There’s a lot we can learn – and relearn – from the younger people in our midst. They do many things in a way that’s highly beneficial for older adults. Dr. Hasan Merali is the author of the new book, Sleep Well, Take Risks, Squish the Peas, which shows us how toddlers bring out the best in humanity and how we can, too. It’s a whole new way of looking at and learning from toddlers.

He joins us from Ontario.

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Bio

Hasan Merali, MD, MPH, is an associate professor in the Department of Pediatrics, McMaster University and a pediatric emergency medicine physician at McMaster Children’s Hospital in Hamilton, Ontario.

He received his medical degree from Harvard Medical School and Master of Public Health degree from Johns Hopkins University.

His research focuses on child injury prevention in low- and middle-income countries.

He has published more than twenty-five peer-reviewed journal articles, and his writing has been featured in Science, The Boston Globe, NBC, CBC, and Popular Science. Dr. Merali lives in Oakville, Ontario, with his wife and their toddler daughter.

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For More on Hasan Merali

Sleep Well, Take Risks, Squish the Peas

Website

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Mentioned in This Podcast Episode

Chatter & Your Inner Voice – Ethan Kross

Auburn Sage

Who Has the Secret to Well-Being? The Answer May Surprise You.

Old People’s Homes for 4 Year Olds

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Podcast Episodes You May Like

The Power of Fun – Catherine Price

Emeralds of Oz – Peter Guzzardi

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Wise Quotes

On Sleeping Like a Toddler

“I think sleep is one of the most important ones, and for anyone interested in wellness or improving their life, I would argue that sleep is the most important one to start with. I think it’s a foundation for everything else to build on. And I like the toddler routine because it is so simple and it works. And so the Toddler bedtime routine is a very easy thing to do. And if we all did it, we would all sleep better like they do, and so what you do is you set a bed time, you kind of stick to it. You got to be regular about that time. Start an hour before. None of this involves any screens, so those screens are completely off. One hour before, you’re either taking a hot bath or shower and what that does actually is cool down your body and your body needs to be cooler when we sleep and so that kind of gets your body into that mode. The next thing you do what toddlers do is they have lotion put on them and certainly that’s something we could all do. It feels good, massage is good but really any hygiene related activity is fine. And then finally I think we’re going to talk about this later too is reading and that is the best way to end your night. It’s no screens. If it’s an e-reader, it is fine, but there’s no other distractions. And it s a way to consolidate all that knowledge we’re getting because if you read and then sleep, you’re going to retain a lot more of it too.”

On Laughing Like a Toddler

“If you look at a graph of age across the spectrum and how much we do an activity, there is the first cliff that we go off is really humor and laughter. And there are a whole bunch of other ones. Reading is another one. Play is a another. And some of them do come back when you’re retired, which is wonderful. You know, for reading, it comes back for example when your 65. But laughter is definitely one of them that we can never reach the same level that we did have when we were toddlers. So toddlers left to themselves and they’re miked up. They’re laughing almost one time a minute. So nearly 60 times an hour. And adults, at most, will get to half of that level. And so this amount of laughter is good for them and us for a lot of different reasons. It’s everyone knows this it’s a stress reliever. It makes us feel good. And one of the things that I mentioned that toddlers are always trying to do is build relationships. And so, you know, one other things we know but we could probably do a lot more of is do some laughter in groups to build those relationships, we get less stress hormones.”

On Engaging with Books

“We kind of want to read all the time when we’re younger, and this kind falls off in later childhood and doesn’t come back until we were in our 60s. And I think this idea of placing that much importance on books is really critical for our well -being. I mean, it’s hard to be around a toddler or preschooler without being asked to read them something almost constantly. And there’s a couple of lessons there. One is that reading is very important for our own learning, but also for cognitive function. You know, looking at the data again, just in adults, if we look at people who read more, they’re the people who have lower rates of mild cognitive impairment and dementia as they get older. I think that’s really the biggest benefit of reading daily and if even get 20 -30 minutes as part of the bedtime routine ideal but any other time is really helpful. And the other big piece is something called deep reading. This has been promoted by a professor at UCLA named Maryann Wolf and she talks about how we are in this culture where we’re doing a lot of skim reading because we read on screens, there’s a lots of online articles, we just looking at the titles and we going through things very fast. But if they really want to absorb a book, we nearly need to get into deep reading. And I think toddlers are the ideal people to emulate with this. You know, I have a three -year -old, so I sit down with her with a book and we get through a couple of pages. There’s a lot of questions about the picture, about the text. We flip back. We have to go through other things, connected the dots. We get to the very end of this book much later than it would take me. And the question invariably is, again, and this way of engaging with the book, really focusing on the Book is really something we need to be doing. And so I would hope that your listeners, when they’re reading, not set chapter goals or amount of reading goals. Really, you want to set time goals and really engage with a book. And that can be in a lot of different ways. It can take notes, highlighting, book club. That’s the kind of deep reading that we’re missing out on and what toddlers and preschoolers do all the time.”

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