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

I’m taking a hiatus from the show; in this episode I explain why and what you can do to help make sure it comes back strong in 2020!Here’s the form to complete if you’re interested in learning more about the yet-to-be-named pilot membership to support children’s interest-led learning at home: https://forms.gle/GGKgdwaLkEfNfMA27

Do you ever feel ‘lost’ in your parenting?  Like you’ve read all the books (and even listened to the podcast episodes!) and you’ve agreed with them in principle, but somehow nothing ever seems to change?   Your family feels directionless; you just muddle along having the same old fights with your partner about the same old things: Should you praise your child when they do what you ask, so they’ll do it again next time? Or punish them for disobeying you? Should you worry about (quality or quantity of) screen time? Does it matter if you and your partner have completely different parenting styles?   In this episode I interviewed Kathryn, and discussed: The cultural differences between living in the U.K. and Canada (saying “please!” and certain differences in directness of humor) How to begin to approach differences in opinion about parenting with your spouse in a way that doesn’t get their back up, but instead focuses on your (and their) values The value of interacting with parents who are a little ahead of you and who can give you advice, as well as parents with younger children so you can see how far you’ve come and offer some support to them How to align your daily interactions with your child with your overall values The importance of bringing fun and playfulness to your parenting in a way that feels relaxed to you (and the positive impact this can have on your child) How to problem solve with a child in a way that encourages them to bring their own solutions to the table   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.     Jump to highlights 01:39 Introducing the guest 07:25 Differences in parenting between the English and the Canadian 15:43 Particular areas that were attractive to Kathryn in terms of the focus of the group 23:48 Transformations that she experienced in her family once she joined the group 32:08 What might have happened if she hadn’t joined the group 36:03 Final thought of Kathryn  

This is the third episode in our series on parental relationships – and the lack thereof…  We started with episode 35, which was called “All Joy and No Fun,” where we learned how children can be one of the greatest joys of a parent’s life – but that all the daily chores and struggles can get on top of us and make parenting – both in terms of our relationship with our child and our spouse – something that isn’t necessarily much fun in the moment.  And if you missed that episode you might want to go back and check it out, because I walked you through a research-based idea I’ve been using to increase the amount of fun I have while I’m hanging out with my daughter, who was a toddler when I recorded that episode. Then we took a turn for the worse in episode 36 and looked at the impact of divorce on children’s development, and we learned that it can have some negative impacts for some children, although the majority are pretty resilient and do make it through a divorce OK.  For the last episode in the long-delayed conclusion to this mini-series we’re going to take a look at what happens after divorce – things like single parenting and remarriage and stepfamilies, that can also have large impacts on children’s lives.  We’ll spend a good chunk of the show looking at things that stepfamilies can do to be more successful.   Jump to highlights 01:01 Introduction of episode 02:15 The things we don’t understand well 06:37 30% of the children live with their unmarried parent 14:36 Impacts of remarriage on a child’s development 15:55 Lists of common areas where stepfather encounters problem after remarriage 17:21 What can we learn from the research 19:05 Definition of authoritative parenting 24:34 Models of blended family 35:44 2 different schools of thought 36:38 Dr. William Jeynes' conclusion of remarriage 38:38 Conclusion of the episode   References Braithwaite, D.O., Olson, L.N., Golish, T.D., Soukup, C., & Turman, P. 001). “Becoming a family”: Developmental processes represented in blended family discourse. Journal of Applied Communication Research 29(3), 221-247. Choi, J-K, & Pyun, H-S. (2014). Nonresident fathers’ financial support, informal instrumental support, mothers’ parenting, and child development in single-mother families with low income. Journal of Family Issues 35(4), 526-546. DOI: 10.1177/0192513X13478403 Coleman, M., & Ganong, L.H. (1997). Stepfamilies from the stepfamily’s perspective. Marriage & Family Review 26(1-2), 107-121. Fine, M.A., Coleman, M., & Ganong, L.H. (1998). Consistency in perceptions of the step-parent role among step-parents, parents and stepchildren. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 15(6), 810-828. Fine, M.A., & Kurdek, L.A. (1995). Relation between marital quality and (step)parent-child relationship quality for parents and stepparents in stepfamilies. Journal of Family Psychology 9(2), 216-223.  Furstenberg, Jr., F.F. (1988). Child care after divorce and remarriage. In E.M. Hetherington & J.D. Arasteh (Eds.), Impact of divorce, single parenting, and stepparenting on children. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Ganong, L.H., Coleman, M., & Jamison, T. (2011). Patterns of stepchild – stepparent relationship development. Journal of Marriage and Family 73(2), 396-413.  Hequembourg, A. (2004). Unscripted motherhood: Lesbian mothers negotiating incompletely institutionalized family relationships. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. 21(6), 739-762. DOI: 10.1177/0265407504047834 Hetherington, E.M. (1993). An overview of the Virginia longitudinal study of divorce and remarriage with a focus on early adolescence. Journal of Family Psychology 7(1), 39056.  Jackson, A.P., & Scheines, R. (2005). Single mothers’ self-efficacy, parenting in the home environment, and children’s development in a two-wave study. Social Work Research 29(1), 7-20.  Jeyes, W.H. (2006). The impact of parental remarriage on children. Marriage & Family Review 40(4), 75-102. Kumar, K. (2017). The blended family life cycle. Journal of Divorce & Remarriage 58(2), 110-125. Livingston, G. (2014, December 22). Fewer than half of U.S. kids today live in a ‘traditional’ family. Pew Research Center. Retrieved from: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/22/less-than-half-of-u-s-kids-today-live-in-a-traditional-family/ Livingston, G. (2014, November 14). Four-in-ten couples are saying “I Do,” again: Growing number of adults have remarried. Pew Research Center. Retrieved from: http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/11/14/four-in-ten-couples-are-saying-i-do-again/ Lucas, N., Nicholson, J.M., & Erban, B. (2013). Child mental health after parental separation: The impact of resident/nonresident parenting, parent mental health, conflict and socioeconomics. Journal of Family Studies 19(1), 53-69. DOI: 10.5172/jfs.2013.19.1.53 Maccoby, E.E., Buchanan, C.M., Mnookin, R.H., & Dornbush, S.M. (1993). Postdivorce roles of mothers and fathers in the lives of their children. Journal of Family Psychology 7(1), 24-38. Papernow, P.L. (1993). Becoming a stepfamily: Patterns of development in remarried families. Cleveland, OH: Gestalt Press. Papenow, P.L. (2017). Blended family. In J.L. Lebow et al. (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Couple and Family Therapy. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation (2015). Poverty Rate by Race/Ethnicity: Timeframe: 2015. Retrieved from: http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/poverty-rate-by-raceethnicity/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D Twaite, J.A., Silitsky, D., & Luchow, A.K. (1988). Children of divorce: Adjustment, parental conflict, custody, remarriage, and recommendations for clinicians. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Weaver, S.E., & Coleman, M. (2010). Caught in the middle: Mothers in stepfamilies. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 27(3), 305-326. DOI: 10.1177/0265407510361729  

I can hardly believe we made it to this point: the 100th episode of the Your Parenting Mojo podcast! Join me for a special celebration of the show, featuring questions (from you!) and answers (from me!), clips of some of my favorite episodes, some fun at NPR interviewer Terry Gross’ expense, the occasional Monty Python reference, a story about how Carys got her name that you won’t want to miss.

Is your child Highly Sensitive?  Does it sometimes feel as though you don’t understand them, and struggle to support them in the ways it seems they need to be supported?  Or does your child experience and process things more deeply than other children, but this is the first time you’re hearing about High Sensitivity? In this episode Dr. Michael Pluess helps us to understand how we can know whether our child is highly sensitive, and how to parent these children effectively so they can reach their full potential.   References Aron, E. N., Aron, A., & Jagiellowicz, J. (2012). Sensory processing sensitivity: A review in the light of the evolution of biological responsivity. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 16, 262–282. Aron, E. N., Aron, A., & Davies, K. M. (2005). Adult shyness: the interaction of temperamental sensitivity and an adverse childhood environment. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 31, 181-197. Aron, E.N. (2002). The highly sensitive child: Helping our children thrive when the world overwhelms them. New York, NY: Harmony. Aron, E. N., & Aron, A. (1997). Sensory-processing sensitivity and its relation to introversion and emotionality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73, 345-368. Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., & van IJzendoorn, M. H. (2011). Differential susceptibility to rearing environment depending on dopamine-related genes: New evidence and a meta-analysis. Development and Psychopathology, 23, 39–52. Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., Van IJzendoorn, M. H., Pijlman, F. T., Mesman, J., & Juffer, F. (2008). Experimental evidence for differential susceptibility: dopamine D4 receptor polymorphism (DRD4 VNTR) moderates intervention effects on toddlers' externalizing behavior in a randomized controlled trial. Developmental Psychology, 44, 293-300. Belsky, J., & Puess, M. (2013). Beyond risk, resilience, and dysregulation: Phenotypic plasticity and human development. Development and Psychopathology 25, 1243-1261. Belsky, J., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., & Van IJzendoorn, M. H. (2007). For better and for worse: Differential Susceptibility to environmental influences. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16, 300-304. Bouvette-Turcot, A-A., Pluess, M., Bernier, A., Pennestri, M-H., Levitan, R., Skolowski, M.B., Kennedy, J.L., Minde, K., Steiner, M., Pokhvisneva, I., Meaney, M.J., & Gaudreau, H. (2015). Effects of genotype and sleep on temperament. Pediatrics 136(4), e914-e921. Pluess, M. (2015). Vantage sensitivity: Environmental sensitivity to positive experiences as a function of genetic differences. Journal of Personality 85(1), 38-50. Pluess, M. (2015). Individual differences in environmental sensitivity. Child Development Perspectives 9(3), 138-143. Pluess, M., & Boniwell, I. (2015). Sensory processing sensitivity predicts treatment response to a school-based depression prevention program Evidence of Vantage Sensitivity. Personality and Individual Differences 82, 40-45. Pluess, M., & Belsky, J. (2013). Vantage sensitivity: Individual differences in response to positive experiences. Psychological Bulletin 139(4), 901-916. Pluess, M., & Belsky, J. (2011). Differential susceptibility to maternal sensitivity. Maternal Sensitivity: A critical review for practitioners, 95-107. Retrieved from http://philosonic.com/michaelpluess_construction/Files/PluessBelsky_2010_Differential%20Susceptibility%20to%20Maternal%20Sensitivity.pdf Pluess, M. & Belsky, J. (2010). Differential susceptibility to parenting and quality child care. Developmental Psychology 46(2), 379-390.  

A few months ago a listener in my own home town reached out because a potentially incendiary device had been found on the elementary school property, and many parents were demanding disaster drill training in response.  The listener wanted to know whether there is any research on whether these drills are actually effective in preparing children for these situations, and whether it’s possible that they might actually cause psychological damage. In this episode we review the (scant) evidence available on drills themselves, and also take a broader look at the kinds of measures used in schools in the name of keeping our children safe – but which may actually have the opposite from intended effect. Read Full Transcript Jen 01:21 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We have another serious topic to cover today and it's probably one that you don't want to listen to with children around. I received a question from listener Selena about 6 months ago saying that an incendiary device had been discovered on the grounds of the public school that my daughter would actually going to be attend if we weren't going to homeschool. And that some of the parents who were very worried and were demanding video surveillance and disaster preparedness drills and she wants to know whether there was any research available about the impacts of drills to prepare children for things like active shooters. And I wanted to know are these drills effective? And then when I started researching this issue, I went down a complete rabbit hole related to the effectiveness of other kinds of school security measures as well as bullying, as a potential cause of violence in schools. Jen 02:08 And the kind of relational aggression that girls particularly to practice as well. So expect episodes on those topics soon in the coming months. But here to kick us off today on this mini series is Dr. Ben Fisher. He's Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at University of Louisville. Dr. Fisher’s research focuses on the intersection of education and criminal justice, but particular focus on school safety, security and discipline. He approaches this research from an interdisciplinary perspective with a focus on inequality that is grounded in his Ph.D. in community research and action from Vanderbilt University, which prepared him to work on this view from a social justice orientation. Welcome Dr. Fisher. Dr. Fisher 02:46 Thank you. Glad to be here. Jen 02:47 And so before we get going with our conversation today, I do want to just take a minute and acknowledge that we're recording this in the week after a gunman killed 22 people in Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and then another gunman killed 9 people outside a bar in Dayton, Ohio. So, it feels very raw to me to be discussing this today. We're going to talk today about the likelihood that a child will be killed in a school shooting. And despite the impression that we might get from the endless news cycles that keep these kinds of incidents top of mind when they happen, our chances of dying from many other causes are far, far greater than dying during a mass murder. But despite this, I do believe there are too many guns in our society and not enough control over who has access to them and what they do once they have them. Jen 03:30 And I also think that these kinds of events are not the ultimate problems we need to deal with. Yes, we need to make it much more difficult to access guns. So, people who feel disaffected can't harm large numbers of people very easily and instituting tighter gun control in a country where so much of the political power is tied to the money provided by the gun lobby currently seems like a really insurmountable challenge. But in my mind, the far greater challenges, the one facing our families and schools where we need to address what is leading children and later adults to feel so disconnected from their families and communities, but the best tool they have to express their emotions is to kill people. So with that said, let's talk about some ways we might be able to do this. Okay. So let's start by putting this topic in context because I think many parents, myself included before I started this research, are probably under the impression that there's kind of an epidemic of violence and particularly violence perpetrated by people with guns in schools. Dr. Fisher, can you help us understand whether that is in fact the case? Dr. Fisher 04:26 Well, we certainly do have a problem with violence in our country as we've seen in very clear fashion this past week. However, the statistics also indicate that our countries become safer and safer over the past two decades in terms of crime and victimization rights. Schools in particular have not been as safe as they are in the past 20 years in terms of rates of all sorts of crime and violence in schools. So although violence certainly does continue to be a problem, particularly gun violence and many of its forms compared to where we were two decades ago, things are going fairly well. Jen 05:02 Yeah, I was really surprised by that. It seemed as though there was sort of a high watermark around 1992 and 1993 where the rate of homicide risk was much higher than it has been in the more recent years, I think with the exception of the year of the Sandy Hook shooting. And why do you think that is? Dr. Fisher 05:21 Well, it's been across the board with all types of crime and violence. It's not just gun violence, although it does include that. Part of that is most certainly regression to the mean where when stuffs gets really bad, it is going to get better on average. When stuffs going really well, it's going to get worse on average. So that's gotta be part of it in my mind. And I'm a little less familiar with sort of the broader sociological explanations around long-term reductions in crime, but we've seen parallel trends in community policing strategies where officers are more focused on building relationships with community members instead of going out and cracking skulls, only I say that and just mostly, but they're less concerned about, you know, just finding and responding to crime. There's a lot more of a proactive approach. So, there's that law enforcement perspective on it, but that's not too much of my area of expertise. So, I don't want to step away like too much here. Jen 06:19 No worries. A couple of the stats that stuck out to me as I was researching that was the deaths by different causes over that period. And bicycle accident was one of the highest ones at 2,400 and this is deaths of children by various causes, a fire accident of some kind 1900 and change, accidental fall around 1700, lightning strikes 251 and then school shootings 113 children. And then just to put that number in context, only about half a percent of the 24,000 children who were murdered in that period between 1999 and 2013 were killed at school. So I think there is still a lot of violence in our society and there are definitely children who are meeting an end way before their time is due, but only a tiny fraction of those are actually happening in school. I was I guess maybe I just hadn't thought about it, but those isolated incidents tend not to get the same coverage that the large scale incidents at school have. I think maybe part of it. Dr. Fisher 07:20 Yeah, that's right. Statistically speaking, schools are among the safest place for children and youth to be compared to other homes, neighborhoods, or almost anywhere else. Unfortunately, a lot of the media coverage around gun violence that occurs in schools, that's sort of gripped the public imagination and some degree, rightfully so because it's a sort of an absolute affront to the conscience to see the sort of gun violence happen in schools regardless of how common or uncommon it is. But in another sense there's been this sort of undue fear that has been stoked to where there's this idea that schools are dangerous places that need to be locked down and targets that need to be hardened in certain ways so that strangers or students with guns and ill-intentions can't do violence there. Jen 08:12 Yeah, I think parental fears are really key issue and some research that I saw in that said that somewhere between 25% and 30% of parents sort of have this sort of like a background level of fear about the researchers quiz them on their oldest child’s safety while in school in most years. And right after Columbine that spiked up to about 55% and then I guess there was another incident in Santee, which I think is in Florida, that was led to a spike in 45% and then only up to 33% right after Sandy Hook. So I wonder if people were sort of becoming a little bit immune to it. You know, the spikes were not quite so high each time above that baseline level, but still that's a very, I mean a third of parents almost are between a quarter and a third of parents have some kind of fear about their child's safety in school. Dr. Fisher 08:57 What I think was interesting is that a parallel research that has been conducted with students finds almost no effect of these shootings. So, I've conducted research where we measured students' levels of fear and feelings of safety at school and Sandy Hook happened to occur right in the middle of our data collection. So, we could compare those students right before or right after and there are similar research done by Lynn Addington around the Columbine shooting in 1999. And both studies found statistically significant effects, but ones that were so small as to actually be practically zero. So, essentially no changes in students' perceptions of safety or fear. So, this fear seems to be taking hold mostly in our adults and less so in our students. Jen 09:47 Do you have any sense as to why that is? Is it because the adults are watching these news cycles and that they're trying to protect the children from it and so the children aren't exposed to as much information or what's your sense on that? Dr. Fisher 09:59 I don't know. I don't have a strong sense of that. I can tell you that when I'm confronting potential danger, I'm usually more worried about the people I'm with than I am about my own safety. So it may be that sort of a factor, you know, parents love very few people in the world more than their own children and then maybe they just maybe sensitized to that. Jen 10:19 Yeah. Okay. And so as we heard about at the beginning of the episode is often parents who will then call for more security at schools, particularly after an incident at another school as sort of prompted their fears. And so I want to spend some time talking about what kinds of security are now in place in schools. So maybe we could walk through some of these and just talk about what they are and what kind of effects they have. So, the first one is the Gun-Free Schools Act that was enacted in 1994 and I think it calls for States to enact laws requiring that a student who brings a firearm or who possesses a firearm at school to be expelled for a period of not less than one year. How effective has that been? What do you know about that particular act? Dr. Fisher 11:01 Yeah, that act is credited largely with bringing in sort of this era of zero tolerance discipline into schools. And so it began with, as you mentioned, guns in schools and it quickly expanded to drugs as well. And then schools have followed that approach to extend it to other things such as fighting, even repeated offenses of more minor actions. So, when folks talk about zero tolerance, they sometimes talk about specific policies, like if you bring a gun to school, you're out. But a lot of researchers are also talking about this culture of zero tolerance where disciplinary strategies are bound up in the use of school security measures that are used to monitor and surveil students. And just sort of this sense that schools, yes are places of education, but also places of control. So critical scholars who look back to the Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994 largely point to that as legislation that has ushered in that era. Jen 12:04 Yeah, and I think on the face of it, it seems like a really valid thing to do. You know, yeah, no kid should have a gun in school. No child should have a knife in a school. Yes, they should be sort of things that are non-negotiable. But I think, 75% of schools now have these policies, but I read in an American Psychological Association report that found there is little evidence that this act is a deterrent firstly for people who are planning to do these kinds of things, they're going to bring it to school anyway. They don't increase school safety. They're disproportionately applied to students of non-dominant cultures. And you hear all the time in the news about, you know, some person who there was a kid who picked up her mom's lunchbox and her mom had a paring knife in her lunchbox so that she could cut an apple up at her work. And so the child finds it immediately, hands it in and gets kicked out of school. So once you look below the surface, how effective do you think this zero tolerance policies are? Are there instead of intended goal of reducing violence? Dr. Fisher 12:58 Well, they're not effective and I think some of us would even argue that their intention wasn't as much to prevent violence as it was to exert control. So, from a violence prevention perspective, they have been ineffective. From a control perspective, they've been highly effective. As you mentioned, there's a high degree of disproportionality in who is being excluded from our schools, this largely students of color, students with disabilities. In that sense, this sort of zero tolerance culture has reinforced ideas of what is considered normal. What is the status quo has maintained a lot of those cultural paradigms. Jen 13:39 Yeah. Okay. So let's talk about some of those more control and surveillance types of activities. I think 64% of public schools used cameras and this data is kind of out of date in the 2011-2012 school year. Is that increasing and what trends are you seeing around the use of cameras in schools? Dr. Fisher 13:56 Yeah, that's been to my knowledge, one of the largest increases over the past decade or so to where the vast majority of schools now use security cameras. I assume this is largely driven by sort of the advent of new technology that seems to be happening on a weekly, monthly basis. And cameras are becoming cheaper and cheaper. I just completed a study earlier this year with two of my graduate students where we examined a set of 850 schools that implemented cameras between time one and time two and what time one and time two varied a little bit, but it was all within the 2000. So, within that 850 schools, some implemented cameras, some didn't. Then we compared, you know, was there a reduction in crime when you implement cameras? Did it make a difference for violent crime, for property crime, for more routine things like a bullying or gang activities in the school? And across outcome after outcome we saw zero effect, zero effect, zero effect. Jen 15:01 Wow. Dr. Fisher 15:02 Even though cameras are becoming more and more prevalent, statistically we're not seeing any improvement in crime outcomes, at least in the data that we used. Jen: 15:11 Okay. So I want to sort of tease that out a little bit. I'm wondering, okay, so maybe there's this baseline level of crime and then cameras are implemented in the school. Is it possible that some children are deterred from committing crimes while other children are still committing them, but they're more likely to get caught? And so this sort of, you know, decrease in number but increase in number of people getting caught, are they canceling each other out and having that zero effect or do you think there’s something else going on? Dr. Fisher 15:38 Oh, that's certainly possible. I can't rule that out. I also wonder and speculate if young people today are so desensitized to being on camera with having one or two cameras on each of our cell phones that we use having so many in public spaces. I wonder if there's just not the deterrent effect that there may have been in earlier decades. Jen: 15:59 Oh, interesting. Yeah. It'd be interesting to compare that with an English dataset because you're on camera everywhere, everywhere you go in England. But that would be really interesting. Dr. Fisher 16:09 Fascinating. Jen 16:10 Yeah. So, I know that a lot of your researches focused on school security personnel and so there's a variety of forms these can take. There can be security guards, there can be actual police, there can be what's called school resource officers, which I think are police who are kind of deputized to the school. Can you talk a little bit about what your researchers found on those? Dr. Fisher 16:30 Sure. Yeah, so I think to begin there are maybe some useful working definitions that we'll give. And I will say that the definitions that I use differ slightly from the ones that other researchers use, which differ slightly from ones that practitioners and people in schools use, which differ slightly from ones that the public uses. So, I'll sort of define the terms as I'm speaking about them and folks can chime in and tell me I'm wrong afterwards. So, yeah, I see a sort of three types of security personnel. One being security guards who are not part of a police force, they are not sworn officers, they don't have arrest powers, but they're there to sort of address behavior issues in school to keep a general sense of order. There's police officers who are not SROs, who are not School Resource Officers where they do have arrest powers. Dr. Fisher 17:23 Typically, will carry a firearm. They’re assigned to a school maybe on a full time, maybe on a part time basis, but they don't have any sort of special training around working in schools or working with children and youth. Then finally School Resource Officers are a subset of police officers. So it's another form of school-based law enforcement. But when people talk about SROs, they typically talk about them in a context of folks who have had some sort of training around say, child and adolescent development or understanding the school system or things like that. On the ground, it’s not always the case that they have those sorts of trainings, but when people talk about them as a general idea. So most of the research that I have been involved in over the past two or three years has been with school resource officers. Dr. Fisher 18:10 I've been partnering with two different school districts, one in a very urban area, one in a rural and suburban area. And I've done interviews with around 75 officers. And I've looked at some administrative data in the suburban district, talked with a variety of other stakeholders, teachers, students, parents. One of the major themes that we've found has been that context really matters in schools. So the context, both in terms of the school context, but also the neighborhood and community really shapes what SROs do, how they understand their jobs and what effects they have. How other folks perceive them. Jen 18:49 Okay. And so I know that the incidents of having SROs in schools really increased dramatically after Columbine because the Federal Government made $475 million in grant money available to hire and train SROs despite any lack of empirical evidence of their effectiveness. So, I wonder if we can talk through what your research and the research of others has found about things like links between the use of SROs and other...

Recently a listener posted a question in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group asking about research related to children who are assigned to one gender at birth, but later realize that this assigned gender doesn’t match the gender they experience.   Another listener recommended Dr. Diane Ehrensaft’s book The Gender-Creative Child, and we are fortunate that Dr. Ehrensaft quickly agreed to speak. Listener Elizabeth co-interviews with me as we learn how to truly listen to our children when they tell us about their gender, and what we can do to help them navigate a world full of people who may know very little about – and even fear – children whose gender does not conform to expectations.   While we didn’t get a chance to discuss it (too many other topics to cover!), you might also be interested to learn about the “They-by” movement, which advocates for allowing children to choose their own gender when they feel the time is right, rather than the parents assigning a gender at birth based on the child’s genetalia.   Here are some especially recommended resources:   Human Rights Campaign’s Guide on supporting transgender children: https://assets2.hrc.org/files/documents/SupportingCaringforTransChildren.pdf?_ga=2.156922811.1499059672.1559845994-1938179427.1559845994   Recommended books for children – for ALL children, not just those actively exploring their gender identity (note: these are affiliate links): 10,000 Dresses The Adventures of Tulip, Birthday Wish Fairy My Princess Boy The Paperbag Princess Mama, Mommy, and Me Daddy, Papa, and Me Who Are You? The Kid’s Guide to Gender Identity I am Jazz Julian is a Mermaid Introducing Teddy   Read Full Transcript Jen: 00:01:21 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today, we're going to talk about a topic that originated from a question in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. Now, sometimes I have questions on my list for a long time, but other times when someone expresses an interest in a topic, they also point me toward a place to start the research, which really does speed things up and that's actually what happened with this episode. So, listener Elizabeth asked if I'd done an episode on children's gender identity and some other listeners chimed in with potential resources, one of which was Dr. Diane Ehrensaft’s book, The Gender Creative Child. And after I read the book, I knew that Dr. Diane Ehrensaft was the right person to talk to about this topic. So, she's here with us today. Dr. Ehrensaft is a Developmental and Clinical Psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Director of Mental Health and founding member of the Child and Adolescent Gender Center, a partnership between the University of California, San Francisco and community agencies to provide comprehensive into disciplinary services and advocacy to gender conforming and transgender children and youth and their families. She's an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco and the chief psychologist at the UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital Child and Adolescent Gender Center Clinic. Her research and writing focuses on the areas of child development, gender, gender nonconforming and transgender children and youth parenting, parent-child relationships and LGBTQI families. She also serves on the board of Gender Spectrum and National Organization offering educational training and advocacy services to promote gender acceptance for youth of all genders. Welcome Dr. Ehrensaft. Dr. Ehrensaft: 00:02:52 Thank you so much for having me. Jen: 00:02:54 So, to help us understand more about the research on this topic as well as what to do with it practically in our real lives as parents, listener Elizabeth is here as well. Her child, John was assigned a male gender at birth. John is now 4 and has been telling his parents pretty insistently for a while now that he is a girl, even though he still likes to use the pronouns he, him and his as well as the name his parents gave him at birth. Welcome Elizabeth. Elizabeth: 00:03:18 Thank you. I am glad to be here as well. Jen: 00:03:20 And so I do want to say briefly before we get started that even if your child seems fairly convinced that the gender they were assigned at birth is the one they want to express, that you might want to listen to this episode anyway because I'd say there's a reasonable chance that somebody in your child's class is probably somehow exploring their gender identity. And so knowing the information we're gonna discuss today will help both you and your child be a better friend and ally. So, let's start off with some terminology please, Dr. Ehrensaft because I didn't know a lot about this topic before I started researching it. And even now I find I have to constantly revisit the definitions to remember what's what. So, can you kind of give us a crash course in some of the terminology we’ll be using today, please? Dr. Ehrensaft: 00:04:00 Absolutely. So, we start out with what we call the sex designated at birth and the sex designated at birth is usually what you will see on a birth certificate and it's typically one or the other F or M and that essentially is based primarily on your chromosomes, whether you have XX or XY chromosomes. And it's usually determined by whoever delivered the baby, looking between the baby's legs and seeing what genitalia up here and then declaring the sex of the baby. It's often declared before birth these days in a sonogram, so that you can know early in your child's gestation what people think the sex of your baby's going to be. So it's just physical. Gender is the next thing. And that's very different than sex. We actually don't assign a gender at birth. We assign a sex at birth and that's the physical part. Dr. Ehrensaft: 00:04:58 Then the world around the baby comes in to match that sex with the gender. And the gender is really how we live out being male, female or other in the world and it's based both on inside and outside. And certainly has a very strong social component, looks really different from one culture to another, but I don't know any culture in the world that does not use some organization around gender, not necessarily into boxes. And when we understand gender, let’s divide that up. There's a gender identity and that is who I know myself to be as male, female or other. It's just an inner sense of being. Your gender expressions have more to do with how you do gender. For a little kid that might be the clothes they wear, the toys they play with, the kids they want to play with, the activities that they want to do, how they move and so forth. Dr. Ehrensaft: 00:06:00 And sometimes we lump the two together and it's really important to keep them separate. And those two things, again, needs to be kept separate from our sexual identities. And we often lump all three together, gender identity, gender expressions and sexual identity or orientation. They are absolutely different. Gender is one path, sexuality is another, then they cross, but really your sexuality is who you desire, who you are attracted to, who you want to be with. And it might be someone who is the same gender as you, someone who's opposite or different gender than you. All these things come in quite different combinations, which is the beauty of it all. Jen: 00:06:44 Okay. Already having a hard time keeping it straight in my head. So to summarize, I guess gender identity and expression is kind of about who you are. Is that a good way of thinking about it? And sexual identity and expression is about who you desire? Dr. Ehrensaft: 00:06:59 Mm-hmm. Jen: 00:07:00 Okay. Okay, super. That helps then. And so then we start talking about things like cisgender, gender-expansive. Can you talk a little bit about those? Dr. Ehrensaft: 00:07:08 Yes. The cisgender people in the world are the people who are experiencing the gender they lived at, usually starting out with who their parents assumed them to be based on their sex. And so their gender is the same and matches the sex designated to them at birth. So, those are our cisgender people. And then our transgender or gender-expansive people, people who are saying, I have a different match. It's not based in our culture, the gender binary boy, girl, man, woman. So it might be, for example, a little person who says, you all have it wrong. You think I'm a boy, but I am a girl, I am a girl with a penis. I'm an XY girl. So, transgender means a cross that your gender does not match the sex designated to you at birth and those are transgender children. Dr. Ehrensaft: 00:08:14 Gender-expansive children are also children who say, look, it's not an exact fit for me, so we're going to have to expand it some because it's not totally working for me. They may have a gender identity that's a good match for the sex designated at birth. So, maybe they were born, somebody said, oh, you have a boy. And they say, yeah, I'm a boy, but I don't like the rules for boy. And I like dresses. I like to play the Mommy in all my role play activities, but I am a boy and that’s the way I like to do. So, those would be different combinations that wouldn't be your fit under the cisgender umbrella. Jen: 00:08:59 Okay, that's really helpful. And so in the reading that I was doing about this, I think I learned that there's really no inherent problem with not feeling like the gender you were assigned at birth or I guess would it be more correct to say the sex you’re assigned at birth? Dr. Ehrensaft: 00:09:14 I like to use the sex assigned at birth. Jen: 00:09:15 Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. So the sex you are assigned at birth, but we also have a diagnosable disorder related to this, right? Can you talk about that nuance, please? Dr. Ehrensaft: 00:09:26 There is a history of diagnosis for gender for children and it actually began when the diagnosis of homosexuality was taken out of the American DSM (Diagnostic Statistical Manual). And what took its place when homosexuality was removed from the books in the 1970s was a new diagnosis for gender. So, we now have gender identity disorder to basically pinpoint those people who did not feel cisgender as I just described it. And that diagnosis remained on the books for a long time. And then it was changed recently to gender dysphoria, which is a step up from gender identity disorder because it really just designates those people now who feel distress about their designated sex at birth, not being a good match for the gender they know themselves to be. So it's a step up, but from my perspective it's not good enough because there's still places that under the category of a mental disorder or a mental problem and it pathologizes what I call gender infinity, all different kinds of gender modalities, the rainbow of gender. Dr. Ehrensaft: 00:10:52 So, it is a controversial issue in the field right now. And I will disclose that I am a proponent of, particularly with children, removing the diagnosis from any mental health manual because the intent right now is to depathologize gender and say it's the beauty of humanity to have such a wide variation of gender and all its possibilities. And there is nothing that is unusual or mentally discordant about that. And I would like to give a new diagnosis and I call that social gender dysphoria. It’s the society that needs to be treated, not the child. Jen: 00:11:41 Yeah. And I imagine health insurance programs wouldn't pay for that, isn't it? But yeah, that was sort of where I was thinking on this was it seems to me that the dysphoria, which is sort of the discomfort, is arising from the lack of support that the child feels may be from their parents, may be from society and not from these sort of feelings of not feeling an alignment between their sex and gender. Dr. Ehrensaft: 00:12:04 I think that's absolutely correct. I will say that with all the support in the world, we still have some kids who feel uncomfortable about the poor body match for themselves. And I do think that this is exacerbated by continuing to say boys have penises, girls have vaginas, rather, there are penis-embodied people and vagina-embodied people and most vagina-embodied people identify as girls, but some are boys, etc., etc. So, I think we always will need to pay attention to people who would like to be able to bring their body in better alignment with the gender they know themselves to be. But we might want to get rid of the word dysphoria for that and just call it discordance. Jen: 00:12:59 Yeah. And so just kind of playing on that for a few minutes, I have a bit of a long sort of statement/question before we start getting into the super practical stuff and pulling Elizabeth in for that. So, we talked about how the diagnostic and statistical manual does list this gender dysphoria as a pathological condition and in the previous 4th edition of the DSM, the diagnosis was gender identity disorder in children abbreviated to GIDC. And so the shift is that in the 4th edition it was the cross-gender identification itself that was the problem. Whereas now it's discomfort without identification is the problem. And so I just want to tip my hat to Dr. Jake Pyne, who is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Guelph for putting some things into words that were kind of swirling around in my mind and I couldn't quite figure out. Jen: 00:13:44 And so Dr. Pyne notes that Dr. Ken Zucker, who was a big proponent of this GIDC diagnosis defends it based on “expert consensus”. So in other words, if a bunch of experts think that something is an illness, then it's an illness. And the threat of social ostracism is cited as sufficient rationale for treatment. And Dr. Zucker said that children often misclassify their own gender and he believes a child who disagrees with a clinician is inherently wrong. And it isn't society's phobia of gender variant people, but rather the active being gender variant itself that causes distress in children. And this diagnosis is the result of poor parenting. It's up to the clinician to save the child from their inevitable fate as a social outcast and remake the child into a normal person. And so this shows up in places like the DSM, which has this unstated but nevertheless powerful view of what normal is, which is White and heterosexual and male. Jen: 00:14:38 And so it's kind of unfortunate that it's the psychologists who carry a lot of the weight of responsibility for the way that gender variant people have been persecuted since it’s their theories that legitimize the actions taken by people like teachers and social workers who control what a child does as well as parents who are taught to surveil their children and administer this humiliation and a desire for success in normalcy. And while the three of us on the call today are all White, I also want to acknowledge the Black and Brown youths who face an incredibly potent combination of threats. There was one researcher whose work I read said that I quote “I always marvel at the ways in which non-White children survive a White supremacist US culture that prays on them. I'm equally in awe of the ways in which queer children navigate a homophobic public sphere that would rather they did not exist. The psychic survival of children who are both queer and racially identified as non-White is nothing short of staggering.” Jen: 00:15:32 And so Dr. Ehrensaft, I know you were co-interviewed with Dr. Zucker for an NPR show in 2008 where you acknowledged that his approach to treating GIDC was still the most prevalent one, but his clinic has since been closed down after it emerged the children he treated were not experiencing positive outcomes. And your model of embracing gender variance is becoming much more normalized. So, I'm sorry to put you on the spot here, but I wonder if you could speak just briefly to the way in which gender variance has been kind of problematized over the years. And we as a society have tried to make gender-variant people fit into our norms rather than adapting our norms to fit this huge variation in the human experience. Dr. Ehrensaft: 00:16:12 So, I want to start out by having my field be accountable and that is the field of psychology, mental health, gender studies, and we are the best of the worlds and the worst of worlds. And some of the so-called experts who based the shaping of a diagnosis on research should be humbled enough now to say they were wrong. The research was flawed and history is proving them wrong and I would say going back to the interview on NPR in 2008, at that time I remember being put on the spot around the question about whose model is more prevalent and I had to be honest and I think I gave a nervous laugh and said, oh, Ken’s. If you ask me now in 2019 and not just because his particular clinic has been closed, but because what has happened in this last decade, I will tell you without a doubt that our model which is the gender affirmative model is the ascendant model of care throughout the world right now and I'm very happy to be able to say that because I think we are repairing what did great damage to gender-expansive people, particularly children throughout history and continues to damage children every time someone tries to employ reparative or conversion therapy with the child to make them conform to what society wants them to be. Dr. Ehrensaft: 00:17:42 The challenge to that that we are offering is to basically enhance these kids resilience and the adults around them and the Trans Community and also to both educate and increase the gender literacy in the world around them because it's the support of others and their own resilience, persistence and gender creativity that's going to make such a better world for everybody. As you said in the introduction, this is not just about children who are gender-expansive. This is about any child who has a gender and every child in our culture has a gender and the acceptance in the room at the table for everybody as not just being but it is dividing will hopefully challenge the kind of intersectionality of oppression that you mentioned before that can happen no matter what it is that creates you as a category of being other than what someone else said was normative. Jen: 00:18:50 Yeah, and thank you for addressing that. And I'm wondering what happens to a child if we don't permit them to live as the gender that they perceive themselves to be? Dr. Ehrensaft: 00:19:01 The data coming in is simple, elegant and common sense....

This is another of those topics I really wish I didn’t have to do. In this interview with Dr. Jennie Noll of Pennsylvania State University, we discuss the impacts that sexual abuse can have on a child (even many years after the event itself!), and we talk extensively about what parents can do to prevent abuse from happening in the first place. If you want to be sure to remember this info, there’s a FREE one-page cheat sheet of the 5 Key Steps Parents Can Take to Prevent Sexual Abuse available here: Get the FREE Guide!   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"]   Jen: 01:26 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We have a pretty serious topic to cover today and it's what I've been thinking about for a long time now. In 2016 the USA gymnastics sexual assault scandal broke and we learned that Dr. Larry Nassar had been sexually assaulting gymnast for years as he claimed to be providing them legitimate medical treatment. Now obviously there were failings at so many levels here. This was reported and ignored and covered up at many levels. But one thing that stuck in the back of my mind was an interview with gymnast Aly Raisman where she said she really thought this was what medical treatment was like and I want to be 100% clear that I'm not blaming Raisman or any other gymnast who had this awful experience, but I just couldn't get my head around how and why she didn't know she was being sexually abused.   Jen: 02:11 I realized that it's at least partly because we live in a culture where we don't talk about this. We don't teach children to watch for warning signs and we don't look out for them ourselves as parents or we pretend we don't see them. We just stick our head in the sand. So today's episode is probably not one you want to listen to with children around because we're going to be very explicit and discussing sexual abuse and how to prevent it. I also want to give a shout out to listener Christine who helped me to think through some great questions to ask my guest today. I spent a really long time looking for someone to talk with us about this and finally found the right person. Dr. Jennie Noll is Professor of Human Development and Family Studies and Director of the Child Maltreatment Solutions Network at Penn State University.   Jen: 02:52 She earned her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology and Statistical Methodology from the University of Southern California. The reason I’m so interested to talk with her about this topic is because she has active research projects on two topics that are very important to us, the long-term health outcomes for victims of child sexual abuse and programs for the prevention of that abuse. Welcome Dr. Noll.   Dr. Noll: 03:13 Thank you very much for the opportunity.   Jen: 03:16 So before we get started, I actually also want to mention that I took the training that Dr. Noll studies and it's called Stewards of Children and it's published by an organization called Darkness to Light. I've created a free one page guide to preventing sexual abuse that you can download from this episode's page at YourParentingMojo.com/SexualAbuse. So we're going to talk a lot more about the Stewards of Children program today I imagine. But I wonder if we can get started by looking at the mental health or the general health actually impacts of sexual abuse because I was really surprised to find out how many of these there are. Can you walk us through these and do we have any indication of how likely they are to occur in a child who is chronically abused for years versus one who experiences abuse that it's discovered or reported fairly quickly.   Dr. Noll: 03:58 Yeah, very good. So what we've understood and this has been my work for the last 30 years, what we've understood really well as sort of the mental health and emotional health consequences of abuse. We have pretty good trauma informed treatments for mental health. These are things like persisting posttraumatic stress disorder, other anxiety disorders, depression, other sorts of attachment related disorders in terms of not being able to attach to a partner, relationship difficulties, and substance abuse. These kinds of things that we normally think about as mental health or emotional health. But what we're learning I think in the last decade is something that surprised a lot of us and that is just how we see sort of physical health consequences that we didn't really anticipate when we were just studying mental and emotional health and these are things like physical health disorders, these are heart attacks, obesity, strokes, stress-related diseases like inflammation, interferences with disease processes. Dr. Noll: 05:04 These are the kinds of things that we see in chronically stressed populations like PTSD Vietnam vets, people who have endured long and chronic stressors in their lives early on. And we think about this as how does stress sort of get under the skin and impact physiology? And we're talking about not just disease process but brain development, right? Other sorts of major organs, systems, the stress response system. So after studying survivors, which I have done for over 30 years and across generations, we're really starting to see a strong causal influence of early sexual abuse on long-term health outcomes because of the early and chronic exposure to stress and the stress hormone cortisol and other assaults on the stress response system.   Jen: 05:57 Wow, that's incredible. So that completely makes sense from the sort of chronically abused perspective, if the stress is ongoing for a really long period of time. Do you see similar effects in people who have this experience maybe once or twice and it's discovered fairly quickly?   Dr. Noll: 06:13 Yeah, that's a great question. It has two parts to the answer and my answer would be it depends. It sort of depends on what outcome you're looking at. For example, when we look at things like, sexual development, promiscuity, teen pregnancy, sort of more sort of sexual outcomes, right? Those are not necessarily tied to physical health, but something to do with the severe sexual boundary violation that has happened in the context of sexual abuse. I actually have some papers that really show clearly that it doesn't matter all that much if it's happened chronically or one time or several times or at what age, but more the fact that there was a sexual boundary violation and some kind of trust that was violated early on. So I don't like to put things on a continuum from mild to severe or one time to chronic. It's more about the interpretation of that violation and how it happened and the context in which it happened that helps us understand the sequelae and how to treat this kind of survivor.   Jen: 07:20 Okay. So that leads me to think about, what's the prevalence of these kinds of problems among children who are sexually abused? We actually did an episode on Intergenerational Trauma and how that's passed down through the generations and it's amazing. Some people can experience incredible trauma and not pass it onto the next generation and the vice versa happens as well. So I'm wondering, do most children manage these transitions to adolescence and adulthood kind of okay, kind of normally as it were or are problems really common?   Dr. Noll: 07:49 I think problems are a lot more common than we initially had thought about because of our work, not just mine, but others in the field where we follow survivors through time and we're able to compare those to kids of a normal developmental trajectory. And what we see is as much more common in survivors than in the normal population. Things like I've talked about and things like sexual outcomes, depression, mental health, and also these physical health outcomes. So much more common, significantly more common than would be accounted for by chance than the general population. But you're right, the road to resilience I think is under studied and under understood. And we are trying to look at models now of those who do not have affects. Those do not seem affected and what can we learn from those trajectories. Those are things like having a really good support system early on in life, having someone who believes in you, having some good evidence based trauma treatment early on, and also revisiting these issues as different developmental transitions happen.   Dr. Noll: 08:53 For example, getting married often triggers some effects of sexual abuse as memories or sort of clarified and uncovered and even experienced differently in the context of a new relationship or a new sexual relationship. Also the birth of a child can trigger a trauma symptoms as well. So we often suggest revisiting of treatment as survivors go through their lives. These are the kinds of success stories that we hear. In terms of intergenerational transmission, let me just say one thing quickly. We don't see necessarily victims of sexual abuse going on to sexually abuse their children. That's not the kind of intergenerational transmission we're talking about. We're talking about sexual abuse victims recreating an environment for their children were adversity persists or where other people have access to their kids who might be exploitive individuals who then pass sexual abuse on to those kids or physical abuse or neglect. So what happens with a survivor when they become a parent, if they have substance abuse issues or other mental health issues, children suffer because of those kinds of issues. Not necessarily because they are being sexually abused by a person who's a survivor. So let me just make clear, it's about the environment that's recreated or abuse and neglect are allowed to persist in that environment as opposed to someone sending that perpetration per se along to their kids. Does that make sense?   Jen: 10:26 Yeah, it does. So it sort of sets up a potential problem for researchers, isn't it? If you're not necessarily in studying the next generation, but in the current person who's experienced that abuse, if they are also in an environment where physical abuse is common and neglect is sort of ongoing, how do you and how do other researchers untangled these effects of the sexual abuse compared to the other co-occurring adverse child experiences that the child might be going through?   Dr. Noll: 10:51 Yeah. Another great question and I think what we have to do is look carefully at the research that's out there and how it's designed. I am chiefly charged with doing just what you said, how do I create models and research designs that actually parse out the impact and the causal impact of sexual abuse when accounting for all of the other adversities, other types of abuse, etc. that are happening in the lives of survivors. So our models are very, very comprehensive. We monitor and model all kinds of adversities and we do what we call statistical controls for those to see if there's a variation above and beyond other adversities that can only be explained by the experience of sexual abuse. We indeed have long-term longitudinal studies that actually show the effects of sexual abuse being different. As always, it depends. It depends how you're looking at. This is particularly pronounced when we're looking at sort of sexual context outcomes like teen pregnancy, teen motherhood and sexual activities.   Jen: 11:55 Okay. So I'm wondering, are there factors that can protect children who have been sexually abused from some of these outcomes? Or is it sort of inevitable that they might happen depending obviously on the abuse and the person's individual circumstances?   Dr. Noll: 12:11 Oh, this is far from inevitable and if that's one message I could get through that.   Dr. Noll: 12:17 These kinds of problems persist when the environment doesn't change. So there's a lot of propensity toward revictimization. So that is someone who might've been a survivor of sexual abuse ends up in an abusive relationship when they get older or they're raped or they're in a domestic violence situation, etc. etc. because the basic environment never changes, right? And the basic coping mechanisms and coping skills never change. But with adequate support from caregivers, from mentors, from other strong women and men in the lives of survivors, these trajectories can change, these environments can change and as well as really good evidence based trauma treatments, right? These are all things that target exactly the mechanisms that we see complicating the lives of survivors.   Jen: 13:06 Okay. So I want to get really practical. What form does this support take? Who is this coming from? What does a parent do when their child has experienced something like this?   Dr. Noll: 13:14 Oh, the very first thing in the paramount of everything that we talk about with survival is believing the victim. This is a basic tenant of prevention as well. Being able to listen, being able to understand what abuse really is, and then being able to really listen to the survivor and make that report to the official so that it stops. Stopping it and believing, those are the important features of the road to recovery. So that's the very first thing and then continued support, right? Continued monitoring throughout development, throughout the various developmental stages that’s the survivor might accompany like say transition to puberty, transition through adolescence, transition to adulthood. These kinds of milestones often trigger trauma symptoms and there should be supports in place at every single one of those transitions so that survivors continually feel the support. It can be a parent, a sister, an aunt, a boyfriend, a husband, a caring individual who understands and that survivors can confide in, a really good therapist, a clergy member who's trusted. These are the kinds of support systems that often do show up regularly in success stories.   Jen: 14:30 Okay. So what these people are specifically doing is, I mean in the short term, believing that it happened and in the longer term providing empathy and a person to talk to. Are there specific things other than that sort of general, I'm here if you need to talk kind of thing that successful support systems exhibit?   Dr. Noll: 14:48 Just like in any support system, it's sort of holding the person accountable to their treatment. Right? Going to treatment, making sure that it happens. Having the right kind of insurance coverage, those kinds of things parents can do for their children. But also making sure they go to the sessions, making sure they adhere, going with them if need be. And also looking for other ancillary systems like substance abuse, right? Problematic relationships. If these things sort of crop up at certain periods, that might mean the coping mechanisms are breaking down and that treatment should be revisited. So just looking at the lives of survivors and just loving people through. That's what we do in a caring society.   Jen: 15:28 O kay. So I want to make a shift here because I think this is important to parents as well. Talking about the prevention of sexual abuse. So firstly, can we talk about how common it is for children to be sexually abused?   Dr. Noll: 15:40 Oh boy. It depends. I'm sorry, I keep saying depends because it's important to understand the nuances of the question if you're really going to understand how to prevent it. So there are two ways at looking at the incidents, let's say. And that is sort of what do we know about confirmed cases in the US, right? So we see about (I don't remember what the numbers are today) but we see about it is tens of thousands per year in the US where we have confirmed cases of sexual abuse that meet the criteria of substantiation in various jurisdictions. But if you look at the CDC stats and what the CDC says about the incidents of sexual abuse, they estimate that based on retrospective reports of adults looking back over their lives, that about one in 10 women will experience sexual abuse by the time they are 18 and about 1 in 5 men. So those numbers are largely, you know, there's a large discrepancy between the cases that we know about that reach protective services and the cases that adults say happened when they were children. So somewhere in between is my guess.   Jen: 16:55 Okay. So what you're saying here is that there are probably a lot of cases that are never reported.   Dr. Noll: 17:00 That's what the CDC says based on the discrepant findings. And that says a lot about our society. So are people not coming forward? Are people not recognizing that they were abused until someone asks when they're an adult? Are there not good support systems out there built in for survivors to come forward? There's layers and layers of reasons why there might be these discrepant numbers.   Jen: 17:25 Yeah. Okay. So I think we have this sort of perception because we latch onto these sort of, you know, one of media events or things that happen in the media, latch onto them and really over report them. And we have this idea in our minds that most abuse is happening or same as kind of kidnappings that somebody snatching my child off the street. It's somebody who I don't know and I have no idea that this could have happened. Whereas I was shocked in the training that I took from Darkness to Light, the Stewards of Children training, that the vast, vast majority of abuse is actually perpetrated by either a family member, which is less common admittedly, but somebody that the family knows and trusts. So I'm wondering why do young children have trouble recognizing what “good people” who do “bad things” as being abusers?   Dr. Noll: 18:18 Yeah. This is sort of the biggest question and how to prevent, because if you study these cases and the Nassar cases is a good example. What perpetrators do is they gain access to kids. They need that access and in order to gain access, they have to be trusted by the parents and they have to be in the lives of the family on a regular enough basis to be able to gain at that access. It's not just gaining access, it's deciding which child might be, let's call it groomable. When we study Sandusky, Nassar and priests, etc. etc., we learned that they first try to figure out who might be a likely candidate. So the grooming behaviors like who's amenable, who will take the gifts, who's trust can they gain, right? Those are the kinds of things, and it's not just the child, but the parents, which parents are going to allow their kids to be seen alone by the doctor, to stay the night alone with the coach, right?   Dr. Noll: 19:20 To be left alone in the company of a babysitter who might be exploiting the children. So there's lots of layers of access. And when that access happens, there's a level of trust that gets built. This is how it works. They gained the trust. You listened to Aly Raisman and she talks about this was the most trusted physician in the country for this kind of injury, right? So that trust is built and when trust is built, it's much more difficult to discern the difference between the good guys and the bad guys. When we're taught about stranger danger, that's easy. Strangers are the guys who offer you candy and snatch you off the street. They're really...

A couple of months ago, when I was interviewing listener Rose Hoberman for her Sharing Your Parenting Mojo episode, she casually mentioned after we got off air that her father in law – Dr. Benard Dreyer – is the immediate past president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, and would I like her to make a connection? I almost coughed up my water as I said yes, please, I very much would like her to make a connection if he would be interested in answering listener questions about the AAP’s policies and work.  Dr. Dreyer gamely agreed to chat, and in this wide-ranging conversation we cover the AAP’s stance on sleep practices, screen time, discipline, respect among physicians, and what happens when the organization reverses itself… Read Full Transcript Jen 00:01:37 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Regular listeners might recall that I launched a new segment of the show a couple months back called Sharing Your Parenting Mojo where I interviewed listeners about what they've learned from the show and what parenting issues they’re still struggling with. My second interview for this segment was with listener Rose Hoberman and at the end of our conversation she just kinda casually threw out, “so, you know, my father in law is actually a past president of the American Academy of Pediatrics. So let me know if you'd like to interview him.” And I was kind of shell shocked for a minute and I just said, yes, if you could set that up for me as soon as you can, I'd really appreciate it. So here with us today is Dr. Benard Dreyer who's Director of the Division of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics and also a Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the Hassenfeld Children's Hospital, which is part of New York University Langone. Jen: 00:02:26 Dr. Dreyer works closely with children who have autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, language delays, genetic problems and behavioral difficulties in school. Dr. Dreyer received his M.D. from New York University and he held a variety of leadership positions within the AAP before serving as its president in 2016 and he continues to serve as its Medical Director for Policies. Dr. Dreyer has also hosted the SiriusXM Satellite Radio Show On Call For Kids, a two-hour show that has run two to three times a month since 2008, which is incredible coming from a podcast perspective. Welcome Dr. Dreyer. Dr. Dreyer: 00:03:02 Pleasure to be here. Jen: 00:03:03 So I solicited most of the questions from this interview from people who are subscribed to the show via my website and who get emails from me and they were able to email me back and send me their questions as well as those who are in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. One thing that really stuck out to me as the questions started rolling in was the extent to which parents, at least in the US to some extent abroad, really like to know what the American Academy of Pediatrics says about a particular topic. And they might not always agree with the AAP’s position and they might even make a decision to ignore the AAP’s advice, but they always like to know what the AAP says before they do that. So the position that AAP takes really does carry a lot of weight. I wonder if you can walk us through what it's like to make one of these recommendations that are probably based on hundreds of studies with conflicting results and boil it down into something like no screen time for children under 18 months and no more than one hour a day for children ages two to five. How does that work? I guess starting at the beginning, how do you decide what studies to include? Dr. Dreyer: 00:04:06 Well, I think even before we decide what studies to include, there is the question of what topics should we have like policies or recommendations on. I think we choose topics based on what we think are the important issues for both pediatricians and practice where they're dealing with issues and so we hear from them and also what factors or issues are very important to parents. Then we look to see if there is enough evidence for us to actually make a recommendation, not every aspect of childcare, etc. is enough evidence for us to feel confident that we are making a recommendation that's based on it. So having said that, for each topic, we do a literature search through the medical and psychological and educational literature and we gather all the studies that exist there, the authors of each policy, review all those studies and throw out some of those studies because they're poorly designed, but include all the studies that are well designed from the research perspective so that we can be sure that their findings are useful. Dr. Dreyer: 00:05:31 As you said, sometimes these studies are conflicting and also sometimes we don't have complete information and we have to use whatever information we have to make a recommendation. I mean we don't choose studies to include, we review all the studies on a topic. So for example, screen time, we reviewed all the studies on screen time for young children and looked at the evidence as to, you know, on the one hand what we know about child development. So there might be studies, for example, that show that children under 18 months of age don't learn from a flat screen. So there are scientists that have studied, for example, language development with adults speaking to children through a flat screen versus speaking the same way to them live so that the child recognizes them as another human being at that young age and showing that they actually don't learn language well from a flat screen experience and certainly in the first year of life, whereas when they're interacting on a live basis with an adult, they actually learn. So that kind of study informs our policies from the point of view of how the child's brain works. We may then have other studies which look at whether children given video games, etc. learn or don't learn from those specific video games or for those specific iPad or other kinds of activities. So that's a different kind of study that's basically testing an intervention to help children learn. So therefore, I mean, we use studies based on physiology or biology or brain function versus studies that actually test an intervention usually in a randomized control way. Jen: 00:07:46 Okay. So I'm curious about whether children's development is the only or the primary concern or is there any weight given to kind of the family structure and parenting relationship? So what I'm thinking through as an example here is okay, we acknowledge the child is possibly not learning very much by looking at a screen for half an hour a day or an hour a day. But if the parent is getting some much needed alone time in that period of time and thus the parenting quality improves for the remainder of time that the pair interacting, is there any weight given to sort of that aspect of the relationship between the parents and the child or is the weight entirely on what is the child developmentally getting out of this particular screen time experience? Dr. Dreyer: 00:08:31 So that's a great question by the way. We do get input from parents on many policies. I can't tell you the exact input we got on the screen time. I was not one of the writers there, but we have a group of families called Family Voices, which often review our policies and give us feedback on them before we put them out to the rest of the world. So, we do get input from families. I can tell you that our recommendations are part of a conversation with families. In other words, this is our recommendation that children don't learn from screen time. That there is no good amount of screen time for them to have. Parents then take that and integrate that into the way they do their lives. I don't think we've ever told a parent that if you put your kid in front of a screen for 20 minutes, their brains will be fried, you know what I mean? Dr. Dreyer: 00:09:32 But we also know that on the average, US children under the age of two have one to two hours of screen a day. So therefore when we come down on our recommendations, our recommendations are also based on what we know many parents in the United States are doing, which is allowing their children to have two hours of screen time. So, therefore we think that's a bad thing for people to be doing because that's bad in two ways. One is children really learn from interactions with their parents or other adult caregivers at younger ages. So we want parents to talk to their kids, to play with them, to read books to them, etc. That's how children learn. And we want to encourage that which we do. We also know that too much screen time is associated with behavior problems in children where they become distracted. Dr. Dreyer: 00:10:35 They developed symptoms like ADHD. I don't mean that it causes ADHD, but they become somewhat scattered. There’s somewhat more aggressive behavior with those kids who have a lot of screen time. So, we want parents to understand that a lot of screen time is not a good thing. I often have parents asked me for example, well what happens if I just want to go into the kitchen and finished cooking something and my kid is watching TV for 20 minutes, is that terrible? The answer of course is no, but that 20 minutes often becomes an hour. So we want parents to really understand that actually under the age of about 18 months, there is nothing your kid is getting out of that and if you want to use it as a babysitter recognize that you’re using it as a babysitter, but alive babysitter would be better. Dr. Dreyer: 00:11:35 Who can talk to the kid. Jen: 00:11:36 For sure. Dr. Dreyer: 00:11:37 Yeah, and also a lot of this image of the parents just putting their kid in front of a TV for 15 minutes while they go into the kitchen or the bathroom or whatever is somewhat of a fantasy. Most of the kids who get put in front of screens are there for quite a while. To be honest, it's not that safe to just stick your kid in another room in front of the screen while you're in another room in the kitchen. That kid should be in the kitchen with you or nearby where you can observe them. Again, we're talking about kids under 18 months of age. We're not talking about two or three year olds or four year olds. We don't want too much screen time. But that's a different question and that's one of the reasons we modified our recommendations is exactly what you're telling me about, which is we felt the original recommendations sounded so rigid that parents felt that either they followed them or they didn't follow them and that was not what our point was. Jen: 00:12:44 Yeah, that was actually another question that I had was around that sort of what is seen from the outside when the revised recommendations came out that that they were being revised because parents were not following them at all because the recommendation was so different from their daily lived experience. So I'm curious, I know the science is changing all the time, but was that changing recommendation primarily changed because of the discrepancy between the recommendation and what parents were doing rather than because the science had changed and suddenly indicated that it was safe for children to be having screen time at younger ages? Dr. Dreyer: 00:13:19 No. So let me put a little wrinkle on that comment. There was more science out there for us to look at. So our policy about our policies is that they should be updated every five years. The reason is there is new information out there. So our recommendations automatically should be changing approximately every five years or at least we should review the information and sometimes we review the information and say there's really nothing new here. We can keep these recommendations for another five years and we will check it five years later. But we do automatically in fact look to change our recommendations approximately every five years because there's new science that informs our decisions and we may have to change our decisions. In the case of, I don't want to focus the entire show on screen time, but in the case of screen time, we kept basically our recommendations for the first 18 months. Dr. Dreyer: 00:14:29 We’ve said there should be no screen time except skyping with your grandparents. We allow skyping with grandparents. We used to get calls like is screen time with grandma in Iowa good? The answer is sure, that's not what we're talking about. First of all, that's interactive. You are going to be with your kid. That's a good thing. So we wanted to sort of explain what we were talking about and we kept basically that we don't recommend, we didn't say we forbid but we don't recommend screen time for the first 18 months. We dropped it from two years because 18 months to two years is a transitional period. There were some kids who can benefit from certain kinds of use of iPads or watching shows on TV that are geared towards children that are entertaining or that they learned something from. Dr. Dreyer: 00:15:27 So we did modify our recommendations based on new information and new studies, which allowed us to be a little more nuanced and graded in our recommendations. Then sometimes we make recommendations which are based on very little evidence. So we had to make a decision like after 18 months or two years, how much screen time should a child be watching? And we don't have hard evidence about exactly what that amount is. That's why we chose like one hour for younger children just to make the point that children should not be in front of the TV or sitting on an iPad or computer for hours a day when they're that young, they still need to be with adults or other children in play. Jen: 00:16:19 Okay. So that was another question that listeners had was it's not that one hour is a magic number, it's more that this is an idea that children benefit more from interacting with parents because parents were wondering, well is the number low because the AAP knows that if they say two hours is okay then parenting can end up doing four hours. Dr. Dreyer: 00:16:40 Yeah. Yeah. But also I think as a parent and a grandparent, I'm going to talk, as well as a pediatrician who takes care of families with children, there isn't really much for children to spend more than an hour a day on an iPad really at the age of three. If they are doing that then they're probably missing out on other activities which would be more beneficial for them. Jen: 00:17:10 Okay. Dr. Dreyer: 00:17:11 But you're right, one hour is not based on some absolute study which showed and I think that's how it's stated in the policy. I decided I was not going to pull the policy stuff in front of me because I want the conversation not about this. I don't think we say one hour is an absolute, but I do think that we picked an hour based on some TV or some computer time or some iPad time or some smartphone time is okay, but not excessively. Jen: 00:17:43 Yeah. Okay, so leaving screen time behind and waiting even deeper into the murky waters, let's go and talk about safe sleep recommendations. So, I know a lot of parents are interested in this topic. So the AAP’s stand on this is pretty clear and that is the safest place for a baby is on a firm flat surface like a crib or a bassinet with no soft bedding in the same room as the parents but not on the same sleeping surface for the first six months. So I have a number of followup questions on this. Firstly, is it true to say that the risk of infant death is always higher when bed sharing than when the child is sleeping on their own sleep surface on their back, in a crib or a bassinet? In other words, is there no way to make bed sharing as safe as the child's sleeping alone on their back in a crib? Dr. Dreyer: 00:18:35 So let me just say in general, I'm all for bed sharing. I mean as a general principle not for the first six months of life. Because we do know that the incidents of sudden infant death syndrome is much higher with bed sharing and also that it's decreased coincident with less bed sharing and less prone sleeping and prone sleeping is probably the biggest issue. But bed sharing can also be an issue. So there are ways of making pseudo bed sharing safe. So there are parents who can buy these extensions to their beds with a flat cribs that kind of attaches to the bed so that the child is there close to them, but on his own flat surface on the back. And what’s good about that is especially for breastfeeding parents, the child is right there. So when they want to breastfeed, they don't have to get out of bed. Dr. Dreyer: 00:19:44 They can just pick up the child, breastfeed, put the child back. That's not bed sharing, but that's why I use the term pseudo bed sharing, and that is in fact what I recommended to the famous Rose Hoberman who was on your show on your podcast, which brought me here and that's the kind of setup that they have. Now regarding sleeping on the back versus the belly, it's really a matter of parent persistence and point of view. Parents who believe that their kid should sleep on their back and encourages the kids sleep is fine. Parents who every time the kids cry feels that they are better off on their belly, once you start putting kids on their belly and then convince yourself that that's the only way they'll sleep, well then that's the only way they’ll asleep. But I can tell you, I have many, many families who are firmly convinced that the baby sleeping on their back is safer and babies sleep on their back fine. Dr. Dreyer: 00:20:58 It doesn't make them cry all night. It doesn't wake up the parents all night. I mean, babies often wake up parents. My usual joke with parents is your baby will sleep through the night sometime before college, because parents sleep, babies sleep is like one of the big issues for most new parents. But that's separate from saying it's related to sleeping on their back. But once parents start moving them to their belly and then want to turn them back to their back then that causes problems. But babies from the get go who are put on their back and sleep there, sleep fine, and there's no evidence that they need to sleep on their belly. Again, remember we're talking about the first six months or so of the baby's life. We're not talking about the first five years of their life. Jen: 00:21:58 Okay. So for that period, after the first six months, is the AAP stands that bed sharing can be done safely? Dr. Dreyer: 00:22:06 I think I'd have to pull up the policy, but I think that we focus on the first year as being of somewhat concerning for bed sharing. Most SIDS cases occur in the first six months, but some do occur later in the first year and so we don't encourage bed sharing for the first year. After that, I don't know if we have a policy that says yes or no for bed sharing. Jen: 00:22:34 Right. Dr. Dreyer: 00:22:35 Remember our safe sleep recommendations are really for the first year, not for the rest of the child's life. We do recognize that many cultures have bed sharing from the get go. That doesn't mean it's safe and many kids do want to be in their parents' beds. It's comforting to them. Though once the risk of SIDS is over, I think that's up to the parents to decide whether they want a kid in their bed or they don't want the kid in their bed. Many parents don't want their kids in their bed because they want to have a good night sleep. Their bed is their bed, but other parents would like their kids in their bed. And I don't know that we're...

My guest on today’s episode in the Sharing Your Parenting Mojo series is Dovilė Šafranauskė, who joins us from Lithuania. Dovilė has discovered respectful parenting and her husband is on board, but many of the central tenets of RIE go very much against how children are raised in Lithuanian culture. Dovilė wonders how she can work with her parents – who look after her children regularly – to help them feel more comfortable with RIE, as well as what to do with Aunty Mavis whom her toddler twins see a couple of times a year and who insists on a kiss as a greeting.   Dovilė is also a sensitive sleep coach with focus on following natural baby sleep paterns, advocating for gentle sleep interventions and finding tairored solutions that fit best with the needs of the whole family. Her business is called Miego Pelytes, which means Sleep Mice in Lithuanian, and refers to her twin daughters. Click here to learn about Sleep Mice   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.