Parent Previews: Home Again

Guest: Laurie Nadel, PhD, Psychotherapist, Hurricane Sandy survivor, Author, “The Five Gifts: Discovering Hope, Healing and Strength When Disaster Strikes” People from Texas to Florida will spend the coming months and years rebuilding their homes and lives after the devastating hurricanes and flooding of the last few weeks. Irma is still churning her way up the Gulf Coast, no longer a hurricane, but still a large, powerful storm.  Psychotherapist Laurie Nadel had built a career helping people overcome trauma when, in 2012, she lost her own home to Hurricane Sandy. She would go on to lead support groups for Sandy survivors and has a forthcoming book about healing from a disaster.

Guest: Ana Homayoun, Author, “Social Media Wellness: Helping Tweens and Teens Thrive in an Unbalanced World” You’ve heard of Snapchat, but have you ever used it? How about Tumblr, WhatsApp or AskFm? If you’ve got a teen or tween in the house, they know exactly what those sites are and probably use them more than you think. What’s the best way to talk to your kid about what they’re up to on social media? How can you help your kids spend less time looking at their phones without coming across as overbearing and out-of-touch?

Guest: Robert Malkin, PhD, Professor of the Practices of Biomedical Engineering and Global Health, Duke University More than one million children in the world have HIV. Many of them got it from their mothers at birth. Transmission of the virus from mother to child can be prevented if the baby receives HIV drugs soon after being born. But many babies in the developing world are born at home and either don’t get the medicine or receive it too late.  That’s why Duke University Professor Robert Malkin and his engineering students invented the Pratt Pouch—it’s like a ketchup packet of antiretroviral drugs that can last up to a year and doesn’t need any refrigeration. The mother just tears it open and squeezes the medicine into her baby’s mouth after birth.

Guest: Ulf Zoelitz, PhD, Post-Doctoral Researcher, Behavior and Inequality Research Institute  More than half the states in the US have legalized marijuana use in some form, and as more proponents of recreational marijuana use push to change state laws, it’s helpful to look abroad to understand the consequences of marijuana use. Two economists from the Netherlands—where recreational cannabis consumption has been decriminalized for four decades—decided to take a closer look at the effect marijuana has on students and found, maybe unsurprisingly, that the less you smoke, the better you’ll do in school.

Guest: Jeremy Carl, PhD, Research Fellow and Director of Shultz-Stephenson Task Force on Energy Policy, Hoover Institution, Stanford University Just a decade ago, there was talk of a “nuclear renaissance” in the US. Plans were in the works for several new nuclear plants – the first to be built in the US in 40 years. But a couple of weeks back, construction was abandoned on two of those new nuclear reactors – they’re not even halfway built but had already cost 9-billion dollars. And the energy companies building them decided just to cut their losses and walk away. The future of nuclear power in America looks bleak at the moment. But Jeremy Carl says it’s not too late to save it.