Get on Their Turf with Dr. Suzanne Simpson
Are you worried about your teen’s anxiety, screen time, or emotional distance? You’re not alone. Get on Their Turf is the parenting podcast that helps you support your child’s mental health and build lasting connection. I’m Dr. Suzanne Simpson, teacher and researcher with 3 decades of experience, and biweekly I share expert interviews, parenting strategies, and real stories from my work in classrooms and a youth psychiatric unit. Episodes explore teen anxiety, depression, screen time struggles, listening without fixing, and spotting early warning signs of stress or crisis. Let’s raise kids who feel safe, seen, and heard—because connection changes everything.
Get on Their Turf with Dr. Suzanne Simpson
Parenting Teens: How to Make Life Worth Living Before Crisis Hits
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Does your teen feel disconnected, hopeless, or like they don't belong? What if we stopped waiting for crisis and started building the will to live early?
In this episode, I sit down with Kerry Martin - Harvard MPP, attempt survivor, and founder of Foundation for Life - a nonprofit dedicated to going all the way upstream on teen mental wellness. Kerry and I dig into what it actually means to make life worth living for our kids, not just stop them from dying.
What you'll learn:
- Why all children are at risk and why prevention matters more than crisis response
- The five program pillars Foundation for Life uses to hardwire hope and resilience early
- What dialectical behaviour therapy is and what parents can use from it at home
- Why being seen, heard, and understood is at the core of every child's will to live
➜ Foundation for Life: https://foundationforlife.us ➜ Stay One More Day Movement: https://stayonemovement.org
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Disclaimer: Please note that the contents of this podcast are not a substitute for professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment. My scope of practice is as an educator, and this work is intended to provide information for educational purposes only. Testimonials of lived experiences are opinions only and have not been scientifically evaluated.
If you or someone you know is struggling, please reach out to a mental health professional or a crisis line in your area.
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Please note that the contents of this website are not a substitute for professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment. My scope of practice is as an educator, and this work is intended to provide information for educational purposes only. Testimonials of lived experiences are opinion only and have not been scientifically evaluated.
How do we upstream making life worth living and meaningful versus just stopping somebody from dying?
KERRY:We are all worthy as you say of a life worth living. We're all worthy of joy and happiness. But at the very, very core, when everything is stripped away, we have to teach our kids about self-worth. They need to feel connected to us and they need to feel like they belong. There has to be unconditional love.
SUZANNE:Hi, Carrie Martin from San Diego.
KERRY:from Vancouver.
SUZANNE:From Vancouver and I bet you we have more rain here than you do. I want to talk to you today about Upstreaming in terms of suicide prevention in terms of this idea for parents understand that let's make life worth Living rather than just not dying because this is what you're all about so you have great experience about it and I'm excited to dig into this stuff with you you have Got Foundation for Life You Started This Month, which is a suicide prevention upstreaming platform. You are a suicide attempt survivor. You proudly have bipolar disorder. You are Harvard MPP. And you are really into this idea of like shifting upstream. Let's make life better. Thanks for joining me. What do you want to tell me about you after I did that brief intro?
KERRY:Wow, thank you. That was a lovely intro and thank you for having me. So yeah, as you mentioned, we're starting a nonprofit called Foundation for Life. And it's just not me. I have an amazing team. You are of course our connection scientists on our board. And we're grateful to have you. We call ourselves the HOPE Architects. And what we are doing is we are building sort of a fence of hope upstream. Why are we doing this? As suicide survivors that have come together, we have realized in retrospect that we can't wait for a crisis. We can't wait for our kids to sort of jump into the river, right? That work we're doing in crisis management, suicide prevention, don't get me wrong, super, super important. We have to jump in and save them, obviously. However, what makes much more sense to us as survivors is actually to do what's called going upstream. So why would we do this? It makes a lot more sense to actually prevent our kids from jumping in in the first place. So kind of in a nutshell, what we're trying to do at Foundation for Life is we're trying to go all the way upstream and do programs which get into sort of the earliest developmental windows for our kids. And what we do is we hardwire resilience, making life the only option.
SUZANNE:I just had analogy as you're talking. It's like you have a child that you don't want to drown. So instead of just hiring somebody to watch the pool and when they're drowning, they'll save them. You teach them to swim as early as you can. As early as you can, you teach them to swim.
KERRY:Yes. So when we're building this fence of hope and kind of cultivating the will to live in children, we are doing it by building five program pillars, which we can talk about if you like, which again, it's about hardwired resilience and hardwiring hope into our children. And in my own personal situation, when I think about, you know, what led me to take my own life and what would have made the difference. I really feel that these five program pillars have been in place. I perhaps wouldn't have attempted three times.
SUZANNE:I wanna get a lot later on into actually tangible solutions, what we do, but I actually wanted to talk about your own story of what you wanna share. You've said you have done counseling, you've worked with youth, you've done dialectical behavior training sessions, which is something that you can tell me about that later in terms of suicide prevention. What's your story that you wanna share that's led you to be, you and I connecting over this Suicide Prevention Upstream organization that you are launching?
KERRY:Well, I mean, I've been doing mental health advocacy work for a couple different decades. It all started for me. I, as you mentioned at the outset, call it, I like to call it anyway, I thrive with the bipolar diagnosis. I always, well, I haven't always been thriving. Let me just put it that way. The world is a difficult place for people with bipolar. We're often misunderstood and certainly stigmatized. And for me, started actually when I was at Harvard. I was really, really struggling. My mother actually is also a suicide survivor. I was struggling with that. I was struggling with coming out of the closet. And I really kind of lost my way. I found it within myself to reach out to the mental health clinic at Harvard and set up an appointment. I went. poured out my soul and had a good sort of what I thought was a good session. I went back to my apartment in Somerville and I stepped into the apartment about 10 minutes later, I got a ring and the woman I had poured my soul out to was on the other end of the phone and she says, Carrie, I'm sorry, but I can't help you. And at that moment, that was sort of a clinical failure understatement. I just felt Like, my goodness, Suzanne, I'm actually beyond help. I spiraled down after that and just didn't have the support I needed and I felt like I didn't belong and the world would just be better off without me. And that led to my first attempt. Thankfully, I'm still here. And then some other things happened in my life where I just couldn't get myself sorted. I didn't have the coping skills. the emotional regulation, distress tolerance, all the things we're taught in DBT, to really just to stay. It's one thing we talk about foundation, if the life is to stay one more day, then we'll be to you. I just couldn't get it together. So I've been through a lot, but I've managed to turn my kind of pain into purpose and to now build what we call it also in DBT, kind of a life worth living. And I want to make sure nobody goes through what I did. And part of Foundation for Life is making sure our children never go out on the edge like that. And they never ever contemplate suicide. word suicide is just a completely foreign concept to kids.
SUZANNE:I think you've just answered my next question, but I want to confirm that. I think she's read my questions. My next question was, what were defining moments for you that led you to this where you are doing suicide prevention in terms of let's make what life worth living? So it sounds like you being told that a counselor therapist can't help you was enormous. Are there other defining moments that got you to this today?
KERRY:Yes, I have a bunch of questions for some of them. I do like to ramble. So perhaps that's why I covered it. good. I obviously, my two other attempts, I got laid off from a company in the throes of bipolar depression. And rather than them showing some sort of empathy, we're often very stigmatized and misunderstood when we have bipolar. they even though was a rock star at work. didn't realize like, goodness, there's something wrong with Carrie. We just sort of reach out and say, hey, what's going on with you? Your work has really plummeted. And point in fact, just getting up in the morning and dragging myself out of bed and going to work took a mammoth, mammoth effort on my part. But rather than get the empathy I needed and the support, I got laid off. That caused another really, really difficult breaking point in my life. And then the third and final time was, actually I had a bit of a psychotic break and there was some issues with the broken mental health system in the States I won't get into, rather than be forced into involuntary treatment to get myself back on track, I unfortunately didn't go that route and I spiraled again and that was my third and final attempt. And through that whole entire process, I actually did start a nonprofit in 2014 called Hope Exchange. We specialize just in helping the bipolar community. I felt like if I had had somebody who had walked in my shoes that I could ring and say, hey, here's what I'm going through. I really desperately wanted someone to understand me. And there was nothing like that in the States. So we had a program where people could be virtually mentored by people like myself. And we did that for five years and unfortunately we couldn't get funding because I've found people don't care about people who have bipolar sadly. So I've been a mental health advocate, you know, after all these years after that I worked as a peer support specialist in the field of being a bipolar coach. I'm very, very driven to give back again because I just don't want people to go through what I did. There's nothing. more, more painful than struggling with this feeling that nobody wants you here. There will be better off without you. For three months, I couldn't get out of bed. It's just the most awful, bleak, lonely place. And I can't imagine my granddaughter being in that space for a nanosecond.
SUZANNE:I did an interview with David Woods Barley, who's on our team. And that was about healing from a suicide attempt because it feels so much of there's just so much of a story to get to that point. That there's healing that is absolutely required in the aftermath of an attempt. It seems like a process
KERRY:Yes. Yes. So as you walk through the darkness and you come out into the light, you go through this sort of transformation and you realize you, in addition to wanting nobody else to kind of walk through that path, you want to sort it out. And so my Solution after all of this time. I have a marketing background is I want to offer a picture of hope not despair like David We want to save people from jumping in we don't want people to do what we did in jump, right? There's no reason to wait till you get to the downstream crisis mode Yeah, we can go upstream and save people from jumping in So that is now my mission and You know, at the outset, we talked about suicide. We're not really a suicide prevention nonprofit. The impetus for starting it was because we're suicide survivors. But we're trying to replace the epidemic of suicide slash despair with one of with one of hope.
SUZANNE:What does that look like? Like how does that play out when you've got this upstream approach of making life worth living and meaningful versus just stopping somebody from dying? How do you know when it's happening? How do you do it? Just kind of more in general terms.
KERRY:So. Well, I'm sure David probably shared with you because he and I see the eye to eye on everything. All of our children are at risk of suicide. We spend a lot of money modeling who's at risk when pointed back to all of our children are at risk. So we need to go out to dream and really work with all of our kids. This is not about suicide prevention. This is about mental wellness. This is getting all of our children on track. Children today do not feel seen. They don't feel heard. and they don't feel understood. So all of our programs at Foundation for Life that we're going to be funding in this Hope Rising cohort are programs for our kids in general, and they're about setting up all kids. So they have what's called at Foundation for Life, A Will to Live. How do we do that? Well, we have programs in the States, and I'm sure you have in Canada, where we're going all the way upstream and we're helping our children. We have five program pillars. They are teaching hope to our kids. It's a teachable skill and scientifically proven. It's about arming them with resilience toolkits. It's about going in very, very early. Kids are hardwired, as you know, from zero to 60 months, about going in very, very early in what's called the alpha theta brainwave stage, early childhood priming programs. And it's about setting up this sort of more community and more belonging for our children. They're behind this wall of disconnection with social media. We have got to eradicate that. And then the final thing is, you know, for me, I'm bipolar. I'm also gay. We have got to go in and help these very vulnerable communities. My brother's gender in the States is usually rate is astronomically high because of somebody. Yeah. Well, it's one of reasons, but he's certainly not helping. So we've got to come in and we've got to spend more money on these extremely, really vulnerable communities that we're not right now.
SUZANNE:You know, one of the things about the LGBTQIA plus community is there's always a story behind that. I did an interview with a transgender student I had at my psychiatric unit, which was such a great interview. They were 17 at the time. And what came out was there is a story there and there's a very high rate of substance use. Like you said, there's a very high suicide rate. And there's our upstream that we need to start with when we're young too, right? Can you tell me so for you've got five pillars you said, can you give me like in two or three sentences of each, like the five in order and what a parent would do with that at home?
KERRY:Well, that's a good question. mean, obviously, when it comes to parents, they can't do all of these programs at home. Some of these are driven into the school districts and we can hope that they send their child to a school that teaches children this mental armor, so to speak. Parents can only work within the paradigm of what they can control, right? Parents cannot control, you know, the fact that their kids are on social media. Well, of course, they can control what you know, social media they can be on how many hours a day, but they can't control the extent to which their children have the sense of community and belonging outside of the home. And they can't control whether or not their children have access to early childhood priming kind of curriculum in the schools and so forth. But zeroing in on what parents can control when it comes to, for example, community and belonging. Are they allowing their children to interact with their grandparents? So there's this intergenerational kind of sensor belonging. Are they really taking time to be present with their children and making sure their children are seeing, heard, validated? I see a lot of parents who are controlling versus connecting with their kids. So there's a lot of things not necessarily within the confines of our programs, but a lot of principles underlying our program, so think parents could take away and apply at home if that makes sense to you.
SUZANNE:Well, so you just had a connection, right? Right. Go take your kid on a walk or for a bike ride or for a burger. Like that. I'm sure that everything would align with what we can do at home to upstream to make that life meaningful. Right.
KERRY:Right. So it's hard for parents right now. And I understand that. And I see that. But we can as parents arm our children to the extent we can with tools to help them cope with an incredibly challenging world. You know, I do practice DBT. I run DBT groups. I have and I am a coach. army now children with more coping skills, particularly people who I'm a bipolar coach. Because the world is challenging. So what can parents do? They can just accept that as their reality and they can work with, as I said, things they can control. I'm a big, big believer in DBT, as you and I talked about before we started this. It's a modality that is extremely, extremely intuitive. And a lot of It has been adapted to be understandable by our children. I'm not saying parents should only come, know, DBT therapists, etc. But some of it is very, very approachable. There's even the core, the foundation of DBT is mindfulness. Can we sit with our children and meditate, do a bit of yoga? Of course we can. Can we teach our children how to manage their distress properly, which is one of the three triangles of DBT? Of course we can. So there's lots of things in the toolbox that parents can kind of pull out to help our children deal with growing up in a very disconnected world.
SUZANNE:Can you explain what dialectical behavior therapy is? Like the basic premise of it and when we use it?
KERRY:One of the reasons I love it is it was started by a woman named Marsha Linhan and she was in her late teenage years and she was in a psychiatric hospital hearing voices going crazy quote unquote and nothing anybody did was helping her. So she checked herself out and she left. She went to a Zen monastery and was with the monks for a long time. And she came out and she said, well, there's gotta be something more we can do for people like me. She was diagnosed with a serious mental illness, by the way. And so she came up with DBT. It's kind of a variant on CBT, which is cognitive behavioral therapy. And she realized that not only can we have a modality with mindfulness in it, which was very, very different, but we can have this dialectic approach or thinking behind it where on the one hand, we have to teach our children to the things they cannot control. And on the other hand, we have to teach them that you also can work on changing yourself. You accept yourself for who you are, but you also can be responsible for changing things. So that's the dialectic part of it. And then the other thing she really pushed, and which I so, love and so beautiful is We, regardless of who we are, regardless of our diagnoses and things like that, our sexuality, we all deserve to be happy. We all deserve to have a life, in her words, worth living. And so all of DBT and all her modality and her practices and her skills she teaches on this triangle of emotional regulation, distress tolerance, interpersonal effectiveness skills is all driving people to build a life worth living based on finding your purpose, finding your joy. And to me, it's just a beautiful, beautiful modality. It is.
SUZANNE:So you might, I'm curious to what you think of this, because what I'm going to say is contentious here. I really, I so believe it all starts at home. And I don't mean that in a way that is guilt inducing. We all have our own mistakes. I don't mean that we have to be perfect. I just yesterday interviewed a former student of mine who's now a surgeon. She's now Dr. Ali Donaldson. And I was asking her, I mean, she's 28 years old. She's just new in this field and just asking her about, you know, connection. And she commented that one thing she saw when she was in her psychiatric rounds was if there was a youth there, patient there, sometimes the parents would go off about how bad that kid is in front of the practitioners. And they do this and they do that and they don't listen and they misbehave. And we said, wow, like there's your disconnection. And so I've seen that with so many psychiatric students that I had of just feeling a disconnect between mom and dad. And I say as a teacher, we have programs through the yin-yang in school, social-emotional learning, trying to get up our emotional intelligence. And what I found in my research and experience was at the end of the day, every child, like you said, wants to be seen, heard, and understood, valued, you are worthy. every single child on this planet, no matter what age you are, wants your parents face to light up when you walk into the room. So that was my parent, like I understand all of these modalities and I'm all about therapy. I'm all about, you know, dialectical behavior therapy, cognitive behavior therapy. I've had the opinion that there are things we can emulate at home. like what you said about the mindfulness or just that you are worthy, you're worthy of this life. So go ahead, what are your thoughts on that?
KERRY:Well, I think if you strip away all of the jargon and all of the psych talk and the therapy talk, you're absolutely correct. And it's very, very core. Any, I don't know about any therapy, but definitely DBT is this notion of we are all worthy. As you say, of a life worth living. We're all worthy of joy and happiness. But at the very, very core, when everything is stripped away, there is this, we have to teach our kids about self-worth and so forth and to do all that. They need to feel connected to us and they need to feel like they belong there has to be unconditional love So all of that where do the kids spend their time at home, right? Of course, they're out there in the world and we can't control all of that But we can we can equip them with mental armor Send them out the door wrapped in our love to make sure when they get out there They're best equipped to deal with all the bullshit. They have to face For sure the one thing I though I do want to add is I get approached a lot by parents who have lost their children to suicide. And I just want to make sure that there are parents out there who just aren't doing an amazing, amazing job with their kids. And when there's a loss like that, an unimaginable loss, there's guilt. Yes. I to make it very, very clear to anybody who's listening that you did nothing wrong. there's, there are situations where tragedy happens when there's no amount of love you could have poured into that kid, which would have changed the outcome. which is, it's just something you have to keep repeating yourself. And someone actually reached out to me three or four days before Christmas and they were writing 12 days. What is the 12 letters of Christmas? Whatever that thing is. Someone had just lost their son and it was their first Christmas that just happened. And she was writing. getting these 12 letters for the parents and the siblings he had left behind. And she asked me if I could reach out to people to help write these letters. I reached out to a couple of people on LinkedIn who I think you know, and they immediately wrote letters as his eyes, as I parents reiterating exactly what I'm just saying. There's nothing that the parents could have done to have saved their kids. So I just I don't know, I want to make it very, clear that there is good parenting, and then there's parenting that could be better. But it's incumbent on on schools and on other things in society to help. I think there's not enough stuff out there helping parents. There's not support.
SUZANNE:I'm so glad you brought that up. I find it such a juxtaposition. I'm so glad you brought that up because I totally agree with you, is that I wanna call a spade a spade. It starts at home. We need to step up the plate to the plate. Parenting is not an afterthought. Parenting is not a pastime. You are on for a period of time. And if you can't be on, you can do damage to children. But I'm so glad you said that because there are lovely, amazing families out there that have enormous grief over suicide. that they did everything that they could. So it's tricky in the same conversation to have both of those. And for sure that guilt I can't imagine. And yet I stand by it starts at home. So that's a...
KERRY:Yeah. I hear you too, because you know, I tell Sarah who's 28, you know, granddaughter, my, I think you've seen her pictures, Noel, think she's the most beautiful little kid on the planet, but I'm biased. And I always tell Sarah when she's sort of like making a decision in life about priorities, I say, Sarah, when you made a choice to have Noel, you made a choice to put Noel first, always, regardless of whatever is going on in your life, that kid is front and center, every single thing you do has to be about putting the wall first. And I think, you know, if parents adopted that mindset a wee bit more, when it came to making a decision about how do I spend Sunday afternoon, well, I can tell you, it should be with your child.
SUZANNE:Right, but then like you said, we still need all of these upstreaming entities everywhere else because we need it in schools. We need it in institutions, absolutely. And I have talked about this village approach. I do believe it starts at home, but it is a village approach. And some people that you and I know that have are suicide loss survivors. There were things maybe not in place around in society. they needed. okay here's my my last question before I do my wrap-up questions. Tell me where meaning and purpose specifically meaning purpose come into play with this up streaming approach making life worth living.
KERRY:I think, you know, I know you've studied DBT. One of the things that for most people, I'm not talking just about kids, but teenagers, you know, as you go into adulthood and college, I'm a particularly huge believer in this. What pulls us through the darkness back into the light, what keeps us on track is finding purpose in our lives. I don't know if you want to call it your calling, but that is just central to me building a life worth living. I know when I have myself being depressed and gotten into a lot of trouble, what's really gotten my life back on track is finding my purpose. And for me, it's always started with sometimes I've been too sick to work, volunteer work, it just fuels me this notion of giving back to help others lifts me back up. So we have to do whatever we can to help our children. find purpose, it's never never too early. Like I took Sarah a lot. We made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to go out and feed the homeless in the parks or to serve food to the homeless, like a shelter on Thanksgiving. If we can instill this notion of volunteering and giving our children kind of a view into what is it or how do you go about finding deep meaning and purpose I think the world would just be a lot better off in addition to our children.
SUZANNE:what I found in my research that I think is related to meaning and purpose. So I had 25 students over, well, participants, I don't like saying study participants, over the course of a year at the psychiatric unit. it was research, and like, what did they say that they needed for wellness, as you know. And I had a youth care worker ask them questions, and one of them was about my little tiny classroom on the unit. And remember, we were 10 bed inpatient unit, so it was very quiet. two teachers, which I was embarrassed to tell colleagues at the time. Like it was a ratio of one to five max. And the question was, what was the best thing of the classroom? This little tiny psychiatric classroom. And I thought they'd say they get Nespresso, there's books, they can come in with their stuffy and sit on the comfy chair and listen to music. None of that. What just absolutely gobsmacked me was of the 25. And we were an end of the road unit. Right, I lost eight students that I know of right now within the five and a half years. It was hardcore. I had the highest risk kids in the country with the highest death rates in the country for their age group. Every single one of the 25, every single one mentioned something related to success that they liked the best in my classroom. I could read, I saw that, I read. I did some math, I handed something in, maybe I can graduate. I learned, one kid said, I like psychology and maybe I could go to university. All of the 25, and nobody's ever guessed this when I ask people to hypothesize about it. Not a single person so far has come up with this, because I wasn't expecting it. And I equated it to the idea of meaning and purpose. Maybe I can do something in my life. I can get out of this whole, I can change the past and flip the script on my family. There is hope in my future was my analysis on that.
KERRY:It's kind of like they've given by reaching within themselves, they've given themselves like these little sparks of hope. And there's a little bit of light on the horizon for them. So they find it within themselves to kind of keep moving forward. We all need that, not just kids, but that's an amazing story. I'm so, however, the one thing that sticks in my mind is you lost eight of the 25 and that's the problem. We need to have these sparks of hope be sustainable. can't just be in your beautiful classroom. Totally. So we need to help our parents. We can't dump all the responsibility on the parents. We need to arm the parents with the tools and then we need to outside of the home, we need to do a much better job without kids.
SUZANNE:For sure. You it was interesting too. Not a single one mentioned any sort of a framework or worksheet that's done that we do in our classes right now. It was all the connection. Some of that cared. They all mentioned us as human being that leaned in, that cared. Yeah. I have always three wrap up questions that take us back to my main question about how do we upstream making life worth meaning for suicide prevention versus just stopping from living. And so here's number one. Can you tell me, What comes into your head with this question, the very first thing is how do I start this early? Like the one little thing with that little tiny newborn baby, what's the one thing that can start with these growing brains that we know are completely malleable when they are born to begin that process?
KERRY:I'm not a person who specializes in early childhood development and what do we do without children, you know, when they're tiny. But I am extremely maternal. This is a gut answer to your question. That's what I want. You know, obviously I spent a lot of time with Noelle when she was born. That kid never ever for one second doubts she is incredibly loved. And it's turned her into this little angel. I called her my angel, Sarah's the one and Noel's angel number two. Where you go into a room now and the first thing she does is she outstretched her little hands because she wants to be picked up. Not because she's in need of love, because she loves love. And she grabs her around her neck and she won't let go. And we have to make our children feel loved and comfortable with love to be honest. Yeah.
SUZANNE:I could not agree more. Could not agree more. You are the best thing on this planet to ever and to ever lock the earth. That's what I think of you, my child or grandchild or little little tiny being. Okay, here's number two. Can you give me three tangible ways that we can foster this meaning and purpose and kids knowing that they are worthy?
KERRY:You know, I go back to this notion about kids needing to be seen, heard, and understood. When it comes to seeing kids, we literally just to see them. If they've got a soccer game, go to the soccer game. You know, see your children, be present with your children. Don't turn on the TV. Play a game, sit across from the board game and look them eye to eye. Honey, how was your day at school? really connect and see your children. When it comes to hearing your children, don't sit there and listen to respond to them. Sit there and actively listen, validate them. Don't give a lot of advice. Don't control them. And then when it comes to understanding them, you have to understand what it's like to be a kid now. This is not what it's like when we grow up. The times have changed. So try and understand with a deep empathy, not sympathy, but empathy. If you haven't watched Bernie Brown's RSA on the difference between sympathy and empathy, watch it. So I would say I'm going to answer both on seeing, heard, and understood. Really dial into those three.
SUZANNE:on. Totally bang on. That's exactly I think you've just I'm going to do some big massive carousel and infographic about what you just said.
KERRY:Parents can pick whichever works for them and resonates with their own children. child has their own inner spark and needs something different from their parents. Pay attention, tune in.
SUZANNE:It is and you know what understanding like, well, each of those three, I think there's so much within that, like, it's also deep and broad and vast. One of the things of understanding is I I did an interview with a teacher that I had worked with. She's up north in northern BC teaching and she said get your head your butt. She said this isn't about you, right to understand you've got to get your own head out of your butt.
KERRY:out of your
SUZANNE:that you're looking at that kid before you in all of your own experiences, history, nuances, responses, perspectives have to go away to truly understand.
KERRY:Good. mean, I'm guilty of that because of my personal relationship. project on my girlfriend like you would not believe, but we cannot be doing that on our children. mean, come on.
SUZANNE:I know. Okay, last question. You might need to think about this and we can, I will edit out your thinking because I think this is tough question. When talking about the will to live, I want to be here versus just stopping death. If you could put that logo on a t-shirt, what would it be about that?
KERRY:Um, that's a hard question. mean, obviously with the stay movement now logo is stay one more day, the world needs you. Um, partly because, um, suicide is typically very impulsive and if people could just realize, um, the despair is very fleeting and just to hang in there. A logo for the will to live. It would probably, I mean, the stay movement is not a plea. for people to stay. It's really giving out children, I know the word hope is very esoteric. But we've got to give our children hope, which is sorely sorely lacking, particularly in the United States. totally. We've got to give our children hope for a future that gives them a reason to stay. And right now there's just heaps of reasons that are just dark. Well, there's just no good reasons really why for some people they should stick around. And we have got to change that. wake up with a smile on their face with a feeling like, gosh, it's a new day. I'm so excited. And not with a dreadful feeling like I don't want to go to school. because so-and-so is going to put me in a locker or throw my lunch away. I've got to sort that out.
SUZANNE:You know, and with all of that, the difference in the world feels to me like when you know that you were wanted, then you get up.
KERRY:Yes, when you are the most important thing to somebody in the world, like the most important thing to your parents, trust me, you're gonna wanna get up and go get in the cuddle.
SUZANNE:Yeah, yeah. Kerry Martin, thank you for your time. Tell me where we can find you. I will put it in the show notes here too.
KERRY:So you can find me at the foundationforlife.us. We'll be launching the stayinmovement.org in a couple weeks. You can find me there. But it's been a real pleasure. Love talking to you and I'm so excited you're on our team as our connection scientist helping us connect with the kids.
SUZANNE:Thank you, Carrie, for your time.
KERRY:You're welcome. Take care.
SUZANNE:Thanks for listening. Now you can do your part and share. This was somebody who needs to hear about it. building our kids up and making life worth living rather than just stopping dying. Click like on that little link below and I will see you next time for more interviews to come about how we can connect better with our kids and get on their turf. I am at drsuzanne simpson.com and fire some comments below. I will respond to everything and let me know what you want to learn.