A move to Minnesota, where she is now a professor at the university, saw Gewirtz focus more specifically on prevention science: “the science of understanding how to reduce the risk of mental health problems in kids”. For the past decade her research has concentrated on US military families exposed to war, along with studies of Israeli families on the Gaza border exposed to rocket attacks.
Now a mother of four, she is publishing her first book, looking not just at parenting children experiencing extreme trauma, but at parenting generally. When the World Feels Like a Scary Place covers talking to toddlers through to teens about everything from climate change to racial injustice, and from bullying to gun violence.
It’s a practical guide, set out as a series of conversations (often between kids and “moms”; assorted Americanisms betray that fact the ex-Bnei Akiva girl and Norrice Lea member has now spent more than half her life in the States). Gewirtz was motivated to write it because she has seen “an increase in feeling like the world is a scary place” over the past 20 years, starting with 9/11, but carrying through to natural disasters like the fires raging on the West Coast, the death of George Floyd, myriad school shootings, hate crimes and antisemitism. Donald Trump’s election saw America become increasingly divided, with families split on political lines.
Yet Gewirtz’s father’s earliest memories are of the Blitz; is the world really scarier today? “The world feels like a more scary place, is it actually more scary, to me that’s the big question,” she says.
What is indisputable is the rise in cases of anxiety and depression and suicidal feelings in kids. Whether this is because we are diagnosing more now is impossible to know, acknowledges Gewirtz, “but we are more aware of it, so let’s grab the opportunity to do something about it”.
A key factor in changing perceptions of safety, she suggests, has been “the rapid and overwhelming access kids have to cellphones”. In the book, she gives the example of a boy seeing an alert about an abduction pop up on a friend’s phone, leading him to spiral into panic — despite the child having already been found.
Gewirtz takes a pragmatic stance on technology — “it’s impossible, even if we are very conscientious parents, to block our kids from seeing everything that comes in. You just can’t,” — and her book is partially about helping parents deal with the reality of a tech-infused world.
In fact, her main advice is to put the phone down and have conversations with children; something that sounds simple but isn’t necessarily happening. “We live in such a distracted world, it’s so easy to pay only selective attention,” she says. “It’s about being able to focus on our kids — not bore into them but just listen to them.”
It’s not just the technology we need to put aside, but our feelings too. “You can be more effective at [having these conversations] if you can put aside your emotional reactions,” says Gewirtz. “If we can be aware of how things affect us, and take time to think about what our values are, then we can give kids a lot more space to be heard and to have these essential conversations.”
Some “conversations” are drawn from personal experience; hers, or colleagues who have dealt with racism or prejudice. One deals with anti-Israel sentiment on campus, particularly from the left, something she says people find more surprising in the US than in the UK.
“It’s only recently that Jews in America have understood there is a version of antisemitism on the extreme left that’s no less dangerous than the version of antisemitism on the extreme right,” she says. And with her own university-age children, she has seen first-hand how difficult it can be for liberal-minded young Jewish adults “to figure out where they belong”.
Campaigning for a congressional candidate recently, her daughter found herself fielding calls from people who would make antisemitic remarks. “It was really eye-opening to her to realise how much antisemitism there is from people whose political views she’d otherwise agree with,” she says. She wrote about this specific issue “because I think a lot of people struggle with how to address it with their kids”.
Another section looks at explaining security at synagogues, a conversation she felt was needed in the wake of the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue. With something like this, she advises the first thing to consider is “who is your child, how old, and what kind of child are they”.
“Once your child gets past ten, whatever information there is, they probably have it already and so it’s less an issue of how much are you willing to tell them,” explains Gewirtz. “But when you have a young child and they are going to be asking questions, you want to be ready to say what you are willing to discuss.” So, if your child asks why there are guards outside shul, you could answer simply it’s to make sure we are safe, or you could expand and say it’s because in other countries people have broken into synagogues and killed people.
“The impact of those two sentences is going to be very, very different, so you have to think about what kind of anxiety your child has,” she says. Meanwhile, as a child matures, it’s about seeing thorny questions as an opportunity, in this example “to discuss things like hate crimes and antisemitism”.
Gewirtz is a big believer in buying time, rather than feeling you must answer immediately. “Because if you do, what’s going to come out is your reaction rather than your reasoned response,” she says. “When we feel like we have to say something, more often than not it’s going to be something that, if we’d had more time to catch our breath, would be different.”
So where possible, her advice is to “sit on our hands, take a few breaths and have a talk with your partner and think about what to do”.
The book was written before lockdown began, although a section does address Covid-19. With second waves looming, how can parents handle the uncertainty? Again, Gewirtz says we must avoid passing on the feeling of being unsettled.
“Our job as parents is to provide them with safety and stability, which is harder now,” she says. The crucial thing is to create as much structure and certainty as possible. “You can’t say to a child you’ll be in school or you’ll be out of school, but you can say ‘you are in reception and you’re going to be in reception even if it’s online’. Focus on what you can provide as consistency.”
As she says, “this is such a stressful time for parents but it’s easier when you set limits. Kids need predictability, and even though we’re in an unpredictable situation we don’t have to pass that on.”
When we speak, Gewirtz is quarantining in London, having travelled here to escort her daughter to start studying at Birmingham. With ample family in the UK, she is excited to be spending Yomtov with them. Back home, the family belong to a small Orthodox community; Judaism is integral to her life and has been a huge influence on her value system.
As she is a parenting expert, people always want to know what her children are like. Would they say she practised what she preaches? Gewirtz laughs. “I tried to,” she says. “I’m incredibly proud of our kids and I’m grateful to them for who they are.”
But fittingly for this time of year, she adds: “We all have to forgive ourselves. We all have moments where we think ‘if only I could have a do-over’. I think all of us parents do the best we can.”
When the World Feels Like a Scary Place: Essential Conversations for Anxious Parents and Worried Kids by Dr Abigail Gewirtz is published by Souvenir Press
