You are listening to Feeding the Mouth That Bites You with Ashley Parrish and Jessica Pfeiffer.

A weekly podcast guide on parenting teens and launching them into the world. As always, we are

joined by psychologist and author, Dr. Ken Wilgus. Hey, everyone, and welcome back on today's episode.

We'll be discussing self-harm and suicide today is going to be a

heavier topic so if you have little ones around you might want to pause this episode and listen to it

later when you're alone maybe on a walk or folding laundry in your room alone I just wanted to

put that warning out there Jessica you and I have looked up some

statistics about this and what we found is that one in four girls and one in ten boys are

self-harming. And this statistic comes from a study from the American Journal of Public Health.

It's pretty staggering the idea that

there are that many kids involved in self-harm. Now, I did want to put a definition out there as

to self-harm. So we're going to define self-harming as something that you purposely do to hurt

yourself without the intent of dying, such as cutting yourself or burning yourself or pulling your hair out

or picking at wounds severely. Yes. Now, Dr. Ken, I want to know why do teens do this? What is

motivating this behavior? Well, this is where it's helpful to be involved in a profession where I do this all the time. So for 30 years, I've been talking to parents about this. There's really few topics that bring up more fear in parents than their kids harming themselves or suicide.

So what also makes it harder is that we don't have as much information as you might think to really answer a question like what causes kids to do this.

Self-harm, for example, comes from probably a number of sources.

And what I find useful is to think about some self-harm really is easily seen. This is your kid who reaches for the butter and

he's got these cut marks up his arm or her versus a kid that is really hiding it. So those are

two different types of cutting. There is a kind of cutting that is almost a chain reaction. I've heard

of someone else doing it. I've seen it and or easily spotted by somebody else, so it's a kind of

attention seeking. And then there's another kind that's really done, for example, on the hip,

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