Speakers

<figure id="attachment_4958" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-4958" style="width: 125px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><figcaption id="caption-attachment-4958" class="wp-caption-text">Sally Pfitzer, Podcast Host</figcaption></figure>
<figure id="attachment_4959" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-4959" style="width: 125px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><figcaption id="caption-attachment-4959" class="wp-caption-text">Dr. Rahil Briggs,  National Director of ZERO TO THREE’s HealthySteps Program</figcaption></figure>

Joining us on today’s podcast is Dr. Rahil Briggs, National Director of ZERO TO THREE’s HealthySteps program. Rahil, thanks so much for being here with us today and just for timing, I’m going to jump right into our first question. What can we tell parents and caregivers about the potential effects the pandemic lifestyle changes could have on development, particularly on infants and toddlers?

Dr. Briggs: Thank you Sally, and thanks for having me. I know this question is on a lot of people’s minds. We’re a year into this and what’s been the effect? For some of these kids, it’s half of their life that they’ve lived within the COVID pandemic. But for parents of babies and toddlers, I think we mostly have really good news. Because they are learning through serve and return interactions, it doesn’t need to occur in one particular kind of learning environment or even a specific variety of environments for them to continuously be learning. So, parents can rest assured that babies and toddlers who are having that regular interaction with their primary caregivers in loving, supportive, nurturing ways with all sorts of serve and return moments all day long are still learning a lot. So, reading books, singing, playing music, just observing what’s going on around them. We often talk about—you know nobody expects that you’re going to put your life on hold and read 20 books to your kids every hour, but can you just comment on what you’re doing as you’re cooking dinner? Now I’m putting the water in the pot, and now I’m putting the rice in, and let’s watch it boil—and just really narrating or sportscasting that day.

I’ll say it again and again and again, you know, it’s about really taking care of oneself—avoiding toxic stress, bringing in mindfulness if you can. And I don’t mean that we all become yogis and meditate every day. That is not realistic right now. We’re trying to juggle 12 different things every minute.

It’s about self-care of adults. Self-care is not selfish as we’ve discussed before. Reducing that caregiver stress will reduce baby and toddler stress, and when babies and toddlers are less stressed, they learn better just like us, right? We learn better when we’re less stressed and it’s exactly the same for them. And of course, if there’s one thing we’ve all learned in this last year, it’s that stress can’t be avoided per se, but it’s about regulating. And so, for parents and caregivers it’s about self-regulating or asking for help. And when you do those things, either self-regulate or ask for help, you model really important social-emot