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

One of the things people email me wanting to know about most often is "what does the research say about how to set up a play room? What toys should I buy that will have the greatest benefit for my child's learning and development?" I'd actually been putting off doing this episode for a while, in part because the research base on this topic is thin on the ground - but also because the idea just made me kind of uncomfortable. I mean, we've survived for tens of thousands of years without play rooms - or even dedicated toys, never mind the incredibly beautiful and expensive ones that are available now! - what could I really say about this? Well, now's the time. Perhaps it shouldn't surprise you that this episode is coming in the middle of our series on the intersection of money and parenting. I hope it offers you some reassurance about how to set up your own play room - if you choose to and are able to. And even more reassurance if you choose not to or can't. Other episodes on this series This episode is the second in a series on the intersection of parenting and money. You can find other episodes in this series: 038: The Opposite of Spoiled 105: How to pass on mental wealth to your child 107: The impact of consumerism on children 115: Reducing the Impact of Advertising to Children 118: Are You Raising Materialistic Kids? [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today we’re covering a topic that listeners have been asking for for ages, which is How to Set Up a Play Room. And if you hear some trepidation in my voice, it’s because there’s a lot of it in me. And if you think it’s an incredible coincidence that this episode is coming hot on the heels of a couple of episodes exploring children and consumerism then…I’m sorry to say that this is not a coincidence. I was uncomfortable enough with the topic that I felt I really couldn’t do this episode without covering those other topics as well as a counterpoint. The main reason I’m uncomfortable is, of course, even having the wherewithal to ask the question “how do I set up a child’s play room” represents an absolutely enormous amount of privilege. It says that the person asking the question has so many resources that they can devote an entire room in their house to nothing but a child’s play, and on top of this, they have enough resources to equip the room with a sizeable proportion of whatever toys I suggest that the scientific literature says are necessary to bring about a positive outcome for their child. But when my listeners ask for something I do try my best to deliver. So here we go! While we’ve discussed the benefits of play on the show before in an interview with Dr. Stuart Brown, who is the Director of the National Institute for Play, we haven’t specifically looked at toys and play, or the role of parents in play. And it turns out that the concept of parents getting involved in children’s play, or directing children’s play, or providing materials for children’s play is something that’s pretty much unique to Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic (or WEIRD) countries – plus Japan as well, and possibly China is heading in this direction too. For ethnographic evidence on this topic we look to our old friend Dr. David Lancy, who gathered hundreds of ethnographic studies on child development in his book The Anthropology of Childhood. Dr. Lancy reports that Sisala parents in Ghana regard an interest in children’s play as beneath their dignity. Even the face-to-face position where the baby is held facing the mother that is so common in Western cultures is very rare elsewhere. Western scholars consider talking to and playing with the infant essential to promote the bond between mother and infant, but this activity is rare in many cultures as well – the !Kung people who live on the western edge of the Kalahari Desert not only don’t play with their children but believe the practice may be harmful to the child’s development because children learn best without adult intervention. Gusii children in Kenya may try to get their mother to play or talk but will be ignored, because the mother believes that responding would be simply pointless, as the child is not a valid human being until it reaches the age of ‘sense,’ at around six or seven. A little closer to home, interaction between Mexican children tends to take place through shared work activity, rather than child-centered play. All of these approaches are in stark contrast to the recommendations provided to parents in Western countries - the American Academy of Pediatrics’ clinical report on this topic is called The Importance of Play in Promoting Healthy Child Development and Maintaining Strong Parent-Child Bonds – implying that play has some kind of unique qualities in promoting these parent-child bonds that can’t be replaced by other activities, when anthropological evidence shows that this bonding can occur through other kinds of activities like shared work as well. Dr. Lancy goes on to try to understand the gulf between societies where mothers simply don’t play with children and those where the absence of play between mothers and children is seen as an indicator of clinical abnormality. He sees the discrepancy as primarily driven by differing parental goals – rather than needing to keep the child out of the way or involve them in productive work as soon as possible, Western parents are responsible for developing literate children who have high levels of concentration, self-discipline, emotional self-control, persistence in the face of failure, cooperation with others, attention to adults and to the material that adults deem it necessary for children to learn so they can be successful in school. Dr. Lancy says that “mothers carefully control the toy inventory to facilitate these lessons as well as expose their children to the artifacts of schooling, such as letters, numbers, colors, and “staying within the lines.” In several Asian cultures parents also use play didactically to socialize the child to restrain its own desires and adopt a cooperative and deferential attitude toward others. A failure to achieve these goals brings scorn on the parents and humiliation for the mother, and could have a materially negative result for the parents if they don’t instill enough filial piety and gratitude in the child that will prompt the child to care for the parents for the remainder of their lives and beyond. In addition to school readiness, parents manage children’s play for other reasons, like living vicariously through their children’s experiences in sports, as we segregate players by age and deliberately develop their skills and self-confidence. A hundred years ago, children would manage their own games, not worrying who wins and who loses, or even if the game is finished. So it’s against this rather strange backdrop – where play is found to be something that children from most cultures enjoy, even if they aren’t permitted to do it much, contrasted with Western cultures where parents organize and direct the materials of play and the actual games themselves, that we situate this episode on how to set up a child’s playroom. Before we get into the toys themselves, for those of you who haven’t listened to Episode 57, What is the Value of Play, for a while, let’s just do a really quick review of the evidence on the benefits of play. And they are many. We can count improvements in executive functioning, including cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control, and working memory, as well as language development, early math skills, social development, peer relations, physical development and health, creativity, reasoning about hypothetical events, and an enhanced sense of agency. If we think back to the introduction to this episode, we can see how well these skills line up with our goal to raise children who are successful in school. A number of these studies do look at play outside of the parent-child relationship, and some specifically look at play where children are provided with objects and “minimal adult direction,” and find more creative play where adults aren’t standing over the child – or maybe even sitting next to the child - telling the child what to do. This also brings us to an important definition about what play is – while different scholars use different definitions, one of the most commonly agreed upon criteria is that play doesn’t seem to serve any apparent immediate purpose – children engage in it just for the sake of it, because it’s fun. If an adult is trying to ‘teach’ the child something then it isn’t play – in fact, some researchers see the presence of a ‘minimally intrusive adult’ as a contextual cue to play. So *play* is important and useful to children (although play itself may not be inherently critical to children’s development), but what about individual toys? Is there any evidence looking at the impact of the number or types of toys that are available to a child and the child’s outcomes? Most of our children are fortunate enough to own toys; in one ethnography of 32 families’ homes in Los Angeles published in 2012, the authors reported that family homes had an average of 139 toys visible to researchers, with most homes having at least 100 and some as many as 250. The researchers didn’t specifically note the presence or absence of play rooms, but the book does include hundreds of absolutely fascinating photos, many of them photos of the material clutter that sometimes seems to threaten to take over our homes, and noted that “it is not unusual to also find kids’ art and Disney-themed images in public rooms of homes, giving them a very child-centered look that would have been rare during the middle decades of the twentieth century, when there was far more emphasis on presentation and formality in the living room, dining room, and even kitchen areas.” And how much does all this children’s stuff cost? Well, the U.S. in the mid-2000s we spent about $24 billion on toys each year, with $3.1 billion specifically for infant and preschool toys. The average family spent about $240 on toys and games each year, and grandparents spent $500 each year on gifts for grandchildren. But the most telling statistic to me is that the U.S. represents 3.1% of the world’s children, but 40% of the global toy market. So children have toys. But how are they used in the home? One researcher visited a set of 18 mother/infant pairs once a month when the infants were aged between 1 month and 18 months – so yes, this is definitely a small sample size, but the extended visits with each family (rather than dragging them into a lab and telling them to play “as you would at home”) and duration of the visits over 18 months yielded some really interesting information. The researcher, Dr. Doris Pierce, did this study for her dissertation in Occupational Therapy, and she was interested in learning more about “the relatively unrecognized work that mothers do in managing the play objects and play spaces of infant toddlers in the home,” which she says is “critical to child development” – because occupational therapists so rarely encounter the child in their home environment and so don’t have much understanding of how the techniques they prescribe are actually used in the home. Dr. Pierce saw mothers as “the stage managers behind the play scene in the home;” constantly engaged in positioning the infant and toddler for play, selecting toys, setting up the play space, monitoring for safety, and controlling access to areas of the home. It’s work that requires judgement, decision making, and ongoing manipulations of the physical environment – and when you put it in terms like that, suddenly it makes it much clearer to me why we feel so exhausted at the end of the day when as far as an outsider is concerned, we haven’t really “done” anything. Dr. Pierce found that new mothers often rely heavily on the messages from commercial toy manufacturers to make toy selections, and used these to try to make sure their child had access to as many toys that can aid their development. First time mothers were more likely to fit into this category, and have ideas about what they ‘ought’ to buy, although these opinions were often based on the design, labeling, and marketing of toys. But another group of mothers, who often had less money available to spend on toys, tended to let their children mainly play with household objects and told Dr. Pierce that they didn’t believe commercial toys were important in the infant’s life. I thought there was some interesting rationalizations going on there on both sides – parents who could afford toys rationalized their decision to buy them by saying it was in their child’s best interest, while parents who didn’t have money rationalized their inability to buy toys by saying they didn’t believe toys were important for children’s development. More experienced mothers often had a store of outgrown toys from previous children, and were better able to offer an appropriate toy at the right age for the child, a puzzle that first time mothers sometimes struggled with. It seemed like the primary way mothers decided that the child had developmentally moved on from the toy was when the mother found she could no longer leave the child with the toy and expect the child to be entertained while she did housework nearby. The mothers would often rotate the toy selection to try to maintain the child’s interest so she could step away and get the work done around the house that our culture requires be completed. Once the children became mobile, the kitchen cupboards often became an important source of toys – particularly while the mother was cooking or washing the dishes, and then as the child matured into a toddler toys like shape sorters, books, puzzles, and other educational toys made an appearance in at least the upper income homes. Dr. Pierce noted that it was usually the mother who tried to engage the child in play with these toys, rather than the child playing with them independently. Of course, this kind of interaction is deeply embedded in our culture as well – when we play try to engage our child with an educational toy we are passing on a message about who holds knowledge and who needs to develop knowledge, and that what the adult knows is valuable and what the child knows or discovers by themselves may be less valuable, and that children should listen to what adults are telling them. All of these lessons are preparing children for success in school, where they must learn that it doesn’t really matter what questions they have, that providing the correct answer to a question that someone else has deemed important is what constitutes ‘knowledge.’ I want to add a side note about something that I’ve wondered about and that may have been bugging you as well - we have a number of toys made from recycled plastics in our house and I know from my work in sustainability consulting that chemicals in plastics – and particularly recycled plastics are not amazing for our health. Pthalates are added to plastic toys to increase flexibility and durability, but have also been shown to have negative impacts on liver, kidney, and reproductive systems. Experiments in rats have found that two kinds of phthalates increased the incidence of many reproductive malformations by more than 50% and reduced the size of men’s testicles. Polybrominated diphenyl ethers were freely added to toys before the year 2007, when new regulations restricted the amount that could be in each toy; this chemical has thryroid disrupting properties. But now we’re not using that we’re using phosphate flame retardants instead, which are neurotoxic and carcinogenic. And you might be asking what these chemicals are doing in toys; the answer is that they were added to the plastic for whatever its original use was, and they stay in the plastic when it’s melted down and reshaped into a toy. So it seems as though yes, these chemicals are very much present in toys – but just the presence of a chemical isn’t the only thing that matters. As the saying goes, “it’s the dose that makes the poison” – and the news on this front may be as depressing as it is reassuring – even if children put toys made from recycled plastics in their mouths, the amount of exposure to these chemicals they get is an order of magnitude lower than the exposure they received through breast milk. And as they get older, the exposure they get through touching toys with their hands and then putting their hands in their mouths is TWO orders of magnitude lower than their exposure to the chemicals through household dust. So it’s good news that worrying about chemicals in toys made from recycled plastic shouldn’t be our top priority – because due to the way we’re living our lives our children are getting exposed to these chemicals anyway. Once the toys are in the house, Dr. Pierce found that it was usually primarily the mother’s role to offer the toys to the child, and as the child got older this shifted to arranging the toys for the child’s use – and this was the defining factor in the infant’s experience of the home no matter whether the family had a lot of money and lived in a large home or had less money and lived in a small home. Each home play space was unique, but the most common arrangement was that toys were most highly concentrated next to the kitchen, where the mother spent the most time working. And, of course, this way of organizing the home – and the play space – is highly unusual in the rest of the world. We do see parallels in Japan where mothers often find themselves isolated in high rise apartments with their infant while the husband goes to work, but the home filled with hard surfaces, sharp corners, electricity, and tiny objects everywhere, and only one adult is available for the vast majority of the day to keep them safe, keep the home tidy, and play with the child is something that people in many cultures would think is absolutely batty. In Dr. Pierce’s study toys most commonly entered the house through the mother’s purchases at toy stores, although six of the 18 infants in the study also had a toys mailed to them every six weeks from a club that had been promoted in a parent magazine. With only one exception in 18, the child’s first birthday gift included at least one large wheeled push toy or riding toy. Visiting relatives often brought gifts, maternal aunts gave outgrown toys, and maternal grandmothers would pass on toys the mothers themselves had played with as infants in a symbol of the importance of the family being extended for another generation. So we can see that the mother – but also the toy industry, family, and friends all play a role in determining the number and types of toys available. The French sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bordieu talked about an idea which also came up in Dr. Allison Pugh’s work on consumerism, although I didn’t have time to discuss it with her, and that’s the idea that parents have cultural capital like knowledge, taste, and ways of speaking that children internalize without consciously thinking about them. One of the ways this knowledge is passed on to children is through the toys we give them to play with. So when we buy the authentic $100 Grimm’s rainbow that was cut from a single, solid piece of Linden wood and matches the peg doll and Large Element Stacker accessories, we’re saying to our child:...

Do you often feel anxious or irritated, especially when you're around your child? Do you often feel like you might snap, perhaps even threatening violence if they don't do what you say? Are you so disconnected from them that you sometimes consider walking out and never coming back? If you have, it's possible that you're suffering from parental burnout. Listener Kelly reached out to me recently because she has been diagnosed with parental burnout and wanted to know what research is available on this topic, and on how to protect her two-year-old from its impacts. We did some searching around in the literature and it actually didn't take long to turn up the preeminent researchers in the field who actually work as a team and one of whom - Dr. Moira Mikolajczak, kindly agreed to talk with us. We learned about the warning signs to watch out for that indicate that you might be suffering from parental burnout, and what to do about it if you are. We ran a bit over time at the end of the episode and I wasn't able to ask about whether self-compassion might be a useful tool for coping with parental burnout but Dr. Mikolajczak and I emailed afterward and she agreed that it is - I'm hoping to do an episode on self-compassion in the future.   More information on Dr. Mikolajczak's work on parental burnout can be found at https://www.burnoutparental.com/ The Parental Burnout Assessment, available in French and English, can be found here: https://en.burnoutparental.com/suis-je-en-burnout   Taming Your Triggers If you need help with your own big feelings about your child’s behavior, Taming Your Triggers workshop is now open. We’ll help you to: Understand the real causes of your triggered feelings, and begin to heal the hurts that cause them Use new tools like the ones Katie describes to find ways to meet both her and her children’s needs Effectively repair with your children on the fewer instances when you are still triggered It’s a 10-week workshop with one module delivered every week, an amazing community of like-minded parents, a match with an AccountaBuddy to help you complete the workshop, and mini-mindfulness practices to re-ground yourself repeatedly during your days, so you’re less reactive and more able to collaborate with your children. Sign up for the waitlist and we'll let you know once enrollment re-opens. Click the image below to learn more.       [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen  01:45 So let's meet the people we're talking with today. First up is listener Kelly, who is enrolled in the Taming Your Triggers workshop and who reached out to us whether I'd be interested in doing this episode on Burnout since she's been experiencing it for several months. Kelly is a postdoctoral researcher in the health field in the Netherlands and wanted to know more about how her experience of burnout is impacting her daughter. After we found the leading researchers on this topic, Kelly graciously agreed to join me as a co-interviewer even though she's an introvert like me and is a little bit nervous about doing it. Welcome, Kelly.   Kelly  02:14 Hi. Thanks.   Jen  02:16 Thanks for being here. And so here with us today is Dr. Moïra Mikolajczak whose bio on her website firstly states that she's the mother of a daughter Louise and then secondly states that she's Professor of Psychology and Health at the Catholic University of Louvain, which is now known as UC Louvain in Louvain-la-Neuve. She is a renowned expert in the field of emotional intelligence and has published several reference books on this topic. In 2015, she began a research program on parental burnout in conjunction with UC Louvain professor, Isabelle Roskam. Together they have published their results in several scientific articles and in two books, one for parents and one for professionals and I've read the one for parents which is currently only available in French but should be translated soon. With their Ph.D. student Maria-Elena Brianda, they have also developed and validated the first targeted treatment for parental burnout. Welcome, Moïra.   Moïra  03:06 Thank you, Jen.   Jen  03:07 All right, so, I wonder if we could get started with a definition just to make sure that we're all on the same page. Moïra, could you please tell us what is parental burnout and how common is it?   Moïra  03:17 Yeah. So parental burnout is like its name indicates an exhaustion disorder. Parents feel totally exhausted by their parenting role. They feel that just thinking about what they have to do for or with their children make them feel that they've reached the end of their tether. And this exhaustion which is the first and main symptoms will lead to a second symptom which is the emotional distancing from one's children. And then the parent will totally lose the pleasure of being with his or her children. And finally, he or she will experience a contrast between the parent she is now and the parent she has been before and wanted to be. So, the exertion, the emotional distancing, the loss of pleasure and the contrast are the main symptoms of parental burnout. And of course, these symptoms are often accompanied by guilt and shame for not being the parent one used to be and wanted to be.   Jen  04:20 Yeah, and I know that a lot of the research on this topic actually came out of research on burnout at work, but these are two very different things, right?   Moïra  04:29 Yeah. So as you could see from the definition, they are both exhaustion syndromes, but the context of origin and of expression of the symptoms defer. So in the case of job burnout, people are exhausted by their work. They lose the pleasure of being at work, so they become distant from the beneficiaries of their work. And in the case of parental burnout, people are exhausted by their parenting role, become distant from their children, lose the pleasure of parenting and what is interesting is that one can be in parental burnout without being in job burnout and vice versa. And actually, what we have found in our research is that many parents in parental burnout kind of escape their parenting in their job. So they start to work more. And at the end, of course, these people experience the risk of being burnout in both spheres, and then this would obviously lead to depression.   Jen  05:28 Mm-hmm. Yeah. And Kelly, I think you found that there was some relationship between the two and you also mentioned escaping to your job to me as well when we were chatting beforehand, right?   Kelly  05:36 Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yes. Like my home situation, there are so many challenges with my daughter when she was very young and I barely slept. I was finishing a Ph.D., which was going quite okay, but I was kind of escaping to work to deal with the home situation, but then again, at some point work got tougher and tougher as well. And I kind of felt like I was living those days off to the max as well to kind of escape from the job thing. So I really recognize that escaping part from both parts. But then I burned myself by doing so.   Jen  06:11 Yeah. And we'll talk more about that in a minute. And I'm wondering about how curious this is, Moïra, I've seen in your research, numbers of 5% to 6%, there was a meta-analysis of the research on this topic that found a lot higher numbers, except actually a lower number in The Netherlands. Can you help us understand roughly how many parents suffer from this?   Moïra  06:29 Yeah, so, of course, the differing prevalence comes from two factors. First, the cutoff that you use to decide that somebody is in burnout or not. If you change the cutoff obviously it will change the prevalence, and the other factor is the country that's under an investigation. We have just finished a study on 40 countries around the world, very scattered. We had Cameroon, Togo, Australia, Belgium, Finland, of course, the US and a number of South American countries. And the results of the study shows that the prevalence of parental burnout really varies a lot across countries. And so in the countries with the highest prevalence rate, 9% of parents are in burnouts and in the countries with the lowest prevalence rates, less than 1% parents are in burnout. So there is a huge variation across countries. But basically, what we can say and what's really obvious in the results of this study is that Western countries are much more exposed to parental burnout than other countries like Asian or African countries.   Jen  07:46 Oh, really, and I'm guessing that has something to do with social supports there, but we'll probably come back to that.   Moïra  07:52 Yes.   Jen  07:54 Okay. And so, Kelly, question for you. I'm guessing there are some parents who are listening to this right now and are wondering if they have parental burnout, and there are others who are thinking, you know, come on, you know, if you feel burned out, why don't you just try and stop doing as much and then you wouldn't have a problem. And so can you help us to understand a bit about your lived experience with burnout? How did it start? And I know that you're in therapy now, how did you get to the point where you realized you needed therapy? And what was that journey like for you?   Kelly  08:20 Yeah, so I suppose it has been growing for quite some time, maybe even up to 10 years in a lighter variance of it. I guess, for me, it was a combination of my characters, some health issues have been going through. Like I said, that the tough time the first year is my daughter really, really hadn’t opened and then some challenges that work. So it was really like a lot of things that were out of my control, but then combined with my response to them that just led to this burnout. And most times, actually, I wasn't aware of how much I was racing. And later my husband described it as if he was trying to stop a very heavy train and I just kept going and going and he couldn't stop me. It was kind of weird because I just didn't realize how I was doing. It was later when we talked about when I was a lot more calm. And he explained that to me when it dawned on me, I suppose. And it really hit me when I came back after holiday and went back to work and I felt quite okay at the start of the day. But when I came home, I was so shaken and stressed and I felt physically sick. And I just realized how much work was contributing to the story as well. And then finally, I had a breaking point. So just kind of when it already dawned that something was up. But then I had a breaking point about a month later when I was away for work. And I just had a blackout, total blackout. I was sitting on a wall there. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know where to go. I phoned my husband and he helped me to get to a train station and to find a train to come home and he came in the car halfway to pick me up. And then when I was in the car, I had more or less collapsed. I was crying for hours. I couldn't do anything anymore. I was exhausted for the next few days. I was just in bed. I felt so sick as if I had a terrible flu. I was shocked because it was the day before I was quite well, a lot of energy. And then suddenly, I couldn't do anything anymore. And my body ache. I was crying, very emotional. It was, yeah, it was very weird to experience such a change in a short time.   Jen  10:16 Probably quite scary too I would think.   Kelly  10:19 Yes, yes. Although at that time, it was more – yeah, no I suppose it was scary. I feel like, I just let it come over me because I had absolutely no sense of what was going on anymore. Well, at that point, I suppose it's still very important that at that point, I thought, it's just one or two weeks of rest, and I'll be okay again. And it took a lot, a lot of time to sink in that it wasn't minor at all. And I still find it very hard to believe like, I'm still so tired mentally and physically, and we're seven months in, I never expected that it would be so tough and big.   Jen  10:52 Yeah. And thank you for sharing that very personal experience with us. And if listeners are recognizing themselves in what Kelly's saying then that could be one experience of it. There's also other potential ways that it can come out. There was one paper that interviewed mothers about their experience of this. And some of them were saying, you know, I didn't recognize myself, even now I don't to be capable of such strong mood swings and violent with my own children. Another parent was saying, I got so scared and destabilized, I completely stopped feeling confident as a mother. A third one said, I couldn't share this. I was very afraid of other people's judgement and misunderstanding. And I shared these things with Kelly. And she said, “No, I didn't feel there's so much”. There was another one about, you know, keep running fast and sticking to my habits rather than stopping and thinking and Kelly said, “Yes, that was me”. So different people that seems to experience burnout in different ways. And, Kelly, I know you're curious about the factors that determine the impact of parental burnout on a child as well. I wonder if Moïra can speak to that part a little bit.   Moïra  11:47 Yeah. Jen, would you mind if I say something before going to that, something about cortisol because I say these are our new findings that have just been accepted for publication. So you could have not found them. But they are very relevant and related to what Kelly said. Do you mind if I say something?   Jen  12:05 Please do?   Moïra  12:07 So yeah, Kelly's symptoms are, of course, this total collapse is very surprising to her. But it's not that surprising to me because we have just finished a study on hundreds of parents in burnout, which we compared to hundreds of matching controlled parents, so parents who are not in burnout, but who have exactly the same social democratic characteristics, so the same family situations and children etc. And what we looked at was the hair cortisol. So hair cortisol gives you an idea of the level of cortisol, so the stress hormone that the person has released over the last three months, so it gives you an objective idea of how much the person was stressed over the last three months. And what we found was that the level of cortisol of parents in burnout was twice as high as controlled parents. And the level of cortisol of burnout parents was even higher than the level of cortisol of people suffering from severe chronic pain. It was also higher than the level of cortisol of person who are victims of marital abuse. So, this means that parents in burnout are under a tremendously high amount of stress. And so, at the end, this level of stress finally damages the body to the point where the hypothalamic pituitary axis which is the adrenal axis, which is the axis that secretes cortisol will totally collapse. And at that point, the parents will not have any energy anymore because cortisol is what gives you energy. And when you're under stress, you secrete more cortisol. But at the end, when your axis is broken, you cannot secrete any cortisol. So you don't have any energy to face life so that's why these people totally collapsed and cannot wake up the next morning. I mean, they can open their eyes, obviously, but they do not have energy to just get out of their bed. So yeah, that's probably what Kelly went through, the breakdown of her HPA axis.   Kelly  14:28 I can add something to that, Moïra. That makes sense looking back now because I had a very important big presentation about two hours before that. And when the adrenaline settled down, that was the point where this blackout happens. So looking back, yes, that makes total sense. Just at that point it didn't yet.   Jen  14:49 And so what we're wondering from that, I mean, that experience, it's incredibly difficult to deal with and of course, what we're trying to do as we're going through this is raise a child and Kelly is fortunate that she has a partner on hand who can help with that, and obviously, is a partner in that. But there are many parents who are facing this who are on their own with their children. And so what kind of impacts does this have on the child.   Moïra  15:12 So in fact, when the parent is only exhausted parental burnout mostly has effect on the parents and not on the children. But parental burnout starts to have effect on children when the parent becomes emotionally distant. So when the second symptom kicks in, an emotional distancing will bring about either a neglect or a violence be it verbal or physical, or a combination of both neglect and violence. And it is really the neglect and violence that will have an impact on the child. And obviously, as you can imagine, these are most damaging if the partner or the spouse is also burnout or is never or rarely at home because he or she's working too much. So the effect of parental burnout on the children are mitigated by the support or the presence of the partner. If the partner is okay, he or she can compensate and the child will be affected might be affected, but not as much as if the parent is alone with the children. And so the way to reduce the impact of burnout on the children is of course, to try to elicit support if one does not have a partner or a spouse to reduce the time that one will spend with one's children, and so reduce the likelihood of either neglect or violence.   Kelly  16:40 But if I am alone with my daughter, so I take the majority of the care for my daughter by myself, how can I mitigate the negative effects then if I am alone, and obviously in the current situation with Corona a lot of support is not possible, or in our case at the moment actually none? What can I do then?   Moïra  16:59 Yeah, so that's indeed a tricky situation and the Coronavirus makes it even trickier because usually you could elicit the support from neighbors or from a babysitter or from other people in the network. So in this situation, the most important would be the balance between your needs and those of your child. So obviously your child needs you. I don't know how old is she?   Kelly  17:24 Two and a half.   Moïra  17:25 Two and a half, yeah. So she needs you at that point. At the same time, she's probably old enough to understand that you cannot play...

In this enlightening discussion, Brian Stout, a progressive philanthropist focused on social justice, delves into the nuances of dismantling patriarchy through parenting. He shares why even those who benefit from patriarchal systems, like himself, are invested in challenging them. The conversation explores how subtle parenting choices may enforce patriarchal norms and highlights the emotional toll these systems take on men and women alike. Brian offers actionable insights for parents seeking to foster equity in their families, making profound changes in societal dynamics.

It seems pretty clear that we are in a societal 'liminal space' right now, which is a threshold between what we have known until now and what we will know in the future. We are also in a liminal space related to learning and education, as schools hastily try to move learning online (despite disparities in access to online learning systems), and we have an incredible opportunity to think through what we think children's learning should look like in the future. In today's episode we hear from Dr. Zak Stein, who has spent many years thinking about ways in which the education system in the United States could be reimagined to take advantage of virtual learning opportunities and 'learning labs,' which gather resources around learners instead of having learning take place in classrooms isolated from real-world experience.  Dr. Stein is a big-picture thinker, and it was really exciting to sit with him and envision the future of learning. To learn more about the memberships I mention in this episode, please visit yourparentingmojo.com/together   Dr. Zak Stein's book Education in a time between worlds - Affiliate link   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen 1:46 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. To put the show into context before we get going, I wrote the questions for this episode on the night of Friday, March 20, 2020. And we recorded it on Sunday, March 22, which is coincidentally my birthday and I took at least half a day off. Here in the California Bay Area, we’ve been ordered to stay home for everything except non-essential errands for five days now. And the shutdown has now been extended to cover one in five Americans, including the entire states of California, New York and Illinois.   Now, I plan to reach out to our guests for the show in a few months’ time. But all of a sudden, on Friday night, I realized that I needed to talk with him now and that we need to hear from him today. And so our guest today is Dr. Zach Stein, whose book title tells you something of the breadth of scope of what we’re going to discuss, it is called Education in a Time Between Worlds: Essays on the Future of Schools, Technology and Society.   We will lay some groundwork so we have a common understanding of how some of our global systems work, and then we’ll start to look at the role that education plays in the system. I think it’s become really clear to us in the last couple of weeks that many of the systems that we’ve built are unsustainable, and for a long time, that word has been used to mean that they’re bad for the environment. But I think that now we’re seeing that they’re actually not that good for us either. And so what will it take for us to do things differently?   Well, first, we need to start imagining what kinds of systems we might want to see instead and how we and our children can both live within those and also shape those. So that’s what we’re going to think about in this episode. And we wrap up the show by thinking about some of the steps that we ourselves can take in the coming days and weeks to start to put this in motion. And it was really great to hear Dr. Stein share some surprising and very doable advice on this topic.   One of the things that’s become most clear to me over the years that I’ve been doing this work is that the way we raise our children may be the single thing that we do that will have the most impact on the world. We talked about it a bit in the episode on Patriarchy a few weeks ago with listener Brian Stout and Dr. Carol Gilligan. The idea that systems that privilege men’s voices over women’s voices seems so huge and so deeply ingrained in our culture and they just seem impossible to change. But if we personally see the role that we are playing in the current system, and we accept that with grace and humility, but at the same time, take steps to do things differently with our own children, then we can actually make change happen. And I really feel like we’re on the cusp of some kind of big shift in our society right now.   Even a month ago, the conversation that we’re about to hear would have been mostly academic, I think, because it’s so easy to keep following the grooves in the system that we’re in, rather than get out of that groove and create a new system. But we’ve all been thrown out of our groove right now. We don’t have a choice but to do things differently. And we might miss the groove for sure it was comfortable, and it was comforting after all, and it seemed like we knew what was going on, and we could function within it. But the opportunity that I see is that the level of effort between the way that we’re currently existing and the future systems we can imagine, has never been smaller and may never be smaller again in my lifetime. And if today’s conversation sort of maybe helps us similar light bulb to go off in your head as it has in mine, even if it’s only a very nimble but you can’t really see anything else around it yet, but you can see that that bulb is there, I wonder if you would consider coming and joining me in a special edition of my memberships that I’m currently running.   I was planning to open them on a staggered basis later in the year, but we know that a lot has changed in the last few weeks. And I can tell from the kinds of questions and issues that are being raised in the free workshop that I’m running, which is called The Kids are Off School: Now What? There’s a real need for me to open these again right now. And so I host two memberships.   The first one is called Finding Your Parenting Mojo and it’s designed for people who agree with the ideas that they hear about in the podcast, but somehow find that they just really struggle to implement these in their daily lives. I know it’s so easy when you’re listening to a podcast, you just kind of nod along and you’re thinking, yeah, that sounds good. I’m gonna do that next time there’s a meltdown.   And then when you’re actually in the meltdown and you’re feeling triggered, then that thing that you heard in the podcast two weeks ago is nowhere to be found in your mind and you react in the same way that you’ve always reacted. And after it happens, you might even look back on the meltdown and you think, oh, I was gonna do that differently. Wasn’t I?   Or was there something I was going to do differently and then you just kind of fall back just as we do as a society into our regular group and nothing really shifts. But over time, things just seem hard. And maybe you wonder if parenting should be this hard. Or perhaps you’re just not sure what to do about it.   In the parenting membership, we take one topic per month and in the beginning of the month, I send you a short guide. And it turns all the research that I do for this podcast into a short set of really actionable tools on that topic.   Around the 10th of the month, we get on a group call, we see if you have any questions as you read through the guide, and you start to think about implementing the ideas. And then you go away for a couple weeks and you start practicing them. And towards the end of the month, we have a second group call because by then you tried a bit and you’ve had some successes, yay. And you probably have some failures as well and things that didn’t quite go the way you hoped. And we celebrate those successes, and we work through what happened with the things that didn’t go as well as you hoped.   And we help you to adjust course so that you can refine your approach and by the end of the month, you haven’t just read or listen to something and forgotten about it or even half remembered it, but don’t really know what to do with it, you’ve actually had support in figuring out how to implement it in your real life with your real family. And you’ve been through a couple of cycles of doing it. And you’ve been supported in that, and you’re on the way to making it a new habit.   And then in the next month, we move on to the next topic, and we repeat that process. So in terms of the topics we cover in the first month, we dramatically reduce the incidence of tantrums at your house, give you a bit of breathing space, and who doesn’t need breathing space right now. And in the second month, we look at what values we want to hold as parents and how we raise our children in line with those values. And this isn’t me telling you what values you should be using to raise your children. But this is you defining these with my help and support.   In the third month, we will understand where we might want to get more aligned with our parenting partner and use some tools to open up conversations with them in a way that invites them to share their ideas with you rather than making them feel attacked. And we also acknowledge that it’s totally fine for parents not to be on the same page some of the time and we help you figure out which are those areas for your family, and how to manage those. And after that we picked topics by group vote and these may include things like supporting emotion regulation, understanding anxiety in both parents and children, and navigating screen time. All the ideas and tools that I present in the membership are based on scientific research, but the overarching principle is that if you don’t want to, you never have to read another parenting book.   You just don’t have to do that anymore, because we go right to supporting you and implementing the tools that are based on the research. And given that a whole lot of parents are at home with their children for an extended period of time, it sort of seems as though the time is right to start thinking about how you want the next few months to go. Schools been closed for a couple weeks now. So how are things going? Can you imagine doing things the way you’ve been doing them for the last few weeks for several more months? If so then way to go. You got this. But if that thought makes you kind of nervous and you might want to think about using the membership to make a shift in your approach towards something that helps you work with your child, rather than feeling like you’re butting heads all the time, so the coming months and even years really can be easier and more peaceful. So that’s the Finding Your Parenting Mojo membership.   And so the second membership is the Your Child’s Learning Mojo membership. And that’s where we support children’s intrinsic love of learning. And you’ll hear a little in this episode about how schools have really not been designed for children’s learning. They were actually designed to mold people who would produce goods in factories and consume them in homes. And that’s why education is so standardized because getting people with standardized skills out the back end is really useful when you’re producing standardized products. And I have to say, it frustrates me no end that so many thousands of skilled and compassionate and knowledgeable teachers work within the system that so devalues their abilities and their relationships with our children in a way that really stamps out our children’s natural curiosity and the world around them by about second grade.   So in the Your Child’s Learning Mojo membership, we understand in layman’s terms how children learn. And then we learn how to use their own questions and interests as a jumping off point for engaging them in learning those deep and meaningful, and we’ll stay with them for so much longer than learning based on worksheets and curriculum. And as well as the actual learning on individual topics that happens which is great, we’re also helping them learn how to learn.   So we’re really being their guide on the side rather than the sage on the stage. Where it’s reimagining our job. Our job isn’t to provide them with answers. Our job is to connect them with resources, and see how the process of learning works so that they can apply this no matter where their interest take them in life.   And so schools are going to be closed for at least the next several months. So I know parents are wondering how the heck they’re going to support their children’s learning in that time, without standing over them, forcing them to fill out worksheets every day. Nobody finds that fun. One of the parents in the Learning membership told me last week that, “My children’s creativity and excitement over learning has been exploding since I’ve been in the membership.   Until last week, my only concern was that we would never get to all the projects we thought of based on their interests now home because of the Corona virus, we have no shortage of meaningful activities to fill our days for weeks, or even months to come. This course has put me in a position where I can turn lemons into lemonade.” And of course, that’s not to say that you or even this parent has to fill every moment of your day with projects. We’re not saying that at all. But rather, that you never need to search online for another list of 100 things to do with your child while shelter in places in effect, because you’ll already be working with your child on things that they love to do.   And so just to tie all this together, on Thursday, I hosted a circle for 40 parents it was on a Zoom call and they’re all taking the free workshop which is called The Kids are Off School: Now What? We were laughing a little and we were crying a little and for a couple of hours it was just kind of okay for us to lose it a bit and then gather up the pieces and go back to our families and some of the folks who are in the memberships also joined and they were feeling as much stress as everybody else was, but a couple of them said, “I feel like we’ve been preparing for the last 18 months for this.”   And so they’re referring to that period since they’ve been working with me and they’ve been practicing tools to help them in regular everyday parenting that they’re now finding are also so incredibly helpful in navigating their children’s anxieties about Coronavirus as well as just simple things like routine changes and not being able to see their friends and so these parents are feeling confident and prepared and ready for whatever comes up with their child.   So if that sounds like the kind of feeling you would like to have as you prepare for the next few months at home, which so many people seem to need both at once right now, I’m running a special package when you sign up for both of these memberships together, both the learning and the parenting one.   So, to see how that works just head on over to YourParentingMojo.com/Together.   Once again, that’s YourParentingMojo.com/Together. All right, so with all that out of way, let’s go ahead and meet today’s guest. Dr. Zach Stein studied Philosophy and Religion at Hampshire College and then Educational Neuroscience, Human Development and the Philosophy of Education at Harvard University. He’s now a scholar of the Ronin Institute, where he researches the relationships between education, human development and the evolution of civilizations. He’s also the co-president of a Think Tank, a board member at a number of technology startups, and he consults with schools, organizations and technology companies. Welcome Dr. Stein.     Dr. Stein  13:29 It's great to be here.   Jen  13:31 So I'd like to start by waiting right into the deep end with the big picture systems and then we'll move from there towards understanding the implications of these for our children's learning and education. And I'm going to quote from your book you've said that, “Based on an analysis of long-term global trends in economics and political history, contemporary world systems analysts argue that we have reached a crucial moment in geo history. When any complex system reaches its structural limits and evolutionary crisis ensues and a fundamentally new kind of system must be painfully and violently born”. So, if we were beginning this conversation a month ago, you know, yes, research on this topic has been around for a long time, but we might have needed to spend some time thinking through what this actually mean for us as fortunate people in our real lives? And today, we don't need to do that, we see the collapses beginning to happen. And we intuitively understand that what you wrote is true. I wonder if you can help us to maybe put your thinking about the Corona virus pandemic in the light of your previous writing and thinking please.   Dr. Stein  14:31 Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I've been thinking about that a lot. I, along with a bunch of other scholars since about 1972, not myself personally, you know, that the current way the systems running simply can't be sustained. So if you look at a book like The Limits to Growth, which was published in 1972, where the Student Loan Corporation, which was founded in 1972. And you look at the predictions from a lot of economists who saw the kind of waning of American hegemony beginning in 1972, which is when the dollar was taken off the gold standard by Nixon, through Fiat. And so a whole bunch of things basically started to get a bunch of people thinking that we need a fundamental change, right? Environmentalist sounding the bell, right? I think Silent Spring was 1962. So, what you have is a sense that, yeah, we were seriously running out of time, that there were all these extremely fragile systems that were reaching the limits of their growth, that the thing was wrongly conceived that you can’t have a plan to infinitely extract resources for capital gain on a finite planet. And so there was just this question of, what will that transition look like? How will we go from this kind of unsustainable model of civilizational growth to a sustainable way for in perpetuity, there to be human civilization? So, I started talking about this notion of being in a time between worlds because we're aware that the current system is ending, even though it may not look like it on the surface. And we're aware that the current systems ending and we don't know exactly what that next system looks like. So we're valley crossing in terms of evolutionary theory, we're moving out of one world and to another world. And this was apparent to people who were like, a small number of academics were basically looking through into the deeper structures but now this rather esoteric notions become exoteric and you're getting it like down on Main Street at an every living room that there's a phenomenology, there's an experience so whoa, we just been deworlded, right? The world as we knew it has kind of changed, that the old world is gone. And something new on the other side of this will emerge. That's been the feeling in the abstract and now it's the feeling in the concrete. And so it's revealing all of those systematic vulnerabilities in civilizational architecture, which have been known about, but it's making everyone aware of those, like, for example, the supply chain, right? It's like, when you go into a store and it's packed with goods, you're like, there's no problem with civilization. Look at this, like, everything's packed, right? You go into a store, and there's some stuff missing. You start to think maybe you maybe have the thought occasionally, but now you're thinking like hard about it, like, how does that supply chain actually work?   Jen  17:33 And then you buy more toilet paper?   Dr. Stein  17:35 Right. So this is the idea is that whoa, all of these supply, you know, all of the vulnerable infrastructures that sustain us now are...

In this episode we discuss how to cope with parents’ and children’s fear and anxiety related to the Coronavirus pandemic, how to keep the children busy so you can get some work done (without resorting to hours of screen time), and how to use the time that you are focused on them to develop your family relationships as well as their learning, rather than you driving each other nuts. To download a FREE sample routine to help you organize your days, and also join a FREE one-week workshop to give you the tools you need to cope with this situation, please go to yourparentingmojo.com/coronavirus   Other episodes mentioned in this show Talk Sex Today Understanding the AAP’s new screen time guidelines Raising your child in a digital world   Resources List of video conferencing companies offering free services Geocaching website Nature journaling videos with John Muir Laws   Jump to highlights 00:58 Introduction of episode 04:16 Difference between fear, worry, anxiety, and panic and how they impact a person 07:23 Official diagnosis of anxiety 08:36 Official diagnosis of a panic attack 10:05 What can we do to be less afraid 16:33 Difference between routine and schedule 22:48 A learning exploration 29:49 Parents worry about loneliness 39:50 Realization during the pandemic   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast!  I know that listeners who have been with me for a while know that an episode is going to be different when I dispense with the music at the beginning – I think the last time I did this was six months ago when I announced that I was taking a break from the show.  But have no fear; I’m not going anywhere – I just did it today to indicate that this is not a normal show because these are not normal times.  I’m recording this on March 15 2020, four days after the World Health Organization declared that the coronavirus outbreak is a pandemic, which means it is dispersed across a very wide geographic area and affects many individuals at the same time.  Many, many things have been canceled in the last few days – most schools are canceled for at least the next few weeks; big events are canceled or postponed, and we’re being advised to practice ‘social distancing’ by remaining six feet apart from other people. This all seems really big and super stressful and I’m not going to go into the details of much of the epidemiological information because frankly that isn’t my specialty.  But I also know that a lot of you are struggling with issues that very much do fall into my wheelhouse – things like “what on earth am I going to do with my kids for the next six weeks when we usually start to get on each other’s nerves on day six of a vacation,” and “will my child get behind on school work,” and “how am I going to still get my own WORK work done so I can get paid and keep us afloat while we’re all cooped up in this tiny space?” So in this episode I’m going to cover two main things – firstly, resources for you, because you may well be feeling quite anxious and approaching the end of your rope already and unsure how you’re going to make it through the coming weeks. Then we’ll talk about issues that affect your children while we’re going through this and how to answer your children’s questions about the virus and how to be thoughtful about screen time when it seems like there’s nothing else to do and also how to support their learning while they’re out of school. And because I know some of you are REALLY stressed out about this, I also want to let you know about a FREE one-week workshop that I’m running starting on March 23rd. It draws together elements of many of the paid workshops and memberships that I’ve built over the last few years into resources that you can use RIGHT NOW.  So for example, I’m in the middle of hosting a workshop on Taming Your Triggers, where we spend weeks digging into the many sources of your triggers because we often find that if we understand those better it creates space for us to choose a different reaction.  But right now we KNOW the source of our triggers – for many of us it’s our anxiety about the virus and about being cooped up with our kids – whom we love and cherish and enjoy, but just not ALL DAY EVERY DAY.  So we go right to the strategies that you can put in place immediately to feel less triggered by the situation, which will allow you to respond more effectively to your child when they’re acting out. We’ll also cover similar, immediately implementable strategies to cope with sibling fighting in a way that gives your children tools to solve their own problems, ways to keep children busy so you can get things done, and how to use their own interests as a jumping off point for real learning that isn’t based on worksheets or spelling drills or math problems for when you do have focused time with them. So if all that sounds like something you could use, just head on over to yourparentingmojo.com/coronavirus and sign up; you just have to enter your name and email address and you’re in.  There’s no charge whatsoever, so if you know of other parents among your friends, family, colleagues, and online networks and groups that could benefit from this then please do feel free to forward the yourparentingmojo.com/coronavirus page. The workshop gets started on March 24th, and as a bonus, as soon as you sign up I’ll email you a sample daily routine that you can use to bring a sense of order to the few days that we have until we get started.  I don’t think you necessarily need a formal schedule, and you may do just fine even without the parameters of a loose routine, but since many of our children will be coming from the highly routinized worlds of daycare and school, they may find the structure gives them a sense of security when so much around them might feel uncertain.  So that routine should carry you through the days when this is all still new and being out of daycare or school is still somewhat exciting, and then when you’re starting to get on each other’s nerves and you’re wondering how you’re going to do this for the foreseeable future, I’ll be standing right alongside you with tools to help.  If you’d like to download that sample schedule and sign up for the workshop, just go to yourparentingmojo.com/coronavirus, and as a reminder it is completely FREE, so please do share it with anyone you think might benefit. OK, so on to our topic for today – and in the spirit of putting your own oxygen mask on before helping others with theirs, let’s start with you. I know a lot of you are really anxious about what’s happening in the world at the moment, so I want to be really specific about our language here and define our terms.  I’m going to walk through the difference between fear, worry, anxiety, and panic. When we’re thinking about fear, then that’s a response to a known or definite threat.  If we’re hiking in the woods and we see a bear, fear is a normal response.  Our bodies use fear to trigger us to do something productive, which is usually fight or flight, or sometimes the freeze response which can mean playing physically – or emotionally – dead.  For many of us, we are very fortunate that in the situation we’re in with the virus, objectively speaking there really isn’t a lot to fear.  If we are healthy and our children are healthy and the elderly people we know are staying home and staying away from people who might have been infected, then there really isn’t a lot to have actual fear about.  Yes, there is still a possibility that we might catch the virus and we’ll probably feel crappy for a couple of weeks, but the transmission rate in children seems to be very low, and the fatality rate in healthy adults and children is very very low, so we probably won’t be too severely impacted. But if we think out beyond our immediately fortunate circumstances, then there actually is quite a lot of reason to be afraid.  If our elderly relatives can’t be completely isolated, or if we or our family members are immunocompromised, or if we care about people who are forced to live in close quarters like prison, or who are homeless and lack access to the basic sanitation practices that we are able to take for granted, or if we are working on the front lines in hospitals then that fear suddenly seems very rational because there IS a threat.  The threat is HERE, and it’s happening now. When we feel fear for an extended period of time – longer than it takes to run away from a bear - we often worry.  Worrying is defined by being exact; we’re not generally worried about things in general; we’re worried about something specific.  We’re worried that we are going to catch the virus and pass it on to others.  We’re worried that our vulnerable friends and relatives are going to be seriously ill or die. In many cases, in regular life, worry is actually adaptive, which means it’s useful.  It tells us that there’s something we need to focus on and maybe shift our approach.  The problem here, of course, is that many of us are already doing the things we’ve been told to do to reduce the transmission of the virus, but if there are things we simply can’t do – like not going to work if we’re a nurse and we’re not sick, or completely protecting our parents who are in ill health – and then it’s much more difficult to reduce the worry by changing our approach. When we can’t reduce our worries, they may become generalized into anxiety, which is a diffuse, unpleasant, vague sense of apprehension.  It’s possible that you might not even say what’s making you anxious – yes, you’re anxious about the virus, but even after you’ve rationally told yourself about the relatively low risks to most people, you might still feel anxious and not really be able to fully explain why.  We don’t often feel worry in our bodies, but we feel anxiety.  The official diagnosis requires three or more of the following six symptoms to be present – restlessness or feeling on edge; being easily fatigued, difficulty concentrating, irritability, muscle tension, and sleep disturbance.  These reactions aren’t going to help you to cope with any specific threat, so they are maladaptive.  A good test is to tell a friend about your thoughts – if they can understand, you’re worrying.  If they say “that makes no sense,” or if you already know yourself that it makes no sense, that’s probably anxiety.  Worry might make us nervous, but anxiety makes us afraid; it feels beyond our control, and it changes our ability to function in life for a substantial period of time – the diagnosis criteria say six months on this, although I’m guessing that in acute situations like this that the six month criteria may not be as relevant. A panic attack is like an acute onset of anxiety.  Instead of having ongoing, low to moderate intensity physical symptoms and a generalized sense of apprehension, the official diagnosis of a panic attack is defined as periods of intense fear or discomfort in which at least four of the following 13 symptoms develop quickly, reaching a peak within 10 minutes.  The 13 symptoms are pounding heartbeat, sweating, trembling or shaking, shortness of breath, feeling of choking, chest pain, nausea, feeling dizzy or faint, derealization (which means you have altered perceptions about your self and/or your environment), fear of losing control or going crazy, numbness or tingling, and chills or hot flushes.  If you are already anxious then it’s possible that you might experience the symptoms of a panic attack if you’re in a public place where people are coughing and sneezing, especially if that place is your work so you can’t escape from it. And when we’re experiencing these things one of the things we’re probably also worrying about the impact that our experience is having on our children.  Some children aren’t terribly perceptive and might not notice that something is wrong, while others will be sensitive to every shift in your mood. Either way, many of them will notice if your symptoms cause you to snap at them or lash out at them, and of course it’s hard enough to be patient with your children when you’re cooped up with them in a small space, even if you WEREN’T experiencing fear, worrying, anxiety, or maybe even panic attacks yourself, along with all the uncertainty that comes with the constant change in status of what’s open and whether we’re still going to have a job in six weeks and if our city is going to be put on lockdown. So what can we do?  If we think about what helps us to feel less afraid, worried, and anxious, it’s usually not that someone tells us “Don’t worry; that thing you’re thinking about is never going to happen.” These aren’t rational responses in us, so they often don’t respond well to rational logic. It’s far more powerful to reach out to a friend (via phone!) and say “hey, I’m really worried.  Can I talk with you about it?”  Hopefully if your friend is a good listener they’ll empathize with your feelings and your experience first, and connect with you as a human being to show you they care about you before letting you know whether or not you’re being irrational.  And if they’re worried too, hopefully you can do the same thing for them. When we are ready for some rational information, we can try to understand what is the real risk to ourselves and our family.  It can be hard to see countries on lockdown and not think that this virus is coming to get us personally, and while the risk to the community is very large, the personal risk to you as an individual is actually quite small.  We just can’t extrapolate the community risk to the personal risk and assume that because the community risk is large, the personal risk is also large.  Finding trusted sources of information on issues like this is really important – so look to places like the World Health Organization, or your healthcare provider. You can look at what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is doing as an advisory, but I will say that in general the American government has not been good at detecting, understanding, and reducing risks associated with all kinds of public health threats over the years, and that they it tends to be more reactionary than proactive so I personally don’t necessarily trust that I’m getting all the information I need in a timely manner from them. You can do a simple mental risk analysis and ask yourself if you know of anyone who has been infected with the virus, and if you’ve been in contact with them.  If you have, then there’s definitely more of a reason to worry than if you haven’t. And thirdly, what are the steps you can reasonably take to prevent the spread of the virus?  These are fairly simple – regular, effective handwashing for 20 seconds, not touching your face, and staying away from someone who might be infected.  That’s where the advice to maintain social distance comes into play, and most of what I’m reading says to stay around six feet or two meters from other people when you’re out.  There’s probably not a lot of point in wearing a face mask unless it’s a very high quality one and you’re trained in how to use it and you are disciplined in using it – I was at the hospital the other day picking up some medicine for poison oak and I can’t tell you how many people I saw with masks pushed down around their chins.  Masks are actually mostly designed to keep nasty stuff in rather than out, so they’re designed for sick people to wear so they don’t get other people sick, not for healthy people to wear to keep other people’s germs out.  There are mask shortages as well at the moment so it’s best to save those for people who are on the front lines dealing with real exposure risk. For those of you who are in these situations where you genuinely do have an elevated risk of exposure, my heart goes out to you.  One of the things that seems to happen when we experience symptoms related to anxiety is we feel alone, and like no one else can possibly understand.  But since there are thousands of people experiencing this right now, it’s highly likely that there are very many people who do understand how you’re feeling not only about the exposure, but the fact that this is happening in a situation that you can’t get out of.  One thing you might try is to create a virtual social community for people who are at increased exposure risk using a phone or video conferencing tool so you don’t actually have to be together in the same room.  I’ll put a link in the references to an article about video conferencing providers who are offering free services right now. It could be as simple as you and a colleague sending out an email saying you’ll be on the line at a certain time; if nobody else shows up then you’ll have one other person to talk with, but you might find that many others have been feeling a need for connection like this but didn’t know how to make it happen. When we’re anxious it’s possible that understanding rationally that our actual risk of exposure is fairly low if we have access to adequate protective equipment, but you also need to address the emotional aspect as well which seeks reassurance and solidarity and empathy, so by going at this from both sides you’ll stand the best chance of making it through this with your sanity intact.  In the free workshop we’ll go more deeply into some other tools you can use to create space for yourself when you feel triggered so you can choose a different response, as well as resources to help you have conversations about your fears with your colleagues and your partner that invite them to help you and allow you to offer your support to them.  We’ll also talk about a concept from Buddhism called grasping, which is the idea that we tend to get attached to certain outcomes (like keeping our families safe) that in reality we really can’t control.  Taking steps to stop grasping – even as we continue to take all necessary precautions like handwashing and social distance – can go an enormously long way toward releasing the grip that anxiety has over us. This is really powerful work, and I’m excited to share it with you in the workshop. OK, so that was a lot on anxiety specifically related to the virus.  For those of us who aren’t feeling especially anxious about our risk of exposure, there’s still the anxiety of knowing that while we love our children, we really do better when we spend a significant chunk of the day apart from them.  Even for those of you who have chosen to be stay-at-home-parents, getting out of the house and socializing both with other children and other parents has probably provided a big part of the resources that you use to feel connected and have a purpose beyond that of raising your children, and with that rug pulled out from under you, you too may also feel very isolated.  One thing I really want to underscore here is that I don’t think you need a minute-by-minute schedule that tries to replicate the kind of schedule your child has at school, and when we talk about children more in a minute I’ll also make the case that keeping up on school work is a pretty low priority. But I do think that if your children have been in a very structured environment and will probably be going back to

A few weeks ago we talked with Dr. Brad Klontz about the 'money scripts' that we pass on to our children - perhaps unintentionally - if we fail to examine these and make conscious decisions about the messages we want to convey about money to our children. Today we continue our series on the intersection of parenting and money with a conversation with Dr. Allison Pugh, whose doctoral dissertation (and subsequent book, Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture) remain seminal works in this field even a decade after their publication. In this interview, we take the position that advertising to children is happening - so what do we do with that?  How do children make meaning out of the messages sent to them through our consumerist culture?  How do parents attempt to resist the effects of this culture, and how successful are they? In our next episode in this series we'll dig more deeply into the effects of advertising itself on children's brains, so stay tuned for that!   Book mentioned in the episode Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture (Affiliate link).   Other episodes on this series This episode is the second in a series on the intersection of parenting and money. You can find other episodes in this series: 038: The Opposite of Spoiled 105: How to pass on mental wealth to your child 112: How to Set up a Play Room 115: Reducing the Impact of Advertising to Children 118: Are You Raising Materialistic Kids?   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen  01:31 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today's episode is part of a series that I'm doing on the Intersection of Childhood and Money. A while back now I interviewed New York Times columnist Ron Lieber, on his book The Opposite of Spoiled and we do use his approach to several topics related to money. But it seemed to me for a while now that there's a lot more to say on this. So more recently, I interviewed Dr. Brad Klontz on his concept of Money Scripts, which are the ideas about money that were passed on to us by our parents and that we will probably pass on to our children as well if we don't critically examine these and potentially make a conscious decision to choose a different path. Another avenue I've been wanting to explore is consumerism since I come from England, which is certainly becoming more Americanized than many other places, but where consumerism still doesn't have the same force that it does here in the US where buying things to express love or because you're feeling sad or just because you feel like it is pretty much considered a birthright. And I spent a lot of time looking for someone to talk with on this topic and finally found our guest today Dr. Allison Pugh. Dr. Pugh is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia whose teaching and research focuses on contemporary work and relationships, and particularly the intertwining of culture, emotions, intimacy and economic life. She's currently a fellow at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles while she writes a book about her research on the automation of work that's historically relied on relationships between people like the caring professions. She wrote the book Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children and Consumer Culture back in 2009, in which she studies how children and parents in both affluent and working class communities in the East Bay Area of California where I live, manage the commercialization of childhood. The book was named by contemporary sociology as one of the 12 most influential books on the family written since 2000 and received several awards. A decade later, it remains the seminal work on this topic. So I'm excited that Dr. Pugh is here today to talk with us and help us think through this important topic. Welcome, Dr. Pugh.   Dr. Pugh 03:26 Thank you so much.   Jen  03:28 All right, so I'd like to start by quoting a few of the very first sentences from the preface of your book. So you say “Ask them straight out and most upper income parents will tell you they don't buy much for their children because they have the ‘right values’. Meanwhile, low income parents will try to convince you they buy quite a bit because they are not ‘in trouble’. Go into their children's bedrooms, however, and you will find many of the same objects Nintendo or Sony gaming system, the collectible cards, the Hello Kitty pencils.” You go on to describe how nine in 10 Americans feel that children today want too many material things. And four out of five parents think Americans overly materialistic society produces over commercialized children. Oh, my goodness. So what are some of the popular reasons why we might think this situation exists?   Dr. Pugh  04:17 Well, the first thing I would say is what is the situation?   Jen  04:19 Yes.   Dr. Pugh  04:20 And the situation is that children have a lot of things and yet Americans are worried about how much children might attach to those things, how much kind of emotional attachment they might feel towards material things. And those two, that's why I'm saying that, I'm describing that situation using those two things. They both have the things and Americans are worried about their feelings toward those things. That's the situation we're describing. And why do we have that situation? One issue is the kind of massive influence of consumer culture on Americans generally, not just children but children and adults, and that's why children have those things. And then the question about like, or the issue about how Americans are worried about how children feel about those things, that's a different issue. And that reflects our ambivalence towards consumer culture. As a culture, we both embrace it and we are worried about it. We are concerned about its impact on our own lives. And we express that concern with our concern around children. That's what I would say, kind of writ large. Now, the question about like popular reasons why people think children might be materialistic. That is, you know, people are sure that children are just glued to the TV or to their screens and then very susceptible to the advertising that's they're more susceptible than they see themselves as being. That would be like the number one reason why people are afraid that children are too materialistic. Another thing that you hear sometimes popular reasons would be people are pretty sure that other people, other parents are less able to control themselves than they themselves are. So they're pretty sure that other parents are, you know, kind of opening the spigot and just letting kids have whatever they ask. And then there's often a lot of generational critique, like, oh, kids today, you know, that would be another kind of popular reason why people are afraid. They're like, oh, kids today, they're more materialistic. They're more screen-focused, they're more obsessed with stuff, you know, that kind of thing. So those are three potential reasons why people—those are reasons you hear batted about, like, why kids, they have so much and be maybe too attached to those things.   Jen  06:45 It's like we're caught in a really difficult bind here, isn't it? We want the convenience of being able to make one click and buy something on Amazon that shows up tomorrow, whenever we feel like it. But at the same time, we're so worried about what this means for our children's futures. It's a very difficult position to be in for parents, I think.   Dr. Pugh  07:04 Yes, I agree. And, yeah, my overall kind of conclusion from all the years of research that I did and talking to people about this subject after is that, you know, the overarching conclusion I would want people to walk away with is something like, you know, be aware that children live in the same culture that you do.   Jen  07:25 They do?   Dr. Pugh  07:28 And whatever you're worried about for your children, kind of look at your own self, and what is the kind of modeling that you are doing? That's kind of the main thing that I come away with.   Jen  07:42 Yeah. Okay. All right. Thanks for giving that away early on.   Jen  07:46 And so you'd mentioned advertising, and I know that advertisements geared towards children isn't a big focus of yours. And so I'm hoping to do a follow up episode on that with somebody else who does really focus on this, but I wonder if you could just tell us briefly before we move on, why do you take a different view on this topic?   Dr. Pugh  08:02 Right. Well, it's not that I don't think advertising is important. Advertising is very important. I’m not, you know, kind of discounting the findings of many, many psychologists and experimental scientists that find that, you know, you show children an ad in an experimental situation in a lab, and then they turn out they want it more later or, you know, like there's a lot, not to mention all the corporate research finding efficacy, you know, they spent billions of dollars on advertising to children, and they're not doing it for their health. They’re doing it because they believe it to be effective. So it's not that I'm saying advertising is not effective. For me, I was less interested in tracking the effectiveness of advertising than I was in kind of how children what's the meaning children make of the stuff in their lives when they're out in the real world? What does it mean to them? And so the reason why I didn't focus on the advertising is because I kind of made it a constant. I just assumed all kids are exposed to advertising to some degree. And I did this at a time when I myself had three young children ranging in age from about, I think it was about three to 10. And my kids, you know, we don't have a TV, you know, like all these things, I was doing all these things to, I thought shelter my children from advertising.   Jen  09:26 As a good middle class parent does.   Dr. Pugh  09:29 You know, doing my best. And then they're in school or just walking around, like they swim in this water just like we do. So, even if you're doing some things, to keep them what you think sheltered or protected from advertising culture or consumer culture, they get it anyway from a whole bunch of other sources. And so that was part of the thinking that like, you know, advertising is everywhere. But that's not the end of the conversation. That's the beginning of a conversation like, given that advertising is everywhere, what do we know then? What's next about what to know about the meaning that children make from stuff? That's where I started. I wasn't controlling the effect of advertising because I didn't perceive that that was very possible. I was just like, okay, assuming advertising is everywhere, what next?   Jen  10:24 Yeah. And so that takes us nicely to one of the key themes in your book, I think, which is the balance of needing to fit in, but also not be too different from people. So you want to be different enough to express your individuality, which is why you need Nike sneakers, right? The right logo on the side. So you have to fit in, but you also have to show your individuality. And of course, this exists both on the part of the children that you studied, as well as on the parents’ memories of their own childhoods and whether or not I as a parent felt like I fit in as a child really can have some profound impacts on how I want to raise my child. And so I'm curious, what can you tell us about the differences that you notice that were important to children and parents?   Dr. Pugh  11:05 Mm-hmm. Well, one thing I want to emphasize a little bit differently, put a slightly different emphasis on what you are saying, which is I found that everyone, I would say, was concerned about fitting in. And the concern about individuality seemed, I'd say, of course, that's going to vary by temperament. So some kids are more concerned with that, but really, that was coming from the parents. So the kids were much more interested in belonging. And that's why I came up with that title. That title says it all.   Jen  11:39 Yeah, longing and belonging.   Dr. Pugh  11:43 What's the meaning? If the question is what is the meaning that kids make of the stuff in their lives? The answer is belonging. And that's actually a really different thing than a lot of research I found thinks the existing research is like thinking about status and how to be better than, you know, the better than your neighbor or your, you know, in a hierarchy. And actually, the kids and I remember, you know, I sat with kids for three years.   Jen  12:16 You knew these kids really well.   Dr. Pugh 12:17 I knew them really well.There were three different locations that varied essentially by class. There was a kind of wealthy public school, a private school, and then a low income public school setting. And each of these the kids are using the meaning of the goods and the kind of services that they could buy or that the parents were buying to belong more than to assert their dominance. So it was like I kept seeing again and again, you know, kids sitting around going, you know, I have a Gameboy, which I realized is a rather outdated reference, so, whatever they're talking about today. I have a Gameboy and then someone else would say, well, I have a We or something they would try and trump it. They would instead say, well, I have a Gameboy. Yeah, I have one too. Yeah, I have one too. And it was like, I have one too or I've done that too, was much more prevalent and much more prominent in the conversations that I was witnessing over three years. Then, well, that's for losers and really everyone should have this or whatever, you know. Now, that's the kids’ world that I was witnessing. And that was a surprise to me, because I had been kind of prepped by the culture, I think the Mean Girls trope, you know, the obsession with status that is a lot of popular culture as well as the existing research. But then you talk to the parents. So I also interviewed parents of the children that I was observing in each location, and the parents were worried like about belonging also. But they were also worried about their kids’ individuality or I should say the affluent parents in particular were most focused on their kids’ individuality in ways that the children were less so. And I can talk more about that, because that's tied into all sorts of other things about parenting, but those things I found in their consumer.   Jen  14:19 And I think from the affluent parents’ side, that sort of, I'm thinking ahead to the college years and the getting into college years, and you've sort of got to show that your kid is different from the other 50,000 kids who are applying to Harvard, right? Is that a big part of the difference aspect?   Dr. Pugh  14:34 Isn’t that interesting? So I think that's true. But it's mediated through a kind of generalized parenting style of, you know, intensive concerted cultivation that I think you may have talked about before on the podcast. So Annette Lareau’s really important work diagnosing what middle class and above parents are trying to do, this concerted cultivation is figure out how your kids are unique individuals and then cultivate the things that they are going to make them particularly special that are their particular passions. That's something that starts at very young, will say toddlers, and I think is powered by, in my opinion by rising inequality and the higher stakes of getting into college and which colleges, the college race.   Jen  15:27 Yup. So you mentioned Dr. Annette Lareau’s work there, and yeah, we have mentioned that on the podcast before and the term concerted cultivation is one that she used to describe how parents used organized activities and I guess consumption as well to foster their child's talents and I'm going to quote you on this that you said,“From the perspective of upper income parents knowing children's desires was also part of caring well, of listening, empathizing and reflecting back to their children their true natures, so they grew to know and love themselves. Upper income parents sought to understand their children’s individuals including their desires as part of diagnosing their individual strengths and weaknesses, the central task of every upper income caregiver before commencing on the path of concerted cultivation, plumbing the depths of children's desires was good parenting.” And I have to say, I'm gonna go out on a limb here, this statement made me really feel kind of uncomfortable, because I see so much of myself and my daughter in it. And there's a lot kind of going on in my personal life right now that I'm struggling with or related to not really knowing myself and I talked to Dr. Carol Gilligan recently about how patriarchy causes women to not really truly know and to use their true voice and men not to know and express their true feelings. And so I do want to help my daughter to know herself and to express herself from a very young age and we plan to homeschool and so we're going to have the time and space for her to really know her own strengths and weaknesses. And kind of in a way cultivate herself and I think and hope this will help her to live a fulfilling life. But I also see Dr. Lareau is arguing I'm essentially preparing her to function as an upper middle class White person in society. And of course, the reason I'm able to do this is because I have economic privilege. And so what I'm trying to tease out here is, is it wrong of me to do it in some way?   Jen  17:12 It's okay to say yes.   Dr. Pugh  17:15 I completely empathize with it. And I have a kind of two part answer.   Jen  17:20 Okay.   Dr. Pugh  17:21 The first is that what you're describing is kind of seeing another person with positive regard and reflecting that person back to her or him, you know, the child, that's part of good parenting. That’s part of good caring on some level, like even the psychologists with their analysis of infant caregiver relations will tell you that that this is mirroring. And that's part of good care. So on the most fundamental level, the answer is no, no, it's not wrong. The problem is when it gets kind of activated as entitlement, and that's the direction in which our culture is going. So there's really great work after Lareau, which was published, you know, 15 years ago or more. There's really great work showing that kids of middle class versus kids of working class or poor backgrounds, take that the streets you could say that they derive from being seen so regularly and so typically by their parents, and take it into the classroom and customize the classroom to their needs, in ways that accentuate the advantages that they have. You know, it's not just their parents speak more vocabulary to them or that they have more books in the home, but that they assume that they can customize...

In this thought-provoking discussion, scholar Carol Gilligan, an expert on patriarchy's impact on parenting, joins listener Brian Stout, who is dedicated to dismantling these systems. They explore how patriarchy represses emotional expression in boys while silencing girls, revealing its detrimental effects on personal identity. The conversation highlights creative ways to raise children outside rigid gender norms and emphasizes the role of open communication in fostering healthy emotional development. Join them in uncovering paths toward dismantling these entrenched societal structures.

Think about your parents. Now think about money. What kinds of ideas, images, and feelings come to mind? Do you recall any discussions about money - or were these hidden from you? Was there always enough to go around - or were you ever-conscious of its absence? What little incidents do you recall that ended up becoming defining 'money scripts' of your life? Perhaps it won't be a shock to learn that just as we learned how to raise children from our parents, we also learned how to think about money from them.  And as we will raise our children the way we were raised unless we choose a different path, we will also pass on our ideas about money - unless we decide differently. Today we hear from Dr. Brad Klontz, co-author of the book Mind over Money: Overcoming the Money Disorders That Threaten Our Financial Health (Affiliate link), who helps us to think through the money scripts we want to pass on to our children - and how to adjust course if we decide we need to do this. Find more information from Dr. Klontz on his YouTube channel.   Other episodes in this series This episode is the first in a series on the intersection of parenting and money.  You can find other episodes in this series: 038: The Opposite of Spoiled 107: The impact of consumerism on children 112: How to Set up a Play Room 115: Reducing the Impact of Advertising to Children 118: Are You Raising Materialistic Kids?   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"]   Jen: 01:36 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today's episode kicks off what I'm hoping is at least going to be a miniseries on issues related to money and economic privilege, although I'm still in the process of figuring out exactly where we're going with this. So, quite a long time ago now, we talked with New York Times columnist, Ron Lieber about money and we got a high level overview of some of the problems we can face when we're thinking about how to talk with children about money. So, things like from what information to give at what age and what to do when your child nags you to buy something that they want at a store. But a friend recommended that I read the book that our guest today co-wrote with his father. His father is Dr.Ted Klontz and the book is called Mind over Money: Overcoming the Money Disorders That Threaten Our Financial Health. So our guests, Dr. Brad Klontz holds a Doctorate in Psychology. He's a certified financial planner. He co-founded the Financial Psychology Institute and he's an Associate Professor of Practice in Financial Psychology at Creighton University Heider College of Business. So, we're here today to take our conversation on money to the next level by thinking through how our own relationship with money will impact our children's relationship with money. Welcome, Dr. Klontz.   Dr. Klontz: 02:45 I'm so happy to be here and I'm really happy that hopefully I can get some parenting mojo and a conversation too.   Jen: 02:51 Do you have children?   Dr. Klontz: 02:52 I do. I have 2 children.   Jen: 02:53 How old are they?   Dr. Klontz: 02:54 I've got a 6-year-old and a 2-year-old.   Jen: 02:57 Oh, okay.   Dr. Klontz: 02:58 And it's sort of amazing what they're already reflecting back to me on what I'm sort of unconsciously teaching them around money.   Jen: 03:03 I can imagine. Okay. So, you should know that it's perfectly fine to share personally learned lessons with us.   Dr. Klontz: 03:09 Okay, I'll do my best.   Jen: 03:11 All right, cool. So, let's dive right in. I wonder if you can kind of get to the crux of your book, which I think is about this idea that you call money scripts. What is a money script?   Dr. Klontz: 03:20 Yeah, so I got really curious. I grew up myself in a, my mom likes to say we were middle-class except lower. And I said, well, they have words for that, but we don't have to say what those are.   Jen: 03:30 Yeah. We need to say them.   Dr. Klontz: 03:32 Right. But I became really curious at a young age, I was surrounded by a loving family of real hard workers who never seem to really get ahead financially. And so I sort of had that inquisitive mind, I think as a child. And so going through my adolescence and then later on professionally, I was always really curious about how people look at the world differently, whether it's different religions or different sort of socioeconomic backgrounds. We all sort of have this worldview and it sort of collects around people who are similar to us. So, I became really curious. That's sort of the framework.   Dr. Klontz: 04:04 And so a large part of my research into the realm of financial psychology has been looking at what we call money scripts, which are these beliefs about money that are passed down to us, typically from our parents, our grandparents, our culture, society at large. You know, these are things that sort of get into our subconscious mind around what money is, what's possible, how the world works. And then my research has really been focused and by now we've done research with thousands and thousands of people on how these beliefs predict things like your income, your net worth, your financial behaviors, and a whole host of other financial outcomes.   Jen: 04:43 Okay. And so what are some of these money scripts?   Dr. Klontz: 04:47 So, we found four main categories and what we did is we collected basically beliefs around money that we worked with people around. And so we had some tools that you saw in the book Mind over Money to sort of draw these to the surface. So, we collected all of these and then we put them into a test. And as I mentioned, we've given it to thousands of people thus far. And we found some patterns and so we found four main patterns. The first one is what we would call money avoidance and this is where we have a negative association with money and in true for all of these money scripts, they come from really valid experiences that have happened to you as a child or your parents or grandparents or sometimes even further back in your family history, but it's a negative association with money, so things like rich people are greedy, money corrupts or there's virtue in living with less money.   Dr. Klontz: 05:33 Now, no big surprise, and this is true with the next couple of categories I'm going to describe to you, if you have those beliefs around money, it's going to be damaging to your financial health and sure enough, what we found is that people with this belief pattern tend to sort of undervalue themselves financially at least. They end up having lower net worth and they engage in some self-destructive financial behaviors, which makes sense. If you have this negative association with money, chances are you're probably gonna to repel it or try to get rid of it when it does come into your life. The next category we found is what we would call money worship beliefs. And this is sort of, I would say, ubiquitous in our culture. This belief that money is going to somehow magically make my life better, take away all my problems and finally get me to the place where I can be happy in this world.   Dr. Klontz: 06:20 And of course this leads to a lot of consumerism. So, what we've noticed in our studies, people have a tendency to overspend, spend more than they make, really be attached to stuff because we sort of make that belief money and stuff will make us happier. And of course there's been a lot of research done on this and it's certainly true. It's absolutely true that money will make you happier up to about middle-class. And that's sort of where we feel like, okay, so we're okay. Above that, there’s really no significant correlation between money and happiness, a bunch of studies that's been done all over the place. And so for many people, again, like if you’re trying to climb that socioeconomic ladder to get to stability for your family, a roof over your head, clothes, taking care of your children. Absolutely. But above that, there's really no significant correlation.   Jen: 07:07 It's kind of amazing, isn't it, considering how we still pursue it beyond that point?   Dr. Klontz: 07:12 Yes. Yes. Right. So, this is something that I keep studying because I'm like, of course not. Come on. So it's one of those things that I think confuses researchers.   Jen: 07:20 Yeah.   Dr. Klontz: 07:21 But you know, I work with a lot of people who are, have money and have means and it's totally true. Like wherever you go, your humanity follows you and whatever you're worried about in terms of health and children and meaning in life and purpose, none of that gets erased depending on how much money you have. So it's sort of this, we call it a hedonic treadmill in psychology too where we're always sort of striving to get to the next place. And what you learn over time is that it doesn't fundamentally change who you are or your experience of life when you get to that new place, we sort of become accustomed to it.   Dr. Klontz: 07:50 It's a bit of a curse of humanity, if you will, which has actually led to a lot of advancements because we're never sort of satisfied. So there's the good part. But the bad part is that if you believe that somehow money is going to magically solve all your problems and make your family closer and your marriage better and all this sort of thing, it's not. And so the message I always give to people is really strive to be happy now. That’s sort of the practice because then when you get money and more money, you can use that to definitely accentuate that happiness, but it's not gonna magically make you happy. The third category we found is what we call money status. And this is where we're really linking our self-worth with our net worth.   Dr. Klontz: 08:32 And some other items on this particular scale are, you know, I tell people I make more than I actually do, or I'll only buy something if it's new, really focused on that outward display of value and of wealth. And in our studies we found that people who come from lower socioeconomic households are more vulnerable to this type of belief. And I see it all the time in social media too. There's this belief that wealthy people and rich people live a life of luxury, have very expensive watches and cars and mansions. A bunch of studies done on this and we did one, actually you mentioned Ron from the New York Times, I did a study with Paul Sullivan in the New York Times where we looked at the psychology of wealth as well as spending habits of ultra-wealthy compared to middle-class. And it sort of confirms the classic book, The Millionaire Next Door, where it turns out that if you actually do want to climb that socioeconomic ladder in terms of net worth, it requires you saving money, not spending it.   Dr. Klontz: 09:30 And so as a culture, I think, well we do, we have a real misperception on how people who have money, how they actually spend money and it's a gross exaggeration of how much money they spend. In our study, for example, we saw that the ultra-wealthy in our study had about 18 times more money than the middle-class comparison group, but they spent only about twice as much on things like cars, houses, vacations and watches. Well, those exact things. So those are the things we asked people how much they spend on. And which by the way is great. I mean like having a house that cost twice as much is probably twice as good, but it's also not 18 times as good. And so for me, that really drove home the point and it’s definitely true anecdotally with the clients I work with, a lot of them are just really hard workers.   Dr. Klontz: 10:15 A lot of hard workers across all the socioeconomic spectrum, but had a real value towards saving money. Like this was something built into their consciousness. They started early, they were saving 10, 20 sometimes 30% of every dollar they made. And when you start doing that in your 20s and 30s it's almost impossible unless you do something really stupid for you not to be a millionaire a few decades later. So anyway, that's the money status and that's, I'm sort of like challenging some of those beliefs as we're talking. The fourth category, and there's some good news here, there's a good one for you and we called it money vigilance. And this is the belief that it is important to save for rainy day. I put that item in our studies now I sort of surprised at the number of people who actually don't believe that's true.   Dr. Klontz: 10:56 So these are people who believe it's important to save for rainy day. They'd almost, they'd be a nervous wreck if they didn't have money saved for an emergency. So there's, we call it vigilance because there's some anxiety associated with it. Like this is something I need to pay attention to and be vigilant about. I mean, of course that's good for your net worth. I mean that's good for your income too. So they had much better financial outcomes and this is across a bunch of different studies. So people who are doing better financially have better financial health, are taking care of themselves financially are more likely to endorse that money vigilant belief pattern. And interestingly part of that belief too was they trended towards sort of minimalism in the sense that they would actually, if somebody asked them how much they made, they would probably tell them they made less than they actually made. So there was some secretiveness around how much they were making. Now interestingly, not within their partner relationships, so they weren't lying to their spouse around money. Some of the other categories were, but much more likely to sort of downplay how much money they have.   Jen: 11:54 Okay. And so you kind of alluded to where these money scripts come from and that they come from our childhood, they come from potentially further back even in our family than that. I'm curious about how things like shame and stress connect to where our money scripts come from.   Dr. Klontz: 12:11 Yeah. So you know, shame and stress are very profound influencers in our lives. And in terms of stress, money is the number one source of stress in the lives of Americans. And the American Psychological Association does a survey every year and they've been doing it since 2007 and it kind of doesn't matter what's happening, about three out of four Americans are identifying money as the biggest source of stress in their lives, which is always a little bit ironic too, given that we're the richest country in the world at the richest time in human history. But this is how much it consumes our emotions and our psyche. And of course a big part of that stress, when we're talking about money scripts, is how we are comparing ourselves to those around us. That actually creates the stress. It actually doesn't have anything to do really with objectively how much money you have.   Dr. Klontz: 13:00 And this is something in psychology called the Theory of Relative Deprivation. And it turns out that our subjective well-being, so how good we feel like we're doing in the world is entirely related to the comparison group we're using. It has nothing to do with actually how much money we have, which is just really interesting. And it helps explain why people who are in war-torn poverty laden countries can be happier than the average American because for them, they're in a small group, sort of a tribal group, and we all have tribes too. This is sort of our brain in the modern world that is really the prehistoric cave person brain we all have. And this is how we're operating around money. So, you compare yourself to the people around you and if you feel like you're doing as well or about as well, you're fine psychologically.   Dr. Klontz: 13:48 If you feel like everyone else is doing better than you, it creates a sense of panic, a very deep primal sense of panic that things aren't okay and actually your survival's at risk. And so I think that drives a lot of that anxiety. And of course, social media just makes it so much worse. Like in terms of what's being put forth as like look at all this stuff people have that's better than you and look at this incredibly happy family. Doesn't that couple look like they're really in love. I'm looking at my wife, I don't feel quite as much in love right now with her as they seem to be. So we're inundated with all this stuff that sort of tells you that things aren't okay and other people are doing better than you, which really creates, and is a driver for a lot of that stress and anxiety.   Jen: 14:29 Yeah. And I’m also thinking about how these events that can seem completely insignificant maybe to the parent at the time can really form the basis of something that seems much bigger to the child. And thinking about an incident from my childhood, I think I was probably between about age six and eight and I was up in my bedroom one day, I was cold, I turned the heating up. Our heaters will always set on number two out of six. So it was set on number two. I turned it up to the top setting of 6. But the thing is in England we are on central heating, and it actually takes a long time to warm up. And it wasn't until later in the evening that my mom and I came into my room to go to bed and we both suddenly realized it's really warm in here. And when she saw the radiator was set on number 6, she was so mad at me.   Jen: 15:10 And she made me go and tell my dad what I had done. And I don't remember being punished for it, but I so clearly remember the shame and I clearly remember the message that we do not waste. And that has become an absolutely defining money script for me. And I try and make sure that my daughter doesn't waste water and food and stuff like that. But I also try not to shame her about it when it does happen. And so I'm wondering is there a way to know whether I'm passing on sort of, I don't know if good is the right word, but productive or useful money scripts, healthy messages about wasting and about money or how to tell if, you know, when we're parents and we're in these moments if we've overstepped the line.   Dr. Klontz: 15:47 Yeah. So, wow, just a profound example that you just gave me and those are the defining moments for many of us in terms of our relations with money.   Jen: 15:56 Yeah. And did it seem defining to my parents?   Dr. Klontz: 15:59 Probably not at all.   Jen:...

Listeners have been asking me for an episode on supporting anxious children for a loooooong time, but I was really struggling to find anyone who didn't take a behaviorist-based approach (where behaviors are reinforced using the parent's attention (or stickers) or the withdrawal of the parent's attention or other 'privileges.'). Long-time listeners will see that these approaches don't really fit with how we usually view behavior on the show, which is an expression of a need - if you just focus on extinguishing 'undesirable' behavior, you haven't really done anything about the child's need and - even worse - you've sent a message to the child that they can't express their true feelings and needs to you. Listener Jamie sent me a link a book called Beyond Behaviors written by today's guest, Dr. Mona Delahooke, and I immediately knew that Dr. Delahooke was the right person to guide us through this. Listener Jamie comes onto the show for the first time as well to co-interview Dr. Delahooke so we can really deeply understand our children's feelings and support them in meeting their true needs - and overcome their anxiety as well.     Dr. Mona Delahooke's Books Beyond Behaviors: Using Brain Science and Compassion to Understand and Solve Children's Behavioral Challenges Beyond Behaviors Flip Chart: A Psychoeducational Tool to Help Therapists & Teachers Understand and Support Children with Behavioral Changes (Affiliate links).   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen: 01:28 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today, we're talking about a topic that parents have been asking me about for ages and that is how to support children who are experiencing anxiety. Now, it's not super hard to find research on anxiety and on treatments for anxiety, but the hard part is finding someone who doesn't just see anxiety as an unwanted behavior that we need to extinguish using reinforcements and who actually sees anxiety as a potential cause for behaviors like having a bad attitude or lacking impulse control that we might typically think of as bad behavior rather than being caused by anxiety. So, we have a special guest today who's going to help us move beyond this view of anxiety and that's Dr. Mona Delahooke. Dr. Delahooke is a licensed clinical psychologist with more than 30 years of experience caring for children in their families. She's a member of the American Psychological Association and holds the highest level of endorsement in the field of infant and toddler mental health in California, as a Reflective Practice Mentor. She has dedicated her career to promoting compassionate relationship-based neurodevelopmental interventions for children with developmental, behavioral, emotional and learning difficulties and has written a book called Beyond Behaviors: Using Brain Science and Compassion to Understand and Solve Children's Behavioral Challenges. Welcome Dr. Delahooke.   Dr. Delahooke: 02:43 Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here.   Jen: 02:45 Thank you. And we have another special guest here today as well. We've heard about her, we've heard her words and now we're going to hear her very own voice. Today, we have with us listener, Jamie. She's not listener Jamie to us. She's Jamie Ramirez in real life and she and her wife are the proud parents of now 11-month-old daughter Elliot. Jamie struggled with anxiety for a good deal of her life and has also read on this topic a lot. And she was the one who suggested that I read Dr. Delahooke’s book and so when Dr. Delahooke agreed to an interview, it was only natural to ask Jamie to join me as a co-interviewer and she enthusiastically agreed. Welcome Jamie.   Jamie: 03:22 Hi.   Jen: 03:23 Yey, you’re here. All right, so let's start kind of at the beginning I guess by talking about how Dr. Delahooke’s thinking about anxiety is different from the way that most researchers and psychologists think about it and treat anxiety and children. So Jamie, I wonder if you could start by reading one of your favorite passages from Dr. Delahooke’s book and then perhaps we can contrast this with the more common view on anxiety. So do you want to go ahead and do that?   Jamie: 03:48 Yeah.   Jen: 03:49 Okay.   Jamie: 03:50 “The truth is that we scrutinized children's behavior from the time that they're born. “She's such a good baby”, we might say of a newborn who is easy to care for, doesn't cry too much, sleeps through the night and whose moods are predictable and easy to read. Without realizing it, we are betraying our cultures understandable bias toward valuing behaviors that we can easily understand and that make our own lives easier as caregivers, teachers, or other providers. As children reach school age, we lavished praise in good grades on those who are good listeners, follow directions and can sit still and perform well on tests. We often reward these good behaviors with positive recognition, not realizing the messages we are sending to children whose natural tendencies fall outside of the easy child profile, particularly in the educational arena e.g. those who can sit still are better than those who cannot. Quiet is better than loud. While these messages may well serve the purposes of group education, they ignore the importance of understanding and appreciating and not judging the range of children's individual differences demonstrated through their behaviors.”   Jen: 04:57 That's such a powerful passage. I can see where it resonated with you. Yeah. And so Dr. Delahooke, I wonder if you can contrast that as sort of the way that you view anxiety with the way most psychologists think about anxiety. What do most psychologists think anxiety is?   Dr. Delahooke: 05:13 Well, the way I was trained and really I think the predominant thought still amongst most psychologists is that anxiety is understood as a disorder. And maybe we can understand that through understanding that the DSM, are you familiar with the DSM?   Jen: 05:35 Yeah. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Just for listeners.   Dr. Delahooke: 05:38 Yes. For listeners, it's kind of the dictionary, so to speak, for labeling and diagnosing individuals along a set of criteria. So one shift that's happened in the last kind of less than a decade starting in 2013 was that the DSM that Tom Insel, who was the head of the National Institutes of Mental Health announced that the national institutes were going to be diverting funding away from straight DSM criteria and more towards looking at underlying causality. So the short answer to your question, the way many of my colleagues, I believe view anxiety is as a DSM disorder and the American Psychological Association defines anxiety as an emotion characterized by feelings of tension, worried thoughts and physical changes like increased blood pressure. So anxiety is defined kind of loosely in a way as something that if you have a certain amount of characteristics or symptoms, then you have anxiety.   Dr. Delahooke: 06:51 And that's kind of how it's viewed now as a thing, as an actual like, oh, your child has anxiety. Well, there is no blood test for anxiety. Right? So it's not exactly like your child has diabetes, you know, your child's blood sugar level is above 105 or whatever. Anxiety, the way I was trained, I was really in my education in the 80s was that it seemed like anxiety was this thing that you treat with a certain protocol such as cognitive behavioral therapy and medication if needed. And that was what would help it go away. But what I wasn't taught was what's underlying all sorts of anxiety. Well, there's all these different subtypes and so it's really exciting to me that the shift is now not just looking at a symptom checklist, but looking at the brain circuitry and the domains, the dimensions of functions rather than these categories. And it's a really exciting shift.   Jen: 08:04 Yeah. And I just want to delve a little deeper into a couple of things you mentioned, you mentioned medication and cognitive behavioral therapy, and from the research that I've done, it seems as though each of those are effective in about half of the children that are treated. Is that right?   Dr. Delahooke: 08:19 Well this, yeah, generally speaking with the research you might find different percentages, but some percentages are about a third. Some go up to a half.   Jen: 08:29 Okay.   Dr. Delahooke: 08:31 But you think about half, that still leaves another half.   Jen: 08:35 Yes, it does. Yeah. And so what are some of the challenges of treating this anxiety in children?   Dr. Delahooke: 08:42 Well, now that I have a different protocol, I'm finding much way fewer challenges that I think that early in my career when I was using the standard protocols is that I found that for example, cognitive behavioral therapy, trying to talk to a child and help a child actively change their thoughts and their cognitions come up with the ways that their brain can help them shift their thinking and feel better. Right? Which are great ideas, super great ideas. But I've found that for many children that fall fell flat on its face. And that's when I went to look for answers as to why. Why would some children be able to shift their thoughts? And why would others just not have that capacity, especially in the heat of the moment? And that became one of my biggest clinical questions.   Jen: 09:39 Okay. And so just before we get to that, I want to briefly mention the study that came out of the Yale Child Study Center that got a lot of press, I think it was about within the last year or so and it found that a new program that teaches parents how to use reinforcements to treat their child's anxiety was as effective as traditional cognitive behavioral therapy. So again, it's working for about the third to a half of the people who are being studied. And so I'm just curious about what you make of that particular approach just because it's something that parents have probably heard of recently.   Dr. Delahooke: 10:10 Right. Well, first of all, parent involvement is fantastic. We know that parent involvement, parent-based treatment is really makes most sense from a neurodevelopmental perspective because the way human beings regulate their emotions and eventually their behaviors is through co-regulation, meaning other human beings who attuned to them and we develop our emotional capacities in our ability to self-regulate emotions through relationships. So, parent involvement is great. Now, I glanced at this study yesterday, but I think you said Jen, that it uses a behavioral paradigm.   Jen: 10:54 Yup. Yup.   Dr. Delahooke: 10:56 Okay. Okay, so here's where I think the research coming out of the lab of Jonathan Green is way more impactful and will have more efficacious results and that is because it's not based on the paradigm of behavioral reinforcement essentially. Now the idea of reinforcing behaviors we want to see and ignoring or punishing behaviors we don't want to see is a paradigm that was developed in the last century.   Dr. Delahooke: 11:28 And it started with studying animals, you know, in the lab. And it was exciting back then because you could figure out how to alter rats and dogs behaviors through reinforcement schedules. This was picked up to work with humans. And specifically one population that it was picked up on was for individuals, children and teens who are self-injuring at the University of Washington and later on at UCLA with Ivar Løvaas. So the science then was to protect and to try to of course try to help children improve their behaviors. But what is missing in my opinion and perhaps why the Yale study didn't get more than a 50% improvement rate so it equaled cognitive behavioral, is that it involved the paradigm, the older paradigm of reinforcing surface behaviors. And we now know that behaviors aren't the tip of the iceberg. So once you locate what is happening underneath the child's behavior, then you have a pathway to really helping them gain behavioral control and deal with their anxiety or their worries or their, whatever concerns they have that is much more natural and much more sympathetic with brain development. So essentially what this study apparently did not, it had--okay, the good part was that it was parent-based, but it was still along the lines of cognitive behavioral therapy because it involved the assumption that children's behaviors are deliberate and purposeful. We might think of that as willful and we can talk to them about it or put them on a reinforcement schedule for it. But to me that's the problem because not all behaviors are due to reinforcement.   Jen: 13:31 Yeah. I love this ‘cause it's a bridge from where we've been to where we're going. So what I'm hearing you say is that the reason the study was as successful as it was was because of the involvement of parents. And maybe this helped parents to attune to their children a little better than they were before, which helped them to better support their child. And the reason it didn't work better is because we were using reinforcement.   Dr. Delahooke: 13:54 That's a yes. Again, I'm not a researcher, but I'm going to go back and read that study. Yeah, I think that's a good guess because once you involve parents and especially if the parents have a gentle way with the child and look how were the parents doing the reinforcement, right? Was it gentle? Was it soothing? Was it calming the autonomic nervous system? Likely the artifacts of the study and the variables that they didn't measure may have been just as important as the reinforcements.   Jen: 14:27 Yeah. Okay. All right, so now I understand a bit about where we've been. Jamie, do you want to kind of take us forward from here and delve into some of Dr. Delahooke’s ideas a little bit?   Jamie: 14:35 Yeah, sure. I wanted to spend a good chunk of time drawing out your thinking on the idea that when we see behavior that is problematic or confusing, the first question we should ask isn't how do we get rid of it, but rather what is this telling us about the child? And I'd like to do this using a case study from your book of a child named Matthew.   Jamie: 14:54 So to summarize, Matthew was late to start speaking and was diagnosed with autism. You observed him in a session in school when he was trying to get the attention of his aide who was next to him. When she didn't respond, he touched her arm and then she followed his IEP or individualized educational plan, which says she wasn't supposed to respond to non-preferred behaviors. So she moved away from him. He continued to try to get her attention. So she moved behind him and when he leaned back in his chair to see her, he fell over. So then the aide took Matthew to the calm down room, which was a small closet with a padded floor and you watched him through the one way window looking really flattened sad with his aide ignoring any interaction with him. So let's talk about what's going on here. What do you think that the teacher and the aide are seeing in this situation? And do you think that they see Matthew as being in conscious, volitional control of his actions?   Dr. Delahooke: 15:48 Thank you for reading that Jamie. And it just brings, every time I hear it or listen to it, it brings me back to that moment to that classroom where I was sitting in the back of the room and using the lens that I now use. It felt like I was watching a slow moving car crash. So the answer to your question, did I think that they saw Matthew as being conscious and having volitional control of his actions? Absolutely. And let me just say that I have so much compassion for the teachers. I did and I do. And if anyone's listening today and you've heard me talk before, you know that this is a no blame, no shame space for me. I don't intend to have anyone feel bad about what they have done or the ways they approach children because it's in our cultural DNA to view behaviors on the surface.   Dr. Delahooke: 16:47 So I'll just say that out front I don't mean to offend anybody with what I'm saying. I just need to add a layer of understanding to our current approaches. So when I looked around the room, when I saw that Matthew, his initial bid for attention, which was to try to grab the arm of his aide, that was viewed as a bad behavior because she was wanting him to listen to the teacher who was giving the lesson. But this was a child who had individual differences that compromised his ability to easily ask for things he did not have the words to do that and his motor system was also kind of roughly connected to his intention system, so the very best he could do was swat at his aide. And I saw that as a brilliant adaptation to him letting her know he needed something.   Dr. Delahooke: 17:47 He either needed help or he was feeling uncomfortable or he needed to move. And when she moved away so that he couldn't touch her, I just thought, Oh wow, there we go, the behavior is being viewed as bad because it's noncompliant or because it's poorly understood. And what I wanted to do with that moment is say, let's celebrate that behavior. He needs you. Let's find out what this child needs at this moment. Anyway, as you read, when he started to increase his ability to grab her, then he's trying to grab her, which meant to me that his nervous system, his fight or flight system was engaged and he was actively trying to seek social engagement to feel better. She moved where he could not see her or touch her and he fell over and then they brought him to, it was called the calm down room, but it was really a timeout room.   Dr. Delahooke: 18:45 There was nothing soothing about that room. So when I looked around the room I expected to see, or I guess I hoped to see adults in distress going, Oh my gosh, this poor child who can take him out and see what he needs. And instead what I saw was everybody ignoring the situation, which was how they were trained. It was on the child's IEP to ignore non-preferred behaviors. And so I believe they absolutely saw Matthew’s behaviors as volitional and that he had control over them. And what I saw was a stress response that started off slow, what I call the light green zone like he was still in social engagement. He was looking at her, he was trying to touch her and the aide was trained to understand that as a noncompliant behavior and it went south very fast and he ended up being punished for trying to reach out and that's why I put that story in the book.   Jamie: 20:01 So, you wanna...

Dr. Rose defines a Dark Horse as someone who uses a variety of unusual strategies like understanding their 'micromotives' and not worrying about their overall destination and to focus instead on more immediate goals to create a fulfilled life. In his book he focuses on the paths adults have followed to become Dark Horses, which is almost invariably one of either: Child is successful in school, attends an elite university, achieves financial stability, realizes they feel unfilled, and switches direction mid-life Child flounders in school and barely graduates or doesn't graduate; gets married and has children or works a series of low-level jobs before discovering their path But I wondered: rather than following either of these (highly frustrating!) paths, could we instead support our children much earlier in life to discover how their passions can lead them toward a fulfilling life, rather than forcing them through a standardized system and then making them figure it out on their own later? Dr. Rose agreed that this would indeed be the preferable path, and we also talked about how to do this. Dark Horse: Achieving Success Through the Pursuit of Fulfillment can be purchased in your local bookstore or on Amazon. (Affiliate link)   Learning Membership Want to know what skills YOU need to raise a dark horse? The Learning Membership is here to help you. Make learning a fun adventure that not only strengthens your bond, but also nurtures your child’s intrinsic love of learning—an essential foundation for success in an AI-driven world. Get tools and strategies to support your child’s love of learning and future-proof their success in navigating whatever comes their way. No special skills needed—just a willingness to explore alongside them. All the usual stuff applies - sliding scale pricing, money back guarantee. Enrollment will open again soon. Click the banner to learn more!     Here is Dr. Rose's interview on The Art of Manliness, where you can learn more about how his approach could help you as an adult to become more of a Dark Horse     [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"]   Jen 00:01:25 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today's episode comes to us via a bit of a different route than they often do. A friend of mine actually heard our guests, Dr. Todd Rose on The Art of Manliness podcast and said, “Hey, you might want to listen to this because it sounds a lot like what you're trying to do with the way your daughter Carys learns”. And I listened to the episode and then I did something I've never done before. The message that I heard from Dr. Rose on the podcast made him feel like such a kindred spirit in terms of how we think about learning and work, that I reached out to him and asked him to talk with us even before I read his book. And rather than go over ground that's already been covered elsewhere, I'd really encourage you to go to this episode's page at YourParentingMojo.com/DarkHorse to find a link to that episode on The Art of Manliness because there's so much there to help adults discover and follow their passions if you're feeling unfulfilled in the work that you do and that you might need some help charting a different course.   Jen 00:02:20 So, today we're going to look at the outcomes for what Dr. Rose calls dark horses, but we'll specifically focus on how we can support children in navigating their path to becoming a dark horse, which involves identifying your skills and true motivations and harnessing those to do work that you're truly passionate about. And on the related note, I wanted to let you know about a pilot program that I'm running that's open for signups right now. It's called Your Child's Learning Mojo and it will help parents to support their children's intrinsic motivation to learn. If your child is in the early preschool years right now, then you're probably inundated with their questions about the world, but research shows that by the early school years, children learn that their own questions aren't really valued anymore and what counts is whether they know the answers to questions that other people have asked and yet the ability to formulate questions and ask them and know how to find some initial answers and then circle back to a deeper level of questions and explore ideas with both depth and breadth and demonstrate that learning to communities that care about the topic is going to be a foundational set of skills for life 20 years from now and in the age of search engines, the ability to recall an answer is already pretty well obsolete.   Jen  00:03:25 If we're worried about our children's success when they graduate from school and maybe college, then we might be tempted to teach them a skill like coding and while there are plenty of apps and afterschool clubs and summer camps that have popped up, which imply that if you aren't teaching your child to code, then you're making an error that says fundamental is not teaching them how to read. Developers tell us that coding isn't about getting the syntax of code right. It's about having an idea, proposing a solution, seeing if it works, delving deeply into an issue, developing creative solutions to problems and sticking with it when it repeatedly fails while you try different approaches and improve on them each time you take another run at it. Teaching the syntax of coding doesn't teach any of those skills, but harnessing your child's natural intrinsic motivation to learn does support the kinds of skills that will be needed to learn coding and complex problem solving and critical thinking and creativity and all of the other skills the experts know are really going to be important in the future.   Jen 00:04:20 In their book Becoming Brilliant that we looked at way back in episode 10 psychologists, Dr. Roberta Golinkoff and Dr. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek argued that schools are doing really well at preparing our children for the kinds of jobs that existed in 1953 and there are some places where schools are beginning to shift their approach. But in general, being in school means mostly being tested on your ability to remember facts rather than developing the critical skills. So, if we want our children to have these critical skills, it's really on us as parents to make it happen. And the good news is that children come out already prime to develop these skills. We know they have boundless curiosity and they want to delve deeply into topics that interest them, whether it's dinosaurs or beading or construction. And if we can just learn how to become their guide on the side, who connects them to resources and helps them to deepen the work they're already doing, rather than the sage on the stage who provides all the answers, then we'll be able to help our children become the profoundly fulfilled dark horses that Dr. Rose will describe.   Jen 00:05:20 I took a career coaching course a while back and I'm still in its Facebook group and almost without fail, the people who sign up for the course and introduce themselves, give some variation of the story, “I did well in school and I got a good job and I made quite a bit of money and now I'm approaching midlife I realized I'm really unsatisfied and I'm here to discover my true passion so I can live a life that feels meaningful to me.” So, as good as that career coaching course was and it was really good, my goal with this episode and with Your Child's Learning Mojo membership is to make that course obsolete for that purpose because instead of getting to midlife and realizing they're incredibly unfulfilled, our children will engage in activities and learning that fulfill them from the very beginning and as they live their lives, they'll continually reassess their passions and whether their work is in service of their passions and have the knowledge and ability and desire to make micro adjustments as they go along.   Jen 00:06:09 So, they never reach that breaking point and instead they'll become dark horses who were truly connected to work that they find meaningful throughout their lives. So, if you'd like to learn more about how to do this, please do go to YourParentingMojo.com/LearningMojo to see how I will support you in this work. I'll teach you what's going on in children's minds when they learn and why the kinds of strewing activities that you see all over Pinterest are really just the very beginning of that process and don't help your children to learn much that's meaningful or connected to their own interests. We'll begin a learning journal that you can use to identify your child's interests and passions and then engage with these in a way that supports your child in developing the critical skills of the future. And we'll understand how to use nature as inspiration for developing questions and ideas and a sense of wonder.   Jen 00:06:52 You'll become a member of a learning community of parents who will support each other in developing our own skills so we can help our children. And of course you'll get my guidance as well. So if you're interested in participating, please head on over to YourParentingMojo.com/LearningMojo for all the details and just sign up. The group is currently accepting new members through January 31st and we'll get started on February 1st. So to make a formal introduction to our guests today, Dr. Rose is a lecturer on education and leads the Laboratory for the Science of the Individual at Harvard University. His work is focused on the intersection of individuality and personalization applied to help people learn, work and live. He's the author of the books, The End of Average and most recently Dark Horse: Achieving Success Through the Pursuit of Fulfillment. Welcome Dr. Rose.   Dr. Rose 00:07:36 Thanks for having me.   Jen: 00:07:37 And so before we kind of dig into the real meat here, I wonder if you can set the stage by telling us what is a dark horse?   Dr. Rose 00:07:45 Yeah. So from our work, we've found that sort of the traditional definition is really there are people who end up being successful that nobody saw coming, right? And that can be because they were viewed as failures early and then succeeded or because they end up being successful in one domain, but then make these pivots and ended up doing stuff that's completely different. And again, nobody sees them coming.   Jen: 00:08:09 And in some ways this resonated with me so much when I read it because in a way I think of myself as a dark horse. You know, I got degrees from Berkeley and Yale and a job at a prestigious consulting company and I really did enjoy what I was doing for a while in sustainability consulting. But the work that I find really so fulfilling came after I got a Master's in Psychology, which was focused on Child Development and then another in Education and sharing this through the podcast with other people that, I mean it just keeps me going, keeps me getting up in the morning and I would never have seen that coming.   Dr. Rose 00:08:43 You're hitting on something really important, which is like, you know, ever since the term dark horse was created quite a while ago to talk about things that are successful that no one sees coming, in our research in the dark horse project, this is exactly what we found, right? ‘Cause we were interested in why do these folks get off the beaten path and yet still end up surprising us and to a person, the thing that kept emerging was the way they thought about success in life. And rather than playing by sort of society's definition of success or somebody else's view, they were deeply focused on pursuing personal fulfillment. And given that it's so personal, it’s so individual, the things that light you up, it's not surprising in a standardized society that it often requires getting off the beaten path to make it happen.   Jen 00:09:29 Yeah. And okay, so let's talk about that standardization because I mean this is a question that seems like it should be really simple, but of course it isn't and it has so much to do with learning and how we think about school. And so how do children, and we're thinking about children, but of course it's applicable to all people as well, how do they learn best?   Dr. Rose 00:09:48 Yeah. It's funny, right? Because that seems like something that is so obvious, but in many ways it runs so counter to the way we actually educate. So if you think about some of the basics like it won't sound like rocket science, right? Not surprisingly, kids that are learning in ways that are engaging to them are going to learn better. That sounds almost silly, silly obvious, but it is surprising how much we neglect that. So if you're engaged, if you're motivated, which I think are related at the same thing, if the learning is contextualized in a relevant way, right? So it's not just abstracted away from your real life but deeply embedded into it when people are more active rather than passively learning. And one of the things that's really important is the extent to...