On Monday, April 30, from 7 to 9pm, Dr. Lisa Damour, author and psychologist at the Schubert Center for Child Studies at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, took the stage of the Heller Auditorium for Parker’s “Nightviews,” in a lecture entitled “Parenting in an Age of Anxiety.” Damour informed parents as to how to better communicate with their adolescent children and help manage their stress in a more healthy and effective manner.

Damour spoke earlier that day with several different groups at Parker. She held sessions with the seventh and ninth grades, spoke with faculty and counselors, and presented during Morning Ex. She  discussed gender roles with the seventh graders, anxiety with the freshmen, and how to confront these topics with faculty.

The main floor of the auditorium was populated with parents (mostly female, with approximately ten men in attendance), both from Parker and from around the wider Lincoln Park community. Anyone could register online for the free presentation, with or without a Parker affiliation.

Damour made sure that she didn’t lose her audience, avoiding overly scientific neurological terms and instead relating examples and humorous stories. She began by detailing how stress is not the monster it’s often made out to be. “Psychologists don’t see anxiety as inherently problematic” Damour said. “We actually see it as healthy and normal thing. Stress is actually seen as strength-building. We see stress and anxiety as healthy and normal, but that doesn’t mean it’s fun to parent.”

Many parents were furiously scribbling away on notepads as she began talking about ways for them to better interact with their children at home. “I have an eighth grader, and I’m just very cognizant of all the stress in middle school and high school kids’ lives, and I just wanted to hear somebody who’s an expert in dealing with it and may have some tips,” Parker parent Kathy Monahan said. “And she had some incredible strategies. What really resonated was when she said, ‘Think about what you want when you come home and just want to vent. What are the things that you do to decompress and unwind?’”

Damour advocated parents acting as “emotional trash bags,” as opposed to forcing solutions on kids without their prompting. She shared ideas her own children have given her for how to be a less overbearing parent. Damour does a lot of her studies at an all girls’ school in Ohio, where she lives. She spent some time talking about relationships and how those add another stress to adolescents lives, and she urged parents to encourage their kids to pick their battles. She argued that the word “consent,” in the context of romantic relationships, creates an offensive vs. defensive narrative that is unhealthy.

She detailed what she calls the “ballistic model of parenting”: hoping that if one’s kids do everything they’re supposed to, they’ll be on the perfect path to a successful life. It’s a model she called both false and harmful. Latin School of Chicago parent Whitney Lasky was taken with this thought. “I thought something that was really interesting was the idea that if you do everything right, and you get into an Ivy League school, then your success is going to be written,” Lasky said, “but that’s so not true.”

Damour closed with a powerful imperative asking parents to check their children’s privilege when they complain about their lives by reminding them how lucky they are. After her presentation, Damour opened the floor up for questions from the audience.

Unlike many of the parents, freshman Noah Keim while happy to have attended the freshmen talk and Morning Ex, did not feel like he came out of it with a much larger understanding of stress and anxiety. “I thought her presentation was helpful, and it was an interesting way to talk about anxiety and stress, which we never really have talked about,” Keim said. “Other than that, it was sort of a generic stress and anxiety talk that you’d expect. There were some parts that were interesting, but most of it was kind of already known.”

A lively, interactive Damour, slightly different from the more composed version presenting at “Nightviews,” was met with approval during her Morning Ex, in which students were loudly participating and laughing as she asked first for students to yell out descriptions of the worst day possible, and then asked students to volunteer their ways of decompressing after a bad day.

After attending MX, “Nightviews,” or a smaller group session, Principal Dan Frank hopes that parents, faculty, and students learned from Damour. “I hope it affirms the importance that, here at Parker, an education is not only developing all these solid academic skills, but as a person you feel capable and confident to act on your skills and values, to go out there and make a difference in the world,” Frank said. “One’s own social-emotional development is integral to the formation of a person.”

Started by Frank and occuring about six to eight times a year, “Nighviews” presents experts in various fields for the larger community to learn from, with speakers such as author Ta-Nehisi Coates and scientist Eric Lui having come this year. “‘Nightviews’ is something I started because of all the opportunities I saw for people, both in our own community and outside, to come together and kind of have Morning Ex at night — Evening Ex,” Frank said. “It’s featured all kinds of topics and people. It brings a lot of people into the school to think about aspects of the human condition that might be meaningful to people.” Having known her for many years through friends, Frank was responsible for bringing Damour in to speak.

Damour herself offered what she thought was the most important takeaway from her presentation. “What I hope in my time here today is to try to communicate that stress is a normal function, and so is anxiety, and we don’t need to panic about having these feelings because they’re just part of life, and for the most part a very healthy and productive part of life,” Damour said. “I do worry that for some reason we’ve come to a place in the culture where we talk about stress and anxiety like we need to get rid of them. And that’s not an option, and it’s also not a good idea. Anxiety alerts us that there’s something going on around us, and stress comes with growth. You cannot grow without stress.”