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

  "I was spanked and I turned out fine."   How many times have you heard this defense of spanking children? But what does the research tell us about spanking effectiveness, child discipline, and long-term consequences?   My guest, Professor Andrew Grogan-Kaylor from the University of Michigan, has extensively researched physical punishment and argues that spanking should be classified as an Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE)—a marker of severe trauma. When we examine spanking closely, we're discussing hitting another human being, something we'd never accept between adults. As Dr. Grogan-Kaylor points out, parents typically spank when frustrated or angry, making it virtually impossible to administer in a truly "controlled" way.   In the episode, we also discuss how, due to the way that a quirk in one researcher’s agenda aligned with changes in ethical rules governing experiments, that there’s actually scientific evidence from randomized controlled trials to support the efficacy of spanking at changing children’s behavior to make it acceptable to their parents!  Now the rules have changed and wouldn’t permit spanking during an experiment, it isn’t possible to generate evidence against spanking.  So advocates of spanking (and yes, there are some!) can honestly say that there is evidence of the highest quality in favor of spanking, and no evidence of that quality against it.   And of course we have to ask ourselves: is compliance what we really want?  Our instinctive response to that question might be “Yes!  I do want flipping compliance – and I want it now!” But I know many parents listening to the show have a goal to raise children who speak up when they see injustice, and who are internally motivated to do the right thing…and unfortunately focusing on making children’s behavior comply with our wishes works against that.   But that doesn’t mean the alternative is letting our child rule the roost.  There are ways to get your needs met and also meet your child’s needs, without spanking, threatening to spank, punishing, giving Time Outs, withholding privileges, or any other tools like this.   Questions this episode will answer What does research show us about spanking children? Professor Grogan-Kaylor's meta-analysis examined five decades of research covering over 160,000 children. He found consistent evidence that spanking is associated with increased: Aggression Antisocial behavior Mental health problems Cognitive difficulties. The research clearly shows that spanking doesn't improve behavior—it actually makes it worse.   Is spanking different from physical abuse? Dr. Grogan-Kaylor's research found that the effects of spanking and physical abuse on children are very similar. This challenges the idea that we can spank children without hurting them in the same way that physical abuse hurts them. Hitting, even when called "discipline," affects a child's developing brain and sense of safety in similar ways to abuse.   Should spanking be considered an Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE)? Spanking affects a child's stress response system, and impacts their development. The long-term outcomes from spanking are similar to outcomes associated with established Adverse Childhood Experiences. Dr. Grogan-Kaylor makes a compelling case that spanking should join the list of recognized ACEs.   What about parents who say "I was spanked and I turned out fine"? This is one of the most common defenses of spanking. Dr. Grogan-Kaylor explains how our understanding of child development has evolved over the last 50 years. Personal experiences, while valid, don't override the consistent findings from hundreds of scientific studies across diverse populations and cultures.   At what age do parents typically spank children? You might be surprised by what the research shows. Dr. Grogan-Kaylor and Dr. Shawna Lee found that about a third of parents reported spanking their one-year-old children. One-year-olds cannot reliably remember and act on parent's instructions. Spanking one-year-olds is unlikely to lead to them remembering and acting on these instructions. Even at age two and three, remembering and acting on instructions is an emerging capability.   What effective alternatives to spanking can parents use instead? The conversation doesn't just identify problems—it offers solutions! We offer evidence-based approaches to discipline that improve children's behavior while strengthening the parent-child relationship. Professor Grogan-Kaylor shares insights about why non-physical discipline methods work better for: Teaching children appropriate behavior; Supporting the development of emotion regulation; Developing problem-solving skills.   What you'll learn in this episode Physical punishment like spanking is considered harmful to children's development. Even "normal" spanking shows negative outcomes in research studies spanning five decades. The scientific evidence showing how spanking increases children's: Aggression Antisocial behavior Mental health problems. Dr. Grogan-Kaylor's comprehensive meta-analysis shows that spanking does not improve children's behavior. How spanking affects children across different cultures, socioeconomic backgrounds, and family situations Why spanking should be considered an Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE). This would put it in the same category as other forms of harmful trauma. The connection between spanking and increased risk for long-term behavior problems. This can affect a child's future relationships. Effective parenting strategies that build positive relationships. This teaches children appropriate behavior - without resorting to physical discipline Why the common defense "I was spanked and I turned out fine" misses important context about child development and trauma   Go from constant struggles and nagging to a new sense of calm & collaboration. I will teach you how to set limits, but we’ll also go waaaay beyond that to learn how to set fewer limits than you ever thought possible.   Click the banner to learn more.       Jump to highlights  01:33 Introducing today’s episode and featured guest 05:25 The definition of spanking 07:38 The age range advocated by some for spanking, ranging from two to 12 years old 09:20 The effectiveness of spanking 16:16 The critique of positive parenting research, particularly focusing on methodological fallacies outlined by Dr. Lazarle 22:24 The question of whether there might be an optimal level of spanking that leads to maximum compliance in children 24:40 How to handle defiant children who are not complying with milder disciplinary tactics 26:21 How to comprehend the overall impact of spanking on children 32:03 Dr. Diana Baumrind's surprising involvement in studies on spanking suggesting that authoritative parents, considered successful, spank their children 35:56 The legality of spanking and the absence of legal protection for children against physical punishment 38:11 Arguments against banning spanking, citing studies that suggest little evidence of parents adopting more effective disciplinary tactics after a ban 42:10 Potential cultural and racial differences in the use of spanking 44:09 Wrapping up the discussion   References Afifi, T.O., Mota, N.P., Dasiewicz, P., MacMillan, H.L., & Sareen, J. (2012). Physical punishment and mental disorders: Results from a nationally representative US sample. Pediatrics 130(2), 184-192. Afifi, T.O., Ford, D., Gershoff, E.T., Merrick, M., Grogan-Kaylor, A., Ports, K.A., MacMillan, H.L., Holden, G.W., Taylor, C.A., Lee, S.J., & Peters Bennet, R. (2017). Spanking and adult mental health impairment: The case for the designation of spanking as an adverse childhood experience. Child Abuse & Neglect 71, 24-31. Baumrind, D., Larzelere, R.E., & Cowan, P.A. (2002). Ordinary physical punishment: Is it harmful? Comment on Gershoff (2002). Psychological Bulletin 128(4), 580-589. Borduin Quetsch, L., Wallace, N.M., Herschell, A.D., & McNeil, C.B. (2015). Weighing in on the Time-Out controversy: An empirical perspective. The Clinical Psychologist 68(2), 4-19. Retrieved from https://www.incredibleyears.com/wp-content/uploads/Weighing-in-on-Time-Out-Borduin-et-al.pdf Cuartas, J., Ward, K.P., Ma, J., & Grogan-Kaylor, A. (2020). Physical punishment and Colombian children and adolescents’ cognitive and behavioral outcomes. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 68, 101140. Deater-Deckard, K., & Dodge, K.A. (1997). Externalizing behavior problems and discipline revisited: Nonlinear effects and variation by culture, context, and gender. Psychological Inquiry 8(3), 161-175. Durrant, J.E., Trocme, N., Fallon, B., Milne, C., & Black, T. (2009). Protection of children from physical maltreatment in Canada: An evaluation of the Supreme Court’s definition of reasonable force. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma 18(1), 64-87. Freeman, M., & Sanders, B.J. (2014). Can we conquer child abuse if we don’t outlaw physical chastisement of children? International Journal of Children’s Rights 22, 681-709. Gershoff, E.T. (2010). More harm than good: A summary of scientific research on the intended and unintended effects of corporal punishment on children. Law & Contemporary Problems 73, 31-55. Gershoff, E.T., Lansford, J.E., Sexton, H.R., Davis-Kean, P., & Sameroff, A.J. (2012). Longitudinal links between spanking and children’s externalizing behaviors in a national sample of White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian American families. Child Development 83(3), 838-843. Gershoff, E.T., Goodman, G.S., Miller-Perrin, C.L., Holden, G.W., Jackson, Y., & Kazdin, A.E. (2018). The strength of the causal evidence against physical punishment of children and its implications for parents, psychologists, and policymakers. American Psychologist 73(5), 626-638. Gershoff, E.T., & 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. Gershoff, E.T., & Grogan-Kaylor, A. (2016). Race as a moderator of associations between spanking and child outcomes. Family Relations 65(3), 490-501. Gershoff, E.T., & Grogan-Kaylor, A. (2016). Spanking and child outcomes: Old controversies and new meta-analyses. Journal of Family Psychology 30(4), 453. Grogan-Kaylor, A. (2004). The effect of corporal punishment on antisocial behavior in children. Social Work Research, 28, 153–162. Grogan-Kaylor, A. (2004). Corporal punishment and the growth trajectory of children’s antisocial behavior. Child Maltreatment 10(3), 283-292. Heilmann, A., Mehay, A., Watt, R.G., Kelly, Y., Durant, J.E., van Turnhout, J., & Gershoff, E.T. (2021). Physical punishment and child outcomes: A narrative review of prospective studies. The Lancet. Retrieved from https://www.christian.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Physical-punishment-and-child-outcomes-June-2021.pdf Holden, G.W., Williamson, P.A., & Holland, G.W.O. (2014). Eavesdropping on the family: A pilot investigation of corporal punishment in the home. Journal of Family Psychology 28(3), 401-406. Holden, G.W., Grogan-Kaylor, A., Durrant, J.E., & Gershoff, E. (2017). Researchers deserve a better critique: Response to Larzelere, Gunnoe, Roberts, and Ferguson (2017). Marriage & Family Review 53(5), 465-490. Horn, I.B., Joseph, J.G., & Cheng, T.L. (2004). Nonabusive physical punishment and child behavior among African American children: A systematic review. Journal of the National Medical Association 96(9), 1162-1168. Lansford, J.E., Wager, L.B., Bates, J.E., Pettit, G.S., & Dodge, K.A. (2012). Forms of spanking and children’s externalizing behaviors. Family Relations 61(2), 224-236. Larzelere, R.E., Cox Jr., R.B., & Smith, G.L. (2010). Do nonphysical punishments reduce antisocial behavior more than spanking? A comparison using the strongest previous causal evidence against spanking. BMC Pediatrics 10(1), 1-17. Larzelere, R.E., & Baumrind, D. (2010). Are spanking injunctions scientifically supported? Law & Contemporary Problems 73(2), 57-87. Larzelere, R.E., Gunnoe, M.L., Roberts, M.W., & Ferguson, C.J. (2017). Children and parents deserve better parental discipline research: Critiquing the evidence for exclusively “positive” parenting. Marriage & Family Review 53(1), 24-35. Larzelere, R.E., Knowles, S.J., Henry, C.S., & Ritchie, K.L. (2018). Immediate and long-term effectiveness of disciplinary tactics by type of toddler noncompliance. Parenting: Science and Practice 18, 141-171. Larzelere, R.E., Ferguson, C.J., Gunnoe, M.L., & Roberts, M.W. (2019). The insufficiency of the evidence used to categorically oppose spanking and its implications for families and psychological science; Comment on Gershoff et al. (2018). American Psychologist 74(4), 497-499. Larzelere, R.E., Gunnoe, M.J., Roberts, M.W., Lin, H., & Ferguson, C.J. (2020). Causal evidence for Exclusively Positive Parenting and for timeout: Rejoinder to Holden, Grogan-Kaylor, Durrant, and Gershoff (2017). Marriage & Family Review 56(4), 287-319. Lee, S.J., Grogan-Kaylor, A., & Berger, L. (2014). Parental spanking of 1-year-old children and subsequent child protective services involvement. Child Abuse & Neglect 38(5), 875-883. Lee, S.J., Pace, G.T., Ward, K.P., Grogan-Kaylor, A., & Ma, J. (2020). Household economic hardship as a moderator of the associations between maternal spanking and child externalizing behavior problems. Child Abuse & Neglect 107, 104573. Ma, J., Grogan-Kaylor, A., & Lee, S.J. (2019). Does community violence exposure moderate the associations between maternal spanking and early childhood behavior problems? Aggressive Behavior 46, 210-219. Ma, J., Han, Y., Grogan-Kaylor, A., Delva, J., & Castillo, M. (2012). Corporal punishment and youth externalizing behavior in Santiago, Chile. Child Abuse & Neglect, 36, 481–490. Paolucci, E.O., & Violato, C. (2004). A meta-analysis of the published research on the affective, cognitive, and behavioral effects of corporal punishment. The Journal of Psychology 138(3), 197-221. Ward, K.P., Lee, S.J., Pace, G.T., Grogan-Kaylor, A., & Ma, J. (2020). Attachment style and the association of spanking and child externalizing behavior. Academic Pediatrics 20(4), 501-507.

When I interviewed Dr. Chris Winters last year, I described how we’ve been using a No Set Bedtime method with our daughter Carys.  He used it with his children starting in the Elementary years, and his eyes nearly fell out of his head when I told him we’d been using it since Carys was about three.   In the email about the Dr. Winters interview I asked any listeners who wanted to learn more about this method to be in touch, so in this episode we’ll meet listeners Katherine and Gila.  Katherine’s daughter is three and Gila’s son is seven, and in this episode I explain the No Set Bedtime approach and then they pepper me with questions about how to make it work in their families.     We recorded our conversation back in November 2021, and in January I followed up with them to see how it’s going.  I share their feedback and my ideas on what’s going well and what they might adjust.   [embed]https://vimeo.com/671735528[/embed]     [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"]   Jen Lumanlan  00:02 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want her children to lead fulfilling lives. But it can be so   Jessica  00:11 Do you get tired of hearing the same old intros to podcast episodes? Me too. Hi, I'm not Jen. I'm Jessica, and I'm in Burlesque Panama. Jen has just created a new way for listeners to record the introductions to podcast episodes, and I got to test it out. There's no other resource out there quite like Your Parenting Mojo, which doesn't just tell you about the latest scientific research on parenting and child development. It puts it in context for you as well. So, you can decide whether and how to use this new information. If you'd like to get new episodes in your inbox, along with a free infographic on 13 reasons your child isn't listening to you what to do about each one. Sign up at YourParentingMojo.com/subscribe, and come over to our free Facebook group to continue the conversation about this episode. You can also thank Jen for this episode by donating to keep the podcast ad free by going to the page for this or any other episode on YourParentingMojo.com. If you'd like to start a conversation with someone about this episode or know someone who would find it useful, please forward it to them. Over time, you're gonna get sick of hearing me read this intro as well. So come and record on yourself. You can read from a script she's provided or have some real fun with it and write your own. Just go to YourParentingMojo.com and click Read the Intro and I can't wait to hear yours.   Jen Lumanlan  01:32 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. Today, we're actually going to do something that we have not done before. We have two parents here with us today, they reached out to me after the still recent to us as we're recording here, that's going to be a little while before this episode is really on the episode with Dr. Chris Winter, where we were learning about sleep and we talked about our no set bedtime process. And at the beginning of that interview, I said, if anyone's curious about this and is interested in applying this idea with their own children, feel free to reach out and maybe we can set something up. And so we have two fabulous parents here today, Gila and Katherine. And each of them reached out and we're curious about various aspects. And we're also kind of hesitant about various aspects. And so today we're going to talk through with them what it might look like to have a no-set bedtime routine in their house. So I'm gonna ask each of them to introduce themselves. And then I'm going to talk for a bit about how this has played out for us and for what I've seen with the families that have implemented it. And then we're gonna go into a q&a, and they're gonna poke holes in this on your behalf, dear listeners so that you can really see how this could play out with your family if you decided to try this. So hello, and welcome to Gila and Katherine, Gila doyou want to go first and introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about you and your family and where you are in the world? And what made you reach out when you saw this offer?   Gila  02:54 Thanks for having me. So I am a single mom of a seven-year-old boy, and we're in upstate New York. And I reached out for a couple of reasons. One is that my son, while sometimes he falls asleep relatively easily, sometimes, relatively frequently, he falls asleep more than an hour after lights out. And I'm a little familiar with the insomnia literature. And my understanding is that it's not good to be in bed for that long and tossing and turning. And I want to establish healthy sleep habits. But I also really think sleep is so important. The other piece is that sleep is a time when behavioral challenges can come up. And I think there's a lot of reasons why that's the case. But one of them is the power dynamic that this is a place where there can be a power struggle. And I've seen in other places how better things go when I can shift away from the sort of power-over dynamic and have a more collaborative approach. But I struggle with that with bedtime because I do think that sleep is so important. And because it's a place where I think structure and consistency are helpful. So but I was very intrigued and I'm very curious to learn more.   Jen Lumanlan  04:07 Okay, super. And my understanding is you have more than a passing professional interest in this topic. Is that right?   Gila  04:13 Yeah, so I am a psychologist and a neuropsychologist. And so I recommend to my patients all the time to improve sleep habits with is just so critical for cognitive functioning, emotional functioning, psychological and physical.   Jen Lumanlan  04:27 Okay, cool. Well, thank you very much for telling us about you. Katherine. Who are you? Where are you in the world? Who's your family?   Katherine  04:33 Yes, I'm Katherine, based in Southern Maryland, just outside of DC. I have one daughter who's both three years and three months now. So our bedtime routines have been a little bit inconsistent over time. And lately, at one point we had gotten to a pretty good timing where she was usually in bed and we left the room by 8:30. And now it's kind of crept up to 9:30 by the time we leave, and that leaves very little time for my husband and I to spend time together or just relax, I think that the no set bedtime approach would be exciting to her.   Jen Lumanlan  05:16 It is to most children, yup.   Katherine  05:18 Potentially be really helpful for us. But I am hesitant about, alright, I can see potential challenges with getting her to actually stay in her room while we go do something else. We usually like to just watch a TV show together or, you know, spend time together and I could see her begging to leave her room and spend time with us.   Jen Lumanlan  05:42 Okay, so also like Gila feeling pretty excited about the possibility of this and also like, how on earth is that actually going to work in real life with my real child? Is that right? Okay, so let me tell you how we put this in place for us. And then we can answer all of your questions on behalf of all the parents who are listening to this. So I will say that I'm not sure that everybody who's listening to this necessarily needs to try this approach or to use this approach. I think that one of the main indicators that we can use to say, should we try this approach is maybe something about bedtime is not working for us right now, either, It's not working for the child, and we'll know it's not working for the child because we see them resisting. We see them stalling, we see them not wanting to go to bed, or something isn't working for us. And Katherine, I think you're a great example of that, where you're not necessarily sort of that you're seeing the stalling and eventually the child's getting into bed, and then you get your downtime. It's like your downtime has kind of evaporated at this point. And so something about that is not working for you. And so if the way that we're doing things right now is not working for one or both parties involved, then I think that's a really good reason to consider doing something differently. So we introduced this when my daughter was about two and a half, which even Dr. Winter was pretty shocked by how young she was and basically it came about through resistance to bedtime, and thinking, why are we doing this? Why are we doing this every night, this is harder than it needs to be. What can we shift that can make this potentially easier? Our routine definitely shifted a little bit with how light it is outside and it has also shifted as she's gotten older as well. But in general, what we end up doing is dinner is at around 6:45. And I've cooked every other night. Usually I cook one night and then we have leftovers reheated the second night and dinner itself takes about 20 minutes. So we're coming into the period just after seven o'clock and then we have a good deal of flex time in that hour, that almost hour until about eight. I keep a learning journal for her and I try and keep that out on the end of the dining room table, and so that's my period of the day to write in there. She takes a bath every other day. Sometimes she wants to have playtime if something interesting came in the mail, or we're just back from a trip where we've been exploring national parks, and she didn't finish some of her junior ranger badges and she wants to finish those. So that's sort of a good deal of flex time in that almost hour. And then at eight o'clock, we used to have brushing teeth right at eight o'clock. And we've sort of flex that a little bit as she's gotten older to have stories first, and then she brushed his teeth after. If your child has strong resistance to brushing teeth, I would definitely advise having brushing teeth before stories. So that you can sort of use that as a light touch logical consequence. If you're having trouble getting the teeth to brush that we might not have time for stories if we don't get the teeth brushed in an expedient manner. We're at a point now where that's not so much of a challenge as it has been in previous years. And so we can allow a little more flexibility there. So but at eight o'clock, we are starting our storytime and Carys actually sleeps on a pile of blankets on the floor in her bedroom. By her choice, certainly not our preference. And that does mean that her bedroom is not a very comfortable place to read stories. But if your child is sleeping in a bed like most children do, and that is a comfortable place then you could certainly read stories in your bedroom. And many parents find that the fewer transitions that they have around bedtime, the better. And so that's one more reason to get the teeth done early so you don't have to come out of the bedroom if that is potentially a challenge. For us. Again, that's not so much of an issue so we have stories in the living room, and then after that we're transitioning to this mythical time that you're all wondering about what actually happens in this time. So our basic parameter is you can do whatever you like. It needs to be mostly in your room and we took a harder line on this when she was younger, and I am not going to be involved in this. So if you need help with stickers, or glue or tape, or anything like that, that is not a project that we're going to be doing during this period after storytime that it needs to be something that you can do without asking for my help. In the early days with a younger child, what you will probably find is that if you just set up the options of you can go to bed, even if you're not tired, or you can play in your room quietly by yourself, that you will probably find the child will be quite attracted to this idea of not lying in bed, which they may have been forced to do for some period of time before that. I think the key idea that a lot of parents are struggling with here is that this period of time has to meet both party’s needs and really everything that we're doing in our interactions with our children, ideally is going to be meeting both of their needs. And the important part to distinguish there is the difference between needs and strategies. And a strategy is a way that we can meet a need. Firstly, let's look at it from the other way, I might think to myself, well, I want to read a book every night.  That's part of how I want to spend my time. And I need to read a book, I need that for myself. Actually, that reading that book is a strategy to meet a need, which could be depending on what kind of book it is—it could be intellectual stimulation, it could be relaxation, it could be self-care time, it could be any one of a number of needs that I'm meeting by reading this book. And when we bring this back to the level of needs, rather than strategies, we can see actually, there might be a whole bunch of other ways to get those needs met. So if my need for that time is for intellectual stimulation, I might be able to listen to a podcast just as easily as like, as I can read a book, if my need is for self-care, maybe a bath in the bathroom with the door locked, would be another way to have that need met. And that doesn't involve anything to do with books necessarily. So if we can see this at a level of needs, then all of a sudden, a whole bunch of different ways of meeting that potential need can be met. And so we're always looking to understand what is my real need here, not the strategy I'm using to try and meet that need. And what is the child's real need here, maybe the child is not tired and that's why they're not wanting to go to bed. Maybe they don't feel as though they've had enough connection time with you during the day, and that's why they don't want to go to bed. And we need to understand what is their needs so that we can help them to address that, because if their need is for connection time with you, then when eight o'clock or whatever is your time or you know, 8:30 once you get to the end of the story, storytime rolls around, they're probably still going to be coming out of their rooms saying I want to spend time with you because they're not feeling as though they've had that connection time with you. So if you're seeing behavior that is difficult for you to navigate, like coming out of the room, when you're hoping that they're going to be spending this time in their room, then you always want to be asking yourself, what need is the child trying to fulfill by doing this behavior? And so if it's connection time, well, what can we do about that, maybe you could have connection time with them earlier in the day, and so their cup is full by bedtime, and thus they don't mind the Separation from you as much. If you don't have time to do that earlier in the day, maybe an hour and a half of kind of irritated, you know, I told you to stay in your, room I told you to stay in your room is not meeting your need for relaxation and self-care at the end of the day. And perhaps 30 minutes of one-on-one time with your child could refill their cup for connection. And also then get you an hour of time on the back end, for your self-care time, your connection time with your partner, and so on. So I think that's really at the crux of the well what do I do if my child doesn't stay in their bedroom idea? On the younger end when they're not necessarily as able to communicate their needs, you know, do you want to be in bed? Or do you want to play in your room quietly by yourself can be useful? But as soon as they're old enough to start expressing what's actually going on for them, then we can start to bring in this idea of needs and meeting theirs, and meeting hours as well. And in the meantime, we can always hypothesize we can always sort of taking an educated guess at what we think is going on for them and try to help them meet their needs to the best that we can understand it. So that's a super important piece. Then of course you get to what happens if they go to bed late.   Jen Lumanlan  14:27 And when we first started this yes, I will say there was a period of maybe it was probably two weeks at the most where we had gone from sort of an 8:30 lights out to it was heading towards 9:30 and 10. And at that point, we had been making up songs or story. I would lie with her for a little bit and make up a song or a story based on some funny thing that happened in the day or she would suggest a character and I would make up a song or story based on that. And so, of course, it gets to 9:30 or 10 and she's like, “Okay, it's song time now!” And I'm like, “It's not song time.” It's 10 o'clock at night, it is not time for making up songs and stories. And so I put a boundary in place to say, after nine o'clock, I do not have the mental capacity to be able to make up songs and stories. So if you choose to go to bed before nine o'clock, then I will be able to tell you a song, and make up a story, if you choose to go to bed after that, then I'm not going to be able to do that and I don't have the mental capacity to do that. And so there was then a period of time where she chose to go to bed at nine o'clock, so she could get her song or her story, and there were other days where she's like, I don't really care that much—I'd rather keep doing what I'm doing, It doesn't matter to me. And so yeah, there will be a period of time where they're learning what it is like to self-regulate, and they may end up tired. And if you were to start this on a Monday, you know, they're in preschool, and they would just spend those days in school. Would that be the end of the world if you were not the person who had to deal with that? My hypothesis might the way I approached it was no, it would not be the end of the world if I was not the person who had to deal with that. So yes, we very deliberately did this on school days, and yeah, that means you're gonna get woken up at a certain time, and I'm gonna be super upfront about that. I'm gonna say we need to be out the door at 8:15 and it takes you a bit of time to get going. I'm thinking 7:30 is a reasonable time. We're simplifying our morning routine as much as we can so things like getting dressed, brushing teeth, and eating breakfast, those were really the only three things we were doing in the morning at that time. And at 7:30 rolls around and waking her up, she's pretty tired, and she's not super happy to be woken up. But within a couple of weeks, she had learned that if you go to bed at 10, you are probably going to wake up very tired, and the day is probably going to be kind of rough. And there may be a period of time where you have to sort of say, “Hey, it's 9:30 Are you sure you want to stay up?” And you can see they're still in whatever they're doing, and they don't want to stop. It's like, okay, I'm waking you up at 7:30 No matter what. And then pretty soon, you get to a point where the luster of staying up until whatever time I like wears off a little bit. And they don't feel as though this is something you're going to take away. And thus, they have to do it to the max in case my parent changes their mind and won't let me do this anymore. They realize this is a long-term thing. And so all of a sudden, staying up until super late becomes something that it's not a big deal. And I will say for probably a year now, right off to storytime on most nights, Carys has been going to bed at 8:30. And so we're kind of where I might want to be if I was forcing her...

In this episode we hear from parent Amy, who is a White parent married to a Black man raising four biracial children in Colorado.  Amy has been on quite a journey to explore her role as a descendant of Puritans who came to the United States looking for religious freedom on her father’s side, and of Irish Catholics on her mother’s side.  She sees how her parents were able to get advanced education and a loan to buy a house and start a business, and that from the outside they looked like a pretty happy family.   But behind closed doors, things were not so pretty - they were actually chaotic and volatile.  Amy was an intense, spirited child and her parents didn’t have the tools they needed to meet her needs.  She learned to use her intellect to protect herself, and projected an image of having her stuff together - a habit that she then continued as a parent, as she projected a Supermom-type image.  Our culture rewards us for looking like we’re keeping it together, even when everything’s falling apart inside.   So Amy is a deep believer in dismantling patriarchy (she actually wanted to do this on Wall Street!) and in treating people with respect, but in a sleep-deprived moment after her fourth baby was born she broke up a squabble between two of her older children by pulling them roughly apart and yelled at the older one: “Why did you do that?” (a question for which of course there’s no answer).     She saw the terrified look on her daughter’s face which brought back the visceral fear she felt at her own parents’ explosive feelings and felt so much pain that she, Amy - the believer in breaking down traditional power structures and treating people with respect - had caused this kind of fear in her own child.   And of course it seemed like the things that really needed to change were her partner, who should stop doing obnoxious things, and her children, who were pushing each other’s buttons and fighting and leaving disgusting blobs of oatmeal on the floor for her to step in with bare feet when she came downstairs in the morning with a baby in her arms that would make her lose her shit before the day even got started.   Over the last few months Amy and her children have been learning new tools to be in right relationship with each other.  It started with learning that Amy did herself, but she shared each idea with her children so they could practice them together.     Amy is now reparenting herself, in a way, so she can be a different sort of parent to her own children - who now empathize with each other’s struggles, and actively try to support each other in difficult moments rather than throwing more fuel on the fire.  Of course all of this is intimately linked to the reconciliation and healing that Amy wants to see in her relationships with Black and Indigenous people in her life and on the land where she lives.   Taming Your Triggers If you need help with your own big feelings about your child’s behavior, Taming Your Triggers will be open soon. We’ll help you to: Understand the real causes of your triggered feelings, and begin to heal the hurts that cause them Use new tools like the ones Katie describes to find ways to meet both her and her children’s needs Effectively repair with your children on the fewer instances when you are still triggered It’s a 10-week workshop with one module delivered every week, an amazing community of like-minded parents, a match with an AccountaBuddy to help you complete the workshop, and mini-mindfulness practices to re-ground yourself repeatedly during your days, so you’re less reactive and more able to collaborate with your children.   Sign up for the waitlist and we'll let you know once enrollment re-opens. Click the image below to learn more.    

This episode continues our conversation on the topic of children and food.  A few months ago we heard from Dr. Lindo Bacon about how the things we’ve learned about obesity might not actually be the whole story.  Then we talked with Ellyn Satter about the approach she devised called Division of Responsibility, which holds the parent/caregiver responsible for the what, when, and where of eating and the child responsible for whether and how much.   We followed that with a conversation with Dr. Michael Goran, a world-renowned expert on the impact of sugar on our bodies, and specifically on children’s bodies – and co-author of the book SugarProof.  While the research seems to indicate that consuming large amounts of sugar isn’t necessarily the best thing for us, when I dug into the original papers that form the backbone of SugarProof I found that the results didn’t always seem to be quite as large as the book indicated.   In this episode we take another look at sugar – this time from the perspective of sociologist Dr. Karen Throsby.  Dr. Thorsby received her BA in English Language and Literature from Lincoln College, Oxford, and a MSc in Gender and later a Ph.D from the London School of Economics.  She is currently  an Associate Professor in Gender Studies at the University of Leeds, and is writing a book entitled Sugar Rush: Science, Obesity, and the Social Life of Sugar.  For the book, she is analyzing over 500 UK newspaper articles about sugar, as well as policy documents, scientific publications, popular science articles, self-help literature, and documentaries.  She wants to understand what happens when we demonize sugar as ‘public enemy number one,’ and along with it the fat body.  She doesn’t aim to determine the ‘truth’ about sugar or offer prescriptions about what people should eat, but instead think about how this debate relates to how scientific knowledge is produced, validated, and appropriated, panics about health and body size, the role of generation, gender, race, and class, and the lived inequalities associated with food.   Jump to highlights: (02:10) Introducing Dr. Throsby (03:22) One of your big focuses is on the idea of sugar being addictive.  Can you tell us why you start there?  What does it mean to be addicted to something, and can we be addicted to sugar? (09:46) We have to be really careful with any attempt to define addiction because some people and certain groups of people are seen as more liable to be seduced by sugar than others (12:18) The neuroscientific model of addiction recognizes that addiction is more than a failure of will and morals but also factors in biological vulnerability which can affect some people more than others (15:10) The idea that you could stop consuming sugar if you wanted to is part of the problem in the way that sugar is being figured because it ignores the social context within which consumption occurs (21:18) The reason the book is called Sugar Rush is obviously it's a play on the idea of having a lot of sugar, but also about the rush to blame sugar (22:04) Sugar is often referred to as empty calories but actually, it's a category of food that is absolutely laden with meaning that I think is really important   Other episodes mentioned in this episode: 145: How to Sugarproof your kids with Dr. Michael Goran   Links: Subscribe to the show Record the intro to Your Parenting Mojo :)   Resource Links: Sugarproof: The Hidden Dangers of Sugar That Are Putting Your Child's Health at Risk and What You Can Do   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"]   Jen Lumanlan  00:02 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives, but it can be so...   Jenny  00:09 Do you get tired of hearing the same old intros to podcast episodes? I don't really but Jen thinks you might. I'm Jenny, a listener from Los Angeles, testing out a new way for listeners to record the introductions to podcast episodes. There's no other resource out there quite like Your Parenting Mojo, which doesn't just tell you about the latest scientific research on parenting and child development, but puts it in context for you as well so you can decide whether and how to use this new information.   Jenny  00:42 I listened because parenting can be scary and it's reassuring to know what the experts think. If you'd like to get new episodes in your inbox along with a free infographic on 13 reasons your child isn't listening to you and what to do about each one, sign up at YourParentingMojo.com/SUBSCRIBE. You can also join the free Facebook group to continue the conversation.   Jenny  01:06 Over time you might get sick of hearing me read this intro so come and record one yourself. You can read from a script Jen's provided or have some real fun with it and write your own. Just go to YourParentingMojo.com/RecordTheIntro. I can't wait to hear yours.   Jen Lumanlan  01:32 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. Today we're continuing our series of episodes looking at the intersection of parenting and food. Recently we heard from Dr. Michael Goran who's co author of the new book Sugarproof: The Hidden Dangers of Sugar That Are Putting Your Child's Health at Risk and What You Can Do, where we discuss the research and what that says about the impact that sugar has on our bodies and our children's bodies. But when I was looking around to see who is looking at issues related to sugar that are beyond just what those are there that are happening in the body and really lifting their head up and looking at the broader social and cultural issues, I found the work of today's guest Dr. Karen Throsby.   Jen Lumanlan  02:10 Dr. Throsby is Associate Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Leeds in England. She obtained a bachelor's degree from Lincoln College, Oxford and completed a master's and PhD from the gender Institute London School of Economics. Her research explores the intersections of gender technology, the body and health and explores how bodily transformations happen and what this says about the wider social context they live in. She's currently working on a book called Sugar Rush: Science, Obesity and the Social Life of Sugar, which begins from the question, what are the social meanings and practices of sugar in the context of a war on obesity.   Jen Lumanlan  02:44 She focuses less on the truths about the dietary debates on sugar, but instead uses it to think about how scientific knowledge is produced, validated and used. Our panics around health and body size and the politics of food and its lived inequalities. Welcome Dr. Throsby.   Dr. Throsby  03:00 Thank you very much for having me.   Jen Lumanlan  03:02 We were just having a little chat before we started and I was saying that whenever we get a sociologist on the show, I always feel completely out of my depth. I acknowledge that I very much approach these questions from a psychologist perspective and I've invited Dr. Throsby to push back when I'm asking these questions in a way that's really different from the way that she sees them.   Jen Lumanlan  03:22 One of the the major threads that run through your work is this idea of addiction and sugar being addictive. I guess I'm curious why do you start there? Then we can sort of talk about what does it mean to be addicted to somethin and can we be addicted to sugar? I know there's 100 directions we can go from there but let's start with that as an overarching concept.   Dr. Throsby  03:44 Sure. I think just to take a little step back from that is to think about the project that I've done, the research that I've done, which is a study of primarily newspaper coverage of sugar from about 2013 up to the present, which is when you start to get an increased interest in sugar as sort of the dietary enemy of the day. Then I looked at self help books, diet books, public health campaigns, anything I could find within that time period. What I'm interested in is how sugar is talked about and how it's kind of represented, and what kind of role it's playing. What function is sugar playing as an enemy, or as a sort of a slice of pleasure, and so on. This is how I came across these constant references to sugar as addictive. It's used in a very unquestioning way, particularly in newspaper coverage which cites it as a kind of known truth. Sugar is addictive.   Dr. Throsby  04:52 In a sense, that therefore is what I'm interested in. Therefore what? If we are claiming that It is addictive, what does that mean? For me, there's a number of questions that come out of that. I think, firstly, what does it mean to say that something is addictive? When you look at the scientific literature, there is very little agreement about what constitutes addiction and at the moment, we're kind of moving towards a sort of neuroscientific interpretation of it but there's no consensus around that really either.   Dr. Throsby  05:25 It changes sort of. It sort of evolves how we think about it - about addiction - and what counts as a potential site of addiction. It's not just substances now. There's a kind of expansion of what we consider to food, to online environments, to Twitter to all those things. For me, I'm interested in it because it's given a great amount of certainty, that we all know what it means to say that sugar is addictive, when in fact, if you sort of scratch below the surface, there's very little certainty there.   Dr. Throsby  06:00 My question then is, so what is it doing? What is that claim doing when a journalist says, but it is addictive? Or an anti sugar activist says it. what is being done? For me, I think it does two key things. Both of them not well, in my view.   Dr. Throsby  06:22 The first one is that it suggests that if we can pin it down as addictive, we then know what to do about it. Oh, we should just treat it like drugs, for example.   Jen Lumanlan  06:35 Which we know what to do with, right? We can fix that problem.   Dr. Throsby  06:39 As if there is no problem with drugs and addiction. We don't really know what it means. It doesn't give us a solution, necessarily. It also, and I think this is its primary function is to create a sense of urgency. Rhetorically, it functions, the claim that it's addictive functions as this urgent claim that something must be done, and what that does then it authorizes a series of interventions that don't need to be proven in order to be enacted because it's urgent. It's an urgent problem.   Dr. Throsby  07:23 It creates, in this case, sugar, which is usually the problem that's being addressed is fatness, which also we don't really understand very well either. It creates this sense of urgency that pulls against the need to stop and think about what are we actually doing socially when we intervene in these practices - with eating practices in this case?   Jen Lumanlan  07:50 Thank you for setting the scene on that. I want to go into a number of those areas. Your first contention that we don't really know what addiction is, and also the idea that how we think about addiction is really changed over time. Digging through the references in some of your papers, I wasn't familiar with this suite of literature but, seeing how from the 1930s where addiction is really seen as this moral flaw in people moving towards this nearer psychological model which potentially ignores the social context of it -somebody is not addicted in isolation - can you trace that for us and how does that link to sugar?   Dr. Throsby  08:37 I think one of the quite important things is that in those changes that have happened, say, from a very moral judgment about personal failings through to this very kind of biologized vision where it's kind of written into the body in a way that we can't be responsible for. That, actually, we never leave those earlier models behind and actually, we can see with addiction, drug addiction say, or alcoholism, or a presumed addiction to sugar, there is a massive amount of blame attached and kind of moral judgment attached to individuals. I'm certainly not saying that, but things that are kind of recognizable or known as addiction, I'm not saying they don't exist. I'm not saying people are not under the sphere of alcohol or drugs in terrible traumatic ways, but we never leave these other judgments behind and we do judge people who are addicted to all kinds of things, although in different ways to different kinds of substances.   Dr. Throsby  09:46 There are kind of acceptable addictions: to exercise, for example, is much more acceptable than cocaine. I think there's that shift, but also I think, for me, it tells us that we have to be really careful with any attempt to define. Not that definitions don't have functions. We have to kind of have provisional definitions for lots of things but we have to be really careful with those and ask who is being excluded. Who is being brought into the center of vision, who then becomes the focus of intervention. I think where sugar is concerned, this becomes really important, because some people and certain groups of people are seen as more liable to be seduced by sugar than others.   Dr. Throsby  10:41 It's incredibly classed, and it's incredibly gendered. I think as soon as we start thinking about those models, we need to think about who are they speaking about? Who is considered vulnerable in those kinds of definitions and in those models? Who becomes the target of intervention, and surveillance, when we're deciding what counts as addiction?   Jen Lumanlan  11:11 Thinking about the neuropsychological view of addiction, then, it seems like if it's something that's inside ourselves that we can't help, then the most appropriate way to deal with that is to deal with supply. If you can cut off the supply, then the person won't have to deal with their brains inability to cope with whatever is happening. I think we've seen that play out in the story of drug addiction we're now also seeing that related to sugar and thinking about Dr. Goran's book, where we're talking about reducing the quantity of sugar that we're taking in, and things like soda taxes, and those kinds of mechanisms - companies voluntarily reducing the amount of sugar and salt in their foods. We're seeing this play out already. What implications does that have if what we're saying is that a neuro psychological view of addiction is not necessarily the right way of looking at it, because it's ignoring all these cultural and social factors?   Dr. Throsby  12:21 There are many appealing aspects to this kind of neuro scientific approach to it in that by saying it's actually not a matter of willpower, for example. If you're saying it's about how the brain is structured and operating, that it's kind of beyond your control in some way. It's not just a failure of will. It's not a moral failure, in that sense. It has a lot of appeal, I think and I think in many ways, it's been mobilized as an attempt to try and shift blame away from individual failings, to think about the broader structures that might expose people to particular drugs or foods or whatever, but I think the analogy between drugs like cocaine, and oriental tobacco, and sugar starts to break down in these terms because you can't abstain from food.   Dr. Throsby  13:25 Some people are in a position to control what is in their food to some extent. You could. I know a lot of people do completely remove added sugar, for example, but they're still eating sugar. You can't abstain in the same way. You can certainly reduce but we don't think about wouldn't it be great if people had slightly less cocaine. We think about them as they need to stop having cocaine because you can't have a little bit. A lot of people feel the same about tobacco for example, you have to stop and so on. Alcoholics, obviously, are told  you must not have any. I think this is where the analogy breaks down.   Dr. Throsby  14:13 In the UK, when Action On Sugar, which is an anti sugar organization in the UK, they launched in 2014 and they launched with the taglines that sugar is the new tobacco, which was a direct invocation of addiction of addictive properties, plus health harms from then consuming, but even Professor Graham McGregor, who's the Chair of Action On Sugar, sort of later on in the newspaper commentaries said "Yep, we know it's not really like tobacco." It's different but but we said it for emphasis. It circles back to the effect of it. The social effect of saying that it's addictive is flagging up a great big warning.   Dr. Throsby  15:10 At the same time, still actually, even through the neuroscientific model, shifting responsibility back onto the individual. It's your responsibility as an individual then to, to know the dangers of sugar, and to find ways to restrict your consumption and to make the right choices. And so even though it seems to lift the responsibility, like almost all environmental arguments about sugar, about soda taxes and everything, in the end, it always comes back to individual choices that you could stop it if you wanted to which, for me is part of the problem of the way that sugar is being figured.   Jen Lumanlan  15:55 Why is that part of the problem?   Dr. Throsby  15:58 It ignores the social context within which consumption occurs. If we look, for example, at people living in poverty, with very little choice over how to eat, when to eat, what to eat, because of lack of money, lack of time, they're often working multiple jobs, might not be able to afford to have a fridge, might not be able to afford to put the oven on. There's over a million children eating out of food banks in the UK.   Dr. Throsby  16:35 By making it a matter of individual choice, and by focusing on sugar - I think this for me is another problem of talking so explicitly about sugar - is that it closes down the other conversations that I think we need to be having, which are about inequality, and poverty. And so you often hear people say, you know, okay, people who are poor, are more likely to be fat, and more likely to have higher sugar consumption. Yes. And that's fairly well documented, but a government policy response to that is usually, "Ah, so we must target the poor people with our anti sugar, anti fat interventions, rather than saying, how can we make people less poor?" I think, by focusing so exclusively on sugar as the problem to be solved, it actually stops the conversation...

“Storytelling? I’m already reading books to my child – isn’t that enough?” Your child DOES get a lot out of reading books (which is why we’ve done a several episodes on that already, including What children learn from reading books, How to read with your child, and Did you already miss the boat on teaching your toddler how to read?. But it turns out that storytelling benefits our relationship with our child in ways that reading books really can’t, because you’re looking at the book rather than at your child. If you ask your child what kind of story they’d like you to tell, you also get incredible insight into both their interests and concerns – I can attest to this, as I’ve been singing story-songs about poop and various kinds of baby animals who can’t find their mamas on and off for several weeks now (we had an incident a few months back where she couldn’t find me in a store). In this episode we also discuss the ways that people from different cultures tell stories, and what implications this has for them as they interact with our education system.   Jump to highlights 02:35 Where to start in supporting your child's learning 07:20 Introduction of episode 08:00 History of storytelling 12:25 Approaches in censoring the stories of our children 14:36 What are the benefits of storytelling 25:25 Why we should tell stories 31:05 2 short stories Kendall Haven used in his book Story Proof 35:45 Ideas to convey   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] 00:01 If we want our children to have the best chance to live fulfilling lives, that can you keep up with all the books and scientific research on parenting, and fit the information into your own philosophy on how to raise kids. Welcome to Your Parenting Mojo, the podcast that does the work for you by investigating and examining respectful research-based parenting tools to help kids thrive. Now welcome your host, Jen Lumanlan. Jen Lumanlan 00:38 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Before we get going with today’s topic on the subject of storytelling, I wanted to let you know about a little something I’ve been working on for a while now.  I think I’ve mentioned before that I was working on a Master’s in Education – well, I’ve finished that now and I’m actually not in school at the moment which is both amazingly freeing and rather strange.  I’ve mentioned before that after we made the decision to homeschool our daughter, whenever anyone asked me about homeschooling, they would always ask me the same questions, so I created a course to help families figure out whether homeschooling could be right for them – you can find more info on that at yourhomeschoolingmojo.com if you like.  But a lot of friends said “homeschooling sounds awesome, but I could never do it,” or “homeschooling sounds awesome but I don’t want to do it,” or just “we’re committed to public schools.”  When I asked them to tell me more about this they invariably expressed some kind of anxiety about this decision – kind of a “we’re committed to public schools but….” – they’re worried about class sizes and a lack of funding and the quality of the education their child will receive. And I thought to myself: “hmmm…what if there was a way to take everything I’ve learned during a master’s in psychology and another in Education and make it relevant to people who are committed to public school for whatever reason, but who recognize the limitations in the system and want their children to come out of public school among the 40% of 12th-graders who can read and do math at or above a proficient level, and not among the 60% who are at a basic or below-basic level.  Parents want to imbue their children with a love of learning, but research has shown that the toddlers who couldn’t stop asking questions basically stop being curious by about third grade.  Instead of asking why things happen or how things work, they learn that their job is to answer the teacher’s questions, rather than to ask their own.  And when I interviewed parents, I also found they didn’t know where to start in supporting their child’s learning – they’ve been reading to their child since birth, and they taught their child how to count, but they just have no idea what to do next. Jen Lumanlan 02:34 So I took what I learned during those degrees, and I did a whole lot of research outside of them, and I talked with Principals and teachers and parents and I asked them what challenge they had had.  What challenges they had in teaching, and in parenting children in school, and in teachers and parents working together, and in catching small problems before they become really big problems, which I found actually doesn’t happen all that often – it was way more common than I’d thought for something to go unnoticed for quite a while and even once it was noticed, to take quite a while to fix.  It really wasn’t uncommon for a student to lose the better part of a year of learning waiting for testing for learning disabilities, or while being bullied, or simply because they had a personality mismatch with their teacher.  I took all of the research on those topics, and a number of others besides, and I made a course for you lovely people that will give you the tools and support you need to prepare yourself and your child for the transition to and first year or two of school.  It helps you to understand the different ways parents can participate in their child’s education in school and which are associated with better learning outcomes.  It digs into the neuroscience of learning, and especially of learning reading and math, so when your child stares at you blankly after you try to show them a new concept you understand what connection is missing in their brain. It looks at homework and whether children should be getting any of it, and gives you the data you need to work with administrators to establish homework policies that are actually grounded in research.  It shows you the critical components of a life-long love of learning, and shows you how to support the development of these through activities connected to school as well as those outside of school.  And best of all, it does all this in a way that doesn’t make you think “Holy cow, here are another 300 things I need to teach my kid; I can’t keep tabs on it all or do it all and it’s stressing me out just thinking about it,” but rather “If your child is having problems with X, here are some things you can try.”  It helps you to see what things you might be able to change in schools if you want to put the energy into it, and which ones are probably here for the long haul.  And we have an awesome group on Facebook that thinks through these issues together in a supportive way. Jen Lumanlan 04:35 So what’s it like to be in this course?  Well, I’ll quote a couple of the people who have been through it: Kesha from Oklahoma, who is actually a Your Parenting Mojo listener, sent me an email after she finished the section on the neuroscience of learning and said “I LOVED this section on the neuroscience of learning, it made so much sense, provided so many pointers, and gives tools I can definitely use to find better ways to make new things we learn relevant to my son. I had a really hard time doing that before but I think using his interests, then finding ways to tie different subjects to them, and letting him lead me through how he’d like to demonstrate his learning are concrete, easy to apply tactics. This course is amazing!” And Kathryn in the U.K. said: “I had been worried about the transition to school but this course was both tremendously reassuring and inspiring. It both makes very clear the limitations of the school setting but empowered me to see what I can individually do to make the most of the experience. It also, refreshingly, makes clear that perfection is not the goal. Instead it provided me with the knowledge and ideas to find and make the most of opportunities to extend my daughter’s learning according to her own unique needs and interests.” Jen Lumanlan 05:44 I’m looking for a few more people to test the course for me before I launch it out into the wider world and I wanted to give my listeners a first shot at doing that, and also to give you a special discount on it as well.  The first twenty people who go to JenLumanlan.com, that's L u m a n l a n, and click on supporting your child's learning in school chorus can use discount and use discount code BETA-60-OFF will get $60 off the $199 price, so the price is just $139.  Once again, that’s Jen Lumanlan - L u m a n l a n .com. Click on supporting your child's learning in school, enter the discount code BETA-60-OFF at checkout.  If you subscribe to the show via my website then you actually got the link and the discount code in your newsletter last week, so you can find it there, and if you’re hearing this for the first time on this episode then just click over to the page on my website for this episode at yourparentingmojo.com/storytelling and all the information is right there for you.  I’m looking forward to getting to know a lot more of you in the course! Jen Lumanlan 06:52 On to our topic of the day: we’re working on a couple of different series of episodes at the moment – I like to mix them up a bit in case you’re not interested in a particular topic so at least you only get bored every other week rather than every week… We’re currently in the middle of two series of episodes – one on the importance of play, and the other on storytelling. This topic hadn’t even been on my radar until I did a paper on discourses in education for my master’s in Education. Today we’re going to cover why we should tell stories, and in an upcoming episode, we’ll talk about how to learn and tell stories which we differentiate from reading stories because we do learn them and tell them rather than reading them.  If you’re anything like me, you might think that you’re not sure you really need this episode.  It wasn’t until I started researching it that I learned about the powerful impact that storytelling can have on our children’s lives, and even on their academic outcomes, and why I wanted to share this with you. I also want to give you a heads-up episode has some content that you might not want children to hear.  No swearing; just some concepts that are more suitable for adult ears only. Jen Lumanlan 07:55 Let’s start with the story of stories – how did stories orginate?  Researchers think that at one time everyone was a storyteller, but as human society became more complex, people started to specialize in one form or another of the arts – like drama, dance, or music.  People who had a good sense of timing, a good command of language, and a memory to hold it all together became a community’s storytellers.  One theory holds that the stories became so exaggerated that they had to be told in the third person for the teller to retain some sense of modesty, which gave rise to the hero tale.  Storytellers weren’t just entertainers – they were geneologists, historians, and keepers of culture. The first written record of an activity that appears to be storytelling comes from what is known as the Westcar Papyrus, recorded between 2,000 and 1,200 BC, in which three sons entertain their father, who had built the pyramids, with strange stories.  Stories wended their way through history – the first known heroic epic, (Gilgamesh), Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, through the traveling master storytellers of Ireland and Wales who knew would each have known 350 stories during the period of the Roman Empire, to the height of storytelling in Western Europe when professional organizations of storytellers would hold storytelling competitions in the Middle Ages.  After the printing press was invented in 1450, storytelling in Western cultures started on a down-slide from which it really hasn’t recovered.  The written word is now the primary way Western people communicate with each other, and oral traditions (as well as the people whose cultures rely on them) are really looked down upon. Jen Lumanlan 09:27 The one use we seem to still have for stories is telling them to children – librarians told stories to children to integrate immigrants into the U.S. in the early twentieth century and to inculcate the new residents with their new country’s values, and a history of storytelling in this period is basically a series of life histories of notable children’s librarians.  What was once a way that culture was transmitted to all people had become a way to, in the words of Russian author Kornei Chukovsky: “foster in the child, at whatever cost, compassion and humaneness – this miraculous ability of man to be disturbed by another being’s misfortunes, to feel joy about another being’s happiness, to experience another’s fate as one’s own.”  Sharing a story is a very different experience than reading it by oneself, and in general all people, even adults, enjoy these experiences – which is why we go to the theater and attend concerts, but Westerners have mostly gotten out of the habit of getting together to share stories.  Sharing a story may make the story more enjoyable and also enhance the relationship because the story is an object of shared attention. Jen Lumanlan 10:28 And what kinds of stories do we share?  Parents sometimes wonder at the unsavory ideas expressed in folk tales – including one-dimensional good and evil characters and stereotypical depictions of women and people of color, as well as violence.  Psychologists believe, though that the confines of the story – the “once upon a time” at the beginning and the “The end” at the end help children to know that what is happening in the story is not real, and that children can safely experience ideas and emotions through stories that they couldn’t do in real life.  Folk tales actually weren’t originally intended for children; even the Brothers Grimm’s original edition of fairy tales published in 1812 was intended for adults.  Almost immediately people started to read them to children, so the Grimms edited the stories for children by censoring out some of the violence and sexuality.  For example, in the 1812 version of the story The Frog Prince, the frog just wants to get into bed with the princess – the story is openly sexual.  Psychoanalysts subsequently imposed their own ideas about why children find these stories appealing: because they give children permission to express “complex, unconscious, infantile fantasies about sexual wishes, anger, guilt, and fear of punishment within the family.  It is unacceptable to consciousness for these to be explicit so they are expressed symbolically.”  The frog in the story represents the princess’s revulsion toward the male member, which she must overcome before she gets married. Some authors note that the Grimms thought that sex was unsuitable in stories for children but violence was perfectly acceptable, although some changes have to be made – it wouldn’t be appropriate for a mother to starve her children to death in the forest so the mother became an evil stepmother in Hansel and Gretel. Jen Lumanlan 12:06 Now I have to admit that I got to this point in researching this episode and I thought to myself “what the heck are we teaching our children in these fairy tales?”  That’s when I reached out to Dr. Deena Weisberg of the University of Pennsylvania; you heard my interview with her a few weeks ago.  I was surprised to learn that, in general, she’s not a huge fan of censoring the stories we read to our children, although I do think there are a few approaches you could take with this.  One would be to read the stories anyway – some researchers believe that hearing a scary story from a trusted adult leads to intense feelings of anxiety and excitement, with a happy ending enabling relief and a return to safety.  This can allow traumatic experiences to be portrayed and intense emotions to be experienced safely.  I would think, though, that the suitability of this approach very much depends on the child – my own almost four-year-old cries when one friend might not see another friend again in a story, so I don’t think we’ll read original fairy tales anytime soon – but some children *enjoy* being scared and might get a lot out of this experience even at a young age. Another approach would be to share the Disney-type versions of the stories which are fairly effectively sanitized for the worst of the sex and violence, as long as you don’t think too deeply about how the parts of the story that are edited out – things like how Sleeping Beauty gets pregnant (she was raped by a married man) or that Quasimodo’s master has Esmeralda hanged in the Hunchback of Notre Dame, or that the sea witch cuts out the Little Mermaid’s tongue in the original version of the story.  You could read original versions of stories but change the worst-offending ideas on the fly as you go, although to my introverted, slow-thinking brain this would be more stressful than anything. Jen Lumanlan 13:41 The other thing you can do is just pick different stories.  There are *so many* stories out there that you can choose one with messaging that you support and that your child will enjoy.  There’s plenty of time down the line for your child to get to the gory stuff, when they decide they’re ready for it.  This actually fits with the way that stories were used in previous generations, which is as one more tool in our toolbelt of ways we can support our personal development, and this means we can select a story for a particular purpose in a particular context.  These stories can take a couple of different forms – firstly, we might choose to learn a particular story in which we find a lot of meaning that is important to us.  The other thing we can do is to tell what is called family stories, which are the stories of our own families, and I should acknowledge here that I’m indebted once again to Dr. Laura Froyen for introducing me to this term because I hadn’t previously heard of it.  We’ll talk about family storytelling in our next episode in this series. So what are the benefits of storytelling, given that it currently is not prioritized in our culture?  Storytelling isn’t as common among Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (or WEIRD) families as it is in families from some other cultures, and I believe that this is because people in WEIRD cultures have chosen to prioritize the ability to read above the ability to share stories.  Because schools happen to also prioritize the ability to read, likely because the systems in schools were set up by and primarily for the benefit of the dominant culture in WEIRD societies, which are White children, White families’ preparation of their children thus dovetails nicely with the skills their children will need once they get to school. Jen Lumanlan 15:16 Families from other cultures value different kinds of information sharing, and I want to tell you about an incredibly powerful lesson I learned during my Master’s of Education.  I had the opportunity to choose one of five theorists who work on the topic of discourses, and in this context a discourse is the vocabulary and symbols that are used when thinking about and understanding a specific topic.  It’s like a “kit” of ideas that surround a concept and the way we think about it, and we can show ourselves as members of a group or as people who are outside a group using the way we describe that group. I actually had the option to pick a theorist who is working in the...

Way, waaay back in Episode 3, we wondered whether we had missed the boat on teaching our babies to read (didn’t you teach your baby how to read?). We eventually decided that we hadn’t, but given that many parents have a goal of instilling a love of reading into their children, what’s the best way to go about doing that? And what if your child is the kind who wriggles out of your lap at the mere sight of a book? Our second-ever repeat guest, Dr. Laura Froyen, helps us to delve into the research on this topic. We conclude by talking through some of the things parents can do to promote a love of reading, because it turns out it’s not as intuitive as one might think! Dr. Froyen's  11 Ways to Support Your Child in Learning to Read PDF guide. References Bus, A.G. (2001). Joint caregiver-child storybook reading: A route to literacy development. In S.B. Neuman & D.K. Dickinson Handbook of Early Literacy Research. New York: Guilford. Bus, A.G., van IJzendoorn, M.H., & Pellegrini, A.D. (1995). Joint book reading makes for success in learning to read: A meta-analysis on intergenerational transmission of literacy. Review of Educational Research 65(1), 1-21. Full article available at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Marinus_Van_IJzendoorn/publication/230853169_Joint_Book_Reading_Makes_for_Success_in_Learning_to_Read_A_Meta-Analysis_on_Intergenerational_Transmission_of_Literacy/links/53f05d6f0cf26b9b7dcdfe58.pdf Burchinal, M., & Forestieri, N. (2011). Development of early literacy: Evidence from major U.S. longitudinal studies. In S.B. Neuman & D.K. Dickinson Handbook of Early Literacy Research (Vol. 3). (85-96). New York: Guilford. Bus, A.G. (2003). Social-emotional requisites for learning to read. In A. van Kleeck, S.A. Stahl, & E.B. Bauer (Eds.), On reading books to children: Parents and teachers (3-15). New York: Guilford. Butterworth, G. (2001). Joint visual attention in infancy. In G. Bremner & A. Fogel (Eds.). Blackwell handbook of infant development. (213-240). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Carlsson-Paige, N., G. Bywater McLaughlin, and J. Wolfsheimer Almon (2015). Reading instruction in kindergarten: Little to gain and much to lose. Available online at: http://www.allianceforchildhood.org/sites/allianceforchildhood.org/files/file/Reading_Instruction_in_Kindergarten.pdf Evans, M.A., & Saint-Aubin, J. (2011). Studying and modifying young children’s visual attention during book reading. In S.B. Neuman & D.K. Dickinson Handbook of Early Literacy Research (Vol. 3). (242-255). New York: Guilford. Fletcher, K.L., & Reese, E. (2005). Picture book reading with young children: A conceptual framework. Developmental Review 25, 64-103. Full article available at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kathryn_Fletcher2/publication/223236320_Picture_book_reading_with_young_children_A_conceptual_framework/links/0912f503ce1f9d05ec000000.pdf Landry, S.H., Smith, K.E., Swank, P.R., Zucker, T., Crawford, A.D., & Solari, E.F. (2011). The effects of a responsive parenting intervention on parent-child interactions during shared book reading. Developmental Psychology 48(4), 969-986. Full article available at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Paul_Swank/publication/51831766_The_Effects_of_a_Responsive_Parenting_Intervention_on_Parent-Child_Interactions_During_Shared_Book_Reading/links/0912f5097cf5ddf41c000000.pdf McBride-Chang, C. (2012). Shared-book reading: There is no downside for parents. In S. Suggate & E. Reese (Eds.), Contemporary debates in childhood education and development (pp.51-58). Abingdon, U.K.: Routeledge. Morow, L.M. (1993). Literacy development in the early years: Helping children read and write (2nd ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Notari-Syverson, A., (2006). Everyday tools of Literacy. In Learning to Read the World: Language and literacy in the first three years (61-78). Washington, D.C.: Zero to Three. Otto, B. (2008). Literacy development in early childhood: Reflective teaching for birth to age eight. Long Grove, IL: Waveland. Phillips, L.M., Norris, S.P., & Anderson, J. (2008). Unlocking the door: Is parents’ reading to children the key to early literacy development? Canadian Psychology 49(2), 82-88. Reese, E. (2012). The tyranny of shared book-reading. In S. Suggate & E. Reese (Eds.), Contemporary debates in childhood education and development (pp.59-68). Abingdon, U.K.: Routeledge. Rosenkotter, S.E., & Wanless, S.B. (2006). Everyday tools of Literacy. In Learning to Read the World: Language and literacy in the first three years (81-100). Washington, D.C.: Zero to Three. Scarborough, H.S. (2001). Connecting early language and literacy to later reading (dis)abilities: Evidence, theory, and practice. In S.B. Neuman & D.K. Dickinson Handbook of Early Literacy Research. (97-110). New York: Guilford. Schickedanz, J.A. (1999). Much more than the ABCs: The early stages of reading and writing. Washington, D.C.: National Association for the Education of Young Children. Senechal, M. (2011). A model of the concurrent and longitudinal relations between home literacy and child outcomes. In S.B. Neuman & D.K. Dickinson Handbook of Early Literacy Research. (175-188). New York: Guilford. Whitehurst, G.J., & Lonigan, C.J. (1998). Child development and emergent literacy. Child Development 69(3), 848-872.

Today I join forces with Malaika Dower of the How to Get Away with Parenting podcast to interview Dr. Christia Brown, who is a Professor of Developmental and Social Psychology at the University of Kentucky, where she studies the development of gender identity and children’s experience of gender discrimination.  Dr. Brown’s book, Parenting Beyond Pink and Blue (Affiliate link), helps parents to really understand the scientific research around gender differences in children, which is a harder task than with some other topics because there’s just a lot of bad research out there on this one.  I ask about theories of gender development while Malaika keeps us grounded with questions about how this stuff works in the real world, and we both resolve to shift our behavior toward our daughters just a little bit.  Related Episodes  Interview with Yarrow Dunham on how social groups form  Interview with Kang Lee on children’s lying (yep – your kid does it too!)     References  Brown, C.S. (2014). Parenting beyond pink and blue. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press. (Affiliate link)  Taylor, M.G., Rhodes, M., & Gelman, S.A. (2009). Boys will be boys and cows will be cows: Children’s essentialist reasoning about gender categories and animal species. Child Development 80(2), 461-481. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2009.01272.x 

“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., & 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., & 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., & 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., & 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., & 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., & 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., & Freitas, L.B.L. (Eds.) (2018). Developing gratitude in children and adolescents. Cambridge, U.K: Cambridge University Press. Wang, D., Wang, Y.C., & 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.

In just a few years, today’s children and teens will forge careers that look nothing like those that were available to their parents or grandparents. While the U.S. economy becomes ever more information-driven, our system of education seems stuck on the idea that “content is king,” neglecting other skills that 21st century citizens sorely need. Backed by the latest scientific evidence and illustrated with examples of what’s being done right in schools today, Becoming Brilliant (Affiliate link) introduces the “6Cs” collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creative innovation, and confidence along with ways parents can nurture their children’s development in each area. Join me for an engaging chat with award-winning Professor Roberta Golinkoff about the key takeaways from the book.   References Duckworth, A. (2016). Grit Scale. Available at: http://angeladuckworth.com/grit-scale/  (Duckworth also wrote a book, although I haven’t read it…yet…: http://angeladuckworth.com/grit-book/) Dweck, C. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York, NY: Random House. Golinkoff, R.M., & Hirsch-Pasek, K. (2016). Becoming Brilliant: What science tells us about raising successful children.  Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association. Kohn, A. (1999). Punished By Rewards. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.  

In this short episode I reflect on where we’ve been over the past year, my plans to slow down a bit at the end of the year (as well as a super exciting project I’m working on!), and what episodes we have lined up for the new year.   In this episode I also mention something I haven’t done for a while, which is that it’s possible to donate to support the show.  You might know that it takes 20-40 hours to do the research for each episode (although my record is about 80 hours for the show on Self-Reg, because the research was in such a mess and I had to check what I was reading with several developmental psychologists who tempered the claims of the person who created the concept of Self-Reg!).   A core group of listeners (shout out to: Jacqueline B., Rebekah S., Elizabeth M., Kelsey B., Jessica S., Crystian M., Megan P., Alison O., and Cristin B.) have helped to sustain the show over the last months and years.   If the show has helped you, would you consider making a donation to support it?   You can now do this from any episode page.  If a particular episode has given you an insight or a tool that resonated with you and/or your child, I’d be really grateful if you would make a one-time donation to acknowledge that, or consider a recurring donation to help me keep making more episodes for you.  I know there’s always the temptation to say that “eh; I don’t have time right now and it probably doesn’t make that much of a difference and someone else will do it anyway.”  And maybe they will, but as we all know, if everyone thinks like that then the work doesn’t get supported….   I mention in the episode that I’m writing a book!  And the e-book will be available for a sliding scale price on this website, to help everyone who wants to read it be able to read it, no matter what their financial constraints.  I also now make every course and membership I offer over a $100 threshold available with sliding scale pricing, and invite folks who can’t afford even the minimum price to get in touch to figure out a price that works for both of us.  I’m doing everything I can to live my values to make my work available to as many people as possible.  If this resonates with you, I’d be grateful if you would consider donating to support me in continuing to do this work.  You can now donate from any episode page (including this week’s episode!).  Just look for the Support Jen’s Work button on the right side.   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen Lumanlan  00:02 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives. But it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a free guide called 13 reasons why your child won't listen to you and what to do about each one, just head over to yourparentingmojo.com/subscribe. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us. Jen Lumanlan  00:56 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. I just have a short episode lined up for you today with a few updates about the podcast and the Your Parenting Mojo world more broadly, we're coming to the end of what has been a pretty amazing year. I finally feel as though we have a really complete set of memberships and courses to help parents at all stages of their parenting journey. I run the Right From The Start course with Hannah and Kelty of upbringing to help expecting parents and those with a child under a year old to get it right from the start. And of course, we mean figuring out what's right for you and your family. We've had so many people sign up because they found that it's the only course for parents of very young children that doesn't focus entirely on the baby and instead looks at both babies and the parents needs and how to meet both of those as you negotiate your new relationship. That course has actually opened registration right now for a couple more days until midnight Pacific on November 3rd. Later on, the parenting membership helps parents who are struggling with their child's behavior to understand what's going on when their child is resisting them and what to do about it. Not just by changing their child's behavior, but by meeting their child's needs and also meeting their needs. Then we cover every other topic that parents want to know about from raising healthy eaters to screentime to supporting anxious children. If the parents are finding they're having a hard time with their own reactions to their child's behavior, the parents exploding or mentally shutting down, or doing anything they can to placate the child and get them to stop crying or screaming or hitting, then the taming your triggers workshop allows them to see where those feelings are coming from and gives them concrete tools to navigate them more effectively. And then once things are on a more solid footing the Supporting Your Child's Learning Membership helps parents to support their child's intrinsic love of learning. So the child can retain their motivation for learning and gain new skills on how to learn which they will carry for the rest of their lives. Of course, all of that is grounded by the podcast where I interview the who's who of academic researchers in parenting and child development to use scientific research to help us understand how to guide our children's development and learning based on principles of respectful parenting. Increasingly, over the last couple of years, I've also begun to look beyond the scientific research, not to just question the methodology of an individual study, but to look at the context that a body of work sits within, and understand how the studies fit with what we believe about capitalism and patriarchy, and racism that some people hear about on the show and then give me a one-star review on iTunes because they don't appreciate discussions of these topics alongside information on parenting. This year, I particularly enjoyed the episodes we covered on the topic of sex, both talking with children about it, and also teaching them about respect-based pleasurable relationships, through the ways that we interact with them. We also looked at how to use tools like Mindfulness and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to live in a way that's more aligned with our values. We started a series of episodes on food and I have more to come on that topic. And we did a series on How Children Learn. Early in the year, there was an episode on whether you should hold your child back a year when entering school, which is called Redshirting in the US. Then later, we looked at How Children Learn with their Bodies as well as their Brains and How to Support Gifted Children. The thing that keeps me going in all of this work is hearing from parents who are in the courses and memberships and who listen to the podcast who tell me what an impact these have had on them and their families. I was talking with my husband about it recently, he does a lot of the editing of the testimonial videos that go on the information pages for the courses and memberships. So he gets to watch the multiple times and look for the rich stories that members are telling that illustrate these transformations they've made. And he said, You know, I just edit the videos. I'm not the target audience and even I can see how your work is impacting so many people. I can only imagine what it must be like to see it from your perspective. And he's right. It's what I love about this. Might be a parent or a caregiver coming into Taming Your Triggers and realizing by the end that they have a whole lot more issues to deal with that are the reasons why they exploit their children all the time. So they sign up for therapy, or another parent who reports having conversations with their partner and children that they could never have imagined possible, where each person expresses their needs and together they come up with a solution to the problem that actually works for everyone, so the parent doesn't need to nag or be frustrated or explode. And then they go deeper into the parenting membership and expand their learning to all the other topics or they have another baby and they realize they need right from the start to navigate these uncharted waters with multiple children, or they see their child's love of learning as a precious resource to be nurtured rather than squashed so they joined the learning membership. It's really truly my privilege and honor to work with parents who are so committed not only to their children but to children everywhere. Also, this year, a racially diverse team of listeners helped me to develop anti-racist policies, I'd been on my own anti-racist journey for a couple of years, and by then after I learned that I do actually have White privilege. And it shows up in all kinds of ways in my parenting. My critical exploration through a series of podcasts episodes, and blog posts and other resources that you can find at yourparentingmojo.com/race. I knew there was a lot more to do. But I didn't really know where to start uncovering issues related to race that touch a podcast and a business related to parenting and child development. How to develop a narrative on exactly how we did that at some point, so anyone who wants to replicate this kind of work or build on it and improve it doesn't need to reinvent the wheel. But the short version is that a small set of listeners helped me to research frameworks to guide the development of these policies. So we would know that we were being as complete as possible, then we drafted the policies themselves, and reviewed them with a broader group to get feedback and make sure we were developing policies that would be true to anti-racistcist mission that we developed, and also having a meaningful impact. If you go to yourparentingmojo.com/anti-racism, you can see the policies and the rationale behind each one, as well as a mechanism for reporting any departures from the policies that you might find in the podcast or on the website so we can address those issues. This was no one-time project, I do plan to assess my progress towards the goals that we've set and report this to listeners annually. And I'm also investigating ways to make more commitments and take deeper action on this topic. So that's where we've been this year. And the reason for this episode is to take a chance to reflect because I don't think we do nearly enough of that in our culture, and also to let you know what's coming. In the short term, a hiatus is coming, I'm going to take a break from releasing new episodes for a few weeks. And there are a few reasons for that. Firstly, our culture prioritizes Go Go going all the time and I've been doing that for quite a while, until we spent a couple of months traveling recently, I was averaging one day off per month over an 18-month period so that I can produce all the content to help parents during COVID lockdowns. Since we've been traveling, I've been doing a bit better than that and I'd like to continue that trend when we get home. I want to spend more time with my family and doing things that I enjoy other than reading about child development for the rest of this year and into early January. And the other main reason I'm taking some time off is that I'm writing a book, this has been quite a journey as well, so a year ago, a book editor approached me after hearing me on somebody else's podcast and asked if I'd like to write a book, and she helped to guide the proposal development, and she said that she only takes projects forward internally that have a very good chance of being approved. But ultimately, the executive team did not approve the project after all. I have a friend who works for a company that helps writers to improve their work and get published, and he advised me to get an agent who could shot the proposal around to several publishers, and I submitted the proposal to several of them, but I never received any calls back. And then serendipity struck. So Hannah and Kelty of upbringing mentioned that an editor had approached them about writing a book and the timing wasn't right for them, so they offered to introduce me to her. And we were right in the middle of launching Right From The Start at the time, so I said, “Yes, please, but in a few weeks.” And so the course finished and I said to them, “Okay, I'm ready now,” and they said, “You already know her.” It turned out the editor and her partner are expecting a baby and had just been through the Right From The Start course, and I had no idea at the time that she was the editor. So I emailed her and I explained the history of the book proposal and asked if she'd be willing to look at it and she emailed me back immediately and thanked me for reaching out first before she'd had a chance to do it. She told me my coaching had changed her life and she said she definitely wanted to work with me to develop the proposal. So overall, while I wish it hadn't taken a year, going from initial development to actually having a signed book contract, I know that many authors go a lifetime without receiving an offer from a publisher, so I'm very grateful that happened for me. And I also think the proposal was much stronger the second time around and we'll create a more useful book for readers. It's going to be a how-to guide for putting into action, many of the ideas you hear about on the podcast, to help you interact with your children in a way that's aligned with your values. And also just so happens to bring about the kind of social change towards justice and equality and away from capitalism, and patriarchy, and racism that generates those lovely one-star iTunes reviews Jen Lumanlan  09:57 And in the spirit of practicing what I preach, I also got the publisher to agree to allow me to provide a sliding-scale ebook version of the book on my website. I'd hoped to have it available on the same basis on their website as well. But I certainly prefer the option to do it myself over being forbidden to undercut the retail price. And I hope that that's going to enable more people who want to dig deeper into this work to do it in a way that they can afford. I'm super, super excited to start working on the book and some friends have loaned me a cabin in the mountains for a couple of weeks, so I can actually focus instead of riding myself around in circles, which is going to happen if it gets dragged out over a period of months. The break is also going to give me time to plan episodes for next year and start researching those in a less time-pressured way. and give my team a chance to make all kinds of updates to stuff that happens behind the scenes to make it faster and easier to serve you when you reach out to us, and to improve the website as well. And of course, all of this costs money. I've produced 146 episodes requiring 20 to 40 hours of research each over the last six years, as well as a variety of episodes with other parents and folks working in the field, and short episodes commenting on current events. I haven't counted them, but I'm guessing we're in the neighborhood of about 170 episodes by now. And throughout all of these episodes, I've never run a single advertisement. I know they're really common on podcasts but I've always said that, “Really? Everything you need to raise your child is in you, so why would I tell you that and then sell you cruises or activity subscriptions for your child or mattresses?” I've had a donation page up on my website for a long time and if your listeners have used it, I particularly love it when listeners reach out to tell me that they've donated because an episode has been especially helpful to them. And I recall one listener who made a substantial donation in memory of the look on her mother's face after the listener’s mother was strapping her daughter into the car seat and her daughter said something like not so tight grandma that doesn't feel good on my vulva. The listener at the very early episode on the book talk sex today and had been putting it into practice with our daughter with hilarious results. The reality is, at this point, the donations don't cover the hard costs associated with the podcast, never mind the hours of time that I put into each episode. And I know how much value many listeners get from the show because of the emails I receive and the many five-star iTunes reviews that outweigh those one-star reviews from folks who don't appreciate my approach. I know it's easy to think, oh, I should donate and I'll get to it someday. I've done that myself. I actually took a break from writing this episode to donate to Tara Brach because I've been listening to her meditations and talks for a year now. And she doesn't take advertising either. And before each episode, she requests a donation. Of course, I'm always in bed with my eyes closed while I'm listening to her so it's easy to forget. I know I haven't mentioned the opportunity to donate very often, so maybe you didn't even realize you could do it. A listener and a friend reached out to me six months ago actually to say she had been job searching and had been using a website published by someone who offered some really helpful interviewing tips. And on each page was a short little blurb saying, “If you found this information useful, please consider donating.” My friend send those to me and she said, “You should do that!” I've always focused first on creating content for members and listeners so it's taken six months to actually get around to doing it, but it's now been done. And so you'll see an invitation to donate on each episode page on my website. So if you're listening to an episode and you're finding the information in it to be useful, I invite you to make a donation. It could be a one-time amount that recognizes the value you got out of that one episode or you could become a sustaining member, as they say on National Public Radio pledge drives in the US, which means that your recurring donations helped me to not have to ask for them as often. I'm especially grateful to members who have made one-time donations in the past but particularly to Jacqueline B, Rebecca S, Elizabeth M, Kelsey B, Jessica S, Christian M, Meghan P, Alison O, and Kristin B who have been making monthly donations for quite a while now. Which funds things like website hosting fees, a podcast editor, and all the little tools that it takes to pull various aspects of the episode together, from scheduling to graphics for the cover art, which all adds up. Thank you so much to each of you. If you'd like to join these awesome parents in helping to pay for a service that you get value from you can go to any episode page and look for the donate button on the right side. So we won't have new episodes for a few weeks but I do have a schedule of oldies but goodies lined up to be re-released. These include a super early episode with Dr. Roberta Golinkoff with co-author Dr. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek. She co-wrote Einstein Never use Flashcards among many other books. She was the first nationally known guest whom I reached out to and I still remember exactly the place that I was sitting in a cafeteria at a client's office, back when I still had a day job when I received her email, saying that they would be delighted to talk about their book becoming brilliant. I...