Do you try to give your children messages about gender that are aligned with your values? Do you tell your daughter that she can do anything she wants to do, and look for shows that have equal representation of male- and female-presenting characters?If so, you're off to a good start.And...there's so much more to do.One of the core ideas in my book, Parenting Beyond Power, is that we parents pass cultural messages on to our children. We do that through the books we read, the actions we praise, and the conversations we have (or don't have).I don't censor the books I'm reading to Carys - we just talk about them. Right now we're reading Wild Born, Book 1 of the Spirit Animals collection. (I did check to make sure that the concept of 'spirit animals' isn't disrespectful to Indigenous people...it turns out it's a concept that White people made up, and it's only disrespectful if we try to link it to Indigenous practices.)Here's an excerpt from the beginning of Chapter 3:"Meilin sat on a cushion before her looking glass, meticulously applying facial paint. She didn't mind letting her handmaidens prepare her for festivals or banquets. But today was important. Today she wanted to look just right. And when you wanted something done right, you did it yourself.After finishing the accents around her eyes, Meilin inspected her handiwork. It was a work of art atop a work of art. People always remarked that she was stunning. She had never needed paint on her face to earn compliments. But now she possessed an allure beyond her natural beauty."It goes on to describe the strategic imperfection in her hair that made it "more appealing," and then she practices the looks she will display during her ceremony.There's a lot going on here... It starts with the White supremacy-based idea that if you want something done right you can never rely on others but only do it yourself. (This book seems to be primarily about relationships, so I assume it's marketed to girls. And we wonder where women and mothers get the idea that they have to do it all themselves if we want it done right?) The book opened with a male character who obviously cared a lot about his clothes who waited impatiently while a servant connected forty eight clasps.No male character's face is described in this level of detail. No male character puts paint on their face. No male character is introduced to the reader as an object to be looked upon with desire.This is how cultural ideas are passed on.This is how girls learn that being pretty has currency.That it's a girl's job to create and use their appearance to manipulate others.And if any boys happen to be reading, they learn that their job is to judge the performance.These messages are harmful for all children, because they say that certain behaviors aren't acceptable in certain children - for no other reason than it doesn't match their genitals (of all things!).What messages are your children learning about gender from the books you're reading to them, or that they're reading by themselves?In this episode Virginia Mendez, author of Childhood Unlimited: Parenting Beyond the Gender Bias (affiliate link), helps us to see examples like this in books, films, toys, and even in the language we use around and toward our children.Join me for this fun conversation with Virginia as we learn how to raise children who won't be constrained by their gender, and who can express their full selves.Virginia Mendez's Book:Childhood Unlimited: Parenting Beyond the Gender Bias (affiliate link)Parenting Beyond PowerMy new book, Parenting Beyond Power, will be released on September 5, 2023. It’s packed with ideas to help you create the kind of relationship you want to have with your child.Don't miss out! Pre-order today and unlock special bonuses like how-to videos and early chapter access. Click the banner to pre-order now:Jump to Highlights 00:39 Introduction of this episode’s topic and guest01:28 Sex involves biological traits while gender is a diverse social identity that defies binary categorization.04:01 Children's gender differences are largely influenced by societal norms and upbringing.09:11 Pink's gender association shifted historically due to color symbolism, marketing, and cultural influences.10:42 Despite some progress, children's media retains subtle gender biases and stereotypes.24:18 Embracing non-binary identities, using inclusive pronouns, and challenging traditional gender categories can promote a more respectful and inclusive society.30:01 Virginia Mendez's book highlights the societal constraints on children's potential due to gender stereotypes.43:15  Those new to the concept of non-binary identities should focus on cultivating awareness and curiosity about non-binary identities, while those already familiar can continue having open conversations with their children and encouraging exploration for an inclusive and understanding environment.46:59 Embrace discomfort as a sign of personal growth and be open to adjusting to non-binary language and identities.

Do you try to give your children messages about gender that are aligned with your values? Do you tell your daughter that she can do anything she wants to do, and look for shows that have equal representation of male- and female-presenting characters? If so, you're off to a good start. And...there's so much more to do. One of the core ideas in my book, <a href="http://yourparentingmojo.com/book" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">Parenting Beyond Power</a>, is that we parents pass cultural messages on to our children. We do that through the books we read, the actions we praise, and the conversations we have (or don't have). I don't censor the books I'm reading to Carys - we just talk about them. Right now we're reading Wild Born, Book 1 of the Spirit Animals collection. (I did check to make sure that the concept of 'spirit animals' isn't disrespectful to Indigenous people...it turns out it's a concept that White people made up, and it's only disrespectful if we try to link it to Indigenous practices.) Here's an excerpt from the beginning of Chapter 3: "Meilin sat on a cushion before her looking glass, meticulously applying facial paint. She didn't mind letting her handmaidens prepare her for festivals or banquets. But today was important. Today she wanted to look just right. And when you wanted something done right, you did it yourself.After finishing the accents around her eyes, Meilin inspected her handiwork. It was a work of art atop a work of art. People always remarked that she was stunning. She had never needed paint on her face to earn compliments. But now she possessed an allure beyond her natural beauty." It goes on to describe the strategic imperfection in her hair that made it "more appealing," and then she practices the looks she will display during her ceremony. There's a lot going on here... It starts with the White supremacy-based idea that if you want something done right you can never rely on others but only do it yourself. (This book seems to be primarily about relationships, so I assume it's marketed to girls. And we wonder where women and mothers get the idea that they have to do it all themselves if we want it done right?) The book opened with a male character who obviously cared a lot about his clothes who waited impatiently while a servant connected forty eight clasps. No male character's face is described in this level of detail. No male character puts paint on their face. No male character is introduced to the reader as an object to be looked upon with desire. This is how cultural ideas are passed on. This is how girls learn that being pretty has currency. That it's a girl's job to create and use their appearance to manipulate others. And if any boys happen to be reading, they learn that their job is to judge the performance. These messages are harmful for all children, because they say that certain behaviors aren't acceptable in certain children - for no other reason than it doesn't match their genitals (of all things!). What messages are your children learning about gender from the books you're reading to them, or that they're reading by themselves? In this episode Virginia Mendez, author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Childhood-Unlimited-Parenting-Beyond-Gender/dp/1529395380" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Childhood Unlimited: Parenting Beyond the Gender Bias</a> (affiliate link), helps us to see examples like this in books, films, toys, and even in the language we use around and toward our children. Join me for this fun conversation with Virginia as we learn how to raise children who won't be constrained by their gender, and who can express their full selves. Virginia Mendez's Book: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Childhood-Unlimited-Parenting-Beyond-Gender/dp/1529395380" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Childhood Unlimited: Parenting Beyond the Gender Bias</a> (affiliate link) Parenting Beyond Power My new book, Parenting Beyond Power, will be released on September 5, 2023. It’s packed with ideas to help you create the kind of relationship you want to have with your child. Don't miss out! Pre-order today and unlock special bonuses like how-to videos and early chapter access. Click the banner to pre-order now: <a href="http://yourparentingmojo.com/book" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a><h3>Jump to Highlights</h3>  00:39 Introduction of this episode’s topic and guest 01:28 Sex involves biological traits while gender is a diverse social identity that defies binary categorization. 04:01 Children's gender differences are largely influenced by societal norms and upbringing. 09:11 Pink's gender association shifted historically due to color symbolism, marketing, and cultural influences. 10:42 Despite some progress, children's media retains subtle gender biases and stereotypes. 24:18 Embracing non-binary identities, using inclusive pronouns, and challenging traditional gender categories can promote a more respectful and inclusive society. 30:01 Virginia Mendez's book highlights the societal constraints on children's potential due to gender stereotypes. 43:15 Those new to the concept of non-binary identities should focus on cultivating awareness and curiosity about non-binary identities, while those already familiar can continue having open conversations with their children and encouraging exploration for an inclusive and understanding environment. 46:59 Embrace discomfort as a sign of personal growth and be open to adjusting to non-binary language and identities.

189: Childhood Unlimited with Virginia Mendez

In this episode we hear from listener Lindsay who wonders whether it's safe to delay math learning, since (they've heard) there's a 'critical window' for learning language.Would delaying math learning mean that our child can't catch up later? Will they develop a negative view of their own learning? What if they can't get into college? We address all of these questions and more.Parenting Beyond PowerMy new book, Parenting Beyond Power, will be released on September 5, 2023. It’s packed with ideas to help you create the kind of relationship you want to have with your child.Don't miss out! Pre-order today and unlock special bonuses like how-to videos and early chapter access. Click the banner to pre-order now:The Learning MembershipDiscover an empowering learning approach for your child. The Learning Membership supports you in nurturing their love for learning–whether you homeschool or send them to school! In our supportive community, we cherish their unique learning style, fostering curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking. Enrollment is now open until August 9, 2023.  Join now and watch your child soar to new heights of knowledge and lifelong learning! Click the banner to sign up!  If you want to get a taste for what it's like to be in the Learning Membership, sign up for the FREE 90 minute You Are Your Child's Best Teacher masterclass. It's now available to watch on demand until August 6, 2023. Sign up now! Jump to Highlights01:10 Listener Lindsay asks the question, “How safe is it to neglect math education until your child shows some kind of interest in wanting to do it?”01:48 Jen gives her academic history in math and admits to applying problem-solving strategies without full comprehension.07:44 The critical period for learning seen in animal research also applies to children with severe language deprivation during early months.08:51 The critical period for language development and second language acquisition is questioned in relation to math learning.12:58 Sudbury School's anecdotal evidence suggests children can learn math quickly when motivated, sparking questions about early teaching, fostering a love of learning, and the impact on future opportunities.15:54 Emphasizing intrinsic motivation over forced comparisons in math fosters self-awareness, more vital for a fulfilling life than specific skills.19:31 Cognitively Guided Instruction values children's math knowledge, encourages pattern exploration, and validates individual methods, fostering a deeper understanding of math concepts.22:09 Fostering children's intuitive understanding of math through collaborative learning and self-developed algorithms is a powerful approach.24:01 Don't worry about formal math instruction; children will naturally develop their own strategies and algorithms when provided with a supportive learning environment.ReferencesSingleton, D., &amp; Lesniewska, J. (2021). The critical period hypothesis for L2 acquisition: An unfalsifiable embarrassment? Languages 6(3), 149.

In this episode we hear from listener Lindsay who wonders whether it's safe to delay math learning, since (they've heard) there's a 'critical window' for learning language. Would delaying math learning mean that our child can't catch up later? Will they develop a negative view of their own learning? What if they can't get into college? We address all of these questions and more. Parenting Beyond Power My new book, Parenting Beyond Power, will be released on September 5, 2023. It’s packed with ideas to help you create the kind of relationship you want to have with your child. Don't miss out! Pre-order today and unlock special bonuses like how-to videos and early chapter access. Click the banner to pre-order now: <a href="http://yourparentingmojo.com/book" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>The Learning Membership Discover an empowering learning approach for your child. The Learning Membership supports you in nurturing their love for learning–whether you homeschool or send them to school!  In our supportive community, we cherish their unique learning style, fostering curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking. Enrollment is now open until August 9, 2023.  Join now and watch your child soar to new heights of knowledge and lifelong learning! Click the banner to sign up! <a href="https://yourparentingmojo.com/learningmembership/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> <h3></h3>  If you want to get a taste for what it's like to be in the Learning Membership, sign up for the FREE 90 minute You Are Your Child's Best Teacher masterclass. It's now available to watch on demand until August 6, 2023. Sign up now! <a href="https://yourparentingmojo.com/bestteacher/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a><h3></h3> <h3>Jump to Highlights</h3>01:10 Listener Lindsay asks the question, “How safe is it to neglect math education until your child shows some kind of interest in wanting to do it?” 01:48 Jen gives her academic history in math and admits to applying problem-solving strategies without full comprehension. 07:44 The critical period for learning seen in animal research also applies to children with severe language deprivation during early months. 08:51 The critical period for language development and second language acquisition is questioned in relation to math learning. 12:58 Sudbury School's anecdotal evidence suggests children can learn math quickly when motivated, sparking questions about early teaching, fostering a love of learning, and the impact on future opportunities. 15:54 Emphasizing intrinsic motivation over forced comparisons in math fosters self-awareness, more vital for a fulfilling life than specific skills. 19:31 Cognitively Guided Instruction values children's math knowledge, encourages pattern exploration, and validates individual methods, fostering a deeper understanding of math concepts. 22:09 Fostering children's intuitive understanding of math through collaborative learning and self-developed algorithms is a powerful approach. 24:01 Don't worry about formal math instruction; children will naturally develop their own strategies and algorithms when provided with a supportive learning environment. <h3>References</h3>Singleton, D., &amp; Lesniewska, J. (2021). The critical period hypothesis for L2 acquisition: An unfalsifiable embarrassment? Languages 6(3), 149.

Q&A 4: Is it safe to delay math learning?

When you listen to this episode you may get a bit of a sense of deja vu - way back in 2020, listener Kelly reached out to me and asked if I would be willing to do an episode on parental burnout, which she was struggling to navigate at the time. We ended up interviewing Dr. Moira Mikolajczak, one of the world's experts on parental burnout.     After the conversation Dr. Mikolajczak expressed to me how much her heart went out to Kelly, who was navigating what seemed like an individual-level problem when it was actually very much our society's failure to support her that created the problem. Having explored the connection between race and parenting in a series of episodes the previous year, ideas were definitely percolating for me about how societal issues show up in our families which is, of course, a massive theme in my book (which will be published on September 5!).     So it was so amazing to see Kelly recently in a much better place, reflecting on the connections between her school-based learning and her burnout, and how she's taking steps to help her child learn lessons she thinks are truly important, like how to:     Think critically about messages she receives from other people; See multiple people's needs in an interaction, and find ways to meet both of their needs; Learn about the world immediately around her (which often involves Kelly backing off and not doing anything, rather than stepping in to teach a lesson).     Kelly's children are certainly learning profound lessons in this process - but so is Kelly. I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone so delighted to say that she's thrown out a puzzle book that still had three un-done puzzles in that she didn't want to do, having (finally) learned that it's OK not to finish every single thing you start. Because not being able to do that can lead to burnout.            Parenting Beyond Power          My new book, Parenting Beyond Power, will be released on September 5, 2023. It’s packed with ideas to help you create the kind of relationship you want to have with your child.     Don't miss out! Pre-order today and unlock special bonuses like how-to videos and early chapter access. Click the banner to pre-order now:       The Learning Membership     Discover an empowering learning approach for your child. The Learning Membership supports you in nurturing their love for learning–whether you homeschool or send them to school!      In our supportive community, we cherish their unique learning style, fostering curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking. Enrollment is now open until August 9, 2023.        Join now and watch your child soar to new heights of knowledge and lifelong learning! Click the banner to sign up!               If you want to get a taste for what it's like to be in the Learning Membership, sign up for the FREE 90 minute You Are Your Child's Best Teacher masterclass. It's available to watch on demand between July 24 - August 6, 2023. Sign up now and we'll send it over on July 24th!      Jump to Highlights 01:26 Introduction to today’s topic  02:02 Kelly talks about her family.  02:34 In the Netherlands, Kelly (who later discovered she had ADHD) attended a non-religious public school, enjoyed learning despite feeling out of place, and found ways to stay engaged.  06:32 Kelly’s burnout was influenced by her tendency to prioritize meeting teachers' expectations rather than pursuing genuine interest, the impact of ADHD on her learning experience, and the mismatch between her learning style and the educational system.  12:12 Before working with Jen, Kelly focused on academic subjects for her child's learning, while also recognizing learning in everyday experiences, but found it challenging to be at home with the children all day due to energy limitations.  14:13 Kelly considered homeschooling but found that the strict regulations in the Netherlands, along with the lack of community support and limited options for activities during the day, made it extremely difficult.   15:25 Kelly engages in discussions with her daughter about the school system, emphasizes meeting individual needs, and recognizes her advanced learning beyond the classroom.  23:33 Kelly, a member of the Learning Membership, engages in informal and organic learning explorations with her children.  30:37 Kelly's perspective has shifted, realizing that she doesn't have to finish everything and can find alternative approaches that work for her and her family.  35:19 Kelly feels more relaxed and confident in her role as a parent, allowing her child to learn from mistakes and pursue their own interests, while also engaging in important discussions about diversity and the environment to prepare her child for adulthood.  39:11 Kelly advises parents to have faith in their child's learning, embrace peace and calm, enjoy their child's curiosity, and play along with their exploration for their happiness and growth as individuals and good citizens.

When you listen to this episode you may get a bit of a sense of deja vu - way back in 2020, listener Kelly reached out to me and asked if I would be willing to do <a href="https://yourparentingmojo.com/burnout/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">an episode on parental burnout</a>, which she was struggling to navigate at the time. We ended up interviewing Dr. Moira Mikolajczak, one of the world's experts on parental burnout.   After the conversation Dr. Mikolajczak expressed to me how much her heart went out to Kelly, who was navigating what seemed like an individual-level problem when it was actually very much our society's failure to support her that created the problem. <a href="http://www.yourparentingmojo.com/race" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Having explored the connection between race and parenting in a series of episodes</a> the previous year, ideas were definitely percolating for me about how societal issues show up in our families which is, of course, a massive theme in my book (<a href="http://www.yourparentingmojo.com/book" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">which will be published on September 5!</a>).   So it was so amazing to see Kelly recently in a much better place, reflecting on the connections between her school-based learning and her burnout, and how she's taking steps to help her child learn lessons she thinks are truly important, like how to:   <ul> <li>Think critically about messages she receives from other people;</li> <li>See multiple people's needs in an interaction, and find ways to meet both of their needs;</li> <li>Learn about the world immediately around her (which often involves Kelly backing off and not doing anything, rather than stepping in to teach a lesson).</li> </ul>   Kelly's children are certainly learning profound lessons in this process - but so is Kelly. I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone so delighted to say that she's thrown out a puzzle book that still had three un-done puzzles in that she didn't want to do, having (finally) learned that it's OK not to finish every single thing you start. Because not being able to do that can lead to burnout.     Parenting Beyond Power   My new book, Parenting Beyond Power, will be released on September 5, 2023. It’s packed with ideas to help you create the kind of relationship you want to have with your child.   Don't miss out! Pre-order today and unlock special bonuses like how-to videos and early chapter access. Click the banner to pre-order now:   <a href="https://yourparentingmojo.com/book/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>The Learning Membership   Discover an empowering learning approach for your child. The Learning Membership supports you in nurturing their love for learning–whether you homeschool or send them to school!    In our supportive community, we cherish their unique learning style, fostering curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking. Enrollment is now open until August 9, 2023.    Join now and watch your child soar to new heights of knowledge and lifelong learning! Click the banner to sign up!   <a href="http://yourparentingmojo.com/learningmembership" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>     If you want to get a taste for what it's like to be in the Learning Membership, sign up for the FREE 90 minute You Are Your Child's Best Teacher masterclass. It's available to watch on demand between July 24 - August 6, 2023. Sign up now and we'll send it over on July 24th!   <a href="https://yourparentingmojo.com/bestteacher/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a><h3>Jump to Highlights</h3> 01:26 Introduction to today’s topic 02:02 Kelly talks about her family. 02:34 In the Netherlands, Kelly (who later discovered she had ADHD) attended a non-religious public school, enjoyed learning despite feeling out of place, and found ways to stay engaged. 06:32 Kelly’s burnout was influenced by her tendency to prioritize meeting teachers' expectations rather than pursuing genuine interest, the impact of ADHD on her learning experience, and the mismatch between her learning style and the educational system. 12:12 Before working with Jen, Kelly focused on academic subjects for her child's learning, while also recognizing learning in everyday experiences, but found it challenging to be at home with the children all day due to energy limitations. 14:13 Kelly considered homeschooling but found that the strict regulations in the Netherlands, along with the lack of community support and limited options for activities during the day, made it extremely difficult.  15:25 Kelly engages in discussions with her daughter about the school system, emphasizes meeting individual needs, and recognizes her advanced learning beyond the classroom. 23:33 Kelly, a member of the Learning Membership, engages in informal and organic learning explorations with her children. 30:37 Kelly's perspective has shifted, realizing that she doesn't have to finish everything and can find alternative approaches that work for her and her family. 35:19 Kelly feels more relaxed and confident in her role as a parent, allowing her child to learn from mistakes and pursue their own interests, while also engaging in important discussions about diversity and the environment to prepare her child for adulthood. 39:11 Kelly advises parents to have faith in their child's learning, embrace peace and calm, enjoy their child's curiosity, and play along with their exploration for their happiness and growth as individuals and good citizens.

188: How to learn way beyond ‘doing well in school’

Those of us in the Northern Hemisphere are in the middle of summer now, with the whirlwind of cobbled together childcare and kids at home saying: "I'm booored!".What's happening for them when they're saying this?And, more importantly, what should we DO about it?We don't want to have to entertain them, but what other option is there besides threatening chores?This episode will help you to answer their question during the summer months in a way that supports their wellbeing, and also address boredom that crops up at other points in the school year. Like when they're in school.Because while I approached this episode from the perspective of navigating summer holidays, it turns out that most researchers can't include the word "child" and "bored" in a study without also including the word "school."Parenting Beyond PowerMy new book, Parenting Beyond Power, will be released on September 5, 2023. It’s packed with ideas to help you create the kind of relationship you want to have with your child.Don't miss out! Pre-order today and unlock special bonuses like how-to videos and early chapter access. Click the banner to pre-order now:The Learning MembershipIf your child is often complaining of boredom and losing their love for learning, I invite you to join the Learning Membership, which opens for enrollment on Sunday, July 30, 2023. This membership is designed to support your child's intrinsic love of learning, whether they are in school or not. We’ll cover topics such as understanding how children learn, exploring their interests, finding inspiration in nature, effective learning strategies, recording their learning journey, and building critical thinking skills. The membership caters to homeschooling families who use the acquired knowledge as the foundation of their children's education, as well as families who choose traditional schooling but feel that their child's love of learning needs additional support beyond the classroom. Click the banner to sign up!You Are Your Child’s Best Teacher MasterclasssWant to have a taste of what it's like to be in the Learning Membership? Sign up for the FREE You Are Your Child's Best Teacher from July 24 - August 6, 2023 and we'll send you the 90-minute on-demand video masterclass. Unlock your full potential as a parent-educator. Ignite your child's love for learning, explore their interests, and create an empowering educational experience. Whether you are homeschooling or sending your kids to traditional schools, remember you are your child’s best teacher!  Click the banner to sign up.The Confident Homeschooler CourseConsidering homeschooling? Discover the power of the Confident Homeschooler course – your guide to providing a personalized and adaptable learning environment for your child. Gain the tools and knowledge you need to homeschool with unwavering confidence. Let's dive in and explore the possibilities together! Enrollment starts July 24, 2023. Click the link to know more.Jump to Highlights00:59      Introduction to today’s topic02:32      Dr. Peter Toohey's book explores various definitions of boredom, including one tied to predictable circumstances and another linked to existential despair.04:16      The concept of boredom has evolved over time.07:57      Boredom can be linked to dopamine levels in the brain.10:45      Boredom is connected to negative outcomes and low dopamine activity, leading to depression, anxiety, addiction, and poor performance13:51       Boredom in children, particularly in school, has negative consequences on academic outcomes and well-being23:32      Exercising autonomy and pursuing assignments aligned with personal interest and relevance can foster intrinsic motivation and enhance student performance and well-being29:53      The traditional school system prioritizes conformity over individual interests, leading to disengagement and boredom35:47      The Learning Membership offers support and resources for parents to cultivate their child's intrinsic love of learning, whether they are in school or not38:18      Students can combat boredom in school by gamifying tasks, finding personal meaning in them, and recognizing the value of boredom as a guide to more engaging activities42:54      Boredom serves a purpose in learning by promoting exploration, enhancing performance on creative tasks, and signaling the need for novelty and change45:26      The Warlpiri people in Australia embody a cultural mindset of infinite patience and being fully present in the moment, where boredom seems non-existent as they engage with their surroundings and find meaning in the immediate place and time48:17       As explored through the lens of Buddhism, embracing boredom allows us to gain insights into our minds and self-identity, fostering a sense of peace52:40      To wrap up, the response to a child's boredom depends on their environment–whether they are in school or at homeReferenceshttps://www.gotoquiz.com/results/boredom_proness_scaleBegnaud, D., Coenraad, M., Jain, N., Patel, D., &amp; Bonsignore, E. (2020). “It’s just too much”: Exploring children’s views of boredom and strategies to manage feelings of boredom. In: Proceedings of the Interaction Design and Children Conference (p.624-636).Brankovic, S. (2015). Boredom, dopamine, and the thrill of psychosis: Psychiatry in a new key. Psychiatria Danubina 27(2), 126-137.Danckert, J. (2022). Boredom in the COVID-19 Pandemic. Behavioral Science 12(1), 428.Healy, S.D. (1984). Boredom, self, and culture. Rutherford: Farleigh Dickinson University Press.hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York: Routledge.Joseph, N.M. (2022). Making Black girls count in math education: A Black feminist vision for transforming teaching. Boston: Harvard Education Press.LaCapra, D. (2016). Trauma, history, memory, identity: What remains? History and Theory 55, 375-400.Lehr, E., &amp; Todman, M. (2008). Boredom and boredom proneness in children: Implications for academic and social adjustment. In: M. Todman (Ed). Self-Regulation and Social Competence: Psychological Studies in Identity, Achievement and Work-Family Dynamics (p.75-89). Athens: Athens Institute for Education and Research.Lin, Y., &amp; Westgate, E.C. (2021). The origins of boredom. Unpublished manuscript. Retrieved from: https://psyarxiv.com/bz6n8/download?format=pdfLomas, T. (2017). A meditation on boredom: Reappraising its value through introspective phenomenology. Qualitative Research in Psychology 14(1), 1-22.Lomas, T. (2017). A reappraisal of boredom: A case study in second wave psychology. In: N.J.L. Brown, T. Lomas, &amp; F.J. Eiroa-Orosa (Eds.), The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Positive Psychology (p.213-226). Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge.Musharbash, Y. (2007). Boredom, time, and modernity: An example from Aboriginal Australia. American Anthropologist 109(2), 307-317.O’Hanlon, J.F. (1981). Boredom: Practical consequences and a theory. Acta Psychologica 49, 53-82.Pfattheicher, S., Lazarevic, L.B., Westgate, E.C., &amp; Schindler, S. (2021). On the relation of boredom and sadistic aggression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 121(3), 573-600.Toohey, P. (2011). Boredom: A lively history. New Haven: Yale University Press.Waterschoot, J., Van der Kaap-Deeder, J., Morbee, S., Soenens, B., &amp; Vansteenkiste, M. (2021). “How to unlock myself from boredom?” The role of mindfulness and a dual awareness- and action-oriented pathway during the COVID-19 lockdown. Personality and Individual Differences 175, 110729.

Those of us in the Northern Hemisphere are in the middle of summer now, with the whirlwind of cobbled together childcare and kids at home saying: "I'm booored!". What's happening for them when they're saying this? And, more importantly, what should we DO about it? We don't want to have to entertain them, but what other option is there besides threatening chores? This episode will help you to answer their question during the summer months in a way that supports their wellbeing, and also address boredom that crops up at other points in the school year. Like when they're in school. Because while I approached this episode from the perspective of navigating summer holidays, it turns out that most researchers can't include the word "child" and "bored" in a study without also including the word "school." Parenting Beyond Power My new book, Parenting Beyond Power, will be released on September 5, 2023. It’s packed with ideas to help you create the kind of relationship you want to have with your child. Don't miss out! Pre-order today and unlock special bonuses like how-to videos and early chapter access. Click the banner to pre-order now: <a href="https://yourparentingmojo.com/book/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>The Learning Membership If your child is often complaining of boredom and losing their love for learning, I invite you to join the Learning Membership, which opens for enrollment on Sunday, July 30, 2023. This membership is designed to support your child's intrinsic love of learning, whether they are in school or not. We’ll cover topics such as understanding how children learn, exploring their interests, finding inspiration in nature, effective learning strategies, recording their learning journey, and building critical thinking skills. The membership caters to homeschooling families who use the acquired knowledge as the foundation of their children's education, as well as families who choose traditional schooling but feel that their child's love of learning needs additional support beyond the classroom. Click the banner to sign up! <a href="https://yourparentingmojo.com/learningmembership/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>You Are Your Child’s Best Teacher Masterclasss Want to have a taste of what it's like to be in the Learning Membership? Sign up for the FREE You Are Your Child's Best Teacher from July 24 - August 6, 2023 and we'll send you the 90-minute on-demand video masterclass. Unlock your full potential as a parent-educator. Ignite your child's love for learning, explore their interests, and create an empowering educational experience. Whether you are homeschooling or sending your kids to traditional schools, remember you are your child’s best teacher!  Click the banner to sign up. <a href="https://yourparentingmojo.com/bestteacher/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>The Confident Homeschooler Course Considering homeschooling? Discover the power of the Confident Homeschooler course – your guide to providing a personalized and adaptable learning environment for your child. Gain the tools and knowledge you need to homeschool with unwavering confidence. Let's dive in and explore the possibilities together! Enrollment starts July 24, 2023. Click the link to know more. <a href="https://yourparentingmojo.com/confidenthomeschooler/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a><h3>Jump to Highlights</h3>00:59      Introduction to today’s topic 02:32      Dr. Peter Toohey's book explores various definitions of boredom, including one tied to predictable circumstances and another linked to existential despair. 04:16      The concept of boredom has evolved over time. 07:57      Boredom can be linked to dopamine levels in the brain. 10:45      Boredom is connected to negative outcomes and low dopamine activity, leading to depression, anxiety, addiction, and poor performance 13:51       Boredom in children, particularly in school, has negative consequences on academic outcomes and well-being 23:32      Exercising autonomy and pursuing assignments aligned with personal interest and relevance can foster intrinsic motivation and enhance student performance and well-being 29:53      The traditional school system prioritizes conformity over individual interests, leading to disengagement and boredom 35:47      The Learning Membership offers support and resources for parents to cultivate their child's intrinsic love of learning, whether they are in school or not 38:18      Students can combat boredom in school by gamifying tasks, finding personal meaning in them, and recognizing the value of boredom as a guide to more engaging activities 42:54      Boredom serves a purpose in learning by promoting exploration, enhancing performance on creative tasks, and signaling the need for novelty and change 45:26      The Warlpiri people in Australia embody a cultural mindset of infinite patience and being fully present in the moment, where boredom seems non-existent as they engage with their surroundings and find meaning in the immediate place and time 48:17       As explored through the lens of Buddhism, embracing boredom allows us to gain insights into our minds and self-identity, fostering a sense of peace 52:40      To wrap up, the response to a child's boredom depends on their environment–whether they are in school or at home <h3>References</h3><a href="https://www.gotoquiz.com/results/boredom_proness_scale" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.gotoquiz.com/results/boredom_proness_scale</a> Begnaud, D., Coenraad, M., Jain, N., Patel, D., &amp; Bonsignore, E. (2020). “It’s just too much”: Exploring children’s views of boredom and strategies to manage feelings of boredom. In: Proceedings of the Interaction Design and Children Conference (p.624-636). Brankovic, S. (2015). Boredom, dopamine, and the thrill of psychosis: Psychiatry in a new key. Psychiatria Danubina 27(2), 126-137. Danckert, J. (2022). Boredom in the COVID-19 Pandemic. Behavioral Science 12(1), 428. Healy, S.D. (1984). Boredom, self, and culture. Rutherford: Farleigh Dickinson University Press. hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York: Routledge. Joseph, N.M. (2022). Making Black girls count in math education: A Black feminist vision for transforming teaching. Boston: Harvard Education Press. LaCapra, D. (2016). Trauma, history, memory, identity: What remains? History and Theory 55, 375-400. Lehr, E., &amp; Todman, M. (2008). Boredom and boredom proneness in children: Implications for academic and social adjustment. In: M. Todman (Ed). Self-Regulation and Social Competence: Psychological Studies in Identity, Achievement and Work-Family Dynamics (p.75-89). Athens: Athens Institute for Education and Research. Lin, Y., &amp; Westgate, E.C. (2021). The origins of boredom. Unpublished manuscript. Retrieved from: <a href="https://psyarxiv.com/bz6n8/download?format=pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://psyarxiv.com/bz6n8/download?format=pdf</a> Lomas, T. (2017). A meditation on boredom: Reappraising its value through introspective phenomenology. Qualitative Research in Psychology 14(1), 1-22. Lomas, T. (2017). A reappraisal of boredom: A case study in second wave psychology. In: N.J.L. Brown, T. Lomas, &amp; F.J. Eiroa-Orosa (Eds.), The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Positive Psychology (p.213-226). Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge. Musharbash, Y. (2007). Boredom, time, and modernity: An example from Aboriginal Australia. American Anthropologist 109(2), 307-317. O’Hanlon, J.F. (1981). Boredom: Practical consequences and a theory. Acta Psychologica 49, 53-82. Pfattheicher, S., Lazarevic, L.B., Westgate, E.C., &amp; Schindler, S. (2021). On the relation of boredom and sadistic aggression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 121(3), 573-600. Toohey, P. (2011). Boredom: A lively history. New Haven: Yale University Press. Waterschoot, J., Van der Kaap-Deeder, J., Morbee, S., Soenens, B., &amp; Vansteenkiste, M. (2021). “How to unlock myself from boredom?” The role of mindfulness and a dual awareness- and action-oriented pathway during the COVID-19 lockdown. Personality and Individual Differences 175, 110729.

187: What to do when my child says: “I’m booored!”?

Listener Kelsey posted in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook community a while ago asking how she should respond when her child asks: "Why does Daddy have to go to work?" She got some great answers from community members...and yet there was also a lot more to explore. I asked her to record her question so I could answer it in an episode, so here it is! Of course, the issue of Daddy going to work has intersections with patriarchy as well...and many Your Parenting Mojo listeners of both/all genders work and probably hear this question from their children, so I adjusted the title of the episode a little. The episode looks at capitalism and how it impacts our families and other peoples' families...and how we can start to have conversations about that with our children. If you'd like to ask a question for me to answer in a future Q&amp;A episode, please email a link to a video of you asking the question to support@yourparentingmojo.com, or go to yourparentingmojo.com/question and look for the Record A Question button.Jump to Highlights00:58 Listener Kelsey asks how to honestly but age-appropriately answer the question, "Why does daddy have to go to work?"02:54 Carys shares her ideas on capitalism and work14:10 Kelsey's child isn't necessarily questioning why Daddy has to work, but rather why Daddy isn't available to play17:51 The cultural devaluation of certain types of work, the influence of capitalism, housing discrimination, and societal expectations contribute to financial burdens23:32 Every time we're making a choice to buy something, that is a choice to spend more time working24:00 The mindset plays a significant role in finding joy and value in any job25:16  Job satisfaction, financial security, and the role of money in addressing challenges and enhancing safety are crucial in deciding on work27:26 Money doesn’t guarantee safety30:11 Undervalued care work, predominantly performed by women, is crucial for the capitalist system.31:47 Building communities that meet each other's needs can provide more choices and reduce reliance on financial resources.32:59 We can talk to our children about capitalism, explaining that work allows us to meet our needs and wants, while addressing the inequalities and challenges that some people face. 35:14 Teaching children about capitalism and its objections fosters critical thinking about fairness, inequality, and alternative economic perspectives.37:40 Teaching financial literacy to children should involve a critical examination of capitalist-focused programs42:24 Wrapping up

Listener Kelsey posted in the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/2174808219425589" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">Your Parenting Mojo Facebook community</a> a while ago asking how she should respond when her child asks: "Why does Daddy have to go to work?" She got some great answers from community members...and yet there was also a lot more to explore. I asked her to record her question so I could answer it in an episode, so here it is! Of course, the issue of Daddy going to work has intersections with patriarchy as well...and many Your Parenting Mojo listeners of both/all genders work and probably hear this question from their children, so I adjusted the title of the episode a little. The episode looks at capitalism and how it impacts our families and other peoples' families...and how we can start to have conversations about that with our children. If you'd like to ask a question for me to answer in a future Q&amp;A episode, please email a link to a video of you asking the question to support@yourparentingmojo.com, or go to <a href="http://yourparentingmojo.com/question" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">yourparentingmojo.com/question</a> and look for the Record A Question button. <h3>Jump to Highlights</h3> 00:58 Listener Kelsey asks how to honestly but age-appropriately answer the question, "Why does daddy have to go to work?" 02:54 Carys shares her ideas on capitalism and work 14:10 Kelsey's child isn't necessarily questioning why Daddy has to work, but rather why Daddy isn't available to play 17:51 The cultural devaluation of certain types of work, the influence of capitalism, housing discrimination, and societal expectations contribute to financial burdens 23:32 Every time we're making a choice to buy something, that is a choice to spend more time working 24:00 The mindset plays a significant role in finding joy and value in any job 25:16 Job satisfaction, financial security, and the role of money in addressing challenges and enhancing safety are crucial in deciding on work 27:26 Money doesn’t guarantee safety 30:11 Undervalued care work, predominantly performed by women, is crucial for the capitalist system. 31:47 Building communities that meet each other's needs can provide more choices and reduce reliance on financial resources. 32:59 We can talk to our children about capitalism, explaining that work allows us to meet our needs and wants, while addressing the inequalities and challenges that some people face.  35:14 Teaching children about capitalism and its objections fosters critical thinking about fairness, inequality, and alternative economic perspectives. 37:40 Teaching financial literacy to children should involve a critical examination of capitalist-focused programs 42:24 Wrapping up

Q&A #3: Why do you have to go to work?

Mara Glatzel

We talk a lot about meeting needs on the show. And mostly we focus on meeting your child's needs, because when those are met then your needs for peace and ease and collaboration with your child get met as well.But of course those are not your only needs. You also have needs independent of your relationship with your children, and you deserve to have these met. Mara Glatzel's new book focuses squarely on your needs. Why is it so hard to understand what our needs are? How can we figure out what our needs are...before they explode out of us in a meltdown? And how can we get these met on a regular basis?This episode will show you how to do that.  Jump to highlights:01:20 Introduction of the guest - Mara Glatzel02:20  Mara shares the story at the beginning of her book where she tells her personal reflection when she felt learned the importance of asserting one's needs and the impact it has had on her  life and relationship06:13 Mara differentiates needs from wants09:47 The societal pressure to maintain a perfect and productive facade may just lead to burnout and a denial of our own humanity13:31 It is important to recognize and identify  physical sensations, symptoms, and circumstances associated with burnout to prevent and reverse it20:20 Setting boundaries with children allows parents to prioritize their own needs so they meet their children’s needs as well24:49 Consistently pushing ourselves beyond our limits and striving for perfection sets us up for burnout29:31 Prioritizing our own needs and well-being - even if it means doing things differently from others - is essential for sustainable productivity and a fulfilling life34:37 It can be challenging to find the right balance between meeting our children's needs and taking care of our own, but by modeling self-care, setting boundaries, and teaching them how to communicate their needs effectively, we can find ways to support each other41:36 Balancing our commitment to creating positive change with prioritizing our own well-being is crucial, as our ability to make an impact is compromised if we neglect self-care47:34 If we're unable to deal with our own needs, we make our needs other people's problems - and this impacts our relationships50:55 Mara shares about finding joy in trying new activities and embracing the freedom of being a beginner while following personal interests54:46 Wrapping up Mara's book: Needy: How to advocate for your needs and claim your sovereignty (affiliate link)

We talk a lot about meeting needs on the show. And mostly we focus on meeting your child's needs, because when those are met then your needs for peace and ease and collaboration with your child get met as well. But of course those are not your only needs. You also have needs independent of your relationship with your children, and you deserve to have these met. Mara Glatzel's new book focuses squarely on your needs. Why is it so hard to understand what our needs are? How can we figure out what our needs are...before they explode out of us in a meltdown? And how can we get these met on a regular basis? This episode will show you how to do that. Jump to highlights: 01:20 Introduction of the guest - Mara Glatzel 02:20 Mara shares the story at the beginning of her book where she tells her personal reflection when she felt learned the importance of asserting one's needs and the impact it has had on her  life and relationship 06:13 Mara differentiates needs from wants 09:47 The societal pressure to maintain a perfect and productive facade may just lead to burnout and a denial of our own humanity 13:31 It is important to recognize and identify  physical sensations, symptoms, and circumstances associated with burnout to prevent and reverse it 20:20 Setting boundaries with children allows parents to prioritize their own needs so they meet their children’s needs as well 24:49 Consistently pushing ourselves beyond our limits and striving for perfection sets us up for burnout 29:31 Prioritizing our own needs and well-being - even if it means doing things differently from others - is essential for sustainable productivity and a fulfilling life 34:37 It can be challenging to find the right balance between meeting our children's needs and taking care of our own, but by modeling self-care, setting boundaries, and teaching them how to communicate their needs effectively, we can find ways to support each other 41:36 Balancing our commitment to creating positive change with prioritizing our own well-being is crucial, as our ability to make an impact is compromised if we neglect self-care 47:34 If we're unable to deal with our own needs, we make our needs other people's problems - and this impacts our relationships 50:55 Mara shares about finding joy in trying new activities and embracing the freedom of being a beginner while following personal interests 54:46 Wrapping up Mara's book: <a href="https://amzn.to/422uiVI" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">Needy: How to advocate for your needs and claim your sovereignty</a> (affiliate link)

186: How to meet your needs with Mara Glatzel

A lot of parents (and teachers) are concerned right now about children's resilience. Will they 'bounce back' from the difficulties of the pandemic?But is 'bouncing back' really the way we should be thinking about this? We have all been changed by the pandemic; shouldn't we acknowledge this and see how we can be the best versions of ourselves, incorporating what we've been through over the last few years, rather than trying to 'bounce back' into what we were before (which frankly wasn't all that amazing in a lot of cases, as we rushed from one thing to another with never any time for ourselves).In this episode we also consider Black and Indigenous researchers' perspectives on resilience, and see how their ideas can perhaps shift how we perceive resilience - and thus how we support our children.Other episodes referenced069: Reducing the impact of intergenerational trauma069: Reducing the impact of intergenerational trauma140: Mythbusting about fat and BMI with Dr. Lindo Bacon140: Mythbusting about fat and BMI with Dr. Lindo Bacon137: Psychological flexibility through ACT with Diana Hill137: Psychological flexibility through ACT with Diana Hill148: Is spanking a child really so bad?148: Is spanking a child really so bad?098: Do school shooter trainings help (or hurt) children?098: Do school shooter trainings help (or hurt) children?114: How to stop 'othering' and instead build 'belonging'114: How to stop 'othering' and instead build 'belonging'074: Attachment: What it is, what it's not, how to do it, and how to stop stressing about it074: Attachment: What it is, what it's not, how to do it, and how to stop stressing about it106: Patriarchy is perpetuated through parenting106: Patriarchy is perpetuated through parenting Jump to highlights:01:10  Introduction01:34  Defining resilience from various perspectives03:16  Resilience requires exposure to some kind of threat or severe adversity06:37  What a lack of resilience looks like and how to measure its absence08:16  Measuring resilience in research09:08  The challenge of defining ‘protective’ factor10:00  The history of research on resilience12:03  The importance allowing children to cope with mild stressors14:40  The Indigenous resilience17:17  The control and dominance of indigenous peoples in Canada achieved through education and immersion in settler culture19:25  The importance of resilience culture in Indigenous communities21:02  A model of resilience by Dr. Edith Grotberg 27:01  Resilience determined by the dominant culture's expectations of normal, healthy, and good outcomes30:08  The real purpose of resilience32:18  What happens when a person isn't deemed to be resilient and why that is33:46  Resilience as a code for social compliance38:59  What true resilience should be about (based on the story about the Claremont Counseling Center's community building)40:53  Wrapping upReferencesAranda, K., Zeeman, L., Scholes, J., &amp; Morales, A. S-M. (2012). The resilient subject: Exploring subjectivity, identity and the body in narratives of resilience. Health 16(5), 548-563.Block, P. (2008). Community: The structure of belonging. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.Grotberg, E. (1995). A guide to promoting resilience in children: Strengthening the human spirit. Early Childhood Development: Practice and Reflections Number 8. Bernard van Leer Foundation.Gutman, L.M. (2018). Risk and resilience. Reference Module in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-809324-5.21835-XHenderson, J., &amp; Denny, K. (2015). The resilient child, human development and the “postdemocracy.” BioSocieties 10(3), 352-378.Hess, J. (2019). Moving beyond resilience education: Musical counterstorytelling. Music Education Research 1`(5), 488-502.Kirmayer, L.J., Dandeneau, D., Marshall, E., Phillips, M.K., &amp; Williamson, K.J. (2011). Rethinking resilience from an indigenous perspective. Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 56(2), 84-91.Liu, J.J.W., Reed, M., &amp; Girard, T.A. (2017). Advancing resilience: An integrative, multi-system mode of resilience. Personality and Individual Differences 111, 111-118.Lopez, M., Ruiz, M.O., Rovnaghi, C.R., Tam, G.K-Y., Hiscox, J., Gotlib, I.H., Barr, D.A., Carrion, V.G., &amp; Anand, K.J.S. (2021). The social ecology of childhood and early life adversity. Pediatric Research 89(2), 353-367.Luthar, S.S., Cicchetti, D., &amp; Becker, B. (2000). The construct of resilience: A critical evaluation and guidelines for future work. Child Development 71(3), 543-562.Masten, A.S. (2001). Ordinary Magic: Resilience processes in development. American Psychologist 56(3), 227-238.Masten, A.S.. (2021). Resilience in developmental systems: Principles, pathways, and protective processes in research and practice. In Ungar, M. (Ed.), Multisystemic resilience: Adaptation and transformation in contexts of change (p. 113-134). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Masten, A.S., and Barnes, A.J. (2018). Resilience in children: Developmental perspectives. Children 5, 98.McCalman, J., &amp; Bainbridge, R. (2021). Indigenous education, well-being, and resilience – a systemic approach. In Ungar, M. (Ed.), Multisystemic resilience: Adaptation and transformation in contexts of change (p. 199-219). Oxford: Oxford University Press.McGuire, P.D. (2010). Exploring resilience and indigenous ways of knowing. Pimatisiwin: A Journal of Aboriginal and Indigenous Community Health 8(2), 117-131.Rutter, M. (2012). Resilience as a dynamic concept. Development and Psychopathology 24, 335-344.Thomas, D., Mitchell, T., &amp; Arseneau, C. (2015). Re-evaluating resilience: From individual vulnerabilities to the strength of cultures and collectivities among indigenous communities. Resilience 4(2), 116-129.Traub, F., &amp; Boynton-Jarrett, R. (2017). Modifiable resilience factors to childhood adversity for clinical pediatric practice. Pediatrics 139(5), e20162569Solkoski, S.M., &amp; Bullock, L.M. (2012). Resilience in children and youth: A review. Children and Youth Services Review 34, 2295-2303.Wexler, L. (2013). Looking across three generations of Alaska Natives to explore how culture fosters indigenous resilience. Transcultural Psychiatry 51(1), 73-92.

A lot of parents (and teachers) are concerned right now about children's resilience. Will they 'bounce back' from the difficulties of the pandemic?But is 'bouncing back' really the way we should be thinking about this? We have all been changed by the pandemic; shouldn't we acknowledge this and see how we can be the best versions of ourselves, incorporating what we've been through over the last few years, rather than trying to 'bounce back' into what we were before (which frankly wasn't all that amazing in a lot of cases, as we rushed from one thing to another with never any time for ourselves).In this episode we also consider Black and Indigenous researchers' perspectives on resilience, and see how their ideas can perhaps shift how we perceive resilience - and thus how we support our children.Other episodes referenced 069: Reducing the impact of intergenerational trauma <a href="https://yourparentingmojo.com/captivate-podcast/intergenerationaltrauma/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">069: Reducing the impact of intergenerational trauma</a> 140: Mythbusting about fat and BMI with Dr. Lindo Bacon <a href="https://yourparentingmojo.com/captivate-podcast/eating/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">140: Mythbusting about fat and BMI with Dr. Lindo Bacon</a> 137: Psychological flexibility through ACT with Diana Hill <a href="https://yourparentingmojo.com/captivate-podcast/act/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">137: Psychological flexibility through ACT with Diana Hill</a> 148: Is spanking a child really so bad? <a href="https://yourparentingmojo.com/captivate-podcast/spanking/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">148: Is spanking a child really so bad?</a> 098: Do school shooter trainings help (or hurt) children? <a href="https://yourparentingmojo.com/captivate-podcast/schoolsafety/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">098: Do school shooter trainings help (or hurt) children?</a> 114: How to stop 'othering' and instead build 'belonging' <a href="https://yourparentingmojo.com/captivate-podcast/othering/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">114: How to stop 'othering' and instead build 'belonging'</a> 074: Attachment: What it is, what it's not, how to do it, and how to stop stressing about it <a href="https://yourparentingmojo.com/captivate-podcast/attachment/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">074: Attachment: What it is, what it's not, how to do it, and how to stop stressing about it</a> 106: Patriarchy is perpetuated through parenting <a href="https://yourparentingmojo.com/captivate-podcast/patriarchy/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">106: Patriarchy is perpetuated through parenting </a>Jump to highlights: 01:10  Introduction 01:34  Defining resilience from various perspectives 03:16  Resilience requires exposure to some kind of threat or severe adversity 06:37  What a lack of resilience looks like and how to measure its absence 08:16  Measuring resilience in research 09:08  The challenge of defining ‘protective’ factor 10:00  The history of research on resilience 12:03  The importance allowing children to cope with mild stressors 14:40  The Indigenous resilience 17:17  The control and dominance of indigenous peoples in Canada achieved through education and immersion in settler culture 19:25  The importance of resilience culture in Indigenous communities 21:02  A model of resilience by Dr. Edith Grotberg  27:01  Resilience determined by the dominant culture's expectations of normal, healthy, and good outcomes 30:08  The real purpose of resilience 32:18  What happens when a person isn't deemed to be resilient and why that is 33:46  Resilience as a code for social compliance 38:59  What true resilience should be about (based on the story about the Claremont Counseling Center's community building) 40:53  Wrapping up References Aranda, K., Zeeman, L., Scholes, J., &amp; Morales, A. S-M. (2012). The resilient subject: Exploring subjectivity, identity and the body in narratives of resilience. Health 16(5), 548-563. Block, P. (2008). Community: The structure of belonging. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler. Grotberg, E. (1995). A guide to promoting resilience in children: Strengthening the human spirit. Early Childhood Development: Practice and Reflections Number 8. Bernard van Leer Foundation. Gutman, L.M. (2018). Risk and resilience. Reference Module in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Psychology. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-809324-5.21835-X" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-809324-5.21835-X</a> Henderson, J., &amp; Denny, K. (2015). The resilient child, human development and the “postdemocracy.” BioSocieties 10(3), 352-378. Hess, J. (2019). Moving beyond resilience education: Musical counterstorytelling. Music Education Research 1`(5), 488-502. Kirmayer, L.J., Dandeneau, D., Marshall, E., Phillips, M.K., &amp; Williamson, K.J. (2011). Rethinking resilience from an indigenous perspective. Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 56(2), 84-91. Liu, J.J.W., Reed, M., &amp; Girard, T.A. (2017). Advancing resilience: An integrative, multi-system mode of resilience. Personality and Individual Differences 111, 111-118. Lopez, M., Ruiz, M.O., Rovnaghi, C.R., Tam, G.K-Y., Hiscox, J., Gotlib, I.H., Barr, D.A., Carrion, V.G., &amp; Anand, K.J.S. (2021). The social ecology of childhood and early life adversity. Pediatric Research 89(2), 353-367. Luthar, S.S., Cicchetti, D., &amp; Becker, B. (2000). The construct of resilience: A critical evaluation and guidelines for future work. Child Development 71(3), 543-562. Masten, A.S. (2001). Ordinary Magic: Resilience processes in development. American Psychologist 56(3), 227-238. Masten, A.S.. (2021). Resilience in developmental systems: Principles, pathways, and protective processes in research and practice. In Ungar, M. (Ed.), Multisystemic resilience: Adaptation and transformation in contexts of change (p. 113-134). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Masten, A.S., and Barnes, A.J. (2018). Resilience in children: Developmental perspectives. Children 5, 98. McCalman, J., &amp; Bainbridge, R. (2021). Indigenous education, well-being, and resilience – a systemic approach. In Ungar, M. (Ed.), Multisystemic resilience: Adaptation and transformation in contexts of change (p. 199-219). Oxford: Oxford University Press. McGuire, P.D. (2010). Exploring resilience and indigenous ways of knowing. Pimatisiwin: A Journal of Aboriginal and Indigenous Community Health 8(2), 117-131. Rutter, M. (2012). Resilience as a dynamic concept. Development and Psychopathology 24, 335-344. Thomas, D., Mitchell, T., &amp; Arseneau, C. (2015). Re-evaluating resilience: From individual vulnerabilities to the strength of cultures and collectivities among indigenous communities. Resilience 4(2), 116-129. Traub, F., &amp; Boynton-Jarrett, R. (2017). Modifiable resilience factors to childhood adversity for clinical pediatric practice. Pediatrics 139(5), e20162569 Solkoski, S.M., &amp; Bullock, L.M. (2012). Resilience in children and youth: A review. Children and Youth Services Review 34, 2295-2303. Wexler, L. (2013). Looking across three generations of Alaska Natives to explore how culture fosters indigenous resilience. Transcultural Psychiatry 51(1), 73-92.

185: How can we raise resilient children?

Do you sometimes wish your co-parent would join you on the respectful parenting journey you’re on?Would things be easier if you were on the same page?Does it seem like you try to convince them using all the research you’ve done respectful parenting…only to have them throw up the “I don’t think we have to make a big deal out of this” card?Sarah and Declan had this dynamic in their relationship too.Knowing each other well isn’t always enoughThey met when they were 10 and have been together for 15 years, so they know each other pretty well.  They had even talked about their values before they got married, and found alignment on many of them.But Declan is a psychologist working with children and families, so he got the Big Veto.  (It turns out that psychology training focuses on evidence-based strategies to change behavior…which isn’t that hard to do with rewards and punishments.  I think a lot of psychologists show up in my programs because they realize that “evidence-based” doesn’t necessarily mean “good for us” or “aligned with my values”).Sarah was struggling with the transition from two to three children, along with Declan’s full-time work, her own part-time work, and a major home renovation - they haven’t had a functional kitchen in two years.Sarah knew she needed more support…but Declan wasn’t sure.  Until he realized that when you’re on a team, you don’t tell an injured player to suck it up.  You can’t tell the parent who is struggling to figure it out by themselves.  We all have a role to play in a family that meets everyone’s needs.A way to repair ruptures that meets both of their needsThis was most apparent when Sarah would say something critical, causing a temporary rupture…and then would desperately try to repair, wanting to talk it out then and there so she could reestablish connection with him, in a reenactment of her anxious attachment relationship with her mother.Declan didn’t find that connecting at all…he saw that she was trying to make herself feel better, not to reconnect with him, and he would retreat - the exact opposite of what she was looking for from him.On a group coaching call a few months ago we worked through an example of this dynamic - and found a way to help them reestablish connection that worked for both of them that has made a profound difference in their ability to navigate conflict.  They discuss how it has worked for them in this new episode.Parenting Beyond PowerMy new book, Parenting Beyond Power, will be released on September 5, 2023. It’s packed with ideas to help you create the kind of relationship you want to have with your child.Don't miss out! Pre-order today and unlock special bonuses like how-to videos and early chapter access. Click the banner to pre-order now:The Parenting Membership is now open for enrollment!This isn't a course that you take once and forget, and things go back to the way they always were.Whenever you get off-track, or when a new challenge pops up, we're here to support and guide you for as long as you're a member.The membership information page has all the details on what you’ll get when you join - monthly modules of content, the not-on-Facebook community, monthly group coaching calls, weekly ACTion groups with five other members and a peer coach, occasional 1:1 coaching sessions with Jen. Click the image below to learn more about the Parenting Membership.  Enrollment is open until Wednesday May 17![caption id="attachment_9798" align="alignnone" width="960"] Enrollment of Parenting Membership 2023 is open until May 17.[/caption]Jump to highlights:01:20 Introduction of this episode’s guests 01:44 Basic information about Sarah and Declan’s family02:27 Sarah’s childhood experiences and the intergenerational trauma that affected her family07:25 Declan’s family dynamic which was not emotionally open or supportive09:20 Declan talks about his experiences with his authoritarian father10:30 What it was like being together for a long time and then becoming parents11:21 What Sarah and Declan consider as the most important values they had as a family, as well as the effective parenting strategy that worked during their early years of parenthood12:44 The challenges of transitioning to having older babies15:19 Some challenging interactions with the kids17:03 Declan is the stabilizing force in the family18:41 How Declan responds to Sarah’s emotional stress21:20  How they approach certain situations and have learned from each other's feedback22:06 finding a balance between having a structured decision-making process and ensuring that each one is heard23:14 How patriarchy shows up in their decision making23:53 How their shared values allowed them to work together despite their differences26:44 How Sarah managed to convince  Declan to join the Parenting Membership28:52 Declan appreciates the flexibility of Parenting Membership that allows members to choose their level of engagement with the content31:12 How being part of the Parenting Membership differs from just listening to podcasts32:47 How the  community aspect of the Parenting Membership helps38:58 How relationship patterns can impact difficult conversations between partners40:38 How the Parenting Membership has made a huge difference in their parenting dynamics50:31 How Sarah has changed to becoming less triggered52:57 Wrapping up

Do you sometimes wish your co-parent would join you on the respectful parenting journey you’re on? Would things be easier if you were on the same page? Does it seem like you try to convince them using all the research you’ve done respectful parenting…only to have them throw up the “I don’t think we have to make a big deal out of this” card? Sarah and Declan had this dynamic in their relationship too. Knowing each other well isn’t always enough They met when they were 10 and have been together for 15 years, so they know each other pretty well.  They had even talked about their values before they got married, and found alignment on many of them. But Declan is a psychologist working with children and families, so he got the Big Veto.  (It turns out that psychology training focuses on evidence-based strategies to change behavior…which isn’t that hard to do with rewards and punishments.  I think a lot of psychologists show up in my programs because they realize that “evidence-based” doesn’t necessarily mean “good for us” or “aligned with my values”). Sarah was struggling with the transition from two to three children, along with Declan’s full-time work, her own part-time work, and a major home renovation - they haven’t had a functional kitchen in two years. Sarah knew she needed more support…but Declan wasn’t sure.  Until he realized that when you’re on a team, you don’t tell an injured player to suck it up.  You can’t tell the parent who is struggling to figure it out by themselves.  We all have a role to play in a family that meets everyone’s needs. A way to repair ruptures that meets both of their needs This was most apparent when Sarah would say something critical, causing a temporary rupture…and then would desperately try to repair, wanting to talk it out then and there so she could reestablish connection with him, in a reenactment of her anxious attachment relationship with her mother. Declan didn’t find that connecting at all…he saw that she was trying to make herself feel better, not to reconnect with him, and he would retreat - the exact opposite of what she was looking for from him. On a group coaching call a few months ago we worked through an example of this dynamic - and found a way to help them reestablish connection that worked for both of them that has made a profound difference in their ability to navigate conflict.  They discuss how it has worked for them in this new episode. Parenting Beyond Power My new book, Parenting Beyond Power, will be released on September 5, 2023. It’s packed with ideas to help you create the kind of relationship you want to have with your child. Don't miss out! Pre-order today and unlock special bonuses like how-to videos and early chapter access. Click the banner to pre-order now: <a href="https://yourparentingmojo.com/book/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>The Parenting Membership is now open for enrollment! This isn't a course that you take once and forget, and things go back to the way they always were. Whenever you get off-track, or when a new challenge pops up, we're here to support and guide you for as long as you're a member. The membership information page has all the details on what you’ll get when you join - monthly modules of content, the not-on-Facebook community, monthly group coaching calls, weekly ACTion groups with five other members and a peer coach, occasional 1:1 coaching sessions with Jen.  Click the image below to learn more about the Parenting Membership.  Enrollment is open until Wednesday May 17! [caption id="attachment_9798" align="alignnone" width="960"]<a href="https://yourparentingmojo.com/parentingmembership/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> Enrollment of Parenting Membership 2023 is open until May 17.[/caption] Jump to highlights: 01:20 Introduction of this episode’s guests  01:44 Basic information about Sarah and Declan’s family 02:27 Sarah’s childhood experiences and the intergenerational trauma that affected her family 07:25 Declan’s family dynamic which was not emotionally open or supportive 09:20 Declan talks about his experiences with his authoritarian father 10:30 What it was like being together for a long time and then becoming parents 11:21 What Sarah and Declan consider as the most important values they had as a family, as well as the effective parenting strategy that worked during their early years of parenthood 12:44 The challenges of transitioning to having older babies 15:19 Some challenging interactions with the kids 17:03 Declan is the stabilizing force in the family 18:41 How Declan responds to Sarah’s emotional stress 21:20 How they approach certain situations and have learned from each other's feedback 22:06 finding a balance between having a structured decision-making process and ensuring that each one is heard 23:14 How patriarchy shows up in their decision making 23:53 How their shared values allowed them to work together despite their differences 26:44 How Sarah managed to convince  Declan to join the Parenting Membership 28:52 Declan appreciates the flexibility of Parenting Membership that allows members to choose their level of engagement with the content 31:12 How being part of the Parenting Membership differs from just listening to podcasts 32:47 How the  community aspect of the Parenting Membership helps 38:58 How relationship patterns can impact difficult conversations between partners 40:38 How the Parenting Membership has made a huge difference in their parenting dynamics 50:31 How Sarah has changed to becoming less triggered 52:57 Wrapping up

184: How to get on the same page as your co-parent

Recently, a number of parents in the Parenting Membership have posted in our community about challenges they've faced that they've navigated with grace that would have seemed insurmountable a couple of years ago.     Many of these are parents of children who are already through the toddler stage, and the parents are starting to see the tools they've been using come alive in their interactions with their children.     I thought: There's a podcast episode in that!     I asked parents to submit short videos to me responding to the question: What do you wish you had known about parenting when your children were young?     The resulting videos are collected, along with my commentary, in this week's episode.     The insights that these parents offer are profound. I don't want to give too much away, but let's just say that you're not going to hear advice about a must-have crib or wipe warmer or toy.     This is advice about:  How we see ourselves What is our role as parents to guide our children without shaping them How we can be whole, fulfilled people ourselves when there's so much pressure on us to be a 'good parent'     If you want to hear from parents who share your values and who have been in it for a while to know what's worth worrying about and what isn't, this episode is for you.           Parenting Beyond Power          My new book, Parenting Beyond Power, will be released on September 5, 2023. It’s packed with ideas to help you create the kind of relationship you want to have with your child.     Don't miss out! Pre-order today and unlock special bonuses like how-to videos and early chapter access. Click the banner to pre-order now:       The Parenting Membership is now open for enrollment!  This isn't a course that you take once and forget, and things go back to the way they always were.     Whenever you get off-track, or when a new challenge pops up, we're here to support and guide you for as long as you're a member.     The membership information page has all the details on what you’ll get when you join - monthly modules of content, the not-on-Facebook community, monthly group coaching calls, weekly ACTion groups with five other members and a peer coach, occasional 1:1 coaching sessions with Jen.      Click the image below to learn more about the Parenting Membership.  Enrollment starts on May 7!     [caption id="attachment_9798" align="aligncenter" width="960"] Enrollment for the Parenting Membership is open until May 17.[/caption]     Other episodes referenced in this episode:  079: What is RIE?  079: What is RIE? | Your Parenting Mojo     084: The Science of RIE  084: The Science of RIE | Your Parenting Mojo     085: White privilege in schools  085: White privilege in schools | Your Parenting Mojo     SYPM 010: From anxious overwhelm to optimistic calm  https://yourparentingmojo.com/captivate-podcast/anne/     Jump to highlights:  (01:40) Introduction of this episode’s topic  (02:25) Jen admits that she didn't give much consideration to parenting before her daughter, Carys, was born  (03:17) Jen shares how her journey into respectful parenting started through RIE   (04:42) Parent Elizabeth reflects on her experience and shares what she wished she had known about parenting  (06:33) The impact of unhealed trauma is reflected in the way we parent our children  (07:21) How the arrival of a child can shift the balance in a relationship leading to conflict, even if both partners entered into the partnership as equals  (09:05) The dynamics of patriarchal relationships  (10:09) Parent Jenny reflects on her experience and shares what she wished she had known about parenting during the time she wasn't prioritizing her own need for sleep  (12:29) Discussion on how patriarchal power structures can play out within the context of parenting and caregiving  (13:48) Parent Jenny's decision to prioritize rest shows that her need for rest is legitimate and important  (14:19) Our child expresses their unmet need by hitting  (15:33) Parent Anne reflects on her visions about parenting and shares what she wished she had known about parenting  (18:45) What is “Opportunity hoarding” among White parents  (20:48) Parent Iris reflects on her parenting experience  (22:33) the pressure that parents put on themselves that creates enormous pressure  (23:50) Parent Iris realizes that buying things to solve parenting problems is not always the answer  (25:14) The privilege that some parents have in terms of how they are perceived by society and the consequences they may face for certain choices  (26:11) Parent Anne shares what she wished she had known about her interactions with her mom, her husband, and her child  (29:53) Parent Anne shares her struggles with setting boundaries  (31:14) Parent Anne's journey to becoming a better parent and healing from her own trauma  (33:58) Parent Laura shares her son's potty problems and what she wished she had known about potty learning  (37:13) Parent Laura highlights the importance of trusting your intuition and problem-solving skills as a parent  (38:20) Respectful and gentle parenting as a tool to build a good relationship with our child  (39:09) Parent Lucinda reflects on her experience and shares what she wished she had known about parenting  (41:56) How understanding one's own needs is crucial for being able to have authentic relationships with family and community  (43:24) Parent Melissa reflects on her experience and shares what she wished she had known about parenting  (45:51)  The benefits of being in an ACTion group in the Parenting Membership  (47:14) Parent Benson reflects on his experience and shares what he wished he had known about parenting  (48:51) Parent Amanda reflects on her experience and shares what she wished she had known about parenting  (50:35) The importance of having a plan in parenting  (52:03) Parent Elizabeth shares her realization that parenting is a continuous learning process  (53:18) The importance of learning new skills to do things differently  (55:34) Invitation to join the Parenting Membership

Recently, a number of parents in the Parenting Membership have posted in our community about challenges they've faced that they've navigated with grace that would have seemed insurmountable a couple of years ago.   Many of these are parents of children who are already through the toddler stage, and the parents are starting to see the tools they've been using come alive in their interactions with their children.   I thought: There's a podcast episode in that!   I asked parents to submit short videos to me responding to the question: What do you wish you had known about parenting when your children were young?   The resulting videos are collected, along with my commentary, in this week's episode.   The insights that these parents offer are profound. I don't want to give too much away, but let's just say that you're not going to hear advice about a must-have crib or wipe warmer or toy.   This is advice about: <ul> <li>How we see ourselves</li> <li>What is our role as parents to guide our children without shaping them</li> <li>How we can be whole, fulfilled people ourselves when there's so much pressure on us to be a 'good parent'</li> </ul>   If you want to hear from parents who share your values and who have been in it for a while to know what's worth worrying about and what isn't, this episode is for you.     Parenting Beyond Power   My new book, Parenting Beyond Power, will be released on September 5, 2023. It’s packed with ideas to help you create the kind of relationship you want to have with your child.   Don't miss out! Pre-order today and unlock special bonuses like how-to videos and early chapter access. Click the banner to pre-order now:   <a href="http://yourparentingmojo.com/book" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>The Parenting Membership is now open for enrollment! This isn't a course that you take once and forget, and things go back to the way they always were.   Whenever you get off-track, or when a new challenge pops up, we're here to support and guide you for as long as you're a member.   The membership information page has all the details on what you’ll get when you join - monthly modules of content, the not-on-Facebook community, monthly group coaching calls, weekly ACTion groups with five other members and a peer coach, occasional 1:1 coaching sessions with Jen.    Click the image below to learn more about the Parenting Membership.  Enrollment starts on May 7!   [caption id="attachment_9798" align="aligncenter" width="960"]<a href="https://yourparentingmojo.com/parentingmembership/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> Enrollment for the Parenting Membership is open until May 17.[/caption]   Other episodes referenced in this episode: 079: What is RIE? <a href="https://yourparentingmojo.com/captivate-podcast/whatisrie/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">079: What is RIE? | Your Parenting Mojo</a>   084: The Science of RIE <a href="https://yourparentingmojo.com/captivate-podcast/rie/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">084: The Science of RIE | Your Parenting Mojo</a>   085: White privilege in schools <a href="https://yourparentingmojo.com/captivate-podcast/schoolprivilege/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">085: White privilege in schools | Your Parenting Mojo</a>   SYPM 010: From anxious overwhelm to optimistic calm <a href="https://yourparentingmojo.com/captivate-podcast/anne/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://yourparentingmojo.com/captivate-podcast/anne/</a>   Jump to highlights: (01:40) Introduction of this episode’s topic (02:25) Jen admits that she didn't give much consideration to parenting before her daughter, Carys, was born (03:17) Jen shares how her journey into respectful parenting started through RIE  (04:42) Parent Elizabeth reflects on her experience and shares what she wished she had known about parenting (06:33) The impact of unhealed trauma is reflected in the way we parent our children (07:21) How the arrival of a child can shift the balance in a relationship leading to conflict, even if both partners entered into the partnership as equals (09:05) The dynamics of patriarchal relationships (10:09) Parent Jenny reflects on her experience and shares what she wished she had known about parenting during the time she wasn't prioritizing her own need for sleep (12:29) Discussion on how patriarchal power structures can play out within the context of parenting and caregiving (13:48) Parent Jenny's decision to prioritize rest shows that her need for rest is legitimate and important (14:19) Our child expresses their unmet need by hitting (15:33) Parent Anne reflects on her visions about parenting and shares what she wished she had known about parenting (18:45) What is “Opportunity hoarding” among White parents (20:48) Parent Iris reflects on her parenting experience (22:33) the pressure that parents put on themselves that creates enormous pressure (23:50) Parent Iris realizes that buying things to solve parenting problems is not always the answer (25:14) The privilege that some parents have in terms of how they are perceived by society and the consequences they may face for certain choices (26:11) Parent Anne shares what she wished she had known about her interactions with her mom, her husband, and her child (29:53) Parent Anne shares her struggles with setting boundaries (31:14) Parent Anne's journey to becoming a better parent and healing from her own trauma (33:58) Parent Laura shares her son's potty problems and what she wished she had known about potty learning (37:13) Parent Laura highlights the importance of trusting your intuition and problem-solving skills as a parent (38:20) Respectful and gentle parenting as a tool to build a good relationship with our child (39:09) Parent Lucinda reflects on her experience and shares what she wished she had known about parenting (41:56) How understanding one's own needs is crucial for being able to have authentic relationships with family and community (43:24) Parent Melissa reflects on her experience and shares what she wished she had known about parenting (45:51) The benefits of being in an ACTion group in the Parenting Membership (47:14) Parent Benson reflects on his experience and shares what he wished he had known about parenting (48:51) Parent Amanda reflects on her experience and shares what she wished she had known about parenting (50:35) The importance of having a plan in parenting (52:03) Parent Elizabeth shares her realization that parenting is a continuous learning process (53:18) The importance of learning new skills to do things differently (55:34) Invitation to join the Parenting Membership

183: What I wish I’d known about parenting

All of our children go through phases when they do things we wish they wouldn’t do. Sometimes those things are relatively harmless but are pretty annoying, because they take extra time for us to clean up - things like eating (and making crumbs) in areas where we don’t want them to eat, shaving up a bar of soap, or piling up all the toys and refusing to help clean them up. Other times it’s not so harmless.  They might hit us.Or hit a (smaller) sibling, for what seems like no reason.We want to get that behavior to stop…but how?In this episode we’ll meet a parent who’s struggling with the annoying behaviors…and we’ll hear directly from two parents who have found ways to navigate resistance and hitting, and these are no longer the problem they once were.There is hope.  We don’t have to keep walking on eggshells waiting for the next explosion, or worried about what our child is doing as soon as our back is turned.Jump to highlights:(00:50)  Introduction for today’s episode(01:33)  A member of Jen's community is seeking advice on how to manage her child’s frustrating behavior(04:23)  How Jen resolved her issues with her husband's frustrating behavior during the COVID lockdown(06:16)  The importance of understanding children's behavior and finding ways to meet their needs in a way that works for both the child and the parent(07:36)  One of the reasons why children engage in activities that they know are forbidden: Lack of Impulse control(09:20)  The importance of recognizing that our children are still learning how to regulate their emotions and impulses(11:17)  How setting fewer limits can create a more positive and respectful relationship between parent and child (12:46)  Parent Peju shares how she sets limits on her child(14:46)  Understanding the underlying issues of a child's behavior is critical for effective parenting(15:54)  The importance of recognizing the need for autonomy in children (17:50)  Parent Fiona shares her struggles and how the community and the membership helped her resolve her problems(26:44)  Parent Fiona’s non-cognitive shift as a result of seeing the issue from her son's perspective(28:19)  Parent Stephanie, expresses how her connection with the ACTion group has been incredibly fulfilling for her. (30:01)  The importance of curiosity when we feel triggered (33:39)  The second reason why children engage in activities that they know are forbidden: They're doing it deliberately to get our attention(34:36)  How our culture and capitalist system affect families and the way we parent(35:45)  Why does our culture make it difficult to ask for help in parenting(36:43)  Invitation to Setting Limits MasterclassParenting Beyond PowerMy new book, Parenting Beyond Power, will be released on September 5, 2023. It’s packed with ideas to help you create the kind of relationship you want to have with your child.Don't miss out! Pre-order today and unlock special bonuses like how-to videos and early chapter access. Click the banner to pre-order now:The Parenting Membership is now open for enrollment!This isn't a course that you take once and forget, and things go back to the way they always were.Whenever you get off-track, or when a new challenge pops up, we're here to support and guide you for as long as you're a member.The membership information page has all the details on what you’ll get when you join - monthly modules of content, the not-on-Facebook community, monthly group coaching calls, weekly ACTion groups with five other members and a peer coach, occasional 1:1 coaching sessions with Jen. Click the image below to learn more about the Parenting Membership.  Enrollment starts on May 7!

All of our children go through phases when they do things we wish they wouldn’t do.  Sometimes those things are relatively harmless but are pretty annoying, because they take extra time for us to clean up - things like eating (and making crumbs) in areas where we don’t want them to eat, shaving up a bar of soap, or piling up all the toys and refusing to help clean them up.  Other times it’s not so harmless.   They might hit us. Or hit a (smaller) sibling, for what seems like no reason. We want to get that behavior to stop…but how? In this episode we’ll meet a parent who’s struggling with the annoying behaviors…and we’ll hear directly from two parents who have found ways to navigate resistance and hitting, and these are no longer the problem they once were. There is hope.   We don’t have to keep walking on eggshells waiting for the next explosion, or worried about what our child is doing as soon as our back is turned. Jump to highlights: (00:50)  Introduction for today’s episode (01:33)  A member of Jen's community is seeking advice on how to manage her child’s frustrating behavior (04:23)  How Jen resolved her issues with her husband's frustrating behavior during the COVID lockdown (06:16)  The importance of understanding children's behavior and finding ways to meet their needs in a way that works for both the child and the parent (07:36)  One of the reasons why children engage in activities that they know are forbidden: Lack of Impulse control (09:20)  The importance of recognizing that our children are still learning how to regulate their emotions and impulses (11:17)  How setting fewer limits can create a more positive and respectful relationship between parent and child  (12:46)  Parent Peju shares how she sets limits on her child (14:46)  Understanding the underlying issues of a child's behavior is critical for effective parenting (15:54)  The importance of recognizing the need for autonomy in children  (17:50)  Parent Fiona shares her struggles and how the community and the membership helped her resolve her problems (26:44)  Parent Fiona’s non-cognitive shift as a result of seeing the issue from her son's perspective (28:19)  Parent Stephanie, expresses how her connection with the ACTion group has been incredibly fulfilling for her.  (30:01)  The importance of curiosity when we feel triggered  (33:39)  The second reason why children engage in activities that they know are forbidden: They're doing it deliberately to get our attention (34:36)  How our culture and capitalist system affect families and the way we parent (35:45)  Why does our culture make it difficult to ask for help in parenting (36:43)  Invitation to Setting Limits Masterclass Parenting Beyond Power My new book, Parenting Beyond Power, will be released on September 5, 2023. It’s packed with ideas to help you create the kind of relationship you want to have with your child. Don't miss out! Pre-order today and unlock special bonuses like how-to videos and early chapter access. Click the banner to pre-order now: <a href="http://yourparentingmojo.com/book" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>The Parenting Membership is now open for enrollment! This isn't a course that you take once and forget, and things go back to the way they always were. Whenever you get off-track, or when a new challenge pops up, we're here to support and guide you for as long as you're a member. The membership information page has all the details on what you’ll get when you join - monthly modules of content, the not-on-Facebook community, monthly group coaching calls, weekly ACTion groups with five other members and a peer coach, occasional 1:1 coaching sessions with Jen.  Click the image below to learn more about the Parenting Membership.  Enrollment starts on May 7!

182: How to get frustrating behavior to stop

Jen Lumanlan always thought infancy would be the hardest part of parenting.  Now she has a toddler and finds a whole new set of tools are needed, there are hundreds of books to read, and academic research to uncover that would otherwise never see the light of day.  Join her on her journey to get a Masters in Psychology focusing on Child Development, as she researches topics of interest to parents of toddlers and preschoolers from all angles, and suggests tools parents can use to help kids thrive - and make their own lives a bit easier in the process.  Like Janet Lansbury's respectful approach to parenting?  Appreciate the value of scientific research, but don't have time to read it all? Then you'll love Your Parenting Mojo.  More information and references for each show are at www.YourParentingMojo.com.  Subscribe there and get a free newsletter compiling relevant research on the weeks I don't publish a podcast episode!

I haven&#39;t even started it yet, but I saw another reviewer warn others of a &#34;clear liberal and feminist bias.&#34; That&#39;s all I needed to hear, 5 stars.

Clear Liberal, Feminist Bias

I love the data and continue to watch because I can draw my own conclusions from the data.  However, be careful because in some episodes there is a clear liberal or feminist bias.

Good data but biased

Jen Lumanlan always thought infancy would be the hardest part of parenting. Now she has a toddler and finds a whole new set of tools are needed, there are hundreds of books to read, and academic research to uncover that would otherwise never see the light of day. Join her on her journey to get a Masters in Psychology focusing on Child Development, as she researches topics of interest to parents of toddlers and preschoolers from all angles, and suggests tools parents can use to help kids thrive - and make their own lives a bit easier in the process. Like Janet Lansbury's respectful approach to parenting? Appreciate the value of scientific research, but don't have time to read it all? Then you'll love Your Parenting Mojo. More information and references for each show are at <a href="http://www.YourParentingMojo.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.YourParentingMojo.com</a>. Subscribe there and get a free newsletter compiling relevant research on the weeks I don't publish a podcast episode!

Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive

Do you ever feel ‘lost’ in your parenting?  Like you’ve read all the books (and even listened to the podcast episodes!) and you’ve agreed with them in principle, but somehow nothing ever seems to change?     Your family feels directionless; you just muddle along having the same old fights with your partner about the same old things:  Should you praise your child when they do what you ask, so they’ll do it again next time? Or punish them for disobeying you? Should you worry about (quality or quantity of) screen time? Does it matter if you and your partner have completely different parenting styles?     In this episode I interviewed Kathryn, and discussed:  The cultural differences between living in the U.K. and Canada (saying “please!” and certain differences in directness of humor) How to begin to approach differences in opinion about parenting with your spouse in a way that doesn’t get their back up, but instead focuses on your (and their) values The value of interacting with parents who are a little ahead of you and who can give you advice, as well as parents with younger children so you can see how far you’ve come and offer some support to them How to align your daily interactions with your child with your overall values The importance of bringing fun and playfulness to your parenting in a way that feels relaxed to you (and the positive impact this can have on your child) How to problem solve with a child in a way that encourages them to bring their own solutions to the table     If you’re interested in learning more about the Finding Your Parenting Mojo membership, you can find all the info on it at yourparentingmojo.com/membership – and also sign up for the FREE Top 5 Strategies to Tame Your Triggers webinar (scheduled for Wednesday September 30th at 11am PT) there as well.     [accordion]  [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"]     Jen: 01:25  Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We're doing something a little bit different on today's episode because I'm actually going to interview a listener, Kathryn. Kathryn is a Canadian living in London and she's married to an English husband and she has a daughter and a son. I connected with Kathryn to talk about the transformation that she's experienced in her parenting over the last 6 months or so. Kathryn's family was doing pretty well, although she was having some challenges knowing how to parent her spirited daughter and having a very different approach to doing this than her British husband who was raised with much more of a traditional British approach of not talking about feelings very much, which really contrasted pretty sharply with Kathryn's belief that the experience and the emotions should be validated and supported. These different approaches were causing some friction in her marriage and she felt like she didn't really have the tools to articulate why this issue and others like it were so important to her in a way that could invite her husband to share his perspective and feelings so they could work together to find a path forward in parenting their children.     Jen: 02:25  Now, both Kathryn and her husband feel more at ease in their family because they know the decisions they're making are based on their values and not just on knee jerk reactions made in the moment when their daughter asked to do something and they might be feeling a bit stressed and as a result they've really become to embrace the joyful aspects of parenting as you'll hear in the conversation. Before we talked with Kathryn, I do have a question for you and that is, are you truly enjoying your family right now? Yes, families have their ups and downs and not every day is perfect and neither will it be, but more often than not, do you feel confident about how the little decisions you make every day as a parent are adding up to and leading toward a goal that you've thoughtfully and purposefully established with your parenting partner, if you have one?     Jen: 03:08  If you do feel these joyful moments in your family where you feel confidence and clarity and a sense of ease, but they're more few and far between than you would like, then this episode is going to have a lot of nuggets of wisdom for you. I should also explain that Kathryn is a member of my Finding Your Parenting Mojo membership group, which is open to new members right now in July 2019 and the group we work on one topic each month. The first three topics are set before we start, in the first month, we focus entirely on reducing the incidents of tantrums. You can get a little bit of breathing room to take a step back and then look at setting goals in the second month. And these aren't just template goals that will tell you the right way to raise your child, but they’re goals that you set based on your own values and priorities.     Jen: 03:49  In the third month we have a co-teacher, Dr. Laura Froyen, who literally wrote a doctoral thesis on How Marriage and Family Relationships Influence Parenting and Child Development. She helps us to move beyond the same old arguments about the same old topics that we have over and over again with our partners to a deeper understanding of each other's values, so we can use these to figure out how to parent our children. After those first three months of core content, we choose topics by voting on them. So you actually get to help decide what we learn. I created the group after I surveyed my listeners last summer and I realized that while you're on board with the ideas you hear about on the show you have a really hard time actually implementing them in your real lives, with your real families and you need more support to do this. So that's what the group is designed to do, so you can stop worrying about the stack of parenting books you haven't read or even the ones you have read and forgotten about and actually learn and practice these techniques with my support and the support of all the other parents in the group.     Jen: 04:46  I also wanted to let you know that I've been running a free online workshop called Tame Your Triggers since July 8th which has been helping hundreds of parents to understand why their children's behavior triggers their frustration and anger and how to cope with this in a more productive way in the future. The workshop is already underway and it's too late to join now, but I'm actually hosting a free webinar on Thursday, July 25th at 11:00 AM Pacific that will summarize what we learned over the two weeks and give you some tools to overcome this challenge. This is exactly the kind of topic that we cover in the Finding Your Parenting Mojo groups or if you're interested in learning more about the group or just learning how to tame your triggers, then do sign up for that webinar, which will be on Thursday, July 25th at 11:00 AM Pacific at YourParentingMojo.com/Membership. Even if you know you're busy at that time and you can't join live, go ahead and register anyway if you want to hear it because I'll send out a replay afterwards for anyone who couldn't make it. All right, I think we're ready. Let's go ahead and meet Kathryn. Hello and welcome Kathryn. Would you mind telling us a bit about yourself to start please?     Kathryn: 05:47  My name is Kathryn. I have two kids. My daughter is nearly six and my son is two and a half and we live with my husband in London and I'm Canadian originally, but I relocated here about 10 years ago and my husband is British and so we've decided to stay here.     Jen: 06:06  Nice. Where are you from in Canada?     Kathryn: 06:10  Well, most of my time I've lived in Calgary, in western Canada.     Jen: 06:13  Oh, okay. So not quite as cold in the UK as it is in Calgary?     Kathryn: 06:17  No. I know people complain about the weather here, but I think it's great. Not very much so.     Jen: 06:24  So I'm guessing that there are probably some challenges involved in being a Canadian living in England?     Kathryn: 06:29  Yes. I suppose I wasn't expecting it to be much of a culture shock, I suppose you think English speaking Western country, but it's not a black and white differences, but just along a continuum, isn't it I supposed. And so just some of the things I suppose you initially, no, it was just day-to-day in some of the interactions and then again when you have kids and just pick up on things like the humor and the way people converse and things.     Jen: 06:58  What do you mean about the humor?     Kathryn: 07:01  I quite like the English humor that did actually attract me to hear and stuff. But it's a lot more direct, isn't it?     Jen: 07:08  It certainly is, yes.     Kathryn: 07:10  People are able to laugh at themselves. I think, so yeah, it's just a little bit different. People don't always know how to take my husband I think when we come back to Canada sometimes.     Jen: 07:20  Yes, I've had that problem myself.     Kathryn: 07:22  Because the humor has slightly different tone to it.     Jen: 07:25  What other differences have you noticed?     Kathryn: 07:28     I suppose it's just a sense of formality a little bit like I think both countries are known for their politeness, but it's just interesting to me that it can look a little bit different in the different places and I quite enjoyed your podcast where you mentioned about manners and like saying please and that I thought was quite funny because I had such a complex when I first arrived about saying, please, my husband would say, you haven't said please. You haven’t said please.     Kathryn: 07:55  And you think it’s implied.     Jen: 07:59  We are in a committed relationship. Right?     Kathryn: 08:01  Oh, I know.     Jen: 08:03  I hadn't thought about it in that depth until I did that episode. The fact that you don't necessarily have to say it to somebody when you're in that committed relationship because it is implied by the fact that you're committed to them, but still it's nice to hear, right?     Kathryn: 08:18  Yeah. Well I think sometimes too for me, like it almost sounds like I expect that you will say yes if I say please. So I prefer my roundabout way is just ask me. So yeah, I suppose it's just the subtleties like that can be a bit funny.     Jen: 08:36  So how does that play out in terms of how you're raising your children?     Kathryn: 08:40  So I suppose both of us have kind of adjusted a lot. So I have noted like myself things I would be taken aback at first with like very mild put downs I think, but aren't intended that way.     Kathryn: 08:54  I remember when Bridget Jones's Diary as well, when he laughingly says stupid co**t to his wife and that surprised me in the film and now it's like that wouldn't faze me. That's just normal, right? Now when we have kids, they didn't say exactly that, but you know, then it just you notice things that you wouldn't necessarily have otherwise and stuff. So there's just been a little bit of give and take that, you know, have discussions around, oh would you say that? And it's made me change a lot I think in terms of taking myself less seriously, I think I've become better at that as well.     Jen: 09:34  So do you see a really sort of solid desire in yourself and your husband to capture the best of both worlds as you’re parenting your children? Or does one approach more predominate than the other?     Kathryn: 09:44  For a lot of the smaller things, like there are differences that you just notice. For example, like something as innocuous as the pronunciation for example. It's just we have different ways of speaking and it's kind of fun sometimes to watch the things that they'll pick up from my husband or later from school and others that speak like that or things that they noticed in school. My daughter will say, yogurt and that sounds more like me. Those kinds of things are funny. Then there are some things that I suppose do require a lot more conversation around. For example, I think in the UK there's a stronger value on like stoicism and emotional stability. So for me just, I don't know if that's Canadian or general or just my own experience wanting to support emotional expression and emotional awareness and things like that, then that can feel a bit alien for my husband I think because he spent all these years trying to achieve something different and trying not to displace certain emotions more openly and negative emotions more openly than I suppose this can be a bit of an alien concept and I think I’m trying to change him into a Canadian.     Jen: 11:02  So it sounds as though that's really important to you. I wonder if you can tell us about what are some of your really strongest beliefs and values both as an individual and also as a parent.     Kathryn: 11:10  So I have quite a live and let live kind of philosophy. I am very interested in different perspectives on things and having respect for people who have different needs and different beliefs and interests and personalities and therefore for my children too I’m expecting that they can grow up with not having all the same beliefs that I do or that I am seeing my children grow into two very different people with two very different personalities. I believe that's part of the fun is kind of coming to learn who they are and how best to support them uniquely. To me that's very important. That's a fundamental part of respecting your child I suppose is to allow them to be who they are and their best self.     Jen: 12:00  Yup. And so how does that play out on kind of a daily basis for you?     Kathryn: 12:05  Most of what I've tried to learn about in this journey is more around my daughter I suppose specifically because she by temperament is one that's a lot more sensitive to her environment I suppose. It feels like she has more specific needs. So it takes a lot more thought for me to try to understand what might be influencing her or things aren't quite set up in the best possible way for her to be the least stressful or to make her be her best whereas with my son, you know, just a lot more straight forward and things fall into place. So day-to-day I suppose I do try to expose myself to a lot of things, to try to work on where our next step is with things we might be tackling with her and then my son benefits by experience I guess.     Jen: 12:57  Yeah. So for listeners who may be listening thinking Kathryn’s voice sounds awfully familiar. If you have listened to the Parenting Your Spirited Child episode, Kathryn was actually featured on the episode interviewing Dr. Mary Sheedy Kurcinka about her spirited daughter. So this has definitely been a journey for you, hasn't it?     Kathryn: 13:18  Yes, it has. I think coming through a quite difficult time initially, just I suppose that the usual transition to having two kids that can be a bit of a bumpy ride, especially, when the older child is adjusting to it all. But yes, our journey for sure I think were well down that road now, which is lovely.     Jen: 13:38  Yeah, that's great. So can you tell me how did you first find the Your Parenting Mojo podcasts? Do you remember?     Kathryn: 13:44  Yeah, so it was actually quite funny because I don't remember what page it was, but some page that I've liked on Facebook had just given a list of best podcasts to listen to. And I had found it through there and quite taking to it and it was funny on one of the interviews that you had with Dr. Laura Froyen which I really loved and had looked her up subsequently and I realized it was actually her that had authored that list. So, I found you through her list and I found her through you.     Jen: 14:12  Through me. Wow!     Kathryn: 14:14  That's a mutually beneficial relationship.     Jen: 14:16  Yeah. Then you actually got to interact with her because you're a member of the Finding Your Parenting Mojo membership group. And Dr. Froyen actually teaches the third month of the group on parenting as a team. So, I hadn't realized what a full circle that was for you.     Kathryn: 14:31  Yes. You complement each other very well.     Jen: 14:34  Nice. So do you remember how you first learned about the membership group?     Kathryn: 14:39  Yes. I think it was a podcast initially. I think I subscribed to everything there is to subscribe to you. So I've no doubt received the emails as well.     Jen: 14:47  Got it. And then what made you even consider joining the group? Where you're looking to solve a particular problem when you joined or was there something else?     Kathryn: 14:56  It wasn't a specific, I suppose, I will always have the desire for self-improvement and just better understanding. I suppose there's new challenges all the time and as my kids get older and I suppose, I have an insatiable desire to learn more about it and it seemed like an opportunity to go deeper into it. I do listen and read a lot of this kind of stuff, but you kind of tend to think about a piecemeal, I find, or for me anyway, that's my personality. So it appealed to me the idea to kind of sit down and focus on one specific area at a time and do it in a bit of a more methodical way than might be my natural approach. Because I certainly benefit from it, but I don't do that naturally.     Jen: 15:43  Okay. And where there other particular areas that were attractive to you in terms of the focus of the group or the way it worked?     Kathryn: 15:52  I liked the breadth and how it laid out the initial few months and also that it included the component of parenting with a partner because I think that's an area that does get really neglected. So when you're looking at a lot of the peaceful parenting things, if there's any mismatch at all, it can create a little bit of anxiety thinking, oh, we're supposed to be doing this.     Jen: 16:13  United front. Right? We're supposed to have the exact same approach to our children all the time.     Kathryn: 16:18  That's exactly it. You can't control your whole environment. I think that I like that more holistic picture, and not just that, but I know from other work you've done as well to look at the whole environment and what all the influences are and what the cultural influences are and stuff I really liked. Your approach is so thorough and it isn't often like that. So it always feels like when you're going to implement things that there are areas you haven't accounted for. So that's something I've always really appreciated of the different courses in podcasts that I've listened to of yours.     Jen: 16:57  Okay. So as you were thinking about joining the group, what were you thinking? Did you ever doubt that you didn't need it? Or what were some of the reasons why you thought, eh, this might not be for me?     Kathryn: 17:10  Yeah, I mean I had no doubt that I would enjoy participating in it. I suppose with any investment, like I have done a previous course in a peaceful parenting kind of arena and all the audio books and things like that. I suppose whenever it's a new investment you think about, am I going overboard because you have invested other time and money into other things. But when it came down to it, it just seemed like a really good opportunity that I wanted it to be a part of and

Do you ever feel ‘lost’ in your parenting?  Like you’ve read all the books (and even listened to the podcast episodes!) and you’ve agreed with them in principle, but somehow nothing ever seems to change?   Your family feels directionless; you just muddle along having the same old fights with your partner about the same old things: <ul> <li>Should you praise your child when they do what you ask, so they’ll do it again next time? Or punish them for disobeying you?</li> <li>Should you worry about (quality or quantity of) screen time?</li> <li>Does it matter if you and your partner have completely different parenting styles?</li> </ul>   In this episode I interviewed Kathryn, and discussed: <ul> <li>The cultural differences between living in the U.K. and Canada (saying “please!” and certain differences in directness of humor)</li> <li>How to begin to approach differences in opinion about parenting with your spouse in a way that doesn’t get their back up, but instead focuses on your (and their) values</li> <li>The value of interacting with parents who are a little ahead of you and who can give you advice, as well as parents with younger children so you can see how far you’ve come and offer some support to them</li> <li>How to align your daily interactions with your child with your overall values</li> <li>The importance of bringing fun and playfulness to your parenting in a way that feels relaxed to you (and the positive impact this can have on your child)</li> <li>How to problem solve with a child in a way that encourages them to bring their own solutions to the table</li> </ul>   If you’re interested in learning more about the Finding Your Parenting Mojo membership, you can find all the info on it at <a href="https://yourparentingmojo.com/membership/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">yourparentingmojo.com/membership</a> – and also sign up for the FREE Top 5 Strategies to Tame Your Triggers webinar (scheduled for Wednesday September 30th at 11am PT) there as well.   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"]   Jen: 01:25 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We're doing something a little bit different on today's episode because I'm actually going to interview a listener, Kathryn. Kathryn is a Canadian living in London and she's married to an English husband and she has a daughter and a son. I connected with Kathryn to talk about the transformation that she's experienced in her parenting over the last 6 months or so. Kathryn's family was doing pretty well, although she was having some challenges knowing how to parent her spirited daughter and having a very different approach to doing this than her British husband who was raised with much more of a traditional British approach of not talking about feelings very much, which really contrasted pretty sharply with Kathryn's belief that the experience and the emotions should be validated and supported. These different approaches were causing some friction in her marriage and she felt like she didn't really have the tools to articulate why this issue and others like it were so important to her in a way that could invite her husband to share his perspective and feelings so they could work together to find a path forward in parenting their children.   Jen: 02:25 Now, both Kathryn and her husband feel more at ease in their family because they know the decisions they're making are based on their values and not just on knee jerk reactions made in the moment when their daughter asked to do something and they might be feeling a bit stressed and as a result they've really become to embrace the joyful aspects of parenting as you'll hear in the conversation. Before we talked with Kathryn, I do have a question for you and that is, are you truly enjoying your family right now? Yes, families have their ups and downs and not every day is perfect and neither will it be, but more often than not, do you feel confident about how the little decisions you make every day as a parent are adding up to and leading toward a goal that you've thoughtfully and purposefully established with your parenting partner, if you have one?   Jen: 03:08 If you do feel these joyful moments in your family where you feel confidence and clarity and a sense of ease, but they're more few and far between than you would like, then this episode is going to have a lot of nuggets of wisdom for you. I should also explain that Kathryn is a member of my Finding Your Parenting Mojo membership group, which is open to new members right now in July 2019 and the group we work on one topic each month. The first three topics are set before we start, in the first month, we focus entirely on reducing the incidents of tantrums. You can get a little bit of breathing room to take a step back and then look at setting goals in the second month. And these aren't just template goals that will tell you the right way to raise your child, but they’re goals that you set based on your own values and priorities.   Jen: 03:49 In the third month we have a co-teacher, Dr. Laura Froyen, who literally wrote a doctoral thesis on How Marriage and Family Relationships Influence Parenting and Child Development. She helps us to move beyond the same old arguments about the same old topics that we have over and over again with our partners to a deeper understanding of each other's values, so we can use these to figure out how to parent our children. After those first three months of core content, we choose topics by voting on them. So you actually get to help decide what we learn. I created the group after I surveyed my listeners last summer and I realized that while you're on board with the ideas you hear about on the show you have a really hard time actually implementing them in your real lives, with your real families and you need more support to do this. So that's what the group is designed to do, so you can stop worrying about the stack of parenting books you haven't read or even the ones you have read and forgotten about and actually learn and practice these techniques with my support and the support of all the other parents in the group.   Jen: 04:46 I also wanted to let you know that I've been running a free online workshop called Tame Your Triggers since July 8th which has been helping hundreds of parents to understand why their children's behavior triggers their frustration and anger and how to cope with this in a more productive way in the future. The workshop is already underway and it's too late to join now, but I'm actually hosting a free webinar on Thursday, July 25th at 11:00 AM Pacific that will summarize what we learned over the two weeks and give you some tools to overcome this challenge. This is exactly the kind of topic that we cover in the Finding Your Parenting Mojo groups or if you're interested in learning more about the group or just learning how to tame your triggers, then do sign up for that webinar, which will be on Thursday, July 25th at 11:00 AM Pacific at <a href="http://YourParentingMojo.com/Membership" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">YourParentingMojo.com/Membership</a>. Even if you know you're busy at that time and you can't join live, go ahead and register anyway if you want to hear it because I'll send out a replay afterwards for anyone who couldn't make it. All right, I think we're ready. Let's go ahead and meet Kathryn. Hello and welcome Kathryn. Would you mind telling us a bit about yourself to start please?   Kathryn: 05:47 My name is Kathryn. I have two kids. My daughter is nearly six and my son is two and a half and we live with my husband in London and I'm Canadian originally, but I relocated here about 10 years ago and my husband is British and so we've decided to stay here.   Jen: 06:06 Nice. Where are you from in Canada?   Kathryn: 06:10 Well, most of my time I've lived in Calgary, in western Canada.   Jen: 06:13 Oh, okay. So not quite as cold in the UK as it is in Calgary?   Kathryn: 06:17 No. I know people complain about the weather here, but I think it's great. Not very much so.   Jen: 06:24 So I'm guessing that there are probably some challenges involved in being a Canadian living in England?   Kathryn: 06:29 Yes. I suppose I wasn't expecting it to be much of a culture shock, I suppose you think English speaking Western country, but it's not a black and white differences, but just along a continuum, isn't it I supposed. And so just some of the things I suppose you initially, no, it was just day-to-day in some of the interactions and then again when you have kids and just pick up on things like the humor and the way people converse and things.   Jen: 06:58 What do you mean about the humor?   Kathryn: 07:01 I quite like the English humor that did actually attract me to hear and stuff. But it's a lot more direct, isn't it?   Jen: 07:08 It certainly is, yes.   Kathryn: 07:10 People are able to laugh at themselves. I think, so yeah, it's just a little bit different. People don't always know how to take my husband I think when we come back to Canada sometimes.   Jen: 07:20 Yes, I've had that problem myself.   Kathryn: 07:22 Because the humor has slightly different tone to it.   Jen: 07:25 What other differences have you noticed?   Kathryn: 07:28   I suppose it's just a sense of formality a little bit like I think both countries are known for their politeness, but it's just interesting to me that it can look a little bit different in the different places and I quite enjoyed your podcast where you mentioned about manners and like saying please and that I thought was quite funny because I had such a complex when I first arrived about saying, please, my husband would say, you haven't said please. You haven’t said please.   Kathryn: 07:55 And you think it’s implied.   Jen: 07:59 We are in a committed relationship. Right?   Kathryn: 08:01 Oh, I know.   Jen: 08:03 I hadn't thought about it in that depth until I did that episode. The fact that you don't necessarily have to say it to somebody when you're in that committed relationship because it is implied by the fact that you're committed to them, but still it's nice to hear, right?   Kathryn: 08:18 Yeah. Well I think sometimes too for me, like it almost sounds like I expect that you will say yes if I say please. So I prefer my roundabout way is just ask me. So yeah, I suppose it's just the subtleties like that can be a bit funny.   Jen: 08:36 So how does that play out in terms of how you're raising your children?   Kathryn: 08:40 So I suppose both of us have kind of adjusted a lot. So I have noted like myself things I would be taken aback at first with like very mild put downs I think, but aren't intended that way.   Kathryn: 08:54 I remember when Bridget Jones's Diary as well, when he laughingly says stupid co**t to his wife and that surprised me in the film and now it's like that wouldn't faze me. That's just normal, right? Now when we have kids, they didn't say exactly that, but you know, then it just you notice things that you wouldn't necessarily have otherwise and stuff. So there's just been a little bit of give and take that, you know, have discussions around, oh would you say that? And it's made me change a lot I think in terms of taking myself less seriously, I think I've become better at that as well.   Jen: 09:34 So do you see a really sort of solid desire in yourself and your husband to capture the best of both worlds as you’re parenting your children? Or does one approach more predominate than the other?   Kathryn: 09:44 For a lot of the smaller things, like there are differences that you just notice. For example, like something as innocuous as the pronunciation for example. It's just we have different ways of speaking and it's kind of fun sometimes to watch the things that they'll pick up from my husband or later from school and others that speak like that or things that they noticed in school. My daughter will say, yogurt and that sounds more like me. Those kinds of things are funny. Then there are some things that I suppose do require a lot more conversation around. For example, I think in the UK there's a stronger value on like stoicism and emotional stability. So for me just, I don't know if that's Canadian or general or just my own experience wanting to support emotional expression and emotional awareness and things like that, then that can feel a bit alien for my husband I think because he spent all these years trying to achieve something different and trying not to displace certain emotions more openly and negative emotions more openly than I suppose this can be a bit of an alien concept and I think I’m trying to change him into a Canadian.   Jen: 11:02 So it sounds as though that's really important to you. I wonder if you can tell us about what are some of your really strongest beliefs and values both as an individual and also as a parent.   Kathryn: 11:10 So I have quite a live and let live kind of philosophy. I am very interested in different perspectives on things and having respect for people who have different needs and different beliefs and interests and personalities and therefore for my children too I’m expecting that they can grow up with not having all the same beliefs that I do or that I am seeing my children grow into two very different people with two very different personalities. I believe that's part of the fun is kind of coming to learn who they are and how best to support them uniquely. To me that's very important. That's a fundamental part of respecting your child I suppose is to allow them to be who they are and their best self.   Jen: 12:00 Yup. And so how does that play out on kind of a daily basis for you?   Kathryn: 12:05 Most of what I've tried to learn about in this journey is more around my daughter I suppose specifically because she by temperament is one that's a lot more sensitive to her environment I suppose. It feels like she has more specific needs. So it takes a lot more thought for me to try to understand what might be influencing her or things aren't quite set up in the best possible way for her to be the least stressful or to make her be her best whereas with my son, you know, just a lot more straight forward and things fall into place. So day-to-day I suppose I do try to expose myself to a lot of things, to try to work on where our next step is with things we might be tackling with her and then my son benefits by experience I guess.   Jen: 12:57 Yeah. So for listeners who may be listening thinking Kathryn’s voice sounds awfully familiar. If you have listened to the Parenting Your Spirited Child episode, Kathryn was actually featured on the episode interviewing Dr. Mary Sheedy Kurcinka about her spirited daughter. So this has definitely been a journey for you, hasn't it?   Kathryn: 13:18 Yes, it has. I think coming through a quite difficult time initially, just I suppose that the usual transition to having two kids that can be a bit of a bumpy ride, especially, when the older child is adjusting to it all. But yes, our journey for sure I think were well down that road now, which is lovely.   Jen: 13:38 Yeah, that's great. So can you tell me how did you first find the Your Parenting Mojo podcasts? Do you remember?   Kathryn: 13:44 Yeah, so it was actually quite funny because I don't remember what page it was, but some page that I've liked on Facebook had just given a list of best podcasts to listen to. And I had found it through there and quite taking to it and it was funny on one of the interviews that you had with Dr. Laura Froyen which I really loved and had looked her up subsequently and I realized it was actually her that had authored that list. So, I found you through her list and I found her through you.   Jen: 14:12 Through me. Wow!   Kathryn: 14:14 That's a mutually beneficial relationship.   Jen: 14:16 Yeah. Then you actually got to interact with her because you're a member of the Finding Your Parenting Mojo membership group. And Dr. Froyen actually teaches the third month of the group on parenting as a team. So, I hadn't realized what a full circle that was for you.   Kathryn: 14:31 Yes. You complement each other very well.   Jen: 14:34 Nice. So do you remember how you first learned about the membership group?   Kathryn: 14:39 Yes. I think it was a podcast initially. I think I subscribed to everything there is to subscribe to you. So I've no doubt received the emails as well.   Jen: 14:47 Got it. And then what made you even consider joining the group? Where you're looking to solve a particular problem when you joined or was there something else?   Kathryn: 14:56 It wasn't a specific, I suppose, I will always have the desire for self-improvement and just better understanding. I suppose there's new challenges all the time and as my kids get older and I suppose, I have an insatiable desire to learn more about it and it seemed like an opportunity to go deeper into it. I do listen and read a lot of this kind of stuff, but you kind of tend to think about a piecemeal, I find, or for me anyway, that's my personality. So it appealed to me the idea to kind of sit down and focus on one specific area at a time and do it in a bit of a more methodical way than might be my natural approach. Because I certainly benefit from it, but I don't do that naturally.   Jen: 15:43 Okay. And where there other particular areas that were attractive to you in terms of the focus of the group or the way it worked?   Kathryn: 15:52 I liked the breadth and how it laid out the initial few months and also that it included the component of parenting with a partner because I think that's an area that does get really neglected. So when you're looking at a lot of the peaceful parenting things, if there's any mismatch at all, it can create a little bit of anxiety thinking, oh, we're supposed to be doing this.   Jen: 16:13 United front. Right? We're supposed to have the exact same approach to our children all the time.   Kathryn: 16:18 That's exactly it. You can't control your whole environment. I think that I like that more holistic picture, and not just that, but I know from other work you've done as well to look at the whole environment and what all the influences are and what the cultural influences are and stuff I really liked. Your approach is so thorough and it isn't often like that. So it always feels like when you're going to implement things that there are areas you haven't accounted for. So that's something I've always really appreciated of the different courses in podcasts that I've listened to of yours.   Jen: 16:57 Okay. So as you were thinking about joining the group, what were you thinking? Did you ever doubt that you didn't need it? Or what were some of the reasons why you thought, eh, this might not be for me?   Kathryn: 17:10 Yeah, I mean I had no doubt that I would enjoy participating in it. I suppose with any investment, like I have done a previous course in a peaceful parenting kind of arena and all the audio books and things like that. I suppose whenever it's a new investment you think about, am I going overboard because you have invested other time and money into other things. But when it came down to it, it just seemed like a really good opportunity that I wanted it to be a part of and

102: From confusion and conflict to confident parenting

Is your child ‘spirited’?  Even if they aren’t spirited all the time, do they have spirited moments?  You know exactly what to do in those moments, right? No? Well then we have a treat for you today.  Dr. Mary Sheedy Kurcinka, author of Raising Your Spirited Child, walks us through the ins and outs of her book on the same topic.  Best yet, we do the interview as a consult with a parent, Kathryn, who has read and loved the book, but struggled with implementing the ideas. Warning: we spend quite a bit of time brainstorming very specific problems that Kathryn is having with her daughter.  You may not be having exactly the same problem with your child, but the brainstorming method we use is one you can do with a friend – take the approach with you to address your own problems, rather than the specific ideas. Read more about Dr. Mary’s books and other work on her website.  Reference Kurcinka, M.S. (2015). Raising your spirited child (3rd Ed.). New York, NY: William Morrow. (Affiliate link)   Read Full Transcript    Transcript Jen:                                      [00:39]                   Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. I know we’re going to help a lot of parents out today because we are here with Dr. Mary Sheedy Kurcinka, who wrote the book Raising Your Spirited Child, which I know is an absolute classic read for any parent of a spirited child. I read the book because a listener had requested an episode on it and what surprised me about it was that I don’t think my daughter is particularly spirited, but I definitely saw elements of her behavior described in the book and what I took out of that was that probably pretty much any child can have spirited elements of their personality or even just spirited moments. And so both the book and this episode are really for anyone who raises a child and who has ever had a moment where they think, “why won’t he or she just do what I ask.” Jen:                                      [01:26]                   So Dr. Mary has a bachelor’s in early childhood education, a Master’s in family social science, and a doctorate in education. She has written four books on various aspects of raising children, which have been translated into 23 languages. Her son and daughter are now fully fledged adults and she lives with her husband in Bozeman, Montana. Welcome Dr. Mary. Kathryn:                             [01:46]                   Thank you. Jen:                                      [01:48]                   And so when I mentioned in my fortnightly newsletter, which you can actually receive by subscribing to the show YourParentingMojo.com, that I was looking for a coat interviewer to help me interview Dr Mary and really dig into the ways to apply the wisdom in the book. I received a number of responses, but one really stuck out. Kathryn is based in London and she has a four year old daughter who we’re going to call Jane in this episode and a son who’s a little over a year old and we’re going to call him George. Jen:                                      [02:14]                   I asked Kathryn to help us with this interview because she’d actually read and love the book, but had been struggling with the application of some of the strategies. She’s tried hard to support her spirited daughter as she grows and develops, but has found a particularly challenged in some areas since the birth of her son. So we’re here today to really get into the book, but also go beyond the book and get the real lowdown on how to implement the strategies in the book when the first attempt has maybe been a little bit less than successful. Welcome Kathryn. Kathryn:                             [02:41]                   Thank you. Jen:                                      [02:42]                   All right. So Kathryn, let’s start with you. I wonder if you could please describe your daughter and how she fits into your family dynamic and I know you’ve read the book so you know that the words that are used to describe spirited children are very important. So what words do you use to describe her and what words do people around you who might not have read the book use? Kathryn:                             [03:01]                   So after reading the book, I would say that in particular it was the intense and persistent elements that really struck a chord, but also she’s sensitive, very perceptive, a very high energy introvert, I would say. And just very articulate about what she wants, funny, enthusiastic, that kind of thing. And in terms of other peoples, there’s never been so much the label’s put on her I would find, but it’s just kind of when people talk, when they’d see something happening, you know, as if, oh, so and so that I know that they’re spoiled and oh well people don’t treat me like King Tut, or you know, just, it’s more in people’s tone. And I, I noticed as well since her brother was born that it’s more she falls into a particular persona kind of in contrast as the main older sibling almost. Jen:                                      [03:54]                   Is that pretty common? Dr. Kurcinka? Dr. Mary:                           [03:57]                   As the mean older sibling? Well, certainly one of the things we know about spirited children is their intent. So every emotion is intense, including jealousy, they’re also slow to adapt. So a shift in the family dynamic is certainly going to affect them, but they’re also incredibly perceptive of the stress levels within our family and so often it’s the spirited child who I refer to them as our stress barometers because they’ll often start acting out because they’re taking in the stress around them. And obviously a new baby brings a great deal of stress to a family dynamic. Jen:                                      [04:42]                   Yeah. Do you feel as though that’s really impacted your family dynamic, Kathryn? Kathryn:                             [04:46]                   Yes, I would say that has made a huge difference because I think, you know, when people talk about age two and age for as being particularly noteworthy in our family, it was really age three. But I think that’s because that was, you know, in the leadup my pregnancy and then the birth of her, her brother, the starting of preschool. So many things kind of happened at that period of time and therefore also our resources were that much less to kind of cope with it. And whereas I had kind of taken everything on with her, largely myself, because I stayed at home, I didn’t go back to work after my maternity leave and had kind of tried to protect her a little bit there because she had very distinct needs as far as I could see it in terms of being a little bit more sensitive to stimulation and to situations and things I had kept her under my wing a little bit in that respect. Whereas I couldn’t obviously do that with a newborn and also just adjusting to letting go a little bit in terms of preschool, you know, and no longer being her whole world anymore. That kind of rattled things a little bit and of course changed the family dynamic quite a bit and then adding an extra person. Jen:                                      [05:58]                   And these are all fairly natural things to happen, right? Brothers and sisters are born and their children tend to go up to some kind of care or preschool or something. Dr. Mary, how can we help children and prepare them for the kinds of transitions that Jane’s been going through? Dr. Mary:                           [06:15]                   Well, there’s several things. One is, as you said, with the starting preschool, there’s also a change in routine in one of the things I talk about and work with families on in my private consultants, there’s two aspects to effective discipline, there’s structure, which is the routine, the rules, the expectations, they’re the things that remain pretty stable and then there’s the emotion coaching and the challenge with a new baby and starting preschool is the structure gets disrupted and so if you think about it’s kind of like all of a sudden moving or changing jobs or changing bosses at work that all of a sudden there are…what you expected in the past is no longer occurring. Things are different, so in preparing them, one is reforming that structure and creating predictability for them, which will then reduce the frequency and intensity of the meltdowns, leaving you the patience and energy to do the emotion coaching when it needs to be done. Jen:                                      [07:25]                   Yeah, Dr. Mary, you just said something really profound there that helped me to understand the gravity of these kinds of changes in a child’s world. When you talk about being comparable to moving for an adult or changing a boss for an adult, you know, I think if there was a big deal, I need to figure out what a new boss wants for me and how I interact with that person and you know, even as something as simple as changing a child’s teacher at preschool, you might think, well all the other teachers are still there and all the other children is still there, but that’s a very different interaction and it makes me feel as though, oh yeah, I can understand that. I can understand why that would be difficult for a child. Does that help us to bring more compassion to it, do you think? Dr. Mary:                           [08:02]                   Well, I think it is important to look at that and look at this situation, yes, very compassionately. And that’s another thing that we can do is actually reduced expectations on that older child, which can be hard because it’s like, okay, now you’re the older one and I need to be taking care of the baby. But one of the stress reactions you’ll see is shut down. And shut down behaviors are, I can’t dress myself, I can’t walk, I can’t feed myself, and the natural reaction to those responses are you could do it yesterday or you could do it an hour ago and we push to have them do what they’re capable of doing, but what they’re actually telling us is I’m so overwhelmed, I’m shutting down. And so one thing that we can do as a parent is proactively say to them before they’re demanding, carry me, dress me, feed me, is, “is today a day that you can dress yourself or do you need help?” And if they say I need help, we help them because we recognize, wow, they’re dealing with a lot of stuff here. And so instead of fighting and struggling, we help them, but we also nudge them by saying, okay, you know, today I’ll help you, but pretty soon maybe even tomorrow you’re going to surprise me and do it yourself again. So we let them know we’re not doing this for ever, but we can see that right now, you need a little extra support. Kathryn:                             [09:46]                   Do you see that dynamic in Jane, Kathryn? Yes, and I think some of those kinds of things about the dressing herself and things like that, that was a little bit easier for me or when we had in meal times the returned to kind of wanting to be fed for a little while or when my son was weaning than wanting to be on our laps as well and so some of that we definitely saw and I think I was used to a little bit more doing things at her own pace beforehand, so that part of it was a little bit easier for me, but I struggled a little bit. I think with things that were just suddenly new in those transitions, so transition around having the new sibling created a kind of a new level to my own intensity. I think in terms of a protectiveness over the small person than she had never shown aggression really before then to see some of those behaviors being targeted towards him specifically rather than wanting to be baby. But something that kind of felt like a bit more of an emergency in the moment kind of thing. That was triggering to me in a way that I hadn’t really been triggered as much in the past, Dr. Mary:                           [10:54]                   And you’re absolutely right, Kathryn, you know, as a mom who are very protective of our children. It’s kind of the mother bear syndrome and one of the things I think that’s important to recognize, especially with a four year old, four year old and many spirited children, tend to be very bright and have excellent language skills and so we often assume that they have an understanding of things that they don’t because they are so verbal and so when we see behaviors that are potentially dangerous to the baby or a safety issue for the baby, the question becomes what is Jane feeling and needing in this situation? So is it an issue that she actually doesn’t realize, you can’t hug a baby that firmly. And so it’s teaching her how to hold and touch the baby. Is she feeling jealous? So instead of pushing the baby, teaching her to say I want him to go away, and that when she uses the words, we actually at that…because we’re teaching the words at this point, set the baby down and hold her because she used words instead of action. So it’s in those situations stopping to think what is she feeling or needing. Is it a skill issue? Is it a feeling she doesn’t know how to express appropriately. But as a four year old she has no idea that she can harm the baby. Jen:                                      [12:39]                   Wow. I would never have thought that. Wouldn’t you think that if you hit something it might hurt. But no, that’s a very profound realization I think to understand that a four year old can’t think that. Kathryn:                             [12:51]                   And I think sometimes if there are kind of two elements to it and like for, it’s the intensity piece around just that kind of out of control, excitement/anxiety, kind of that, you know, in the beginning in particular, if I’m trying to spend time just one on one with her to have a little bit of that, she actually would reject that for quite awhile. And she always wanted to know where he was and oh, if he was asleep she wants to be there waking up. Like she just really didn’t want to take her eyes off him. Like really was affectionate to like overzealously affectionate, but you know, in a way you would expect. But just couldn’t. It was like, yeah, simultaneously just out of control, affection and anxiety around the situation that she just couldn’t quite get to grips with, it felt like. Dr. Mary:                           [13:42]                   And, and I think that’s an interesting choice of words when you say kind of anxiety about it. And again with the energy and that frenzied energy, we look at the fuel source because that frenzied energy is saying she’s...

055: Raising Your Spirited Child

“Social and Emotional Learning” is all the rage in school these days, along with claims that it can help children to manage their emotions, make responsible decisions, as well as improve academic outcomes. But what if those programs don’t go nearly far enough? What if we could support our child in developing a sense of compassion that acts as a moral compass to not only display compassion toward others, but also to pursue those things in life that have been demonstrated – through research – to make us happy?  And what if we could do that by supporting them in reading cues they already feel in their own bodies, and that we ordinarily train out of them at a young age? Dr. Brendan Ozawa-de Silva, Associate Director for the Emory University’s Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics, tells us about his work to bring secular ethics, which he calls the cultivation of basic human values, into education and society Learn more about Breandan’s work here: www.compassion.emory.edu https://www.facebook.com/emoryseelearning/   We also mentioned the Yale University course The Psychology of Wellbeing, which is available on Coursera here.      References Desbordes, G., Negi, L.T., Pace, T.W.W., Wallace, B.A., Raison, C.L., &amp; Schwartz, E.L. (2012). Effects of mindful-attention and compassion medication training on amygdala response to emotional stimuli in an ordinary, non-meditative state. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 6(1), 1-15. Frey, K.S., Nolen, S.B., Edstrom, L.V., &amp; Hirschstein, M.K. (2005). Effects of a school-based social-emotional competence program: Linking children’s goals, attributions, and behavior. Applied Developmental Psychology 26, 171-200. Lantieri, L., &amp; Nambiar, M. (2012). Cultivating the social, emotional, and inner lives of children and teachers. Reclaiming Children and Youth 21(2), 27-33. Maloney, J.E., Lawlor, M.S., Schonert-Reichl, K.A., &amp; Whitehead, J. (2016). A mindfulness-based social and emotional learning curriculum for school-aged children: The MindUP program. In K.A. Schoenert-Reichl &amp; R.W. Roeser (Eds.), Handbook of mindfulness in education (pp.313-334). New York, NY: Springer. Ozawa-de Silva, B., &amp; Dodson-Lavelle, B. (2011). An education of heart and mind: Practical and theoretical issues in teaching cognitive-based compassion training to children. Practical Matters 4, 1-28. Pace, T.W.W., Negi, L.T., Adame, D.D., Cole, S.P., Sivilli, T.I., Brown, T.D., Issa, M.J., &amp; Raison, C.L. (2009). Effect of compassion meditation on neuroendocrine, innate immune and behavioral responses to psychosocial stress. Psychoneuroendocrinology 34, 87-98. Rovelli, C. (2017). Reality is not what it seems: The journey to quantum gravity. New York, NY: Riverhead.   Read Full Transcript    Transcript Jen:                                      [00:40]                   Hello and welcome to today’s episode of Your Parenting Mojo, which is on the topic of compassion. I actually need to thank Dr Tara Callahan, whom I interviewed way back in episode four of the show on encouraging creativity and artistic ability for bringing us this episode. She met today’s guest Dr Brendan Ozawa-de Silva at a conference and was kind enough to put us in touch. Dr Ozawa-de Silva is the Associate Director for the Emory University Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics, where he’s responsible for Emory’s Social, Emotional, and Ethical learning program, or SEE Learning; a worldwide kindergarten through twelfth grade educational curriculum based on compassion and secular ethics. He received his doctorates from Oxford and Emory universities as well as master’s degrees from Boston and Oxford Universities; I think you’ve actually got more degrees than I do. His chief interests lies in bringing secular ethics, which he calls the cultivation of basic human values into education and society. I’m excited to learn more today about his work and the benefits that it has for children. Welcome Brendan. Dr. de Silva:                       [01:42]                   Thank you Jen. Jen:                                      [01:43]                   So can you start by telling us what are secular ethics, what do these have to do with social and emotional learning that parents might already be familiar with? Dr. de Silva:                       [01:51]                   So secular ethics means basic human values, so things like compassion, gratitude, sense of common humanity, a recognition of our responsibility to one another and to the environment. And if we look at the two words, the word secular means that we approach these ethics not on the basis of any one religion or ideology, but in a broad way on the basis of science, common Sense, common experience. So what we have in common with each other rather than what kind of separates us, which religion and ideology can do, but it doesn’t mean secular in the sense of anti-religious. So secular ethics doesn’t mean anything against religion, but it’s rather what we all have in common despite our religious national cultural differences. And then when we talk about ethics, it’s important to state that we’re not talking about ethics as a set of rules or principles that are being handed down by an authority that this is right and that is wrong; this is good and that iss bad, but really exploring the dimension of what contributes to individual and social flourishing. So what’s beneficial for us, what are the kinds of common values that we would share that will be beneficial to us. So we agree on those values politically and legally. For example, we have laws saying, you know, you can’t steal and you can’t murder people. And those reflect our common values independent of religion. So that’s what we’re approaching it. And the connection to SEL is that we believe that the cultivation of these basic human values is very linked to social and emotional intelligence and social emotional skills. So these moral emotions are actually social emotions, just emotions that involve how we relate to one another. So it’s a kind of different approach to ethics. Jen:                                      [03:40]                   Yeah. And as you’re listing off those components, compassion, gratitude, responsibility, individual and social flourishing, I’m going down that list thinking, Yep, I want that. I want that for my daughter. So that gives us a framework to think within and to me, that sounds. Yes. I want to know more about that. So can you tell us why this kind of learning is important for children? And specifically I’m interested in it seems as though not all of these concepts are a component of the existing SEL programs. And by SEL we mean social and emotional learning programs as they’re typically taught in schools. Dr. de Silva:                       [04:15]                   Yeah. Well, I’d like to just very briefly give a story of myself when I was a child when I was growing up because it’s kind of a funny story and it kind of explains why I’m doing this. I remember when I was probably 10 or 11 maybe I first had these thoughts. Even earlier I was kind of thinking and I know what children think about this. Even at a much younger age, I was thinking about what’s important in life and what am I doing here and what am I supposed to be doing? What’s going to happen when I grow up? And I was asking these questions and wondering when in school we would actually be learning about these things. So I thought, well, they’re going to teach us. The adults are going to teach us about the meaning of relationships and loves and meaning in life and what life is about and all these things. Dr. de Silva:                       [05:03]                   And I thought you know; we’re too young right now, so they’re going to teach us later. So maybe when we get to middle school, they’re gonna teach us these things and got to middle school and I said, no, they’re not teaching us that. And then I thought, well maybe in high school they’ll be teaching us those things and know it’s the same thing. Math, history, biology, you know, and by then I was old enough to realize that even looking at college that we would never be taught these things. So not only are we not taught them, but there’s no space in the school day to even talk about them or discuss them. But I think that as human beings, we all have a need to find meaning in life as you said, as parents. We always want the best for our children. We want our children to have happy lives and we know that there’s a connection between character and flourishing; being a good person, however we define that. Dr. de Silva:                       [05:47]                   We know that there’s a relationship between that and leading a happy life. So why don’t we make space for that in education and maybe in previous times that’s a space that would have been held by the family or extended family, the community churches, but what we’re seeing in today’s pluralistic society is that increasingly these things aren’t talked about and so kids don’t have a space to talk about them and since all children go through school in some form or another, why not allow school to be the place where we do that. Social and emotional learning is a step in that direction because it creates a space in the curriculum and in the school day for kids to talk about emotions, talk about relationships, but SEL has stayed away from the kind of more thorny question of values and things like compassion and things like meaning because you know that’s moving in the direction of ethics and to some people that starts sounding like religion, but we think that there’s a way to talk. Jen:                                      [06:49]                   And dangerous, too… Dr. de Silva:                       [06:49]                   Yeah, exactly. And we have a history of people trying to indoctrinate our kids in various ways and of course we should be very suspicious of that, but we believe that there’s a way of doing it, which is not about indoctrination at all, but about exploration. So our program is very much not about teaching children how to think or what to think, but creating a space where they can explore these questions for themselves to talk about their own anxieties, their fears, their hopes and these deeper questions of meaning so that they can kind of get a jumpstart on those things. And also we think it might be protective against some of the problems that we’re seeing among kids and in schools with regard to anxiety, bullying and just a host of various issues that we’re dealing with. Jen:                                      [07:33]                   Okay. Your anecdote reminded me of my own moment where I thought the grownups had it all figured out. I was in geography class when I learned about climate change and it was just before the 1992 Rio climate conference and my teacher told us about the conference and I thought, Oh okay, well the adults are going to go and figure out what to do about this and they’re going to come back and tell us and we’re going to do it and climate change will be solved. I believe that’s probably not what happened at the Rio conference or we wouldn’t still have climate change today, but yeah, so when that leads us to the broader issue of the fact that the grownups don’t always have all the answers and that can be uncomfortable I think for teachers and also for parents. And so what would you say to parents who are thinking, oh, I do not want to open this can of worms with my kid because I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what the answer is. Dr. de Silva:                       [08:22]                   I think that’s a great point. I think there’s a moment in every child’s life. Probably when they have that Aha moment, they realized that the world is a lot crazier than it should be and that means that the, the grownups have not figured all things out. I remember going to school in the seventies and eighties and being taught stop, drop and roll. You know, what happens if a nuclear bomb falls on you learning things like MAD; Mutually Assured Destruction. So if the Russians fire warheads at us in the States, then that’s no problem because we will fire warheads back at them and everyone will die. So yeah, you learn this, you hear these horrifying things as a kid and you realize, yeah, the adults don’t have all the answers but there’s no place in school to talk about that. And for a lot of kids sometimes there isn’t even a place at home. Dr. de Silva:                       [09:07]                   So I think it is very important for parents to make that space and be courageous enough. It also takes courage from our teachers also to walk into this space where they know they don’t have all the answers. You know, we haven’t figured out our own emotions, our own relationships certainly, but just creating that space is so important and to allow children to explore that. Children have an incredible amount of wisdom on their own and it never ceases to amaze us that when that space is created, the things that they come up with and the learning that takes place just through the conversations. And we also find that parents learn a lot. So a lot of children who go through our program…we’ll bump into the parents and the drug store or at a yoga studio if it’s a school here in Atlanta for example. And they’ll say, you know, my kid was teaching me this about stress and teaching me this about what I can do when I get upset. And, and you know, was seeing me stressed out and saying, know mommy, you can take a few deep breaths now or you can push against the wall. You know, we teach them all these various techniques and those, they get deeper and deeper and deeper. And so the parents, you know, that’s the funny thing is that the parents can also learn, so if parents are open to it, it’s a great opportunity for growth for themselves and their kids and their relationship with their kids. Jen:                                      [10:21]                   Yeah. And you know, your curriculum addresses kindergarten through age 12, but I think it’s important to note that this isn’t something you have to wait until school age to start. Actually in an astounding moment of coincidence. I was just browsing Facebook before we got on this call and a friend of mine posted a discussion he’d had with his son who’s four and his son, they were just eating lunch. His son said what’s the best thing to do Papa? And he said, I think the best thing is to keep asking questions and his son said Oh, why? And he said, because if you keep asking questions you understand more. And with understanding you become more compassionate. And his son said what’s compassionate? And he said, what do you think it is? And his son said Well, compassionate is when you hear more laughs and more crying and, and, and he said, yeah, that’s right. When you hear more laughs and more crying, you’ll understand yourself and the people around you better and with that more love goes around and I just thought, wow, this kid is four years old and he’s already having conversations like that with his father. So shout out to my friend – you know who you; are not going to out you on the show, but yeah. So yes, we’re talking about a curriculum that’s used in school, but this is also relevant to kids younger than this, right? Dr. de Silva:                       [11:31]

064: Compassion (and how to help your child develop it)

Beverly Daniel Tatum

This episode is part of a series on understanding the intersection of race, privilege, and parenting.  Click here to view all the items in this series.We’ve laid a lot of groundwork on topics related to race by now: we learned about white privilege in parenting, and white privilege in schools, and even how parents can use sports to give their children advantages in school and in life.Today my listener Dr. Kim Rybacki and I interview a giant in the field: Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, author of the now-classic book (recently released in a 20th anniversary edition!) Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria: And Other Conversations About Race.We begin by assessing what is White parents’ responsibility to help dismantle structural racism, and then learn how to discuss race and racism with our children.  And in the next episode in this series I’ll have some really in-depth resources to support you in having these conversations with your own children.Dr. Tatum was featured in a short piece with Lester Holt on how to talk with children about racial injustice that you might also find helpful - she describes ways you can answer their questions honestly and fully in an age-appropriate way.  You can find a link to the interview on her website here.ReferencesBonilla-Silva, E., (2004). From bi-racial to tri-racial: Towards a new system of racial stratification in the USA. Ethnic and Racial Studies 27(6), 931-950.Cheney-Rice, Z. (2018, November 11). Bernie Sanders and the lies we tell white voters. New York Intelligencer. Retrieved from http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/11/bernie-sanders-and-the-lies-we-tell-white-voters.htmlDerman-Sparks, L., &amp; Olsen, J. (2009). Anti-bias education for young children and ourselves. National Association for the Education of Young Children. Available at https://www.naeyc.org/resources/pubs/books/anti-bias-educationHagerman, M. (2018). White Kids: Growing up with privilege in a racially divided America. New York, NY: New York University Press.Helms, J. E. (Ed.). (1990). Contributions in Afro-American and African studies, No. 129. Black and White racial identity: Theory, research, and practice. New York, NY, England: Greenwood Press.King, M.L. (2010). Where do we go from here: Chaos or Community? Boston, MA: Beacon.Kivel, P. (2017). Uprooting racism: How white people can work for racial justice (4th Ed.). Gabriola Island, B.C.: New Society.Miller, S. (2017, December 8). Reading race: Proactive conversations with young children. Raising Race-Conscious Children. Retrieved from http://www.raceconscious.org/2017/12/explicitlanguageracebooks/Roda, A. (2015). Inequality in gifted and talented programs: Parental choices about status, school opportunity, and second-generation segregation. London, U.K.: Palgrave MacMillan.Stalvey, L.M. (1989). The education of a WASP. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press.Sullivan, S. (2014). Good white people: The problem with middle-class white anti-racism. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.Tatum, B.D. (2017). Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?. New York, NY: Basic.Van Ausdale, D.V. &amp; Feagin, J.R. (2001). The first R: How children learn race and racism. Lanham, MD: Rowman &amp; Littlefield.[accordion][accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"]Jen: 01:25Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We have a very special episode lined up for today and I’m recording this introduction separately, so as not to take time away from the interview. If you’re a regular listener, you might have heard my episodes on White Privilege and Parenting and also White Privilege in Schools in which we looked at some of the structural racism that’s present in our society that we might not have recognized until now, especially if we’re white. I’d also like to direct you back to the very beginning of the show because in episode 6, which was called “Wait, is my toddler racist?” We discovered how implicit bias works, how it’s often present even in very young children and how just not talking with children about color or what is known as the colorblind approach is one of the more effective ways to raise a child who experiences racial prejudice.Jen: 02:10Having been completely immersed in the literature on this topic for the last couple of months, I’m also going to adjust my terminology to be more in line with the language that my guest uses. Racial prejudice describes a person’s attitude while racism or structural racism is the system that confers advantages on white people and disadvantages on people who aren’t white by reinforcing ideas about white superiority. If you haven’t already listened to these previous episodes then I would strongly encourage you to do so as a lot of the ideas and language we’ll use today was established in these episodes and we won’t spend a lot of time laying groundwork today so we can maximize our time on the really deep questions. I also want to acknowledge that when we use terms like white privilege and implicit bias, that it can make it seem like white people are innocent if ignorant recipients of an unfair advantage.Jen: 02:55We didn’t ask for this privilege after all, we were just born into a system in which we have it, but in reality, there are a lot of things that white people do every day to perpetuate and even reinforce the system. We talked about some of them in our episodes on White Privilege. These can be as simple as things like finding a resource related to education that not everybody knows about and sharing that information among networks of white people, which makes it more difficult for people of nondominant cultures to access these resources and of course they can take much more insidious forms like electing racist leaders who explicitly perpetuate whites’ advantage. So today we’re very lucky to have two special guests with us. The first one needs almost no introduction. Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum is former president of Spelman College, licensed clinical psychologist and nationally recognized authority on racial issues in America.Jen: 03:45Dr. Tatum holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Michigan and for 18 years she taught a course called Psychology of Racism at three different institutions. She’s the author of the seminal book, Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria, which was revised and updated in 2017 and is a nationally renowned expert on the subjects of race and racial identity development. And here with me today to help me co-interview Dr. Tatum is Dr. Kim Rybacki who received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the City University of New York, and is on the Behavioral Sciences Faculty at Dutchess Community College in New York. Dr. Rybacki is in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group, which you should join if you’re not already a member, and we had a conversation in the group about things that she’s trying to do to “fight for a better system while doing the least amount of damage in the current one as possible.” But she seemed very unsure as to whether she was doing the right things or even enough of the right things and so I realized she’d be the perfect person to talk this through with Dr. Tatum.Jen: 04:42I mentioned in the introductions to the previous two episodes that I acknowledged that race can be a difficult thing to talk about. To some extent, I think it’s sort of like talking about sex and even anatomically correct names for body parts, the more time you say vulva and penis, the less ridiculous it feels and the more ridiculous it feels that it feels ridiculous to say these words. So even if you’re feeling some resistance to the idea of listening to this episode, I would encourage you to sit tight with us, especially if you have a goal of raising race conscious children. So, we’re going to start off today by talking about the structural racism and what is our responsibility as parents to change the system and then we’ll talk about things that we can talk about and do with our children specifically on issues related to race.Jen: 05:22I’ll also remind you that we’ve began each of the episodes in this series by having both me and my guests state our privileges. You’ve heard mine a couple times already by now, so I’ll just state them quickly and then we’ll start by asking our guests about theirs. So, some of my main privileges are my whiteness, my economic status in the upper middle class, heterosexuality, able-bodiedness and my education. Now let’s hear from my guests. So, welcome Dr. Tatum it’s great to have you here.Dr. Tatum: 05:49Thank you so much. Glad to be with you.Jen: 05:51And welcome Kim as well.Kim: 05:53Thank you. Great to be here.Jen: 05:55So, I’ve already stated my privileges in the introduction to this episode. I wonder if you wouldn’t mind starting by having each of you state your privileges in turn perhaps by starting with Dr. Tatum, please.Dr. Tatum: 06:06Sure. Well, when I think about privileges, I define that in terms of the ways that I’m systematically advantaged and so I’m systematically advantaged as a heterosexual. I identify as Christian and living in a Christian dominant society that also gives me privileges. I’m physically and cognitively able. I grew up in a middle class home with well-educated parents and have been the recipient of an excellent education myself, so that certainly advantages me and I am someone who identifies as economically secure. I am an African American woman and of course I’m targeted by racism and sexism, but I always just want to acknowledge that as a light skinned person, a light skinned African American, I feel that that also gives me privileges that dark skinned people don’t get.Jen: 06:55Thank you so much. Kim, would you mind saying yours as well?Kim: 06:58Sure. I mean using the same definition as Dr. Tatum, I would certainly start off with stating that I have white privilege as a white woman. Also cisgender heterosexual privilege. I am an able-bodied person with a strong educational background and secure economic status. So, those are what would come to mind first.Jen: 07:20Super. Thank you. And so we’re going to take two major tacks with our questions today. We’re going to start out by talking about structural racism and then we’re going to talk about how we actually talk to our children about racism and race as well more generally. When I was trying to think, can we really cover this in an hour? I was trying to think what on earth I could cut, but I decided that I wanted to try and ask Dr. Tatum as much of it as we can. So, we’ll start with the structural racism and then we’ll get into the how to talk with children about this topic. So, my first question for you is for anyone whose view of the history of black people in America goes something kind of like black people were brought here as slaves and then Lincoln freed them because he thought that slavery was wrong and then black people essentially had all the same rights as white people, except that they couldn’t vote.Jen: 08:03Then they got that right in the 60s and now they’re essentially the same as whites and they really don’t deserve any special treatment like affirmative action. Then I just want to encourage my listeners to read Carol Anderson’s book, White Rage because it just systematically dismantle all of these ideas and hundreds more besides and I was so impressed that it has 80 pages of references in 230 pages of book. Kim actually recommended that book to me. So, the point that I’m trying to make here is that while we might think that the playing field is level, the playing field has never been level. So, we may think this is a recent problem, now we’ve managed to elect a president who has sort of spews these hateful ideas and these ongoing nationwide problems with the election of officials who have racially prejudiced ideas and less we think this is a Republican or Conservative problem.Jen: 08:50We should also acknowledge the large role of the Clinton administration played in promoting mass incarceration in the name of war on drugs. And also Bernie Sanders’ recent suggestion that whites who are uncomfortable voting for an African American president aren’t necessarily racist. So, this stuff is just all around us. It suffuses our everyday lives. It’s not just those people over there who don’t know any better. So, Dr. Tatum, I realize I’m sort of throwing us in the deep end a bit here, but I’m wondering what are some concrete steps we can realistically take ourselves as individuals to move forward and start to break the system?Dr. Tatum: 09:23Well, Jen I think you started with something that’s very important which is educating oneself. As you mentioned, a lot of people are quite misinformed or uninformed about the ways in which racism has operated in our society and continues to operate. And so you can’t solve a problem if you don’t acknowledge that it exists. So of course learning more about it is critical. One of the reasons I wrote my book, Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria: And Other Conversations About Race back in 1997 and then updated it in 2017 was really for that purpose to help people, the readers white and of color understand what racism is, the systematic nature of it, how it has been built into the very fabric of our society and how that impacts all of us in terms of how we think about ourselves and other people and ultimately what we can do about it, but the first starting point I think for people who are listening and saying, what are they talking about? Education through reading books like Carol Anderson’s excellent book, White Rage, and certainly I would advocate for my own.Jen: 10:30 Of course, yeah.Dr. Tatum: 10:31I think it can be a good place to start. Once we have an understanding of the ways in which racism is operating, we can begin to think about how we can use our own individual spheres of influence, whether that’s in our homes, in our neighborhoods, in our workplaces to begin to interrupt that cycle of racism.Jen: 10:53Okay, and so I’m starting to think about, okay, how do we make this move? So, I’m thinking about the philosopher, Dr. Shannon Sullivan and she’s written about White Guilt and Shame, which I think can sort of take the form of hand wringing a lot like we’re doing on this podcast if we were to look at it uncharitably I suppose, and I think that can lead to a toxic form of anger, but she says that these feelings aren’t actually very good at prompting us to act. So, I feel as though this education is a necessary step and then we might get angry about it and we feel the shame as well. And then we just kind of throw up our hands and say, well, what do we do about it? So I’m wondering if you see it in the same way or if these emotions are things that white people have to experience before they can accept all the things that haven’t worked so far and go on to find what does.Dr. Tatum: 11:41Well, I often talk about something I call the cycle of racism. So let me just say a word about that and if we think about racism as something that was operating in our society before any of us on this conversation were born, right? We didn’t start a fire so to speak, but it has been operating and we are all influenced by starting in our early years. We get misinformation, we’re exposed to stereotypes, we’re influenced in the socialization process by people we know, love and trust, our parents, our teachers, our friends, our neighbors, and we internalize a lot of that misinformation, the stereotypes about people different from ourselves as well as stereotypes about people like ourselves. When I say we, I’m talking about not just white people, but people of color as well. We all get misinformation. It’s like breathing smog. If you live anywhere, there are pollutants in the air, you breathe them in, not because you want to, but because it’s the only air that’s available.Dr. Tatum: 12:45And to the extent that we are all being exposed to it, we are not always conscious of it. In fact, a lot of the times we’re not conscious of it at all. We come to believe that misinformation is truth. We see difference as not different but equal, but difference as wrong or abnormal, and we passed that misinformation on to the next generation. That’s what I mean by that cycle. It continues. So sometimes we are, as I said, we’re not even aware of it, but when we become aware whether that’s by listening to a conversation like this one or having an experience where we witnessed something happening, we know to be wrong or we learned something in school or via documentary. However, the information comes to us, there are common emotions associated with it anger, guilt, confusion, alienation. These are common and they’re certainly common for white people, but they can also be part of the experience that people of color have as well.Dr. Tatum: 13:45And when you have that feeling of this is not right and feeling overwhelmed by it, one response can be, particularly for white people, I think who often are living in racial isolation, most white people in the United States live in largely white communities and go to school in largely white settings and have a pretty homogeneous social network. And if that describes someone and then they’re exposed to information that they didn’t have before or have a heightened awareness, confusion is common, guilt can be a feeling, anger can be a feeling, and sometimes the desire is to just not have those uncomfortable feelings. If I didn’t notice, if you didn’t bring it up to me, if I didn’t listen to this program, I wouldn’t have to think about it and there’s a tendency to want to just tune the information out. But for some people the impulse will lead to action. I want to do something about it. I want to take action, but I don’t know where to start, which brings us back to your earlier question and connecting with other people who are having a similar experience who also want to work against racism, who also want to speak up, can be one way to move forward, to find like-minded others with which you can connect and do some problem solving together.Jen: 15:06 Kim, I’m wondering, I think you used Dr. Tatum’s book as a teaching tool in some of your classes. Do you see the students in your classes going through these kinds of stages?Kim: 15:15I do. Obviously, the students come at very different points in the process, so speaking of my white students specifically, some of them are at the point where they’re sort of familiar with the problems associated with racism and now looking for things to do to be active, but I also get a lot of students who are still in that anger denial, discomfort stage where what they’re really looking for is to become more comfortable if that means denying the problem and for some of them that’s where they’ll go and it’s sort of a process of trying to push them out of that.Jen: 15:54Okay. Yeah, and I think part of the we want to feel comfortable, I think it’s sort of a human nature in general to want to feel comfortable. And so before I started researching this, I always figured, okay, racism has been a problem. It still is a problem. At some point I hope it’s...

087: Talking with children about race, with Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum

When should I start potty training?  What books should I read?  Can I do it in a day (or a week)?  Do I need stickers (for rewards)?  Does it have to be stressful? I get these kinds of questions pretty often, and I’d resisted doing an episode on potty training because there are so many books on it already, and everyone has their opinion, and I really didn’t want to wade into it.  But ya’ll kept asking and my resolve has finally crumbled, so today we’re going to talk all about what the research says, what the books say, and how there’s essentially no correlation between the books and the research.  We’ll review the “do it in a day!” methods and what makes them successful, and we’ll also look at child-led methods.  You’ll leave this episode with a clear picture of which is probably going to work best for you, and some concrete tools you can put to work (today, if you need to!) to start what I prefer to call the “toilet learning” process.    Other episodes references in this show 021: Talk Sex Today 009: Do you punish your child with rewards? 020: How do I get my child to do what I want them to do? (Unconditional parenting) 042: Manners   References Au, S. &amp;; Stavinoha, P.L. (2008). Stress-free potty training: A commonsense guide to finding the right approach for your child. New York, NY: AMACOM. Barone, J.G., Jasutkar, N., &amp; Schneider, D. (2009). Later toilet training is associated with urge incontinence in children. Journal of Pediatric Urology 5, 458-461. Benjusuwantep, B., &amp; Ruangdaraganon, N. (2011). Infant toilet training in Thailand: Starting and completion age and factors determining them. Journal of the Medical Association of Thailand 94(12), 1441-1446. Blum, N.J., Taubman, B., &amp; Nemeth, N. (2003). Relationship between age at initiation of toilet training and duration of training: A prospective study. Pediatrics 111(4), 810-814. Butler, J.F. (The toilet training success of parents after reading Toilet Training In Less Than A Day. Behavior Therapy 7, 185-191. Duong, T.H., Jansson, U-B., &amp; Hellstrom, A-L. (2013). Vietnamese mothers’ experiences with potty training procedure for children from birth to 2 years of age. Journal of Pediatric Urology 9, 808-814. Fertleman, C., &amp; Cave, S. (2011). Potty training girls the easy way: A stress-free guide to helping your daughter learn quickly. Philadelphia, PA: Da Capo. Fertleman, C. &amp; Cave, S. (2009). Potty training boys the easy way: Helping your son learn quickly – even if he’s a late starter. Philadelphia, PA: Da Capo. Gerber, M. (2002). Dear parent: Caring for infants with respect (2 nd Ed.). Los Angeles, CA: Resources for Infant Educarers. Glowacki, J. (2015). Oh, crap! Potty training: Everything modern parents need to know to do it once and do it right. New York, NY: Simon &amp; Schuster. Goode, E. (1999, January 12). Two experts do battle over potty training. The New York Times. Retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/12/us/two-experts- do-battle- over-potty- training.html Gross-Loh, C. (2007). The diaper-free baby: The natural toilet training alternative. New York, NY: William Morrow. Horn, I.B., Brenner, R., Rao, M., &amp; Cheng, T.L. (2006). Beliefs about the appropriate age for initiating toilet training: Are there racial and socioeconomic differences? Journal of Pediatrics 149, 165-168. Kaerts, N., Van Hal, G., Vermandel, A., &amp; Wyndaele, J-J. (2012). Readiness signs used to define the proper moment to start toilet training: A review of the literature. Neurology and Urodynamics 31, 437-440. Kimball, V. (2016). The perils and pitfalls of potty training. Pediatric Annals 45(6), 199-201. Koc, I., Camurdan, A.D., Beyazova, U., Ilhan, M.N., &amp; Sahin, F. (2008). Toilet training in Turkey: The factors that affect timing and duration in different sociocultural groups. Child: Care, Health and Development 34(4), 475-481. Martin, J.A., King, D.R., Maccoby, E.E., &amp; Jacklin, C.N. (1984). Secular trends and individual differences in toilet-training progress. Journal of Pediatric Psychology 9(4), 457-468. Matson, J.L., &amp; Ollendick, T.H. (1977). Issues in toilet training normal children. Behavior Theraly 8, 549-553. Shaikh, N. (2004). Time to get on the potty: Are constipation and toileting refusal causing delayed toilet training? Journal of Pediatrics 145, 12-13. Taubman, B. (1997). Toilet training and toileting refusal for stool only: A prospective study. Pediatrics 99(1), 54-58. Vermadel, A., Van Kamepn, M., Van Gorp, C., &amp; Wyndaele, J-J. (2008). How to toilet train healthy children? A review of the literature. Neurology &amp; Urodynamics 27, 162-166.   Read Full Transcript  Transcript Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  I had actually resisted doing an episode on today’s topic for quite a while but listeners kept emailing to ask me about it so my resistance has crumbled and today we’re going to talk about potty training.  I prefer to call it toilet learning, but we’re going to look at a lot of different studies on this topic and I’m going to use the language that the individual authors use in their work. There are SO MANY books about it and everyone seems to have their own opinion about it and I kind of didn’t want to stir the pot. Or even put my oar in it, to mix metaphors.  But you, my dear listeners, have spoken, and so I, your humble research assistant, have listened, and so today we are going to talk about potty training.  And toilet learning.  And we’re going to look at all of this through the lens of respectful parenting, because practitioners of respectful parenting have a fair bit to say on this topic.   So for those of you who listen to the show regularly, it probably won’t be enormously surprising for you to hear that toilet learning is profoundly impacted by cultural considerations.  Starting with the earliest possible age for toilet learning, we come to the concept of Elimination Communication, abbreviated to EC, which was popularized anew in Christine Gross-Loh’s book The Diaper-Free Baby, and I’m going to spare you the $13 on Amazon or even the three week wait in your library’s hold queue and tell you that the method basically involves watching for and learning a baby’s signals that he or she needs to pee or poo and providing opportunities to go at that time, providing opportunities to go at regular intervals even when the baby doesn’t indicate readiness, and making a whistling or zzzzz sound while you hold the baby over a potty or a hole in the garden which tells the baby that it’s time to go.  Not much to it, right? This approach is, of course, most common in countries where interdependence, rather than independence, is prized – since it relies so heavily on reading signals given by others, it’s not surprising that this approach is used in countries like China and Vietnam where a big part of being a citizen in society is developing the ability to read signals given by other people.  The key to all of this is that it’s done when the baby is very young.  And I’m talking infant stage.  A study conducted by a joint Vietnamese-Swedish research team interviewed forty seven mothers about their potty training experiences from the time the babies were newborns until they were 24 months old; the researchers stopped interviewing the mothers when the babies were 24 months because all of the children were potty trained by then.  To a Western audience, that must sound incredible – I was certainly pretty surprised, and I even had some experience with EC. The Digo tribe in East Africa begins toilet training a few weeks after birth; they expect some dryness at night by around six months and complete dryness at one year.  The babies are in constant contact with the mothers for the first couple of months of the baby’s life and whenever the mothers sense that the baby needs to pee or poop the mother holds the baby between her knees.  When the baby is 3-5 months old a sibling or other female family member aged between 5-12 years takes over primary care of the baby during the day, and if an accident occurs it is actually the caregiver rather than the infant who is punished.  So in the Digo culture, it is primarily the responsibility of parents and caregivers to recognize and respond to the child after the child indicates their need to pee or poop.  This is in stark contrast to Western cultures where the responsibility is primarily placed on the child to indicate that they need to pee or poop and to get themselves to the toilet, undress, void, wipe, and re-dress.  One study looked at mothers from different backgrounds in Turkey, and found that the both the age of initiation of potty training as well as the age of completion was much earlier among rural families that lived in homes without an inside toilet, families using washable diapers, and families who punish children.  Mothers having an education of more than 12 years tended to initiate training much later and used a more child-led approach.   We had a pretty traumatic first few months with my own daughter’s peeing; she would cry as soon as she peed and would continue to cry until her diaper was changed.  She was also very gassy as well so she actually cried a lot of the time in those early days and we had the Pamper’s diapers with the stripe on them that turns from yellow to blue when it gets wet.  She would start to cry and we would quickly check the stripe to see if it was blue, and it wouldn’t be blue, and she would keep crying and twenty seconds later it would turn blue – she was actually more reactive than the wetness indicator stripe.  We wondered if she might have a urinary tract infection but sometimes she would pee mid-change and wouldn’t cry at all then.  We went through sixteen diapers a day in the first few months; I know this because I hiked around Mont Blanc with her when she was eight weeks old and I had to count how many diapers we were using each day before we went so we could be sure to carry enough. I think I read The Diaper-Free Baby when she was about five months old, because my in-laws were living with us from the time she was four through six months old to help take care of her while I went back to work.  I knew they would think I was crazy for trying EC so I waited until the day they left to start.  Within a couple of weeks she was doing pretty much all of her pees and about half of her poops on the potty, and when our nanny started work a few weeks later she was stunned to find a seven month-old mostly using the potty.  And the nanny was actually from Thailand, but I guess she had been in the States for entirely too long because a study out of Thailand reports that 80% of 50 infants who were followed by some Thai researchers were fully toilet trained by 12 months.  That study also found that children who weren’t the first child, and who were taken care of by a well-educated mother, were found to start toilet training late – perhaps exposure to more Western ideas, as well as having enough money to be able to afford diapers, were behind this trend. I read a few books on potty training to prepare for this episode, along with a whole host of empirical research, and I have to say that that’s where the correlation between the two ends – researchers publish the results of empirical studies, but the people who write books on potty training seem not to read that research – or at least, I’ve yet to meet a book that cites any of it.  So let’s start going through some of that research and I’ll bring in information from the books as it seems appropriate. If we missed the window for teaching through EC, which by all accounts has to be done early in the child’s life, then we have two-main choices for how to proceed – we can do a parent-led approach where we establish a date when we will “train” the child, and we train them on that day – we expect results the same day or certainly within the same week.  Or we can watch for signs that the child is ready to begin learning how to use the toilet, and allow the child to lead the process. This readiness is, like many of these kinds of things, something that is culturally determined.  A study of 779 parents visiting child health providers in and around Washington D.C. found that the average age at which Caucasian parents believed toilet training should be initiated was 25.4 months, significantly later than African American parents (18.2 months) and parents of other races at 19.4 months.  Higher income was also associated with later toilet training.  This is certainly later than parents have toilet trained in the past – I found an abstract for a study from 1983 (although I couldn’t find the full study) stating that the first appearance of toileting skills appeared between 18 and 36 months in a dataset from 1975, which itself is described as being much later than in a comparable cohort (we have to assume they mean “mostly white”) from 1947.  Another study found that when children start training at a younger age then toilet training takes longer, although these children do end up completing training earlier than children who start later.  Training before the age of 27 months is apparently not correlated with the earlier completion of training, suggesting that there is little benefit to starting before then. A variety of researchers have produced impressive-looking charts of signals that a child is ready to begin potty training.  One literature review graphed twenty one signs of readiness according to when the sign appears – some of these included the ability to sit and to walk, which appear between four and 18 months, acquiring voluntary control of the pelvic muscles which appears between 9-24 months, and understanding and responding to directions or questions and being able to follow simple commands appears between 9 and 26 months.  The majority of researchers as well as lay authors writing about potty training stress the importance of readiness, but there is no consensus whatsoever in the literature about how many of these readiness signs need to be present for the child to start potty training, which ones are more important in terms of judging an individual child’s readiness.  Many of the authors who say “a child must be ready” often give ages at which certain readiness signs should be present give different ages from each other.   So that gives us some information about when we might start thinking about toilet learning, but what do we actually do when we think that window has opened?  Well, it seems as though there are basically two approaches, and some people who attempt a middle ground between the two.  One approach seems to see toilet learning as the process of “getting urine and feces in the toilet,” as Magda Gerber, who founded the RIE approach to parenting, puts it.  Parents who see toilet training in this way will do whatever it takes to get the urine and feces in the toilet, typically making extensive use of rewards to make that happen. Let’s cover the with the parent-led approach to toilet training first, which was formally developed by two psychologists named Asrin and Fox in 1974.  Any book published since then that promises parents they can potty train in a defined and short period of time probably uses some elements of this approach, although what they invariably neglect to state is that it was actually developed for “retarded and brain-damaged children,” and then the researchers appear to have decided that it was also applicable to normally developing children as well.  I should be up-front here and say that I haven’t read the book; I couldn’t get it from the library and honestly I didn’t want to give the researchers any money by buying it.  So if you’re considering this approach you should certainly read the book, but the gist of it is that once children are 20 months old (I’m not sure why this is the magic number) and can meet a variety of other criteria like being able to walk, staying dry for a couple of hours at a time, and following simple instructions, you set aside a day for potty training.  You set up a potty in an area big enough to play in, like the kitchen, and you show the child how to use the potty by showing a doll “drinking” water and “urinating” on the potty after taking its diaper off.  You do this a couple of times, first successfully, so the doll “pees” on the potty and gets a reward, and then “unsuccessfully” so the doll wets its underwear and then has to do a practice drill of going to the potty even though they don’t need to go.  You make sure your child drinks lots of fluids so he needs to pee.  Then repeat the same process with the child – when the child pees on the potty, he gets a reward.  If the child pees in his underwear, he has to do the drill of sitting on the potty.  Azrin and Fox tested their method on 34 children with the average child completing training in 3.9 hours and having a 97% decrease in accidents the week after training.  Sounds good, right? Apparently there were so many reports about failures of parents to train their children using the book that people began to form classes to train parents in using the Asrin and Fox method.  One researcher noted that parts of the procedure are subtle (so don’t try to use this method just from my description; you’ll have to go and read the book) – and parents might lack the self-control required for this method.  It turns out that having extra support ends up being fairly critical for success – one admittedly very small study of ten children randomly assigned the children to either have a parent who would just read the book, or have a parent read the book as well as have an experienced trainer available for “supervision and prompting.”  Children whose mothers just read the book had about five accidents per day at the beginning of treatment, which dropped to about four over the course of five days of treatment, but actually rebounded to a peak of SEVEN accidents per day seven weeks after training before dropping again slightly to a level that was still above where they were when they started.  Children whose parents read the book and had “supervision and prompting” started with four accidents per day and dropped to an average of half an accident per day by day three, and maintained somewhere between half and one accident per day for the next ten weeks. Now a couple of things stuck out to me here.  Firstly, that the researchers said that ALL of the mothers reported “emotional side effects” in their children, primarily consisting of tantrums and avoidance behavior.  These behaviors were more evident in mothers who only read the book and didn’t get support, and among younger children and usually occurred after an accident when the child didn’t want to sit on the potty again when they didn’t need to go.  Four of the ten mothers felt so uncomfortable that they wanted to stop the training, but “encouragement” resulted in three of the four...

046: How to potty train a child

Is your child Highly Sensitive?  Does it sometimes feel as though you don’t understand them, and struggle to support them in the ways it seems they need to be supported?  Or does your child experience and process things more deeply than other children, but this is the first time you’re hearing about High Sensitivity?In this episode Dr. Michael Pluess helps us to understand how we can know whether our child is highly sensitive, and how to parent these children effectively so they can reach their full potential.ReferencesAron, E. N., Aron, A., &amp; Jagiellowicz, J. (2012). Sensory processing sensitivity: A review in the light of the evolution of biological responsivity. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 16, 262–282.Aron, E. N., Aron, A., &amp; Davies, K. M. (2005). Adult shyness: the interaction of temperamental sensitivity and an adverse childhood environment. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 31, 181-197.Aron, E.N. (2002). The highly sensitive child: Helping our children thrive when the world overwhelms them. New York, NY: Harmony.Aron, E. N., &amp; Aron, A. (1997). Sensory-processing sensitivity and its relation to introversion and emotionality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73, 345-368.Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., &amp; van IJzendoorn, M. H. (2011). Differential susceptibility to rearing environment depending on dopamine-related genes: New evidence and a meta-analysis. Development and Psychopathology, 23, 39–52.Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., Van IJzendoorn, M. H., Pijlman, F. T., Mesman, J., &amp; Juffer, F. (2008). Experimental evidence for differential susceptibility: dopamine D4 receptor polymorphism (DRD4 VNTR) moderates intervention effects on toddlers' externalizing behavior in a randomized controlled trial. Developmental Psychology, 44, 293-300.Belsky, J., &amp; Puess, M. (2013). Beyond risk, resilience, and dysregulation: Phenotypic plasticity and human development. Development and Psychopathology 25, 1243-1261.Belsky, J., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., &amp; Van IJzendoorn, M. H. (2007). For better and for worse: Differential Susceptibility to environmental influences. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16, 300-304.Bouvette-Turcot, A-A., Pluess, M., Bernier, A., Pennestri, M-H., Levitan, R., Skolowski, M.B., Kennedy, J.L., Minde, K., Steiner, M., Pokhvisneva, I., Meaney, M.J., &amp; Gaudreau, H. (2015). Effects of genotype and sleep on temperament. Pediatrics 136(4), e914-e921.Pluess, M. (2015). Vantage sensitivity: Environmental sensitivity to positive experiences as a function of genetic differences. Journal of Personality 85(1), 38-50.Pluess, M. (2015). Individual differences in environmental sensitivity. Child Development Perspectives 9(3), 138-143.Pluess, M., &amp; Boniwell, I. (2015). Sensory processing sensitivity predicts treatment response to a school-based depression prevention program Evidence of Vantage Sensitivity. Personality and Individual Differences 82, 40-45.Pluess, M., &amp; Belsky, J. (2013). Vantage sensitivity: Individual differences in response to positive experiences. Psychological Bulletin 139(4), 901-916.Pluess, M., &amp; Belsky, J. (2011). Differential susceptibility to maternal sensitivity. Maternal Sensitivity: A critical review for practitioners, 95-107. Retrieved from http://philosonic.com/michaelpluess_construction/Files/PluessBelsky_2010_Differential%20Susceptibility%20to%20Maternal%20Sensitivity.pdfPluess, M. &amp; Belsky, J. (2010). Differential susceptibility to parenting and quality child care. Developmental Psychology 46(2), 379-390.

Is your child Highly Sensitive?  Does it sometimes feel as though you don’t understand them, and struggle to support them in the ways it seems they need to be supported?  Or does your child experience and process things more deeply than other children, but this is the first time you’re hearing about High Sensitivity? In this episode Dr. Michael Pluess helps us to understand how we can know whether our child is highly sensitive, and how to parent these children effectively so they can reach their full potential. References Aron, E. N., Aron, A., &amp; Jagiellowicz, J. (2012). Sensory processing sensitivity: A review in the light of the evolution of biological responsivity. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 16, 262–282. Aron, E. N., Aron, A., &amp; Davies, K. M. (2005). Adult shyness: the interaction of temperamental sensitivity and an adverse childhood environment. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 31, 181-197. Aron, E.N. (2002). The highly sensitive child: Helping our children thrive when the world overwhelms them. New York, NY: Harmony. Aron, E. N., &amp; Aron, A. (1997). Sensory-processing sensitivity and its relation to introversion and emotionality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73, 345-368. Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., &amp; van IJzendoorn, M. H. (2011). Differential susceptibility to rearing environment depending on dopamine-related genes: New evidence and a meta-analysis. Development and Psychopathology, 23, 39–52. Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., Van IJzendoorn, M. H., Pijlman, F. T., Mesman, J., &amp; Juffer, F. (2008). Experimental evidence for differential susceptibility: dopamine D4 receptor polymorphism (DRD4 VNTR) moderates intervention effects on toddlers' externalizing behavior in a randomized controlled trial. Developmental Psychology, 44, 293-300. Belsky, J., &amp; Puess, M. (2013). Beyond risk, resilience, and dysregulation: Phenotypic plasticity and human development. Development and Psychopathology 25, 1243-1261. Belsky, J., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., &amp; Van IJzendoorn, M. H. (2007). For better and for worse: Differential Susceptibility to environmental influences. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16, 300-304. Bouvette-Turcot, A-A., Pluess, M., Bernier, A., Pennestri, M-H., Levitan, R., Skolowski, M.B., Kennedy, J.L., Minde, K., Steiner, M., Pokhvisneva, I., Meaney, M.J., &amp; Gaudreau, H. (2015). Effects of genotype and sleep on temperament. Pediatrics 136(4), e914-e921. Pluess, M. (2015). Vantage sensitivity: Environmental sensitivity to positive experiences as a function of genetic differences. Journal of Personality 85(1), 38-50. Pluess, M. (2015). Individual differences in environmental sensitivity. Child Development Perspectives 9(3), 138-143. Pluess, M., &amp; Boniwell, I. (2015). Sensory processing sensitivity predicts treatment response to a school-based depression prevention program Evidence of Vantage Sensitivity. Personality and Individual Differences 82, 40-45. Pluess, M., &amp; Belsky, J. (2013). Vantage sensitivity: Individual differences in response to positive experiences. Psychological Bulletin 139(4), 901-916. Pluess, M., &amp; Belsky, J. (2011). Differential susceptibility to maternal sensitivity. Maternal Sensitivity: A critical review for practitioners, 95-107. Retrieved from <a href="http://philosonic.com/michaelpluess_construction/Files/PluessBelsky_2010_Differential%20Susceptibility%20to%20Maternal%20Sensitivity.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://philosonic.com/michaelpluess_construction/Files/PluessBelsky_2010_Differential%20Susceptibility%20to%20Maternal%20Sensitivity.pdf</a> Pluess, M. &amp; Belsky, J. (2010). Differential susceptibility to parenting and quality child care. Developmental Psychology 46(2), 379-390.

099: How to parent highly sensitive children

This episode is part of a series on understanding the intersection of race, privilege, and parenting.  Click here to view all the items in this series.In this episode we continue our series on the intersection of race and parenting, which we started with Dr. Margaret Hagerman on the topic of white privilege in parenting; then we covered white privilege in schools with Dr. Allison Roda and what parents can do to overcome structural racism as well as talk with their children about race with Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum.Today we’re continuing the series by learning from Dr. John Bickford about how to actually have a conversation with our child on a topic as complex and difficult as slavery or the Civil Rights Movement, using both primary sources and children’s ‘trade’ books.During the episode you’ll hear Dr. Bickford and I hatch an idea to develop a resource guide for parents on exactly what sources and books to use to make sure you’re discussing the right issues within these topics: download the guide below!References: Bauer, M.D. (2009). Martin Luther King, Jr. New York, NY: Scholastic. Bickford, J.H., &amp; Rich, C.W. (2014). Examining the representation of slavery within children’s literature. Social Studies Research and Practice 9(1), 66-94. Bickford, J.H., &amp; Rich, C.W. (2015). The historical representation of Thanksgiving within primary- and intermediate-level children’s literature. Journal of Children’s Literature 41(1), 5-21. Bickford, J.H. (2015). Assessing and addressing historical misrepresentations within children’s literature about the Civil Rights Movement. The History Teacher 48(4), 693-736. Bickford, J.H., &amp; Schuette, L.N. (2016). Trade books’ historical representation of the Black Freedom Movement, slavery through civil rights. Journal of Children’s Literature 42(1), 20-43. Bickford, J. (2018). Primary elementary students’ historical literacy, thinking, and argumentation about Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan. The History Teacher 51(2), 269-292. Marzollo, J., &amp; Pinkney, J.B. (1993). Happy Birthday Martin Luther King. New York, NY: Scholastic. Southern Poverty Law Center (2019). Anti-racism activity: ‘The Sneetches.’ Author. Retrieved from https://www.tolerance.org/classroom-resources/tolerance-lessons/antiracism-activity-the-sneetches Southern Poverty Law Center (2019). Classroom simulations: Proceed with caution. Author. Retrieved from https://www.tolerance.org/magazine/spring-2008/classroom-simulations-proceed-with-caution  Click below to download FREE guides to teaching children about slavery and the civil rights movement Get the FREE Guide!Read Full TranscriptJen:                              00:01:44          Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Regular listeners will recall that we've been talking about the Intersection of Race and Parenting for a while now. We opened by talking with Dr. Margaret Hagerman on the topic of White Privilege and Parenting. And then we heard from Dr. Allison Roda on White Privilege in Schools. In our third episode, one of my listeners, Dr. Kim Rybacki and I interviewed Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum. And we tried really hard to cover a lot of ground on both what parents can do to overcome structural racism and on how to talk with our children about race. But I was very cognizant of the stones that we left unturned that I really wish we had time to address. Now, I reached out to today's guest because I wanted to better understand his work on how historical figures are depicted in children's literature. And he responded, I should be on your show.Jen:                              00:02:31          And after I read his papers, I said, yes, you should. So, Dr. John Bickford is here with us today. I just wanted to mention though that I'm rerecording this introduction because you'll hear in the conversation that we formulated an idea to develop some resources to help parents talk with their children about difficult topics like slavery and the Civil Rights Movement. And we actually went ahead and did that. So, each one is a short PDF that walks you through primary sources were these exist on each topic as well as a collection of children's books. You’ll hear Dr. Bickford refer to these as trade books and if it's been awhile since you studied history, then primary sources or things like photographs and posters of slave auctions and audio recordings of former slaves, which you might not normally consider as things to share with young children.Jen                               00:03:13          But which Dr. Bickford has actually done very successfully. So, the thing that makes these resources unique is that they use frameworks developed by the Southern Poverty Law Center for teaching young children about these topics. So, it's not just a random collection of books and pictures and videos that we thought were interesting, but together they address what scholars believe to be the most important ideas on each topic. Things like the fact that enslaved people brought rich cultures and traditions with them that continue today and that the Civil Rights Movement was pushed forward by many, many concerted efforts and not just by Dr. Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. Primary sources do exist for a lot of these ideas, but where we couldn't find any, we supplemented with interesting secondary sources like videos. So, if you subscribed to the show through my website, you'll already have received these resources and the email about this podcast episode.Jen:                              00:04:02          If you subscribed through a podcasting platform like iTunes or Stitcher, then I don't have a way to get this to you, but you can head over to this episode's page at YourParentingMojo.com/TeachingRace to download these resources. So, back to the interview, Dr. Bickford received his Bachelor's Degree in History, his Master's Degree in Secondary Education and his Ph.D. in Social Studies Education all from the University of Iowa. And he's now Associate Professor at Eastern Illinois University where he teaches How to Teach Social Studies at the elementary and middle school levels. His research focuses on how social studies and history education is taught at these levels, how students think about history as well as historical misrepresentations within children's literature. And today we're going to discuss a ton of resources to help us teach children about topics related to race. Welcome Dr. Bickford.Dr. Bickford:                 00:04:51          Thank you for having me.Jen:                              00:04:53          All right. So, we've started each episode in this series by both me and my guests stating our privileges. And so my guests have heard mine a number of times right now. So, I'm going to state these quickly. These are my whiteness, my economic status and the upper middle class, heterosexuality, able-bodiedness and my education. And I was actually also reminded by one of my Instagram followers last night that I should acknowledge the native Americans on whose land I sit, and those are the Chochenyo Ohlone. And I actually pay the Shuumi Tax, which is a donation that's acknowledgement of this land used to belong to these people and was taken from them. So, I wonder if you could begin by telling us some of your privileges, please.Dr. Bickford:                 00:05:28          Well, it would be whiteness and upper middle class socioeconomic status. I'm a heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied white male. I benefited tremendously from having two parents with college degrees and a grandfather who was a college professor. So, education and enriching experiences like museums and concerts were something that I kind of grew up with. I also have the privilege of being physically larger and more athletic than most folks, but my teenage son would disagree. And since you mentioned about the first people’s or native American’s land on which you're sitting, mine would be of the Mississippian culture or the Cahokian culture.Jen:                              00:06:12          Oh, wow! And you must know that off the top of your head because I added that after I sent you the question list.Dr. Bickford:                 00:06:18          Yeah, yeah. That was not on the list, but one of my favorite passions as a child and as an adult now still with my own reading is about the native people of North and particularly Central and Southern America. I really, really enjoy that. Yeah.Jen:                              00:06:33          Okay. Well, we may get to talk about that a little bit more in the interview. I wonder if we could start up by talking a bit about your work. Can you tell us what kind of books you study and how you study them?Dr. Bickford:                 00:06:42          Sure. Generally speaking, I study the texts and tasks, the best facilitate historical reading and thinking and writing. These are the sources and strategies that get kids to think historically not memorizing historical dates. That's historical comprehension. But real historical thinking is looking at different sources and figuring out what actually happened, like a detective at a crime scene, so to speak, and invariably that involves the texts that include the curriculum the parents and teachers choose and use with their children and teenagers. And from an educational psychology standpoint, I spend most of my time on elementary children and some children in the middle grades. If you were to think of it as like a Venn diagram with one circle being what the experts know, the historians, the archeologists, the anthropologists, and then the other circle being what's included in the curricula, textbooks and trade books.Jen:                              00:07:40          Those things overlap in some way?Dr. Bickford:                 00:07:43          In some ways they do. I explore the areas of convergence and also particularly the divergences between historians and children's authors. I don't get too much into the historical quibbles or the nuances. I tried to focus on what I consider important big picture aspects. Like is this accurate? But also age-appropriate. Could this be taught to a 5-year-old? Could this be taught to a 10-year-old? Things like that.Jen:                              00:08:10          Yeah. We had a fair bit of email conversation before this episode and I was looking for a blog post that's actually well have been published by the time this episode goes out on what we should learn during black history month. And so I asked Dr. Bickford if he knew of any online resource that actually presented an accurate view of Lincoln rather than this, not quite accurate version that a lot of us understand. And he kind of said, well, historians get over these things when they do an undergraduate degree. So no, there's not really information out there because they don't have a reason to put it out there because they just know it's not true and they don't really speak to laypeople. And I was really interested by that and I'd never thought about the resources that are available online in that way before.Dr. Bickford:                 00:08:52          It really is remarkable, but it's kind of like this idea if you were to ask a hundred folks, when did native Americans start to inhabit North and South America? Probably 95 of them would say something like about 10,000 years ago they walked across the Bering Strait and since then they populated North and South America. The five people who wouldn't say that have background in archeology or historiography or anthropology.Jen:                              00:09:21          Okay. Don't tease us like that. Give us the answer.Dr. Bickford:                 00:09:24          It's hard to know. But they know that they came over more than one way and they can do this linguists. Linguists by evaluating the different patterns of languages and people disagree to degree. But it's anywhere from four to six different language groups that are in the North and South America for Native Americans. And they assume it was in these four to six different waves because presumably there were small tribes that walked across and linguists may disagree here and there on the small aspects, but the most logical answer that most people would agree with is that it was probably multiple groups probably starting somewhere between 25 and 35,000 years ago and probably the last one was maybe 10 to 15,000 years ago and I just mentioned the linguistic evidence, but there's also a lot of contemporaneous evidence when it comes to spheres and in bison and woolly mammoths and things like that, spearhead points and things like that. It's a whole lot more complicated than what I can just convey in a short answer here.Jen:                              00:10:25          Yeah, for sure. I didn't realize your expertise extended to that area. We've been talking a lot about slavery and Lincoln and I didn't realize that was one of your primary interest.Dr. Bickford:                 00:10:34          Actually, my primary interest is what historians call the Black Freedom Movement from slavery until beyond the traditional Civil Rights Movement. Native American history is something that I'm deeply fascinated by, but I haven't taken too many courses in that. I just read it on my own. It's a hobby. But I have done some research on it.Jen:                              00:10:55          Super. So, let's get back to that Venn diagram that you mentioned and I'm going to quote from one of your papers. It says “Trade books potential and popularity give a false impression of their curricular soundness.” And so firstly, I wonder if you could just briefly just find what trade books are for us. And then secondly, what are some of the more egregious examples that you've seen where historical events depicted in these books are just plain wrong?Dr. Bickford:                 00:11:19          Sure. Trade books are biographies, narrative, nonfiction, historical fiction books, books that parents buy for kids over Christmas break and summer break. They're distinct from textbooks, which is trying to be comprehensive. With textbooks, there's lots of different ways to look at textbooks, but you can't cover everything. If you have to cover from Columbus to Lincoln in 300 pages, you can't cover everything. But it's the trade books, it's the biographies of Rosa Parks. It's things like that. It's the biographies of Abraham Lincoln that I'm...

089: Teaching children about issues related to race

Today’s episode pulls together a lot of threads from previous shows, and will also give you some really concrete new tools using what’s called Nonviolent Communication to support you in your parenting.  It’s not like these are concepts that we’ve never discussed before, but sometimes hearing them in a different framework can be the key to making them ‘click’ for you. Our guest Christine King has been teaching these techniques to college students, teachers, and parents for over 17 years.And I’m releasing this particular interview today because these tools are ones we’re learning how to use in the free online workshop.  In the workshop we’re going to spend a couple of weeks learning why our children trigger us so much and how to stop being triggered, and how we can move beyond the power struggles we get caught up in with our children so we can have the kind of relationship with them where their true needs as people are respected and met – and so are ours.Parenting Beyond PowerMy new book, Parenting Beyond Power, will be released on September 5, 2023. It’s packed with ideas to help you create the kind of relationship you want to have with your child.Don't miss out! Pre-order today and unlock special bonuses like how-to videos and early chapter access. Click the banner to pre-order now:Things we discussed in the show:Christine’s game for kids can be found hereVideos of Christine’s giraffe and jackal puppet shows are here List of feelings List of needs (note that neither of these lists claims to be comprehensive)Inbal Kashtan’s book Parenting From Your Heart The No-Fault Zone gameMarshall Rosenberg’s book Nonviolent Communication: A Language of LifeRead Full TranscriptJen: 00:01:43Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. I'm so excited for today's episode because I think it really pulls together a lot of threads from previous shows and it will also give you some really concrete new tools to support you in your parenting. It’s not like these are concepts that we've never discussed before, but sometimes hearing them in a different framework can be the key to making them click for you. I'm releasing this particular interview today because these tools are ones we are learning how to use and the challenge that I'm kicking off on Monday, July 8th. In the challenge, we're going to spend a couple of weeks learning why our children trigger us so much and how to stop being triggered and how we can move beyond the power struggles we get caught up in with our children so we can have the kind of relationship with them where their true needs as people are respected and met and so our ours.Jen: 00:02:30To help us with part of this, I'd like to introduce my guest, Christine King. Christine is a credential K12 teacher, mother of three and describes herself as a teacher and perpetual student. She says on her website that when she discovered the tool we're going to discuss today, which is called Nonviolent Communication or NVC “it seemed like my entire worldview fell into place my lifelong interest in politics and justice, self-transformation and mindfulness.” Christine is a center for nonviolent communication certified trainer and has been teaching NVC principles and strategies to children, college students, teachers and parents for over 17 years. Currently, she teaches NVC at San Quentin State Prison and at the University of California. Today, we're going to talk about how to bring NVC, which helps us to truly understand ourselves and our children to bring a new depth of relationship and ease to our family. Welcome, Christine.Christine: 00:03:23Thank you so much for inviting me to your program, Jen. I have listened to a few of your podcasts. I found them inspirational and educational and so I want to thank you for the work that you're doing in this world to promote more respectful and more conscious parenting.Jen: 00:03:45Oh, thank you. You've got a lot to live up to then, don't you?Christine: 00:03:50Yeah, that's right.Jen: 00:03:51So let's start by asking the question that everyone who's listening, who has never heard of NVC before is thinking, what the heck is nonviolent communication? And if I've never heard of it and I'm not practicing it, does that mean that I'm communicating violently?Christine: 00:04:06Well, I have to smile hearing your question when you say, if I'm not practicing NVC, does that mean I'm communicating violently? And we get that response a lot in the NVC community. When people first hear the words nonviolent communication, they often say, I'm not a violent person so I don't need this. I think their thought is that violence is primarily sort of a physical aggression and they don't see that it's really embedded in the language that we use. So to answer your question, what is nonviolent communication? I once asked that question to Marshall Rosenberg, who’s the founder of NVC, and what he said to me was exposed that communication process on the one hand and a consciousness on the other. So, we need both the process and the consciousness in order to stay in that place of connection and compassion, especially when people say things that are maybe painful to hear and difficult.Christine: 00:05:20So, getting back to that consciousness and the process, the consciousness is this desire to share power with the other person. That includes children, which means being aware of both their needs and being aware of our needs and trusting that it's possible for both of us to get our needs met like even when there's a disagreement. So, before just continuing, I want to say a bit more about shared power because children are smaller than us, it’s so easy for adults to use power over children to get them to do what they wanted them to do. So, parents often will make demands on their children. And especially of course the parent were tired, were stressed, maybe we've had a long busy day and we get home, we just want to rest and the child wants to run around and go crazy and have fun. So, to get them to be quiet or do what we want, we can resort to all kinds of means like bribery, threats, demands, coercion. So, I guess I would say if you're communicating with those tactics then Marshall Rosenberg might say it is a more violent way to communicate and therefore that's going to affect the child's trust, their self-esteem and their willingness to cooperate.Jen: 00:06:47I'm not sure before I learned about this, would've equated those sort of techniques that are a regular part of the parenting arsenal I guess brings it right back to violence, doesn't it? But these are things that we do without even thinking about because we feel as though we need our child's cooperation. So we're going to talk today a lot more about what else is there. But I think parents are probably thinking, what else is there if I'm not doing these things?Christine: 00:07:15Yeah, yeah. We’ll talk a lot about that hopefully. Yeah.Jen: 00:07:17Yeah. So, the idea, I just want to make sure we tease this out fully, you’ve mentioned sharing power with the other person and I think that that's more natural to do when you're perhaps thinking about communicating differently with your partner. When you're thinking about it with your children, I think that's a really kind of radical concept to think that you might share power with your child instead of having power over them. If you do share power with your child, you're not saying, I'm not the parent anymore, you and I are equals, you get to say just as much as I do and what's going to happen?Christine: 00:07:50Exactly.Jen: 00:07:51So, can you just kind of talk us through how that sort of power sharing works in a parent child dynamic?Christine: 00:07:57Yeah, so I think it's not about being a permissive parent per se, like we talk about, you’re either permissive or you are a strict parent. It's really just about acknowledging that your child also has needs and also has feelings. So, if we put our needs above the needs of the child, then the child's going to think my name don't really matter. I mean, they're not going to think that in a concrete way, okay, my names don't matter here, but they're going to feel it and they're going to experience it. So if they are cooperating with us because we make a demand on them or we somehow reward them or punish them or in some way expect them to do what we want them to do, then they're going to do it. But they might do it, but it's not going to be out of this sense of yeah, they're really wanting to do it because they feel honored and they feel that they really matter.Jen: 00:08:52Okay. All right. So that leads me nicely to my next question. So, we talk a lot on the show and on the resources that I put out in blog posts and things like that about self-determination theory and that's the idea that all people have a need for autonomy and competence and relatedness. So, I see some connections here in how this intersects with NVC. Can you help us think through that a little bit?Christine: 00:09:15Yeah, absolutely. So, I think the idea of self-determination and specifically self-determination theory fits in beautifully with NVC. We all have these natural tendencies to want, to learn, to grow, to master our environment and to also integrate new experiences into who we are. So, NVC encourages that self-determination and self-exploration. So, one interesting aspect of these three elements that you mentioned autonomy, competence, relatedness is how much all of them are related not to extrinsic motivations but intrinsic ones. So, NVC is based on intrinsically motivating and also power sharing. In nonviolent communication, the belief is that everything we say, everything we do is related to a universal human need and that these needs that connects us to the humanity of others. So, I want to encourage these intrinsic qualities in children because it's going to make them stronger and more independent adults as well as strong and independent children.Jen: 00:10:41Yeah. Okay. So, before we get into sort of what our needs, and we might think I know what a need is, but there's sort of a very specific idea here. Can you help us think through what are giraffes and jackals and how do you use those to explain principles of NVC?Christine: 00:10:57Well, giraffes and jackals are animals and Marshall Rosenberg started using giraffe and jackal puppets to illustrate his message of nonviolent communication. So, the idea is that the giraffe stands for her connection, caring for the needs of both parties. The reason he used giraffe is because it's got a huge heart, one of the largest hearts of any land mammal. So, it's very loving illustration. The jackal is meant to illustrate a more critical perspective. So, who's right, who's wrong, who wins, who loses. There's a sort of kind of win-lose thinking. It's not that the jackal is bad, giraffe is good, we don't want to be thinking in those kinds of right-wrong thinking. But rather the jackal represents habitual behaviors and can be a reminder to return to our compassionate giraffe nature. So, if you go on YouTube, you can find a lot of videos with Marshall Rosenberg and other trainers using the puppets.Jen: 00:12:17There's one or two of you, isn't there?Christine: 00:12:19Yes. We have so much fun with those puppets.Jen: 00:12:26Yeah. I will post a link to those in the references for the episode. So, if anyone's curious to see how that sort of explained with these puppets, it's a pretty cool sort of elementary way of understanding some of these concepts. So, I want you to help us to understand what are some of the central ideas of NVC? Because then I think that kind of gives us the foundation to moving towards putting these into practice. So, it seems to me as the crux of this is kind of differences between things that maybe we haven't even thought too much about there being differences between before. So, let's start with the first one being what's the difference between observations and evaluations?Christine: 00:13:05Great. I'm really glad that you asked me that. So, earlier I mentioned nonviolent communication being a consciousness and a process. So now we're talking specifically about the process or the tools. So, the first one is observation. When we're trying to use the language of nonviolent communication, we want to see things as they really are and not as we judge them or evaluate them to be. So we might say, what would a video camera see or hear? So video camera, it's not going to see my child being a “brat”, right? Because that would be an evaluation or a judgment of the child. However, a video camera can hear my child say, no, when I say, hey, could you put your toys away? So, video camera would not see the child's room as a mess and could see toys on the floor, clothes on the bed, and dirty dishes on the counter. The reason this is so important is that if we are coming from a judgment or an evaluation, we've already decided who's right and who's wrong. When we come from an observation, there is no moralistic thinking about who's to blame, who's at fault, and what they need to do to make it right again. Does that make sense?Jen: 00:14:37Absolutely, yeah. When we make that evaluation, almost always we're the ones in the right, right?Christine: 00:14:43Right. Of course. Why is that?Jen: 00:14:45Yeah. If they would do things my way or the way that I need them to be done, then things would be better around here.Christine: 00:14:53And you know for me, I'll have to say that observation was the hardest of all the tools. There's only four tools, but that one I spent years just going, okay, that's an evaluation. That's such…Christine: 00:15:09Okay, so that's my jackal and it's a reminder to try to return to a consciousness that is more open, more curious more, you know, just like, okay, so this is what happened. Nobody did anything to anybody. This is actually what happened.Jen: 00:15:27Right. I just also want to point out, it seems to me to be sort of very western centric view of the world, the idea that there is a truth and that people from other cultures may have other ways of seeing this. What do you think about that? Just briefly.Christine: 00:15:41I love that. I love that. I think we do tend to be a little bit more, like you say, a little more moralistic, we're kind of dualistic in the sense of this is right, this is wrong, this is good, this is bad, this is appropriate, this is inappropriate. And can we have a more fluidity in that and look at something and just see it for what it is.Jen: 00:16:05 Okay. So, let's go into the second of the four tools. What's the difference between feelings and thoughts?Christine: 00:16:11Feelings and thoughts. So, we often talk about feelings and we talk about false feelings that are attached to a thought. So sometimes we call that faux feelings or victim feelings. So a true feeling is from the inside out. So you're probably not going to argue with me if I say to you, I feel sad, I feel scared, I feel confused, I feel frustrated, I feel mad because it's my true feeling, right? So, false feeling it may sound like a feeling, but actually it's a thought when the judgment attached. So for example, I might say to a child, I feel taken for granted, right?Christine: 00:17:01Or I feel unappreciated. So, you can see that's kind of from the outside in. It's not from the inside out.Jen: 00:17:08Yeah. And when you say outside in, it has that kind of evaluation baked into it. It’s not truly something you're feeling. They're probably our feelings that you're feeling that are making you feel uncomfortable, but being taken advantage of is not one of those feelings.Christine: 00:17:23Yeah. So when we come from this kind of thinking, then you know, or we say it's a feeling, we're actually blaming the child and we're not taking responsibility for our true feelings and our true needs. So, let's say I say I feel unappreciated. So what would the parent actually be feeling? Maybe sad, maybe unhappy because they're wanting some sort of understanding or acknowledgement or something like that. So, there's kind of a should thinking, you should appreciate me, you shouldn't take me for granted. And again, there's blame. So we're trying to avoid that.Jen: 00:18:04Since we're on that topic of feelings, we hear a lot these days about emotional intelligence, which I think is defined as the ability to recognize and experience and name our feelings no matter how uncomfortable they might be. And we touched on this in my episode on Emotion Regulation and can you say a bit more about that emotional intelligence idea?Christine: 00:18:23Yes, I'd be happy to. I think that there are many parents, I think I was one of them who want to protect their children from uncomfortable feelings, which is completely understandable. We don't want our children to feel badly. We don't want them to suffer. So, a parent might sort of in a way I wanna say unconsciously, they might deny a child's feeling or discount the feeling, they might say something like, there's nothing to be afraid of or don't be sad, I'll get you another hamster, thinking that this is going to help the child minimize these feelings of fear or sadness or loss and therefore the child is going to suffer less. Right? So, what can happen if we try to protect our children from feelings that we think are uncomfortable or hurt is that the child might subconsciously think their feelings don't matter.Christine: 00:19:31Their feelings are not important or not allowed. So, when those feelings might come up for them, they might start to repress them and repressing or exiling feelings of course can lead to other problems. So, the idea then is to allow and encourage our children to feel their feelings as normal and healthy. Then this is going to increase their emotional literacy and their ability to recognize what they are feeling and just allowing those feelings to come and go. An interesting side note is that children who can recognize a name the

Today’s episode pulls together a lot of threads from previous shows, and will also give you some really concrete new tools using what’s called Nonviolent Communication to support you in your parenting.  It’s not like these are concepts that we’ve never discussed before, but sometimes hearing them in a different framework can be the key to making them ‘click’ for you. Our guest Christine King has been teaching these techniques to college students, teachers, and parents for over 17 years. And I’m releasing this particular interview today because these tools are ones we’re learning how to use in the free online workshop.  In the workshop we’re going to spend a couple of weeks learning why our children trigger us so much and how to stop being triggered, and how we can move beyond the power struggles we get caught up in with our children so we can have the kind of relationship with them where their true needs as people are respected and met – and so are ours. <a href="https://yourparentingmojo.com/tamingyourtriggers/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>Parenting Beyond Power My new book, Parenting Beyond Power, will be released on September 5, 2023. It’s packed with ideas to help you create the kind of relationship you want to have with your child. Don't miss out! Pre-order today and unlock special bonuses like how-to videos and early chapter access. Click the banner to pre-order now: <a href="http://yourparentingmojo.com/book" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>Things we discussed in the show: Christine’s game for kids can be found <a href="http://www.groktheworld.com/products" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">here</a> Videos of Christine’s giraffe and jackal puppet shows are <a href="https://www.cnvc.org/profile/2046" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">here</a> <a href="https://www.cnvc.org/training/resource/feelings-inventory" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">List of feelings</a> <a href="https://www.cnvc.org/training/resource/needs-inventory" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">List of needs</a> (note that neither of these lists claims to be comprehensive) Inbal Kashtan’s book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Parenting-Your-Heart-Compassion-Communication/dp/1892005085" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Parenting From Your Heart</a> <a href="http://thenofaultzone.com/the_no-fault_zone.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The No-Fault Zone game</a> Marshall Rosenberg’s book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Nonviolent-Communication-Language-Life-Changing-Relationships/dp/189200528X/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;psc=1&amp;refRID=20R0CBH2NQKCV9CY4XJ7" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life</a><a href="#" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Read Full Transcript</a> Jen: 00:01:43 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. I'm so excited for today's episode because I think it really pulls together a lot of threads from previous shows and it will also give you some really concrete new tools to support you in your parenting. It’s not like these are concepts that we've never discussed before, but sometimes hearing them in a different framework can be the key to making them click for you. I'm releasing this particular interview today because these tools are ones we are learning how to use and the challenge that I'm kicking off on Monday, July 8th. In the challenge, we're going to spend a couple of weeks learning why our children trigger us so much and how to stop being triggered and how we can move beyond the power struggles we get caught up in with our children so we can have the kind of relationship with them where their true needs as people are respected and met and so our ours. Jen: 00:02:30 To help us with part of this, I'd like to introduce my guest, Christine King. Christine is a credential K12 teacher, mother of three and describes herself as a teacher and perpetual student. She says on her website that when she discovered the tool we're going to discuss today, which is called Nonviolent Communication or NVC “it seemed like my entire worldview fell into place my lifelong interest in politics and justice, self-transformation and mindfulness.” Christine is a center for nonviolent communication certified trainer and has been teaching NVC principles and strategies to children, college students, teachers and parents for over 17 years. Currently, she teaches NVC at San Quentin State Prison and at the University of California. Today, we're going to talk about how to bring NVC, which helps us to truly understand ourselves and our children to bring a new depth of relationship and ease to our family. Welcome, Christine. Christine: 00:03:23 Thank you so much for inviting me to your program, Jen. I have listened to a few of your podcasts. I found them inspirational and educational and so I want to thank you for the work that you're doing in this world to promote more respectful and more conscious parenting. Jen: 00:03:45 Oh, thank you. You've got a lot to live up to then, don't you? Christine: 00:03:50 Yeah, that's right. Jen: 00:03:51 So let's start by asking the question that everyone who's listening, who has never heard of NVC before is thinking, what the heck is nonviolent communication? And if I've never heard of it and I'm not practicing it, does that mean that I'm communicating violently? Christine: 00:04:06 Well, I have to smile hearing your question when you say, if I'm not practicing NVC, does that mean I'm communicating violently? And we get that response a lot in the NVC community. When people first hear the words nonviolent communication, they often say, I'm not a violent person so I don't need this. I think their thought is that violence is primarily sort of a physical aggression and they don't see that it's really embedded in the language that we use. So to answer your question, what is nonviolent communication? I once asked that question to Marshall Rosenberg, who’s the founder of NVC, and what he said to me was exposed that communication process on the one hand and a consciousness on the other. So, we need both the process and the consciousness in order to stay in that place of connection and compassion, especially when people say things that are maybe painful to hear and difficult. Christine: 00:05:20 So, getting back to that consciousness and the process, the consciousness is this desire to share power with the other person. That includes children, which means being aware of both their needs and being aware of our needs and trusting that it's possible for both of us to get our needs met like even when there's a disagreement. So, before just continuing, I want to say a bit more about shared power because children are smaller than us, it’s so easy for adults to use power over children to get them to do what they wanted them to do. So, parents often will make demands on their children. And especially of course the parent were tired, were stressed, maybe we've had a long busy day and we get home, we just want to rest and the child wants to run around and go crazy and have fun. So, to get them to be quiet or do what we want, we can resort to all kinds of means like bribery, threats, demands, coercion. So, I guess I would say if you're communicating with those tactics then Marshall Rosenberg might say it is a more violent way to communicate and therefore that's going to affect the child's trust, their self-esteem and their willingness to cooperate. Jen: 00:06:47 I'm not sure before I learned about this, would've equated those sort of techniques that are a regular part of the parenting arsenal I guess brings it right back to violence, doesn't it? But these are things that we do without even thinking about because we feel as though we need our child's cooperation. So we're going to talk today a lot more about what else is there. But I think parents are probably thinking, what else is there if I'm not doing these things? Christine: 00:07:15 Yeah, yeah. We’ll talk a lot about that hopefully. Yeah. Jen: 00:07:17 Yeah. So, the idea, I just want to make sure we tease this out fully, you’ve mentioned sharing power with the other person and I think that that's more natural to do when you're perhaps thinking about communicating differently with your partner. When you're thinking about it with your children, I think that's a really kind of radical concept to think that you might share power with your child instead of having power over them. If you do share power with your child, you're not saying, I'm not the parent anymore, you and I are equals, you get to say just as much as I do and what's going to happen? Christine: 00:07:50 Exactly. Jen: 00:07:51 So, can you just kind of talk us through how that sort of power sharing works in a parent child dynamic? Christine: 00:07:57 Yeah, so I think it's not about being a permissive parent per se, like we talk about, you’re either permissive or you are a strict parent. It's really just about acknowledging that your child also has needs and also has feelings. So, if we put our needs above the needs of the child, then the child's going to think my name don't really matter. I mean, they're not going to think that in a concrete way, okay, my names don't matter here, but they're going to feel it and they're going to experience it. So if they are cooperating with us because we make a demand on them or we somehow reward them or punish them or in some way expect them to do what we want them to do, then they're going to do it. But they might do it, but it's not going to be out of this sense of yeah, they're really wanting to do it because they feel honored and they feel that they really matter. Jen: 00:08:52 Okay. All right. So that leads me nicely to my next question. So, we talk a lot on the show and on the resources that I put out in blog posts and things like that about self-determination theory and that's the idea that all people have a need for autonomy and competence and relatedness. So, I see some connections here in how this intersects with NVC. Can you help us think through that a little bit? Christine: 00:09:15 Yeah, absolutely. So, I think the idea of self-determination and specifically self-determination theory fits in beautifully with NVC. We all have these natural tendencies to want, to learn, to grow, to master our environment and to also integrate new experiences into who we are. So, NVC encourages that self-determination and self-exploration. So, one interesting aspect of these three elements that you mentioned autonomy, competence, relatedness is how much all of them are related not to extrinsic motivations but intrinsic ones. So, NVC is based on intrinsically motivating and also power sharing. In nonviolent communication, the belief is that everything we say, everything we do is related to a universal human need and that these needs that connects us to the humanity of others. So, I want to encourage these intrinsic qualities in children because it's going to make them stronger and more independent adults as well as strong and independent children. Jen: 00:10:41 Yeah. Okay. So, before we get into sort of what our needs, and we might think I know what a need is, but there's sort of a very specific idea here. Can you help us think through what are giraffes and jackals and how do you use those to explain principles of NVC? Christine: 00:10:57 Well, giraffes and jackals are animals and Marshall Rosenberg started using giraffe and jackal puppets to illustrate his message of nonviolent communication. So, the idea is that the giraffe stands for her connection, caring for the needs of both parties. The reason he used giraffe is because it's got a huge heart, one of the largest hearts of any land mammal. So, it's very loving illustration. The jackal is meant to illustrate a more critical perspective. So, who's right, who's wrong, who wins, who loses. There's a sort of kind of win-lose thinking. It's not that the jackal is bad, giraffe is good, we don't want to be thinking in those kinds of right-wrong thinking. But rather the jackal represents habitual behaviors and can be a reminder to return to our compassionate giraffe nature. So, if you go on YouTube, you can find a lot of videos with Marshall Rosenberg and other trainers using the puppets. Jen: 00:12:17 There's one or two of you, isn't there? Christine: 00:12:19 Yes. We have so much fun with those puppets. Jen: 00:12:26 Yeah. I will post a link to those in the references for the episode. So, if anyone's curious to see how that sort of explained with these puppets, it's a pretty cool sort of elementary way of understanding some of these concepts. So, I want you to help us to understand what are some of the central ideas of NVC? Because then I think that kind of gives us the foundation to moving towards putting these into practice. So, it seems to me as the crux of this is kind of differences between things that maybe we haven't even thought too much about there being differences between before. So, let's start with the first one being what's the difference between observations and evaluations? Christine: 00:13:05 Great. I'm really glad that you asked me that. So, earlier I mentioned nonviolent communication being a consciousness and a process. So now we're talking specifically about the process or the tools. So, the first one is observation. When we're trying to use the language of nonviolent communication, we want to see things as they really are and not as we judge them or evaluate them to be. So we might say, what would a video camera see or hear? So video camera, it's not going to see my child being a “brat”, right? Because that would be an evaluation or a judgment of the child. However, a video camera can hear my child say, no, when I say, hey, could you put your toys away? So, video camera would not see the child's room as a mess and could see toys on the floor, clothes on the bed, and dirty dishes on the counter. The reason this is so important is that if we are coming from a judgment or an evaluation, we've already decided who's right and who's wrong. When we come from an observation, there is no moralistic thinking about who's to blame, who's at fault, and what they need to do to make it right again. Does that make sense? Jen: 00:14:37 Absolutely, yeah. When we make that evaluation, almost always we're the ones in the right, right? Christine: 00:14:43 Right. Of course. Why is that? Jen: 00:14:45 Yeah. If they would do things my way or the way that I need them to be done, then things would be better around here. Christine: 00:14:53 And you know for me, I'll have to say that observation was the hardest of all the tools. There's only four tools, but that one I spent years just going, okay, that's an evaluation. That's such… Christine: 00:15:09 Okay, so that's my jackal and it's a reminder to try to return to a consciousness that is more open, more curious more, you know, just like, okay, so this is what happened. Nobody did anything to anybody. This is actually what happened. Jen: 00:15:27 Right. I just also want to point out, it seems to me to be sort of very western centric view of the world, the idea that there is a truth and that people from other cultures may have other ways of seeing this. What do you think about that? Just briefly. Christine: 00:15:41 I love that. I love that. I think we do tend to be a little bit more, like you say, a little more moralistic, we're kind of dualistic in the sense of this is right, this is wrong, this is good, this is bad, this is appropriate, this is inappropriate. And can we have a more fluidity in that and look at something and just see it for what it is. Jen: 00:16:05 Okay. So, let's go into the second of the four tools. What's the difference between feelings and thoughts? Christine: 00:16:11 Feelings and thoughts. So, we often talk about feelings and we talk about false feelings that are attached to a thought. So sometimes we call that faux feelings or victim feelings. So a true feeling is from the inside out. So you're probably not going to argue with me if I say to you, I feel sad, I feel scared, I feel confused, I feel frustrated, I feel mad because it's my true feeling, right? So, false feeling it may sound like a feeling, but actually it's a thought when the judgment attached. So for example, I might say to a child, I feel taken for granted, right? Christine: 00:17:01 Or I feel unappreciated. So, you can see that's kind of from the outside in. It's not from the inside out. Jen: 00:17:08 Yeah. And when you say outside in, it has that kind of evaluation baked into it. It’s not truly something you're feeling. They're probably our feelings that you're feeling that are making you feel uncomfortable, but being taken advantage of is not one of those feelings. Christine: 00:17:23 Yeah. So when we come from this kind of thinking, then you know, or we say it's a feeling, we're actually blaming the child and we're not taking responsibility for our true feelings and our true needs. So, let's say I say I feel unappreciated. So what would the parent actually be feeling? Maybe sad, maybe unhappy because they're wanting some sort of understanding or acknowledgement or something like that. So, there's kind of a should thinking, you should appreciate me, you shouldn't take me for granted. And again, there's blame. So we're trying to avoid that. Jen: 00:18:04 Since we're on that topic of feelings, we hear a lot these days about emotional intelligence, which I think is defined as the ability to recognize and experience and name our feelings no matter how uncomfortable they might be. And we touched on this in my episode on Emotion Regulation and can you say a bit more about that emotional intelligence idea? Christine: 00:18:23 Yes, I'd be happy to. I think that there are many parents, I think I was one of them who want to protect their children from uncomfortable feelings, which is completely understandable. We don't want our children to feel badly. We don't want them to suffer. So, a parent might sort of in a way I wanna say unconsciously, they might deny a child's feeling or discount the feeling, they might say something like, there's nothing to be afraid of or don't be sad, I'll get you another hamster, thinking that this is going to help the child minimize these feelings of fear or sadness or loss and therefore the child is going to suffer less. Right? So, what can happen if we try to protect our children from feelings that we think are uncomfortable or hurt is that the child might subconsciously think their feelings don't matter. Christine: 00:19:31 Their feelings are not important or not allowed. So, when those feelings might come up for them, they might start to repress them and repressing or exiling feelings of course can lead to other problems. So, the idea then is to allow and encourage our children to feel their feelings as normal and healthy. Then this is going to increase their emotional literacy and their ability to recognize what they are feeling and just allowing those feelings to come and go. An interesting side note is that children who can recognize a name the

094: Using nonviolent communication to parent more peacefully

Ever get red-hot angry at your child for no reason, or out of proportion to the incident that provoked it?  Have you wondered why this happens?The way we were parented has a profound impact on us – it’s pretty easy to ‘fall into’ parenting the way you were parented yourself unless you specifically examine your relationship with your parent(s) and how it impacts the way you parent your own child.  This can be great if you have a positive relationship with your parents, but for those of us with less-than-amazing relationships with our parents, trauma can impact more of our parenting that we might like.Join me for a conversation with Dr. Rebecca Babcock-Fenerci from Stonehill College in Massachusetts, who researches the cognitive and interpersonal consequences of child maltreatment, with the goal of understanding factors that can increase risk for or protect against the transmission of abuse and neglect from parents to their children.Even if you were not abused or neglected as a child, you may find that aspects of the way you were parented have left you with unresolved trauma that you could pass on to your child if it remains unaddressed.  Dr. Fenerci helps us to examine some of the ways we can recognize the impact of this trauma on ourselves, and reduce the possibility that we will transmit it to our child.Parenting Beyond PowerMy new book, Parenting Beyond Power, will be released on September 5, 2023. It’s packed with ideas to help you create the kind of relationship you want to have with your child.Don't miss out! Pre-order today and unlock special bonuses like how-to videos and early chapter access. Click the banner to pre-order now:ReferencesAuerhahn, N.C., &amp; Laub, D. (1998). Intergenerational memory of the Holocaust. In Y. Danieli (Ed.), International handbook of multigenerational legacies of trauma (pp.21-41). New York, NY: Plenum.Babcock, R.L., &amp; DePrince, A.P. (2013). Factors contributing to ongoing intimate partner abuse: Childhood betrayal trauma and dependence on one’s perpetrator. Journal of Interpersonal Violence 28(7), 1385-1402.Berthelot, N., Ensink, K., Bernazzani, O., Normandin, L., Fonagy, P., &amp; Luyten, P. (2015). Intergenerational transmission of attachment in abused and neglected mothers: The role of trauma-specific reflective functioning. Infant Mental Health Journal 36(2), 200-212.Cross, D., Vance, L.A., Kim, Y.J., Ruchard, A.L., Fox, N., Jovanovic, T., &amp; Bradley, B. (2017). Trauma exposure, PTSD, and parenting in a community sample of low-income, predominantly African American mothers and children. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy. Psychological Trauma 10(3), 327-335.Dias, B.G., &amp; Ressler, K.J. (2014). Parental olfactory experience influences behavior and neural structure in subsequent generations. Nature Neuroscience 17, 89-96.Fenerci, R.L.B., &amp; DePrince, A.P. (2018). Intergenerational transmission of trauma: Maternal trauma-related cognitions and toddler symptoms. Child Maltreatment 23(2), 126-136.Fenerci, R.L.B., &amp; DePrince, A.P. (2017). Shame and alienation related to child maltreatment: Links to symptoms across generations. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy. Epub ahead of print. doi: 10.1037/tra0000332Fenerci, R.L.B. &amp; DePrince, A.P. (2016). Intergenerational transmission of trauma-related distress: Maternal betrayal trauma, parenting attitudes, and behaviors. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment &amp; Trauma 25(4), 382-399.Kellerman, N.P.F. (2013). Epigentic transmission of Holocaust trauma: Can nightmares be inherited? Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences 50(1), 33-39.Nagata, D.K. (1998). Intergenerational effects of the Japanese American internment. In Y. Danieli (Ed.), International handbook of multigenerational legacies of trauma (pp.125-139). New York, NY: Plenum.Oliver, J.E. (1993). Intergenerational transmission of child abuse: Rates, research, and clinical implications. American Journal of Psychiatry 150, 1315-1324.Riva, M.A. (2017). Epigenetic signatures of early life adversities in animal models: A role for psychopathology vulnerability. European Psychiatry 415, S29.Yehuda, R., Daskalakis, N.P., Bierer, L.M., Bader, H.N., Klengel, T., Holsboer, F., &amp; Binder, E.B. (2016). Holocaust exposure induced intergenerational effects on FKBP5 methylation. Biological Psychiatry 80, 372-380.Read Full TranscriptTranscriptJen:                                      [00:37]                   Hello and welcome to today’s episode of Your Parenting Mojo. Today we’re going to discuss a topic that I first learned about through a piece that I heard on NPR a few months ago, which is called Intergenerational Trauma. The piece described a Vietnamese woman whose parents had escaped Vietnam during the war. Her mother had had to leave one of her daughters behind and her father’s first wife and son died because their boat sank when they tried to follow him to the US. Her parents didn’t talk much about their experiences, but she remembers clearly how incredibly angry they were when she was young. She went onto say that she learned how to suppress her own anger and frustration so that she wouldn’t set her parents off, but then she now finds herself getting angry over very tiny things just like her parents did when she was young. I had never realized this intergenerational trauma was a ‘thing’ before hearing that piece and I immediately knew that I had to do an episode on it and here with us today to discuss her work on intergenerational trauma resulting from family-based trauma is Rebecca Babcock Fenerci of Stone Hill College in Massachusetts. Professor Fenerci is a licensed clinical psychologist who received her doctoral degree from the University of Denver. Her research focuses on the cognitive and interpersonal consequences of child maltreatment with a goal of understanding factors that can increase risk for or protect against the transmission of abuse and neglect from parents to their children. Specifically, she investigates how trauma related cognition’s, for example, post-trauma appraisals, traumatic memory and interpersonal schemers can affect parenting behavior and/or the parent child relationship amongst survivors of maltreatment. When I was preparing for this episode, I reached out to the listeners who are subscribed to this show on YourParentingMojo.com And who get my newsletter and if you want to get that newsletter, go ahead and subscribe at your parenting Mojo Dot com and I asked them to share their experiences of intergenerational trauma with me so I can ask Dr Fenerci questions that would really help you as much as possible. So we’re going to discuss some of those today as well. Welcome Dr. Fenerci and thanks for working through this with us.Dr. Fenerci:                       [02:34]                   Thank you so much for having me.Jen:                                      [02:36]                   So I wonder if you could just briefly define intergenerational trauma forest please. What is it and how does it affect people?Dr. Fenerci:                       [02:43] Definitely. So when we think initially about intergenerational trauma, we may think about trauma essentially being perpetuated across generations. So our parents experienced some type of trauma, whether being in a victim of child maltreatment having been involved in a war or some other type of traumatic event, and therefore their child also experiences that same type of traumatic event. And that is what the research is referring to when we’re talking about intergenerational trauma. So often we think about the cycle of violence. So if a parent was abused themselves, they are neglected as a child, their child somehow experiences the same type of abuse or neglect that they experienced. However, intergenerational trauma…also the definition goes above and beyond the increased risk that children have. Parent trauma survivors have for being either maltreated or experiencing trauma themselves. It also talks about the increased risk these children have essentially having the consequences of that trauma such as posttraumatic stress disorder, other mood, behavioral problems, increased risk that these children may have to experience those type of experiences that may not be the trauma itself, but also the consequences of it. And so a few examples of this would be a child whose parent has survived, let’s say, physical abuse growing up. That child may be at risk when we consider this intergenerational trauma if that child also experienced physical abuse. However, if the child is also, was that an increased risk for a certain mood disorders or behavior problems or disrupted attachment, altered cortisol or hypothalamic pituitary adrenal access functioning, that’s our stress-response system. So we see these different types of alterations and transmitted across generations in various different forms.Jen:                                      [04:41]                   Okay. So it seems to me as though there are two different ways that this trauma can occur in the first place is either trauma that occurs within the family and trauma that occurs outside of the family because of something that somebody else is doing to inflict trauma on a person. And I don’t want to minimize the second one because I actually think it’s so important that we’re going to do another episode on that, but today we’re going to concentrate more on the kind of trauma that originates in families today. So that’s your expertise, right?Dr. Fenerci:                       [05:10]                   Yes. That is very much my expertise and that sounds great.Jen:                                      [05:13]                   Okay, super. So having said that, now my next question talks about the Holocaust. So because that’s where a lot of this research originated is from Holocaust survivors. And so as I was reading through some of these meta-analyses of the literature on intergenerational trauma resulting from the Holocaust and also from children whose fathers were soldiers in the Vietnam War, I was so surprised that the impact even on the immediate survivors was really uneven and in a way the impact on the children was even more uneven. So some survivors are absolutely massively impacted and find it very difficult to function in their daily lives and others seem to come out with barely a scratch, and the same goes for their children. And when I think about the Holocaust, I think about a whole generation of people who have had similar experiences and have had maybe similar impacts on them. But it seems like that’s not the case. Why do you think that is?Dr. Fenerci:                       [06:09]                   So as humans we are very diverse in our experiences and also our reactions to our environment. So if we look at the development of psychopathology, let’s say risk for depression, so to speak, the model, the diathesis stress model talks about there being a combination of both genetic predisposition and also environmental stressors that can impact and potentially results in depression. And so if you’re thinking about the results of trauma and its consequences, whether it’s increased results in psychopathology or developments of mental illness or posttraumatic stress disorder or other negative consequences, it really depends a lot on certain risk factors that may run in a particular family, and this could be genetics, but there’s also what is called epigenetics, which means that our experience can actually change which genes are turned on or off. So it’s an ongoing interaction between genetics which may result in a certain predisposition or personality. Often siblings, even though they grew up in the same family and share half of their genes are very different and can have very different outcomes. I think we see that a lot…Jen:                                      [07:28]                   So parents do for sure.Dr. Fenerci:                       [07:31]                   So it’s an interaction between these environmental factors, trauma being one of them, and genetic risk and also personality. Other life events or stressors that may have happened, let’s say before the Holocaust, all that kind of comes into play because humans are…we’re pretty complex creatures, right? So that’s kind of how I view that and I do think that the more chronic or severe the trauma such as the Holocaust, that’s an exceptionally severe, exceptionally chronic, the more likely it is that the trauma is going to have an impact on a large percent of the population that has endured that. So if like everybody has just a bad enough experience. It’s less likely that some people will come out completely untethered, if that makes sense.Jen:                                      [08:18]                   Yeah. Okay. So then if it’s not correct to say that everyone who has gone through a traumatic event is going to come out of this with trauma, but it may be to more or less extent. And so I’m wondering what are some of the ways that people process that trauma?Dr. Fenerci:                       [08:33]                   So there’s a lot of variability in this quite a bit as well. And so in terms of how the brain processes trauma – trauma is processed differently in the brain than kind of regular memories for a few reasons. So first of all, it it our sympathetic nervous system or fight or flight response system is activated. Second of all, our endocrine system that hypothalamic pituitary adrenal or HPA access is activated; floods our body with cortisol and that’s actually adaptive in the moments to help us survive. So however, as a result, especially in the case of family and family trauma or abuse or maltreatment that happens in the family, this system may become over-activated at the time and what results is either can often be a kind of really intense, vivid memory or flashbulb memory. We’re looking at flashbacks, intrusive memories. A lot of the symptoms of PTSD you’ll see through that or what we can see is some forgetting of the trauma itself, whether it’s through, usually through the process of dissociation.Dr. Fenerci:                       [09:45]                   So because our limbic system is so activated because our body has trained us, fight, flight, or flee from the US to try to save us from this threat in our environment, our higher level cortex or our frontal lobe, which gives us our thinking and our meaning. Making an organization of our events in our life is shut down in the moment, which is a survival mechanism. However, because a lot of times trauma isn’t talked about, especially trauma in the family, what happens is the survivors never really able to process or make meaning of, or organize these events that could be disorganized or very vivid but distressing in one brain.Jen:                                      [10:29]                   Yeah. That actually gets to a question the listener emailed over. And so I wonder if we can kind of jump ahead to that a little bit. And so we did an episode on family storytelling recently and we learned about how telling stories as a family can be a really cathartic activity and it also helps the family members bond with each other. But when I put out a call for questions on this, one of my listeners wrote in and I’ll call her Jane just to make the story easier to tell. And she said that her grandfather was very abusive to her grandmother and to their children to the point where he lined them all up at gunpoint and planned to shoot them all and then himself. But Jane’s mom came out of the bathroom right then and yelled for him to stop, and he just dropped the gun and the grandmother snuck all the children out of the house late that night with basically nothing other than the clothes they wore.Jen:

069: Reducing the impact of intergenerational trauma

“Is RIE backed by scientific research?” It’s a question that comes up every once in a while among parents who use the Resources for Infant Educarers (RIE) approach to raising their children, and then they all (virtually) look at each other kind of uneasily because no study has ever shown that children raised using RIE methods have any better outcomes than children who aren’t. Given how much I focus on scientific research, you would think that I would have determined my overall approach to parenting through extensive reading of the literature – but actually I discovered RIE even before I started looking at research and I latched onto it because parenting in a respectful way just felt right.  I knew that love was necessary but not the only tool I would to discipline (used in its original sense, meaning “to teach”) my daughter about how to live in our family.  I knew immediately that respect was the tool I sought. But it always niggled at me (and these other parents): Is RIE backed in any way by science?  Naturally, I could find no expert who could speak to this.  So I recruited the assistance of a fellow RIE-practicing parent to help us think through RIE’s basic principles, and whether (or not!) the research backs these up. If you’re new to RIE, you might want to listen to this introductory episode on What is RIE first, so you’ll have the background you need.  I actually recorded this Science of RIE episode first so it does have a very brief introduction to RIE, but then I realized it really wasn’t sufficient so I recorded the extra episode. Have questions about RIE?  Want to continue the conversation?  Come on over to the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group and ask away, or join the Toasted RIE group which I help to moderate! Read Full Transcript Jen:	00:00:38	Hello and welcome to today's episode of the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today, we are going to do something we have never done before in more than 60 episodes of the show. Someone else is going to interview me and what are we going to talk about? We're going to talk about a concept that has been absolutely foundational to my parenting. It's an approach to caring for children called Resources for Infant Educarers, which is abbreviated to RIE and pronounced rye. This episode has been a really long time in coming. I had actually thought of doing it when I first started the show, but I figured it would probably be a fairly new concept for a lot of people and I didn't want you all to think that I was some kind of crazy-granola-eating-Californian with really weird ideas about child rearing before you'd probably gotten to know me, but we're at 60 episodes into the show now and I feel like I've mentioned RIE enough times that it is starting to get silly that we actually haven't done an episode on it. Jen:	00:01:29	So when I thought about who I could interview on this topic, I considered all the usual suspects that those of you who are somewhat familiar with who I might have considered, but I quickly realized that probably nobody was going to be able to talk about exactly the aspect of it that I wanted to discuss, which is how does RIE aligned with what science tells us about raising children? Because quite frankly, I've never seen anyone discussed this at all and given that we use scientific research a lot on this show, even though we're not slaves to the research, I couldn't think of anyone other than me to be interviewed on it, but I didn't want to just sit here for an hour and try and convince you about how great RIE is, because when people first learned about it, they tend to have a lot of questions, so I posted in one of the RIE Facebook groups that I'm in and I said, hey, would anyone like to interview me? Jen:	00:02:12	You'd need to be familiar with the basic principles, but really nothing beyond that and you should be interested in learning about it and not openly hostile towards it and you have to be willing to push back if what I'm saying doesn't make sense. So, I'd like to introduce you to our interviewer today. Silvana Naguib, who says that she knows a little bit about RIE that she's gleaned from blog posts and Facebook groups, but she's never read a book about it and she's a lawyer and so she certainly going to push back if what I'm saying doesn't make sense. Welcome Silvana. Silvana:	00:02:40	Hi Jen. Jen:	00:02:41	Thanks so much for joining us today. I think you're joining us from Los Angeles, which funnily enough is actually the home of RIE. So can you tell us a bit about your family and yourself as well, please? Silvana:	00:02:50	Yeah, so I'm actually a recent transplant to Los Angeles. I'm originally from Cairo, Egypt, which is where I grew up and I've been living in the US for about almost 20 years now. Silvana:	00:03:00	And I'm a lawyer by trade and I am married with my husband Ben and we have a daughter, Carolina who is almost three years old. She'll be three this summer and we live here in LA and I'm one of those crunchy-granola-eating social justice lawyer types. I’m actually about to start a new job representing people who are homeless. And so my whole thing in life is I try to help people and make the world suck a little bit less so. Jen:	00:03:32	All right, well thanks for that. Silvana:	00:03:33	That was part of my interest in RIE. I was trying to figure out how to do that for my kid. Jen:	00:03:36	Ah, okay. So how did you first learn about RIE? Silvana:	00:03:39	Well, it actually was on Facebook. A friend of mine had posted a link to a blog post by Janet Lansbury who is a blogger that writes a lot about RIE and she's, I think, well known and I started reading a lot of stuff on her website and thinking, wow, this is a totally different approach to parenting than pretty much everything I've read and how most of the people I know deal with their kids. Jen:	00:04:03	And it struck a chord? Silvana:	00:04:04	It did. And I sort of started poking around if there are any Facebook groups talking about this and reading some other blogs out there. But it's been a pretty superficial exploration. Mostly limited to reading blogs, talking about it on Facebook. Jen:	00:04:19	So, that's kind of the level we're coming at this. So if you don't know a lot about RIE then this is going to be just the interview for you. We're going to go into a lot of the basics and we're going to keep it more relevant to the toddler years. RIE is traditionally and typically used in the zero to two years group, but because my listeners are people who have preschoolers and possibly a little bit even older than that, we're definitely going to focus on the older years and how to apply those principles there as well. So. Silvana:	00:04:48	Well that's perfect for me since I have almost 3-year-old. Jen:	00:04:51	Excellent. Great. Yeah. So we're out of that official period but it's still relevant to us. So this is your interview. What do you want to know about first? Silvana:	00:04:57	Well, I would love to start with some background and just find out where did RIE come from and is it derived from any research, psychological or any other kind of research about child development? Jen:	00:05:09	Okay. So it's actually kind of a strange story about where RIE comes from. There was a pediatrician in Hungary called Emmi Pikler and she had developed this approach to raising children based on respect for them as people and respect for their individual physical developmental processes. And it was in about the middle of the last century and she first tried it on her own children and then after the Second World War, the government asked her to open an orphanage because there were a lot of children that didn't have parents who had been killed in the war, had died after the war. And so she did that and she continued to refine her approach at the orphanage and she did publish some research papers on it, but unfortunately I haven't read many of them because most of them are published in either Hungarian or French. And I read French possibly, but not really a scientific paper level. Jen:	00:05:57	So Magda Gerber, who is the name, who is more traditionally associated with RIE, met Emmi Pikler and this random meeting, Pikler’s daughter and Gerber’s daughter were classmates. And one day Magda Gerber's daughter got sick and their regular pediatrician was out of town. And her daughter said, why don't you call my friend's mom, she is a pediatrician. And so Emmi Pikler came over and Magda Gerber started to tell Pikler about her daughter's symptoms. And Pikler just motioned to her to please be quiet and she started talking to Gerber’s daughter and asked her about her symptoms and how she was feeling and had a very respectful dialogue with her. And Magda Gerber was just blown away and so she ended up getting a Master's in Early Childhood Education in Budapest and started working in the orphanage as well and she works alongside Pikler for a number of years and then after the Hungarian Revolution in the 50s, they moved to Austria and then onto the US and she held a variety of jobs there and eventually moved to Los Angeles where she worked with children who had cerebral palsy and later autism and then in the early 70s, an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Stanford asked her to help him co-direct a program that supported parents in interacting with their children and this guy Forrest and she co-founded the nonprofit Resources for Infant Educarers in Los Angeles. Jen:	00:07:19	But it's actually really unclear in the literature what happened to Forrest after that point. So, he seems to have disappeared off the face of the RIE planet. Hopefully, he didn't disappear entirely. So, she started these parent-infant classes and she also taught development classes at universities around the LA area. So, I guess when I first heard about this background, it was pretty surprising to me that an approach to raising children that was founded in an orphanage in Hungary, something that could even be appropriate for children in a family setting in the US and other places in the world. And I think it's also really interesting how diametrically opposed it is to the traditional Western way of parenting. But we're going to talk a lot more about this and so that's basically where it came from and it's surprising to me that it's relevant, but at the same time I'm so grateful that I found it. Silvana:	00:08:16	Okay. So, the name of this organization, which is now sort of symbolizing this whole movement, RIE has this term educarer in it. What is that? Is it a term they made up? Jen:	00:08:28	Yes, it is actually. And she did that, I always assume it's because she didn't have access to branding experts who are to come up with a lot catchier, but it combines educator and carer and she gives the definition as being one who educates children in a caring manner and that it's not a caregiver or caretaker because a care neither gives nor takes. A care that puts love into action and the way you care for a child is how she experiences your love. So an educarer is showing that love for a child through everyday activities like feeding and diapering, and the idea is that these aren't just chores, these are interactions that deepen your relationship with your child and babies learn so much from these interactions and so if we step back and allow that learning to happen rather than explicitly trying to teach them things all the time, they actually ended up learning a lot. Silvana:	00:09:19	So, do you think that branding it that way was a way to sort of make it seem less about, oh, I'm always doing things for my child and more like I'm just sort of being and experiencing them? Jen:	00:09:30	Yeah, I think so. And it's sort of a weird word and I think it would have been better if it was a word that was a bit more approachable, but yeah, the idea is you don't have to do things, buy things for, take on all these responsibilities about bettering your child and educating your child that your child has an inbuilt drive to learn and that if you step back and support that drive, then amazing things will happen. Silvana:	00:09:59	Okay. So, I'm listening to your podcast and you talk a lot about research and what the science supports. So, we want to try to look at RIE through the lens of what the science and what the research says. We don't want to cherry pick, so maybe we should talk about the eight tenets of RIE and whether there's evidence support either of them. So, I guess one of the things that is most associated with RIE in the limited stuff that I read is this idea of respect. And they put that as their first principle. The RIE website says, “Respect is the basis of the RIE philosophy. We not only respect babies, we demonstrate our respect every time we interact with them. Respecting a child means treating even the youngest infant as a unique human being, not as an object. At RIE, we show respect, for example, by not picking up an infant without telling him beforehand, by talking directly to him and not over him, and by waiting for a child's response.” Is there any evidence to support this idea of respect for even the youngest infants? Jen:	00:11:01	This is actually kind of a strange place for us to start, even though it is the first principle and it is the most important one for us. From a scientific perspective, I would say there is not a ton of evidence for this, particularly on the very young child and I imagine that's more because nobody thinks to study it than people have studied it and found that it is irrelevant or not useful. So, I wanted to quote something that I found in a book of Theories on Early Childhood Education and it describes how Gerber moved to the US and it says “After devoting a good deal of time to becoming grounded and comfortable in her understanding of mainstream American family culture, she set out to find a way to support parents in childcare providers in her new homeland, in rearing confident, competent and authentic children.” And then she said about proposing a method of rearing children that actually goes against mainstream American family culture. Jen:	00:11:53	As an example of that, I was interviewed recently on another podcast and the host of the show ended up being a fairly mainstream parent and I actually hadn't realized that to quite the extent before I started the interview. And halfway through the interview I started talking about my respect-based approach to parenting. And she said, “Respect? I gave birth to them. They should respect me.” And I had to pick myself up off the floor a little bit. And so yeah, I do think that this idea is very strange to a lot of people, I mean in the quote that you mentioned from the RIE website, we don't pick up a baby without first, at least telling him if not asking him about it. And so I didn't do that when my daughter was very young. I discovered RIE when she was about 4 months old and now mostly defunct blog. Jen:	00:12:44	I have a series of pictures of me doing non-respectful things to her. But at that time I'm standing her up while she's standing on the table, she's a month old at the time. She clearly can't stand by herself and so RIE would say that that's not very respectful. And so yeah, we have this approach that is very, very opposed to traditional American parenting. So, to answer the question specifically, no, we don't have any research on being respectful to babies, but I think the closest thing that we have is a book that I love. It's by Alfie Kohn, who's a well-known author in this field and he wrote a book called Unconditional Parenting and it really does a deep dive into the research on tools like withholding love when a child does something that the parent doesn't like or punishes them or rewards them. He finds those tools which really are not based in respect do damage our relationships with our children and he cites a ton of research on that topic and we actually discussed that book at length in an episode we did a while back called How Do I Get My Child To Do What I Want Them To Do, which was the title that I picked on purpose to pique people's interest. Jen:	00:13:53	So I would say overall, if we want to raise children who are respectful of others and compassionate and self-motivated and empathetic, which I think is the goal that a lot of parents have for their children, then we need to model those qualities and treat children with respect rather than just saying, you will be respectful and not having that respect-based relationship. Silvana:	00:14:17	I have a question about that because I actually also read Alfie Kohn’s book and I really read it as more applying to sort of older children. I mean that was definitely his lens and when people get to that stage, preschoolers and young school-aged kids where they're trying to get their kids to do or not do this or that and they use punishment and rewards to try to get their children to behave a certain way and I wonder sometimes if thinking about this respect with very young infants is almost like when you talk about modeling, is it this idea maybe that we just want to start from the very beginning so that we're going to carry that all the way through without necessarily knowing whether it matters to a 2-month-old. If you say, I'm going to pick you up now. Jen:	00:14:58	Yeah. I think that really is it and I can't remember where I read this, but somebody once asked the question. So if you don't start by being respectful, when do you start? Silvana:	00:15:07	That's a really good point. Jen:	00:15:09	Yeah. Well, when the child can talk. Why is it that point? Is it just because they can answer back and tell you that they don't like it? Well, presumably they've been not liking what you've been doing for a long time now and so I think it goes along with the idea that RIE has the children are competent individuals from birth and I've actually seen very young babies, a few weeks old if you have said to them from birth, I'm going to pick you up now before you pick them up, they will actually stiffen their neck because they know what you're about to do and they in a way are cooperating with you and helping you through that process. Jen:	00:15:46	And so to me it's mind boggling and that is supported by neurological research. We understand so much more now about children, very young children and what they're capable of. It seems like every time we test younger children's cognitive abilities, we discovered they were capable of some kind of reasoning we didn't know they could do before. And so yeah, it's the idea that, well, if we don't start now, when will we start? When is this child deserving of our respect? Do they have to earn it? Then we might have to wait awhile. So yeah. So the idea is let's start from birth because why not? Silvana:	00:16:21	Right. Okay. So the second principle in the eight RIE principles is our goal in authentic child and it says “An authentic child is one that feels secure, autonomous and competent.” What's going on here? Jen:	00:16:37	Yeah, this one's actually a much easier one in terms of the research to support it. There's a theory called Self-Determination Theory and it was put forward by Edward Deci. I hope I'm saying that...

“Is RIE backed by scientific research?” It’s a question that comes up every once in a while among parents who use the Resources for Infant Educarers (RIE) approach to raising their children, and then they all (virtually) look at each other kind of uneasily because no study has ever shown that children raised using RIE methods have any better outcomes than children who aren’t. Given how much I focus on scientific research, you would think that I would have determined my overall approach to parenting through extensive reading of the literature – but actually I discovered RIE even before I started looking at research and I latched onto it because parenting in a respectful way just felt right.  I knew that love was necessary but not the only tool I would to discipline (used in its original sense, meaning “to teach”) my daughter about how to live in our family.  I knew immediately that respect was the tool I sought. But it always niggled at me (and these other parents): Is RIE backed in any way by science?  Naturally, I could find no expert who could speak to this.  So I recruited the assistance of a fellow RIE-practicing parent to help us think through RIE’s basic principles, and whether (or not!) the research backs these up. If you’re new to RIE, you might want to listen to this introductory episode on <a href="https://yourparentingmojo.com/whatisrie/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">What is RIE</a> first, so you’ll have the background you need.  I actually recorded this Science of RIE episode first so it does have a very brief introduction to RIE, but then I realized it really wasn’t sufficient so I recorded the extra episode. Have questions about RIE?  Want to continue the conversation?  Come on over to the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/2174808219425589/?ref=bookmarks" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group</a> and ask away, or join the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/notrienotwrong/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Toasted RIE</a> group which I help to moderate! <a href="#" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Read Full Transcript</a> Jen:	00:00:38	Hello and welcome to today's episode of the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today, we are going to do something we have never done before in more than 60 episodes of the show. Someone else is going to interview me and what are we going to talk about? We're going to talk about a concept that has been absolutely foundational to my parenting. It's an approach to caring for children called Resources for Infant Educarers, which is abbreviated to RIE and pronounced rye. This episode has been a really long time in coming. I had actually thought of doing it when I first started the show, but I figured it would probably be a fairly new concept for a lot of people and I didn't want you all to think that I was some kind of crazy-granola-eating-Californian with really weird ideas about child rearing before you'd probably gotten to know me, but we're at 60 episodes into the show now and I feel like I've mentioned RIE enough times that it is starting to get silly that we actually haven't done an episode on it. Jen:	00:01:29	So when I thought about who I could interview on this topic, I considered all the usual suspects that those of you who are somewhat familiar with who I might have considered, but I quickly realized that probably nobody was going to be able to talk about exactly the aspect of it that I wanted to discuss, which is how does RIE aligned with what science tells us about raising children? Because quite frankly, I've never seen anyone discussed this at all and given that we use scientific research a lot on this show, even though we're not slaves to the research, I couldn't think of anyone other than me to be interviewed on it, but I didn't want to just sit here for an hour and try and convince you about how great RIE is, because when people first learned about it, they tend to have a lot of questions, so I posted in one of the RIE Facebook groups that I'm in and I said, hey, would anyone like to interview me? Jen:	00:02:12	You'd need to be familiar with the basic principles, but really nothing beyond that and you should be interested in learning about it and not openly hostile towards it and you have to be willing to push back if what I'm saying doesn't make sense. So, I'd like to introduce you to our interviewer today. Silvana Naguib, who says that she knows a little bit about RIE that she's gleaned from blog posts and Facebook groups, but she's never read a book about it and she's a lawyer and so she certainly going to push back if what I'm saying doesn't make sense. Welcome Silvana. Silvana:	00:02:40	Hi Jen. Jen:	00:02:41	Thanks so much for joining us today. I think you're joining us from Los Angeles, which funnily enough is actually the home of RIE. So can you tell us a bit about your family and yourself as well, please? Silvana:	00:02:50	Yeah, so I'm actually a recent transplant to Los Angeles. I'm originally from Cairo, Egypt, which is where I grew up and I've been living in the US for about almost 20 years now. Silvana:	00:03:00	And I'm a lawyer by trade and I am married with my husband Ben and we have a daughter, Carolina who is almost three years old. She'll be three this summer and we live here in LA and I'm one of those crunchy-granola-eating social justice lawyer types. I’m actually about to start a new job representing people who are homeless. And so my whole thing in life is I try to help people and make the world suck a little bit less so. Jen:	00:03:32	All right, well thanks for that. Silvana:	00:03:33	That was part of my interest in RIE. I was trying to figure out how to do that for my kid. Jen:	00:03:36	Ah, okay. So how did you first learn about RIE? Silvana:	00:03:39	Well, it actually was on Facebook. A friend of mine had posted a link to a blog post by Janet Lansbury who is a blogger that writes a lot about RIE and she's, I think, well known and I started reading a lot of stuff on her website and thinking, wow, this is a totally different approach to parenting than pretty much everything I've read and how most of the people I know deal with their kids. Jen:	00:04:03	And it struck a chord? Silvana:	00:04:04	It did. And I sort of started poking around if there are any Facebook groups talking about this and reading some other blogs out there. But it's been a pretty superficial exploration. Mostly limited to reading blogs, talking about it on Facebook. Jen:	00:04:19	So, that's kind of the level we're coming at this. So if you don't know a lot about RIE then this is going to be just the interview for you. We're going to go into a lot of the basics and we're going to keep it more relevant to the toddler years. RIE is traditionally and typically used in the zero to two years group, but because my listeners are people who have preschoolers and possibly a little bit even older than that, we're definitely going to focus on the older years and how to apply those principles there as well. So. Silvana:	00:04:48	Well that's perfect for me since I have almost 3-year-old. Jen:	00:04:51	Excellent. Great. Yeah. So we're out of that official period but it's still relevant to us. So this is your interview. What do you want to know about first? Silvana:	00:04:57	Well, I would love to start with some background and just find out where did RIE come from and is it derived from any research, psychological or any other kind of research about child development? Jen:	00:05:09	Okay. So it's actually kind of a strange story about where RIE comes from. There was a pediatrician in Hungary called Emmi Pikler and she had developed this approach to raising children based on respect for them as people and respect for their individual physical developmental processes. And it was in about the middle of the last century and she first tried it on her own children and then after the Second World War, the government asked her to open an orphanage because there were a lot of children that didn't have parents who had been killed in the war, had died after the war. And so she did that and she continued to refine her approach at the orphanage and she did publish some research papers on it, but unfortunately I haven't read many of them because most of them are published in either Hungarian or French. And I read French possibly, but not really a scientific paper level. Jen:	00:05:57	So Magda Gerber, who is the name, who is more traditionally associated with RIE, met Emmi Pikler and this random meeting, Pikler’s daughter and Gerber’s daughter were classmates. And one day Magda Gerber's daughter got sick and their regular pediatrician was out of town. And her daughter said, why don't you call my friend's mom, she is a pediatrician. And so Emmi Pikler came over and Magda Gerber started to tell Pikler about her daughter's symptoms. And Pikler just motioned to her to please be quiet and she started talking to Gerber’s daughter and asked her about her symptoms and how she was feeling and had a very respectful dialogue with her. And Magda Gerber was just blown away and so she ended up getting a Master's in Early Childhood Education in Budapest and started working in the orphanage as well and she works alongside Pikler for a number of years and then after the Hungarian Revolution in the 50s, they moved to Austria and then onto the US and she held a variety of jobs there and eventually moved to Los Angeles where she worked with children who had cerebral palsy and later autism and then in the early 70s, an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Stanford asked her to help him co-direct a program that supported parents in interacting with their children and this guy Forrest and she co-founded the nonprofit Resources for Infant Educarers in Los Angeles. Jen:	00:07:19	But it's actually really unclear in the literature what happened to Forrest after that point. So, he seems to have disappeared off the face of the RIE planet. Hopefully, he didn't disappear entirely. So, she started these parent-infant classes and she also taught development classes at universities around the LA area. So, I guess when I first heard about this background, it was pretty surprising to me that an approach to raising children that was founded in an orphanage in Hungary, something that could even be appropriate for children in a family setting in the US and other places in the world. And I think it's also really interesting how diametrically opposed it is to the traditional Western way of parenting. But we're going to talk a lot more about this and so that's basically where it came from and it's surprising to me that it's relevant, but at the same time I'm so grateful that I found it. Silvana:	00:08:16	Okay. So, the name of this organization, which is now sort of symbolizing this whole movement, RIE has this term educarer in it. What is that? Is it a term they made up? Jen:	00:08:28	Yes, it is actually. And she did that, I always assume it's because she didn't have access to branding experts who are to come up with a lot catchier, but it combines educator and carer and she gives the definition as being one who educates children in a caring manner and that it's not a caregiver or caretaker because a care neither gives nor takes. A care that puts love into action and the way you care for a child is how she experiences your love. So an educarer is showing that love for a child through everyday activities like feeding and diapering, and the idea is that these aren't just chores, these are interactions that deepen your relationship with your child and babies learn so much from these interactions and so if we step back and allow that learning to happen rather than explicitly trying to teach them things all the time, they actually ended up learning a lot. Silvana:	00:09:19	So, do you think that branding it that way was a way to sort of make it seem less about, oh, I'm always doing things for my child and more like I'm just sort of being and experiencing them? Jen:	00:09:30	Yeah, I think so. And it's sort of a weird word and I think it would have been better if it was a word that was a bit more approachable, but yeah, the idea is you don't have to do things, buy things for, take on all these responsibilities about bettering your child and educating your child that your child has an inbuilt drive to learn and that if you step back and support that drive, then amazing things will happen. Silvana:	00:09:59	Okay. So, I'm listening to your podcast and you talk a lot about research and what the science supports. So, we want to try to look at RIE through the lens of what the science and what the research says. We don't want to cherry pick, so maybe we should talk about the eight tenets of RIE and whether there's evidence support either of them. So, I guess one of the things that is most associated with RIE in the limited stuff that I read is this idea of respect. And they put that as their first principle. The RIE website says, “Respect is the basis of the RIE philosophy. We not only respect babies, we demonstrate our respect every time we interact with them. Respecting a child means treating even the youngest infant as a unique human being, not as an object. At RIE, we show respect, for example, by not picking up an infant without telling him beforehand, by talking directly to him and not over him, and by waiting for a child's response.” Is there any evidence to support this idea of respect for even the youngest infants? Jen:	00:11:01	This is actually kind of a strange place for us to start, even though it is the first principle and it is the most important one for us. From a scientific perspective, I would say there is not a ton of evidence for this, particularly on the very young child and I imagine that's more because nobody thinks to study it than people have studied it and found that it is irrelevant or not useful. So, I wanted to quote something that I found in a book of Theories on Early Childhood Education and it describes how Gerber moved to the US and it says “After devoting a good deal of time to becoming grounded and comfortable in her understanding of mainstream American family culture, she set out to find a way to support parents in childcare providers in her new homeland, in rearing confident, competent and authentic children.” And then she said about proposing a method of rearing children that actually goes against mainstream American family culture. Jen:	00:11:53	As an example of that, I was interviewed recently on another podcast and the host of the show ended up being a fairly mainstream parent and I actually hadn't realized that to quite the extent before I started the interview. And halfway through the interview I started talking about my respect-based approach to parenting. And she said, “Respect? I gave birth to them. They should respect me.” And I had to pick myself up off the floor a little bit. And so yeah, I do think that this idea is very strange to a lot of people, I mean in the quote that you mentioned from the RIE website, we don't pick up a baby without first, at least telling him if not asking him about it. And so I didn't do that when my daughter was very young. I discovered RIE when she was about 4 months old and now mostly defunct blog. Jen:	00:12:44	I have a series of pictures of me doing non-respectful things to her. But at that time I'm standing her up while she's standing on the table, she's a month old at the time. She clearly can't stand by herself and so RIE would say that that's not very respectful. And so yeah, we have this approach that is very, very opposed to traditional American parenting. So, to answer the question specifically, no, we don't have any research on being respectful to babies, but I think the closest thing that we have is a book that I love. It's by Alfie Kohn, who's a well-known author in this field and he wrote a book called Unconditional Parenting and it really does a deep dive into the research on tools like withholding love when a child does something that the parent doesn't like or punishes them or rewards them. He finds those tools which really are not based in respect do damage our relationships with our children and he cites a ton of research on that topic and we actually discussed that book at length in an episode we did a while back called How Do I Get My Child To Do What I Want Them To Do, which was the title that I picked on purpose to pique people's interest. Jen:	00:13:53	So I would say overall, if we want to raise children who are respectful of others and compassionate and self-motivated and empathetic, which I think is the goal that a lot of parents have for their children, then we need to model those qualities and treat children with respect rather than just saying, you will be respectful and not having that respect-based relationship. Silvana:	00:14:17	I have a question about that because I actually also read Alfie Kohn’s book and I really read it as more applying to sort of older children. I mean that was definitely his lens and when people get to that stage, preschoolers and young school-aged kids where they're trying to get their kids to do or not do this or that and they use punishment and rewards to try to get their children to behave a certain way and I wonder sometimes if thinking about this respect with very young infants is almost like when you talk about modeling, is it this idea maybe that we just want to start from the very beginning so that we're going to carry that all the way through without necessarily knowing whether it matters to a 2-month-old. If you say, I'm going to pick you up now. Jen:	00:14:58	Yeah. I think that really is it and I can't remember where I read this, but somebody once asked the question. So if you don't start by being respectful, when do you start? Silvana:	00:15:07	That's a really good point. Jen:	00:15:09	Yeah. Well, when the child can talk. Why is it that point? Is it just because they can answer back and tell you that they don't like it? Well, presumably they've been not liking what you've been doing for a long time now and so I think it goes along with the idea that RIE has the children are competent individuals from birth and I've actually seen very young babies, a few weeks old if you have said to them from birth, I'm going to pick you up now before you pick them up, they will actually stiffen their neck because they know what you're about to do and they in a way are cooperating with you and helping you through that process. Jen:	00:15:46	And so to me it's mind boggling and that is supported by neurological research. We understand so much more now about children, very young children and what they're capable of. It seems like every time we test younger children's cognitive abilities, we discovered they were capable of some kind of reasoning we didn't know they could do before. And so yeah, it's the idea that, well, if we don't start now, when will we start? When is this child deserving of our respect? Do they have to earn it? Then we might have to wait awhile. So yeah. So the idea is let's start from birth because why not? Silvana:	00:16:21	Right. Okay. So the second principle in the eight RIE principles is our goal in authentic child and it says “An authentic child is one that feels secure, autonomous and competent.” What's going on here? Jen:	00:16:37	Yeah, this one's actually a much easier one in terms of the research to support it. There's a theory called Self-Determination Theory and it was put forward by Edward Deci. I hope I'm saying that...

084: The Science of RIE

Emotion regulation: It’s one of the biggest challenges of childhood (and parenthood!).  We all want our children to be able to do it, but they struggle with it so much, and this is the root of many of our own struggles in parenting. But instead of trying to get them to reduce the intensity of their emotions, should we instead be trying to reduce the stress they experience from things like a too-hard seat at school, itchy labels, and the scratch of cutlery on plates?  Is there any peer-reviewed research supporting this idea? We’ll find out in this, the most frustrating episode I’ve ever researched, on Dr. Stuart Shanker’s book Self-Reg!   References Baumeister, R.F., Twenge, J.M., &amp; Nuss, C.K. (2002). Effects of social exclusion on cognitive processes: Anticipated aloneness reduces intelligent thought. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84(4), 817-827. Crnic, K.A., &amp; Greenberg, M.T. (1990). Minor parenting stresses with young children. Child Development 61(5), 1628-1637. Davies, P.T., Woitach, M.J., Winter, M.A., &amp; Cummings, E.M. (2008). Children’s insecure representations of interparental relationship and their school adjustment: The mediating role of attention difficulties. Child Development 79(5), 1570-1582. Gershoff, E.T., &amp; Font, S.A. (2016). Corporal punishment in U.S. public schools: Prevalence, disparities in use, and status in state and federal policy. Social Policy Report 30(1). Retrieved from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/j.2379-3988.2016.tb00086.x Grant, B. (2009, May 7). Elsevier published 6 fake journals. The Scientist. Retrieved from https://www.the-scientist.com/the-nutshell/elsevier-published-6-fake-journals-44160 Gross, J.J. (2015). Emotion regulation: Current status and future prospects. Psychological Inquiry 26(1), 1-26. Full article available at http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.670.3420&amp;rep=rep1&amp;type=pdf Hamoudi, Amar, Murray, Desiree W., Sorensen, L., &amp; Fontaine, A. (2015). Self-Regulation and Toxic Stress: A Review of Ecological, Biological, and Developmental Studies of Self-Regulation and Stress. OPRE Report # 2015-30, Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Heaviside S, Farris E. Fast Response Survey System. Washington, DC: US GPO; 1993. Public School Kindergarten Teachers’ Views on Children’s Readiness for School. Contractor Rep. Statistical Analysis Report. Lyons, D.M., Parker, K.J., &amp; Schatzberg, A.F. (2010). Animal models of early life stress: Implications for understanding resilience. Developmental Psychobiology 52(7), 616-624. Lyons, D.M., &amp; Parker, K.J. (2007). Stress inoculation-induced indications of resilience in monkeys. Journal of Traumatic Stress 20(4), 423-433. Masten, A. S. (2001). Ordinary magic. Resilience processes in development. American Psychologist, 56(3), 227–238. Muraven, M., Tice, D.M., &amp; Baumeister, R.F. (1998). Self-control as limited resource: Regulatory depletion patterns. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74(3), 774-789. Murray, D.W., Rosanbalm, K., &amp; Christopoulos, C. (2016). Self-Regulation and Toxic Stress Report 3: A Comprehensive Review of Self-Regulation Interventions from Birth through Young Adulthood. OPRE Report # 2016-34, Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Newman, K. (2014, September 3). Book publishing, not fact checking. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/09/why-books-still-arent-fact-checked/378789/ Raio, C. Orederu T.A., Palazzolo, L., Shurick, A.A., &amp; Phelps, E.A. (2013). Cognitive emotion regulation fails the stress test. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110(37), 15139-15144. Schuessler, J. (2018, October 4). Hoaxers slip breastaurants and dog-park sex into journals. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/arts/academic-journals-hoax.html Shanker, S. (n.d.). The self-reg view on: Schools as “Self-Reg Havens.” Self-Regulation Institute. Retrieved from https://self-reg.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Mehrit_Havens.pdf?pdf=schools-havens Shanker, S., &amp; Francis, T. (n.d.). Hide and seek: The challenge of understanding the full complexity of stress and stress-reactivity. Reframed 1(1) (no pagination). Retrieved from https://selfregulationinstitute.org/reframed-volume-1-issue-1-july-2017-hide-seek/ Shanker, S. &amp; Burgess, C. (n.d.) Self-Reg and reframing.  Reframed 1(1) (no pagination). Retrieved from https://selfregulationinstitute.org/reframed-volume-1-issue-1-july-2017-self-reg-reframing/ Silvers, J.A., Insel, C., Powers, A., Franz, P. Helion, C. Martin, R.E., Weber, J., Mischel, W., Casey, B.J., &amp; Ochsner, K.N. (2017). vlPFC–vmPFC–Amygdala Interactions Underlie Age-Related Differences in Cognitive Regulation of Emotion. Cerebral Cortex 27, 3502-3514.   Read Full Transcript  Transcript Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  Today’s episode comes to us courtesy of listener Alison, who sent me some information on Dr. Stuart Shanker’s work on what he calls “Self-Reg,” which seems to be his branded term for “Self-Regulation,” and asked me to explore it in an episode.  And I really don’t think she or I realized what a can of worms we were opening up when she sent the question and I said I’d look into it. According to Dr. Shanker’s Self-Regulation Institute, Shanker Self-Reg ® is “a powerful method for understanding stress and managing tension and energy, which are key to enhancing self-regulation in children, youth and adults of all ages.  Decades of research have shown that optimal self-regulation is the foundation for healthy human development, adaptive coping skills, positive parenting, learning, safe and caring schools, and vibrant communities.” I got Dr. Shanker’s book, which is also called Self-Reg, and I have to say that my warning signals started to go off when every footnote that I went to check out led to a book, rather than to a peer-reviewed journal article.  Now journal articles aren’t perfect; I actually saw an article in the New York Times recently on three scientists who managed to publish twenty papers in journal articles across a variety of fields over the last year in which they “started with politically fashionable conclusions which they worked backward to support by aping the relevant fields’ methods and arguments, and sometimes inventing data.”  And I’ve also seen articles describing how major, respected publishers released entire publications that were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies and looked like peer-reviewed medical journals but didn’t disclose their sponsorship. But in general, journal articles are how scientific information gets disseminated, because they include a methods section and a results section so experts and other readers like you and me can understand how they arrived at their conclusions.  Then other scientists can replicate that work if they want to, or at least offer critiques of the methods and conclusions.  But no such system is in place when a book is published. Craig Silverman, who wrote a book on media accuracy, says in an article in The Atlantic that he did an anecdotal survey asking people: “Between books, magazines, and newspapers, which do you think has the most fact-checking?”  Almost inevitably, the people he spoke with guessed books, but it turns out that fact-checking has never been standard practice in the book publishing world at all.  The article goes on to say that “reliance on books creates a weak link in the chain of media accuracy” because “magazine fact checkers typically treat reference to a fact in a published book as confirmation of the fact, yet too often the books themselves have undergone no such rigorous process.”  Further, when only the book title is provided in the footnotes we have no idea what in the book is being cited – whether it’s the entire premise of the book, or some obscure sentence on page 475. So I want to be clear here and say that I don’t have reason to believe that Dr. Shanker’s book is a lie.  I also don’t have evidence to show that the books he’s relying on to support his points are based on lies, mainly because I don’t have time to read a hundred books in preparation for this episode.  But what I do know is that books are about the least reliable form of evidence you could draw on to make a point about something that’s important to get right, and that he also doesn’t cite research that I now know is available that could actually have supported his ideas.  Instead he makes statements about how he has scanned the brains of hyper-aroused children in his lab (but doesn’t describe any published journal article coming out of that work, which is pretty unusual). Elsewhere he describes a process of physical sensations becoming associated with distinctive emotions: “For example, if an infant is hungry and her cries go unheeded, her muscles tense up, which is associated with sensations of discomfort, and a distinct feeling of anger may begin to emerge.  If a caregiver responds to these first signs of anger by scolding the child…then the physical sensations and the nascent feeling of anger that the child experiences may become further bound up with feelings of hopelessness.  As the child grows older, the same physical sensations – a stomachache, for instance – can trigger feelings of anger and hopelessness – and leave a parent befuddled, completely unaware of how a deep-seated physical/emotional association might be the culprit…” Again, there’s no citation provided for this work and I’ve yet to find any research or researcher who can corroborate that this process happens. A third example is related to a concept called the “interbrain,” which I did find described elsewhere, and which is a kind of shared intuitive channel of communication, which is how parents sense things like tiny shifts in their child’s mood.  Then Dr. Shanker goes on to imply that for some children, minor stressors like “the gleam in a parent’s eyes or a hug or a gentle touch, which normally would be a source of positive arousal, can be more than the baby can bear.”  Once again, I couldn’t find any literature or researcher to support this claim, and my overall impression of the book is that Dr. Shanker takes research on children facing severe stressors like poverty and violence, and connects that research to minor stressors like itchy clothing labels, whirring fans, and the gleam in a parent’s eye to tell us middle class white parents that our children have severe problems, when actually the research doesn’t really support these claims. When I went on Dr. Shanker’s Self-Regulation Institute’s website to look for evidence supporting the principles of Self-Reg I found a series of videos discussing the principles which, strangely, I can no longer locate.  One of which talked about the movement’s detractors and how people who don’t want to be convinced of Self-Reg’s benefits will never be convinced.  He went on to say something along the lines of “there’s evidence to support Self-Reg” – but nowhere is this evidence ever actually described. If you search “self-reg” in any scholarly database, you come up with pretty much nothing except the occasional hit on a non-peer-reviewed article authored by Dr. Shankar.  And I’ve also learned in the course of researching episodes for this show that when a single researcher’s name gets too attached to a concept – if they’ve basically made their name on a concept, then that’s an extra reason to be suspicious.  We saw this in our episode on grit, where we found that the peer-reviewed papers showed effect sizes that were nowhere near as large as Dr. Angela Duckworth describes them to be in places like her book and her TED talk.  Growth Mindset may also be a useful tool but is likely not as large a determinant of success as Dr. Carol Dweck states in her TED talk.  So when I see that Dr. Shanker is essentially the only researcher whose name is tied to Self-Reg but he has actually trademarked the term “Shanker Self-Reg,” my danger radar starts beeping even more loudly. Honestly, I find the claims about self-reg to be compelling.  I want to believe them.  They align with the way I view children, which is that bad behavior isn’t bad behavior; it’s the child trying to tell us something and what Dr. Shanker argues that they are trying to tell us is that they are stressed. But in the absence of much in the way of real evidence in the book or on the Self-Regulation Institute’s website I reached out to the organization to ask them what they had.  I told them that I really do want to believe in what they say but I asked to see some evidence, and the very friendly response that I received essentially said two things.  Firstly, that “Self-Reg is a relatively young model and, as a whole new approach rather than a program, there is time involved in learning the model and refining how best to apply it.  We have begun this work and I am happy to share the research we do have.  I would welcome you to look at our website,” and then there’s a link to the home page, not to any specific evidence for the approach. I’ve seen this idea of it being a “young model” bandied about a lot in the Self-Reg materials – but what confuses me here is that they somehow claim that it’s a young model and they’re still conducting research on it, but Dr. Shanker has written a book that’s at least two years old by the time you’re hearing this.  His bio on his website says he received a $7 million grant in 2005 to establish a state-of-the-art cognitive and social neuroscience centre at York University in Toronto, which was the largest gift the university had ever received.  He has advised governments on child development in at last twelve countries, and developed Shanker Self-Reg, his five domain model for understanding, recognizing and alleviating the impact of negative stress.  The Mehrit Centre, which also funds Dr. Shanker’s work, has a Foundations Certificate program that you can pay $1495 to take online, as well as a Level 2 Facilitator Program which grants you certification in The Shanker Method ® for $2,195, a Master’s Modules Program for $2,195…and the list goes on.  So my question is: if Dr. Shanker has had over a decade in his state-of-the-art cognitive and social neuroscience centre, and has had time to write a book and develop courses to train people on Self-Reg and wants to see the entire country of Canada become a “Self-Reg haven,” as he says in one of his marketing pieces, where’s the research?  How do we know this stuff actually helps? Because so often in doing this show I’ve seen ideas that have prima facie merit actually don’t hold up when we start looking into them.  The first one of these that I ran into was on how to how to raise a child who isn’t racially prejudiced – I’d always just assumed that the best way to do this is to just not mention race, because then my daughter will learn that it isn’t an issue.  And it turns out that this is actually one of the most effective ways to raise a racist child!  And before I did my episode on self-esteem, I just assumed I’d find studies saying how beneficial it is, and then some studies on how to get more of it, and it turned out that actually – despite a massive push in California in the ‘90s to increase every child’s self-esteem as a way of solving the state’s societal problems –  high self-esteem hasn’t been shown to cause good life outcomes – it’s entirely possible that people who have good life outcomes just have high self-esteem. So while it can be attractive to jump on these bandwaggons, that’s not what we do here at Your Parenting Mojo.  We dig into what research there is and get our hands dirty and then try to make a decision based on the best evidence we can find. Which brings me to the second major point of the email that I received from the Self-Regulation Institute, which was to direct me to their new open-access peer reviewed journal called Reframed: The Journal of Self-Reg.  The journal has a link to a page showing its editors; perhaps not surprisingly Dr. Shanker is listed first, followed by Lisa Bayrami who is the Executive Director of the Self-Regulation Institute.  The Managing Editor is Anne Showalater, a Ph.D Candidate in Canadian Studies and is the person who responded to my email.  Two of the four members of the Editorial Board are described as having explicit connections to the Self-Regulation Institute or the Mehrit Centre, so I think it’s safe to say that this journal is probably not going to publish any research that’s critical of Self-Reg.  And actually, as far as I can tell,  it’s not going to publish much in the way of actual scientific research at all – it’s essentially a series of blog posts describing different aspects of Self-reg, with sources cited at the end of each one – the majority, as usual, being books rather than peer-reviewed journal articles.  So in this episode I’m going to go through the references provided in the book, as well as in the Self-Reg “journal” articles, and from other peer-reviewed sources and we’ll see what we can find.   So what is Self-Reg?  I’ll summarize the first chapter of Dr. Shanker’s book.  He starts by arguing that while *self-control* is important in being successful in life, sometimes the more we try to control ourselves the harder it gets.  More important than self-control is the amount of stress we are under and how we manage this, or how we self-regulate.  Dr. Shanker gives the example of cold outside being a “classic example of an environmental stressor that the autonomic nervous system responds to” – in a roundabout way, he states that if there are too many external stressors like being cold on top of the usual emotional, social, and cognitive stressors then the child’s limbic system can become hypersensitive to the slightest hint of danger.  It registers the cold as a big threat that causes the release of neurochemicals that trigger fight or flight mode, and if that doesn’t work then the brain freezes – like an animal playing dead.  The oldest, most “reptilian” part of the child’s brain releases adrenaline which sets off a series of reactions that result in the release of cortisol.  You’ve likely felt the result: heart rate, breathing rate, and blood pressure increase; you’re alert and reactive;...

080: Self-Reg: Can it help our children?

This episode is part of a series on understanding the intersection of race, privilege, and parenting.  Click here to view all the items in this series.This episode launches a series of conversations on the intersection of race and parenting. I spent a month wading around in the psychological literature on this topic and deciding how best to approach it, and eventually decided to split it into four topics.Today we’ll dig into white privilege in parenting through a conversation with Dr. Margaret Hagerman on her book White kids: Growing up with privilege in a racially divided America [affiliate link].For those of us who are white, white privilege can be an incredibly uncomfortable to discuss. After all, we didn’t ask for this privilege – we were just born into a system where we have it. But the reality is that we do have it, and many of the actions we take on a daily basis mean that we don’t just benefit from it but we actively take steps to perpetuate that advantage. So in this episode we’ll learn how we can recognize that privilege in our lives and we’ll start to learn about some steps we can take to address it.In upcoming episodes we’ll look at white privilege in schools, parents’ responsibility to work on dismantling systems of racial privilege, how to talk with children about race, and what children learn about race in school (and what you can do to supplement this).I’m really excited to begin this conversation, but at the same time I want to acknowledge that while these episodes are based on a close reading of the literature, this is a massive subject and I’m not the expert here – I’m learning along with you. If you think I’ve missed the mark, do let me know either in the comments or via the Contact page. And if you’d like to participate in a series of conversations on this topic with other interested parents, do join us in the free Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group – just search for #whiteprivilege to find the thread.You might also be interested to listen back to earlier related episodes:Wait, is my toddler racist? (Recorded back when I was still learning to distinguish between prejudice and racism!)How children form social groups, which is critical to understanding how they develop prejudices in the first place.ReferencesAddo, F.R., Houle, J.N., &amp; Simon, D. (2016). Young, black, and (still) in the red: Parental wealth, race, and student loan debt. Race and Social Problems 8(1), 64-76.Birkhead, T.R. (2017, April 3). The racialization of juvenile justice and the role of the defense attorney. Boston College Law Review 58(2), 379-461.Bonilla-Silva, E. (2018). Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in America (5th Ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman &amp; Littlefield.Brantlinger, E., Majd-Jabbari, M., &amp; Guskin, S.L. (1996). Self-interest and liberal educational discourse: How ideology works for middle-class mothers. American Educational Research Journal 33(3), 571-597. DiAngelo, R. (2011). White fragility. International Journal of Critical Pedagogy 3(3), 54-70. Full article available at https://libjournal.uncg.edu/ijcp/article/viewFile/249/116Goyal, M.K., Kupperman, N., &amp; Cleary, S.D. (2015). Racial disparities in pain management of children with appendicitis in emergency departments. JAMA Pediatrics 169(11), 996-1002.Marrast, L., Himmelstein, D.U., &amp; Woolhandler, D. (2016). Racial and ethnic disparities in mental health care for children and young adults: A national study. International Journal of Health Studies 46(4), 810-824. National Conference of State Legislators (2017, August 1). Disproportionality and disparity in child welfare. Author. Retrieved from http://www.ncsl.org/research/human-services/disproportionality-and-disparity-in-child-welfare.aspxNicholson-Crotty, S., Birchmeier, Z., &amp; Valentine, D. (2009). Exploring the impact of school discipline on racial disproportion in the juvenile justice system. Social Science Quarterly 90(4), 1003-1018.Nodjimbadem, K. (2017, May 30). The racial segregation of American cities was anything but accidental: A housing policy expert explains how federal government policies created the suburbs and the inner city. Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-federal-government-intentionally-racially-segregated-american-cities-180963494/Poehlmann, J., Dallaire, D., Loper, A.B., &amp; Shear, L.D. (2010). Children’s contact with their incarcerated parents: Research findings and recommendations. American Psychologist 65(6), 575-598.Scheindlin, S.A. (2018, May 31). Trump’s hard-right judges will do lasting damage to America (Opinion). The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/30/trump-judge-appointments-roe-v-wade-courtsSibka, R.J., Horner, R.H., Chung, C-G., Rausch, M.K., May, S.L., &amp; Tobin, T. (2011). Race is not neutral: A national investigation of African American and Latino disproportionality in school discipline. School Psychology Review 40(1), 85-107.Wanless, S.B., &amp; Crawford, P.A. (2016). Reading your way to a culturally responsive classroom. National Association for the Education of Young Children. Retrieved from https://www.naeyc.org/resources/pubs/yc/may2016/culturally-responsive-classroom Read Full TranscriptJen: 01:34 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We are kicking off a series on the intersection of race with parenting and child development today. This actually grew out of the episode we did a while back on intergenerational trauma in which I acknowledged that the trauma that black parents experience just as a result of being black and I meant to go back and do another episode on that topic because it was just too big of a topic to slip into a more general episode on trauma, but when I got in touch with a Black friend to discuss how to go about covering this, she said, and I’m going to quote, “Don’t do an episode on that. It smacks of trauma porn.” Instead, she told me to look at what it means to be a white parent in America today and by extension in other colonizing and colonized countries.Jen: 02:16 So, I read a whole lot of books and I thought for a long time and that episode is now in the process of expanding to this series of several episodes. Today, we’re going to talk about white privilege, which I know can be a difficult topic to think about and white people including me, have a tendency to experience what Dr. Robin DiAngelo calls White Fragility, which is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable and triggers our defenses like denial, anger, fear, and guilt. And those caused us to argue or fall silent and leave the stress-inducing situation. So, if you’re feeling any of these emotions right now, after I said the words, White Privilege, and especially if you’re thinking, I don’t have privilege, my family doesn’t have enough money, or my partner just got laid off, or the black cashier at the grocery store was really weird to me today.Jen: 03:04 Then I’d encourage you not to let your defense mechanisms engage by shutting off this podcast, but instead try to listen with an open mind. This stuff isn’t easy, but it is really important. So, today we’re here with Dr. Margaret Hagerman, who’s the author of the brand new book, White Kids: Growing Up with Privilege in a Racially Divided America. I was really excited to find this book because there are a lot of researchers writing on white privileges today, but not nearly so many who are writing about it specifically as it relates to children. Dr. Hagerman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Mississippi State University and as a Faculty Affiliate in both the African American Studies and Gender Studies programs. She received her Ph.D from Emory University. Her qualitative research focuses on the study of racial socialization or how kids learn about race, racism, inequality, and privilege. Her new book is called White Kids: Growing Up with Privilege in a Racially Divided America. And while Dr. Hagerman does study the process of how this occurs, both inside and outside of schools, today we’re going to focus on the outside of school processes because we’ll have another episode very soon that’s entirely devoted to how whites experienced privilege in the school system. So welcome Dr. Hagerman.Dr. Hagerman: 04:14 Thank you for having me.Jen: 04:15 All right, so let’s start out by something that we don’t normally do on podcast episodes, but when I was doing my Masters in Education, it was really common for professors to ask students at the beginning of a paper, particularly on the topic of diversity to identify their privileges. So, I’m going to start by identifying some of mine and I wonder if you’d be kind enough to then follow by identifying some of yours?Dr. Hagerman: 04:37 Sure.Jen: 04:38 Okay, perfect. So my first obvious one is whiteness. I am a white person from England now living in America. I think my second one is economic status. I’m currently lucky enough, fortunate enough, well, we say lucky, but I’m upper middle class, although I come from a working class family and I do not deny that, I imagine it is, in some measure at least due to the fact that I am a white person and I do have privilege.Jen: 05:02 So, it’s not entirely luck that has a gender, this fortune. I’m heterosexual. So that meant my sexuality is accepted by society. I never had to come out to anybody. I’m able bodied, I’m pretty much able to do whatever I need to do to get through life using the body that I was born with. And I also have some educational privilege because I have a number of Master’s degrees, a number of years of advanced education and I recognize also that my privilege has intertwined with the education that I’ve received as well. So, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind telling us a bit about your privileges as well.Dr. Hagerman: 05:33 Sure. So I am a white woman. I grew up in a family that I would identify as having upper middle class status and now I’m a college professor and so I think that that status is probably, you know, still depending on how you measure it. I’m a social scientist, but I think that you would say that that was still that status. I am also heterosexual, able bodied and I have a Ph.D. So, certainly that would put me in a status of having educational privilege.Jen: 06:01 Mm-hmm. Yeah. And also just wanting to make the point before we move on that I deliberately sought out white researchers to interview for this series, partly because we’re examining whiteness rather than blackness and partly also because I think it can be easier to truly hear and take on these truths when they’re presented by someone who looks like you and sounds like you and is more like you rather than someone who appears to be on the outside than looking in. But I do want to acknowledge that black researchers and activists have been talking about white privilege for a really long time. And my hope here is that we can build on rather than refute their work. So, let’s get started with a topic that seems really easy, but perhaps it’s not. So what is race?Dr. Hagerman: 06:43 That is a great question. So, I think that often people, at least my students for example, tell me that they think race is a biological concept, but in fact race is not a biological concept, but instead a social concept. And so the way that I like to think about this is that the lines that demarcate different races, these were lines that were drawn by humans and these were lines that were drawn in ways that relates to political projects. And so as philosopher Charles Mills puts it, “The reality of race is a reality that socially created not an intrinsic reality of the human.” And so I think what that really gets at is the ways in which race is a political system and so where you are located within that system or how you’re categorized, shapes, things like where you live, who you marry, how you see the world and so I think a better or maybe an easier way to think about race is to think about race as a political grouping. And as Dorothy Roberts who is a legal scholar puts it, “Race has always served a political function.” And I think that that’s really important in understanding the history of race and the history of racism and where that leaves us today.Jen: 07:52 Mm-hmm. Yeah, and something that I learned as I was researching this, the way that we know this is a political construct and not a biological construct is that the groups change, right?Dr. Hagerman: 08:02 Absolutely.Jen: 08:03 Sometimes the people who were from Chinese origin will be classified as white and sometimes they’ll be classified as Asian and so the people in power able to change the groups to suit their own needs.Dr. Hagerman: 08:14 Absolutely.Jen: 08:15 So, that to me it was a key learning. I always just sort of symbol, if a person looks like a certain thing then they probably are that thing, but it turns out if you actually dig deeper into it, the group that’s in power has shifted what constitutes different groups and what privileges those groups have to suit their own needs at various points in history.Dr. Hagerman: 08:34 Right.Jen: 08:35 So yeah, it’s… that initial point just kind of blew my mind when I, when I started thinking about it. So. Okay. So a second question, and I think that the children that you talked to in your study had some thoughts on this. Is it racist to discuss race?Dr. Hagerman: 08:47 So this is a question that certainly some of the children would debate with one another, like you just alluded to, but my answer to this is no. It’s not racist to discuss race and as many different scholars coming out of legal studies as well as sociology have found in research and in history, you know, we are at a moment right now where many people talk about new forms of racism. So something like color blindness, like saying that you don’t care about race or that you don’t even notice race or that race doesn’t really matter in our society and that to talk about it is just to re, you know, introduce it and to be racist that that’s really just a way of perpetuating the racial status quo and that, you know, the reality is we live in a society in which resources are allocated along these lines of race.Dr. Hagerman: 09:35 And so to not talk about race is not going to get us anywhere. If anything, I think it will perpetuate the problem.Jen: 09:41 Mm-hmm.Dr. Hagerman: 09:42 So no, I do not think it is racist to discuss race.Jen: 09:45 Okay. And we’ll come back to color blindness in a bit because I think that is so important. But I wonder if first you could give us just a little bit of background on your book. What and who did you study?Dr. Hagerman: 09:53 Sure. So White Kids is a book that’s based on two years of ethnographic research with 30 families who identified both as white but also as affluent. And so these are families that have both race and class privilege. Uh, the children in this book are all in middle school, when I did the initial data collection, so the two-year time period. I do go back and re-interview them when they’re in high school, although that’s not the focus of the book.Dr. Hagerman: 10:17 It comes up at the end. And so these were families that were living in a midwestern community and were kind enough to let me into their world and the sort of private sphere of white families. And so I spent this two years interviewing children, interviewing parents, observing them as they go about their everyday business, you know, birthday parties and soccer practice. And gymnastics and so forth and so I spent a lot of time with these families and my research questions were really about the ways that these families communicated about race and this question is informed by the research on this topic of racial socialization, which really comes out of this really important and powerful work by black scholars in both sociology and psychology who historically were really focused on understanding how black families communicate about race and particularly how black parents prepare their children for, you know, potential experiences of racism.Dr. Hagerman: 11:12 And so sort of building on that scholarship and thinking about how white families are not removed from the discussion of race or racism in America, but in fact are, you know, central to it, you know, I wanted to explore what was going on in these families and really try to see how it is that young white people are developing ideas that either reproduce racism or racial inequality or maybe rework it or maybe even challenge it.Jen: 11:39 And you studied two very different communities in the book, right?Dr. Hagerman: 11:43 Right. So the, there’s one metropolitan area and there’s two neighborhoods within that metropolitan area or within the actual city that I look at, but then I also compare that to a nearby suburban area and sort of notice the differences in why people chose to live in these different communities. So some dynamics with the schools, dynamics with extracurricular activities and so forth. And because these families have these economic resources, they can make all kinds of different choices. And so because of that I was really interested in why, you know, they would choose to live where they did.Jen: 12:16 Mm-hmm. Okay. And so what kinds of ideas did the children that you interviewed have about race?Dr. Hagerman: 12:21 Well, I think one of the interesting findings from my work is that not all of these children’s shared the same ideas, and there was more variation I think in some of their thinking than what I had initially anticipated. But I did find some powerful patterns across different groups of children. And you know, I think one of the things that I was really interested in was to what extent do these children believe that racism is still a problem in America? And for some of the kids they told me that they did not think it was, while other children had lots to say on the matter and could give me very specific examples of racism in the United States. And so the book really goes through and has, you know, a lot of the children’s voices told by them like their actual quotations and some incidents that I observed when I was spending time with them. And you’ve really got, I think a rich sense of the, both the range of...

083: White privilege in parenting: What it is & what to do about it

Is attachment the same as bonding?  Can I have a healthy attachment with my baby if I don’t breastfeed? Do I have to babywear to develop an attachment to my baby? Will being apart from my baby disrupt our attachment relationship? Is co-sleeping critical to attachment?These are just a few of the questions that listeners wrote to me after I sent out a call for questions on Attachment. This was such an enormous topic to cover that Dr. Arietta Slade and I did the best we could in the time we had, and we did indeed cover a lot of ground.If you’ve ever been curious about the scientific evidence on how attachment forms, what are its benefits, and what it has NOT been shown to do, this is the episode for you. We also cover reflective functioning, one of the central ways that the attachment relationship develops, and discuss how to improve our skills in this arena.Check this episode for more attachment research: Most of what you know about attachment is probably wrongDr. Arietta Slade's Book Attachment in therapeutic practice - Affiliate linkReferencesAinsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., &amp; Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the strange situation. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Benoit, D. (2004). Infant-parent attachment: Definition, types, antecedents, measurement and outcome. Pediatric Child Health 9(8), 541-545.Bowlby, J. (1973/1991). Attachment and Loss: Volume 2. Separation: Anxiety and anger. London, U.K.: Penguin.Bowlby, J. (1971/1991). Attachment and Loss: Volume 1. Attachment. London, U.K.: Penguin.Cassidy, J. (2008). The nature of the child’s ties. In J. Cassidy &amp; P.R. Shaver (Eds.) Handbook of Attachment (pp.3-22). New York, NY: Guilford.Greenspan, S.H. &amp; Salmon, J. (2002). The four-thirds solution: Solving the childcare crisis in America today. Boston, MA: Da Capo [Note that Dr. Slade mis-remembered the title of this book as “The Three Fourths Solution”]Hudson, N.W., &amp; Fraley, R.C. (2018). Moving toward greater security: The effects of repeatedly priming attachment security and anxiety. Journal of Research in Personality 74, 147-157.Jones, J.D., Brett, B.E., Ehrlich, K.B., Lejuez, C.W., &amp; Cassidy, J. (2014). Maternal attachment style and responses to adolescents’ negative emotions: The mediating role of maternal emotion regulation. Parenting: Science and Practice 14, 235-257.Julian, T.W., McKenry, P.C., &amp; McKelvey, M.W. (1994). Cultural variations in parenting: Perceptions of Caucasian, African-American, Hispanic, and Asian-American parents. Family Relations 43(1), 30-37.LeVine, R.A., &amp; Levine, S. (2016). Do parents matter? Why Japanese babies sleep soundly, Mexican siblings don’t fight, and American families should just relax. New York, NY: PublicAffairs.Marvin, R.S., &amp; Britner, P.A. (2008). Normative Development: The ontogeny of attachment. In J. Cassidy &amp; P.R. Shaver (Eds.) Handbook of Attachment (pp.269-294). New York, NY: Guilford.Nicholson, B., &amp; Parker, L. (2013). How did attachment parenting originate? Attached at the heart. Retrieved from: www.attachedattheheart.attachmentparenting.org/faq/Raby, K.L., Roisman, G.I., Labella, M.H., Martin, J., Fraley, R.C., &amp; Simpson, J.A. (2018). The legacy of early abuse and neglect for social and academic competence from childhood to adulthood. Online first. Retrieved from https://socialinteractionlab.dl.umn.edu/sites/g/files/pua1356/f/2018/Raby%20et%20al%20%28CD%2C%202018%29.pdfSadler, L.S., Slade, A., &amp; Mayes, L.C. (2006). Minding the Baby: A mentalization-based parenting Program. In J.G. Allen &amp; P. Fonagy (Eds.), The handbook of mentalization-based treatment (pp.271-288). Chichester, U.K.: John Wiley &amp; Sons.Slade, A. (2014). Imagining fear: Attachment, threat, and psychic experience. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 24(3), 253-266.Slade, A. (2005). Parental reflective functioning: An introduction. Attachment &amp; Human Development 7(3), 269-281.Slade, A., Sadler, L., Dios-Kenn, C.D., Webb, D., Currier-Ezepchick, J., &amp; Mayes, L. (2005). Minding the Baby: A reflective parenting program. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 60, 74-100.Slade, A. (2002). Keeping the baby in mind: A critical factor in perinatal mental health. Zero to Three. June/July, 10-16.Read Full Transcript TranscriptJen:                                     [00:37]                  Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today we have an absolutely gigantic topic together and we have a giant in the academic world to help us think through some vet as well. I’d like to welcome Dr Arietta Slade, clinical professor at the Yale Child Study Center and Professor Emeritus in the doctoral program in Clinical Psychology at the City University of New York, and she is here today to talk with us on the topic of attachment theory. She’s an internationally recognized theoretician clinician, researcher and teacher. She’s published widely on reflective parenting, the clinical implications of attachment theory, the development of parental mentalization and the relational context of early symbolization. For the last 13 years, she has co-directed Minding the Baby, which is an interdisciplinary reflective parenting home visiting program for high risk mothers, infants, and their families at the Yale Child Study Center and School of Nursing. This program is one of only 18 certified evidence based home visiting programs in the United States.Jen:                                     [01:37]                  Now, it does seem to be slightly ambitious to try and cover 60 plus years of research on attachment, which has been conducted by Dr Slade as well as other researchers in a single show, but we’re going to give it a shot. Welcome Dr Slade.Dr. Slade:                          [01:49]                  Hello. How are you today, Jen?Jen:                                     [01:51]                  Great. Thanks so much for being with us. So I wonder if we can start all the way at the very beginning. What is attachment and why is it important?Dr. Slade:                          [01:58]                  Well, as you indicated in your introduction, it’s both a really huge topic and a very simple set of ideas. I mean, it’s a huge topic in that it’s been studied for, as you said, 60 years and it’s actually more like 80 years, but at the same time it comprises a set of really simple and accessible ideas and the central idea in attachment theory and has guided a tremendous amount of attachment research.Dr. Slade:                          [02:24] There’s three or four, several key ideas. The first is that children, infants, in particular, human infants are born with a predisposition to become connected, to attach to, the people who take care of them, you know, and this is something that is present at birth and an infant is born with a number of ways to signal the people who are caring for him or her about their needs and their desires and their needs for safety and closeness. And these are signaled very, very early on. And this is essentially a biological given that individuals are born with. And there are plenty of other mammalian species that are born with the capacity to develop attachments.Dr. Slade:                          [03:00]                  One of the main components of detachment system is to protect the child from danger so that the child is able from early on to signal alarmed, to reach out with his hands, to look at the parent, to call to the parent saying, I need help. I need comfort, I need to be protected. And that is a very strong component of the attachment system and that, as I said, is present from birth, and the second element of the attachment system is that when the child feels safe and protected, they are also biologically predisposed to explore their environment. You know, once they feel safe, they can go out and they can explore the world and they can even when they’re infants, they can explore the world with their eyes. They can explore the world with their hands. They can explore the world with their mouths and all of these efforts or efforts to learn about the world in which they are living, you know, in which they live from day one.Dr. Slade:                          [03:53]                  So attachment brings them close to the caregiver. It makes them feel safe. At the same time, the safety that comes from attachment allows them to go out and explore the world and learn about the world and much of their learning about the world comes through exploration of the world and then another element of their learning about the world comes through the relationship with their parents who signal to them, this is important. This is something you should know. This is something I’m interested in. This is something you should be interested in, and much of this takes place non-verbally. Some of course takes place when the child, gets older verbally, but there are a variety of ways that the parent communicates to the child. This is a world in which you and I live and these are the things in our world that it’s important for you to know, so that’s another element of the attachment system.Jen:                                     [04:40]                  I wonder if you can tell us more about what are some of those ways that parents do that, particularly the nonverbal ways they communicate with children that this is the world that we live in and these are the parameters of it.Dr. Slade:                          [04:50]                  Well, there are a number of ways that parents communicate with infants from the earliest days, and I’m sure you know this from your own interactions with your own children, with other people that when adult speak to children, they tend to exaggerate their facial expressions. They slow down the pace of their voice, they exaggerate the vowels and their speeches is notably different and it’s been called Motherese and Baby Speech and so on for many, many years. But they do a variety of things to signal, to really pace their information at a level that the child can grasp, to pace their, you know, like, “Oh wow, that’s big” [speaking slowly].Dr. Slade:                          [05:32]                  You know, and that slows down the pace of information because the child obviously as an infant processes things more slowly. But there are a number of ways that parents communicate things nonverbally, you know, which is that when you moved toward that part of the room, I grimace. And when you reach for that toy, I tense and when I’m holding you in my arms and you cry, I get rigid. There are all these ways that a mother or father or parent caregiver communicates through their body. This is something I want you to attend to or this is something unacceptable and there you know so much of the research over the last, I don’t know, I want to say 40 years now, 30 years on mother-child interaction and parent child interactions has really documented that there’s a whole bunch of communication that takes place between parent and child that is completely out of our view. Only when you really slow down the videotape as it were and watch that baby initiate some other looks away, baby tries again.Dr. Slade:                          [06:35] Mother looks away or baby initiates. Mother expands, baby expands, mother expands. All of those things happen again at a level that we might not see with the naked eye, but is one in which babies really received communication from the environment in a number of subtle ways. The simplest way to talk about it as of course nonverbal communication, but babies know when they’re being attuned to, they know when they’re not being attuned to. You know, when the caregiver has gone flat or when the caregiver turns away or when the is disinterested and all these are powerful messages that teach the baby about the parent, about themselves, about the world.Jen:                                     [07:13]                  Yeah. I guess I, I was not terribly insightful parent when my daughter was that old. I don’t think. And it’s almost mind boggling to wonder what she might have picked up from me when she was that age.Dr. Slade:                          [07:28]                  Well, you know, that’s really the enormous responsibility of parenting and of course there are a million things we don’t want to communicate to our children and there are a million things we communicate to them anyway, and there are a lot of wonderful things that we communicate to children and you know, it’s always important to remember that infants are enormously robust. They’re very good at reading a diverse array of signals. It takes a lot of problematic communications to really disrupt them. And it’s not as if, if you think of him as little computers, they’re very good learners, but they’re also very robust learners so that it’s not that, you know, there’s a researcher who did so much important work in this area named Daniel Stern and he’s one of the people who pioneered these micro analytic studies back in the seventies.Dr. Slade:                          [08:19]                  One of the things he really made clear is that, you know, essentially when in an anomalous thing happens between a parent and the child and the child sort of goes at first. So that wasn’t normal. That’s not mom, you know. And if it happens again, it’s like, oh, well. And then if it happens, you know, like 40 times it’s like, oh, well maybe I need to like develop a different kind of view of this situation because there’s been enough information to make me see it differently. But in general, I think it’s burdensome for parents to feel like every little thing they do is going to change the course of their child’s life because of the fact is it’s the buildup of things over time that really make for a relationship that make for an attachment a that make for a child’s sense of who they are.Dr. Slade:                          [08:59]                  Sixty to 70 percent of children living in low risk environments feel safe in the world, feels secure in their attachments, feel loved and taken care of and supported. And it’s not hard to feel securely attached, you know, and that most environments, depending on the culture, have ways of making children feel secure, if you know what I mean. It’s not something that’s so delicate. It’s a very robust biological system because it’s best for children if they do feel safe and taken care of and understood. And therefore there are pretty able to extract from the environment “I’m safe, I feel, you know, I’m taking care of and I feel understood.” There’s a couple more points I wanted to make while I was defining attachments. So back to that for sec. A child is born with an active attachment system, which means that depending on their age, they have a variety of signals that are age appropriate to signal the caregiver.Dr. Slade:                          [09:54]                  One of the functions of that is to protect them from danger. Another function of the attachment...

074: Attachment: What it is, what it’s not, how to do it, and how to stop stressing about it

“I spent the whole morning painting and doing origami and felting projects with my daughter – and not only did she not say “thank you,” but she refused to help clean up!” (I actually said this myself this morning:-)) “We took our son to Disneyland and went on every ride he wanted to go on except one, which was closed, and he spent the rest of the trip whining about how the whole trip was ruined because he didn’t get to go on that one ride.” (I hope I never have to say this one…I’m not sure I could make it through Disneyland in one piece.)  You might recall that we did an episode a while back on manners, and what the research says about teaching manners, and how what the research says about teaching manners comes from the assumption that manners MUST be explicitly taught – that your child will NOT learn to say “thank you” unless you tell your child “say thank you” every time someone gives them a gift. We also talked about how parent educator Robin Einzig uses the concept of “modeling graciousness” and that if you treat other people graciously, when your child is ready, she will be gracious as well.  The problem here, of course, is that most people expect your child to display some kind of manners before they are developmentally ready to really understand the concept behind it. But what really underlies manners?  Well, ideas like gratitude.  Because when we train children to say “thank you” before they are ready to do it themselves they might learn to recite the words at the appropriate time, but they aren’t really experiencing gratitude. Dr. Jonathan Tudge of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro tells us much more about this, and how we can scaffold our child’s ability to experience gratitude, if we decide we might want to do that. Dr. Tudge’s book, Developing Gratitude in Children and Adolescents (co-edited with Dr. Lia B. L. Freitas) contains lots more academic research on this topic if you’re interested.   References Halberstadt, A.G., Langley, H.A., Hussong, A.M., Rothenberg, W.A., Coffman, J.L., Mokrova, I., &amp; Costanzo, P.R. (2016). Parents’ understanding of gratitude in children: A thematic analysis. Early Childhood Research Quarterly 36, 439-451. Kiang, l. Mendonca S., Liang, Y., Payir, A., O’Brien, L.T., Tudge, J.R.H., &amp; Freitas, L.B.L. (2016). If children won lotteries: Materialism, gratitude, and imaginary windfall spending. Young Consumers 17(4), 408-418. Mendonca, S.E., Mercon-Vargas, E.A., Payir, A., &amp; Tudge, J.R.H. (2018). The development of gratitude in seven societies: Cross-cultural highlights. Cross-Cultural Research 52(1), 135-150. Mercon-Vargas, E.A., Poelker, A.E., &amp; Tudge, J.R.H. (2018). The development of the virtue of gratitude: Theoretical foundations and cross-cultural issues. Cross-Cultural Research 52(1), 3-18. Mokrova, I.L., Mercon-Vargas, E.A., &amp; Tudge, J.R.H. (2018). Wishes, gratitude, and spending preferences in Russian Children. Cross-Cultural Research 52(1), 102-116. Nelson, J.A., Freitas, L.B.L., O’Brien, M., Calkins, S.D., Leerkes, E.M., &amp; Marcovich, S. (2013). Preschool-aged children’s understanding of gratitude: Relations with emotion and mental state knowledge. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 31, 42056. Tudge, J.R.H., &amp; Freitas, L.B.L. (Eds.) (2018). Developing gratitude in children and adolescents. Cambridge, U.K: Cambridge University Press. Wang, D., Wang, Y.C., &amp; Tudge, J.R.H. (2015). Expressions of gratitude in children and adolescents: Insights from China and the United States. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 46(8), 1039-1058.   Read Full Transcript    Transcript Jen:                                      [00:38]                   Hello and welcome to today’s episode of the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. You might recall that we did an episode a while back on manners and what the research says about teaching manners and how what the research says about teaching manners comes from the assumption that manners must be explicitly taught, that your child will not learn to say thank you unless you tell your child, say thank you every time someone gives them a gift. We also talked about how parent educator Robin Einzig uses the concept of “modeling graciousness” and that if you treat other people graciously when your child is ready, she will be gracious as well. The problem here, of course, is that most people expect your child to display some kind of manners before they’re developmentally ready to really understand the concept behind it. Recently I saw an article from the University of California Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center about the development of gratitude and I saw it quoted Professor Jonathan Tudge, who is actually edited a very recent book of research called developing gratitude in children and adolescents, and I knew we’d found the right person to speak with about this. Jen:                                      [01:42] Professor Tudge, who goes by “Jon,” works in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, although you will hear from his accent in a minute that he’s perhaps not native to that part of the world. Most of his research focuses on the interrelations between the social world and children’s social, moral and cognitive development. He draws heavily on the ideas of Lev Vygotsky and Urie Bronfenbrenner, both of whom are practically old friends of our regular listeners by now, which means he’s interested in how social relationships shape development and in observing children “in the wild” as it were, rather than in lab situations. Welcome Jon. Dr. Tudge:                          [02:18] Welcome Jen. Thanks. Jen:                                      [02:20]                   Thank you. So let’s start with the easy questions. What is gratitude? How do you define it? Dr. Tudge:                          [02:27]                   Yeah. It’s not terribly easy. Jen:                                      [02:29]                   No, it’s not. Dr. Tudge:                          [02:30]                   No. Um, I think there are three aspects to a definition of gratitude. First of all, there has to be a benefactor, so when who’s now given something that’s really nice or who’s helped in some nice way and second beneficiary, the person that received that has to appreciate the good intention of the benefactor and feel good about that person and about what’s being done. And third, I think this is the most important part, has to be interested, really addressed. It has to want to desire to reciprocate in some way if there’s an appropriate opportunity. So there are three different parts to what I think is a good definition of the word. Jen:                                      [03:11]                   And so that sort of leads me to think that we’re going to struggle with this in very young children. Dr. Tudge:                          [03:19]                   Uh, yes, we are. Obviously they’re not going to be grateful they’re not, they’re not. They’re not going to be grateful. Well, we have to be doing, I think is to try to think about ways in which we can best enable them over time to become the sort of grateful individuals we’d like them to be. Dr. Tudge:                          [03:38]                   Yeah, and even adults I think struggle with this and I have struggled with this over the years and only, probably in the last maybe five to 10 years or so, have become more cognizant of the fact that when I do someone a favor, when I do something for them, it matters more that the favor, you know, it might be a very small favor, but if it’s something that the other person wants, that’s much better than something that I might perceive as being a really big deal and doing that for that person. If it’s not something the person really valued in the first place. Dr. Tudge:                          [04:08]                   That’s right. Although I have to say, you know, if you try to do something that you think is going to be really nice for that person, I think that person ought to be grateful anyway because your intention was to do something nice for that person, right. So I think intentions do matter and that’s another reason why you can’t expect too much your children because it’s hard for children to understand exactly what someone else’s intention is. Jen:                                      [04:34]                   Yeah, yeah, it is. Okay. So you have a very specific definition of gratitude and I think that from what I’ve read in your research and the research of others that can create problems when you try and measure gratitude because it seems as though all the tools that are used to measure it or looking at much more general concepts about how thankful is the child for being able to watch a sunset or for having things in their lives and that kind of thing. How does all that fit together? Dr. Tudge:                          [05:01]                   Yeah. It doesn’t fit very well at all that I think that most people who say they’re measuring gratitude are in fact measuring his appreciation, which is a different concept; its much broader. I have no problem with any of those scale as being a really good way of measuring how appreciative we are of all sorts of things. Whether it’s like you say, a beautiful sunset or the fact that is finally stopped thundering and lightning here, where I am, or the fact that you know, I live in a nice apartment here and I’m so much better off than anybody else, so I can appreciate all those sorts of things. I can appreciate the fact that I reached the grand old age of 69 and I’m very healthy. I mean so many things and that has almost nothing to do with gratitude. Jen:                                      [05:46]                   And that’s specifically because nobody else is responsible for that. Right? There’s no benefactor that bestowed that on you. Dr. Tudge:                          [05:53] There’s no benefactor. Jen:                                      [05:54]                   Unless you have a particular world belief. Dr. Tudge:                          [05:58]                   Well, yeah, you might. Even then that’s not enough. I think so. If I think the older this is your, for example, God, given which I might, but still if I don’t reciprocate in some way, just accept these things as my good fortune of my good luck or whatever, but don’t try and do anything to reciprocate I’m not being grateful. And I think that notion of trying to reciprocate if at all possible, you know, when it’s appropriate to do so is really important. So for example, if the sun was shining at the end of the day, beautiful sunset and I don’t appreciate it, people would never accuse me of being ungrateful, you know, it’d be stupid, wouldn’t it? They might say he’s unappreciative or you know, have a nice meal and I just wolf it down. You would never say I’m ungrateful for the meal or that I’m unappreciative of it. Dr. Tudge:                          [06:48]                   You might say I’m ungrateful to the person who has taken the time to cook it for me. But that’s because gratitude is towards another person. And if someone has done something nice for me, I don’t think it matters terribly much how warm and fuzzy I feel they know a good emotional response to that, that wonderful meal or that kind act. That’s great. It’s nice, it feels good for me. But if I had the chance to do something for that person, when that person needs it and I don’t do anything, it doesn’t matter how warm, fuzzy, and emotionally appreciative I was, I’m still an ungrateful jerk because I didn’t help when I had the challenge to do so. So I think it really got to distinguish between those two things, between appreciation and gratitude, and even talking about gratitude. You can’t ignore an grateful ingratitude. Jen:                                      [07:47]                   So that makes me wonder then how critical is the other person’s need and reciprocating that gratitude if you never see the person have a need or is that just a completely unrealistic scenario? People are always going to have a need that you could potentially come in and fulfill. Dr. Tudge:                          [08:01]                   No, I don’t think so. I think there oftentimes people do things for you and you never have a chance to reciprocate and that does not make you an ungrateful person. You know, we can’t always do it. And even if you know, let’s say it’s pouring with rain, you can tell what’s been going on here the last couple of days. It’s pouring with rain. You’ve really helped me. And I’m driving along and my little sports car – I don’t actually have a sports car but let’s say I do – and your stuck there by the side of the road. Should I pick you up? Well, of course I should if I’m a grateful person, but it so happens that right next to you is a heavily pregnant young woman who’s just about to give birth and needs to get to the hospital. I ignore you and pick her up and take you. One would say I’m ungrateful in that sense. There are some situations in which we can’t actually reciprocate and there are some times when we can reciprocate, but we still don’t actually do so for valid reasons. When we call so an ungrateful, it’s because they typically, when they have a relevant opportunity to reciprocate to someone that’s already done something nice for them, they don’t do that. And I don’t care how emotionally warm they felt when they got the benefit. If they don’t try and help when they have a chance, they’re not grateful. It’s that simple. Jen:                                      [09:28]                   So then I think you’ve partially answered the question that is on all the parents’ minds, which is is the act of saying thank you, gratitude. Dr. Tudge:                          [09:40]                   Well that’s a really interesting question, isn’t it? Because I [unintelligible] gratitude, but I think there are different types of gratitude and when you...

070: Why isn’t my child grateful?

This episode began out of a query that I see repeated endlessly in online parenting groups: “My child has a really strong preference for me.  They get on great with the other parent (usually the father, in a heterosexual relationship) when I’m not around, but when I’m there it’s all “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!”  This is destroying my partner; how can we get through this stage?”So that’s where I began the research on this question, and it led me down quite a rabbit hole – I’d never thought too much about whether mothers and fathers fulfill unique roles in a child’s development and while it isn’t necessarily as prescriptive as “the mother provides… and the father provides… ,” in many families these roles do occur and this helps to explain why children prefer one parent over another. (we also touch on how this plays out in families where both parents are of the same gender).My guest for this episode is Dr. Diana Coyl-Shepheard, Professor at California State University Chico, whose research focuses on children’s social and emotional development and  relationships with their fathers.Parenting Beyond PowerMy new book, Parenting Beyond Power, will be released on September 5, 2023. It’s packed with ideas to help you create the kind of relationship you want to have with your child.Don't miss out! Pre-order today and unlock special bonuses like how-to videos and early chapter access. Click the banner to pre-order now:Find more info on the Finding Your Parenting Mojo membership group here Sign up for the FREE Tame Your Triggers workshop here (starts July 8th!)Click the “Send Voicemail” button on the right &gt;&gt;&gt; to record your message for the 100th episode: it can be a question, a comment, or anything else you like!Read Full Transcript(Introduction added after the episode was recorded and transcribed):Before we get started with today’s episode on the unique role of fathers in children’s development, as well as why children prefer one parent over another, I wanted to let you know about three super cool things that I’m working on you. The first is about my membership group, which is called Finding Your Parenting Mojo. I don’t mention the group a lot on the show because I don’t like over-selling, but a listener who was in the group the last time I opened it to new members told me she actually didn’t know I had a membership group, so I’m going to tell you a bit more about it this time around! The group is for parents who are on board with the ideas you hear about on the podcast based in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting, but struggle to put them into practice in real life. So if you find yourself nodding along and saying yep; I agree with the whole ‘no rewards and punishments’ thing and I’m on board with working with my child to solve the problems we have, and I really want to relax a bit around my child’s eating, but on the other hand you’re thinking: but rewarding with story time is the only way I can get my child to brush their flipping teeth, and how do I even get started with working with my child to solve problems? And if I ever did relax around my child’s eating then all they would eat is goldfish and gummy bears, then the group is for you. We spend a month digging into each issue that parents face – from tantrums to figuring out your goals as a parent and for your child to getting on the same page as your partner (and knowing when it’s OK to have different approaches!)…raising healthy eaters to navigating screen time and supporting sibling relationships; we cover it all. I’ll open the group to new members in July, and it closes at the end of July and on August 1st we start digging into our first topic, which is reducing the number of tantrums you’re experiencing. The cost for the group is $39/month this time around which is locked in for as long as you’re a member - I increased the price from last time, and I may increase it again next time the group reopens. Or if you sign up before July 18th, you can pay for 10 months and get the last two months of the year free. If you’d like to learn more about joining the membership group you can do that at yourparentingmojo.com/membership – the doors will open on July 1st.So that’s the deal with the group. The second cool thing I’m working on is something to give you a taste of what it will be like to be in the group. I’ve heard a lot of parents talking about how their children’s behavior really “triggers” them, and I was going to do a podcast episode on this and then I realized that this is especially one of those topics that you can’t just listen to and expect a change to happen; but if you’re willing to do a bit of work, that you can see enormous payoffs. So I thought OK; how can I really make the greatest impact possible with this work? And I decided to put together a nine-day online workshop to walk you through it. So if you go to yourparentingmojo.com/tameyourtriggers and sign up, staring on July 8th you’ll receive an email from me on each of the next nine week days that walks you through an aspect of this issue. In the first week we focus on where these triggers come from and it might surprise you to learn that it’s not our child’s behavior that is actually the origin of this feeling in us, but it’s things we remember, half-remember, and maybe even don’t remember from our childhoods. The more we know about those, the better we can manage these feelings when they arise in us. In the second week we look at new tools we can use to reduce the number of times we do feel triggered, and on the rarer occasions when it does still happen, to manage our reaction so we don’t blow up at our children.Now, you might have done these kinds of online workshops or challenges before and sometimes they ask you to do really simple things and you’re thinking “but I already do that!”. This workshop will be different. Each day you will get homework that you could do in about 15 minutes, although if you find that you are feeling triggered very often you would probably make a huge amount of progress if you could spare 30 minutes a day for not every day, but some of the nine days of the workshop. And these are not always easy tasks to do – I’ll be asking you to take a hard look at some potentially pretty uncomfortable aspects of your childhood, so you may need to do this gently and carefully. I’ll be doing short live videos in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group every other day or so which you don’t have to watch, but which you may find illuminate the daily emails which I deliberately made as short and concise as possible. By the end of the workshop you should have a great deal of insight into what really causes you to feel triggered, and how you can feel triggered less often and less intensely. And we will probably have a pretty big group of parents who are working through this alongside you, who can offer support and encouragement as you work through this.Obviously this isn’t exactly how the membership group works – we don’t do nine-day series of emails and Facebook Lives every other day; I actually send out a Guide at the beginning of the month and I answer your questions on two live group calls each month. But that format really works better once you’re already committed, and I wanted to be able to help you make real progress on a real issue you’re struggling with, so I decided the workshop was the best way to show you the kind of support you get in the group, even if the format is a bit different. So if you’d like to join the workshop, just head over to yourparentingmojo.com/tameyourtriggers and sign up – we’ll get started on July 8th.FINALLY, the last thing before we get to today’s episode is that you might have noticed that this is episode 92 of the Your Parenting Mojo podcast, which means we’re only eight episodes away from reaching 100! When I started the show two years ago I really had no idea where it was going to take me, or even how long it could last. I’m always worried that I will run out of topics to discuss but I’m happy to say that two years in I actually have a longer list of topics that I still have to find time to cover than I did when I started. As I started thinking about this, I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations…if I figure that on average it takes me about 20 hours to prepare for an episode, by the time I get to 100 episodes that will have been 2,000 hours, which is 250 days, which is very slightly less than a year, which means I’ve spent just a bit less than a third of the last three years preparing podcast episodes for you! If I figure there’s an average of 15 books and peer-reviewed papers on the reference list per episode, that’s 1,500 books and papers that actually made the reference list, and since only about half of the books and papers I read actually make the reference list I’ve probably read somewhere close to 3,000 of them in three years. When I started the show I was really just putting an intention out in the world to see where it might lead, and now I see that this work is what I want to do. It has – without a doubt – made me a better parent, and I want to use tools like the membership group to support you in your parenting as well. I keep producing the podcast episodes because I know that for some of you, a free resource is enough – and I know that by the reviews that you leave me on iTunes and the emails you send me that quite a lot of you get quite a lot out of the show. So I want to do something special for the 100th episode, and I’d love to have your voice be a part of it. If you go to yourparentingmojo.com, you’ll see a button on the homepage that you can use to leave me a voicemail. You could tell me something you learned from the show that has made a difference for your family, or a question you have either about the research on the show or about some aspect of my life that you wish you knew more about. Depending on how many voicemails I receive I’ll put all of you or a selection of you in the 100th episode, in your own voices, and I’ll answer your questions as well. So if you want to do this, just head over to yourparentingmojo.com and hit the icon to record a message. You don’t need any special equipment to do it; you can just speak right into your computer’s microphone, although listeners would probably thank you if you could plug in a headset with a microphone as this will greatly improve the sound quality. It doesn’t have to be a fancy one – just the kind that comes with a smartphone is fine. So head on over to yourparentingmojo.com to record your message and while you’re there, sign up for the Tame Your Triggers workshop and check out the membership group as well. OK, let’s get on with today’s episode!Jen: 01:20 It's pretty obvious when you're reading the scientific literature on parenting and child development that just as most of the research on children's development is conducted on white children and then the findings are discussed as if they're relevant to all children everywhere. Most of the research on parenting is conducted on mothers and then its applicability to fathers is either extrapolated or it's just simply ignored. So, what role do fathers play in children's development? Our fathers basically like slightly less important mothers or are there unique processes involved in the relationship between fathers and children? Here with us today to sort this out is doctor Diana Coyl-Shepherd Professor at California State University Chico. Her research focuses on mother-child and father-child attachment across the span of childhood and she's especially interested in social and emotional development and children's relationships with their fathers. Welcome Dr. Coyl-Shepherd.Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 02:15 Thank you, Jen.Jen: 02:17 All right, so let's start with, I guess it's kind of the son of the father of attachment theory. The father of Attachment Theory was John Bowlby and so you interviewed his son, Sir Richard Bowlby a few years ago. That must have been pretty exciting.Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 02:32 It was very exciting. Having been a fan both professionally and personally of Attachment Theory for a long time, it was very exciting to meet the son of the author of that theory.Jen: 02:44 Yeah. And so that interview is available for anyone to read in a journal article in early childhood development and care journal. And so I was really shocked to learn that Richard Bowlby actually didn't really talk with his father about Attachment Theory at all and only started learning about it after his father's death. And I was wondering if you could tell us about the different role that Richard Bowlby proposed for fathers and mothers and why mothers had been such a focus of research for so long?Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 03:11 Certainly. Well, what Richard proposed was a model of dual attachment and in the case of heterosexual parents, they would serve complimentary roles in their children's lives. So, mothers would be that safe haven providing care and comfort when children are distressed and fathers, as he observed and other researchers have to, more often were used for secure exploration. So, it was that mothers sensitive responding to their children's distress that increases children's opportunity to turn to their fathers for support during exploration and during challenging tasks. So, what Sir Richard Bowlby explained was that, and this is again based on other people's research as well, that we're driven to explore and seek new experiences, but we need safety and a trusted companion to show us the way. And in our own research we often had children report that they felt safety from their fathers, but more often sought emotional comfort from their mothers. So, each parent can serve both functions of attachment, safety, security and reassurance as well as exploration. But among Western heterosexual couples, we tended to see that mothers and fathers specialized in these areas.Jen: 04:24 Ah, that's fascinating. And so I'm thinking about the ways that we assess this attachment in a lab situation and typically it's using this procedure called The Strange Situation where the mother is withdrawn for certain periods of time and then we look to see how distressed the child is and whether the distress is relieved when the mother comes back. And so it doesn't seem to be that if the child doesn't come to the father to relieve distress, that they're not attached, right? Or is it possible that the way that we are conceptualizing this and the problem is with our measuring tools and not with the attachment between fathers and children.Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 05:03 Exactly right. So, in The Strange Situation that measures in part mother's sensitivity to their children's distress, what it doesn't really measure is what fathers contribute to their children's attachment. And so it was really the research of the Grossmann’s and their colleagues. They did a 16-year longitudinal study, 44 families, and they compared mother's and father's contributions to their children's attachment at ages 6, 10 and 16 and at when the children were toddlers, they had developed this measure called the sensitive and challenging interactive play scale. And what they found, and it's an observational measure of the way that mothers and fathers engaged with their children during play, that father’s play sensitivity was very consistent across the four years and it was father's sensitivity that was predictive of children's internal working models of attachment at when their children were 10 and only fathers play sensitivity, not mothers was predictive of adolescents attachment representations. So, their conclusion was that mothers and fathers are doing different things to support their children's attachment security and consequently we need different ways to assess that.Jen: 06:16 And so I'm just curious as to how this works in sort of real life with real families and whether it doesn't seem as though it's sort of a one person is one role and one person is the other role because I'm sort of the parent who's more likely to stand back and watch as my daughter is climbing up something high and just kinda ask her what's your plan to get down rather than my husband will probably be the one to shout, be careful and we'll both pillow fight with her if she asks us to. So, is it confusing to her at all that that we have this sort of dual role thing going on or not?Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 06:48 I don't think so. I think children's expectations of their parents’ behavior are based on their typical interaction with that parent. So, whatever they usually experience is what they expect to experience. And so if you are engaging in exploration with your child and allowing her to take risks and your husband might be the more cautious of the two that I think she would anticipate that that's the way it goes. That when I want to explore, mom will be my companion and she'll support this. But typically, and in lots of research, fathers do this more than mothers. It’s not that mothers aren't capable of it, it's just typically fathers do it more often.Jen: 07:24 Yeah. Okay. In an article that you and your coauthors wrote in an Introduction to a Special Issue on Fatherhood and Attachment, you said “The link between father attachment quality and children's outcomes are often less direct complicated by individual characteristics like child gender, temperament and father's working models as well as familial and cultural practices.” And that's pretty dense. Can you help us to tease that part a bit?Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 07:48 Yes. There's a lot there. Well certainly, we know that there's research that supports gender differences in the way that parents interact with their children. So for example, that mothers engage with their daughters more frequently and they do more kinds of emotional and social discussion than they do with their sons and fathers more often engage with their sons and the kind of ways that they engage with their sons are activity oriented. So, that sort of supports this model that we're seeing, this idea of father’s activation relationships with their children but more with sons than daughters typically. So, there's a piece there that leads to maybe differential outcomes for children in terms of their social and emotional development based on the way and how often they interact with each parent. But also in culture. Culture plays a role as well because it's really, and this was sort of the argument that Dr. Danielle Paquette made when he developed his measure of the activation relationship of measure he called the Risky Situation is the idea that in cultures where competition is a part of that culture, then what fathers do by the way they engage with their children what he described as rough and tumble kinds of play and security and exploration, that helps children meet the demands in a society where there might be competition.Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 09:07 How do they manage that competition? How do they manage relationships...

092: Fathers’ unique role in parenting

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