm doing this because as a pediatric anxiety and OCD expert, I'm a professional bravery coach.

9:02I'd like to tell you about a kid that I worked with years ago named Sammy. Sammy was this sweet little third grade string bean who lived for adventure. Bright, curious, optimistic, could tell you everything you honestly never needed to know about airport design. But Sammy had a fear. Bees. His brain appreciated bees, vital pollinators. His body, however, reacted like they were flying yellow needles with some anger issues. As soon as those leaves turned green, Sammy would initiate his own personal bee safety protocol. No suites outside, social distancing from the flowers, even staying inside during his family's cabin trips.

9:48When Sammy got to me, he and his parents had tried everything to get rid of this anxiety. Deep breathing, distraction, no luck. They had also debated the fear endlessly. His parents would reassure him, you won't get stung. Sammy reminded his parents they were not fortune-telling wizards in four words. How do you know? This phobia was stealing Sammy's childhood, one sunny summer day at a time. When I sing happy birthday with a cringing 12-year-old as loudly as possible in the grocery store produce section, when I rank order photos of vomit by chunk level, or when I lick my own dirty shoes, I don't just do it for fun.

10:37Although, believe it or not, sometimes it's very fun. I do it for kids like Sammy. Because there is a method to this madness. And after a decade of clinical practice helping kids be brave, it's become clear to me that the method, exposure therapy, isn't just the gold standard treatment for child anxiety and OCD. It is a secret parenting playbook for raising kids that thrive. I want to share that secret playbook with you today. But before we talk about what to do, we need to talk about what we are up against. It's a wild, worried world out there, folks. According to the National Survey of Children's Health, pediatric anxiety diagnoses rose by nearly 30 % from 2016 to 2019.

11:25And that was before COVID. But you don't need stats or lists. You have felt this. Because thanks to evolutionary biology, when kids get anxious, adults get anxious too. Now, I have two girls, and home is the hardest clinic that I have to work in. when one of my little gals looks up at me with the big teary eyes, aka the mommy bat signal. My nervous system does the same thing that yours does. It responds as though I have discovered that the kitchen is on fire. The amygdala, the watchdog in our brain, starts barking, and the fight-or-flight system kicks in, and adrenaline surges, and there is this instant magical transfer of distress.

12:07Her emergency becomes my emergency. And in an emergency, what do you do? You rescue the child. Now, I am proof that professional degrees do not make you immune to this. In my eldest daughter's four short years of life, I have become a one-woman emotional SWAT team more times than I can count. I've answered questions for my daughter when she clams up with a new adult. I've sacrificed my sleep and allowed our little human space heater into the big bed for the night. I have forfeited all privacy while peeing. Because even that closed bathroom door feels too far away. Now, all of this is what I call parenting for comfort.

12:50And it is the single most natural and well-meaning and deeply flawed thing that we do. In the anxiety treatment world, parenting for comfort has another name, accommodation. In my office, it looks like the parents who removed everything green from the house because green meant vomit. In Sammy's case, it looked like kind, loving parents who altered family plans from outdoor fun to indoor fun. No picnics at the park, no meals on the deck at the cabin. Parenting for comfort is not limited to the parents of anxious kids. It's also the common thread in the last 30 years of parenting trends, from the helicopter parenting of yore to the gentle parenting of today.

13:36All of it is rooted in this idea that healthy is a synonym for happy. But I have watched this approach play out hundreds of times in my office, and I can tell you there are three big problems with parenting for comfort. First, it places an incredible burden on parents. It turns us into this stressed out member of the feeling secret service, tasked with controlling something we just can't. Another person's emotional experience. Second, it teaches kids that hard feelings are an emergency. When we cancel that picnic in July or open the bathroom door midstream, we may not say it, but our actions shout, this feeling is a problem.

14:24Third, it doesn't work. We can't eliminate the pain or mistakes of childhood. They're a part of the process of growing up. We cannot guarantee emotional comfort when discomfort is a side effect of being alive. If life won't promise comfort, our parenting can't either. Instead of parenting for comfort, we need to be parenting for confidence. When you parent for confidence, you flip the script. Our goal is not to get rid of anxiety, uncertainty, or distress. Our goal is to build coping efficacy, what I call handleability, this deep in your bones belief, I can handle it. That is the heart of exposure therapy and the key to raising kids that thrive, Not avoiding hard feelings, but experiencing them and still saying, I can do this.

15:19Our kids don't require a comfortable life. They need comfort with discomfort. So how do you do this? How do you parent for handleability? When Sammy got to me, all that he and his parents had tried hadn't really worked, and he was waiting to see if I would waste his time too. But I surprised him. Rather than reassurance or relaxation or distraction with Sammy and with hundreds of other kids, I use the recipe that exposure therapists have relied on for decades. A plus B equals C. Anxiety plus bravery equals confidence. Notice, anxiety is not the problem. It's a core ingredient. It's actually central to how the brain learns safety through what's called inhibitory learning.

16:17Bravery only rewires the brain when fear is present. No one gets confident they can handle hard stuff without handling hard stuff. I explained to Sammy that worry is a bossy bully, but bullies stop messing with you once you say no. in order to shrink worry, he needed to show that bully who's boss through practice being brave. Now, of course, Sammy was immediately convinced by my explanation and was like, ah, yes, Catherine, absolutely. Give me some bees. No, oh my gosh. He was like, uh, thanks. Hot take. I will consider that. But this is where grown-ups come in. A growing body of research from Yale Child Study Center and others shows that we as parents can change child anxiety just by changing our own behavior.

17:15If we parents go from prioritizing comfort through accommodation to prioritizing confidence through practice, we can make it much more likely that kids will take that leap into brave action. Parenting for confidence means supporting kids at each step of the ABC recipe. It means creating opportunities for anxiety through adventure. No kid jumps off the high dive if you never take them to the pool. I asked Sammy's parents to give him some confidence-building opportunities by resuming their family's summer fun. Walk to ice cream, smell the flowers, eat the watermelon on the cabin deck. Parenting for confidence also means be the bravery you wish to see in your child.

18:01Show your kid that they can handle this by modeling it. Do the scary thing. Sammy's parents didn't make Sammy go outside on the deck, but they did go out there and enjoy some watermelon despite the wasps. This is jumping in the pool and showing. The water's fine. Third, we need to celebrate confidence-building actions. Cheer for and reward those brave steps. Brave is hard work, and hard work deserves reward. Sammy built a bravery ladder to face his fears. It went from bee pictures to videos to Dan. Dan is a dead bee in a jar in my office. And finally, real bees. Each step earned brave points, which Sammy cashed in for trips to new restaurants.

18:50Now at this point, a warning. Parenting for confidence is brave parenting. It asks for bravery from kids, yes, but it requires bravery from parents. Watching your kid panic before the hockey game and sending them out onto that ice anyway? Asking them to eat in the den of snakes that is a middle school lunchroom? Or, if you are me, peeling your protesting one-year-old off your body, passing them to a teacher at daycare, and then walking out the door before bursting into tears? This is incredibly emotionally hard. These actions ask us to place a bet on our child's ability to cope when they themselves are screaming, don't bet on me.

19:33But here's the secret. The same way this anxious kids can transfer their anxiety to adults, adults can transfer their own confidence to kids. Thanks to social referencing, or how kids look to adults to gauge safety, if we stand our ground and remain calm, we can lend our kids a nervous system. Our job during that wave of anxiety is not to get kids off the ride, but to be their warm, steady anchor, a lap bar on the roller coaster of distress, the secure base that says, come what may, I love you, I will always love you, no matter what. So you want confident kids? Let them struggle, not suffer. struggle.

20:22Because confidence doesn't come from praise or protection. It comes from practice. Practice being scared and doing it anyway. It is hard, but it's worth it. Because here's the best part. Bravery is contagious. One act of courage lights the way for the next, not just for your kid, but for the people around them. The kid who faces their fear of bees doesn't just play outside again. They raise their hand in class. They try out for the school play. They speak up when something is wrong because they start to ask, what else am I capable of? And when they do, someone else gets a little braver too. By facing fear to do what matters, you give others the faith that they can do the same.

21:14That is why this work matters, not just so your child feels less anxious, but because all of our children are inheriting a world of hard, complicated problems. Polarized communities, economic disruption, global uncertainty. These challenges won't be solved by people who need to feel good before they act. They'll be solved by people who can say, this is hard, but I can handle it. In short, brave people. Parenting for confidence is not a luxury, it is a legacy. Because brave parenting creates brave kids. And brave kids are the ones that will change the world.

22:03So what happened with Sammy?

22:10That is the kid that wouldn't take an apple on a walk. There he is. And while you look up here at all of this bravery, think of the kids that you know and love. What sign do you want that child to be able to hold six months from now or 10 years from now? What sign will you hold to show them the way? What shoe are you ready to lick? revolutions begin with one person doing something hard on purpose where others can see so please let's get uncomfortable together let's thrive together and let's raise them brave thank you

22:59that was katherine hex talk at tedx minneapolis in 2025

23:06And that's it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening. TED Health is a podcast from TED, and I'd love to hear your thoughts about this episode. Send me a message on Instagram at ShoshanaMD. This episode was produced by me, Shoshana Ungerleiter, and Jess Shane. Edited by Alejandra Salazar and fact-checked by Vanessa Garcia-Woodworth. Special thanks to Maria Lages, Farah Degrange, Daniela Balarezo, Constanza Gallardo, Tanzika Sangmarniwang, and Roxanne Heilash.

23:53This episode is sponsored by Toyota. There's a difference between having options and having the right options. When something is designed well, it doesn't just give you more choices. It gives you choices that actually make sense for how you live. That's the thinking behind Toyota's new all-electric lineup. Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, they've built a family of vehicles. The versatile BZ, the adventurous BZ Woodland, and the expressive CHR. Each one meeting people where they are. Because independence isn't about doing everything differently. It's about doing things in a way that feels natural to you.

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