- What
is your newest book, The Antidotes: Pollution Solution, about? The Antidotes: Pollution
Solution
is about Gir, Izi, and their fifth-grade friends coming out of a pandemic
only to discover that a plastic-eating bacteria is making fish and kids
sick. They apply basic public health knowledge, science, and technology to
understand the problem and develop a solution. They also have secret meetings, do a little spy work, and
make some useful discoveries. Along the way, they learn to embrace their
differences, and discover that they are stronger when they all work
together. The Antidotes race against the clock to get out the word to kids
around the world about how to stay safe. But— will the Antidotes be able
to get enough kids to reduce their plastic use before it makes any more
fish or kids sick? The
book touches on returning to normalcy
after a global pandemic, the challenges of grief, and co-parenting in an
age-friendly way.
- What
inspired you to write it? At
the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrator’s (SCBWI)
Conference in New York in 2020, I learned there was a need for smart
middle grade fiction. I figured I had a ready-made audience at home with
my then 7-year-old son. It was the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, and
as a public health professional, I was horrified by the lack of
understanding and appreciation for how public health works among the adult
population. I started joking with my son that things would have not gotten
so bad that we would need to shut down if kids were in charge. That idea
really captured his imagination, and I found a writing collaborator who
had great ideas and very strong opinions about what would work or not for
kids his age. As the rest of the pandemic unfurled it reinforced my sense
that as a society, we as grownups have lost our sense of collective action
around our own individual health and our collective consciousness and
responsibility to public health. But young people haven’t.
- As a public
health specialist and advocate for nearly three decades, with your work
spanning across 45 nations, how do you hope to inform and empower our
youth to care for their well-being physically, psychologically, and
socially? So
much of a young person’s success and ability to thrive in life is
dependent on public health. It takes a combination of healthy individual
choices, but also growing up in a safe and healthy environment. Did you
know that in the United States, a person’s zip code is the most
significant predictor of health and life-expectancy? Where you live can
literally kill you. As a society, we are not teaching public health in
schools – there are components of it with nutrition, physical education,
sex education, etc. But public health is a way of thinking about and
taking action to ensure that youth can assess and evaluate their exposure
to risk and then do something about it. I am hoping to empower young
people through my teaching as a Senior Associate at the Johns Hopkins
Bloomberg School of Public Health, The Antidotes series and my other
writing and speaking, and by directly engaging with teachers, parents, and
young people through workshops and Book Clubs on how to embed basic public
health knowledge into everyday life.
4.
What can – and should – parents be doing
to help their children take ownership of their health? Instilling a solid
appreciation and understanding of science as the systematic study of the
structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through
observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the
evidence obtained- is an important foundation for taking ownership of
health. The study of one’s own body and how it responds to internal and
external influences is a big part of maintaining health and well-being. It’s
also important for parents to model healthy behaviors and practices for their
children and help to expose the cause and effect of different risks. When I was
4 years old, I pretended that my crayon was a cigarette and told my father that
I wanted to be just like him when I grew up. He was horrified, put his pack of
cigarettes in the garbage and never smoked again.
- How about the
health of the planet – can the next generation do what all other
generations have failed to do when it comes to protecting our planet’s
valuable resources? The health of the planet is the biggest external
contributor to human health that includes and involves everything from
access to clean water and air as well as nutritious food. Having politicized
and ignored changing ecosystems and demonized science, we have not done
what needed to be done to maintain a healthy planet. This is creating the
conditions for old diseases to resurface and new diseases to emerge. While
in previous generations, we had the knowledge and the resources to protect
the health of the planet and our own health, the next generation has no
choice. On the positive side, it’s not yet too late. If we are able to act
now together to bring to bear all that science technology and innovation
has to offer- then we might have a change to slow the process and even
reverse some of the damage caused.
- One of your
messages is to encourage more girls and young women to embrace an interest
and a career in STEM. Why do so many females still gravitate to liberal
arts and other areas, instead of to science and math? There are not
very many good examples of women and girls in STEM in the media and many
women in science, including myself, don’t easily self-identify as
scientists. This is starting to change in very positive ways with
characters like Shuri, Letitia Wright’s character in Black Panther and
Wakanda Forever, but we have a long way to go. Science is also a team
sport and without supportive men who can help champion meaningful
engagement and representation of women on the team, it is hard to break
through. Over the past 20 years there has been a significant increase in
women enrolling in science degrees, but still a significant gap in female
role models in senior academic roles. Innovation in general, but
especially in science and technology, is also enhanced through greater
female engagement, but it’s not happening fast enough. For many boys and
men, their success is a zero-sum game. If you succeed, I fail. Whereas in
science, if you succeed, we all benefit. In The Antidotes, this dynamic is
illustrated through Gir and Izi having to learn to work together as a team
as well as through the positive collaboration between Gir’s scientist
divorced co-parents.
- Your book showcases
a stimulating adventure for kids and touches on returning to normalcy
after a global pandemic and the challenges of grief. Did our medical and
scientific community make mistakes during the Covid-19 outbreak that we
need to learn from? The biggest failure during the pandemic was early
clear consistent correct frequent communication about what was known, what
was unknown, what to do, and why it was important for us to all be doing
specific things. With a new disease, there is a lot that was not known at the
beginning and throughout and that’s the reality- but the way it was
communicated was too little too late, inconsistent with lots of
contradictions, and at times unscientific misinformation. This
misinformation or incorrect information took root through social media in
a way that encouraged entire segments of the population to ignore the
science and put themselves and others at risk. It then also became
disinformation – where people knew the information was wrong but they
chose to spread it anyway through social media. This was especially
dangerous as it created an “infodemic” alongside the actual pandemic. Also
much of the misinformation and disinformation that originated in the
United States has spread to and taken root in many countries throughout the
world, making it difficult and slowing the progress towards disease
control. The early politicization of the pandemic made it hard for
everyone to work together to get it under control. It also undermined the
Centers for Disease Control to the extent that what was once the global
leader in public health is no longer respected in the global health
community, which is a shame. As a country we are losing our credibility
and leadership in public health.
- Why are so many
kids challenged to secure a mental wellness balance? Young people
are overstimulated. There’s too much exposure to everything all the time
through our hyper connected technology world. And they are not being
supported to adopt a foundation of health behaviors that can then increase
their resilience to adverse events like pandemics. There are certain healthy basics that
all young people and frankly all people can embrace that would contribute
to overall wellbeing and mental health. The first is good sleep- at least
8 to 10 hours of it. The second is a healthy well-balanced diet of mostly
fruits and vegetables. Then in today’s modern technology age, it’s
important to put technology into context with young people and find ways
to get off our devices to ground ourselves in the real world and engage in
positive human interaction and inter-personal relationships and then also
to engage with technology with eyes wide open about what it is doing to
our brains and wellness. Another key to mental wellness are positive
relationships. More and more young people are escaping into their devices
and losing the ability to form and sustain good friendships in the real
world.
- You were the
first person to study the impact of cellphones on the health of children.
What did you discover? In my research, I was exploring how
mobile phones were being used to increase access to health services and
information in low- and middle-income countries where land-line telephone
infrastructure never took off. Alongside this research, I came across
research looking at how mobile phones were changing everything from family
dynamics and parent-child relationships, but also child to child
relationships. I discovered that technology is a means to an end with both
strong and weak positive influences on health and wellbeing as well as
strong and weak negative influences. There’s also a lot we still don’t
know or understand about the short and long-term effects of mobile phones
on children. Some things we do know is that parent use of cellphones
around children is having a negative effect on child development and from
personal experience with my own son, he does not appreciate having to
compete with my phone for my undivided attention. We also know that it’s
better to keep children on larger devices for as long as possible. For
example, televisions over tablets, tablets over mobile phones, etc. As
soon as children begin to get their own accounts and lines their risk
increases dramatically.
- As a mobile
health pioneer and an award-winning digital health specialist, what are
your recommendations for phone and internet usage for young kids and
teenagers? Technology
is not going anywhere, so we must find ways to harness the positive and
mitigate the negative effects it has on young kids, teenagers, and even
ourselves as grownups. This varies from person to person based on how they
are using technology as well as their state of mind while engaging with
technology. We also must find ways to educate ourselves and our kids on
what we are being exposed to and how it might be influencing our health
and wellbeing. The second Antidotes book is about this very thing, but
through the eyes of the kids themselves as they encounter the benefits and
pitfalls of social media as well as the algorithms that drive the content
that they are exposed to. Some recommendations include delaying the timing
of a young kid getting a mobile phone, co-developing rules about how and
when they use their devices- including what photos are appropriate or
inappropriate, who they are able to engage with through the phone-
limiting to only known and trusted contacts, deactivating features on the
device that might increase exposure to strangers or risk, etc. I recently
received an e-mail from my son’s fifth grade counselor reporting on the
circulating of inappropriate sexual content among students through mobile
phones encouraging parents to talk to review their mobile phone use and
talk to their kids about things like the inability to retrieve anything
that gets posted to the Internet once it is out there.
For more
information, please consult: www.patriciamechael.com
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Book Marketing Help?
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About Brian Feinblum
Brian Feinblum should be followed on Twitter
@theprexpert. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog ©2023. Born and
raised in Brooklyn, he now resides in Westchester with his wife, two kids, and
Ferris, a black lab rescue dog. His writings are often featured in The Writer
and IBPA’s The Independent. This
award-winning blog has generated over 3.3 million pageviews. With 4,400+ posts
over the past dozen years, it was named one of the best book marketing blogs by
BookBaby http://blog.bookbaby.com/2013/09/the-best-book-marketing-blogs and recognized by Feedspot in 2021 and 2018
as one of the top book marketing blogs. It was also named by
www.WinningWriters.com as a "best resource.” For the past three decades,
including 21 years as the head of marketing for the nation’s largest book
publicity firm, and two jobs at two independent presses, Brian has worked with
many first-time, self-published, authors of all genres, right along with
best-selling authors and celebrities such as: Dr. Ruth, Mark Victor Hansen,
Joseph Finder, Katherine Spurway, Neil Rackham, Harvey Mackay, Ken Blanchard,
Stephen Covey, Warren Adler, Cindy Adams, Todd Duncan, Susan RoAne, John C.
Maxwell, Jeff Foxworthy, Seth Godin, and Henry Winkler. He recently hosted a
panel on book publicity for Book Expo America, and has spoken at ASJA,
Independent Book Publishers Association Sarah Lawrence College, Nonfiction
Writers Association, Cape Cod Writers Association, Willamette (Portland)
Writers Association, APEX, and Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association.
His letters-to-the-editor have been published in The Wall Street Journal, USA
Today, New York Post, NY Daily News, Newsday, The Journal News (Westchester)
and The Washington Post. He has been featured in The Sun Sentinel and Miami
Herald. For more information, please consult: www.linkedin.com/in/brianfeinblum.
