051: How to handle social exclusion

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Transcript Jen:  [00:39] Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We’ve done a couple of episodes in the past on social groups. There was one where we interviewed Dr. Yarrow Dunham on the topic of how social groups form and then another on how children develop prejudices. Today we’re going to talk about a book that was recommended to me by a fabulous listener, Jamie in Los Angeles, who sends me a long email every time she finishes listening to an episode to tell me what she thought of it and what kinds of issues and ideas that brought up for her. So the book that she recommended I read is by a teacher, Vivian Paley, and it’s called You Can’t Say You Can’t Play. It’s a really lovely little book. It’s not more than around 100 pages and it describes how Paley thinks about an ultimately implements a rule called you can’t say you can’t play, which is to say that child A can’t say that child B can’t play with whatever child a is doing. Jen:    [01:28] It seemed to me there that there’s a lot more at play here as it were than the simple making up of a role and so I found a professor to talk through these issues with us. Professor Jamie Ostrov is a developmental psychologist at the State University of New York at Buffalo, who is working to understand the development of both relational and physical aggression in children. As part of this work, he has conducted research on how media exposure impacts children’s aggression and that’s where I first met him, quote unquote. I cited some of his work in our episode on understanding the American Academy of Pediatrics’ new screen time guidelines, but media exposure is just one small part of his interest and so I’m really excited today to speak with him about his work more broadly and to understand how relational aggression develops in children and what we know and to do about it to reduce incidence. Welcome professor Ostroff. Dr. Ostrov:   [02:13] Hello. Jen:    [02:15] And so because so much of social exclusion is primarily something that occurs in group settings like preschool and kindergarten in school. We also have a teacher here to help us take the theory and make it really practical. So Caren is a teacher at a preschool in British Columbia that’s inspired by the Reggio Emilia approach to learning, which has a specific focus on what it means to be a friend and on social inclusion. So my hope is today that we’re going to give the teachers among us some really practical suggestions about handling social inclusion in their schools and that parents can get an understanding of what happens in schools and how they can support teachers and creating inclusive environments. Welcome Caren. Caren:  [02:52] Hello everyone. Jen:    [02:53] Alright, so let’s start with a little memory test for Professor Ostrov. Could you tell us a little bit about, for those of who haven’t read it, the book you can’t say you can’t play, so what’s the story about and how did you find it and what did you take out of it? Dr. Ostrov:   [03:07] Sure, so thanks for having me today. You know, the story is a… It’s an interesting story. It was recommended to me by one of our school partners by one of the directors of the childcare centers that we were doing research in and she saw a lot of parallels between what’s conveyed within the book, the overall message, the challenges within the book and some of our own work. And so for me, I definitely will, after reading this very short, very lovely book, I saw some clear connections to our work on social exclusion or what we call relational aggression. A key takeaway for me after reading this book about her struggles to implement this new golden rule. You Can’t Say You Can’t Play within her kindergarten classroom and talking to older children about some of their own peer rejection and pure exclusion experiences and the challenges that they envisioned in implementing this kind of new golden rule. Dr. Ostrov:  [03:59] A key takeaway for me was first, it’s too late to intervene in kindergarten, which in some ways reinforced my view that if we want to intervene, we should intervene when these behaviors are coming online developmentally, and we’ve known for a number of years now that really it starts back in preschool, so that was the first takeaway. The second takeaway was that if we are going to try to intervene even in the preschool environment, it was going to be challenging and it would be really challenging to implement a golden rule like this that you can’t say you can’t play. In part because Vivian Paley talks about the struggles of implementing this rule. The children didn’t like it. There were some real challenges in getting them to adhere to the overall rule and even using fairytale magical story. This character Magpie this bird that can talk to the characters. Even doing all these things in a very developmentally appropriate way didn’t seem to really convince the kids in the end and so without that except ability without the buy in from the kids, I really didn’t think that this program was going to be all that effective, although I was clearly intrigued and it certainly planted a seed that later in my career I would come back to and try to address with the development of our own program. Jen:  [05:11] Okay. And so you’ve mentioned a couple of things there. The first thing that I want to just touch on with Caren is I wonder if Caren, when you first start to see these kinds of behaviors appearing in children, because my job is just a little bit over three and as far as I can tell, she pretty much plays with anyone who walks up to her at this point, but I guess that must shift somewhere probably in the next year. How does that start to manifest itself from what you see in your preschool setting? Caren: [05:34] We find that now with our three year olds that are just coming in, it appears as though they’re, you know, doing more of the solo type play and just getting to know sort of how to be with other children and how to be in the same space and share toys and then later as the friendships form and the connections get stronger, that’s when we start to see more of the exclusion start to happen. Jen:    [05:55] Ah. So it’s more to, I have a real relationship with you and this I want to play with you and you alone and nobody else can play with you. Dr. Ostrov:     [06:04] Right. You know, a lot of sentences like, you know, we asked children like how can you be a friend with child A, but also Child B, and what does that look like? Jen:     [06:13] Okay. A limited amount of love to spread around. Okay. So Jamie, I wonder if we could just talk for a minute about physical and relational aggression and also we’ve used the term social exclusion and social inclusion. Do they have different meanings or can we use them interchangeably and can you just define what those are please? Dr. Ostrov:    [06:30] Sure. So first, I think it’s important to define what we mean by aggression. Aggression is the intent or children, individuals, adults, anybody who has the intent to hurt, to harm or to injure another person, and then that can manifest in different forms and so the typical forms that we study would be physical aggression and another would be what we call relational aggression. So physical aggression is the easiest to define. That’s using physical force as the means of harm and that’s the usual suspects of hitting, kicking, punching, pushing, pulling, taking things away from others. If you would ask somebody on the street what is aggression, they probably would say, oh, I know it’s hitting, kicking. The other form of aggression of what we call relational aggression is using the same overall definition of aggression, the intent to hurt, to harm or to injure another, but it manifests in a different way. Dr. Ostrov:   [07:18] It uses the relationship or the threat of the removal of the relationship as the means of harm. It looks a little differently at different points in development, but some of the prototypical examples would be threatening the removal of the relationship by saying, I won’t be your friend anymore. You can’t play with me. You can’t come to my birthday party. You’re not my friend. Right? You can’t come. My birthday party is a great example because you know, the very young child doesn’t know when their own birthday party is, let alone anyone else’s, so they use that all, all year round. But we can, we can also see, uh, the use of the silent treatment or malicious ignoring. We see evidence of spreading secrets, malicious rumors, gossip and lies about others. These are all part that’s part of the construct that we call relational aggression. So social exclusion is one component of this behavior, but you know, I have no problem with using that interchangeably with the term relational aggression. When we talk about inclusion, I consider that to be part of prosocial behavior or this kind of genuine desire to help others to share with them or to include them in games or activities. Jen:    [08:25] Okay. Wow. It sounds just delightful. A number of ways you can exclude somebody that you don’t want to play with, so I’m wondering how this shifts over the course of a child’s life. Do children start off being more physically aggressive and then maybe as they develop more sophisticated mental and verbal skills, they shift to relational aggression and is the process the same for boys and girls? Dr. Ostrov:   [08:49] It’s a great question. So we know that developmentally physical aggression is actually quite common during the early years, but it typically drops off. There’s a sharp decline in physical aggression such that by the time we approach kindergarten and formal school, for most children, physically aggressive behavior is really relatively low and that in part is related to increases in their social cognitive capacity, their emotion regulation capacity, but also sanctions. Sanctions are higher and children appreciate that, I mean certainly as they get to formal schooling, they understand that there are serious costs to engaging in physically aggressive behavior. Relationally aggressive behavior, we’ve seen the emergence of that to occur around 30 months so that two and a half year old can start engaging in some exclusionary behavior, but it really seems to be picking up between that three to four year old period that we were talking about before and we don’t have a whole lot of longitudinal studies studies that have followed children across long periods of time to really understand the trajectory that changes in behavior or across time, but what we do know is that it certainly is quite common to engage in relational aggressive behavior during this preschool period, the three to five year old period and for many children to continue to engage in these behaviors and in some cases to shift their behavior from physically aggressive behavior to this arguably more covert form of aggression, relationally aggressive behavior as we transition into school and when we move into later periods in development, when we move into the middle childhood years and into adolescence, it’s much more common to see relationally aggressive behavior is occurring. Dr. Ostrov: [10:29] It’s interesting that as far as gender goes, the typical form of aggression, the modal form of aggression for girls is relationally aggressive behavior and that probably has something to do with their social goals which tend to be more about fostering dyadic relationships and intimacy with others, so the best way to harm a girl is to destroy a relationship that you have with her or she has with others. Whereas for boys there modal form, the more common form of aggression is physical aggression and that might be linked to their social goal of social dominance, of instrumentality, of being on top and somebody else on the bottom, and so the best way to knock somebody down is literally to knock them down from that power position. And this does change a bit throughout development such that boys and girls in early childhood, for the most part are operating within a gender segregated world where boys are playing primarily with boys and girls with girls and they’re being...