

Day 4
Important Conversations:
Preparing Our Complex Kids for a Complex World
Today's lineup:

Rabbi Shimon Russell, MSW
Technology and Internet: A difficult Conversation
In this honest conversation, R. Shimon Russell talks out the complexities of technology choices with our children. He enumerates the specific factors he takes into consideration, emphasizes the obligation to role model appropriate use and his “radical” approach to helping teens who have already made poor choices. This is must-watch for any parent who wants to make intentional choices about their chinuch around technology and internet.

Naomi Najman, MD
Discussing Diagnosis with your Child
How do I talk to my child about his/her diagnosis? Medicatoin? Stigma? These are some of the important questions that that Dr. Najman, psychiatrist, addresses in this important conversation. She walks us through language to use at different ages and stages, how to talk to siblings and suggestions for how to help our children distinguish between privacy and secrecy in relation to diagnoses. She gives parents practical tools for making this conversation intentional and helpful.

Yael Trush
A Healthy Relationship with Money
In this conversation, Yael touches on important core money hashkafa to give over to our kids, what to do when kids tend to hoard money or when money “burns a hole in their pocket.” She gives easy-to-implement techniques to help our kids grow up with a healthy relationship to finances. She also talks about allowing finances to guide the choices parents make for services for their children (because our complex kids are expensive and can need so much support!) and ways to explore our own values and baggage around money.

Yaffi Lvova, RDN
A Healthy Relationship to Food
Feeding some of our complex is HARD- food smells funny, textures are “gross,” sitting down to eat is hard. How can we help our kids have a positive relationship to food? How can we understand their experience with food? Why do our kids get hooked on processed foods? Certified Nutritionist, Yaffi Lvova helps us address our kids’ difficulty eating by emphasizing finding JOY: using our kids interests to build food out of lego, finding out about food history or how other cultures eat, etc. Yaffi says she works on “creating neural networks of food and joy.” She also emphasizes feeding yourself diverse and healthy foods, not just for your health and sanity, but for modeling and exposing your child to seeing more diverse foods.

Devorah Genendy Radoff
Balanced Boundries with Complex Kids
If you struggle with making boundaries clear to your complex child, this conversation is for you! Devorah Genendy Radoff works with children with Autism, ADHD and other complexities. Her own parenting struggle and difficulty with boundaries led her on a journey to get clarity about how to set boundaries in a way that felt compassionate for children and effective for adults. She outlines four ways to work with your child around boundaries (based on where the child is at), emphasizes the importance and effectiveness of playfulness and gives us the explicit rules she uses in her classroom and her home.

Tovah Klein, PhD
Resilience: Preparing our Children for the Unknown
Tovah Klein, PhD is an internationally recognized resilience expert. As an expert in early childhood development, she became interested in how to prepare children to cope well with unexpected hardships. This interest led her to identifying the core pillars necessary to enable resilience in children. In this interview, she expands on each of the pillars, talks through what research has taught us about resilience, the importance of parenting with our imperfections, what we can do in moments of crisis to help our children feel as grounded and safe as possible and the importance of joy as a tool to build resilience.
