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

  "You're doing it wrong!  You're not asking for consent before changing the diaper!" In this Sharing Your Parenting Mojo episode we meet parent Nicole, who has core values related to being empathic, constantly learning, and upholding justice in the world.  These awesome values came together in a difficult way when Nicole became a parent: she had a deep fear of not getting parenting right, so she was constantly reading and trying to find that one piece of information that would close the gap between her struggles and the kind of parent she wanted to be.   The stress of parenting an infant brought out a controlling side of her where she attempted to script every aspect of her (and her husband's) interactions with her child, thinking they had already screwed up parenting because he hadn't asked their child's consent before changing her diaper.   Nicole was raised by a single parent who had had a traumatic upbringing, and Nicole grew up sometimes feeling scared by her mother's oversized reactions to normal childhood behavior.  She knew she wanted more for her children - but didn't know what to do.  Over the last year she's been working on 'reparenting' herself so she doesn't have to parent from a place of fear any more, and can relax into understanding her children's feelings - and her own and her partner's feelings as well.   Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits If you want to make your own transformation from a relationship where your child JUST DOESN’T LISTEN to one where you have mutual care and respect for each other’s needs, then the Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits workshop is for you. 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. Sign up for the Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits workshop.   Click the banner to learn more.     Jump to highlights: 03:19 Nicole's background 04:36 Nicole's parenting beliefs and values 06:31 Teaching respect by giving respect 08:07 Fear and anxiety of not getting parenting right 09:32 How inter generational trauma show up in your family 11:37 The unexpected reparenting piece 13:35 How talking about death with children led Nicole to my work 15:13 Nicole's experience with the Parenting Membership 18:32 What shifted in Nicole's that made her decide to take the Membership 19:17 Realizing the most unconditional thing you can do for your kids 20:12 Relationships our complex yet we don't think that way when it comes to our relationship with our children 21:08 Nicole's incredible example of how she shows up for her children and handles things differently now compared to before 24:45 Becoming more confident in parenting 26:09 Having the language to talk about our needs 28:39 How Nicole and her husband wants to model conflict to their children 34:44 Wrapping up   Resource links: Setting Loving (& Effective) Limits Workshop The Parenting Membership

  "Do you know what happens to your body when you get older?"   "Um...you get hairy in some places?"   "Yeah...other things happen too.  We'll get you some books."   That was what I learned about sex education when I was seven - I was always grateful that I learned it from my parents (who were pretty terrified to talk about it,  I think) rather than from the other kids at school.  But then the topic wasn't mentioned again until I was about 18, with a vague reference to "being careful" with my first boyfriend, whom I wasn't even sleeping with yet.   Friends: we have to do more than this if we want our children to be able to show up in relationships as fulfilled human beings who understand what pleasure is, how to ask for it, and how to give it.   We need our children to know that sex does not have to equal intercourse, and that there are a whole host of ways to enjoy our (and each other's) bodies without doing this if we don't want to do it (when they're ready for it!).   And we need to help our children understand boundaries so they can protect themselves when they need to - without getting so caught up in the shame that pervades our thinking about sex.  (Since the sex = shame narrative is deeply pervasive in our culture I don't think we can overcome it completely, but we can make a start...).   In this episode we build on our conversation with Charlotte Rose about sex for us parents to go (far) Beyond Sex Ed with sex educator Dr. Nadine Thornhill, whose direct, fun, engaging style will help you to see that you, too, can have conversations about sex and pleasure with your own children.  You can find more information on Dr. Thornhill's work on her YouTube channel where she addresses topics from what happens if the kid walk in on parents having sex to whether first time sex always hurts, as well as on Instagram.   Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits    If you want to make your own transformation from a relationship where your child JUST DOESN’T LISTEN to one where you have mutual care and respect for each other’s needs, then the Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits workshop is for you.   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. Sign up for the Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits workshop.   Click the banner to learn more.       Jump to highlights: 00:01 Setting Loving and Effective Limits Workshop 02:18 Where we’re at with our mini-series on issues related to sex 03:34 Introducing our guest, Dr. Nadine Thornhill 04:54 The importance of continuing the conversation about sex beyond the basic topics 09:17 Figuring out what kinds of things I need to teach my children and how 12:22 The value of showing our vulnerability to our children 14:45 Talking about the traditional ways we talk about sex and how can we change that narrative 19:03 Having conversations around pleasure of the non-sexual kind 23:27 Modelling intimacy to our children without overdoing it 25:41 Helping our children set boundaries even when we’re having trouble setting boundaries ourselves 31:53 Dr. Thornhill’s son’s case of the “hangry” and how he came to develop recognizing physical signs before he gets hangry 33:41 Talking about shame associated with the White, Christian view of sex 40:34 Talking about bodies and nudity that doesn’t rely on shame 43:07 Going a little deeper into consent and the Authentic Consent Framework 50:48 The House and the Superintendent Metaphor 53:23 How parents can leave more space and be supportive of the potential suite of options about a child’s sexuality 57:46 Should we wait to teach our children about aspects of sex and sexuality until they ask? 01:02:11 Wrapping up   Guest links: Nadine’s website Nadine’s e-books Nadine’s Instagram Nadine’s YouTube Channel   Episodes mentioned: 021: Talk Sex Today! 096: How to prevent sexual abuse 097: How to support gender-creative children   Resource links: FREE Setting Loving (& Effective) Limits Workshop  Sex Is A Funny Word, by Cory Silverberg The Nap Ministry Outspoken Sex Ed

After dinner a few days ago, Carys randomly started telling us that if we want to understand some of the things she's feeling, we should cast our minds back to when we were children and remember how we would have felt about it at the time.  The conversation continued as we explored more of her feelings when she's having difficult moments, and at some point someone (recollections differ on exactly who it was!) suggested we record a podcast episode about it. Carys was immediately on board and wanted to do it right away, but we came back to it the next afternoon.  She thinks that parents often don't understand how their children are feeling and she'd like suggest ways to help your children when they're behaving in a way that may seem 'difficult' to you.   Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits If you want to make your own transformation from a relationship where your child JUST DOESN’T LISTEN to one where you have mutual care and respect for each other’s needs, then the Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits workshop is for you. 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. Sign up now for the self-guided Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits. Click the banner to learn more.       Jump to highlights: (01:00) My special guest in her podcasting debut (02:18) What helps to understand your kid's feelings (03:18) Feeling the physical sensations of frustration (03:42) What Carys feels when she get 'that feeling' (04:19) Parents don't really understand that children sometimes want to be alone (06:07) Different kids deal with things in different ways (07:34) Our new method for when we disagree on things (10:37) We have rewards now (11:46) Carys's thoughts on problem solving   Links: Setting Limits Workshop     [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen [00:00] 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 isn't listening to you and what to do about each one, just head on over to YourParentingMojo.com/Subscribe.   You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the free Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us.   Jen [01:00] Hello and welcome to the, Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. I'm Jen. Who are you?   This is Carys in her world podcasting debut. So if you're not watching this on YouTube, you might want to watch it on YouTube cause then you'll get to see both of us. And so we were having a conversation last night about feelings, right? Yeah. And so I, we were having, you were having ice cream and I was doing dishes.   And all of a sudden you started talking about how you feel when you're having a hard time. And daddy said, You should be in a podcast.   Carys [01:37] Actually, I think I said that.   Jen [01:39] Oh, you did? Oh okay, and daddy agreed. And we were going to do it last night, but you had an appointment to talk to auntie Jas, didn't you? You couldn't do both. So here we are today to talk about feelings.   So how old are you?   Carys [01:52] Six and a half.   Jen [01:53] Six and a half. Okay. You're almost six and three quarters. Aren't you?   Carys [01:56] Yeah. I was going to say that but like....   Jen [02:00] Okay. How many loose teeth do you have? Oh, yeah. Got to be on YouTube to get that one. The two front teeth are wobbly and have been wobbly for a while aren't they? So do you remember what we were talking about last night? Why you started telling us about your feelings? I was trying to remember, and I couldn't remember.   Carys [02:18] I think I just remembered  that it just helps to understand your kids' feelings when you just look back and see a time when you were feeling like that.   Jen [02:32] Oh, that's right. Yeah. That is what you said, isn't it? Yeah. And I was trying to understand more about what you meant by that.   Yeah. Thanks for reminding me about that. And so you were trying to tell us some things about how you feel when you were frustrated. Right? Can you tell us a bit about that?   Carys [02:48] I felt that sometimes maybe somebody, I felt that people weren't really paying attention to me, actually.   Jen [02:58] Okay. And what's it like when you feel like people aren't paying attention to you?   Carys [03:01] It's hard that I don't really want to be with them, or something tells me not to.   Jen [03:08] Okay. So what you're saying is when, uh, when we say something that you don't agree with, is that right? That's when that happens?   Carys [03:18] Yeah.   Jen [03:18] Yeah. Okay. And what, what happens in your body then? What, what kind of things do you feel in your body?   Carys [03:24] Sometimes I just feel like people don't care about me that much.   Jen [03:34] Oh, really? Huh. And does that, do you feel that in your stomach or in your head?   Carys [03:41] Just everywhere.   Jen [03:42] Really. Okay. And so what do you do normally when you get that feeling?   Carys [03:48] I usually like when I'm almost always frustrated, just go in my room.   Jen [03:55] Okay. And sometimes you can seem a little angry to us, right? Like sometimes you close the door or if we try to go to you, you say that you want to be by yourself and you can say it and kind of allowed voice, right? What does it feel like when you're saying that?   Carys [04:11] I just really want to be alone because it helps to... for me to calm down.   Jen [04:19] Okay. And I think that was one of the things that made us want to do the podcast, wasn't it? Was because you were explaining how you think that parents don't really understand that their children sometimes just want to be alone.   Carys [04:32] Yeah. Cause I usually, I sometimes just shut the door on you because I, I just don't want to tell you. And I feel like I can't talk to you at all. So I just shut the door cause I don't want, cause I want to be left alone.   Jen [04:49] And how does being alone help you? How does that help you feel differently?   Carys [04:52] It's just... talking kind of distracts me from everything a little bit.   Jen [04:57] Oh, okay. So when you're, when you're alone by yourself, it seems like you're able to calm yourself down better, right? Like it's easier for you to calm down by yourself then when you're with other people. So, um, I've noticed that then once you've calmed down, you usually come out again. Yeah?   Carys [05:14] Yeah.   Jen [05:15] And then how do you feel?   Carys [05:19] So like sad or something, but I usually just wander around for a little bit.   Jen [05:28] Yeah. And so I'm wondering if there are things that you would like us to do when you're frustrated that we don't do now.   Carys [05:38] Usually it's just if you see me shut the door, that means I don't want you to come in, but you can, but you can still like go into the doorway where your kid is and if they shut the door, it probably means they want to be left alone but if they let you come in, they probably actually really want to be with you.   Jen [06:07] Okay. So you think different kids deal with things in different ways? And that parents can maybe listen to their kids?   Carys [06:14] Yeah. And sometimes I feel usually that I only let you come in cause daddy sometimes just makes me feel even more frustrated.   Jen [06:24] Yeah. We've talked about that, right? How daddy and I were raised very differently than the ways we are raising you. And sometimes it's hard to stop doing things from the way that you learned them when you were growing up, right? Do you remember what you told me when I said that to you last time, a few weeks ago, that we were doing things differently, you said "I'm so glad we're doing things differently."   You remember that?   Carys [06:47] No.   Jen [06:49] No? Yeah. So, um, so I'm wondering if there's anything else that you want parents to know about things that children might be feeling that maybe their children can't tell their parents about?   Carys [07:05] It could be just; they don't really want to see their parents  that much actually.   Jen [07:13] In that moment?   Carys [07:14] And they could just run like  kind of sneak around and wander around.   Jen [07:20] You mean when they're having a hard time?   Carys [07:22] Uh hmm.   Jen [07:22] Okay. Because they need to be by themselves?   Carys [07:24] Uh huh. But they really want to play. So I usually when I want to do that, I just wander around...   Jen [07:32] Yeah?   Carys [07:33] ...the house usually.   Jen [07:34] And so when we do disagree about things, sometimes you get frustrated, right. And then after you've calmed down, we usually.. . There's something we usually do, right?   Carys [07:45] Hmmmm talk about it?   Jen [07:47] Yeah. We have a problem solving conversation. Yeah. And we've been doing those in a new way. Haven't we. Do you want to hold up the diagram, the picture you got to kind of hold it kind of between us so that people can see it?   And so what was happening here? What was happening with this problem?   Carys [08:05] I did not want to brush my teeth.   Jen [08:09] There's the two, there's my toothbrush drawing in the middle and with a big X through it. And then you drew that didn't you? What's that for?   Carys [08:17] Loving teeth. Brushing, no.   Jen [08:23] Yeah. And so we started talking about the reasons why you don't like toothbrushing and you said like, there's you up here. So you look tired cause you didn't like doing it when you're tired and uh, Oh, you, you don't like holding your arm up. So there's you with your arms down. There's you're excited for story time. You liked that one, didn't you? With your holding the book. And then we talked about how you felt about it and that, uh, you often felt frustrated when we tell you to brush your teeth and that it's time to brush your teeth and also mad because you feel, you said again, that I feel like you don't care about me.   And there was one of the things I paid with the toothbrush being loud. Right. You didn't like that either. And so what did we talk about from there? Oh and tooth toothbrushing is boring and it takes too long. It was a whole lot of things you didn't like about toothbrushing wasn't there. And, uh, let's see.   Do we, do we, I guess we didn't look at, um, daddy's and my feelings on this one, did we? Um, cause we had already looked at it with other problem-solving issues, but we talked about some ideas that we could do. You had an idea of brushing every other night instead of every night. So we wrote that down, uh, brushing  after every meal.   Carys [09:43] That wouldn't work.   Jen [09:44] Yeah, you actually, you didn't you say you were going to brush after breakfast this morning. Isn't that what the one number one was for on the floor?   Carys [09:53] Whaaat?   Jen [09:53] Can you turn it around a little bit? Cause I think people can't see you. They're just looking at the back of your head right now.   And you said do it whenever you feel like it in the day. We talked about that, didn't we? The problem with that though, was that then if you don't do it right before bed, the bacteria can be on your teeth. All night. You said find a way to remember to brush after right after dinner. Oh, and that was that the pizza that you drew to represent dinner?   Yeah. And so where did we end up with toothbrushing? It wasn't a place that I would've thought we would have ended up. What are we doing right now? Can you turn around and people can see you? You're sort of facing backwards.   Carys [10:28] Doing two months of brushing teeth. Well, anytime your dinner basically.   Jen [10:37] Yeah. After dinner, right?   Yeah. And then the part about it that I, it wasn't what I thought it would be was you get a reward at the end of it, don't you? What's your reward?   Carys [10:49] Well, a sticker book at the end of the month and also talk about the money.   Jen [10:58] The money? Oh, yeah. Daddy didn't daddy offered to pay you. How much was it? I forgot. Oh, we wrote it down 25 cents for seven days in a row of brushing.   Oh. And there was supposed to be a bonus for two times a day, wasn't there? You forgot about the bonus, didn't you? You can bring that back. So, yeah. So I started looking at ways that we could help you brush your teeth and one of the first things that came up was 'You should reward your child.' And I said that, and you said, I want to do that. Right? So you picked your own reward. You got a ring there, don't you? Okay. Um, I think this is going to make it hard for people to watch.   So I'm wondering you have a lot of practice at problem solving now, don't you? What do you think of problem solving?   Carys [11:54] I think it's actually very, very fun.   Jen [11:58] Yeah? What makes it fun?   Carys [11:59] It's just that I find the pictures sometimes really, really silly.   Jen [12:06] Yes, you do. And what do you think about the ideas that we come up with in problem solving?   Carys [12:13] Pretty good. Yeah.   Jen [12:15] Yeah? They usually work for you in some way?   Carys [12:17] Some way, yeah.   Jen [12:18] Yeah. And then what happens if, if it ends up not working out, what did we do after that?   Carys [12:23] Problem solving.   Jen [12:24] More problem-solving, right? Yeah. If one of us decides that, Ooh, stacked rings. Um, do you want another one of those?   If one of us decides that it isn't working, then we have another conversation and we say, Oh, we thought this was going to work and actually parts of it. It's not working for one of us. Can we have another conversation? And then do we sometimes get to solutions that work better do you think?   Carys [12:47] Yeah.   Jen [12:49] Yeah. Okay. So I'm wondering if there's anything else that you think parents should know about their children's feelings or about solving problems with their children?   Carys [13:01] Well, I would just suggest when you see your kid wandering around, try not to interrupt them cause it sometimes makes me a little bit more frustrated when you do.   Jen [13:16] Yeah? Okay. So, so each child might do a different thing, right? Not all children might do the wandering around thing, but maybe if parents can see what their child does they can think, okay. Maybe my child needs to do that and I should give them a little bit of space.? Yeah. And you think that would help their children?   Carys [13:35] Yeah. Cause I feel like probably most children like to be alone or really like to be with their parents.   Jen [13:44] Yeah. And it's our job to figure out which one of those our child wants.   Yeah. And it will be different for each child. And then if we can do that, we can help you to feel calmer, and then we can feel calmer as well cause sometimes it's hard for us when our children are doing things that we find difficult to understand. Ooh, you got three rings together. All right. So if parents want to know more about understanding their children's feelings and doing problem solving conversations, I'm hosting a workshop which is called Setting Loving and Effective Limits. And we do actually learn a little bit about setting limits, but most of what we learn about is how to set way fewer limits. We don't actually have many limits for free, right? The things that you can't do?   Carys [14:35] I found 8.   Jen [14:35] You did find an 8. Should we show people the eight here's the eight. And so, if you want to learn how to set way fewer limits than you ever thought possible, and also learn some of the problem solving techniques that Carys and I use on a regular basis, you can go to YourParentingMojo.com/SettingLimits, and we will be there for a weeklong workshops starting on Monday, April 26. And we'll walk through the whole thing with you and we'll get you super comfortable with using these ways of being with your children so that you can respond to them effectively... wow. Look at that. You're making rolled up art... even when they're having difficult feelings. Is there anything else you want to say?   How do you use when we're, when you're doing little videos around the house, how do you wrap them up?   Carys [15:24] Usually with thank you...

Today we build on episodes that we've done in the past on talking with children about the basics of sex (so when you listen to this episode we're assuming you've got the basics covered - things like using anatomically correct names for body parts and taking basic steps to prevent sexual abuse).   This is the first in a mini-series of episodes that digs deeper into topics related to sex.  Here we talk with Charlotte Rose, co-host of the Speaking of Sex podcast by the Pleasure Mechanics, about what and how we adults learned about sex. We talk about the shame that pretty much all of us learned to associate with sex (and how to overcome that), and what we can do to improve the chances of having sex with our partner - even if we're feeling so tired that this currently seems out of the question.   We're setting the stage here to approach sex from a less pressured, more fun perspective - which will help us in an upcoming episode to figure out what we want to discuss with our children about sex, sexuality, and pleasure.   Jump to highlights: (01:00) Today's topic and Parenting Membership reopening announcement (02:20) Setting Loving and Effective Limits workshop announcement (03:55) Chris and Charlotte Rose the Pleasure Mechanics (05:16) The primary focus of today's episode (06:09) Sex isn't what it used to be before we became parents (08:39) Responsive desire and spontaneous desire (09:17) Erotic simulation and how there is nothing wrong with your sexual relationship (11:54) Creating a culture of pleasure within your relationship (14:42) Continual consent - it doesn't always need to lead to sex (15:34) Sex is adults at play (17:37) Sex educations centered around abstinence, secrecy, and shame and how we move forward from that (20:39) A parenting opportunity to create a different culture for our children, so that they have to unlearn so much less with regards to sex (22:35) How does shame show up in parents' sexual relationship? (25:21) So much judgment about sexuality and how it gets in the way of our connection with our partner (29:04) A culture of community care to have these conversations (29:49) Initiation and refusal/rejection (34:36) Mindful sex: How to enjoy sex more (39:27) Finding that balance when having the sex conversation with our children (42:23) Giving kids the building blocks so that they can have an experience to healthy sexuality when it is time for them (45:39) Experiencing self massage in a non sexual way (50:16) Body neutrality (51:36) Wrapping up   Here are the resources we discussed on the show:   Pleasure Mechanics Resources Charlotte & Chris' free online course The Erotic Essentials Conversation starters about sex Podcast episode on spontaneous vs. responsive desire Podcast episode on mindful sex (making sex better through focusing on the present) Podcast episode on body image     Other Resources AASECT therapist referral directory Peer-reviewed article on the 237 reasons people have sex Guy Winch's TED Talk on How to Practice Emotional First Aid, as well as more explicit resources on why rejection hurts so much - and in peer-reviewed form too Research on mindful sex Outspoken Sex Ed     Made for you by Jen: The Parenting Membership FREE Setting Loving and Effective Limits Workshop   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen  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 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 on 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  01:00 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We have a bit of a different episode lined up for you today, and if you usually listen to the show with your children around, you might want to reconsider that one today because we're going to be talking about S-E-X. And now we have thousands of little kids around the world asking, "What's S-E-X?" So before we get started with this awesome conversation, I wanted to let you know about a couple things happening in the Your Parenting Mojo world. Firstly, open enrollment for the Parenting Membership is coming up starting on May 2. The membership helps families to take information from the podcast and provides the guidance and the support that you need to help you implement these ideas in your own home with your own family. So whether you're struggling with parenting at the moment and wondering how much longer can things keep going like this, or if you're seeing the vaccine-related light at the end of the tunnel and thinking it's not going to be like this forever, and you're looking for tools to support you through that transition, as well as the normal day to day challenges that will still keep coming up as we all get back to real life, the Parenting membership provides the support that you need to not just survive, but thrive in your parenting journey. I’ll share more in the coming weeks. But in the meantime, you can go to YourParentingMojo.com/ParentingMembership to learn more about the membership. And while you're there, you can join the waitlist if you'd like to be the first to be notified when it reopens.   Jen  02:20 For those of you who might be interested in the membership but would like to dip a toe in the water first or if you can't wait and you need help ASAP then I have some news for you there too. i've just reopened registration for my Setting Loving and Effective Limits Workshop. Normally this is available to pay for and work through at your own pace, but starting Monday, April 26, I will walk you through the whole thing in a series of exercise to help you see limits in an entirely different way. You'll have a little bit of reading and a short exercise to do each day for five days and a supportive community that isn't on Facebook to ask questions and get answers in the community as well as through a masterclass call, where you'll get the chance to ask me questions directly. if you find yourself setting a lot of limits on your children's behavior and they aren't listening to you or they're actively defying you. in the workshop, you'll learn how to cut the number of limits you set by at least half while also not becoming the dreaded permissive parent whose child walks all over them. Parents who go through the workshop report that the tone of the interactions they have in their family makes a huge shift after they learn these tools. And suddenly their children who used to resist every single little thing, are now willing to do amazing things like cooperate, and collaborate, and compromise. So if you could use some more of these things in your life, then head on over to YourParentingMojo.com/SettingLimits to register for the FREE Setting Loving and Effective Limits workshop. Registrations open now and the workshop get started on Monday, April 26. I’ll see you there.   Jen  03:55 So we were supposed to have two guests today, Chris and Charlotte Rose, who are a couple and who are known as the Pleasure Mechanics, and they are also the host of the podcast Speaking of Sex with the Pleasure Mechanics. And unfortunately Chris is in some gastrointestinal distress and is unable to join us today, but Charlotte has gamely agreed to appear with us, and we're hoping that Chris will be available on a future date to continue the conversation. So I found Chris and Charlotte in a really random way because I was exploring a blog post that therapists Dr. Esther Perel had written called the 7 Verbs That Shaped the Way You Love., and we were looking at that in the Parenting Membership Community because one of the important ways that we've learned about these verbs is through our relationships with our children. And we learned about these through our interactions with our parents. And so the most interesting and useful analysis that I found that super short blog post was in a podcast hosted by our new friends Chris and Charlotte and when I started digging into their work, I realized that I wanted to explore so much more about the ways that our children learn about being in relationships as well as about sex from us. And so I’m not just talking about the anatomically correct terminology and how to spot sexual abuse because we have done episodes on both of those things but how to help children understand boundaries and communication and pleasure in their intimate relationships.   Jen  05:16 And so today we're going to focus primarily on the parents angle at this and then we will have more guests, hopefully Chris and some other guests as well in the future, looking at how our children learn about this and what our children are learning and what we want to be teaching them about this. So to formally introduce them, Chris who wishes she were here and Charlotte who is here have very similar bios. Reading through their bios, they both studied Sociology as undergrads, then Sexological Bodywork and then Somatic Sexology and then erotic massage and they've been creating online resources on erotic education since 2006. The internet was a thing in 2006. And they're also parents of a six-year-old so welcome Charlotte today and welcome in spirit to Chris as well.   Charlotte Rose  06:04 Thank you so much. I’m so happy to be here and yes...   Charlotte Rose  06:06 Chris is so sorry not to be here but hopefully you will chat another moment. Yeah.   Jen  06:06 Yeah.   Jen  06:09 Yeah I hope so too. Awesome! Well we are really glad to have you here and we're wondering if maybe we can kind of ease into this topic with something that I’m guessing affects a lot of parents and maybe you're not immune from this either despite all of your training and that is that sex probably isn't what it used to be before we became parents. And we actually use the term kind of broadly in our lives B.C. to mean Before Carys which is our daughter's name and so we might say something like "Oh, we used to do X like mountain biking Before Carys - B.C. -  and of course sex is one of those things that can fit into that framework as well. And so I’m curious with all the people that you work with I’m sure many of them are parents, how common is this in among the people that you work with?   Charlotte Rose  06:52 It is so common and I really want people to know that that it is so normal and it makes so much sense that it is harder to prioritize sex in these early years of having kids especially some experts say that up to kind of when your youngest kid is four or five that your life just is so different in this area and it makes sense like our focus of attention is so on this little being all of a sudden and that changes the relational dynamics entirely in your family, in your relationship. We just don't have enough time to take care of ourselves to rest to sleep. Our hormones have changed our experience of our body has changed. Even for non-carrying parents which is also interesting to think about like the oxytocin levels we're getting from looking at our baby is nourishing in a way and we sometimes don't need it as much from our partner and somebody can feel left out because of that. There are just hundreds of dynamics going on depending on your specific family but the similarities are that it is extremely hard to create time and have the energy to be able to really cultivate this part of our life. And we really like to remember that there are seasons of sexuality in our lifetime and that this one is a harder one and partly if we can go at it knowing that that's normal and that we want to stay connected as much as possible so when we get to the other side of that we still want to be having sex with this person and that we feel connected and supported enough that we are interested and want to keep our sexual relationship going. I also want to tell people that like I cannot tell you how many like late 50s, 60s, 70-year-olds report they're having the best sex of our lives. So also just want to know that there is hope ahead because I found that really like surprising and interesting when I first kept hearing this message.   Charlotte Rose  08:39 But one of the important things I want people to know to be able to shift this slowly and to try and increase the amount of connection and intimate connection we can be having is to really know about this idea of responsive desire versus spontaneous desire because this is something that has been studied and it's so important to know. So we have this cultural idea that we experience desire first and then arousal. And often that is how men experience arousal but that's not even always true. But in reality there is this whole... so it's sort of like a lightning bolt hits you...   Jen  09:14 Yeah like how it happens in the movies.   Charlotte Rose  09:17 That's how we think of right like what happens in Hollywood films so we've been trained like that is what sex is and anyone who deviates from that is broken or not normal and there's something wrong with you. But in reality there's this whole other way of being with our desire and arousal where we're not that

Do we really know what implicit bias is, and whether we have it? This is the second episode on our two-part series on implicit bias; the first part was an interview with Dr. Mahzarin Banaji, former Dean of the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and co-creator of the Implicit Association Test. But the body of research on this topic is large and quite complicated, and I couldn't possibly do it justice in one episode.  There are a number of criticisms of the test which are worth examining, so we can get a better sense for whether implicit bias is really something we should be spending our time thinking about - or if our problems with explicit bias are big enough that we would do better to focus there first. Jump to highlights: (03:38) Is implicit bias baked into our bodies? (06:27) About the Implicit Association Test (IAT) (08:13) Criticism of the IAT and Dr. Banaji’s response (12:48) Blindspot and the inception of the IAT (13:41) We make judgements about individuals based on how they look (14:12) We often say things that aren't true, even if we think we are truthful (16:01) The premise of the IAT and how it works (18:13) Conflicting definition of what implicit bias is (19:40) Meta-analysis of implicit bias (33:16) Implicit bias on the decline in recent years (35:37) The persistent problem with IAT (42:59) From macro-issues to the micro-issues of IAT (53:54) My takeways Resources: Implicit Association Test [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen  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 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  00:59 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Before we start this week's episode, I wanted to take a minute to thank you for being a part of this parenting journey with me and to share a quick update on where things stand with the podcast after four and a half years now. What is that saying? The days are long and the years are short? It certainly seems to be the case here. And well for some of you listening, this may be the very first episode that you're listening to, there are many others who have been with me for the entire 132 plus episodes that I've created to date. We're close to surpassing a million and a half downloads from all around the world, and my goodness, it's a bit strange to even say those words aloud given that I started the show with basically no idea whether anyone would be interested in listening. And it's such an honor to me when you recommend the show to your friends and to other parents at your daycare or preschool. When you share specific episodes that have helped you to find the answers that work with your family and your online communities. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that developing Your Parenting Mojo, which is now the podcast episodes, blog posts, courses, workshops, membership content is more than a full-time job. I have a very small team that helps me to keep my own sanity and my husband is now involved as well. Maybe one day he'll even listen to as many episodes as some of my most dedicated listeners have. Even my daughter now signs off on her videos at home with the brought to you by YourParentingMojo.com. And as the word continues to spread, more and more parents are making transformative lasting change using the methods that we talked about here on the show. We are big cohort in the current Taming Your Triggers workshop who are supporting each other and understanding the sources of their triggered feelings. And just a week or two in they were already reporting the ability to create space for responses to their children that fit with their values, where that just hadn't seemed possible before. And I'm very happy to share that the Parenting Membership open enrollment is just around the corner and will run from May 2 through May 12 in time for celebrating Mother's Day, while the learning membership is going to reopen later in the summer. The community of parents that have already enrolled in the Parenting Membership continues to grow and it's a great resource of knowledge and support and community to help anyone who's looking to apply the ideas and strategies that you hear on the podcast in your own family at home. So I'll share more as we get closer to open enrollment. But for those of you who want to learn more or to join the waitlist, feel free to go to YourParentingMojo.com/ParentingMembership. And thanks again to each and every one of you who have joined me on this parenting journey over the last four and a half years. I learn and I grow every day as a parent and it's amazing to share all this with you.   Jen  03:38 So let's get into our real topic of the day, which is part two of our miniseries on implicit bias. Today we're going to continue to open a real can of worms that's already half opened, and that I had no idea that I was about to open when I started researching this episode. So I've been interested in the connection between the brain and the body for some time now, and I'm planning a series of episodes to explore this topic in some depth. And one aspect of this is related to knowledge that we hold in our bodies rather than in our brains. And as I started to explore that idea, I was thinking about intuition, which we often experience as a felt sense in our bodies rather than a decision that we make in our brains. And that led me down a path toward understanding the role our gut plays in what we know. But another branch of this path led me to the topic of implicit bias because I was thinking, Okay, if we start relying on our brains a bit less and trusting our bodies a bit more, how can we know that this will lead us in a direction that's actually aligned with our values? What if implicit bias means that listening to our bodies actually takes us away from living our values because our bodies have implicit bias baked in so deeply?   Jen  04:43 Now I've read the book Blind Spot: The Hidden Biases of Good People by doctors Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald some years ago, but I hadn't dug into the research behind it at the time. The book's premise is that we have visual blind spots, which are places where visual information is missing, but our brains fill in the gaps without us realizing it, which can be seen when a person whose visual cortex has been damaged and they can't see an object like a hammer in front of them, but if you ask them to reach out and grasp it, then they'll be able to do it. The author state that a parallel idea exists with non-visual stimuli as well, they say and I'm going to quote "Rather than an effective visual perception, this book focuses on another type of blind spot, one that contains a large set of biases and keeps them hidden just as patients who can't see a hammer can still act as if they do. Hidden biases are capable of guiding our behavior without our being aware of their role. What are the hidden biases of this book's title? They are for lack of a better term bits of knowledge about social groups. These bits of knowledge are stored in our brains because we encounter them so frequently in our cultural environments. Once lodged in our minds, hidden biases can influence our behavior towards members of particular social groups, but we remain oblivious to their influence. In this book, we aim to make clear why many scientists ourselves very much included, now recognize hidden bias blind spots as fully believable because of the sheer weight of scientific evidence that demands this conclusion. But convincing readers of this is no simple challenge. How can we show the existence of something in our own minds of which we remain completely unaware?" The book goes on to describe a test called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT, which was designed by Dr. Greenwald and modified by both authors over the years, starting when Dr. Banaji was Dr. Greenwald’s graduate student.   Jen  06:27 And so I'd known about what is the Race IAT  for a number of years, there are actually now quite a few of them on topics ranging from age to religion to body weight. The landing page at implicit.harvard.edu, which is where these tests are housed, doesn't say much about the purpose of these tests. You have to click into the About the IAT page to see the description that "The IAT measures the strength of associations between concepts, for example, Black people, gay people, and evaluations, for example, good and bad, or stereotypes, for example, athletic or clumsy. The main idea is that making your responses easier when closely related items share the same response key, the IAT scores based on how long it takes a person on average, to sort the words in the third part of the IAT versus the fifth part of the IAT. We would say that one has an implicit preference for thin people relative to fat people if they are faster to categorize words, when thin people and good share a response key, and fat people and bad share a response key relative to the reverse."   Jen  07:25 I think I’d even taken the Race IAT once before, a long time ago, which is the version of the test that most people assume you’re talking about when you mention the IAT.  I don’t remember for sure what the result was but I assume it gave the result that it gives about 75% of people who take it, which is to say that they have implicit bias against Black people.   Jen  07:44 I came back to the book again and poked around on both Dr. Banaji’s and Dr. Greenwald’s websites to see what they had been up to recently.  I noticed that the most recent publication on Dr. Banaji’s website was co-authored with Dr. Yarrow Dunham, whom we met way back in episode 28 on how social groups form, which is linked to implicit bias.  I emailed him and asked if he would be kind enough to introduce me to Dr. Banaji, which he was, and she quickly responded to say that while she was too swamped for an interview she’d be happy to answer three or four questions.  So: so far, so good.   Jen  08:13 Now, Pretty often when I reach out to researchers I’ve been able to get an overview of the concept and of their work but I haven’t yet done a deep dive, because if they say ‘no’ then I will have wasted several days of prep work as I’d have to find someone else to ask and then have to do a deep dive into *their* work.  So after Dr. Banaji agreed to answer some questions I reread Blindspot, and thirty peer-reviewed papers on implicit bias, and some really well-written articles in the popular press (and some not so well-written ones as well), and then things got a bit difficult.  I want to give a special shout-out to journalist Jesse Singal, who wrote a really excellent piece on the topic of the research behind the IAT in an online magazine called The Cut.  I had it open in my browser for a while as I was digging into the peer-reviewed literature and when I finally came back to it I found he had already coalesced a number of the thoughts that were swirling in my brain and had pointed to many of the studies I had by then found “by myself,” and directed me to a few more besides.  He also reached out to a number of the researchers who have been involved in quite a drama of dueling analyses about the IAT which has played out in peer reviewed journals over the last decade or so (dramas in the peer reviewed journal world tend to unfold in slow motion!).  It’s been a drama because there seems to be a great deal of uncertainty about whether the IAT measures what it says it measures, and whether that has any practical significance in the real world.   I ended up actually writing the majority of this episode’s content to try to explain to myself what this web of findings was, and I sent the text to Dr. Banaji along with some succinct questions and she responded that she had never met an interviewer who had done more in-depth preparation and would I like to talk?  So I said yes, I very much would, and you’ve already heard the outcome of that interview in a recent episode, where hopefully you got a good grounding in what the IAT is and how it works.   Jen  09:56 And we'll cover a bit more on that in a few minutes. But I have to say that I was highly hesitant to try to do anything that looked remotely like challenging the research on which the IAT sits because of something that appeared toward the end of Jessie Singal’s article in The Cut.  He emailed Dr. Banaji with some questions about the kinds of methodological questions about the IAT that we’re going to look at in this episode, and he says she “repeatedly asserted that criticisms of the IAT come from a small group of reactionary researchers, and that questioning the IAT is not something normal, well-adjusted people do.”   Jen  10:30 He goes on to quote her directly: “Of course it annoys people when a simple test that spits out two numbers produces this sort of attention, changes scientific practice, and appeals to ordinary people. Ordinary people who are not scared to know what may be in their minds. It scares people (fortunately a negligible minority) that learning about our minds may lead people to change their behavior so that their behavior may be more in line with their ideals and aspirations. The IAT scares people who say things like “look, the water fountains are desegregated, what’s your problem.”   Jen  11:01 […]   Jen  11:01 By and large I operate on the view that I need to pay attention to REAL criticisms of the IAT. Criticisms that come from people who are experts – that is[,] people who understand the science’s assumptions about response latency measures. People who do original work using such methods. I’m sorry to say this but we are all so far along in our work that I at least only read criticisms from people who are experts. I don’t read commentaries from non-experts. There’s too much interesting stuff to do and too many amazing people doing it for me to justify worrying about a small group of aggrieved individuals who think that Black people have it easy in American society and that the IAT work might make their lives easier. The IAT as you know is not about any one group, but this small group of critics ignore everything other than race, and it may be a good idea to find out why that may be the case.”   Jen  11:47 Now, if you've been listening for a while, I’m sure you can see the red flags going off in my conflict-avoiding mind already – I’m not an expert; I don’t do original work in this area, and thus she wouldn’t read any commentary or criticism that I proposed, which is why I didn’t get into any of this in the conversation with her.  So I want to be clear what we’re trying to do here.  This is NOT an expose of the IAT, or of Dr. Banaji.  I’m really grateful that she took the time to talk with me, and I’m grateful to Dr. Yarrow Dunham for connecting us.  But I believe strongly enough that the interview we conducted doesn’t tell the whole story of the IAT that I’m going to try to dig more deeply on it here so we can understand whether implicit bias is really something we should pay attention to.   Jen  12:28 So, in this episode my plan is to walk through what the research says about what implicit bias is, and how it’s measured, and why that’s important, and what implications this has for how we and our children interact with the world.  I should mention that the research base on this topic is absolutely massive, and even what has now turned into two episodes isn’t really enough to do it justice.   Jen  12:48 So our story starts with the creation of the Implicit Association Test, or IAT, and that story is told in Dr. Banaji and Greenwald’s book Blindspot.  A substantial chunk of the book is about convincing you that you have blindspots – that you and I, just like everyone else, don’t perceive things in the way they actually happened.  So, for example, if you’re on a jury in a murder trial where the defendant is accused of drunk driving, and an eyewitness says that the defendant staggered against a table and knocked a bowl to the floor as they left the party they were both at then you might believe the eye witness, but if the eye witness says “On his way out the door the defendant staggered against a serving table, knocking a bowl of guacamole dip to the floor and splattering guacamole on the white shag carpet,” you’ll be more convinced of the defendant’s guilt.  Vivid details make information more memorable (which, incidentally, is why stories in children’s textbooks often contain little snippets of vivid detail – they make the material easier to remember, which helps the child pass the test more easily).   Jen  13:41 We also make judgements about individuals based on how they look, and while we might think we’re pretty good at it we’re actually not researchers have asked research participants to judge the trustworthiness of people shown in photographs, they don’t do much better than chance at discriminating between Nobel Peace Prize recipients and criminals who have appeared on the TV show America’s Most Wanted.  A lot of the time we make judgements about people based on what social group they are in, which is why Dr. Dunham’s work is relevant here – you might want to revisit episode 28 on how social groups form for a refresher on that.   Jen  14:12 And then a chapter of Blindspot talks about how often we say things that aren’t true, even if we think we’re a pretty truthful person, such as the answers to the question “how are you?” which was a big cultural shock to me when I got to the U.S. because the person asking the question had often already walked by by the time I could even think about an answer, because they didn’t really want to know the answer to the question, which means the answer we give is pretty much irrelevant.  We might lie and say we don’t have any cash on us when a person on the street asks us for money or tell a telemarketer that we aren’t home when we were the one who answered the phone.  We may lie to the doctor when they ask how often we exercise, or how many drinks we have each day, or whether we’ve ever used illicit drugs.  We try to manage the impressions that other people have of us,

Explicitly, nobody really believes in gender stereotypes anymore, but when we look at the world, and who's where and how much money people make, and so on, it still seems to be there. And the answer to that is yeah, because it's there. It's just not something we say. It’s more of something we do. -Dr. Mahzarin Banaji   What is implicit bias?  Do I have it (and do you?)?  Does my (and your?) child have it?  And if we do have implicit bias, what, if anything, can we do about it? Join me in a conversation with Dr. Mahzarin Banaji, former Dean of the Department of Psychology at Harvard University and co-creator of the Implicit Association Test, for an overview of implicit bias and how we can know if we (and our children) have it. This episode will be followed by a second part in this mini-series where we dig deeply into the research, where results are complex and often contradictory.  Stay tuned!   Jump to highlights: (01:00) An intro of  Dr. Mahzarin Banaji (02:58) What is implicit bias? (07:48) Differentiating bias that you are aware of and bias that you aren’t aware of (08:56) Describing the Implicit Association test (18:11) What the research says about where implicit bias comes from (24:50) Development of group preference from implicit association (32:18) Group bias and its implications towards individual psychological health (40:44) What can be done to potentially prevent implicit biases from developing? (46:56) Some good progress with society’s bias in general and areas that need working on   Resources: Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen  00:02 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.   Jen  00:06 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.   Jen  00:29 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.   Jen  00:42 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  01:00 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today we're going to look at the topic of implicit bias. Now I've been thinking for a while about running a series of episodes on the connection between our brains and our bodies because I've been learning about that and the wisdom that our bodies can hold and wondering, well how can we learn how to pay more attention to our bodies? And then I started thinking about intuition. And I wondered, well, how can we know if we can trust our intuition? What if our intuition is biased? So I started looking at the concept of implicit bias and it became immediately clear who I should ask to interview Dr. Mahzarin Banaji. Dr. Banaji studies thinking and feeling as they unfold in a social context with a focus on mental systems that operate in implicit or unconscious mode. Since 2002, she has been Richard Clarke Cabot professor of social ethics in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, where she was also the Chair of the Department of Psychology for four years while holding two other concurrent appointments. She has been elected fellow of a whole host of extremely impressive societies and was named William James Fellow for a lifetime of significant intellectual contributions to the basic science of psychology by the Association of Psychological Science, an organization of which she also served as president. Along with her colleague, Dr. Anthony Greenwald. She's conducted decades of research on implicit bias and co-authored the book Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People.   Jen  02:21 I should also say that there are a lot of issues that we only got a chance to skim over at a fairly high level in this conversation, which I'm recording this introduction afterwards, because Dr. Banaji was quite pressed for time. And I'm planning to release an episode that follows up into these issues and dives into them at a much deeper level soon. So please consider this part one of a two-part conversation with you.   Jen  02:42 Alright, let's go ahead and get started with the interview.   Jen  02:45 Welcome Dr. Banaji. Thanks so much for being here.   Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  02:48 Hi there.   Jen  02:49 So I wonder if we can start out by understanding a bit more about what implicit bias is. I hear it all over the place, and can you help us to just define what that is, please?   Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  02:58 Sure. So implicit bias, quite simply, is a tendency in every human being to favor one individual over another, one social group over another, and to do so without conscious awareness, or without the ability to be able to exert conscious control over the judgement that one is making. So let's just break the phrase down into the two words that constitute it. The word implicit and the word bias, okay? Bias, what is it? It's simply for us a deviation from neutrality, it is privileging one option over another, right? If I say I prefer blue to red, I'm biased in favor of blue, and not in favor of red relatively speaking. So that for us is what a bias is. And implicit just means that that favoring of red over blue or blue over red is something that I'm not even aware of. It's just that when I go into a store, I pick up clothing that is all blue rather than red. That put together tells us that implicit bias is a deviation from neutrality in ways we ourselves would not be happy to see ourselves doing. If it's in the domain of color, who cares whether I prefer blue to red or red to blue but imagine now that it's not blue and red. Imagine that it is a native born child in the classroom, and an immigrant child in the classroom. And even though I as a teacher believe very much that both should be treated equally that is to say, if they do something good, I should reward both equally. If they did something that's bad behavior, I should reprimand them equally, I should encourage both equally to pursue new things in their lives. I should support both of them equally to meet their goals and so on. A deviation from neutrality would mean that I'm doing these things both the good and bad things in order to teach a child something, that I'm doing them selectively, that I'm doing more for one category over another. So that's all biases. And teachers are so well intentioned, just like parents, what they want is the best for all of the kids in their class. And so when we discovered that a teacher may not be aware but is systematically calling on certain people in the classroom, or saying, "Aha!" or "Good idea!" to some rather than others, then we would say it's implicit. And as you can imagine, teachers, by and large, are very good people and so when they're biased it is almost always without their awareness.   Jen  05:41 Okay, so is this lack of awareness perspective, that's really the key, then?   Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  05:45 That's exactly right. And the reason this is interesting is because if you look in almost any society, but let's just take American society or the Western world or whatever, some large group of people, you will notice that explicit forms of bias have been coming down, at least in what people say on a survey. If you say to a teacher, "Do you think that native born children are just inherently smarter than immigrant children?" The teacher will likely say, "No, I don't believe that that is the case at all. I think all children are talented in all these different ways." So if you measure it explicitly, if you say, "Tell me is this immigrant kid better or worse than this native one kid?" You will not see any evidence of bias. But when you sit in the back of the classroom, and you just measure what the teacher is doing, who the teacher looks at who the teacher says nice things to who the teacher calls on, and you see that there is a systematic difference, then we say we must become interested in this, because the child is experiencing these good and bad things the teacher is doing, but the teacher has no awareness. And think about the child. What does the child think is going on? The child might think I'm bad, or I'm good, right? And that's why we should be interested in both kinds of measures, what people say to us directly, and also what they may not be able to say because they don't think they're that way.   Jen  07:10 Okay, I'm wondering if we can just pull that apart a little bit. And we're sort of using teachers as an example. But this could just as well apply to managers or anyone in any situation. I can understand if a researcher were to come and say, "Do you think that native born children have different capabilities than immigrant children?" Then, I understand the correct thing for me to say in that moment is "No, of course not." But I may still be thinking that and I may have awareness that I'm thinking that. So I'm trying to understand the difference between an explicit bias that I know it's not a socially correct thing to say, and implicit bias that I might not be aware of, how can I parse that difference?   Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  07:48 Yeah, it's a great question. For now, I would say, an explicit bias is something that you know, even if you don't say it to other people, but you know. So let's say that I believe that boys are better at math than girls are. But I'm not going to say that because I don't want my girl students to hear that or feel bad about that. And so I'm not going to say it, but I think it and I'm able to consciously put those words together in my mind, boys are better at math than girls, I know that. As long as that is the case, we would say it's consciously accessible to you. Your mind is capable of saying A is better than B or whatever and to do that to yourself, at least. What makes it implicit is when you say boys and girls are equally good at math, I believe it. You never say to yourself; boys are better at math than girls. But if we look at some other aspects of your behavior, who you spend more time teaching a difficult math problem to, etc., then we would say it is.   Jen  08:56 Okay, perfect. Thank you for helping us to understand that distinction. And so then I wonder if we can go from there into the Implicit Association test, which is something you've spent a bit of time working on over the years. Can you tell us what that is? And how does that measure implicit bias?   Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  09:11 Yeah. So as you can imagine, your listeners and you will easily see what the problem is. A person, if asked genuinely and truly says, "I have no bias." And when you measure their judgments and actions in some way, you're seeing a systematic effect. How do you measure that? When the person themselves is saying no? In psychology, we've relied for over 100 years on what we call explicit measures. If you want to know something about what a person is thinking, ask them. How stressed are you feeling? Okay. Well, sometimes maybe I can tell you that I'm feeling stressed. But there are lots of studies where people like me say that they're not stressed at all and you'll see me breaking out into hives or something, which is a response to the stress. Now you have to have a measure of those hives, you have to be able to measure skin complexion, you know, when one is stressed and not stressed and say whether the person knows it or not, there is some physical response that we can measure. What can we do when the response we are looking for is locked up between our ears in a box that is not easy to penetrate? So the first thing to do is to just imagine the difficulty of trying to even track anything implicit and the measure that you mentioned, the one that we are most familiar with, and the one that I believe today is the dominant measure of implicit cognition in the science as a whole is the Implicit Association test, and I'm one of three co developers of that test. The test has a very simple assumption that underlies it. The assumption is that when two things in our experience have come to go together repeatedly, they're joined in time and in space, let's say, that they become one for us. If when I see bread, there is usually a bowl of butter, bread and butter come to be associated when I think bread, butter comes to mind more quickly than some random word like water, or couch or something like that. So that's very easy to understand and neuroscientists, actually, in order to teach people how neurons in our brain fire after having learned something, they teach it to us by the phrase, if it fires together, it wires together. And we use that when we teach how learning occurs. By firing together, it means in the same moment, if neurons for bread and butter becoming activated, your brain learns that there's something about these that go together, and that's how we learn everything. We learn, you know, that mother and father are a unit, like bread and butter, but we also know certain experiences we have in the presence of something. When I see flowers, I feel happy, and flowers becomes associated flowers almost become synonymous with good, even though the words that we might use to capture goodness have nothing to do with flowers. So you know, not just words like beautiful or peace or joy, but if we use words like you know, angel, or satisfied, or whatever that have no semantic relationship to flowers, those words should become more easily accessible in the presence of flowers because our experience has made them repeatedly be associated. Unlike insects, when we think of an insect, we think yucky, I mean, unless you're a five-year-old boy, yes, I will put them aside for a moment. And say that, yes, that may happen. But even young boys, when they take our test, if it's flower or insect, they have learned that in our culture, flowers are good, and insects are bad. So all we've done is made a test that measures the strength of association between insects, and bad and good flowers and bad and good. Okay, that's what the test is. And now we can begin to go beyond the test by keeping the test logic identical. If I have you look at flowers on a computer screen and press a key - left key when you see flowers on the right key when you see insects - very easy for you to do that. Now I'm going to say okay, not just flowers and insects, but words are going to pop up on the screen words like love and peace and joy, good words, or bad words like devil and bomb and war and things like that. And your job is to use the same key to say flower or good words, and the same key, now a different but the same key when you identify an insect, as having appeared on the screen, or a bad word is having appeared on the screen. Now, if flower and good have truly become one in our minds, this should be a very easy task. Left key for flowers left key for good. Right key for insect right key for bad, right? That's easy. But now let's switch. This is the moment in the test when people groan because I'm saying to them left key for flower and left key for bad things, right key for insect and right key for good things. And they can't do it. By can't do it I mean, they can, but it takes them a whole lot longer to do this and they make many more mistakes when they do this. I show this bias, you show this bias. You know, even entomologists who study insects and love them, show it but to a lesser extent than we do. So they acquired the cultural thumbprint that says insects are not as good as flowers, but because they love insects and they work with them. They show a lower anti insect bias.   Jen  14:51 Fascinating.   Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  14:52 Okay, so now, the logic of the test should be very clear to people, and they will mostly agree in fact, everybody will agree that this is a decent measure of whether we like flowers or insects. And when the data come back and tell you, you have a strong preference for flowers over insects, people nod their head and say, "Yes, I do." There's no quarrel with the test. The quarrel with the test emerges when we replace insect and flower with Black and White faces, Asian and White faces, fat and thin people, people who are Native Americans and European Americans. And sometimes when we even change the good and bad words, to be things like bad and good things like weapons and musical instruments or something like that. Is it easier for me to associate, you know, certain groups with bad things and certain groups with good things? And the startling result is that for people who have, and I would say, genuinely have no explicit bias, now, I can't say what your explicit bias is, because you may think that you think that you know, male is better than female, but you may not be willing to tell me, but I'll take myself, I know that explicitly, I do not believe that Black is bad, and White is good. I know that for sure because it's me, and I can tell myself the truth about what I consciously think. And yet for people like me, who seem to have no explicit bias, this test throws us a curveball, because it demonstrates that people like me are not able to associate good with Black as easily as we can associated with White. And when that happens, it's troubling to us. It's troubling because it doesn't feel like the test is telling us anything true about ourselves. I don't blame people who say what a stupid test is just telling me, you know, it's just all complete lies. I felt the same way when I first took the test. I thought, "What's wrong with this test?" Obviously, I'm the great Mahzarin I'm not biased, so if the test is telling me I am, something's wrong with the test. And you know, a few minutes later, I came to my senses and I realized it's not the test that's the problem. It's my head that's the problem. I have accumulated all this learning two things have gone together, it fired together, it wired together.   Jen  17:22 Okay. All right. Well, thank you for that. And I think there's a lot of different pieces to come up from that, that we're going to get to in due time as we go through the conversation, but I'm wondering if maybe we can start with “Where does this come from?” Because in preparation for this interview, you sent me an epic paper that you had written with one of your grad students, and the reference list alone was enough to make me weep when I saw it,

"When she was younger, she wasn't that into reading and that was like a huge deal for me.  I thought: "I'm such a reader. My daughter doesn't love to read." She's still not a big reader, but it's not hampering her in any way. She's blossoming in fifty other ways, but when I get caught in that story, "She's not like me. She's not..." - that's when I'm suffering. So I settle back into trusting, and think: "Oh, she's becoming who she is. Let her be that." -Diana Winston   Meditation is touted as being a cure-all for everything from anxiety to depression to addictions.  But is it possible that all this is too good to be true?   In this episode, meditation teacher - and former Buddhist nun! - Diana Winston guides us through what we know of the research on meditation that's relevant to parents.  It turns out that the quality of much of this research isn't amazing, but this may not matter to you if you're thinking of starting a meditation practice because the opportunity cost (a few minutes a day) is so low and the potential benefits are so high.   We walk through a basic meditation that you can do anywhere, and no - it doesn't involve sitting cross-legged with your thumb and first finger held in a circle and saying 'ommmmmm....'.   I was skeptical about meditation too - until I tried it.  Perhaps it might help you as well?   Ready to break free from the cycle of triggered reactions and conflict in your parenting journey? If you want to: 😟 Be triggered less often by your child’s behavior, 😐 React from a place of compassion and empathy instead of anger and frustration, 😊 Respond to your child from a place that’s aligned with your values rather than reacting in the heat of the moment,   the Taming Your Triggers workshop will help you make this shift.   Join us to transform conflict into connection and reclaim peace in your parenting journey.   Join the waitlist and we'll let you know when doors reopen. Click the banner to learn more!   Jump to highlights 02:36 Introducing Diana Winston 03:39 Defining Mindfulness 05:25 Distinguishing between mindfulness and meditation 06:26 How can mindfulness benefit me? 08:05 Self-hatred as a Western concept 12:27 The practice of mindfulness rooted in religion and cultural appropriation 13:57 The research on mindfulness 17:27 Why is it so hard to study mindfulness? 19:33 Mindfulness vs science as tools of observation 21:26 The benefits of mindfulness to parents and children 28:04 Improving parent-child relationships through mindfulness 30:27 Working in mindfulness practices in the context of communities 35:52 Practice mindfulness now with this quick walkthrough 42:46 Sit Still and It Will Hurt Eventually   Useful links: Taming Your Triggers Masterclass   Books and other resources: The Little Book of Being: Practices and Guidance for Uncovering Your Natural AwarenessWaking Up App by Sam HarrisUCLA Mindful AppTen Percent Happier AppWide Awake: A Buddhist Guide for Teens   Facebook Group: Your Parenting Mojo Facebook Group   References D’Andrea, W., Ford, J., Stolbach, B., Spinazzola, J., & van der Kolk, B. (2012). Understanding inter-personal trauma in children: Why we need a developmentally appropriate trauma diagnosis. American Journal of Orthopsyhchiatry 82(2), 187-200. Goessl, V.C., Curtiss, J.E., & Hofman, S.G. (2017). The effect of heart rate variability biofeedback training on stress and anxiety: A meta-analysis. Psychological Medicine 47, 2578-2586. Miller, A. (2006). The body never lies: The lingering effects of hurtful parenting. New York: Norton. Tippet, K. (2019, December 26). Bessel van der Kolk: How trauma lodges in the body. On Being. Retrieved from:https://onbeing.org/programs/bessel-van-der-kolk-how-trauma-lodges-in-the-body/van der Kolk, B. (2017). Developmental trauma disorder: Toward a rational diagnosis for children with complex trauma histories. Psychiatric Annals 35(5), 401-408.van der Kolk, B. (2016). The devastating effects of ignoring child maltreatment in psychiatry: Commentary on “The enduring neurobiological effects of abuse and neglect.” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 57(3), 267-270.van der Kolk, B.A., Stone, L., West, J., Rhodes, A., Emerson, D., Suvak, M., & Spinazzola, J. (2014). Yoga as an adjunctive treatment for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 75(6), e559-e565.van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. New York: Penguin.van der Kolk, B., Stone, L., West, J., Rhodes, A., Emerson, D., Suvak, M., & Spinazzola, J. (2014). Yoga as an adjunctive treatment for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 75(6), e559-e565.van der Kolk, B. (2006). Clinical implications of neuroscience research in PTSD.Annals – New York Academy of Sciences 1071(1), 277.van der Kolk, B., & van der Hart, O. (1989). Pierre Janet & the breakdown of adaptation in psychological trauma. American Journal of Psychiatry 146(12), 1530-1540.

Why do we yell at our children - even when we know we shouldn't? Why isn't just knowing what to do enough to actually interact with our children in a way that aligns with our values? For many of us, the reason we struggle to actually implement the ideas we know we want to use is because we've experienced trauma in our lives. This may be the overt kind that we can objectively say was traumatic (divorce, abuse, death among close family members...), or it may simply be the additive effect of having our needs disregarded over and over again by the people who were supposed to protect us. These experiences cause us to feel 'triggered' by our children's behavior - because their mess and lack of manners and resistance remind us subconsciously of the ways that we were punished as children for doing very similar things. These feelings don't just show up in our brains, they also have deep connections to our bodies (in spite of the Western idea that the body and brain are essentially separate!). If we don't decide to take a different path and learn new tools to enable us to respond effectively to our child rather than reacting in the heat of the moment, and because our physical experience is so central to how this trauma shows up in our daily lives, we also need to understand and process this trauma through our bodies. Join the waitlist and we'll let you know when doors reopen. Click the banner to learn more!     Jump to highlights: 01:00 This episode’s rationale 03:12 The two ways trauma shows up in broader family relationships 05:27 The separateness of the brain and the body has a long history in Western culture 06:05 Rene Descartes on the schism of mind and body 07:12 The held belief of the mind as superior to the rest of the body 08:09 The inherent bias of data 09:42 The lies our brain tells us 12:54 The so-called 4 ‘truths’ of the physical experience of trauma 16:22 When we are not attuned to the signals that our body is giving us 19:01 Difficulty in identifying feelings for people who experienced trauma 22:16 Saying OK when you aren’t really OK 26:19 The difference between reacting and responding 27:10 Using physical experience to bring order to the chaos in our minds 31:15 The first step to creating a safe environment for your child 33:26 The root of our inability to create meaningful relationships 34:18 Equipping ourselves with the tools to regulate our arousal   Other episodes mentioned: 113: No Self, No Problem069: Reducing the impact of intergenerational traumaResponding to the U.S. Capitol SiegeDismantling White Supremacy and Patriarchy on MLK Day   Links: Taming Your Triggers Workshop   Facebook group: Your Parenting Mojo Facebook Group   References Boscarino, J.A., (2004). Posttraumatic stress disorder and physical illness: Results from clinical and epidemiologic studies. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1032, 141-153. Fuchs, T. (2018). Ecology of the brain: The phenomenology and biology of the embodied mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hull, A.M. (2002). Neuroimaging findings in post-traumatic stress disorder: Systematic review. British Journal of Psychiatry 181,102-110. Sledjeski, E.M., Speisman, B., & Dierker, L.C. (2008). Does number of lifetime traumas explain the relationship between PTSD and chronic medical conditions?  Answers from the National Comorbidity Survey-Replication (NCS-R). Journal of Behavioral Medicine 31(4), 341-349. Wolfe, J., Schnurr, P.P., Brown, P.J., & Furey, J. (1994). Posttraumatic stress disorder and war-zone exposure as correlates of perceived health in female Vietnam war veterans. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 62(6), 1235-1240. Zoellner, L.A., Goodwin, M.L., & Foa, E.B. (2005). PTSD severity and health perceptions in female victims of sexual assault. Journal of Traumatic Stress 13(4), 635-649.

In this episode we talk with Iris Chen about her new book, Untigering: Peaceful Parenting for the Deconstructing Tiger Parent.   Iris admits to being a parent who engaged in "yelling, spanking, and threatening with unreasonable consequences" - but far from becoming a well-behaved, obedient child, her son fought back.  The harder she punished, the more he resisted. Their home became a battleground of endless power struggles, uncontrollable tantrums, and constant frustration.   But Iris didn't know what else to do: she had learned this over-controlling style from her own parents: watching TV without permission, talking back to her father, and having a boyfriend before college were simply out of the question when she was growing up.   In her parents' eyes, they had done all the right things: Iris got good grades, graduated from an elite university, and married another successful Chinese-American.   But through interacting with her son, Iris realized that all of these achievements had come at a great cost: a cost that her son was trying to show her through his resistance.  Eventually Iris saw that her son's behavior wasn't the problem; he was simply reacting to her attempts to control him, and that it was her own approach that needed to change.   Now Iris is well along her own Untigering path: basing her relationship with her children on finding win-win solutions to problems, being flexible, and respecting each other's boundaries.   As I do too, Iris sees this path as a journey toward creating a society where everyone belongs.   If you see yourself in Iris' descriptions of her early days as a parent, and especially if you find yourself routinely overreacting to your child's age-appropriate behavior, I invite you to join my Taming Your Triggers, which will help you to understand the true source of your triggered feelings (hint: it isn't your child's behavior!), feel triggered less often, and respond more effectively to your child on the fewer occasions when it does still happen.   Join the waitlist and we'll let you know when doors reopen. Click the banner to learn more!     Jump to highlights: 01:34 Children’s dilemma between being seen/heard and being accepted 02:50 The trauma we pass on to our children 04:04 How to tame your triggers 04:59 Confidence in parenting that gives parents a sense of calm 06:39 Iris as a Deconstructing Tiger Parent 08:13 “I thought my responsibility as a parent was to push harder when my child resisted” 09:26 “I saw in my children a freedom to express their resentment in ways that I was never free to” 11:05 The walls that are created between parent and child because children’s authentic selves are not accepted 11:24 Our parents have their own traumas as well 13:18 The Idea of Untigering 14:19 Permissive parenting 16:06 Viewing children as full human beings 18:43 Adultism and Childism 20:05 Is respect something a child needs to earn from their parents? 21:26 Redefining our ideas for success as parents 27:29 Navigating the needs that drive behavior 31:30 Chinese somatization 33:57 The internalization of injustice and suffering 36:50 Holding space for one another and the greater community 41:19 The cascading effect of changing the way we relate to our children   Books and Resources: Untigering: Peaceful Parenting for the Deconstructing Tiger ParentThe Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma   Links: Taming Your Triggers WorkshopUpbringing PodcastUntigering Website   Join the YPM Facebook Community Your Parenting Mojo Facebook Group   Reference Mauner, R.G., Hunter, J.J., Atkinson, L., Steiner, M., Wazana, A., Fleming, A.S., Moss, E., Gaudreau, H., Meaney, M.J., & Levitan, R.D. (2017). An attachment-based model of the relationship between childhood adversity and somatization in children and adults. Psychosomatic Medicine79(5), 506-513.

Parents - worried about their child's lack of maturity or ability to 'fit in' in a classroom environment - often ask me whether they should hold their child back a year before entering kindergarten or first grade.  In this episode I review the origins of the redshirting phenomenon (which lie in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, and which statisticians say contained some seriously dodgy math), what it means for your individual child, as well as for the rest of the children in the class so you can make an informed decision.   Jump to highlights: (01:00) Malcolm Gladwell's anecdote about the Junior League Medicine Hat Tigers and Vancouver Giants ice hockey teams that initiated the redshirting craze (02:56) Ability grouping is done in early childhood, just like in sports (03:59) Parents holding their children back from kindergarten came to be referred to as redshirting (10:20) How common is redshirting? (11:04) Boys are redshirted at a ratio of 2:1 compared to girls (12:18) The maturationist approach of why to redshirt (13:05) State support and agenda for redshirting (15:10) Teachers tendency to view a maturationist view of development. (17:16) The Maturation Hypothesis (17:36) Parents redshirt their children to give their child an advantage (20:34) Redshirting as a way to give boys age and size advantage and avoid getting bullied (27:28) Making a judgement call into what benefits mean with regards to the body of research on redshirting (29:24) The evidence of whether redshirting is beneficial (35:19) Misdiagnosis of ADHD caused by relative maturity (37:56) A year outside of school reduces the likelihood that children receive timely identifications of learning difficulties (38:35) Students with speech impairments may actually benefit from redshirting (39:22) Redshirted students may have more behavioral problems in high school (46:04) Children from higher socioeconomic status are more likely to perform well in tests in kindergarten (48:19) It’s possible that the way the teacher sees the child is what helps the child because of Labelling Theory (49:46) Opportunity hoarding associated with middle-class, White parents. (52:01) Is kindergarten truly the new first grade? (56:06) Advocating for Developmentally Appropriate Practice or DAP (57:35) Almost everyone agrees that retention has negative impacts on children (58:55) Accumulative Advantage (01:00:07) Malcolm Gladwell’s proposed solution to homogenize and my thoughts on it (01:02:32) Summary (01:04:56) Why I think asking "should I redshirt my child" is the wrong question   Books and Resources: Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell 13 Reasons Why Your Child Won’t Listen to You and What to do About Each One School Can Wait, by Raymond S. Moore and Dorothy N. Moore   Links: 085: White privilege in schools 086: Playing to Win: How does playing sports impact children? 117: Socialization and Pandemic Pods   Join our the YPM Facebook Community: Your Parenting Mojo Facebook Group   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen  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.   Jen  00:29 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 and the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group.   Jen  00:48 I do hope you'll join us.   Jen  01:00 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  We have an odd person to thank for what has turned into a bit of an epic episode, and that’s Malcolm Gladwell.  His 2011 book Outliers: The story of success opens with an anecdote about the junior league Medicine Hat Tigers and Vancouver Giants ice hockey teams.  The point of the book is to demonstrate that personal explanations of success that draw on a narrative of self-made brilliance have a lot more to them – that successful people are the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and opportunities that help to give them a leg up in a way that isn’t open to most of us.  In the example of the ice hockey teams in the book (which we’re calling ice hockey for my English listeners, to distinguish it from actual hockey, which is played on a grass field), Paula Barnsley, who is the wife of psychologist Dr. Roger Barnsley, noticed during a game that the majority of the players on teams just like the Medicine Hat Tigers and Vancouver Giants had birthdays that clustered in a certain way.  Roger Barnsley went home and researched all the junior league players he could, and then the national league, and found that in any elite group of ice hockey players, 40% of the plyers will have been born between January and March, 30% between April and June, and 20% between October and December (Gladwell doesn’t say what happened to the 10% born between July and September).  Barnsley said that “In all my years in psychology I have never run into an effect this large.  You don’t even need to do any statistical analysis.  You just look at it.”   Jen  02:28 The reason for this is that the eligibility cutoff for age class hockey is January 1, which means that children born at on January 2nd are a whole year older than children born on December 31st, which is a large proportion of a young child’s life.  The same effect replicates in baseball and football (which I refuse to call “soccer”), because these also have similar age cutoffs in youth sports.   Jen  02:56 Then there’s a half page of text that really caught parents’ ears – reference to a study by two economists who looked at the relationship between scores on a standardized test, and the child’s age at the time of taking the test, and the effect was found here as well.  One of the authors of that paper, Dr. Elizabeth Dhuey, was quoted as saying “Just like in sports, we do ability grouping early on in childhood…so, early on, if we look at young kids, in kindergarten and first grade, the teachers are confusing maturity with ability.  And they put the older kids in the advanced stream, where they learn better skills; and the next year, because they are in the higher groups, they do even better; and the next year, the same things happen, and they do even better again.”  Dr. Dhuey subsequently looked at college students and found that students belonging to the relatively youngest group in their class are underrepresented by about 11.6%.  Gladwell concludes: “That initial difference in maturity doesn’t go away with time. It persists. And for thousands of students, that initial disadvantage is the difference between going to college – and having a real shot at the middle class – and not.”   Jen  03:59 Now those words are almost guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of parents, even though the real problem here is the perception that college is the only path to “having a real shot at the middle class,” who responded by holding their children back from kindergarten when their birthdays were within the last few months of the kindergarten eligibility cutoff.  In the U.S., this practice came to be known as redshirting, which is a term borrowed from sports.  In college athletics, which is big business in the U.S., athletes are only allowed to play for four years but they might ‘redshirt’ the first year which means they wouldn’t formally participate in competition while they get bigger and stronger.  Then they can still play four years after that.  But they’re not just sitting out in that year; they’re practicing with the team and getting bigger and stronger, and they wear a red shirt in practice to indicate that they’re in redshirt status.  From what I’ve read on Wikipedia a coach can tell you at the beginning of the year that you’re redshirting but it isn’t confirmed until the end of the season, so if the star quarterback gets injured then the redshirted player can give up their redshirt status and still play.  So that aspect doesn’t come into play in the academic setting, but the practice of holding a child out of kindergarten for the year when they are technically eligible to attend has become widely referred to as redshirting, and that’s what we’re going to discuss today.   Jen  05:11 In some ways this was a very easy episode to research, and in other ways it was incredibly difficult.  We’re going to aim to answer a series of questions:   Jen  05:20 How common is redshirting?   Jen  05:22 Who does it and why do they do it?   Jen  05:24 What are the benefits of red shirting and who realizes those benefits?   Jen  05:28 And if someone benefits, who is on the other end of the stick and misses out?   Jen  05:33 And then in conclusion, what does the preponderance of the evidence indicate about whether we should redshirt our children or not?   Jen  05:39 Now before we get going on these interesting and important topics, I do want to take a slight detour here to make sure we're all together and understanding the kinds of data and analysis that we're working with here. In many ways, this episode was an incredible relief to research because there's been a lot of interest in the topic, so papers were really easy to find, and the majority of them are based on State-level or National-level datasets.   Jen  06:02 So often on the show, I have to caveat the findings by saying, "Well, now I do have to warn you this study is based on what five White people in Chicago told a researcher." or "This study is based on 100 college students who receive course credit for participating." Here, our datasets are amazing. There are a couple of qualitative studies where researchers are interviewing just a few people, but these add a richness to the quantitative data that would otherwise be missing. The majority of the data sets are produced by State-level records of children's birth and enrollment in school and standardized test scores with some National-level data produced in the same ways as well, combined with National-level surveys of teachers. Researchers using this data are trying to find out what happens under normal conditions when nothing is being manipulated and find correlations between things they think are related. Of course, the problem with correlational data is we can't be sure that just because the two factors vary together that one causes the other. For example, we can find data showing that as seatbelt usage increased in cars in the 1990s, that far fewer astronauts died in spacecraft. So should we try to save astronauts life by putting on our seatbelt, maybe not.   Jen  07:08 And then sometimes States do things like change the cutoff date for kindergarten entry, and that creates what researchers call quasi-experimental data. And we can see what happens when conditions change, and people aren't allowed to do something that they could have chosen to do in the past. And this can help us to get a bit closer to a Cause-and-Effect relationship. Although these effects may not be generalizable outside the area where the experiment happened. But we do have to be a little bit careful with big data sets. One of these issues doesn't apply so much to us, which is the problem of having a sample size that doesn't accurately reflect the population. There's a nice example in one of the papers and the references about a survey of 2.4 million people, which indicated that Governor Alfred Landon of Kansas would win the 1936 election by a landslide. Now you've heard of President Landon, right? If not, that's because the incumbent, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, won 46 of the then 48 States. The magazine that ran the poll surveyed its own readers who skewed towards supporting Governor Landon, so the poll respondents didn't accurately reflect the actual population it was trying to measure.   Jen  08:13 In the State-level data, it's possible the results wouldn't be generalizable to populations outside the State, but they do include the vast, vast majority of students inside the State. They might exclude students who opted out of standardized testing, for example, but we have a number of National-level data sets as well, and these National-level data sets don't necessarily include every child in the country, but they are specifically designed to be representative. So, our data sets are often fully representative of the population, and when they're not, these are very large data sets designed to be nationally representative.   Jen  08:47 And the second thing to be aware of when you're looking at working with large data sets is differences between the two conditions you're studying can look statistically significant very easily. You could get a result with a State or National-level data set, that's statistically significant at p = 0.05, which is the generally accepted standard, but which has an effect size that's tiny and inconsequential to your life. And I always think back to research on tantrums on this topic, which might find that parents who take a certain action when their child's having a tantrum can achieve a statistically significant reduction in the frequency of tantrums their child has. Doesn't that sound amazing? Well, it ends up being a reduction from something like 15 to 14 tantrums a day. Is that change meaningful in a parent's life? No, it is not.   Jen  09:33 And so one final thing to be aware of in this data is that it isn't always super current. Even when I restrict my searches to papers published in the last five years, the data they often use is far older, especially when you're looking at long term effects. You have to look at data from when children were in school 20 years ago, so we can't be sure that educational methods use then are comparable to what's used today. We'll come back to the idea of there being more standardized testing now than there was in the past even in kindergarten, so the educational conditions that were in place when children were redshirted 20 years ago, and they're experiencing certain outcomes now are no longer in place for your child to experience. So a study might find that children who attended kindergarten on time in the 1980s had better lifetime outcomes, but the kind of kindergarten those children attended doesn't exist anymore.   Jen  10:20 All right, so now we're all square on that. Our first question, How common is red shirting is actually excitingly easy to answer. A pretty good conservative estimate came up with a US national average prevalence rate of four to five and a half percent, which in a way makes us wonder why are we even doing a whole episode on it if it's just a small percentage of people that this affects. But the national average conceals considerable variation within specific schools and demographics. In one fifth of schools that serve primarily families of high socioeconomic status, redshirting rates can be as high as 15% of all children, which translates to 60% of children being born within the three months before the cutoff for kindergarten entry being redshirted.   Jen  11:04 All right on to our next question. Who redshirts and why do they do it? Nearly 6% of White children redshirt. But fewer than 1% of Black children do. About 2% of Hispanic and 2.7% of Asian children redshirt. About 2.3% of children in the lowest socio-economic status quintile redshirt compared to 6.4% of children in the highest quintile. Boys are held back in far larger numbers than girls by a ratio of about two to one. The most surprising finding about redshirting rates occurred after North Carolina adjusted its cutoff date to enter kindergarten from October 16 to September 1 in 2006 - we're going to come back to the data on this study pretty often - and the rate of redshirting essentially went to nil. The authors of that study say that these findings suggest that children's absolute age rather than age relative to classmates plays a dominant role in the decision to redshirt.   Jen  11:58 Children who had been born in October would have previously been considered for redshirting, but the authors wondered, "Well did parents of August-born children just start redshirting instead? And it turned out they didn't. For reasons the authors didn't seem to be able to explain. And the rate of redshirting for children born between September 1 and October 16, was close to zero.   Jen  12:18 So why do parents redshirt their children? While allowing children's absolute age to increase before they enter school is one reason which is based on the idea that children need to be mature enough when they enter school to be successful primarily because this increases children's attention spans, their tolerance for seated instruction, and it improves their behavior. This approach to looking at redshirting has been around since the 1960s and 70s, when researchers at the Gesell Institute argued that children should be entered in school grouped and promoted on the basis of their developmental or behavioral age, not on the basis of their chronological age or IQ. The book School Can Wait was published in 1979 and perhaps this accounts for the fairly large number of parents of my generation who were surveyed about their decision to redshirt their child who report having been redshirted themselves.   Jen  13:04 In addition to popular books, there was quite a bit of enthusiasm for redshirting expressed in journal articles in this period. Like this statement from a paper in the journal education: "Redshirting is a program that can be applied at any level of the educational system nationwide, statewide district-wide or in an individual classroom