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

In this episode, Dr. Susan Pollak helps us to apply mindfulness skills to our relationships with our children so we can parent in line with our values, rather than just reacting when our children push our buttons. You'll learn: What's the point of mindfulness, and does it matter if we bring our full attention and presence to diaper changes? Why we're so hard on ourselves, even when we always try to be kind to others Some concrete tools to use when you interact with your children TODAY in those moments when it seems like everything is falling apart. Dr. Pollak is a psychologist in private practice in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is a long-time student of meditation and yoga who has been integrating the practices of meditation into psychotherapy since the 1980s. Dr. Pollak is cofounder and teacher at the Center for mindfulness and Compassion at Harvard Medical School and the Cambridge Health Alliance, and has just stepped down as President of the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy, a position which she held since 2010. She also writes regularly for Psychology today on the topic of integrating mindfulness into daily life.   Book mentioned in the episode: Self-Compassion for Parents: Nurture Your Child by Caring for Yourself (Affiliate link). Other episodes related to this topic: Parental Burn-Out No Self, No Problem Helping children to develop compassion Patriarchy is perpetuated through parenting Mindfulness tools with Mindful Mama Hunter Clarke-Fields   Some key points from the interview: (04:08) Many of us, present company included, we're not raised to be kind to ourselves. (10:47) Mindful self-compassion acknowledges that we need to start with mindfulness. (I've been teaching this course for over a decade, and I've seen that) a lot of people just can't start with compassion because it's foreign for most of us to treat ourselves kindly. (53:59) Allow yourself to rest for a moment feeling that you have distance from the storm, some space from the turbulence to recognize that you are not the storm. (paraphrased) (59:03) It's such a common misconception about mindfulness that you have to sit still and not think about anything. And, you know, people are relieved to know that [mindfulness] is not about stopping our thoughts. It's really about finding a different relationship with our thoughts. [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen 00:03 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives, but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a FREE Guide to 7 Parenting Myths That We Can Safely Leave Behind, seven fewer things to worry about, subscribe to the show at YourParentingMojo.com. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us. Jen 01:00 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. In this episode, we're going to draw threads together from across a number of recent episodes. Most obviously it picks up on our interview with Dr. Moira Mikolajczak where we discuss parental burnout. After that episode concluded Dr. Mikolajczak and I emailed a bit about tools that could potentially help parents, and the primary one that she found useful was the idea of self-compassion. And that's what we're going to discuss today. This topic also picks up on our conversation with Dr. Chris Niebauer about the stories that our left brain tells us by giving us some concrete strategies on how to do that. And it builds on a conversation we had about three years ago with Dr. Brendan Ozawa-de Silva on the topic of compassion. We also touch on issues related to patriarchy and go deeper into some of the mindfulness tools that Hunter Clark-Fields shared with us recently. Jen 01:50 And here to do all of this with us is Dr. Susan Pollak, who is a psychologist in private practice in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is a longtime student of meditation and yoga and has been integrating the practices of meditation into psychotherapy since the 1980s. Dr. Pollack is cofounder and teacher at the Center for Mindfulness and Compassion at Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance, and has just stepped down as President of the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy, a position that she held since 2010. She also writes regularly for Psychology Today on the topic of integrating mindfulness into daily life. Welcome, Dr. Pollack. Dr. Pollak 02:24 Thanks, Jen. It's a pleasure to be with you. Jen 02:28 So, we're going to talk a lot about your book. Because it's on the topic of Self-Compassion for Parents. And one thing that I really liked as I was reading through your book, is the idea that it isn't a manual for self-compassion. It doesn't teach you step by step what self-compassion is, and then how to apply it. I loved what Dr. Chris Germer said in your foreword and he said, I'm going to quote, "The book connects with the direct experience of parenting through detailed examples, personal anecdotes, and elegant exercises to transform parenting struggles through the tools of mindfulness and self-compassion." So that said, we're definitely going to be digging into some more of those things for as we go today, but I'm wondering if we could start by having you help us to understand what is compassion. And from there, what is self-compassion, and also this idea of mindful self-compassion that I know is really important to your work? Dr. Pollak 03:21 Okay, and let me first just respond to your kind words, because my feeling is, there's no recipe for parenting. And I know you're a parent. I am a parent of two kids. And as of just a week ago, a grandmother, Jen 03:39 Congratulations! Dr. Pollak 03:40 Thanks! So, I think it's really important for your listeners to, to realize that one size doesn't fit all. Jen 03:49 Yeah. Dr. Pollak 03:50 You know, I'm not going to be able to give you a recipe for how to be the perfect, compassionate, mindful parent, you know, you have to figure out what works for you, and what works for your kids. Jen 04:07 Yeah. [caption id="attachment_6394" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Many of us, present company included, we're not raised to be kind to ourselves.[/caption] Dr. Pollak 04:08 So that said, let me jump into just some really workable definitions. And let me tell you, I really don't like psychological jargon. So, let me speak in English. So, one way to understand compassion is to really look at the root of the word, which is Latin, and it means to suffer with. Okay, so that's kind of theoretical, what it means in real life, is to really see somebody and to connect with their pain, or the difficulty they're having. So self-compassion, and this is a pretty radical concept, is learning to be kind to yourself. Again, it's that simple. So many of us, present company included, we're not raised to be kind to ourselves. So, it can feel weird, awkward, foreign, like "What? Be kind to myself? No, no, I have to push myself. I have to drive myself. What are you talking about?" So, for me, that concept of being kind to myself felt foreign. And, again, an easy way to think about it is, when you're having a hard time, think about what you say to yourself. And I don't know if your inner language is like my inner language, but to be very self-disclosing. I used to say, "Oh, Susan, that was stupid." Or "Oh, Susan, you're an idiot." or "Oh, how could you have said that?" You know, "You've really blew that." So, it was this constant soundtrack of criticizing myself. Dr. Pollak 05:56 But think also, what you might say, if a friend told you that for someone you really cared about that she had done, or he had done something similar to what you did. And you probably wouldn't say to your friend, "Oh, John, that was so stupid. I can't imagine you said that. How could you have done that? What were you thinking? What is wrong with you? You are such a loser?" Well, I mean if you said that to a friend, you probably wouldn't have many friends. Okay, so we, we do know how to respond kindly. You would probably say, "Look, John, you know, you're human, we all screw up, you know, everyone is a parent..." Let me just kind of stick to the topic of parenting here. Everyone is a parent has really bad days, you know, that book that I've loved Alexander and that No Good, Terrible, Awful Day. I mean, we as parents have those terrible, no good awful days. But you know how nice it would be. If you could say to yourself, "Jen, that was just a really rough day, we all have it, it happens. You know, don't beat yourself up, that's not going to solve the problem. Let's move on here." Or even better with the child, okay, let's make a repair. You know, let's say sorry, gee, mommy really lost it. Or, you know, I used to say, with my kids, when I was having a hard time, "Oops, mommy hit the roof there." You know, let's take a time out or a time in to repair. Okay, so that's our definition of compassion. Jen 07:47 And actually, if I could pause just there for a second, as you were saying, I wasn't raised with this way of thinking. It made me realize none of us were. And it seems to me is it though it's, I mean, it's coming from this Protestant work ethic, right that if you work hard enough, you will be able to achieve and if you're not working hard enough, that's probably why you're not achieving. And so, the only thing to do is self-flagellate and work harder. Dr. Pollak 08:11 Exactly. And supposedly, I know, you're also interested in culture and cross culture, real issues, supposedly, in other countries. There isn't as much self-loathing and self-flagellation because I remember hearing the story, where the Dalai Lama's translator was asking, translating questions like, Okay, so what are we supposed to do if we hate ourselves? And he'd say, "What?" Jen 08:40 "What do you mean?" Dr. Pollak 08:41 What do you mean, if we hate ourselves, and the translator and the Dalai Lama went back and forth, back and forth. This is how the story is recounted, and he had the hardest time understanding why people would hate themselves, why there was such loathing. But I am with you both in terms of the Protestant work ethic and also patriarchy, like, yes, you know, you have to drive yourself, okay, you can't be lazy, you can't slack off. And I think that's where those, that inner critic comes from, like, Oh, you screwed up, you idiot. What is wrong with you? So anyway, just to touch on the importance with those three definitions. The other thing I want to draw on in terms of compassion, and this, I know you're a research geek as well. So, this will probably interest you. One of the pieces of research when they're looking at in fMRI brain scan of what happens with the brain on compassion is it seems to activate the motor neurons. So, compassion is tied to action. And I remember when I was writing the book, I tried to use this headline saying compassion is a verb, because it's active. And of course, the editor being an editor said, No, it's not. So anyway, so I'd let that go. But if we can think of compassion is active, you know, basically, how can you respond? How can you tune in to what that person might need or what that child might need? Or what you might need in the moment? That is really the essence of what a compassionate and self-compassionate response is. Jen 10:38 Okay. Dr. Pollak 10:39 Now do you still want a definition of mindfulness. Jen 10:42 That would be awesome. Yeah. And is, specifically the mindful self-compassion. Yeah.   [caption id="attachment_6393" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] A lot of people just can't start with compassion. It's foreign, for most of us to treat ourselves kindly.[/caption] Dr. Pollak 10:47 Okay. So, what happened in terms of the mindful self-compassion, and I love to give credit where credit is due. Kristin Neff was really the first researcher to do research on compassion, in 2003, had begun to write a number of essays and articles, framing this new construct that she called self-compassion. My friend and colleague, Chris Grimmer, who wrote the foreword of the book. thought, "Whoa, this is really important." And also, I need this. And, you know, so many, we know, Neil. And they connected and put together this program. And I know you will have references to their books, and the eight-week course and their books on self-compassion. So mindful self-compassion, acknowledges that we need to start with mindfulness. And I've been teaching this course for over a decade, a lot of people just can't start with compassion, again, going back to what I was saying, in that it's foreign, for most of us to treat ourselves kindly. But it seems that if we start with the foundation of mindfulness, then people can be more open to compassion. And in fact, again, some of the research is now saying that one of the secret sauce of mindfulness seems to be this element of accepting, without judgement, warmly kindly accepting. So now let me segue into a definition I like, and this is very hands on. Okay, so again, I don't want it to be abstract. So, the easiest thing to do is just with me, raise your hand, if you like, and just wiggle your fingers. Okay, so mindfulness, very simply, is, knowing what you're doing at the moment. It's nothing, Woo Woo, it's nothing, you know, fanciful, it's nothing weird. It's just present moment awareness, with kindness without judgement. So, you're feeling your hand, you're not saying, "Oh, Jen, You're such an idiot." for you know, wiggling your fingers. Just say, "Okay, I'm sitting here, moving my hand, feeling my hand again, being present in the body." And we'll talk about that as well. without judgement. Jen 13:33 Yeah, so I'm not looking at my hands. And my hands are really big in the picture. Dr. Pollak 13:38 Oh, I don't have a manicure. Either. Something absurd. Jen 13:41 Never had that. But yeah, I've heard Joseph Goldstein explain, you know, what is mindfulness, this big topic, and he says, "Sit and know you're sitting." Dr. Pollak 13:52 Exactly. Exactly. It's that simple. Jen 13:55 Yeah. And and I think I saw in your book, actually a quote from Sharon Salzberg, that I really liked. It said, mindfulness doesn't depend on what is happening, but is about how we are related to what is happening. Dr. Pollak 14:06 Exactly, exactly. Jen 14:08 Yeah. Dr. Pollak 14:08 And I think that really says it all. And a lot of people keep coming back to the fact that it's not the external circumstances. It's really the inner experience of how we are dealing with what's happening to us. And as Joseph, let me just make a link between those two teachers, as Joseph Goldstein would say, what is the attitude in the mind? You know, is there resistance? Is there a version, you know, are you saying, Oh, poor me, or are you saying, Okay, this is what's happening? And he puts it wonderfully again, which is anything can happen to anyone, at any time. Jen 14:58 Mm hmm. Okay, so let's Maybe make this super concrete for parents, you talk in the book about diaper changing. Dr. Pollak 15:06 Yeah. Jen 15:06 Which is a task that most parents have done once or twice. There are some parents who managed to take a different path with it. But the majority of parents are doing a decent number of diaper changes for a period of some years. And you described a mindful diaper change. And anyone who's reading your book and knows anything about resources, infant educators, or RIE, well will read that description and they'll just think, you know, this has so many parallels to the idea of it's called wants something quality, time in RIE. It's the idea that even caregiving tasks, which typically, society trains us to, and we think of ourselves as things, we just need to get through them. And then we can do the fun stuff that the other side, you know, we can play with the baby. But actually, even these caregiving tasks, even if they seem unpleasant to us, they're still opportunities for connection. Can you maybe draw that out a little bit in the way that you see it? Dr. Pollak 16:02 Sure. And I also want to thank you, because as I mentioned, my son, and daughter in law just had a new baby, and I got baby just got back from the hospital recently. And I got an email from him saying, Oh, you know, change seven diapers today. And you sent me a wonderful link that I thought was so moving. And you I'm sure you want to include that in the show notes. Where the writer really talks about respecting the child, Jen 16:35 Gosh, I don't know who it was. Do you remember? Dr. Pollak 16:38 Zachary? Is that...? It was in the email you sent me. I googled it and then sent it to my...

Dr. Paul Hewitt, a Professor in the Department of Psychology, talks about perfectionism in children. He discusses the complex nature of perfectionism, explores its impact on behavior and relationships, and delves into the struggles of perfectionist children. The podcast highlights the importance of understanding a child's underlying pain and seeking professional help to support them.

I've heard from listeners that what they call "The Dark Horse Episode," the interview with Dr. Todd Rose, that this is one of their favorite conversations on the podcast, and for this reason I'm doing something I've never done before: reissuing that episode.  Dr. Rose and I discussed ways to personalize children's learning to help them truly discover and live their full potential - both academically and personally (and even getting rid of that distinction entirely...).   Check out what listeners who subsequently joined the Learning Membership said in our private community before the membership had even officially started:     Click the banner to learn more!     References Cantor, P., Osher, D., Berg, J., Steyer, L., & Rose, T. (2019). Malleability, plasticity, and individuality: How children learn and develop in context. Applied Developmental Science 23(4), 307-337. Mischel, W. (2004). Toward an integrative science of the person. Annual Review of Psychology 55, 1-22. Osher, D., Cantor, P., Berg, J., Steyer, L., & Rose, T. (2018). Drivers of human development: How relationships and context shape learning and development. Applied Developmental Science, 1-31. Osher, D., Cantor, P., Berg, J., Steyer, L., & Rose, T. (January 2017). Science of learning and development: A synthesis. American Institutes for Research. Downloaded from: https://www.air.org/sites/default/files/downloads/report/Science-of-Learning-and-Development-Synthesis-Osher-January-2017.pdf Rose, T., & Ogas, O. (2018). Dark Horse: Achieving success through the pursuit of fulfillment. New York, NY: HarperCollins. Rose, T., McMahon, G.T., Saxberg, B., & Christensen, U.J. (2018). Learning in the 21st Century: Concepts and tools. Clinical Chemistry 64(10), 1423-1429. Rose, T. (2015). The end of average: How we succeed in a world that values sameness. New York, NY: HarperCollins. Rose, L.T., Rouhani, P., & Fischer, K.W. (2013). The science of the individual. Mind, Brain, and Education 7(3), 152-158.

Ever have a vague sense that your interactions with your child aren't quite aligned with your values...but aren't quite sure what to do about it?   Have you been to a protest and shouted "Black Lives Matter!  Fight the Power!"...and then gone home and forced your child to brush their teeth?   Have you chastised Grandma for 'stealing' kisses from your child because it disrespects their body autonomy...and then pinned them down for a haircut?   You're not alone.  We're in this weird place where we know we want to do things differently than the way we were raised.  But cultural norms are still telling us: we need to be in charge.  (Because if we aren't in charge, who is?)   A conversation with the hosts of Upbringing My guests today, Hannah and Kelty of the Upbringing podcast, see this dissonance more clearly than almost anyone I've met.  In their podcast they explore how we live one way as people (who believe in freedom!  respect!  consent!  empathy!) and another way as parents (timeouts, shame, control, consequences), and how we're unwittingly undermining the very skills and values we hope to promote.   But blaming and shaming helps nobody (not us...and certainly not our children).  By instead approaching the topic with compassion and optimism, we can get out of an us vs. them relationship with our children, and take back our parenting practices from our cultural conditioning, and parent in relationship with our children in a way that's deeply aligned with our values.   Hannah and Kelty describe their RESIST approach (Respect, Empathy, Sync up, Innovate, Summarize, Trust) and also have a new guide to navigating sibling conflict (use discount code MOJO at checkout for 15% off!) on their beautiful website.  If our conversation strikes a chord, I'd definitely encourage you to check out their podcast and weekly Q&As on Instagram.   Parenting Membership  If parenting feels really hard, and it seems like you’ve read all the books and you’ve asked for advice in free communities and you’re tired of having to weed through all the stuff that isn’t aligned with your values to get to the few good nuggets, then the Parenting Membership will help you out.   Join the waitlist and we'll let you know when enrollment reopens in May 2026. Click the banner to learn more.      

In this episode we hear from Denise, who claims to have listened to every Your Parenting Mojo episode... Denise is a Filipina living in Madrid, and the intentional, respectful parenting style she's chosen to use is somewhat out of place in both cultures.  She wanted to chat about what to do when her daughter is having some big feelings out in public, and a well-meaning senior citizen approaches and says directly to her daughter: "You shouldn't cry, because you look ugly when you cry." We talk through the immediate issue, as well as all the layers underneath that question, on this episode.  And Denise's children make a surprise guest appearance at the end! You can find Denise on Facebook at facebook.com/DeniseSuarezConCarino [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen  00:02 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast where I critically examine strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. In this series of episodes called Sharing Your Parenting Mojo, we turn the tables and hear from listeners. What have they learned from the show that's helped their parenting? Where are they still struggling? And what tools can we find in the research that will help? If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a FREE Guide to 7 Parenting Myths We Can Safely Leave Behind, seven fewer things to worry about, subscribe to the show at YourParentingMojo.com. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us. Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast and to today's episode of Sharing Your Parenting Mojo. And today I'm here with Denise. And Denise, do you want to say hi and tell us a bit about you and your family?   Denise  01:09 Hi, hi, Jen. I'm Denise. I'm from the Philippines. But I live in Madrid. I have two kids age two and four. And I am also a parenting coach and certified how to talk so kids will listen workshop facilitator.   Jen  01:24 Yeah, so it always feels like we're old friends at this point. And they're never met we've been working together for it's got to be almost two years by now. It was   Denise  01:32 I would say, well for you. You've known me for almost two years. I would say I've known you much longer.   Jen  01:41 Isn't that weird?   Denise  01:44 Yeah, because I started listening to your podcast, I think my daughter must have been like four months old, and she's four now.   Jen  01:57 Okay, now now this is getting really weird. There are a few listeners out there, I know of a few of them by name, who have listened to every podcast episode and I believe you're one of those, aren't you?   Denise  02:08 Yeah.   Jen  02:10 Awesome. So um, so you were curious about coming on to Sharing Your Parenting Mojo to talk about kind of, I guess, an interconnected issue around big feelings and cultural issues and, kinds of stuff related to that, right? I guess that probably comes up a lot for you, because you are raising children in a culture that is not the one that you were raised in yourself.   Denise  02:31 Yep. And all of this really started with you.   Jen  02:34 Oh, my goodness, I'm sorry.   Denise  02:38 It all started with that guide on, I didn't even remember what the name of the guide was.   Jen  02:44 Holding values in the Finding Your Parenting Major Membership. Yeah.   Denise  02:49 Yeah. It all started from there. And there were and the questions that you asked which were just like, what are the cultures that you identify with? How do you want to raise your children in line with these cultures, in what ways are you going to be working against them? For me just really made me realise like, oh, there are really these two different cultures that are at play right now. And even though we are living in Madrid, we are living in Spain, and we have that Spanish culture, it doesn't negate the fact that I'm from the Philippines, and that I have my own, like history and my own culture that I also want to pass on to my children in some way. Maybe not in oh, and that's how I realised just how different it is like, you know, parenting in itself has its own difficulties, but when you kind of like, add in that like extra mix, it just makes it all the more interesting. Yeah.   Jen  03:49 So what kind of situations does it play out in for you them?   Denise  03:52 So this is actually one of the things that I wanted to talk about with you Jen was about. So one of the things that like I'm working against. And this comes from both Filipino and Spanish cultures is the denial of feelings, right? It's the you're not allowed to cry. And so sometimes this happens in the middle of the street and I have my daughter crying and you know, she is all out and I'm there kind of holding that space for her. When an older senior citizen comes along like a very well-meaning one comes to tell my daughter how she shouldn't be crying because she looks ugly when she cries. And so, yeah. Very well-meaning. And so it's kind of like how do I hide this? And, you know, for me, it's very easy to just like, brush up what she says because...   Jen  04:48 You don't know her..   Denise  04:49 Yeah! But these are still messages that my daughter's receiving, right? And it's one of those things where part of the guide, one of the things that we did was to get at what are non negotiables. And that, for me is a non-negotiable. And so it's kind of like how do we handle these types of situations where, really what's going on is so contrary to what we want to teach or what we want them to have or to do.   Jen  05:22 Yeah. So if you don't mind, I'd love it if we could back up just a little bit through your childhood and about how that played out for you. There's a big raised eyebrows there for those of who who are listening. Wide open eyes. So what did you learn about feelings when you were a child then and what would have happened if you had, you know, walking across the street and you have a meltdown in the middle of a street?   Denise  05:47 That would never have happened?   Jen  05:49 Yeah, yeah. So what was it like for you then?   Denise  05:52 It's so funny. I was just speaking to someone else about this a few hours ago, about how in our in my childhood feelings weren't a thing. Like, I guess like they happen behind closed doors. And not just like anger or sadness, just like, in general. I don't remember feelings being a topic of conversation or something that we actually saw in each other. Except, you know, I have three sisters. So of course there was that anger and the jealousy but it wasn't something that we talked about.   Jen  06:29 Yeah. And when you when you said it happened behind closed doors, I just got a flashback actually. Because you've listened to all my episodes I know you know that my mom died when I was about 10. And I remember walking down our hallway upstairs one day and going past my parent's room and my dad was sitting on the bed. He was looking at my mom's jewelry box, and he was crying, and I kept walking because I knew he wouldn't want me to see him crying, or even if I didn't know like, I felt. My impression was we don't talk about this. It's not okay for him to know that I've seen him crying. And for me to go to him and you know, could we ever have a conversation about something that's obviously touching us both so profoundly No, no, I as a 10, or 11 year old? No, I do not know how to initiate that conversation. And I don't know if he saw me. But he never came to me and said anything to me about it. And so yeah, I think this is this is common in so many cultures around the world, isn't it? That we're just, it's not that the feeling isn't there because it is. It's just that we were not allowed to express it. And so, okay, let's move one step forward, then how has that played out in your life, things that you saw happening in your childhood and that you were not allowed to express? How was that brought forward into your life as an adult?   Denise  07:45 By myself like without my kids?   Jen  07:49 Well how has it impacted your relationships, I guess, is   Denise  07:54 Okay, so maybe not an adult yet. We can like pass through the beautiful teenage years of how I, of course, was going through all these emotions and just didn't even know what to do with them, you know? And I remember like, I would speak to friends about it. And I would just be like, I think, God, I have really good friends cause they would just like not say anything, and just like, be there. And so moving on to adulthood. How would that look like it would just be adulthood was fine. It was like no problems. I don't want to talk about my feelings. It's not something that I do. And then it's more just like the kids come and you're like, oh, wait, I have feelings. All these very strong feelings. And then again, because of like your work and all the other work that I've done, I also know that what I have or what I had growing up isn't what I want for my kid.   Jen  08:50 Yeah. And that's where I was going with it. And yeah, just to pause on your teenage years for a minute. I mean, is it possible that if our parents had cultivated that relationship with us, where our feelings were allowed that we wouldn't have needed to go to our friends and have our friends be the sounding board that we know we so desperately need and that we can't find a home. And so then we turn outwards to who else can we possibly get this from? I think I see in the child development research, there's really no examination of that issue. It's more of a well children turn to their peers in their teens. Nobody asked, Well, why do children turn to their peers in their teens? And I know you have a degree in psychology as well. You've probably seen the parallels there.   Denise  09:30 Yeah, that's actually what like when you brought it up, that's what I was going to ask you is like, but don't doesn't the research say that developmentally at that stage it's common for you like, for you to look towards your peers and not your parents.   Jen  09:44 Yeah, yeah. And I'm actually exploring this for a podcast episode. And I'm having a really hard time with it, because I'm sure you've listened already to the episode on othering with Dr. John Powell. And so he mentioned a little nugget in there about the failure of the launching model, which is where we're we prepare our children to launch themselves off into college, into careers, into success, into everything else. And so he had sort of seeded this idea that maybe launching is not actually that useful, but in young adults are still very much exploring who they are. What is their role in the world? And they need help with that. And the idea that, okay, we're done, you're off on your own now go out with a bunch of people your own age, might not actually be super helpful to them. And the reason I'm having a hard time is because in the literature.   Denise  10:32 There must be nothing.   Jen  10:34 Yeah, well, firstly, there's nothing on that, and secondly, the phrase failure to launch means that your child has not launched themselves because the only model is the launch. And so if it's not a failure of the model, it's a failure of your child to live within the model. And so yes, this idea is very much swirling,   Denise  10:53 And it reminds me a lot of how you always mention most of the studies are like focused on the W.E.I.R.D. country's culture, whatever the word is.   Jen  11:07 Yes. And if you haven't listened to every episode that's Western, educated, industrialized rich, democratic cultures abbreviated to our acronym is weird. Yeah.   Denise  11:18 And how those cultures are particularly focused on independence. Well, if you look at maybe especially more Asian cultures, their focus is really more of what's more, just like interdependence. .   Jen  11:34 Exactly. Yeah and is failure to launch even a thing. And is there any research on it in English that I can find? Well, it will see, but not so far yet. So, okay, so that kind of brings us to adulthood and to the fact that parenting brings up all these big feelings in us and we were seeing in our children, we want to do things differently. And yet we have all these strong cultural messages around us about what is the right way for a child. to behave. And so your I think there's a few layers to this. Your original question was about what to do with people that you don't know. And then of course, there's another layer about what to do with people you do know. With people you don't know, if it was just some random person walking down the street, what would you say right now? What would be your...   Denise  12:18 I don't mind them.   Jen  12:21 Do you not pay any attention? Do you even acknowledge that you've heard or?   Denise  12:23 It depends on my mood, honestly. Sometimes I just say like, thank you, because I know that again, they're very like well intentioned for it. Other times, then, this is like after working with you, then I kind of like speak to my daughter about it afterwards, when she's calmed down to kind of say like, oh, what do you think of that? And so I think I do kind of know what to do. It's just the question is more, you know, if it was like a one time thing, yeah, it's fine. It's just, you know, if it's something quite consistent, It's just culture.   Jen  12:55 Yeah and culture is made up of people's expectations and actions. And yeah, so I mean, I think you're already on the right track just to sort of as gracious as you can muster. Thank you, maybe even a thank you, I've got this. It seems as though more advice is being offered. And then after the fact, absolutely a conversation with your daughter about what happened. And I would be super explicit about what you believe about feelings, and how feelings are expressed in your family. And of course, because you've been doing this work for so long, you should be able to point to times when she may be in your own apartment, she has been able to express her feelings and, you know, this is how we welcome your feelings. These are the kinds of things that you can know welcome your feelings. Is there anything else that I could be doing that I'm not doing right now, to help you feel as though when you have to express something that you have a safe space to do that in and then have that lead into a conversation about what other people believe about feelings, and we hear in the States, yes, disapproving looks are pretty uncommon. I would say it would be pretty rare for another adult to say a comment like that. So we don't have that as much to deal with on that issue. But we're, of course we're having, we're having explicit discussions with our child about race and what that means and how that intersects with all the different ways that she plays. And so I would talk with your child about what other people believe about feelings and how people in some cultures believe that you shouldn't express your feelings, and that it's better to not do that and that we believe something different. And so it's possible that we're going to encounter people we're going to be out in the street, we'll see a person and this is what you will hear me say when that happens like today when it happened. I said thank you to that person. That doesn't mean that I believe that what they said is right. It means that I believe we should be polite to people that we don't know and especially people who are older than us. And so that's why I said thank you. But that doesn't mean that I believe that what that person said is right, because I believe that my relationship with you is the most important thing. You know, include other family members as appropriate, and that you have the right to express the feelings you want to express and that I, I will help you to find a place for those and I will support you through those. And I think, you know, children become so adept at navigating different worlds and what rules are okay, what things are okay to do at grandma's house, what things are not okay to do at grandma's house. And but they are a code our house, so they can navigate these different things. And so I think that that approach really kind of helps them to know where you stand on it super explicitly, and that this is welcome in your family. And that when we're out, it's possible they're going to get other messages, and this is how you relate to them. So how do you think that would play out if you have that kind of conversation?   Denise  15:54 Yeah, I think it's kind of like I did the first step of having that conversation of like, okay, in our family this is what we do, and I missed the second step which is kind of like explaining how this might be what happens in our family, but it's not necessarily what happened outside. And I guess I like it, because it's also kind of preparing them and letting them know, like, things might be different. And it's okay for them to be different. But still, this is this is what we do in our family.   Jen  16:24 Yeah. And it's going to come up again and again. In school, in playgrounds, in everywhere they interact with other people. It's going to come up again and again. And so you could even prepare them with something to say that if a teacher at school says stop crying, you look ugly when you cry. Maybe there's a you know..   Denise  16:47 Hope none of their teachers say that.   Jen  16:49 Hopefully they wouldn't, but you never know. Maybe they're in the playground and some random person is passing by. You never know. But just you know, what is something that's not super snarky But that also acknowledges their right to express their emotions. It's as long as hopefully nobody's being hit and obviously that kind of support, but if it's an expression of emotions. So yeah, making it really explicit about what we believe and what works in our family and how we interact with each other in our family. And I mean, the extra step for how we apply that out in the world is so important. It's so many issues related to patriarchy related to race and things like that. So as we wrap up, so anyone who's interested in finding out more about your work and where they can interact with you.   Denise  17:36 Yeah, so I do most of my interaction on Facebook. So Jen is going to share the link on the description if you want to listen it's facebook.com/DeniseSuarezConCarino. And so what I really do as a parenting coach is that I support other intercultural...

This episode on the topic of materialism concludes our series on the intersection of parenting and money.  Here we talk with Dr. Susanna Opree of Erasmus University Rotterdam, who studies the effect of advertising and commercial media on use, materialism, and well-being. We discuss how children's understanding of materialism shifts as they age, the extent to which advertising contributes to materialism, and the specific role that parents play in passing on this value. Other episodes in 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 112: How to Set up a Play Room 115: Reducing the Impact of Advertising to Children     [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Dr. Opree  00:00 Basically, if you want to reduce materialism, you need to make sure that's those human connections. And those other values such as generosity, that they are amplified. And so I think what works best if Why do you see young kids to invest in their self-esteem a little bit as well also for adolescence, but I think also teaching young people to be grateful to be grateful ourselves as well for all the things that we have. And really just focus on making those connections. And the tricky thing is that sometimes possessions enable these connections. But I think if we're more focused on what's intrinsic to us, what makes us happy, outside of possessions that then basically the emphasis will shift.   Jen  00:52 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives, but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a FREE  Guide to 7 Parenting Myths That We Can Safely Leave Behind, seven fewer things to worry about, subscribe to the show at yourparentingmojo.com. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. And today's episode we're going to bring our series on the intersection of children and money to a conclusion we started out so long ago by talking with New York Times money columnist Ron Lieber about his book The Opposite of Spoiled. More recently we heard from Dr. Brad Klontz, about how we pass on money scripts to our children. And then we talked with Dr. Allison Pugh about the meaning children make out of the messages they receive about material goods. And then Dr. Esther Rozendaal on how children's brains process advertising.  And in between we looked at what research there is on how to set up a playroom, which has of course many links with the items that we buy and use. And so finally, we're here today with Dr. Suzanna Opree to bring the discussion up to a level that kind of draws all this together as we try and understand what materialism is, and how we pass it on to our children and what we can do if we don't want our children to be very materialistic. Dr. Opree is Senior Assistant Professor of quantitative methods in the department of Media and Communication at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her research focuses on the effect of advertising and commercial media on use, materialism, and well-being. Welcome Dr. Opree!   Dr. Opree  03:00 Thank you for having me.   Jen  03:01 Okay, so I wonder if we could start with something that seems as though it should be kind of simple. And then it turned out that it wasn't. Can you define materialism for us? Because I would, as I was reading through the literature, I found at least six different definitions of it.   Dr. Opree  03:15 Yeah, there are indeed many definitions. Luckily, though, some scholars have already tried to make sense of all those different definitions. And so I myself always go by the work of Richins and Dawson, and they say that materialism is basically three things. So first, it's finding possessions important and just wanting to collect as many possessions as you can. That's the first thing. The second thing is that you actually think that these possessions will make you happier, and not only in the short term, but also in the long run. And so that's basically one of the motivators for actually collecting possessions. And then the third one has to do more with impression management, so to say. So it's that you want to have possessions for adults to basically impress all the others around you. So think of having a big house, having a big car. As for children, and it's that, so getting items that will make you popular among your peers, but also just the belonging and fitting in, which I know you talked about earlier in the podcast series as well. That's important for children as well.   [caption id="attachment_6253" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] According to Richins and Dawson, materialism is basically three things. (1) Finding possessions important and wanting to collect as much as you can, (2) thinking possessions will make you happier, (3) having possessions to basically impress others around you.[/caption]   Jen  04:27 Yeah, yeah, that definitely came out in our episode with Dr. Pugh. So, um, so I'm glad that you are using one of the definitions that I had found instead of springing a new one on me. And so I'm curious as to how you landed on that one instead of some of the others that I mean, one of them says that materialism is a personality trait. Other people think it's a feature of people's identities or a set of attitudes about money and wealth. What is it about this particular definition that speaks to you more than some of the others?   Dr. Opree  04:53 Well, I think it also captures the first two that you're referring to. So when we talk about it as a personality traits I do think materialism is something that's inherent or characters and all of us are materialistic to some extent or another. However, in that research, it's often combined with other character traits. So they talk that materialism is paired with possessiveness, for instance, and non-generosity, envy. And I don't think all naturalistic kids or people actually have these personality traits, but we use possessions as part of our identity. So I do think that part is true, especially in a consumer culture that we have today. Basically, anything you own is a choice. So back in the day, like to my students I always compare it to buying a car. A couple of decades ago, there was one car that you could buy like the Model-T Ford was the only one made available and it had just one color and that was it. Whereas if you go buy a car today, there are so many different each brand has so many different models and so many different colors or color combinations. And that whatever you choose then becomes a signaling of your identity, so to say.   Jen  06:08 Yeah, and I think that's particularly, it's interesting that you brought up the example of cars. I was just talking about this the other day, about how so many cars are essentially the same car with the same chassis, the same engine with a different, you know, wrapper on the outside. Yes, designed to appeal to some particular aspect of our taste. So yeah, and so I'm always trying to look back to previous episodes, and we did one recently on the topic of patriarchy and I was really interested to draw a connection between some research on that and something that I pulled out of the literature on materialism because one of the authors I was reading had argued that materialism and consumerism have feminizing effects on men. And I'm going to quote this by setting up a narrative linking identity or sorry, linking masculinity, rebellion and integrity on one side and femininity, conformity, domestication and commercialization on the other. Production is active while consumption is passive. The consumer is deceived by advertising into purchasing things she doesn't really need, and this femininity is contagious. So men might also find themselves subject to the hypnoidal trance. I mean, what do you make of that? I am trying to square that with the research that says that men are actually slightly more materialistic than women I think.   Dr. Opree  07:25 They are. Yeah, yeah. For me, it was a very interesting point of view, actually a new one for me. So if I actually look at the literature. So Tim Kasser, for instance, has a yeah has worked on the topic of materialism for many years, as well. And he also studies, he linked it to capitalism, basically. And he, I believe, last year also released a book called Hyper-Capitalism, which is great. It's actually a comic book telling you everything about materialism or what you need to know. But what he also explains there, is that he links it to capitalism, but he's saying so materialism often has is occurring in capitalist societies where there's also a huge emphasis on a succession of our success and ambition, of status, wealth. And that's actually if we look at intercultural research, those kinds of societies are actually classified as being more masculine. So there is more emphasis on being the best, so to say then taking care of each other. And so we also see that in countries where actually there is less capitalism and less materialism, that there is, for instance, yeah, more emphasis on values such as harmony and equality, social justice, so this part about how materialism could be. Yeah. How did you call it? Feminizing?   Jen  08:50 Right. Yes.   Dr. Opree  08:52 To me, that's an interesting point of view that I will definitely explore further, but that I wasn't familiar with.   Jen  09:00 Yeah, it almost seems as though the men are looking to the, I mean, it's sort of a cycle that men are advertising to the women who of course most advertising agencies are mostly run by men and are predominantly populated by men, and so they're creating these advertisements for women and saying, well, you're listening to this stuff and, and you're being hypnotized by it and your feminizing us. There was some kind of strange circular logic in it to me as well. So, okay, that brings us to the question of why do we care about materialism? Why does it matter? So let's start with how materialism is linked to well-being what do you see there?   Dr. Opree  09:32 Yeah, so there's actually an interesting link. So in my research has always distinguished well-being from life satisfaction, which are two different things. So well-being are basically all the conditions that needs to be met in order for you to become a happy individual. And what we see in research among adults is that adults who are more materialistic, they become less satisfied with their lives over time and it also works the other way around. So if as an adult, you're less satisfied, then you'll also grow to become more materialistic, as a sort of coping mechanism. And we observe this coping mechanism in children as well. So we see that if children are unhappy that then they are more materialistic. They're also more susceptible to the effects of advertising, but not the other way around. So if they're materialistic, as kids, they will not become less satisfied.   Jen  10:30 All right. So let's dig into that a little bit. Then. What specifically do you find, I guess I'm not sure if this research has been done on children, but are there links between I guess its well-being as you're defining it rather than life satisfaction and materialism? Do we see a lot of negative impacts there? Or are there some positive ones as well, maybe?   Dr. Opree  10:49 Well, actually, that's still partly to be explored. So we aren't too sure yet how that works together. But we do see that that link between materialism and life satisfaction.   Jen  11:00 Yeah, I was thinking about research on things like depression, and anxiety, and narcissism, and substance abuse.   Dr. Opree  11:07 Well, there's research on that. Yeah. Okay, that's and a very specific form of people's mental well-being basically. That if you look at research on self-esteem, for instance, then we do see that youth or adults with less self-esteem, they become more materialistic as well. Similarly, in my own research, I also found that children who experience a big life events, so this could be moving to a new town, but it could also be experiencing someone getting sick in their families, for instance, and then they become more materialistic as well. So for kids, as somehow these possessions seem like a way out in order to feel better.   Jen  11:53 Yeah, and just thinking about the literature on divorce on that as well because I know there's research on divorce and materialism. I'm not sure the extent to which the parents drive this by seeing that the child's unhappy and buying them things as a tool to kind of express, you know, I still love you even though we're not together. And do you think that there is an element of the parents are driving this or it does it come from the children who are looking to possessions where they feel as though something is missing from other aspects of their life? Or is it kind of a circular process again, there?   Dr. Opree  12:26 Yeah, well, so one of those life events is also divorce. So we also included that in our research, and then again, we did see that the children whose parents were divorced, that indeed, they would become more materialistic as well. Part of it is compensation. I think, also because if you're spending less time with your kids, sometimes that is the outcome of divorce as well. You may want to compensate a little bit for your absence. And to a certain extent, like I wouldn't say that that's all that. I just think you need to be aware of the kind of message that you're giving out and also the kind of message you give out while doing so. So it's okay for instance, if you want to create a new bedroom in your house, if you want your kids to feel safe and secure in a new home, then yeah, I don't see the harm in getting them new possessions.   Jen  13:20 Okay. And then sort of heading back up to the broader theme, I was really interested to see that materialistic values are associated with making more anti-social and self-centered decisions. And some people had done some fascinating studies on things like changing price tags on merchandising, I think this was a survey where they asked people if they'd ever done this or knowingly used an expired coupon which gosh, I've done behaving in less pro social and more selfish ways. What links do you see there?   Dr. Opree  13:50 Yeah, with that type of research, I always wonder myself, is it then materialism or maybe a personality trait that is related to materialism. So in my own research within adolescence, we saw that adolescent kids who are more materialistic, tend to be more narcissistic and entitled as well. And so, especially imagine that something like entitlement would perhaps make a bigger difference there than materialism. So if you change the price tag, if you want to get it cheaper, it's probably because you feel like that's the price that's right for you or that you're sort of justifying it maybe in that way. So I think it's it has to do with something linked to materialism rather than materialism itself.   Jen  14:39 Yeah. And of course, that gets to the point of correlation rather than causation, doesn't it? The research shows that and I had written down materialistic values are associated with making more of these decisions. And because if we if we just sort of do a survey, we're finding that these two things vary together, but we can't say that it's the materialism that's causing the unethical behavior, and it could, in fact be other things that the researchers weren't even looking at. So, yeah, yeah. Okay, so that's sort of a fair bit on the personal stuff. And of course, there are other reasons as well related to the environment. And the amount of waste that it produces, which we don't ever really see, you know, when we throw our device away, or whatever, I think is a way we're throwing away a small fraction of the complete amount of waste that was created in the lifecycle of the product. What do you see about how people who have materialistic values view nature and see these circumstances?   Dr. Opree  15:37 Yeah, well, I think this partly has to do with consumer culture as well. So in a sense that if we look at the way our countries have changed over the years, and also how production processes have changed, so I myself, for instance, I grew up in a small town, and we had a big agricultural sector and there was a lot of these greenhouses as well. So there was actually produce being grown nearby. But if you go there now it's all suburbs like all these fields are gone. And so even though we grew up, like seeing what's happening, really knowing where produce come from, I can imagine the same like if you grow up near farms if you see animals being raised, and then the connection to nature is, of course, closer than if you live somewhere where you never observe it. And the tricky thing with the waste is that of course, we ourselves we create waste. Unfortunately, in our homes, not all foods get eaten, or indeed, we get rid of machines as well, that may be could’ve still been fixed, but it's easier just to replace it with something new that will work immediately, so to say. On the one hand is actually also part of the production process. So as I said, we're further away from it. But with all the produce for instance, we don't see the process before the store and so we're creating waste ourselves but actually the industry is also creating waste. So we have certain standards for what fruit and vegetables should look like, for instance, and anything that doesn't meet the criteria and will be cut from the process and will not make it to the stores. And so there's also ways in different parts of the process that I think can be handled as well. So that's one thing. And then on a more individual level. Yeah, it's tricky that we tend to replace things sooner than we used to.   Jen  17:37 Mm hmm. Yeah. And I had read the individuals who are focused on more materialistic values really have more of a negative attitude towards the environment. Do you think that it's just that they don't think about it as much or they think about it and they don't care...

We're delving a little deeper into the topic of mindfulness with none other than the Mindful Mama, Hunter Clarke-Fields!  We discuss Hunter's journey from being triggered just as often as the rest of us, to using mindfulness techniques to center herself so she can parent more effectively.  She even walks me through an impromptu mini-meditation! You can buy Hunter's book, Raising good humans: A mindful guide to breaking the cycle of reactive parenting and raising kind, confident kids on Amazon or at your local bookstore.

One of the questions I see asked most often in parenting forums these days is some variation on: "I’m worried about my child’s socialization now that it looks like daycares, preschools and schools have been closed for several months and will likely remain closed for several more months. Can someone please tell me if I really do need to worry about what the complete lack of socialization with other children will do to my [only] child?” So we'll take a look at that, and then we'll go on to take a look at the other kinds of socialization that happen in school that you may not have even realized happens until we dig into the research on it.   I also let you know about a new Pandemic Pods 'in a box' course.  A lot of parents are thinking of forming what are being called Pandemic Pods - a small group of children who are working together either in some kind of parent care exchange or with a hired teacher/tutor. As I'm sure you can imagine, there are a host of ways to set up these pods in a way that exacerbate existing inequalities that pervade the public school system.  And there are also ways to set them up that might actually help us to begin to overcome some of these issues.  Listen in to learn how! Click here to learn more about the Pandemic Pods 'in a box' course   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today’s podcast episode is on the topic of socialization, because one of the questions I’m seeing most often in parenting forums these days runs along the lines of "I’m worried about my child’s socialization now that it looks like daycares, preschools and schools have been closed for several months and will likely remain closed for several more months. Can someone please tell me if I really do need to worry about what the complete lack of socialization with other children will do to my only child?”  So that’s the main topic for our conversation today. But I also wanted to let you know about some other resources I’ve been putting together for parents who are struggling to cope right now, and this episode is related to those as well. You might have already seen that I have a course called The Confident Homeschooler, which gives you all the information you need to decide whether homeschooling could be right for your child and your family.  It’s based on scientific research, as everything I do is, but it’s not huge and indigestible.  It’s a series of short videos that you could binge-watch in an evening or two, and it gives you everything you need to make a decision about whether homeschooling can really work for you whether you’ll need a curriculum, and if so, how to choose one; how to use your child’s interests to develop their intrinsic love of learning, the social and emotional learning that will enable your child’s success when they return to school, overcoming problems like working with children of different ages, and ways to assess your children’s learning so you can feel confident they are keeping up with academic standards, if you decide that’s important to you. If you want to find out more about The Confident Homeschooler you can do that at yourparentingmojo.com/confidenthomeschooler.     But with many districts announcing that they are moving to remote-only learning for at least the first part of the fall semester, many parents are no longer in a position where they’re choosing whether homeschooling is right for them, they’re doing some form of it whether they want to or not.  And parents are panicking.  They’re panicking about their children’s learning, and whether their children are somehow going to ‘fall behind’ if they can’t make attending school two days a week work, or if they already know from what happened in Spring that their child just isn’t going to be able to sit in front of Zoom calls for even an hour each day. Parents who are in this position are starting to form what are being called Pandemic Pods, and if you haven’t heard of these yet then you will most likely be hearing more about them soon.  They pretty much exploded over social media just last weekend here in the Bay Area, and I expect they’ll move outward from there to other places where schools are closed.  So a Pandemic Pod is a small group of families that are getting together to support their child’s development and learning in some way.  Exactly how that will be done depends on the age of the children; for younger children this might essentially be a nanny share arrangement.  For older ones there would be some aspect of supporting the children’s learning, and this can vary from learning about things the children are interested in to making sure the children complete every assignment sent home by the school district and ensuring readiness for the next grade of learning when school reopens. On the first day people were talking about Pandemic Pods there was a huge rush to form them.  And then the very next day, it seemed like people realized the social justice considerations of what are essentially networks of affluent parents, who are often but not always White, either withdrawing their child from school or providing this extra tutoring to ensure their child stays on track with the school-provided learning objectives.  And there are other considerations like how many families you’ll work with, and whether each family is comfortable really socially isolating so the pod’s potential for exposure is minimized, and whether the children will wear masks all day every day, and whether the caregiver or tutor will wear a mask inside your house all day every day. But I do believe there are ways to set pods up that address many of these logistical issues, as well as the social justice considerations, for two reasons.  I think there can be a bit of a reflexive cry of “public schools are the most equitable arrangement possible, and Pandemic Pods reek of White privilege.”  We’ll get to the public schools issue in a bit, so let’s take the privilege aspect first.  If White people are using their networks to identify resources that not everyone can access then that’s a classic case of what’s called Opportunity Hoarding, which we discussed in depth in the episode on White privilege in schools.  If White people are forming pods and then reaching out to parents of non-dominant cultures and inviting them in to ‘sprinkle a little diversity on top’ primarily for the benefit of our own child then we’re basically just perpetuating White supremacy. (And if this is the first time you’re hearing this phrase ‘people of non-dominant cultures,’ then it’s a term I use to avoid centering Whiteness, and to recognize the power imbalance inherent in systemic racism.) But there are ways to form these pods that don’t do that.  A Pandemic Pod doesn’t inherently perpetuate White supremacy.  The way the pod is formed CAN do that, or can NOT do that.  So if a White parent reaches out to people of non-dominant cultures, maybe parents of other children at the White family’s school, or maybe through a local church and asks what resources parents need access to, then you can open a conversation.  What you may well find is that while you are feeling overwhelmed and panicked because this is the first time our social systems have really completely failed us, that families of non-dominant cultures have robust support systems that have thus far flown under the radar.  So if you ask them what they need, a group of families might already have a long-standing support system and ask you to purchase wifi access for them, and then encourage you not to engage further with them, thank you very much.  They might be deeply suspicious of your motives, as, frankly, I probably would be too if I were them.  But it’s possible that by starting a conversation about what they’re seeing and what are their needs, and what you’re seeing and what are your needs, that you’ll be able to open up a space that is truly inclusive, not just tokenistically inclusive. By making the needs of others at least as important as your own needs, and even centering their needs above yours, you’re doing the real work of dismantling White supremacy here.  This is really it.  You’re listening to the needs of people of non-dominant cultures, and you’re acting on them not out of a sense of duty and obligation and White saviorism, but because your survival and your child’s survival are wrapped up in their survival and their child’s survival.  You will sink or swim together.  This is the work Black people are asking us to do to dismantle the systems that have given us so much power and privilege for so many years. So if you’d like more information on how to form a pandemic pod, from whether you should start one in the first place, to way more of these social justice considerations, to the kinds of questions you’ll want to ask the other families participating, how to identify a caregiver or tutor and what to ask them in an interview, to what the children should be learning and how to know if they are learning, to minimizing costs, then my new Pandemic Pod ‘in a box’ course is for you.  You can learn more and sign up today at yourparentingmojo.com/pandemicpods. Now I do want to come back to this issue of public schools being the most equitable arrangement possible for children, and the idea that if we aren’t supporting public schools then we aren’t doing anti-racist work because it’s intimately connected to the idea of socialization. I think when many parents are thinking of the issue of socialization they’re thinking about it at one level, as I was as well before I started looking into it, so we’ll start there before we go deeper.  We’re thinking about the interactions our children are missing out on with other children, and whether that’s a big deal to their development.  And fortunately for us, that’s actually a relatively easy question to answer.  So maybe this will be a super short episode and we’ll call it done?  But come on; I know you know me better than that! So when we think about this issue of socialization with other children, and whether not being able to be around other children for a long time is problematic, we can say that in many cases the answer here is ‘no.’  I’m thinking back to our episode on the concept of Self-Reg®, which is the term that Dr. Stuart Shanker coined, and which is ““a powerful method for understanding stress and managing tension and energy, which are key to enhancing self-regulation in children, youth and adults of all ages.  Decades of research have shown that optimal self-regulation is the foundation for healthy human development, adaptive coping skills, positive parenting, learning, safe and caring schools, and vibrant communities.” In that episode we looked at a lot of research on childhood stressors, and specifically at some definitions published by the Center for the Developing Child at Harvard University, which distinguishes between three types of stress: A positive stress response is “a normal and essential part of healthy development, characterized by brief increases in heart rate and mild elevations in hormone levels. Some situations that might trigger a positive stress response are the first day with a new caregiver or receiving an injected immunization. A Tolerable stress response activates the body’s alert systems to a greater degree as a result of more severe, longer-lasting difficulties, such as the loss of a loved one, a natural disaster, or a frightening injury. If the activation is time-limited and buffered by relationships with adults who help the child adapt, the brain and other organs recover from what might otherwise be damaging effects. And a Toxic stress response can occur when a child experiences strong, frequent, and/or prolonged adversity—such as physical or emotional abuse, chronic neglect, caregiver substance abuse or mental illness, exposure to violence, and/or the accumulated burdens of family economic hardship—without adequate adult support. This kind of prolonged activation of the stress response systems can disrupt the development of brain architecture and other organ systems, and increase the risk for stress-related disease and cognitive impairment, well into the adult years. While we can see that daycares and schools being closed for a long period of time doesn’t exactly fit the time-limited criteria of the positive stress response, if our child is at home with at least one loving parent, then the stress of not being able to see their friends is not likely to be harmful to the child.  Of course, this may not be the case if being at home exposes the child to things like domestic violence or caregivers who regularly humiliate the child, or other types of situations that we know are traumatic, and remove children from the sources of support they may have had in school. The other side of this high-level question is that even when the child seems happy and reasonably well adjusted, are they missing out on some kind of skill building that they can only get by being around other children in daycare or school.  I do wish I could remember where I read it, but I do recall seeing someone somewhere explain what a strange idea it is that we put all the people in our ‘village’ who are the same age, and who lack social skills, and we put them all together with the smallest possible number of adults we can and expect the children to learn social skills. We do know that children can effectively learn skills like manners and sharing from their parents and caregivers, so just because your child isn’t around other children doesn’t mean that they aren’t going to learn these skills.  And there’s no research indicating that children who aren’t around big groups of other children for extended periods come to some kind of developmental harm because we just wouldn’t have made it as a species if we needed this.  All children enjoy play and create opportunities to play when they can, even when it isn’t culturally sanctioned.  But they don’t have to have large groups of friends to learn how to play.  They can learn with siblings, or with parents spending a bit of time with them each day, and by themselves, and with one or two other children occasionally if you’re able to do that. That said, if your child is extroverted and gets energy from a lot of social contact with others, and especially if you’re an introvert and need more quiet time, or if your child has a condition like autism that makes social contact with others important and that person simply cannot be you 100% of the time, then absolutely you can look for a friend or a small group of friends to co-isolate with to slightly expand your social bubble and give yourself a break.  But it’s possible that it isn’t contact with people their own age is actually the critical factor, and rather it’s just contact with other people that’s the important ingredient, and so having a teen or another adult or even a grandparent spend time with the child could also be beneficial.   But let’s dig a little deeper into this, and ask ourselves what we *really* mean by socialization.  And we can start to get at this tangentially by asking why it matter so much that our children have the experience of being around others.  What are we trying to do by doing this?  We’re trying to give them experiences with other children, and also with other adults – the teachers, with a goal of giving them skills to succeed in the world.  And what kinds of skills do they need to learn to succeed in the world?  Basically, they need to learn the skills to understand what it means to move around in a world that is dominated by White norms. Now I need to give a hat tip here to early childhood education consultant Ijumaa Jordan, whom I heard interviewed on the Pre-K Teach & Play podcast which is hosted by Dr. Kristie Pretti-Frontczak.  I already had a bit of background knowledge on how Whiteness is the assumed norm in most situations in the world – we can see this when a news reporter refers to a White man as a ‘man,’ and a Black man as a ‘Black man’ – because Whiteness is the assumed norm, the reporter didn’t need to mention the White man’s race.  That’s just one tiny example, but it shows how when a group of White people are together, it’s a space that is assumed to be neutral.  Race isn’t an issue.  Race only becomes an issue when someone of another race comes into the space, or when a White person finds themselves in a room full of people of other races. In this podcast episode, Ijumaa Jordan talks about how dominant White culture shows up in preschool classrooms.  One way this happens is through time; where you show up at a certain time (which is called ‘being on time’), and then things happen in a linear sequence that functions as a schedule.  In other places, and Jordan gives the Caribbean as an example, that time is more circular and based on relationships, and things don’t happen until the right people get there.  In our classrooms we might start at 9am, and 10:00 is group time, and 11:00 is outside time, and at 11:25 we start transitioning to washing hands, and at noon everyone has to sit down and eat their lunch.  There’s no space for anyone who doesn’t feel like going outside that day, or isn’t hungry at noon, to do anything different.  And when we’re talking about children of non-dominant cultures, the teacher will then sometimes say “they come from such chaotic homes…” and frame it up as preschool training the child to do something the parents have failed to do, which is to accept a view of time that is used by White culture.  Some things do run on time, and we need to be ready for them.  But this is my interjection here; the majority of the schedules we thrust on our children we do because it makes our lives easier.  We might tell ourselves that our children ‘do better’ when they are on a schedule, and by that we usually mean that they are more compliant, and that the behavior they show when they’re on a schedule might be easier for us to cope with.  But maybe it’s possible that another schedule would work better for them than the one we arbitrarily impose, or maybe they really don’t need as much of a schedule as we think they do. This idea of scheduling becomes problematic in a couple of ways.  Firstly if we’re looking at federally or state-funded programs like Head Start then those programs tend to require that parents show up with their children by a certain time, and if you’re regularly late then you get written up and you could potentially lose access to the services that you rely on to take care of your child while you work.  So there’s not much flexibility there to account for whatever reality you’re facing with getting your kids out the door that morning.  And you might say ‘well, if there were really mostly White kids in the school, does it even matter if we use this highly scheduled approach?’  and Ijumaa Jordan says yes it does, because we’re teaching our children the dominant narrative, that the White way of viewing time is the right way to view time.   Another way White norms show up is around being quiet.  There’s a pretty clear White cultural norm around being quiet.  I haven’t been to church in a long time, but I used to go when I was young and you sit quietly in your pew and listen unless it’s time to sing, in which case you sing but not too loudly, and you’re always singing along with the other people in church following the same melody which really sounds more like a dirge.  And I’ve seen videos of Black people in church and they’re calling out during the sermon to say they agree with what the pastor is...

Work-family conflict can seem unavoidable - especially in the era of COVID when we're either working from home with children underfoot all day, or we're an essential worker who has to leave the house and can't find childcare. In this conversation with licensed psychologist Dr. Yael Schonbrun, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Brown University, and co-host of the Psychologists Off The Clock podcast, we acknowledge that we must enact policies that provide more of a safety net for families.  But even in the absence of these policies, we can make choices that allow us to live in greater alignment with our values, and also find a sense of peace. If you enjoyed episode 113 on Dr. Chris Niebauer's book No Self, No Problem, then you'll find that the tools we discuss in this episode flow directly from that one.   Here's a link to the Choice Point tool that we discuss Here are some Psychologists Off The Clock episodes that discuss Acceptance and Commitment Therapy in greater depth: https://www.offtheclockpsych.com/podcast/acceptance-commitment-therapy https://www.offtheclockpsych.com/podcast/the-heart-of-act https://www.offtheclockpsych.com/podcast/take-committed-action   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen  00:02 Hi, I am Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast where I critically examine strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. In this series of episodes called Sharing Your Parenting Mojo, we turn the tables and hear from listeners. What have they learned from the show that is helped their parenting? Where are they still struggling? And what tools can we find in the research that will help? If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a FREE Guide To 7 Parenting Myths We Can Safely Leave Behind 7 Fewer Things To Worry About, subscribe to the show at yourparentingmojo.com. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you will join us.   Jen  00:59 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Regular listeners might remember that a few months ago we talked with listener Kelly and Dr. Moira Mikolajczak on the topic of parental burnout. And we discussed how parental burnout is a constellation of symptoms that can include mental and physical exhaustion and emotional distancing from children, loss of feelings of being effective as a parent. And it can lead to an assortment of risks for both the parent and the child including shame and loneliness and the risk of neglect of the child or violence towards the child. And the feeling that the situation can only be escaped through divorce or abandonment or suicide. And we talked about how one of the big causes of parental burnout is the unrealistic expectations that we put on mothers to somehow sacrifice everything for their child, and also lead a fulfilling life for themselves. In the show notes, I gave a link to an assessment the Dr. Mikolajczak and her colleagues developed to help you figure out whether you might have burnout because it might not be as obvious as you think. And after the interview, I emailed with her and we discussed how powerful self-compassion can be as a tool to deal with burnout.   More recently, I was listening to a podcast that I really enjoy called Psychologists Off the Clock which features four psychologists discussing the principles that they use in their clinical work, and how they can help the rest of us to flourish in our work and our parenting and our relationships as well. And one of the hosts is Dr. Yael Schonbrun, and she is here with us today. Dr. Schonbrun Brown is a licensed clinical psychologist with a private practice. She is also an assistant professor at Brown University. And she is writing a book on the topic of work-family conflict, which can be an important precursor to parental burnout, which is how these topics are connected. So I got to chatting with her about this by email and I realized that not only are a large proportion of my listeners, working parents, but the ideas that she's thinking about are actually applicable to anyone who feels tension between their family and some other aspect of their life. So, she is going to talk us through this and also give us some new tools to deal with the days when our lives just seem a little bit out of control. So welcome, Dr. Schonbrun.   Dr. Schonbrun  03:00 Thank you so much Jen for having me. And I just want to take a quick moment to compliment your podcast, which is awesome. I love that you integrate data and compassion for parents and the work that you put out there is amazing. I am really honored to be a part of it.   Jen  03:11 Oh, thank you. It is great to have you here. So, I am always the first to admit, as far as working parenthood goes, I have it pretty easy. Even when I had a day job, I worked from home and so I never had that struggle of the commute time and the physical rushing from one place to another that I know a lot of parents and families find really stressful, that even though I no longer have a regular day job, as it were, and the podcast and this business is my work, I sometimes feel really conflicted because I really, really, really love doing this work and I also really like spending time with my daughter. But sometimes I feel distracted when I am with her. Often because I am thinking about the writing that I could be doing, or I should be doing. If I was not out collecting fill bugs in the garden, and now that she's not in preschool for nine hours a day. And so, I wonder if you can maybe help us to understand why is working parenthood's so hard?     Dr. Schonbrun  04:07 Yeah, I think it is great that you're pointing out that not all working parent challenges are created equal. Some of us really are more privileged than others. But it is also helpful to point out that the vast majority of working parents do experience challenges, just as you're describing. So, it's a great question, why is working parenthood so hard for so many of us? And the way that I frame my answer is a little different than the way the popular press typically talks about it. So, I sort of look at it from two different directions. The first is from the outside in, and the second is from the inside out. So, I'll tell you a little bit more about what I mean by that.   So, the outside in is the part of the dilemma in working parenthood that has to do with challenges that exist outside of us that leak into our individual lives. So, these are factors like how flexible and supportive your workplace is and whether your colleagues and work environments support balance between work and non-work time. Whether you have a partner, and if you have a partner: how supportive he or she is capable of being, or willing to be in sharing childcare and household responsibilities, and in supporting your professional effort. Whether your kids have special needs or physical or mental health issues, things like whether you have financial stressors, or whether you live in a country with reasonable family leave policies, and so on. So, the outside-in  factors matter deeply because when those kinds of structures aren't in place in ways that are reasonable and humane, we're going to encounter painful, often insurmountable challenges. And that tends to be what gets talked about most of the time in the popular press, and in most of the books that are out there about work-family conflict. But as a clinical psychologist, I tend to emphasize the importance of the other direction. So, this is from the inside out. So, these are factors that exist inside of each of us. These are human psychological elements, things that make each of us tick, and I like to quote Sigmund Freud here because he famously said, Love and Work are the cornerstones of our humanness. And I like this quote, because it really symbolizes the fact that most of us feel a drive to engage deeply in relationships. And most of us feel a drive to engage in some kind of productive or skillful enterprise, you know, not necessarily paid, but something that is sort of outside of our private family lives.   And these are both wonderful drives. And they are both associated with positive effect with healthy bodies and minds. And they are both individually and jointly able to create rich, meaningful, rewarding life. So, they are both important. But each tends to demand a lot from us and to demand things that sort of pull in opposite directions in which interfere with one another. So, for example, work really wants us to engage in future thinking, to be competitive, to be ambitious to get things done. Rr is parenting really requires us to be present and connected and very patient. And then of course, both roles require an intense amount of time and energy. So, by the fundamental nature of being human and wanting to participate in both work and love, most of us are going to experience conflict between those two roles. And so what a lot of my work focuses on is making sure that we aren't trying to solve inside-out problems with outside-in solutions, because that tends to get us into trouble and ends up making us feel more conflicted, more frustrated, more guilty, more overwhelmed.   Jen  07:08 Yeah, and I think that that distinction is so important and that they can affect each other. It is sort of like the Yin and the Yang, right, that the work that we do internally, is what shifts our culture. Our culture is not some kind of nebulous thing that is out there. It is a collection of how we all interact with each other how we think and how we interact with each other. And that by doing this internal work, we can shift our culture even if it might not go as fast as some of us might hope.   Dr. Schonbrun  07:35 Yeah, yeah. I love that you just mentioned Yin and Yang, because a lot of my thinking about working family conflict and working family enrichment, which we'll get to is really informed by Daoist thinking about Yin and Yang and I love that you're pointing out that it's not just the system that affects us, but we affect the system. But yes, it can be slow progress, and I think that can be immensely frustrating. I certainly feel that frustration too.   Jen  07:58 Yeah, well, that leads us into your story, right? I mean, you got here by a path that had you exploring how these tensions exist in your own life. Right? Did you want to spend a minute telling us about that?   Dr. Schonbrun  08:12 Yeah, sure. So, I was on the tried and true academic path. I was a researcher. And before I had kids, I was really hell bent on staying on that tried and true path. I really, I love science. I love psychology. I was at a wonderful institution, so actually there. And when I became a parent, to my first son, who is 10, I now have three boys. I was just sort of shaking because it was sort of surprising how hard it was to stay motivated and focused on my career. And yet, I didn't want to back away from my career because I really did love it, but I also wasn't comfortable, sort of maintaining the same kind of position that I had had before. And it was surprising to me because I had always been surrounded by amazingly brilliant academics who were also terrific parents. It was not like a judgement of how anybody else was parenting, it was more that I didn't want to be away from my kid for 40 to 50 hours a week.   And so I went through this long year of really painful self-reflection and using a lot of the skills that I talked about in my writing to really dig deep and figure out what was possible, you know, given my situation, given the financial constraints of my life, given my partner's work, and given who I am, which is an ambitious person who really likes to be creative in the outside world and use my intellect in ways that for me are interesting. But also, you know, a person that really wanted to be really deeply engaged as a parent. And at the end of that year, I ended up backing down from sort of pulling back a little bit in my effort in my academic work, and that was a really difficult position to be into. So, it was really privileged because I had supportive mentors and colleagues who are totally fine with me pulling back a little bit It ended up being really hard for me socially because I did not really fit in anywhere. In academia, you do not have part time people. And there is a good reason for that. I mean, academic work is really intense, you have brilliant people working day and night to make progress. And part time effort really doesn't cut it is the reality. And so, I wasn't doing as well as the truth. And I felt that, and I also socially felt kind of out of it. Like I was not really inside of the academic world as much as I used to be. And I also was not at all a stay at home parent. And so, I didn't really fit in there. So socially, it was really interesting.   And so, but I did a lot of thinking and a lot of sort of, again, reflecting on my values and which way I wanted to go. And I ended up in 2014, writing an essay about it that landed the New York Times, totally random lightning strike of luck. I actually wrote it during my kid’s, I at that time had two kids, I wrote it during their nap time. And then at the end of that time is I heard them calling, I Googled "submit op ed piece" and at the top it said you know instructions to say submit to the New York Times and amazingly got in and it sort of just opened up this new career path of writing about working parenthood from kind of a combined academic, scientifically informed perspective, but also one that was really clinically informed as well as personally informed.   Jen  11:16 Okay. And so, I know that you now have a private practice. And you are also in academia. And you are also a parent...   Dr. Schonbrun  11:25 ..a podcast co-host.   Jen  11:27 Yes, yeah. Yeah. As I know it can be...   Dr. Schonbrun  11:30 ...as you know, it does not take any time.   Jen  11:32 No. Yeah. And so, in a way, it seems like you've kind of multiplied the kinds of conflicts that have the potential to exist in your life. And I wonder if Is there a way to segue from the tensions that you've experienced into one of the more general topics that are ways in which families experience with work-life conflict, which of those have you experienced?   Dr. Schonbrun  11:55 All of them. No..   Jen  11:57 All of them are the same. .   Dr. Schonbrun  11:58 Yeah. At the same time. Well, and if Interestingly, I mean, I think you are pointing something out that is really true, which is I do experience a lot of work-family conflict. And I also experienced this other phenomenon that I write a lot about, which is called work-family enrichment. I experience both. And what is I think underdiscussed in the public sphere is how parenting and professional roles can really complement one another. And that does not mean that they do not also conflict I mean that that is a true reality. And Jen, I hope it is okay for me to disclose we this is our second recording of this episode. Because what happened in the first recording is I botched it. And the reason they botched it is I tried to do it at home, it was kind of a gamble. I put my three-year-old to bed to nap and I told my oldest if he is not sleeping, can you just take care of it because I need some quiet to do this interview. And my oldest took care of it. But my three-year-old had to go to the bathroom and I heard the shuffling in the background. It was really distracting, and I could not focus. There is just sometimes where I do it very badly. It is the truth. And I think this gets to something that you said in your introduction, which is the role of self-compassion. And so, I engage a lot of self-compassion when things do not go well. And I hope that you, at some point have an entire episode dedicated to self-compassion, because it is such a powerful construct.   But in brief, it has three components. So, the first is mindfulness to kind of making space for whatever it is that you are feeling, in my case, embarrassment and sort of frustration and disappointment, sometimes kind of anger. Like I wish I had more help with the kids, especially now that we are in a pandemic, and childcare has gone out the window. So, the first component is mindfulness. The second component is self-kindness, to sync the kinds of things to yourself that you would say to a friend who is struggling, so you wouldn't call up a friend who had botched an interview and say, “Wow, you did a really bad job. You should really be embarrassed, and you know, have your tail between your legs.” You'd say, “You know what? We're all human.” Like you were carrying a lot that day. You did as best you could. Forgive yourself, you can see if you can rerecord. You would say kind, supportive, encouraging things. And so if you can say those kinds of things to yourself, and, and it is like a muscle, I think for a lot of people who have that really critical voice, it's a really hard thing to do but practice and it becomes easier. And then the third component is common humanity. So, remembering that many working parents, so I would say, I would venture to say all of us, especially now, have had those really hard days, like you're not alone. Sometimes you feel alone when you are having a rough day. But just remember, you know, this is the plight of the working parent, we are all in this soup together. And knowing that really does ease some of it, and it does not undo it, but it makes it a little easier to tolerate. And then it makes it easier to sort of connect back in and figure out what makes the most sense to do with whatever the frustrating experiences is.   So that's kind of on the side of work-family conflict, but on the side of work-family enrichment. You know, I think I am really fortunate. I am incredibly privileged because all of my roles really do feed one another like my academic and scientific background, helps me do better clinical work. My clinical work helps me to do better, more applicable sort of digestible writing. And my writing helps me to do podcasting, they will, they will really feed each other. And I think my parenting and my perspective on parenting and my interest in parenting, and in my professional work helps all the roles as well.   Jen  15:22 Yeah, yeah. And that, I think, is a really important thing to recognize that it can feel as though  were being torn in 15 different directions. And in some ways we are and you know, if there's work-family conflict from the number of hours that you're working, and

We're almost (but not quite!) at the end of our lengthy series on the intersection of money and parenting.  Most recently, we talked with Dr. Allison Pugh to try to understand the answer to the question "Given that advertising is happening, how do parents and children respond?" In this episode we take a step back by asking "what about that advertising?" with Dr. Esther Rozendaal of Radboud University in the Netherlands whose research focuses on children's understanding of advertising messages.  Can children understand that advertising is different from regular TV programming?  At what age do they realize an advertisement is an attempt to sell them something? And what should parents do to reduce the impact of advertising on children?  It's all here in this episode.   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 105: How to pass on mental wealth to your child 107: The impact of consumerism on children 112: How to Set up a Play Room 118: Are You Raising Materialistic Kids?   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen  00:03 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives. But it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a FREE Guide to 7 Parenting Myths That We Can Safely Leave Behind 7 Fewer Things to Worry About, subscribe to the show at yourparentingmojo.com. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.   Today's episode is a continuation of a series that I'm doing on the intersection of childhood and money. We started by talking with New York Times money columnist Ron Lieber, on his book The Opposite of Spoiled and then continue the conversation with Dr. Brad Klontz about the money scripts that we pass on to our children. Next, we heard from Dr. Allison Pugh who studies the way that parents and children manage in our consumerist culture. Dr. Pugh is a sociologist who is more interested in how people interact with each other than the ways their brains work. And she also takes advertising as a given and says, since advertising and commercialization is happening, how do parents and children respond? But of course, there's another side to the story. And that's the perspective that yes, advertising is happening and what does this mean for our children? How do our children perceive advertisements? Can they understand when a company is trying to sell them something and can we teach them to be more aware about this or is it a lost cause?   Our guest today is Dr. Esther Rozendaal. She's an associate professor At the behavioral Science Institute, as well as an associate professor in communication science at Radford University in the Netherlands. Dr. Rozendaal is an expert on young people's media and consumer behavior and Her research focuses in large part on children and advertising. She obtained a master's in Business Economics from Erasmus University Rotterdam followed immediately by an MSc in social psychology from the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands, followed by a PhD from the University of Amsterdam, for which she wrote her dissertation on the topic of advertising literacy and children's susceptibility to advertising. Welcome Dr. Rozendaal. Thank you. Thanks so much for being here with us. So I wonder if we can sort of start at the beginning and just say, Okay, why do companies advertise? It seems as though companies advertise products because they want us to buy the products. But how does this actually happen? What kind of changes does advertising bring about in I guess all people, children and adults?   Dr. Rozendaal  02:57 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, of course. First of all, for companies and for their brands, it's really important that we are aware of them, right? So if they want to make money, so if it's of course the core business, we need to be aware of all the products that they are creating that they're selling. So that's actually the fact that we can recognize all those products when we are in shops, or even that we can free recall those products that we can say okay, so I'm in need for a new type of mascara, for example. And now suddenly, this brand pops up in my mind, I'd like to have it so that's actually the first thing they like to create in our minds. And then of course, they want us to like all those brands and products that they are creating in all the surfaces they are thinking about. So once we do recognize those products and brands, and once we also like them, then the next step is of course that we are going to buy those products and that we want to request it So especially with kids, is it's highly important that those children start asking their parents to buy.   Jen  04:11 Yes, every parent's favorite form of advertising this way. Yeah. And so what kind of tactics to advertisers used to influence consumers? And I'm wondering, are these different for younger children and what what age did children just kind of understand these?   Dr. Rozendaal  04:27 Well, there are, of course, several tactics that they're using. And when you look at children in particular, an often used appeal is the popularity appeal. So children are of course highly susceptible to the influence of their peers, and to being popular. So when you look at, for example, the traditional television commercials, one of the tactics that you can see quite often is that they are showing some really popular children surrounded by a group of other children using kind of product or service and being really happy about it and all the other kids smiling and happy. Yeah, they're so happy. And this is actually also a technique that is now used quite often not only in the traditional television commercials but also on YouTube for example. So, there also you have deep popularity appeals. So children are films are also other influencers who are not children themselves. Also, they film themselves in settings in which they are really happy and popular, while using the products and the brands they are advertising. And also a thing which is really used quite a lot. For example, by McDonald's is presenting children with free stuff. Right? So the freebies, the things you can get for free and also this is a technique that is seen online quite often. So also with banner ads. For example, on TV ones websites, there are like, showing things like, Okay, do you want to win a free toy? Do you want to get free tickets for a certain festival, just click here, provide us with some of your personal details, and then you'll get a free toy or two tickets. So this is also something that is highly persuasive for children, particularly, but also for adults. Of course, we also want to have free stuff, right? So these are some of the techniques that are used, but there are many, many more.   Jen  06:31 Yeah, there really are. And I want to delve into one of those a little bit because I think it's particularly hard for us to get our head around by just describing a literature review in a study. So there was a pretty recent literature review that was done in 2016. And it found a general consensus that food advertising is positively correlated with unhealthy food take but there's a lack of insight into the causal relationship. So we don't know if more children who are watching ads are unhealthy or if unhealthy children are watching more ads. And then related to that there was another study that was actually too recent to be included in that one from 2017. And I'm going to quote it says children who watched a movie with more food product placement and branding were more likely to choose the snack most highly featured in that movie than children who watched a movie without significant unhealthy branded foods placement. And so what the researchers are doing here is they were putting the children down in front of the movie album, the Chipmunks. And then after that these children were three times as likely to choose the cheese balls snack that was frequently featured in that movie as cheese puffs which weren't seen in the film. And the children were saying then they weren't particularly hungry. They were told they didn't need to finish the snacks. They still ate on average about 800 calories or half the recommended amount of calories per day for children aged nine to 11. And so the researchers were thinking okay, maybe a child who sees a character often eating a product in a movie may be more likely to automatically choose that product in the future and then casting even further light on that and even more recent study from 2018 this is really an active field found that children, when you explain this concept to them, they initially don't believe that integrated advertising could possibly have any impact on their life. So it seems as though you have some thoughts on this.   Dr. Rozendaal  08:17 Yeah. Well, the thing is with those integrated forms of advertising and these, these types of advertising received a lot these days, right, not only in the movies and TV programmes, but also on YouTube, in different influencer videos. The thing is that it's so highly integrated and embedded in non commercial content that children and adults as well do not always recognize the product placement as a type of persuasion with a commercial intent. So all the possible defense mechanisms that could be there are not really likely to be activated in situations like this. And then what happens Is that the brands and the products are associated with a happy stuff in the movie. So this is called effect transfer or evaluative conditioning. So there are a lot of nice things going on in those movies, right? So a lot of funny things. And those brands and products are placed in parts of the movies in which the feelings are really positive. So those positive feelings are associated, this is really an implicit and oftentimes a non conscious process. So it becomes an association in the mind of which we are not really aware and children are also not really aware about this force. And I really recognize this from my own interviews that I had with children about product placements in in influencer videos, that when you ask them, okay, do you think this really affects you? So they just show this product or this brand in in their video? Does it affect you that you're saying no, no. If this really this doesn't affect me at all, and they really believe that some of those children, they do think that it affects others. So this is the third person effect, right? It's not me, he undercuts me. And this often shows something, it shows that somehow they think, yeah, okay, there could be something here. But what I've learned is that being influenced is not really a positive thing. So I resist the fact that it could possibly have an effect on me.   Jen  10:36 And to be fair, I'd probably say the same thing.   Dr. Rozendaal  10:40 So yeah, I would say the same thing as well, even even now, I know that it's not true, right. I've done this research for almost 15 years now. So I should know better than that. But   Jen  10:54 we all want to think we're not influenced right.   Dr. Rozendaal  10:58 And sometimes, we are Actually, no, that is not true. But many times we actually think that we are not influenced. So sometimes we need just need some proof that we actually are to make us aware of the fact that it can have a major impact on our behaviors or thoughts or feelings. Mm hmm. But yeah, so this is really the thing with integrated types of advertising. It's a less conscious influencing process that's going on and we see it more and more often.   Jen  11:28 Yeah. Okay. So I wonder if we can get into the heart of your research. And maybe you can briefly start by defining for us what is advertising literacy?   Dr. Rozendaal  11:36 Yeah, advertising literacy. It's really it's a broad concept. The way I'd like to define it is that it's a set of understandings, it's in the literature, you can see that the focus is mainly on different types of knowledge and understanding. So first, you have to start with it's the understanding how you can recognize different types of activity. And also actually the ability to recognize different types of advertising. And with that comes an understanding of its commercial intent. It's the selling intent and also the persuasive intent, and also the understanding of the different tactics that are being used by advertisers to influence you. It also includes some understanding of the economic models behind advertising, about the source of advertising, who's creating it with what kind of purposes but on the other hand, in the literature, you can also see advertising literacy being defined as a kind of attitude. And this is also what I like about advertising literacy. It's not only about having certain kind of knowledge, it's also about having a general critical attitude towards advertising. So that include a healthy kind of this liking, so to say, right, so it's more like okay, I just this like this. Unless you really convinced me that this is really a good thing. So it's kind of a certain level of skepticism, not believing the things for what they are. It's about criticizing, it's also about thinking about the appropriateness of advertising. So especially with integrated types of advertising, it's also important to have a certain feeling of Okay. How do I feel about this particular tactic? Is it okay that advertisers use these more implicit wastes to influence me? Is that appropriate for me or not? So yeah, so it includes glutes, all these kind of things. And then I do believe that it's also really important also as a part of advertising literacy, that it's a certain scale of using this general knowledge and these general critical attitudes that you can have to work advertising That you are able to activate those knowledge structures and also those attitudes when it's really necessary. So when you are really exposed to advertising, when you're actually exposed to it, and when you recognize it that you can also try to evaluate those advertising messages in light of the attitudes and the knowledge that you have about it. So that's, I call it advertising literacy performance. So it's really using your advertising literacy, instead of only having it. So you can see a large difference between for sure. Yeah, and   Jen  14:37 I wonder if you can talk us through the main stages that children go through as they're developing and sort of an adult level of understanding of advertising recognition, because I think this doesn't come at an early age and it doesn't come all at once, right?   Dr. Rozendaal  14:51 No, no, no, no, it definitely develops when children get older. So when you look at the literature, what it says about family Young children is that they are able to recognize clear forms of advertising. So for example, television commercials, children around the age of five, and recognize these commercials as being an ad, and I have a five year old son myself, and this year around Christmas, I really became aware of the fact that around the age of five, they start recognizing those advertisements on television only he also watches YouTube in there. It's a totally different story. But what's also interesting is that so he said, okay, Mommy, this is advertising. So I asked him, okay, so do you know what advertising is? And he said, No, it doesn't matter. It's just fun. So, what you can see here is that when children are younger, they are probably able to recognize those clear forms of advertising, but they are not yet able to understand the whole commercial intent behind it. The only thing is He could explain to me was that Yeah, so I know that all these things, I can put it on my wish list, right. And I can get it for Christmas. And I'm like, Okay, so that's, of course, one of the basic elements of advertising that is provide you with information of all the things that are in store. But that's just a basic understanding. And you can see it in the literature as well with those young children. And when they get older, you can see that their brain is developing, of course, so they're developing a certain theory of mind. And that's actually the ability to think from the perspective of someone else, and also did his theory of mind as different layers. But basically, it really means that when children get older, they are more and more able to understand that there are other people at ISIS in this respect, that might have this Front thoughts than they have, and that might have different intentions than they have. So first, they need to be able to understand these different perspectives before they are able to understand that there are advertisers that want to persuade them to sell products, and then also to make money. So you can see that around the age of eight children are well, better able to understand perspective, a different perspective and that they are also better able to understand the intentions of advertisers and all sorts of different persuasive tactics.   Jen  17:35 Okay, and then there's sort of another level that comes in at around age 13, isn't there?   Dr. Rozendaal  17:41 Yeah, well, and that also has to do quite a lot to do with critical thinking. So around the age of 12, or 13, children are much better able to think about abstract concepts. And that's of course, also highly important also to email. Wait advertising and also to develop a critical attitude towards it. And not only so when children are really young, they can say, just advertising is stupid and you don't? Well, you just do not believe what they're saying. But they're actually just repeating what their parents are telling them, and not really, really understanding why they should be skeptical, since that's also, of course, a pretty abstract thing to think about. So when they are older, they're better able of doing so. And then of course, also because they're just gaining more and more experience with advertising, and not only with the clear types, like television commercials, but also online types of advertising, integrated forms of advertising, since they are more experienced, they are also better able to grasp what's going on. Mm hmm.   Jen  18:50 Yeah. And so the majority of parents who are listening to this have preschoolers and a good chunk of them are less than five years...