5 Questions with Dr. Ken Ginsburg

Just as GFS students had reading assignments over the summer, this year, our teachers read Lighthouse Parenting and Building Resilience in Children and Teens by Dr. Ken Ginsburg as a community-wide initiative focusing on resiliency. 

As a follow-up to this work, Dr. Ginsburg met with GFS faculty in August to discuss how we can provide students with safe and secure relationships that enable them to overcome challenges and foster growth. His presentation offered faculty concrete tools and language to support the wide range of emotional experiences students may face at home as well as at school. Dr. Ginsburg will return on Thursday, October 16 to present to parents and caregivers on similar themes. 

In addition to authoring books and presenting to educators, parents, and caretakers, Dr. Ginsburg is a pediatrician specializing in Adolescent Medicine at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and a Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

He’s also the Founder and Program Director of the Center for Parent and Teen Communication, rooted at CHOP which provides numerous resources and education to foster healthy adolescent development and strengthen family relationships throughout the nation. Additionally, Dr. Ginsburg serves as Director of Health Services at Covenant House Pennsylvania, an agency right here in Germantown that serves Philadelphia youth experiencing homelessness.

After his workshop with faculty, we sat down with Dr. Ginsburg for a conversation about his work, and what our families can expect during his session at GFS this fall.

Dr. Ginsburg, what calls you to working with youth and adolescents?

Dr. Ken Ginsburg: I'm a child and youth advocate committed to building healthy kids. That's the work.

I see my role as preparing adults to be the kind of people young people deserve in their lives. In that context, I do a lot of work around training professionals, but the people who are most impactful in young lives are going to be their parents. For me, that means speaking to parents about the power of unconditional love and the kind of scaffolding and support that gets kids through the toughest times. 

What are some of the key messages that GFS parents can expect to hear about from you later this month?

The essence of the talk will be the definition of success that parents present to their children. We’ll cover coping with stress, lowering anxiety, and building the best relationship where you have the most influence over your child in a healthy way. It’s really about the power of safe, secure, and sustained relationships that prepare youth to thrive and get through even the toughest times. 

It’s also about upgrading the sense of human belonging and human connection and moving away from the model that says, "We're done when our kids are launched into college” and moving toward a model of long-term human relationships.

How can parents expand on or update definitions of success, and why do you think they should?

When kids are asked what their success means to their parents, they often cite doing well in school, getting into good colleges, and making money as an adult. Often, parents are sad to hear that, because they want “success” to encapsulate relationships, service, and happiness. So we must redefine success. We need to think of the eventual 35-year old that our child will become, not just the 4, 12, or 17-year old in front of us. Success for this adult person looks like having a sense of meaning, being able to collaborate and take constructive feedback, among many other things. 

To redefine success requires helping our kids disengage from perfectionist thinking, believing in them unconditionally, and holding them to high expectations of who they are—not what they do. It means helping them identify their strengths and accept their weaknesses, while not being so afraid of failure that they are unable to think creatively or take risks.

In your books, you discuss different parenting styles, including Authoritarian, Permissive, Disengaged, and Balanced. You encourage parents toward the Balanced style, which you call “Lighthouse Parenting.” It prioritizes structure, rules, and warmth. What are some challenges people have when they're trying to adopt this parenting style, and how do you help them adjust?

We’re all products of how we were raised. When you do things differently than your parents, sometimes you have a feeling like, Wow they did things so wrong, and I'm so glad to be different. 

But sometimes you feel like you're letting them down, or somehow disrespecting their memory by doing something so different from them. And a lot of times we raise our kids to avoid the pain that we experienced in life, and we fear them having feelings of isolation or other tough moments we went through; we want to protect them from that.

There are no villains in parenting. There's always a starting point, and every one of the parenting styles has a strength. Also, making a huge shift in parenting styles doesn't happen from reading a book, and doesn't happen from even the most intensive interventions. So what I do is meet someone where they're at and help them build and broaden their skill sets.

In a classic permissive style, the parent’s strengths are that they prioritize their relationship and trust their kid. But while they think they are giving their kid more freedom, if you don't give kids boundaries, kids restrict themselves, and they don't take safe risks. So I would say to a parent who's permissive, "Congratulations for being someone who loves your child, cares about your child, and trusts them. Did you know that if you gave him very clear boundaries, he would actually take more chances, because he knows you're protecting them?” That's an example of taking the strength of someone's mindset and broadening them. 

How do you think it strengthens our community to have both GFS faculty and our parents and caregivers hear and learn from you? 

Undoubtedly, the two groups of people that are supposed to have the safest and most sustained relationships with children are parents and educators, meaning that their alliance and working together will make all the difference in young lives.

Dr. Ken Ginsburg will lead a Parent & Caregiver Presentation at GFS on Thursday, October 16, from 7-9 p.m. in the Barbara & David Loeb Auditorium. Doors will open at 6:30 p.m. with light refreshments available. All families are invited to join us; please register here.