Sunday Pick: The science of raising kids (Part 2): How to raise healthy kids with Dr. Shari Barkin | from TED Health

[MUSIC] Hey Ted Talks Daily listeners, I'm Elise Hugh. Today we have an episode of another podcast from the Ted Audio Collective Handpicked by Us for you. Are you a parent or caregiver to young people? With everything from negotiating food choices to managing screen time to figuring out the right way to approach heavy topics about the world, it can feel more and more complicated to raise healthy and grounded kids. But pediatrician Dr. Sherry Barkin says it doesn't have to be. On this episode of Ted Health, as part of a mini-series exploring the science of raising kids, host Shashana Ungerlider speaks with Sherry about how to manage parental overwhelm and the importance of carving out 10 minutes of the day to model a healthy lifestyle and help everyone in the family thrive. You'll also hear snippets of a talk from bioethicist and clinical psychologist, Claudia Passo Ferreira, which was published on this feed late last year. You can listen to more of this special series on Ted Health wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about the Ted Audio Collective at audiocollective.ted.com. Now on to the episode. Enjoy. [MUSIC] This is Ted Health, a podcast from Ted and I'm your host, Dr. Sherry Barkin. It's our second episode in a special mini-series called the Science of Growing Up, exploring the health and science of parenting and raising young people. Across these conversations, we're looking at how children grow, not just biologically, but within their families, schools, and communities that shape them every day. And I've been thinking about how raising healthy kids has become complicated, not in a catastrophic way, but in the quiet, everyday decisions that add up. The after-school snacks, the screen time negotiations, the stress of packed schedules and tight budgets. So many parents I talk to tell me they're trying their best, but it still feels like the world around them is stacked with challenges. And the truth is, they're not imagining it. Many families in the US today are navigating neighborhoods without safe places to play. Limited grocery options are the ripple effects of chronic stress. But as we mentioned on this show before, these conditions shape childhood and profound ways. It's important to take a holistic approach to health, particularly for children as they continue to develop and grow. That's why I'm so grateful for people like my guest this week, Dr. Sherry Barkin. Dr. Barkin is an internationally recognized leader in pediatrics. Someone who has spent her career going beyond the exam room to understand how children actually grow, learn, eat, move, and thrive in the world. As a pediatrician and chief for children's health care of Atlanta and the pediatrics chaired Emory University School of Medicine, Dr. Barkin is known for groundbreaking community-engaged research about helping children and families live healthier lives. In our conversation, we talk about what's shaping children's health right now. From the environments they grew up in, to the daily stressors, families, or duggling, to the simple practical steps that can make a real difference. It's a hopeful, grounded look at how we can support kids not just in moments of crisis, but across the arc of their whole lives. Then join us for a talk that takes us back to the very beginning. What is it like to be a newborn? Philosopher and psychologist, Claudia Pazos-Ferrera explores how understanding the infant experience shapes the ways that we care for our youngest children. But before we dive in, a quick break to hear from our sponsors. Dr. Sherry Barkin, welcome to Ted Health. I'm so delighted to be here. Thank you. Dr. Barkin, when you think about raising healthy kids at this moment in time, with real pressures and then so much conflicting messaging about parenting, what feels most important for families to understand about how health actually develops in childhood? First, I remind everybody that the only way our life happens is one step at a time, and that we don't go it alone. What things have you already been trying that you feel works for your family to maximize good health? And where are the trouble spots for you? Yeah, I think that idea of starting small can feel like such a relief for people, especially when we remember that families of course don't operate in isolation. You've spent your career looking not just at a single child's well-being, but at the ecosystem around them. Especially when we know that zip code can be a stronger predictor of health than genetic code. Health happens everywhere all at once, and not as much of the doctor's office as it does in the home, in the schools, in communities, in workplaces. That's where we spend most of our time. So if instead you zoom out and you look and you say, "What's one thing in my home environment that would make this easier for my family?" So not thinking one child at a time, one adult at a time, but something very lowest common denominator that would make things easier for us. I'll give you an example. I have three kids and we made up, you put your phones away, including the adults. This is actually just as hard for adults as it is for kids. But we're going to take this 30 to 45 minutes. If you're lucky, you get more than that, but I would take 30 to 45 minutes any day. You have a basket, everybody puts their phones up so that you have to actually stop reaching for your phone and instead start reaching for each other just around the table. It's one thing you could do in a home environment. I'm not saying it's easy because we're so connected to our phones. It's almost become a part of our bodies. Then we do the same thing and we say, "Well, what's one thing at work? What's one thing in the schools? What's one thing after my kids get home from school?" If you break it down into those elemental pieces, it feels very doable. I certainly have tried that idea of putting the screens that the tablets are the phones aside with my sister and her kids. It makes a difference when kids are really, and the family is really engaged and connected. But it's like you said, really hard to do. Seeing how place and context shape health over time raises important questions about who's responsible and who has the power to create change. You've worked inside hospitals and out in neighborhoods. What does it look like when healthcare teams partner with communities? Then what would it take to ensure that those benefits reach every child out there? I always apply this model where the child is at the center. I'm a pediatrician. Childs at the center, you're surrounded by your family, and that's defined in your way. Families look like a lot of different things. Then you're surrounded by friends, acquaintances. You live in a neighborhood, a community, and then you're influenced by society and societal messages, whether you happen to live in a context where you're in a community with a park you can walk to or if you feel safe walking in your community, all these things interact over time to shape our behaviors, which then really influence our health. When I say health, mental and physical health to me, it's all our health. It's one thing. It's not separate things. That means I look at it from all different levels. I know it feels overwhelming. We need to have our own sense of agency to know that we are our most powerful advocates and our choices and our behaviors matter. They matter not just for us but for our kids. The second component is I'm very fortunate to be a pediatrician and to work with children and families in a healthcare setting. That is an opportunity to really help families understand where they can make the most powerful changes in their context. A lot of the work that I've done in my career is very exciting for me because I've been working with existing community infrastructure, parks and recreation, the library, the YMCA, the YWCA, boys and girls clubs. We have so much in our civic environment that if we fully utilize, we can get to better, faster together. The way that looks as an example, I've created connections and relationships between children's hospitals and parks and recreation. We have worked with schools so that we then design after school programs together where that just becomes part of the natural day. What we learned is that kids are the best agents of change for their parents. I know we think it goes the other way and I'm not saying that it doesn't. Parents of course help shape how our children see the world and how we behave in the world. But we cannot underestimate the power of that bidirectional relationship. When your child says to you, I think it's time to put phone down. You're probably going to put it down more than if I as your child's pediatrician. nutrition will remind you to do it. Yeah. Building on that a little bit, one issue where that, I think community approach and that integration really matters is childhood obesity. I don't need to tell you this, but maybe our listeners don't realize nearly one in five children in the US is now living with obesity. And you've led major community based studies addressing this issue. One area that you focused on is what's known as family based intervention, right? A program that works with both the child and their caregivers to build healthier habits by teaching practical skills around nutrition. As you mentioned, activity, sleep, screen time. So Dr. Barkin, what does a family based intervention actually look like in real life? Yeah. I'll tell you there are many different flavors, but the type of family based interventions that I've led and developed with my teams includes not just one family, but many families coming together in somewhere in the context of their community. It includes not only learning because a lot of people actually already know what's hard is applying, especially if you have $10 in your pocket or you live in a place that's not so safe or you're not feeling comfortable sending your kids outside to play, bringing families together in the context of their communities and allowing them to solve problems together. It's less of an expertise kind of approach of I have the information, here's the education, if only you apply it, you will get to your best health. That's not how it works. Health is dynamic and it also is contextual. So we would bring groups of families together and then we would use something called social networks, social networks, just for our listeners, it's not about social media. It's about social connection and sometimes social media does that, but when I say social networks, I would feel comfortable calling you to say, Hey, I'm going to be late coming home from work today. Could you let my dog out? And you, you might feel comfortable saying, could you take my trash out? I'm going to be away. That's that reciprocal tie is considered to be a social network. Sometimes those ties are strong and sometimes they're weak. We tend to learn new knowledge and new behaviors through the weak ties. So I'm more likely to change my behavior if a friend or an acquaintance introduces me into something new, rather than my sister, my brother, my parent, my spouse recommends it to me. So we use that sociology to guide when we brought groups together, how we put them together. We had people that we would then move around to generate more of these weak ties and we actually mapped them over time. And what we saw was we became a voice, but not the only voice. It was the community of families in that context. People would say, I know sleep is important, but I cannot get my child to sleep. And what do you all do? What works? The other thing that happened because of that sort of shaping using a social networks perspective for behavior change in groups of families is they started reaching out to each other. This was not part of our study. They noticed if somebody wasn't showing up, they went to their home, their apartment, they checked. Actually, this entire group went to check on a family that hadn't shown up for a couple of weeks because they knew that was unusual. And they had started walking together as families. And they knocked on her door and that's how they learned that she was in a major depression. And because of the social connectivity, that social capital, they were able to intervene. And that improved her health and their health and had a ripple effect across the families. So that's what I mean by family-based interventions. Yeah. Fascinating. You know, on this show, we've talked a lot about social connection in the context of older adults and social isolation and loneliness, leading to early mortality. So thinking about it in the context of families and around younger children, I think that's the right time, right? To be thinking about this, to be engaging in those community connections. Now, I want to talk about an area that I know you're passionate about. And that is thinking about childhood obesity. And when we talk about obesity, I think at least I can tell you from my own life, emotions can run high. How do you frame conversations about weight and about health in ways that protect dignity, build trust and hopefully avoid stigma? This is such a good question. The way we see ourselves and our bodies is a very important and intimate part of respecting ourselves. And so how we enter into those conversations really is from a lens of health. So for example, I usually will tell families, I notice that your child's weight is growing faster than their height. And that's not good for their health. Would that be okay if we talked about that? I found that the words obesity overweight, they carry a negative balance. And even though from a medical perspective, we know it is a condition of a chronic inflammatory disease state. It doesn't mean that when I'm talking to the regular person, when I'm talking to a family, it means you're labeling me and you're judging me. And then we've lost all therapeutic lines. Yeah, I think building that trust, finding the right words to talk about it is so critical and even more important when we remember how different families, lives can look across communities, right? You mentioned this resources and stressors can look wildly different. What does it take to design a program or even a study that actually works for families with different schedules, different incomes, cultures, challenges? I know this is a really big question, but maybe I know you've worked in this space a long times, maybe an example of this. I'm expecting that you will only ask me the big questions. So thank you. You are not disappointing me. Sorry, I mean that as a compliment because these are the right questions to ask. I don't assume that anybody lives in the same context. You are the expert in your life. So I ask people to tell me about their circumstance and then tell me about what they've tried and tell me what's worked and what hasn't worked. And then I always ask the question, how can I help you the most? Because if I enter from a place of I actually know these are the things you should eat for best nutrition. This is the physical activity you should have for optimal physiologic functioning. This is how much sleep you have to reset your metabolism and to lower your anxiety. All those things could be true. But if they are not applicable to you in your life, I haven't done anything to help you and that's the ultimate goal. So first, it's true humility. I think this is just how we should be in life to each other. Just not make assumptions. Instead, be curious. Tell me about your life. Tell me about your concerns and how can I help you advance your health and your child's health? Because if we do it together as a family, it will benefit everybody. Yeah. So understanding what works in the real world also pushes us to think differently about behavior change itself. And we're learning more about that in adults and kids and how small shifts compound over time. You mentioned this a little bit earlier, but in your research, what's one practice that consistently moves the needle if there is one, especially in communities where the systemic stressors like housing instability or limited grocery options, surely shape their daily choices. So the answer is going to be different for different people. It's starting small with something you feel you can do that matters to you. So I don't have that value and that valence that I would understand. That's important for you. I might say here are a menu of things that my patients have really benefited from for one small step. Do any of these sound appealing to you? And if not, what would be most appealing to you? So I always work with parent child pairs though. And if there's siblings in the room, I get them involved too. So some families really want to, they're more physically engaged and kinetic when I see them in the room. And I'll say, do you have, do you have family dance parties? Do you just turn the music on one song and have a family dance party? Is that something that you've done before? I often in clinic when I see the more kinetic families, I'll say, I am going to show you three exercises you can do as soon as you wake up every morning. It's going to make you feel good. It's going to build muscles. It's going to just rev up your metabolism and it'll take less than 10 minutes. And then I do it as part of the visit. And I have everybody do it with me. So you dance in the exam room? Oh, I will dance in the exam room. I will do pushups in the exam room. I will certainly do a plank. Like, all right, if I can do this, you can do this. - I love it. - I wish during training there was more of that. - My goodness. - You know what? I also I'll do plyometrics, but all of these things are just examples of, look how tangible it is. This costs zero dollars. This is something you could do in the morning, or at night, or you choose the time. Set your timer for 10 minutes. Everybody can find 10 minutes. - Yeah. Those insights, I think, highlight something that your work has made very clear and that's that children don't build habits alone, right? We often talk about habits as if kids just build them by themselves, but of course, adults matter a lot. So what have you learned about the role of parents and caregivers that maybe felt either counterintuitive or maybe hopeful? I really wanna underscore what you're saying. Parents, and I put that in quotes because every family is the composition looks different. If you are that dependable adult in a child's life, I'm talking to you. And the way that you matter is we learn by observing. This is what our species is built to do. So whatever you're doing, children are watching. So think about what you're doing first. Think about how you can improve your own health. We know, for example, that children who grow up with parents who are physically active, where parents are physically active with their children, they're six to nine times as likely to become physically active, not only in childhood, but when they become adults. Now, if you're off and you're in the gym and your children don't see you being physically active, it doesn't have the same impact. You have to see that this is actually normative behavior in our family is we wake up and we do these crazy dance moves. The Dr. Barkin showed me, or hold a plank, or do some plyometrics, or maybe we just take a walk after dinner for 10 minutes. It becomes normative and that becomes your set point. So paying attention to building those behaviors, your children are watching. And then the main surprise to me is, your children are still watching when you think they don't care. When you think they're just engaged in whatever screen they're looking at and they're not listening to you, they are listening to you. It's just on a different channel. It's on a different wavelength in their brain. Your voice will come back to them. So what you say really matters, what you do matters the most. One thing I hear from my friends, patients, is that what they're seeing on social media, what they're hearing in the news, is a lot of information. Sometimes it's misinformation. Research, of course, is always evolving. So sometimes the scientific community is coming out with new recommendations. What are we confident about when it comes to helping kids thrive? And maybe where are we still learning? Another really wonderful question. So first we're always learning. That's absolutely right. We take what we believe is the best information at the time and we use it to the best of our ability. That's all we can do. And then we might learn that things have changed and we will continue to grow and we will continue to change that way. So I would say here are the foundational truths. We are a social species. We're not meant to be isolated. And the strange thing that I have had the opportunity to witness because I've been a pediatrician for more than 30 years now, is with the introduction of screens, it looks like kids are engaged, but they actually aren't engaged with us and they're not learning how to deal with conflict. They're not learning how to deal with failure. They're not learning how to deal with their own emotions. And that takes us away from how we are structured physiologically to behave, to learn, to be healthy and to grow. Undeniable truth number one, we're a social species and being social means truly connecting where you feel loved in a way that you could reach out and you could say things that are uncomfortable and people aren't going to cancel you. They're not gonna ghost you. They're actually still gonna be right by your side. So that's undeniable truth number one. The second is that we run on fuel, that is the only way our bodies function. And remember when I say bodies, I mean mind and every other element of our body as well. So if we don't have appropriate nutrition, we can't function optimally. That's another way that our body is constructed. So what is optimal and what does that look like? That science is continuing to emerge and it probably looks different for me now that I'm at my age of life than it did for me when I was 10. And so the answers might be different depending on your developmental stage of life. But here is another enduring truth related to nutrition. Anything that is closer to what it actually looks like when it comes out of the ground or it has been prepared in terms of meat for us, the less processing, the better for your body. That is absolutely just a basic truth. The reason why we process food is so that it's convenient and that it can last longer. Nobody processes food to make it healthier. Now there might be things that are added to it where you say that addition might add to my health but if you're able to get that addition, let's say it's more protein, getting more protein from a less processed source is best for your body. So that's the second truth. The third is we're built to move, we're not built to sit. And yet we've engineered a society almost everywhere globally, we've engineered a society where there's a lot less need to move. In fact, we're happy just running in place. That's what a treadmill is. That need to move your body, our entire body is built to move. If you don't move, you're not gonna be able to sustain good health. So movement though, doesn't have to be like what I did last night with TRX, which by the way, if you've ever done that, hardest class of my life. - I love TRX. - Of course you do because you're very strong. I'm committed to making it easier but it doesn't have to look like that. Honestly, it can look like for me, I just walked between one hospital and another hospital here. That is physical activity. I took the stairs enough, the elevator, that is physical activity. When I go home and I'm vacuuming, that is physical activity, just move. So that's the third one. The fourth one is sleep. I'm not all species need to sleep, the amount that we need to sleep. But we need to sleep seven and nine hours and when you are a younger child, it's much more than that, it's 10 to 12. There are so many reasons why we're built that way. A lot of it has to do with metabolism, just physiologic cleanup and all the DNA repair that needs to happen. Memory encoding, just a flush of metabolizing the day and how you're thinking, your immune system, your inflammatory responses. All of those things are related to solid good sleep. So how do you get that solid good sleep? There really isn't a hack, there isn't a hack for it. And it's harder to do in some communities. If you live in a community with a lot of noise pollution, it's hard. If you happen to be sensitive to noise, you could put in earbuds. That's something that you could do to try to make it a quieter environment. Certainly screens and any type of blue light, that gives your brain a different switch and it makes your brain think I should stay awake. So there are certain things that you can shut down. So your brain can also shut down in a way that allows everything in your body that needs to happen. So that's number four, that's an enduring truth. And number five, it's not that stress is bad. We have stress systems and stress responses for a very good reason. We're supposed to be able to handle stress, but it's supposed to be acute. It should have an onset and it should have a switch that turns it off. If instead it's chronic, that's when it creates all of that chronic inflammation that just makes us sick. So our world today has created a lot of stress on and how we process information and even confusion about who we are and our value systems and our identities as we grow over time. And that's really stressful. Yeah, wow. These enduring truths, I think you touched on like every hot topic in health and medicine that we've ever done on this show. Dr. Sherry Barken, thank you so much. This was a fascinating conversation. Thank you and be well, be healthy. (gentle music) My conversation with Dr. Barkin really brings into focus. how early our health is shaped, not just by biology, but by the worlds we grow up in. She reminds us that children aren't blanks' lates. They're sensitive, perceptive humans whose bodies and minds respond to the environments around them from the very beginning. And it makes you wonder, just how early does that perception begin? What's happening inside the mind before a baby can speak? Move with intention or tell us what they're feeling? And how can this information help us consider childhood health from the first moments of a newborn's life? That's exactly what we'll explore in today's TED Talk. In it, Philosopher and Psychologist Claudia Pazos-Ferrera takes us inside the emerging science of infant consciousness. Drawing on new brain imaging research, she shows how even newborns and possibly late-term fetuses are already detecting patterns, reacting to surprise, and experience the world and ways far more complex than we once believed. It's a fascinating look at what awareness might feel like at the very start of life, and how childhood health and development begins long before any of us can put it into words. And now here's Claudia Pazos-Ferrera's TED Talk. You wake up in a new world, your eyes open to bright, confusing lights. Your ears are filled with mysterious sounds. Everything around you feels unfamiliar. This is a reality of a newborn baby. So what does it like to be a newborn? For a philosopher and a psychologist like me, this is a fascinating question. It is hard enough to know what's going on in adult's mind. What could be going on in a newborn baby's mind? Do babies have consciousness, the subjective experience of their mind and the world? In adults, consciousness involves experiences of seeing, hearing, and thinking, and feelings of paying pleasure and emotions. Do babies also have this experience and feelings that light up their inner world? So the tradition of you is that newborns are passive observers of overwhelmed chaos, and they may not be conscious at all. It sounds unbelievable today, but 50 years ago, Dr. Zucchini performed circumcision without an aesthetic, convinced that newborns in matured brain could not feel pain. Since then, developmental psychologists have shown that infants' abilities are much more complex than we thought before. But the question of infant consciousness has remained open. One problem is that infants cannot tell us how they feel. They cannot describe their thoughts, and we certainly cannot take a consciousness test. So how can we know what's going on inside their minds? When the answer is to measure infant's brains, over the past few decades, the science of consciousness has told us a lot about the brain basis of consciousness in adults. We found in the arosigners that are only active when an adult's conscious perceiving his tumulus. Recently, neuroscientists found the same in the arosigners in infants' brains. This provide powerful new evidence that infants might be active experiencing their surrounds from a remarkable early age. An innovative experiment in neuroscience is the audible paradigm. This is a test of how our brain reacts when something unexpected happens. I love this paradigm, and here how it works. The same sequence of sounds, Bbb poop, Bbb poop, Bb poop, suddenly, this part of family patterns interrupted by a different sequence, Bbb, Bb, Bb. Instantly, your brain detects the surprise, produces a measurable brain signal called the Pre-Fey Hundred Wave. This is also the ball response to an expected sequence of sounds only happens when an interview is conscious. People in deep sleep don't have it. People in coma don't have it when newborn babies do. The neuroscientists laying their hand has found that when babies are just a few days old, they show the same type of a brain activity in response to this audible sequence of sounds. What this suggests is that right from birth, infants might be truly experiencing conscious perceptions and conscious expectations. Research have also looked for conscious nerve through patterns of attention in the brain. In conscious adults brain, different types of network alternate their activity when we switch our attention between the external world and our internal thoughts. You know how it is. You might be doing this right now. You focus our attention in the speaker for a while and then you date room for a while. It turns out that infants do the same sort of thing. The neuroscientists, Florina Nati, recently observed the same type of alternation between these networks in newborn brains. This suggests that these switch on the focus of internal and external awareness are present right from birth. There is also evidence from gaps in attention. In our mind, intensely focused on one thing, it usually becomes blind for something that happens immediately afterwards. We call this phenomenon "attentional blink". Infants experience with this phenomenon too, but in this low motion. At three months old, infants take near a full second to shift their attention from one visual cue to another compared to adults that can manage the shift much faster. Amazingly, infants show the same type of brain response when this happens. It's strongly hinting they are active experience of their environment. Researchers have also found relevant brain patterns in premature infants, which makes you wonder, could consciousness begin before birth? This is a really important question. I told you earlier how scientists apply the audible tests to newborns. Well, they apply the same tests to late term fetuses around 35 weeks into pregnancy. The results were striking. This shows the same type of brain response as we found in newborns. So even before birth and entering the world, babies seem to be capable to consciously processing sounds, meaning their awareness might develop while they are still in the womb. Of course, this results as potential implication scientifically, magically and ethically. For a start, we now know that when we perform surgery in newborns or premature infants or late term fetuses, we should give it an anesthetic. I know that many of you be thinking about the abortion debate. In that context, I should stress that our strongest evidence is that consciousness requires brain structures that emerge after 24 weeks of gestation, a time when abortion is rare. The new evidence might extend to fetus in third term ass of gestation, but it doesn't extend earlier than that. This is a new understanding, and this new understanding is a working progress, but might change our picture of newborn babies. They are not passive creatures waiting for consciousness to switch on. They are tiny humans, our ad perceiving patterns and interacting with the world in a meaningful way. As human life unfolds, consciousness unfolds with it. Our sense of ourselves grows and changes. Our consciousness walks us and wanes until one day each ends. From the moment we take our first breath to the moment of or deaths, our lives are lit by the flame of awareness. We share this flame with other animals, and we might want to end day share each with machines. Collectively, our conscious minds illuminate the universe. And though it flame eventually fades, the light of consciousness never disappears. It is rekindled with each new life in the endless dance of existence. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] That was Claudia Pazos-Ferrera at TED in 2025. And that's it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening. Tune in next week for the final episode in our mini-series on parenting and the science of growing up. We'll turn our attention to adolescence, a stage that can feel especially be bewildering for parents and teens alike. We'll look at what's actually happening inside the teenage brain, why emotions run high, risks feel tempting, and connection still matters more than it might seem. If you're living with a teenager, loving one, or still trying to make sense of your own teen years, that conversation is for you. Ted Health is a podcast from Ted. And I'd love to hear your thoughts about this episode. Send me a message on Instagram @ShoshanaMD. This episode was produced by me, Shoshana Ungerlighter, and Jess Shane, edited by Alejandro Salazar, and fact checked by Vanessa Garcia Woodworth. Special thanks to Maria Lagis, Faraday Grunge, Danielle Balerizo, Constanza Gallardo, Tansica Sangmar Nihong, and Roxanne Highlash. [BLANK_AUDIO]