For all of us trying to stay calm in aisle seven.

I trained first as a mathematician, then a statistician, and somewhere along the way took up improvisational theater and the science of behavior. Improv has one rule sitting underneath all the others: when you don’t know what to do, turn toward your scene partner and listen harder. That turned out to be the answer to my research questions too.

We have gotten a bit more comfortable talking about trauma. Naming it, treating it, making room for it in a clinic. But what do we do when that trauma shows up at the grocery store on a Thursday evening, after a long day, with three kids in tow? Or at church, or the library? And what would it take to build communities that can see the nervous system at work underneath behaviors?

Twenty years in, here’s what I think. The hardest moments with our kids work the way improv works, not the way theater works. Nobody knows what comes next, least of all the kid, or anyone else who happens to be around. The only real move is to turn toward each other and pay attention to what is actually happening. That’s a skill, which means it can be taught, which is most of what I do now. Teams start saying the true thing. Parents repair instead of retreat. Kids learn how to move through a hard moment without pretending. And the person in aisle seven is known instead of watched.

It is also how you keep a child safer from abuse, which is why we teach relationship skills instead of warnings.

Connection isn’t the soft part. It’s the part that does the work.

These questions have clear, compassionate, science-tested answers, and I would love to tell you all about them.