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

This episode is part of a series on understanding the intersection of race, privilege, and parenting.  Click here to view all the items in this series. We’ve laid a lot of groundwork on topics related to race by now: we learned about White privilege in parenting, and White privilege in schools, and even how parents can use sports to give their children advantages in school and in life. Today my listener Dr. Kim Rybacki and I interview a giant in the field: Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, author of the now-classic book (recently released in a 20th anniversary edition!) Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria: And Other Conversations About Race. We begin by assessing what is White parents’ responsibility to help dismantle structural racism, and then learn how to discuss race and racism with our children.  And in the next episode in this series I’ll have some really in-depth resources to support you in having these conversations with your own children. Dr. Tatum was featured in a short piece with Lester Holt on how to talk with children about racial injustice that you might also find helpful - she describes ways you can answer their questions honestly and fully in an age-appropriate way.  You can find a link to the interview on her website here.   References Bonilla-Silva, E., (2004). From bi-racial to tri-racial: Towards a new system of racial stratification in the USA. Ethnic and Racial Studies 27(6), 931-950. Cheney-Rice, Z. (2018, November 11). Bernie Sanders and the lies we tell White voters. New York Intelligencer. Retrieved from http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/11/bernie-sanders-and-the-lies-we-tell-white-voters.html Derman-Sparks, L., & Olsen, J. (2009). Anti-bias education for young children and ourselves. National Association for the Education of Young Children. Available at https://www.naeyc.org/resources/pubs/books/anti-bias-education Hagerman, M. (2018). White Kids: Growing up with privilege in a racially divided America. New York, NY: New York University Press. Helms, J. E. (Ed.). (1990). Contributions in Afro-American and African studies, No. 129. Black and White racial identity: Theory, research, and practice. New York, NY, England: Greenwood Press. King, M.L. (2010). Where do we go from here: Chaos or Community? Boston, MA: Beacon. Kivel, P. (2017). Uprooting racism: How White people can work for racial justice (4th Ed.). Gabriola Island, B.C.: New Society. Miller, S. (2017, December 8). Reading race: Proactive conversations with young children. Raising Race-Conscious Children. Retrieved from http://www.raceconscious.org/2017/12/explicitlanguageracebooks/ Roda, A. (2015). Inequality in gifted and talented programs: Parental choices about status, school opportunity, and second-generation segregation. London, U.K.: Palgrave MacMillan. Stalvey, L.M. (1989). The education of a WASP. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. Sullivan, S. (2014). Good White people: The problem with middle-class White anti-racism. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Tatum, B.D. (2017). Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?. New York, NY: Basic. Van Ausdale, D.V. & Feagin, J.R. (2001). The first R: How children learn race and racism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"]   Jen: 01:25 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We have a very special episode lined up for today and I’m recording this introduction separately, so as not to take time away from the interview. If you’re a regular listener, you might have heard my episodes on White Privilege and Parenting and also White Privilege in Schools in which we looked at some of the structural racism that’s present in our society that we might not have recognized until now, especially if we’re White. I’d also like to direct you back to the very beginning of the show because in episode 6, which was called “Wait, is my toddler racist?” We discovered how implicit bias works, how it’s often present even in very young children and how just not talking with children about color or what is known as the colorblind approach is one of the more effective ways to raise a child who experiences racial prejudice. Jen: 02:10 Having been completely immersed in the literature on this topic for the last couple of months, I’m also going to adjust my terminology to be more in line with the language that my guest uses. Racial prejudice describes a person’s attitude while racism or structural racism is the system that confers advantages on White people and disadvantages on people who aren’t White by reinforcing ideas about White superiority. If you haven’t already listened to these previous episodes then I would strongly encourage you to do so as a lot of the ideas and language we’ll use today was established in these episodes and we won’t spend a lot of time laying groundwork today so we can maximize our time on the really deep questions. I also want to acknowledge that when we use terms like White privilege and implicit bias, that it can make it seem like White people are innocent if ignorant recipients of an unfair advantage. Jen: 02:55 We didn’t ask for this privilege after all, we were just born into a system in which we have it, but in reality, there are a lot of things that White people do every day to perpetuate and even reinforce the system. We talked about some of them in our episodes on White Privilege. These can be as simple as things like finding a resource related to education that not everybody knows about and sharing that information among networks of White people, which makes it more difficult for people of nondominant cultures to access these resources and of course they can take much more insidious forms like electing racist leaders who explicitly perpetuate Whites’ advantage. So today we’re very lucky to have two special guests with us. The first one needs almost no introduction. Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum is former president of Spelman College, licensed clinical psychologist and nationally recognized authority on racial issues in America. Jen: 03:45 Dr. Tatum holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Michigan and for 18 years she taught a course called Psychology of Racism at three different institutions. She’s the author of the seminal book, Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria, which was revised and updated in 2017 and is a nationally renowned expert on the subjects of race and racial identity development. And here with me today to help me co-interview Dr. Tatum is Dr. Kim Rybacki who received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the City University of New York, and is on the Behavioral Sciences Faculty at Dutchess Community College in New York. Dr. Rybacki is in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group, which you should join if you’re not already a member, and we had a conversation in the group about things that she’s trying to do to “fight for a better system while doing the least amount of damage in the current one as possible.” But she seemed very unsure as to whether she was doing the right things or even enough of the right things and so I realized she’d be the perfect person to talk this through with Dr. Tatum. Jen: 04:42 I mentioned in the introductions to the previous two episodes that I acknowledged that race can be a difficult thing to talk about. To some extent, I think it’s sort of like talking about sex and even anatomically correct names for body parts, the more time you say vulva and penis, the less ridiculous it feels and the more ridiculous it feels that it feels ridiculous to say these words. So even if you’re feeling some resistance to the idea of listening to this episode, I would encourage you to sit tight with us, especially if you have a goal of raising race conscious children. So, we’re going to start off today by talking about the structural racism and what is our responsibility as parents to change the system and then we’ll talk about things that we can talk about and do with our children specifically on issues related to race. Jen: 05:22 I’ll also remind you that we’ve began each of the episodes in this series by having both me and my guests state our privileges. You’ve heard mine a couple times already by now, so I’ll just state them quickly and then we’ll start by asking our guests about theirs. So, some of my main privileges are my Whiteness, my economic status in the upper middle class, heterosexuality, able-bodiedness and my education. Now let’s hear from my guests. So, welcome Dr. Tatum it’s great to have you here. Dr. Tatum: 05:49 Thank you so much. Glad to be with you. Jen: 05:51 And welcome Kim as well. Kim: 05:53 Thank you. Great to be here. Jen: 05:55 So, I’ve already stated my privileges in the introduction to this episode. I wonder if you wouldn’t mind starting by having each of you state your privileges in turn perhaps by starting with Dr. Tatum, please. Dr. Tatum: 06:06 Sure. Well, when I think about privileges, I define that in terms of the ways that I’m systematically advantaged and so I’m systematically advantaged as a heterosexual. I identify as Christian and living in a Christian dominant society that also gives me privileges. I’m physically and cognitively able. I grew up in a middle class home with well-educated parents and have been the recipient of an excellent education myself, so that certainly advantages me and I am someone who identifies as economically secure. I am an African American woman and of course I’m targeted by racism and sexism, but I always just want to acknowledge that as a light skinned person, a light skinned African American, I feel that that also gives me privileges that dark skinned people don’t get. Jen: 06:55 Thank you so much. Kim, would you mind saying yours as well? Kim: 06:58 Sure. I mean using the same definition as Dr. Tatum, I would certainly start off with stating that I have White privilege as a White woman. Also cisgender heterosexual privilege. I am an able-bodied person with a strong educational background and secure economic status. So, those are what would come to mind first. Jen: 07:20 Super. Thank you. And so we’re going to take two major tacks with our questions today. We’re going to start out by talking about structural racism and then we’re going to talk about how we actually talk to our children about racism and race as well more generally. When I was trying to think, can we really cover this in an hour? I was trying to think what on earth I could cut, but I decided that I wanted to try and ask Dr. Tatum as much of it as we can. So, we’ll start with the structural racism and then we’ll get into the how to talk with children about this topic. So, my first question for you is for anyone whose view of the history of Black people in America goes something kind of like Black people were brought here as slaves and then Lincoln freed them because he thought that slavery was wrong and then Black people essentially had all the same rights as White people, except that they couldn’t vote. Jen: 08:03 Then they got that right in the 60s and now they’re essentially the same as Whites and they really don’t deserve any special treatment like affirmative action. Then I just want to encourage my listeners to read Carol Anderson’s book, White Rage because it just systematically dismantle all of these ideas and hundreds more besides and I was so impressed that it has 80 pages of references in 230 pages of book. Kim actually recommended that book to me. So, the point that I’m trying to make here is that while we might think that the playing field is level, the playing field has never been level. So, we may think this is a recent problem, now we’ve managed to elect a president who has sort of spews these hateful ideas and these ongoing nationwide problems with the election of officials who have racially prejudiced ideas and less we think this is a Republican or Conservative problem. Jen: 08:50 We should also acknowledge the large role of the Clinton administration played in promoting mass incarceration in the name of war on drugs. And also Bernie Sanders’ recent suggestion that Whites who are uncomfortable voting for an African American president aren’t necessarily racist. So, this stuff is just all around us. It suffuses our everyday lives. It’s not just those people over there who don’t know any better. So, Dr. Tatum, I realize I’m sort of throwing us in the deep end a bit here, but I’m wondering what are some concrete steps we can realistically take ourselves as individuals to move forward and start to break the system? Dr. Tatum: 09:23 Well, Jen I think you started with something that’s very important which is educating oneself. As you mentioned, a lot of people are quite misinformed or uninformed about the ways in which racism has operated in our society and continues to operate. And so you can’t solve a problem if you don’t acknowledge that it exists. So of course learning more about it is critical. One of the reasons I wrote my book, Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria: And Other Conversations About Race back in 1997 and then updated it in 2017 was really for that purpose to help people, the readers White and of color understand what racism is, the systematic nature of it, how it has been built into the very fabric of our society and how that impacts all of us in terms of how we think about ourselves and other people and ultimately what we can do about it, but the first starting point I think for people who are listening and saying, what are they talking about? Education through reading books like Carol Anderson’s excellent book, White Rage, and certainly I would advocate for my own. Jen: 10:30 Of course, yeah. Dr. Tatum: 10:31 I think it can be a good place to start. Once we have an understanding of the ways in which racism is operating, we can begin to think about how we can use our own individual spheres of influence, whether that’s in our homes, in our neighborhoods, in our workplaces to begin to interrupt that cycle of racism. Jen: 10:53 Okay, and so I’m starting to think about, okay, how do we make this move? So, I’m thinking about the philosopher, Dr. Shannon Sullivan and she’s written about White Guilt and Shame, which I think can sort of take the form of hand wringing a lot like we’re doing on this podcast if we were to look at it uncharitably I suppose, and I think that can lead to a toxic form of anger, but she says that these feelings aren’t actually very good at prompting us to act. So, I feel as though this education is a necessary step and then we might get angry about it and we feel the shame as well. And then we just kind of throw up our hands and say, well, what do we do about it? So I’m wondering if you see it in the same way or if these emotions are things that White people have to experience before they can accept all the things that haven’t worked so far and go on to find what does. Dr. Tatum: 11:41 Well, I often talk about something I call the cycle of racism. So let me just say a word about that and if we think about racism as something that was operating in our society before any of us on this conversation were born, right? We didn’t start a fire so to speak, but it has been operating and we are all influenced by starting in our early years. We get misinformation, we’re exposed to stereotypes, we’re influenced in the socialization process by people we know, love and trust, our parents, our teachers, our friends, our neighbors, and we internalize a lot of that misinformation, the stereotypes about people different from ourselves as well as stereotypes about people like ourselves. When I say we, I’m talking about not just White people, but people of color as well. We all get misinformation. It’s like breathing smog. If you live anywhere, there are pollutants in the air, you breathe them in, not because you want to, but because it’s the only air that’s available. Dr. Tatum: 12:45 And to the extent that we are all being exposed to it, we are not always conscious of it. In fact, a lot of the times we’re not conscious of it at all. We come to believe that misinformation is truth. We see difference as not different but equal, but difference as wrong or abnormal, and we passed that misinformation on to the next generation. That’s what I mean by that cycle. It continues. So sometimes we are, as I said, we’re not even aware of it, but when we become aware whether that’s by listening to a conversation like this one or having an experience where we witnessed something happening, we know to be wrong or we learned something in school or via documentary. However, the information comes to us, there are common emotions associated with it anger, guilt, confusion, alienation. These are common and they’re certainly common for White people, but they can also be part of the experience that people of color have as well. Dr. Tatum: 13:45 And when you have that feeling of this is not right and feeling overwhelmed by it, one response can be, particularly for White people, I think who often are living in racial isolation, most White people in the United States live in largely White communities and go to school in largely White settings and have a pretty homogeneous social network. And if that describes someone and then they’re exposed to information that they didn’t have before or have a heightened awareness, confusion is common, guilt can be a feeling, anger can be a feeling, and sometimes the desire is to just not have those uncomfortable feelings. If I didn’t notice, if you didn’t bring it up to me, if I didn’t listen to this program, I wouldn’t have to think about it and there’s a tendency to want to just tune the information out. But for some people the impulse will lead to action. I want to do something about it. I want to take action, but I don’t know where to start, which brings us back to your earlier question and connecting with other people who are having a similar experience who also want to work against racism, who also want to speak up, can be one way to move forward, to find like-minded others with which you can connect and do some problem solving together. Jen: 15:06 Kim, I’m wondering, I think you used Dr. Tatum’s book as a teaching tool in some of your classes. Do you see the students in your classes going through these kinds of stages? Kim: 15:15 I do. Obviously, the students come at very different points in the process, so speaking of my White students specifically, some of them are at the point where they’re sort of familiar with the problems associated with racism and now looking for things to do to be active, but I also get a lot of students who are still in that anger denial, discomfort stage where what they’re really looking for is to become more comfortable if that means denying the problem and for some of them that’s where they’ll go and it’s sort of a process of trying to push them out of that. Jen: 15:54 Okay. Yeah, and I think part of the we want to feel comfortable, I think it’s sort of a human nature in general to want to feel comfortable....

Individual sports or competitive?  Recreational or organized?  Everyone gets a trophy or just the winners? And why do sports in the first place?  Granted there are some physical benefits, but don’t we also hope that our children will learn some kind of lessons about persistence and team work that will stand them in good stead in the future? In this interview with Dr. Hilary Levy Friedman we discuss her book Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture, the advantages that sports can confer on children (which might not be the ones you expect!), as well as what children themselves think about these issues. Read Full Transcript Jen: 01:23 Hello and welcome to today's episode of Your Parenting Mojo podcast, and today's episode actually comes to us courtesy of a question from my husband who said “You should really do an episode on the benefits of sports for children.” And I said, sure and I said about researching it and I actually stumbled on Dr. Hilary Levey Friedman’s book Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture, and I really got more than I bargained for with that book. Dr. Friedman has studied not just the advantages and drawbacks associated with participation in sport as an activity, but also much broader sociological issues like how participation in sports helped children to increase what she calls Competitive Kid Capital and can actually impact the child's academic and lifelong success. So, Dr. Friedman received her Bachelor's Degree from Harvard and Master’s in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University. She's currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Education at Brown University and is the mother of a preschooler and a first grader. Welcome Dr. Friedman. Dr. Friedman: 02:24 Thanks for having me. Jen: 02:25 You're right there in the thick of it with us. Dr. Friedman: 02:27 Yes. Jen: 02:29 So, I want to kind of start at the beginning or what seems like the beginning to me here because decades ago it seems as though it was far more common for children to engage in really unstructured outdoor playtime rather than organized sports. I'm curious as to your thoughts on what has shifted here and what do you think children are missing out by not having as much of this unstructured outdoor play? Dr. Friedman: 02:51 Well, it depends what time we're talking about. I mean if we’re talking about 200 years ago, I mean kids were working in the fields and 50 years after that, they were working in factories. So about a hundred years ago, 1918, we're seeing the formation of kids' athletic leagues in particular and also some other organized activities, but it's really more of like a popular myth or a misconception that kids use to spend all this time playing and having free time. The 1950s, which is that time we sort of pulled up is this Utopian time of kids playing in the streets and playing stickball and baseball and all of that is more the anomaly rather than the norm. So, today it is absolutely true that kids spend so much more time, especially, it depends on what age exactly we're talking about, but they spend a lot of time in organized play, not just in organized sports, but we just have to think about the ways in which that took a different shape historically in American childhood. Jen: 03:56 Yeah. Yeah. So, it's less that they were always able to engage in this unstructured play and whether that was sort of a phenomenon of its time just like the structured play as a phenomenon of its time today. Dr. Friedman: 04:07 Yes. Jen: 04:08 Do you think there are unique benefits associated with that unstructured time that maybe children are not able to realize today through the structured play that happens? Dr. Friedman: 04:17 Again, I think it depends on the age group we're talking about, so I'll limit it to elementary school aged kids just because that's the age group that Playing to Win focuses upon. So, I think certainly kids are working out all kinds of ideas, both intellectual but also social and moral when they play together and come up with their own games. Now, I don't think that having organized play is mutually exclusive to that either. So, I'll just give you one example in particular, part of Playing to Win is also about chess, not just about sports. And so I remember being at a chess summer camp for a few weeks and observing there and meeting families and the kids would play chess and then there'd be a recess time and then they'd play a little bit more chess and then have lunch and then have like a much longer period of recess and go out to a playground. And they came up with all these games that they invented on the playground and with pool noodles even though there wasn't a pool nearby and they had rules. It was very elaborate. So yes, they were spending time unstructured play as well, but they also had this space to be creative, workout rules, work together. So, I think it is possible for both of those things to coexist and both of those things are important for kids as well. Jen: 05:35 Oh, that's fascinating. In reading your book, I sort of had the impression that the kids were sort of locked up in a conference hall for 10 hours at a stretch playing chess. Dr. Friedman: 05:44 Well, sometimes at the tournaments it feels much more like that. But that's again not like the everyday experience of doing this. Jen: 05:53 Yeah. Okay. All right, so I'm curious because I think that this is where most of our minds go and certainly my husband's mind was going when he asked the question, what are some of the more immediate benefits for children participating in organized sporting activities? Dr. Friedman: 06:08 So, immediately obviously there is the physical fitness aspect, there's also the teamwork and those are things that you can get by just playing at school or playing recreationally. I think when you up it to the more competitive experience, that's when other lessons kick in as well. So, there's pretty much if you have to think about it, but there are very few sporting experiences where there's not some element of a time limit or some sense of time and rules you have to adhere to. So again, you can get that somewhat from doing it recreationally, but when you're doing it competitively and by that I mean it's organized, adults are running it and records are kept, then you get something much different out of that experience. Performing under pressure for example. Jen: 06:54 Yeah. Okay. So, we're not necessarily talking about elite levels of participation. This is your kid's little league is the same because adults are running it, they are providing the timekeeping and the score keeping and so the children are participating under some time pressure. Dr. Friedman: 07:10 You’re exactly correct. Yeah, I mean I think to be more specific, what I'm talking about here, when I say competitive is a league where you have to try out or not everybody is guaranteed a spot and that sort of thing. So most little league is, I would consider recreational, but if there's an all-star league or any of these what we call in the US travel teams that kids are not elite, they might have some dreams of becoming elite someday, but they certainly are not elite at this moment. Jen: 07:37 Right. Okay. So, there are a number of other sort of health benefits as well that I was reading about things like health and bone density, lower rates of obesity and cardiovascular disease and diabetes and these kinds of things as well. Do you see those as important benefits associated with a lot of different kinds of sporting activities as well as with unstructured playtime? Dr. Friedman: 07:59 Definitely. But there's a caveat there which is that when anything becomes too competitive, there's a health risk too. So we see a lot in increasing number of youth sports injuries. I mean obviously concussions are the most well-known example at this point in time, but at other moments there's been concerns about different joints, elbows, knees, increasing rates of girls who have particular types of knee injuries. We're seeing more and more overused injuries because kids are specializing at younger ages and so yes, there are these positive benefits and then you get to this inflection point and you're like, wait, there might actually be some bad physical things that go along with that. Jen: 08:38 Yeah, and this is just a hypothesis here that I'm generating on the fly, but I'm wondering if this recreational level of sport is actually better for a child's health than specializing and maybe I've heard of people who are very good at sports will say, oh yeah, I played three different sports until I was 12 and then I specialized and maybe that that general level of fitness actually serves them better than early specialization. Are you aware of any research on that? Dr. Friedman: 09:01 Yes, there's definitely a lot of anecdotal evidence by those who are professional like you mentioned, like Tom Brady famously says, he played all kinds of sports until he was much older and so there's this cross training idea. You're not just working the same muscle or muscle groups over and over again. So, you're developing other types of skills too. So, let's say you were really into football, but if you play soccer too, then you're developing the foot-eye coordination in addition to the hand-eye coordination. So, that's definitely a big thing and there's been a lot of research by those who focus on Sports Medicine and Pediatric Sports Medicine that thinks that this is quite important or again from the opposite side, like the increasing number of overuse injuries that are being seen, you can assume that if you're not just using the same muscles over and over again, that there would be a different outcome. Jen: 09:55 Okay. So, there are some really beneficial aspects of sports for children. There are also some potential issues with doing a certain kind of sport too much. So, setting aside the physical thing from it, which I think is where most of us go immediately when we think about sports. Let's talk about some of the psychological and sociological issues. So, the first one that comes to mind for me is what is up with the participation trophies for every child. I think this is more of an American phenomenon than one that seen in other countries and I'm wondering firstly if that's the case and secondly would it not be better for a child to just learn how to be disappointed that they didn't always win something? Dr. Friedman: 10:36 Yeah. So, participation trophies are a major issue and this notion that everybody deserves something and on the one hand you can see that a child did a whole season, put in the work, kept their commitment and so it's nice to have a celebration, right? So that could be a pizza party and it doesn't have to involve an actual sort of tacky gold trophy because most of them are actually not very attractive and ended up being dust gatherers as opposed to a team goes to a tournament and actually wins first place and that has a lot more meaning. I've interviewed kids about this and they're under no illusions that a participation trophy means like you won first place in a tournament. What I will say about participation trophies and from when I interviewed the kids for playing to win, the first one they got meant something to them and continue to mean something. Dr. Friedman: 11:34 But the subsequent ones didn't mean much at all. So, it does appear to be more of an American phenomenon. We certainly see it in other places as well as some aspects of American culture have spread to other countries. But if everybody gets a trophy, like what does it mean? The Incredibles 2 just came out this year and is now just recently released to Blu-ray and DVD and all of that. But the original Incredibles, they have a line in there that says if everybody is special, then nobody is special. So I think that there's a perception that that's what the participation trophies mean for a lot of families. Then also I had a lot of parents say like, wow, I paid a lot of money for like that dollar and thirty cent trophy, it’s so cheap, but I actually paid a lot of money for it. Dr. Friedman: 12:23 So, people are not dumb, kids are not dumb and they understand that that doesn't mean that you're a champion, let's say. Jen: 12:33 So, why do we keep doing it then if the kids see through it and the parents see through it and I think you called it something like parceling out the honor and making every age group at certain subset and within that age group, they're best of this and best of that. And so why do we keep doing this if everybody sees through it and realizes that it's not really real? Dr. Friedman: 12:52 Yeah. So the carving up of honor is a little bit different because at least that is based on some sort of achievement. So, I call it the carving up of honor because now we give prizes, the first place to eight year olds, born in the month of November practice only three hours a week. Dr. Friedman: 13:10 So, there are very specific groups and this is born out of this desire, let's say to say my child is a champion, my child's the national champion of x, y, or z. Where does that come from? That comes from this trend toward quantification that we've seen, the ability to measure achievement and the extracurricular space that then is highly linked to the college admissions process and so sure these things aren't happening until you're 18, but there's this trickle-down effect, particularly in the upper middle class community that we start seeing at younger and younger ages. Jen: 13:49 Okay. So, staying with the idea of just for a minute longer about the idea of becoming elite athletes and do parents really start their children playing sports thinking my kid's going to be the next Mia Hamm, my kid's going to be the next Beckham because it seems though that's not very likely to happen. Dr. Friedman: 14:07 No. I mean I think that there has been a push and people are becoming more sophisticated in terms of the notion that, first of all being a professional athlete, those odds are super, super, super slim making it to the Olympics in most fields. Odds are super, super slim but people have thought for a while, oh, but I'll get a college scholarship and that will make it worth it. But in fact like the number of NCAA athletes who have a scholarship is incredibly small because it's only Division I schools and then only a certain number of Division I schools and then even within that group, the number of students that got a “full ride” to be a college athlete as a percentage of all collegiate athletes, let alone all high school athletes is extremely small. It's like 4%. Dr. Friedman: 14:59 So, I think there was this idea for a long time and I think there's some truth to participating in athletics helps get you a spot at certain types of institutions. So, Division III Liberal Arts Schools where the student body is much smaller, but they're still filling a huge number of sports teams and they have to have students to fill those roster slots. Sure, like athletics can give you a boost. There's other ways too, if you play a certain type of sport, let's say Squash or you do Crew that's going to send a particular signal about your family's class background. So, there are all kinds of ways in which sports can boost your ability to get into college. But it's not necessarily gonna get you dollars to go to college. In fact, many of these places there are no college scholarship, so you're paying money to go there. But it's expanding the world of possibilities for some students in terms of getting into more selective schools. Jen: 15:59 Okay. So, when you ask parents what are their goals for enrolling their young children in sports, what are they telling you? Dr. Friedman: 16:09 Yeah, so I mean, I think there are, and I definitely met parents who are thinking more explicitly about the college process, but more than anything, most parents want to help their child find what they love, what they're passionate about. I know that some people don't like this word passion, but to find an activity or a setting that gives a child an identity, a social group, all of those things where they're going to be able to excel and find themselves and feel like they belong and so parents, especially parents of elementary school age kids are exposing their kids to a lot of different activities and a lot of different sporting activities and kind of seeing what sticks. Jen: 16:54 Okay. So parents, their stated goals, I think you realized they’re a little bit different than what might be some of their unstated goals. You've touched on this a little bit with the term Competitive Kid Capital, so can you tell us a little bit about what are some of these unstated reasons that are sort of underlying the issues that parents will actually talk about? Dr. Friedman: 17:18 Yeah. So, first of all I mentioned the upper middle class, most of the families that I met would be considered middle class and many of them upper middle class. And so these are families that are doing well financially, but aren't going to have necessarily a trust fund to pass onto their kids, right? So they're there by dint of hard work, motivation, advanced degrees, like an MD, a JD and MBA, so any of these kind of professional degrees. And you can't pass that degree onto your kids, right? So, I always actually used to use the example of Donald Trump, like his company was a public company and you can't just pass that onto your kids, right? And so they have to go through some… Jen: 18:01 It turns out maybe you can… Dr. Friedman: 18:03 Yeah, maybe you can, but you have go through some credentialing process to do that. And so what you can pass onto your kids if you're a doctor is learning how to manage a busy schedule and how to be competitive, how to lose and bounce back and keep fighting. And so these competitive activities and competitive sports in particular, and you could argue for both boys and girls, but there's a big impact on women as well here is a way to do that. And it costs money to do these activities, right? Like they're not free. They're very class based to do these travel sports in particular and so this is like a gate-keeping way of teaching kids these skills that hopefully will have these much longer term outcomes. Jen: 18:53 Okay. So, you've mentioned college as a potential outcome and the fact that there could be some money there but maybe not. I'm curious about even beyond college, what connections do you see between longer term career success and success in sports as a child? Dr. Friedman: 19:09 Well, so absolutely those who play college sports have different labor market outcomes. There's an interesting book called Privilege by another sociologist, Lauren Rivera that looks at the hiring practices of major law firms, management consultants, investment banks, sorts of high prestige occupations and they still care about like did you play, were you on a team in college, right? Because that shows your dedication, your like sort of willing to put yourself through the ringer and be in like mental and physical discomfort and like work through that. And that's pretty powerful, right? And those are like high income occupations and so we see it through college, through graduate school and then into the labor market. So, I think that there is a lot there. Even parents I...

This episode is part of a series on understanding the intersection of race, privilege, and parenting.  Click here to view all the items in this series. Public schools are open to all children, no matter what their race, so where’s the privilege in schools? In this episode we’ll learn more about how even (and perhaps especially) well-meaning liberal White parents perpetuate inequalities in schools which disadvantage children from non-dominant cultures. We’ll cover the way that purportedly ‘scientific’ standardized tests perpetuate inequality, ‘second generation segregation’ (which is still alive and well in schools), how White parents who want the best for their children end up disadvantaging others – and what are some steps we can take to move forward.   Dr. Allison Roda's book Inequality in gifted and talented programs: Parental choices about status, school opportunity, and second-generation segregation - Affiliate link   References Antonio, A., Chang, M.J., Hakuta, K., Kenny, D.A., Levin, S., & Milem, J.F. (2004). Effects of racial diversity on complex thinking in college students. Psychological Science 15(8), 507-510. DOI 10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00710.x Bifulco, R., Cobb, C., & Bel, C. (2009). Can interdistrict choice boost student achievement? The case of Connecticut’s interdistrict magnet school program. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 31(4), 323-345. Brantlinger, E., Majd-Jabbari, M., & Guskin, S.L. (1996). Self-interest and liberal educational discourse: How ideology works for middle-class mothers. American Educational Research Journal 33(3), 571-597. Conway-Turner, J. (2016). Does diversity matter? The impact of school racial composition on the academic achievement of elementary school students in an ethnically diverse low-income sample (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from http://mars.gmu.edu/jspui/bitstream/handle/1920/10405/ConwayTurner_gmu_0883E_11159.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y Gamoran, A., Barfels, S., & Collares, A.C. (2016). Does racial isolation in school lead to long-term disadvantages? Labor market consequences of high school racial composition. American Journal of Sociology 121(4), 1116-1167. Holme, J.J. (2002). Buying homes, buying schools: School choice and the social construction of school quality. Harvard Educational Review 72(2), 177-205. Knoester, M., & Au, W. (2014). Standardized testing and school segregation: Like tinder for fire? Race Ethnicity and Education 20(1), 1-14. Mickelson, R.A. (2001). Subverting Swann: First- and second-generation segregation in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools. American Educational Research Journal 38(2), 215-252 National Center for Education Statistics (2017) National Assessment of Educational Progress (Reading and Math results). Retrieved from https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/ Nava, J. (2017, August 28). Do parents value school diversity? The PDK poll offers insights. Learning First Alliance. Retrieved from https://learningfirst.org/blog/parents-attitudes-toward-school-diversity Posey-Maddox, L. (2014). When middle-class parents choose urban schools: Class, race, and the challenge of equity in public education. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Roda, A. (2018). School choice and the politics of parenthood: Exploring parent mobilization as a catalyst for the common good. Peabody Journal of Education 1-20. Roda, A. (2017). Parenting in the age of high-stakes testing: Gifted and talented admissions and the meaning of parenthood. Teachers College Record 119, 1-53. Roda, A. (2015). Inequality in gifted and talented programs: Parental choices about status, school opportunity, and second-generation segregation. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Roda, A., & Wells, A.S. (2013). School choice policies and racial segregation: Where White parents’ good intentions and privilege collide. American Journal of Education 119)2), 261-293. Sattin-Bajaj, C., & Roda, A. (2018). Opportunity hoarding in school choice contexts: The role of policy design in promoting middle-class parents’ exclusionary behaviors. Educational Policy 1-44. Smith, J.A. (2015, February 2). As parents get more choice, S.F. schools resegregate. San Francisco Public Press. Retrieved from https://sfpublicpress.org/news/2015-02/as-parents-get-more-choice-sf-schools-resegregate Trachtenberg, P., Roda, A., & Coughlan, R. (2016, December 12). Remedying school segregation: How New Jersey’s Morris School District chose to make diversity work. The Century Foundation. Retrieved from https://tcf.org/content/report/remedying-school-segregation/ Watson, J. (2018, November 26). Cindy Hyde-Smith’s experience is not an outlier: School segregation in America is still a troubling fact today. NBC News. Retrieved from https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/cindy-hyde-smith-s-experience-not-outlier-school-segregation-america-n940361 Wells, A.S., Fox, L., & Cordodva-Cobo, D. (2016, February 9). How racially diverse schools and classrooms can benefit all students. The Century Foundation. Retrieved from http://apps.tcf.org/how-racially-diverse-schools-and-classrooms-can-benefit-all-students Williams, J. (2016, April 6). Why some Black leaders aren’t down with opting out of standardized testing. Take Part. Retrieved from http://www.takepart.com/article/2016/04/06/black-leaders-not-down-with-opt-out-standardized-testing

Discover the intriguing principles of the RIE approach, focusing on respectful parenting and the vital role of the 'educarer' in child development. Explore the balance between nurturing infants' independence and fostering secure connections. The discussion highlights the significance of modeling respectful behavior and engaging infants in caregiving. Delve into the contrasts between RIE and attachment parenting, and learn how granting autonomy in challenging situations develops intrinsic motivation. This enlightening conversation connects parenting practices with children's natural curiosity and growth.

This episode is part of a series on understanding the intersection of race, privilege, and parenting.  Click here to view all the items in this series. This episode launches a series of conversations on the intersection of race and parenting.  I spent a month wading around in the psychological literature on this topic and deciding how best to approach it, and eventually decided to split it into four topics. Today we’ll dig into White privilege in parenting through a conversation with Dr. Margaret Hagerman on her book White kids: Growing up with privilege in a racially divided America. For those of us who are White, White privilege can be an incredibly uncomfortable to discuss.  After all, we didn’t ask for this privilege – we were just born into a system where we have it.  But the reality is that we do have it, and many of the actions we take on a daily basis mean that we don’t just benefit from it but we actively take steps to perpetuate that advantage.  So in this episode we’ll learn how we can recognize that privilege in our lives and we’ll start to learn about some steps we can take to address it. In upcoming episodes we’ll look at White privilege in schools, parents’ responsibility to work on dismantling systems of racial privilege, how to talk with children about race, and what children learn about race in school (and what you can do to supplement this). I’m really excited to begin this conversation, but at the same time I want to acknowledge that while these episodes are based on a close reading of the literature, this is a massive subject and I’m not the expert here – I’m learning along with you.  If you think I’ve missed the mark, do let me know either in the comments or via the Contact page.  And if you’d like to participate in a series of conversations on this topic with other interested parents, do join us in the free Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group – just search for #Whiteprivilege to find the thread. You might also be interested to listen back to earlier related episodes: Wait, is my toddler racist? (Recorded back when I was still learning to distinguish between prejudice and racism!) How children form social groups, which is critical to understanding how they develop prejudices in the first place.       References Addo, F.R., Houle, J.N., & Simon, D. (2016). Young, Black, and (still) in the red: Parental wealth, race, and student loan debt. Race and Social Problems 8(1), 64-76.Birkhead, T.R. (2017, April 3). The racialization of juvenile justice and the role of the defense attorney. Boston College Law Review 58(2), 379-461. Bonilla-Silva, E. (2018). Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in America (5th Ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Brantlinger, E., Majd-Jabbari, M., & Guskin, S.L. (1996). Self-interest and liberal educational discourse: How ideology works for middle-class mothers. American Educational Research Journal 33(3), 571-597. DiAngelo, R. (2011). White fragility. International Journal of Critical Pedagogy 3(3), 54-70. Full article available at https://libjournal.uncg.edu/ijcp/article/viewFile/249/116 Goyal, M.K., Kupperman, N., & Cleary, S.D. (2015). Racial disparities in pain management of children with appendicitis in emergency departments. JAMA Pediatrics 169(11), 996-1002. Marrast, L., Himmelstein, D.U., & Woolhandler, D. (2016). Racial and ethnic disparities in mental health care for children and young adults: A national study. International Journal of Health Studies 46(4), 810-824. National Conference of State Legislators (2017, August 1). Disproportionality and disparity in child welfare. Author. Retrieved from http://www.ncsl.org/research/human-services/disproportionality-and-disparity-in-child-welfare.aspx Nicholson-Crotty, S., Birchmeier, Z., & Valentine, D. (2009). Exploring the impact of school discipline on racial disproportion in the juvenile justice system. Social Science Quarterly 90(4), 1003-1018. Nodjimbadem, K. (2017, May 30). The racial segregation of American cities was anything but accidental: A housing policy expert explains how federal government policies created the suburbs and the inner city. Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-federal-government-intentionally-racially-segregated-american-cities-180963494/ Poehlmann, J., Dallaire, D., Loper, A.B., & Shear, L.D. (2010). Children’s contact with their incarcerated parents: Research findings and recommendations. American Psychologist 65(6), 575-598. Scheindlin, S.A. (2018, May 31). Trump’s hard-right judges will do lasting damage to America (Opinion). The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/30/trump-judge-appointments-roe-v-wade-courts Sibka, R.J., Horner, R.H., Chung, C-G., Rausch, M.K., May, S.L., & Tobin, T. (2011). Race is not neutral: A national investigation of African American and Latino disproportionality in school discipline. School Psychology Review 40(1), 85-107. Wanless, S.B., & Crawford, P.A. (2016). Reading your way to a culturally responsive classroom. National Association for the Education of Young Children. Retrieved from https://www.naeyc.org/resources/pubs/yc/may2016/culturally-responsive-classroom   Read Full Transcript Jen: 01:34 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We are kicking off a series on the intersection of race with parenting and child development today. This actually grew out of the episode we did a while back on intergenerational trauma in which I acknowledged that the trauma that Black parents experience just as a result of being Black and I meant to go back and do another episode on that topic because it was just too big of a topic to slip into a more general episode on trauma, but when I got in touch with a Black friend to discuss how to go about covering this, she said, and I’m going to quote, “Don’t do an episode on that. It smacks of trauma porn.” Instead, she told me to look at what it means to be a White parent in America today and by extension in other colonizing and colonized countries. Jen: 02:16 So, I read a whole lot of books and I thought for a long time and that episode is now in the process of expanding to this series of several episodes. Today, we’re going to talk about White privilege, which I know can be a difficult topic to think about and White people including me, have a tendency to experience what Dr. Robin DiAngelo calls White Fragility, which is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable and triggers our defenses like denial, anger, fear, and guilt. And those caused us to argue or fall silent and leave the stress-inducing situation. So, if you’re feeling any of these emotions right now, after I said the words, White Privilege, and especially if you’re thinking, I don’t have privilege, my family doesn’t have enough money, or my partner just got laid off, or the Black cashier at the grocery store was really weird to me today. Jen: 03:04 Then I’d encourage you not to let your defense mechanisms engage by shutting off this podcast, but instead try to listen with an open mind. This stuff isn’t easy, but it is really important. So, today we’re here with Dr. Margaret Hagerman, who’s the author of the brand new book, White Kids: Growing Up with Privilege in a Racially Divided America. I was really excited to find this book because there are a lot of researchers writing on White privileges today, but not nearly so many who are writing about it specifically as it relates to children. Dr. Hagerman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Mississippi State University and as a Faculty Affiliate in both the African American Studies and Gender Studies programs. She received her Ph.D from Emory University. Her qualitative research focuses on the study of racial socialization or how kids learn about race, racism, inequality, and privilege. Her new book is called White Kids: Growing Up with Privilege in a Racially Divided America. And while Dr. Hagerman does study the process of how this occurs, both inside and outside of schools, today we’re going to focus on the outside of school processes because we’ll have another episode very soon that’s entirely devoted to how Whites experienced privilege in the school system. So welcome Dr. Hagerman. Dr. Hagerman: 04:14 Thank you for having me. Jen: 04:15 All right, so let’s start out by something that we don’t normally do on podcast episodes, but when I was doing my Masters in Education, it was really common for professors to ask students at the beginning of a paper, particularly on the topic of diversity to identify their privileges. So, I’m going to start by identifying some of mine and I wonder if you’d be kind enough to then follow by identifying some of yours? Dr. Hagerman: 04:37 Sure. Jen: 04:38 Okay, perfect. So my first obvious one is Whiteness. I am a White person from England now living in America. I think my second one is economic status. I’m currently lucky enough, fortunate enough, well, we say lucky, but I’m upper middle class, although I come from a working class family and I do not deny that, I imagine it is, in some measure at least due to the fact that I am a White person and I do have privilege. Jen: 05:02 So, it’s not entirely luck that has a gender, this fortune. I’m heterosexual. So that meant my sexuality is accepted by society. I never had to come out to anybody. I’m able bodied, I’m pretty much able to do whatever I need to do to get through life using the body that I was born with. And I also have some educational privilege because I have a number of Master’s degrees, a number of years of advanced education and I recognize also that my privilege has intertwined with the education that I’ve received as well. So, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind telling us a bit about your privileges as well. Dr. Hagerman: 05:33 Sure. So I am a White woman. I grew up in a family that I would identify as having upper middle class status and now I’m a college professor and so I think that that status is probably, you know, still depending on how you measure it. I’m a social scientist, but I think that you would say that that was still that status. I am also heterosexual, able bodied and I have a Ph.D. So, certainly that would put me in a status of having educational privilege. Jen: 06:01 Mm-hmm. Yeah. And also just wanting to make the point before we move on that I deliberately sought out White researchers to interview for this series, partly because we’re examining Whiteness rather than Blackness and partly also because I think it can be easier to truly hear and take on these truths when they’re presented by someone who looks like you and sounds like you and is more like you rather than someone who appears to be on the outside than looking in. But I do want to acknowledge that Black researchers and activists have been talking about White privilege for a really long time. And my hope here is that we can build on rather than refute their work. So, let’s get started with a topic that seems really easy, but perhaps it’s not. So what is race? Dr. Hagerman: 06:43 That is a great question. So, I think that often people, at least my students for example, tell me that they think race is a biological concept, but in fact race is not a biological concept, but instead a social concept. And so the way that I like to think about this is that the lines that demarcate different races, these were lines that were drawn by humans and these were lines that were drawn in ways that relates to political projects. And so as philosopher Charles Mills puts it, “The reality of race is a reality that socially created not an intrinsic reality of the human.” And so I think what that really gets at is the ways in which race is a political system and so where you are located within that system or how you’re categorized, shapes, things like where you live, who you marry, how you see the world and so I think a better or maybe an easier way to think about race is to think about race as a political grouping. And as Dorothy Roberts who is a legal scholar puts it, “Race has always served a political function.” And I think that that’s really important in understanding the history of race and the history of racism and where that leaves us today. Jen: 07:52 Mm-hmm. Yeah, and something that I learned as I was researching this, the way that we know this is a political construct and not a biological construct is that the groups change, right? Dr. Hagerman: 08:02 Absolutely. Jen: 08:03 Sometimes the people who were from Chinese origin will be classified as White and sometimes they’ll be classified as Asian and so the people in power able to change the groups to suit their own needs. Dr. Hagerman: 08:14 Absolutely. Jen: 08:15 So, that to me it was a key learning. I always just sort of symbol, if a person looks like a certain thing then they probably are that thing, but it turns out if you actually dig deeper into it, the group that’s in power has shifted what constitutes different groups and what privileges those groups have to suit their own needs at various points in history. Dr. Hagerman: 08:34 Right. Jen: 08:35 So yeah, it’s… that initial point just kind of blew my mind when I, when I started thinking about it. So. Okay. So a second question, and I think that the children that you talked to in your study had some thoughts on this. Is it racist to discuss race? Dr. Hagerman: 08:47 So this is a question that certainly some of the children would debate with one another, like you just alluded to, but my answer to this is no. It’s not racist to discuss race and as many different scholars coming out of legal studies as well as sociology have found in research and in history, you know, we are at a moment right now where many people talk about new forms of racism. So something like color blindness, like saying that you don’t care about race or that you don’t even notice race or that race doesn’t really matter in our society and that to talk about it is just to re, you know, introduce it and to be racist that that’s really just a way of perpetuating the racial status quo and that, you know, the reality is we live in a society in which resources are allocated along these lines of race. Dr. Hagerman: 09:35 And so to not talk about race is not going to get us anywhere. If anything, I think it will perpetuate the problem. Jen: 09:41 Mm-hmm. Dr. Hagerman: 09:42 So no, I do not think it is racist to discuss race. Jen: 09:45 Okay. And we’ll come back to color blindness in a bit because I think that is so important. But I wonder if first you could give us just a little bit of background on your book. What and who did you study? Dr. Hagerman: 09:53 Sure. So White Kids is a book that’s based on two years of ethnographic research with 30 families who identified both as White but also as affluent. And so these are families that have both race and class privilege. Uh, the children in this book are all in middle school, when I did the initial data collection, so the two-year time period. I do go back and re-interview them when they’re in high school, although that’s not the focus of the book. Dr. Hagerman: 10:17 It comes up at the end. And so these were families that were living in a midwestern community and were kind enough to let me into their world and the sort of private sphere of White families. And so I spent this two years interviewing children, interviewing parents, observing them as they go about their everyday business, you know, birthday parties and soccer practice. And gymnastics and so forth and so I spent a lot of time with these families and my research questions were really about the ways that these families communicated about race and this question is informed by the research on this topic of racial socialization, which really comes out of this really important and powerful work by Black scholars in both sociology and psychology who historically were really focused on understanding how Black families communicate about race and particularly how Black parents prepare their children for, you know, potential experiences of racism. Dr. Hagerman: 11:12 And so sort of building on that scholarship and thinking about how White families are not removed from the discussion of race or racism in America, but in fact are, you know, central to it, you know, I wanted to explore what was going on in these families and really try to see how it is that young White people are developing ideas that either reproduce racism or racial inequality or maybe rework it or maybe even challenge it. Jen: 11:39 And you studied two very different communities in the book, right? Dr. Hagerman: 11:43 Right. So the, there’s one metropolitan area and there’s two neighborhoods within that metropolitan area or within the actual city that I look at, but then I also compare that to a nearby suburban area and sort of notice the differences in why people chose to live in these different communities. So some dynamics with the schools, dynamics with extracurricular activities and so forth. And because these families have these economic resources, they can make all kinds of different choices. And so because of that I was really interested in why, you know, they would choose to live where they did. Jen: 12:16 Mm-hmm. Okay. And so what kinds of ideas did the children that you interviewed have about race? Dr. Hagerman: 12:21 Well, I think one of the interesting findings from my work is that not all of these children’s shared the same ideas, and there was more variation I think in some of their thinking than what I had initially anticipated. But I did find some powerful patterns across different groups of children. And you know, I think one of the things that I was really interested in was to what extent do these children believe that racism is still a problem in America? And for some of the kids they told me that they did not think it was, while other children had lots to say on the matter and could give me very specific examples of racism in the United States. And so the book really goes through and has, you know, a lot of the children’s voices told by them like their actual quotations and some incidents that I observed when I was spending time with them. And you’ve really got, I think a rich sense of the, both the range of ideas but also the patterns that exist as well. Jen: 13:14 Mm-hmm. And where there major patterns appearing in each of the two communities that you studied? Dr. Hagerman: 13:19 Yes. So for the families that lived in the suburban...

This podcast explores emotion regulation in children and provides resources to support their development. It discusses the significance of positive and negative behavior, the role of caregivers, and the impact of disciplinary practices. The podcast also delves into the challenges parents face in regulating their own emotions.

I regularly receive questions from listeners asking me whether they should put their child in daycare or preschool and my response has typically been that there isn’t a lot of research on the benefits and drawbacks for middle class children on whether or not the child goes to daycare/preschool, and that is still true.  I’ve done research on my listeners and while parents of all types listen to the show, the majority of you are fortunate enough to not be highly economically challenged. So in this episode we’ll talk about why preschool is considered to be such a good thing for children of lower-income families, and also what research is available on the effects – both positive and negative – of daycare and preschool on children of middle- and upper-income families. You’ll also hear me mention in the show that it’s really, really difficult even for researchers to accurately measure the quality of a daycare/preschool setting because you can’t just get data on child:teacher ratios and teacher qualifications to do this.  You have to actually visit the setting and understand the experience of the children to do this – but what do you look for?  And what questions do you ask?  In the show I mention a list of questions you can ask the staff and things you can look out for that Evelyn Nichols, M.Ed of Mighty Bambinis and I put together – Click here to download. Let me know (in the comments below) if you have follow-up questions as you think through this decision for your family!   Read Full Transcript Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today we’re covering an altruistic episode – one that I don’t need, because we already made this decision a long time ago – and that’s on how to decide whether you should put your child in daycare or preschool. I regularly get questions from listeners on this and my response has typically been that there isn’t a lot of research on the benefits and drawbacks for middle class children on whether or not the child goes to daycare, and that is still true. I’m going to be really up-front here and say that the vast majority of the literature related to childcare is conducted from the perspective of looking at methods to close the enormous deficit in skills – particularly language skills – with which poor children, and particularly poor Black children, enter kindergarten. Yet very, very few of these researchers ever think to question the system in which this research, and the poor children themselves, reside – these children only have a “deficit” of skills because the school system isn’t set up to value and develop the skills these children DO bring. So the vast majority of this research says something along the lines of “poor children have X, Y, and Z skills when they enter daycare, and daycare has success at closing the X gap between poor children and middle class children but not Y and Z.” Now I’ve done research on the listeners of this show and while there are certainly parents of all kinds listening, I think my listeners – and certainly the people who email me asking about daycare – are mostly fortunate enough to not be highly economically challenged. Many of them have been stay-at-home parents for several years and are trying to decide whether the child would benefit more from continuing to stay home or go to daycare, rather than making this decision from the perspective of “our family needs another income so my child is going to have to go to daycare,” although there are a few who worry about whether they are somehow being selfish for wanting to work and sending their child to daycare. So we should acknowledge that the concerns of parents who are asking me about daycare and preschool for their children are pretty different from those of most of the researchers who look at this question. But there are some researchers who have taken a different perspective, or who have looked at the data in such a way that allows us to understand more about how this decision affects our children, so today we’re going to look at the what the scientific literature says on this topic. We’ll look at whatever research is available in the pre-kindergarten years, so throughout this episode when I say “daycare” I mean care for infants, and when I say “preschool” I mean care for toddlers and up, and I’ll let you know the age group that the studies refer to. And I have a couple of other treats lined up for you as well. If you’re in the U.S. and possibly some other Western countries as well you may be gearing up for preschool touring season so my friend Evelyn Nichols, who used to run the RIE- and Reggio Emillia-inspired daycare Mighty Bambinis, has written a blog post for us drawing on her expertise running a daycare as well as her Masters in Education to help us understand what questions we should REALLY be asking on a preschool tour to get a feel for whether a preschool is going to be a good fit for your family. That post will be out next week, but if you want to get a headstart (or you have tours coming up this week!) head on over to yourparentingmojo.com/preschool to download a really cool printable list of questions to take on a preschool tour with space for you to jot down your answers. That printable is available right now, and if you’ve subscribed to the show through my website then you actually received it in the same email I used to let you know that this show is live. If you’re not subscribed through my site then head on over to yourparentingmojo.com/preschool to download the printable to take with you on your tours, because it’s going to let you know the kinds of questions to ask and things to look out for that will help you to judge the real quality of a care setting, which the literature shows is not as easy to judge as you might imagine. OK, now into the research. I want to lay just a little bit of groundwork with research on the effects of daycare in infancy, even though that isn’t our focus. A lot of the studies looking at daycare and preschool takes advantage of policy changes related to parental leave in European countries, and looks at shift in children’s abilities before and after the change. And as a little methodological side note, these studies are done in a pretty different way from the usual ones we see on the show where a researcher takes 50 children into a lab and asks 25 of them to do one kind of task and the other 25 just play a game and the researchers ask both groups to do a different task and see which children can do it better. For many of these studies the researcher calls up, for example, Statistics Norway and says “could you please send me the data you have on the percentage of mothers that worked the year before and after the maternity leave increase, as well as the test scores for all five-year-old students in the country in those years, and also the final graduation rates and test scores for those children when they left school?” and Statistics Norway says “certainly Madam; we’ll send it to you within a couple of weeks” and the researcher can just sit in their office and run some statistical analysis on the data. So this data can give us some incredibly powerful country-level information that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive to gather by an individual researcher. But we should also acknowledge that this data isn’t able to tell us much about the individual-level processes going on. A child might score poorly or well on a standardized test for a host of reasons not related to the amount of time they spent in daycare or preschool, so while these studies can tell us about how children *on average* respond to being in daycare or preschool, they don’t tell us much about how YOUR CHILD will respond to this. So one study on infant care compared child outcomes after an increase in mandatory paid maternity leave from 0 to 4 months, and mandatory unpaid maternity leave from 3 to 12 months in Norway in 1977. These children were 29 in 2006 when the study happened, and the study found that 2.7% more of the children completed high school after the reform, going up to 5.2% for those whose mothers have less than 10 years of education. There wasn’t really any high quality childcare available in Norway for under two-year-olds at the time, so the alternative was grandparents or other informal care, so this isn’t really a comparison between the kinds of care that most of my listeners are considering. An American study found that children whose mothers worked during the first year had lower scores on a test of cognitive ability and verbal intelligence, but this was potentially offset by a positive effect when the mother works in the second and subsequent years. The negative first year effect wasn’t impacted by the increased maternal income that came with the mother’s work, although this did appear to play an important role in producing the positive effect in the second and later years, but this study didn’t look at the kind of care the mother was using so we don’t know if it was center-based or informal (which is a pretty important distinction, as informal care is regularly associated with detrimental outcomes for children), and we also don’t know anything whether these differences between the two groups persisted as the children got older. Another American study aimed to control for factors that might have differed between families using daycare and families not using daycare - so things like the fact that women who return to work earlier may provide a less nurturing or stimulating home environment and be less likely to breast feed, and the type of care used. These researchers found adverse effects of maternal employment on cognitive outcomes for non-Hispanic White children, but not for African American or Hispanic children, that persisted until age 7 or 8, although the effects were not large and were worse among lower-income families. The child’s home environment was an important factor predicting cognitive ability, breastfeeding didn’t seem to impact the results one way or the other, with informal care provided by non-relatives again producing the worst outcomes. One particularly pessimistic study said that looking at young children’s verbal ability isn’t a very good way of assessing the impacts of maternal work because we should actually be looking farther ahead, and if we do that, we see that mothers’ early work is linked with worse performance on reading and math tests at age 5 and 6 – about the same decline in performance as if the mother had 2-3 years less education than she really does. This is one of the few studies that looked at part-time employment and found a reduced but still negative effect for part time work, but the effects of the type of daycare used were highly mixed. It also disaggregated the results by economic status, noting that “children with working parents come from relatively advantaged backgrounds or possess attributes associated with rapid cognitive development,” which is a bit opaque to me but I think what they’re saying is that White middle class parents are “good parents,” and when these parents spend less time with their children because they’re working, the children experience adverse outcomes. Once again, however, what we’re really measuring is the ability of all children to do well on the types of tests that predict academic ability in a system that is really designed for White children to succeed in. So that’s what some of the research on working while the child is very young has found – in general, it seems to be more negative when low quality care is used and the parent is “advantaged,” and may be somewhat offset if the mother continues to work in subsequent years. But what happens if the mother remains at home for the child’s first and maybe second year, and then returns to work after that? The research on this front is decidedly mixed, so we’re going to spend some time teasing it out. Once again, there is a large body of work demonstrating the “benefits” of high quality care for the population of welfare recipients, largely because the skills that these families develop in their children are not ones that are valued in school so formal daycare environments get these children used to functioning in an environment where you need to sit still and listen to the teacher, which helps the children once they get to school since sitting still and listening to the teacher is a valued skill in that environment. In other words, White middle class parents do just fine at preparing their children to succeed in a school that espouses White middle class values, a finding that is echoed in several other studies as well. A couple of studies looked at Norway’s 1998 Care-for-Cash reform, which provided cash to families with young children who did not use formal child care facilities and instead took care of their infant or toddler themselves, used grandparent care, or used other informal care. This program apparently reduced the score on a reading test by about 1.24% among mothers with low levels of education. There’s a small increase in the scores driven by increased income from the mothers going back to work, but this is offset by the use of low quality informal child care and encourages the mother to have more children who will also have lower scores. But on the flip-side of that, another study found that older children whose mothers had an infant or toddler who made them eligible for the Cash-for-Care program actually had a better-than-expected 10th grade GPA, possibly because the school day in Norway is short and students get a lot of homework assignments but after-school programs are of low quality, so having the mother available to help could have supported the older child’s educational achievement. But this was just a tentative hypothesis, as the study didn’t seem to fully explore the link between maternal education or family income and the child’s outcomes. It’s possible that White middle class mothers might have provided more effective homework support for children than lower income mothers from other backgrounds. Now I want to take a little detour here because I’ve mentioned the terms “high quality” and “low quality” a few times now, and you’re probably wondering “well, what IS a high quality preschool?”. It seems as though that should be a relatively easy thing to define, but it turns out that it’s actually not. Some researchers in the U.K. looked at the indicators that the U.K. Schools Inspectorate, which is called OFSTED, uses measure quality – things like staff qualifications, the staff-child ratio and group size, which roll up into a score of Outstanding, Satisfactory, or Inadequate. It turns out that attending preschool that is rated Outstanding is associated with moving up less than one level on just one of the 13 scales that make up the Foundation Stage of primary education at age 5, and children who attend Inadequate preschools do not always have the lowest readiness scores. It seems as though the type of administrative data that is usually used to measure quality is easy to collect and conveniently objective, but the actual experiences of the children in the setting, which is also called “process quality,” can only be measured by actually observing children in the setting – which makes this data very time-consuming and expensive to collect (which is why nobody does it on a large scale). Other studies have found positive but weak relationships between the average qualification level of staff and process quality; specifically for social skills like being cooperative, sociable, and less worried and upset. The same researchers found that helping some of the nursery staff to achieve a qualification leads to a significant improvement in process quality, but studies in the U.S. have found few associations between qualifications and quality at all. The blog post that I’m working on with Evelyn Nichols that will be published next week will help you to ask questions when you go on preschool tours that will help you to get at some of these process quality metrics, and the printable is something you can actually take with you so you remember what questions to ask and have space to jot down some short answers. I should acknowledge that pretty much all of the research that I’ve found on quality is related to quality in formal daycare centers, rather than related to in-home nannies or nanny shares (which are a pretty common way to care for young children among the middle class in the U.S.), or in informal settings like the grandmother down the street who takes in the neighborhood children for a pretty cheap rate and probably does not have any formal qualifications. Daycare centers and preschools are much easier to inspect and assign numerical scores to, so that’s where the research seems to focus. OK, so back on to the implications of being in preschool for children. A study by Dr. Christina Felfe in Germany published in 2012 looked at changes in parenting practices after the expansion of parental leave from 3 months in 1979 to 36 months of job protected leave and 24 months of that being paid leave (which probably makes American parents want to cry). In contrast with previous studies conducted in Quebec, which found that the introduction of a childcare subsidy led to more hostile parenting styles and thus to a deterioration of child well-being, this one in Germany found that the quality of maternal care does not deteriorate as a result of sending the child to center-based care. The paper notes that this could be because the kinds of activities that get crowded out in the mother-child interactions are things like running errands and watching TV, and I did want to linger on this point for just a minute. Firstly, I think that running errands actually has the potential to be a very rich interaction for children; my 4.5YO daughter Carys loves to come grocery shopping with me and we spend quite a bit of time talking about the things we’re buying and now she’s receiving pocket money I imagine the cost of items is going to become more of a discussion point. She helps me to unpack the bags when we get home, which Dr. Roberta Golinkoff cites as a perfect example of an activity that supports the development of skills related to cooperation. It also reminded me of things I’ve read in the homeschooling literature discussing how parents whose children are in school tend to run errands while their children are at school, but it turns out that running errands is a lot of what life is about. As a result, many children get to age 16 or 18 never having been in a bank or a post office or having any idea how to interact with the staff of those institutions. There’s a real tendency in modern parenting to get these kinds of errands out of the way so you can do the “fun stuff” with your children, but when you’re a stay-at-home parent the children are around all the time so these errands become a natural part of their lives and they see what it means to be an adult rather than being apart from adults in school and learning how to be an adult there. And the other part of this that caught my attention was the observation that low-quality solo time in front of the TV is something the child is less likely to spend time doing if they attend preschool, which reminded me of an article the New York Times ran just a couple of days ago discussing the pressures of modern parenting. It talked about how the American Academy of Pediatrics is contributing to this trend by saying that if parents do allow their children to watch TV, the parents...

Emotion regulation: It’s one of the biggest challenges of childhood (and parenthood!).  We all want our children to be able to do it, but they struggle with it so much, and this is the root of many of our own struggles in parenting. But instead of trying to get them to reduce the intensity of their emotions, should we instead be trying to reduce the stress they experience from things like a too-hard seat at school, itchy labels, and the scratch of cutlery on plates?  Is there any peer-reviewed research supporting this idea? We’ll find out in this, the most frustrating episode I’ve ever researched, on Dr. Stuart Shanker’s book Self-Reg!   References Baumeister, R.F., Twenge, J.M., & Nuss, C.K. (2002). Effects of social exclusion on cognitive processes: Anticipated aloneness reduces intelligent thought. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84(4), 817-827. Crnic, K.A., & Greenberg, M.T. (1990). Minor parenting stresses with young children. Child Development 61(5), 1628-1637. Davies, P.T., Woitach, M.J., Winter, M.A., & Cummings, E.M. (2008). Children’s insecure representations of interparental relationship and their school adjustment: The mediating role of attention difficulties. Child Development 79(5), 1570-1582. Gershoff, E.T., & Font, S.A. (2016). Corporal punishment in U.S. public schools: Prevalence, disparities in use, and status in state and federal policy. Social Policy Report 30(1). Retrieved from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/j.2379-3988.2016.tb00086.x Grant, B. (2009, May 7). Elsevier published 6 fake journals. The Scientist. Retrieved from https://www.the-scientist.com/the-nutshell/elsevier-published-6-fake-journals-44160 Gross, J.J. (2015). Emotion regulation: Current status and future prospects. Psychological Inquiry 26(1), 1-26. Full article available at http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.670.3420&rep=rep1&type=pdf Hamoudi, Amar, Murray, Desiree W., Sorensen, L., & Fontaine, A. (2015). Self-Regulation and Toxic Stress: A Review of Ecological, Biological, and Developmental Studies of Self-Regulation and Stress. OPRE Report # 2015-30, Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Heaviside S, Farris E. Fast Response Survey System. Washington, DC: US GPO; 1993. Public School Kindergarten Teachers’ Views on Children’s Readiness for School. Contractor Rep. Statistical Analysis Report. Lyons, D.M., Parker, K.J., & Schatzberg, A.F. (2010). Animal models of early life stress: Implications for understanding resilience. Developmental Psychobiology 52(7), 616-624. Lyons, D.M., & Parker, K.J. (2007). Stress inoculation-induced indications of resilience in monkeys. Journal of Traumatic Stress 20(4), 423-433. Masten, A. S. (2001). Ordinary magic. Resilience processes in development. American Psychologist, 56(3), 227–238. Muraven, M., Tice, D.M., & Baumeister, R.F. (1998). Self-control as limited resource: Regulatory depletion patterns. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74(3), 774-789. Murray, D.W., Rosanbalm, K., & Christopoulos, C. (2016). Self-Regulation and Toxic Stress Report 3: A Comprehensive Review of Self-Regulation Interventions from Birth through Young Adulthood. OPRE Report # 2016-34, Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Newman, K. (2014, September 3). Book publishing, not fact checking. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/09/why-books-still-arent-fact-checked/378789/ Raio, C. Orederu T.A., Palazzolo, L., Shurick, A.A., & Phelps, E.A. (2013). Cognitive emotion regulation fails the stress test. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110(37), 15139-15144. Schuessler, J. (2018, October 4). Hoaxers slip breastaurants and dog-park sex into journals. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/arts/academic-journals-hoax.html Shanker, S. (n.d.). The self-reg view on: Schools as “Self-Reg Havens.” Self-Regulation Institute. Retrieved from https://self-reg.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Mehrit_Havens.pdf?pdf=schools-havens Shanker, S., & Francis, T. (n.d.). Hide and seek: The challenge of understanding the full complexity of stress and stress-reactivity. Reframed 1(1) (no pagination). Retrieved from https://selfregulationinstitute.org/reframed-volume-1-issue-1-july-2017-hide-seek/ Shanker, S. & Burgess, C. (n.d.) Self-Reg and reframing.  Reframed 1(1) (no pagination). Retrieved from https://selfregulationinstitute.org/reframed-volume-1-issue-1-july-2017-self-reg-reframing/ Silvers, J.A., Insel, C., Powers, A., Franz, P. Helion, C. Martin, R.E., Weber, J., Mischel, W., Casey, B.J., & Ochsner, K.N. (2017). vlPFC–vmPFC–Amygdala Interactions Underlie Age-Related Differences in Cognitive Regulation of Emotion. Cerebral Cortex 27, 3502-3514.   Read Full Transcript Transcript Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  Today’s episode comes to us courtesy of listener Alison, who sent me some information on Dr. Stuart Shanker’s work on what he calls “Self-Reg,” which seems to be his branded term for “Self-Regulation,” and asked me to explore it in an episode.  And I really don’t think she or I realized what a can of worms we were opening up when she sent the question and I said I’d look into it. According to Dr. Shanker’s Self-Regulation Institute, Shanker Self-Reg ® 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.” I got Dr. Shanker’s book, which is also called Self-Reg, and I have to say that my warning signals started to go off when every footnote that I went to check out led to a book, rather than to a peer-reviewed journal article.  Now journal articles aren’t perfect; I actually saw an article in the New York Times recently on three scientists who managed to publish twenty papers in journal articles across a variety of fields over the last year in which they “started with politically fashionable conclusions which they worked backward to support by aping the relevant fields’ methods and arguments, and sometimes inventing data.”  And I’ve also seen articles describing how major, respected publishers released entire publications that were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies and looked like peer-reviewed medical journals but didn’t disclose their sponsorship. But in general, journal articles are how scientific information gets disseminated, because they include a methods section and a results section so experts and other readers like you and me can understand how they arrived at their conclusions.  Then other scientists can replicate that work if they want to, or at least offer critiques of the methods and conclusions.  But no such system is in place when a book is published. Craig Silverman, who wrote a book on media accuracy, says in an article in The Atlantic that he did an anecdotal survey asking people: “Between books, magazines, and newspapers, which do you think has the most fact-checking?”  Almost inevitably, the people he spoke with guessed books, but it turns out that fact-checking has never been standard practice in the book publishing world at all.  The article goes on to say that “reliance on books creates a weak link in the chain of media accuracy” because “magazine fact checkers typically treat reference to a fact in a published book as confirmation of the fact, yet too often the books themselves have undergone no such rigorous process.”  Further, when only the book title is provided in the footnotes we have no idea what in the book is being cited – whether it’s the entire premise of the book, or some obscure sentence on page 475. So I want to be clear here and say that I don’t have reason to believe that Dr. Shanker’s book is a lie.  I also don’t have evidence to show that the books he’s relying on to support his points are based on lies, mainly because I don’t have time to read a hundred books in preparation for this episode.  But what I do know is that books are about the least reliable form of evidence you could draw on to make a point about something that’s important to get right, and that he also doesn’t cite research that I now know is available that could actually have supported his ideas.  Instead he makes statements about how he has scanned the brains of hyper-aroused children in his lab (but doesn’t describe any published journal article coming out of that work, which is pretty unusual). Elsewhere he describes a process of physical sensations becoming associated with distinctive emotions: “For example, if an infant is hungry and her cries go unheeded, her muscles tense up, which is associated with sensations of discomfort, and a distinct feeling of anger may begin to emerge.  If a caregiver responds to these first signs of anger by scolding the child…then the physical sensations and the nascent feeling of anger that the child experiences may become further bound up with feelings of hopelessness.  As the child grows older, the same physical sensations – a stomachache, for instance – can trigger feelings of anger and hopelessness – and leave a parent befuddled, completely unaware of how a deep-seated physical/emotional association might be the culprit…” Again, there’s no citation provided for this work and I’ve yet to find any research or researcher who can corroborate that this process happens. A third example is related to a concept called the “interbrain,” which I did find described elsewhere, and which is a kind of shared intuitive channel of communication, which is how parents sense things like tiny shifts in their child’s mood.  Then Dr. Shanker goes on to imply that for some children, minor stressors like “the gleam in a parent’s eyes or a hug or a gentle touch, which normally would be a source of positive arousal, can be more than the baby can bear.”  Once again, I couldn’t find any literature or researcher to support this claim, and my overall impression of the book is that Dr. Shanker takes research on children facing severe stressors like poverty and violence, and connects that research to minor stressors like itchy clothing labels, whirring fans, and the gleam in a parent’s eye to tell us middle class White parents that our children have severe problems, when actually the research doesn’t really support these claims. When I went on Dr. Shanker’s Self-Regulation Institute’s website to look for evidence supporting the principles of Self-Reg I found a series of videos discussing the principles which, strangely, I can no longer locate.  One of which talked about the movement’s detractors and how people who don’t want to be convinced of Self-Reg’s benefits will never be convinced.  He went on to say something along the lines of “there’s evidence to support Self-Reg” – but nowhere is this evidence ever actually described. If you search “self-reg” in any scholarly database, you come up with pretty much nothing except the occasional hit on a non-peer-reviewed article authored by Dr. Shankar.  And I’ve also learned in the course of researching episodes for this show that when a single researcher’s name gets too attached to a concept – if they’ve basically made their name on a concept, then that’s an extra reason to be suspicious.  We saw this in our episode on grit, where we found that the peer-reviewed papers showed effect sizes that were nowhere near as large as Dr. Angela Duckworth describes them to be in places like her book and her TED talk.  Growth Mindset may also be a useful tool but is likely not as large a determinant of success as Dr. Carol Dweck states in her TED talk.  So when I see that Dr. Shanker is essentially the only researcher whose name is tied to Self-Reg but he has actually trademarked the term “Shanker Self-Reg,” my danger radar starts beeping even more loudly. Honestly, I find the claims about self-reg to be compelling.  I want to believe them.  They align with the way I view children, which is that bad behavior isn’t bad behavior; it’s the child trying to tell us something and what Dr. Shanker argues that they are trying to tell us is that they are stressed. But in the absence of much in the way of real evidence in the book or on the Self-Regulation Institute’s website I reached out to the organization to ask them what they had.  I told them that I really do want to believe in what they say but I asked to see some evidence, and the very friendly response that I received essentially said two things.  Firstly, that “Self-Reg is a relatively young model and, as a whole new approach rather than a program, there is time involved in learning the model and refining how best to apply it.  We have begun this work and I am happy to share the research we do have.  I would welcome you to look at our website,” and then there’s a link to the home page, not to any specific evidence for the approach. I’ve seen this idea of it being a “young model” bandied about a lot in the Self-Reg materials – but what confuses me here is that they somehow claim that it’s a young model and they’re still conducting research on it, but Dr. Shanker has written a book that’s at least two years old by the time you’re hearing this.  His bio on his website says he received a $7 million grant in 2005 to establish a state-of-the-art cognitive and social neuroscience centre at York University in Toronto, which was the largest gift the university had ever received.  He has advised governments on child development in at last twelve countries, and developed Shanker Self-Reg, his five domain model for understanding, recognizing and alleviating the impact of negative stress.  The Mehrit Centre, which also funds Dr. Shanker’s work, has a Foundations Certificate program that you can pay $1495 to take online, as well as a Level 2 Facilitator Program which grants you certification in The Shanker Method ® for $2,195, a Master’s Modules Program for $2,195…and the list goes on.  So my question is: if Dr. Shanker has had over a decade in his state-of-the-art cognitive and social neuroscience centre, and has had time to write a book and develop courses to train people on Self-Reg and wants to see the entire country of Canada become a “Self-Reg haven,” as he says in one of his marketing pieces, where’s the research?  How do we know this stuff actually helps? Because so often in doing this show I’ve seen ideas that have prima facie merit actually don’t hold up when we start looking into them.  The first one of these that I ran into was on how to how to raise a child who isn’t racially prejudiced – I’d always just assumed that the best way to do this is to just not mention race, because then my daughter will learn that it isn’t an issue.  And it turns out that this is actually one of the most effective ways to raise a racist child!  And before I did my episode on self-esteem, I just assumed I’d find studies saying how beneficial it is, and then some studies on how to get more of it, and it turned out that actually – despite a massive push in California in the ‘90s to increase every child’s self-esteem as a way of solving the state’s societal problems –  high self-esteem hasn’t been shown to cause good life outcomes – it’s entirely possible that people who have good life outcomes just have high self-esteem. So while it can be attractive to jump on these bandwaggons, that’s not what we do here at Your Parenting Mojo.  We dig into what research there is and get our hands dirty and then try to make a decision based on the best evidence we can find. Which brings me to the second major point of the email that I received from the Self-Regulation Institute, which was to direct me to their new open-access peer reviewed journal called Reframed: The Journal of Self-Reg.  The journal has a link to a page showing its editors; perhaps not surprisingly Dr. Shanker is listed first, followed by Lisa Bayrami who is the Executive Director of the Self-Regulation Institute.  The Managing Editor is Anne Showalater, a Ph.D Candidate in Canadian Studies and is the person who responded to my email.  Two of the four members of the Editorial Board are described as having explicit connections to the Self-Regulation Institute or the Mehrit Centre, so I think it’s safe to say that this journal is probably not going to publish any research that’s critical of Self-Reg.  And actually, as far as I can tell,  it’s not going to publish much in the way of actual scientific research at all – it’s essentially a series of blog posts describing different aspects of Self-reg, with sources cited at the end of each one – the majority, as usual, being books rather than peer-reviewed journal articles.  So in this episode I’m going to go through the references provided in the book, as well as in the Self-Reg “journal” articles, and from other peer-reviewed sources and we’ll see what we can find.   So what is Self-Reg?  I’ll summarize the first chapter of Dr. Shanker’s book.  He starts by arguing that while *self-control* is important in being successful in life, sometimes the more we try to control ourselves the harder it gets.  More important than self-control is the amount of stress we are under and how we manage this, or how we self-regulate.  Dr. Shanker gives the example of cold outside being a “classic example of an environmental stressor that the autonomic nervous system responds to” – in a roundabout way, he states that if there are too many external stressors like being cold on top of the usual emotional, social, and cognitive stressors then the child’s limbic system can become hypersensitive to the slightest hint of danger.  It registers the cold as a big threat that causes the release of neurochemicals that trigger fight or flight mode, and if that doesn’t work then the brain freezes – like an animal playing dead.  The oldest, most “reptilian” part of the child’s brain releases adrenaline which sets off a series of reactions that result in the release of cortisol.  You’ve likely felt the result: heart rate, breathing rate, and blood pressure increase; you’re alert and reactive; your sweat glands open to cool you down, and endorphins are released that increase your pain tolerance.  These...

What is – WHAT? Resources for Infant Educarers, or RIE (pronounced like Rye bread) is the parenting approach that we use with our daughter Carys which is grounded in respect for the child.  I’ve wanted to do an episode on this topic ever since I started the show but at first I didn’t want you thinking I was all California-granola-hippie-crazy and stop listening.  Now I figure there are enough of you that have been listening for quite a while that you’re willing to at least listen to this ‘respect for children’ idea. Because it’s no exaggeration to say that it has literally transformed my parenting, and underpins every interaction I have with my daughter.  I’m so proud of the relationship we have that’s based in our respect for each other. In this episode we’ll cover a brief history of how RIE came into existence, Magda Gerber’s eight qualities of a good parent, and how to encourage your child to play independently… And I’ll be honest and say that this is probably the first episode in the entire show which is not grounded in scientific research because I wanted to give you an overview of RIE first – and also discuss the parts of it we didn’t/don’t practice, before we devote an entire upcoming episode to what aspects of RIE are supported by scientific research – so stay tuned for that!   References Gerber, M., & Johnson, A. (2002). Your self-confident baby: How to encourage your child’s natural abilities – from the very start. Nashville, TN: Turner. Gerber, M. (2003). Dear Parent: Caring for infants with respect. Los Angeles, CA: Resources for Infant Educarers. Karp, H. (2004). The ‘fourth trimester’: A framework and strategy for understanding and resolving colic. Retrieved from https://www.drdefranca.com/the-fourth-trimester-and-colic.html Read Full Transcript Transcript Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today we’re going to talk about a topic that is near and dear to my heart, and that is what is known as Resources for Infant Educarers, which is abbreviated to RIE, which (for reasons I’ve never understood) is pronounced “Rye.”  Now I’m guessing that those of you listening to this right now are dividing yourselves into two groups: those of you in one group are saying “finally!” and those of you in the other are thinking “Resources for Infant – what???.”  So this episode will really be for those of you in the second group to learn about RIE, and those of you in the first can listen along and nod your heads and email me afterward if I got any of it wrong.  This will probably be the first episode in this entire show where we really don’t discuss much in the way of scientific research, because I actually have an entire episode lined up that delves into what aspects of RIE are supported by the literature, so we’re not going to do that here.  And I should also acknowledge that I’m going to tell you about the core principles of RIE but I’m also going to tell you about the parts of it that I didn’t or don’t practice, because I really don’t follow any approach dogmatically. So where did RIE come from?  Well, I was surprised to learn that it actually originated in the work of Dr. Emmi Pikler, who worked in Austria and Hungary in the middle of the 20th Century.  She had seen that working class children who played on the street had lower rates of injuries than middle class children who played inside under a governess’ watchful eye.  She also studied with two doctors who focused on treating children as people, rather than just as an illness that needed to be fixed, and who believed in the importance of being outside, playing a lot, and following the child’s lead regarding food – so not forcing the child to eat even a single spoonful more than they wanted. In 1930, Dr. Pickler married a high school math teacher who held progressive views, including that children should study at their own pace of development.  When they had a daughter, Anna, in 1931, they agreed that they would follow her developmental lead – they wouldn’t prop her to sit or steady her to walk, and that they would allow space and time for her to develop at her own rate.  She also began to make the connection between the physical and the mental, asking whether propping children to sit and leading them to walk communicates to the child that what the child is doing is not good enough, and that the child should be doing something that he isn’t actually yet capable of doing. In 1932, Dr. Pikler opened a private practice in Budapest where she put all these elements together for her clients, and anecdotal evidence from Pikler’s daughter Anna notes that the children in her practice seemed healthier than other children. Around 1937, a woman named Magda Gerber who was living in Hungary had a daughter who got some kind of mild illness; the family’s regular doctor was out of town and Gerber’s daughter remembered that her classmate Anna’s mother was a pediatrician so they gave her a call.  Pikler came over to their house and Gerber was just about to describe Anna’s symptoms when Pikler asked her to be quiet, and instead asked Anna herself about her symptoms and invited her cooperation with a physical exam.  Gerber was absolutely struck by the revolutionary nature of this approach, and began studying closely with Dr. Pikler. Dr. Pikler stayed in Europe and after the second world war, she was asked by the local authority to set up a residential nursery in Budapest to take care of the orphans the war had left behind.  If you’ve heard of orphanages it might be the ones in Romania in the 1980s that you’re more familiar with – the children were confined to their beds for many hours a day, did not have caring relationships with adults, and many experienced cognitive delays due to the inadequacy of their care.  The children in Pikler’s orphanage, by contrast, were supported physically and emotionally, spent much of their time playing, and also allowed Dr. Pikler to test her ideas about the natural evolution of gross motor development.  A study conducted by the World Health Organization in the 1960s and 70s found that the children who had been in the orphanage didn’t differ from children who hadn’t in any meaningful way. In the 1950s, Gerber’s family moved to Austria and then the U.S., where she worked as a translator in Boston and then with children in Los Angeles.  In 1978, she co-founded the non-profit Resources for Infant Educarers with an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Stanford named Tom Forrest, who strangely disappears from the RIE story pretty much immediately after that.  Gerber continued to work at the RIE organization in Los Angeles until her death in 2007. So as we move into the meat of what RIE is, let’s start with a definition: what is an “educarer”?  Gerber coined this term to refer to “who educates children in a caring manner.”  She didn’t want to use “caregiver” or “caretaker” because a carer neither gives nor takes, although I would argue that she might not have used the word “educate” to me either if she’d thought a little more closely about that word too – to me, learning is something a child does; education is something that is done to another person.  So a carer, who can be a parent, grandparent, or paid childcare provider, puts love into action: the way the carer cares for a child is how she experiences your love.  And the ways we typically care for a child are in everyday activities like feeding and diapering, which Gerber transforms from chores that need to be gotten through as quickly as possible so you can get to the interesting stuff, to the really important part of caring for a child. So let’s talk about what this looks like at the earliest stages of your baby’s life, and we’ll go forward from there.  The RIE approach to infants seems to me to be in contrast to the theory of the ‘fourth trimester’ that has been popularized by Dr. Harvey Karp.  Dr. Karp argues that unlike many animals who emerge at birth ready to run around, human babies are more like fetuses than infants.  They don’t really become alert until about three months of age, they cry a lot, especially in the evening, possibly due to a gradual accumulation of stress throughout the day, and this crying is apparently absent in cultures where babies are carried all day long with constant holding and rocking and frequent nursing.  For this reason, Dr. Karp recommends swaddling, calming a baby by putting them on their side, shushing loudly, swinging, and allowing the baby to suck as a calming mechanism. Magda Gerber acknowledges, with a rare biblical reference, that “the newborn baby, up to about three months old, is between heaven and earth, not quite here yet…a parent’s job is to help the newborn make this transition into the world.  How can this be done in a respectful manner?  There are several keys in doing this.  The most important ones include observing your baby in order to understand her, helping her form attachment by talking to her and telling her what you are going to do, being slow and gentle with her, and waiting before intervening.”  There’s a lot here, so let’s break it apart a bit. Observing the baby can be one of the hardest things for Westerners to do, since we are so accustomed to needing to *do* something, instead of just watch.  But it is by watching that you understand her body language and can begin to read her signals, which will enable you to do what attachment researchers like Dr. Arietta Slade, whom we talked to a few weeks ago, would call ‘sensitively responding’ – in other words, respond appropriately to her needs, not just guess blindly at what she needs and do whatever you can to make the crying stop. Forming attachment is pretty clear; the parent needs to come when the baby cries, and develop a predictable daily schedule which helps to develop trust.  Gerber believed that it is important for a parent to be home with the child in the early years – that sensitive early care outside the home can be arranged, but parental care is preferable, although she does say that it’s better for a parent to work and arrange for high quality care than for the parent to stay at home and be miserable. Gerber believed that talking with your child is critical, although she didn’t appreciate what is known as ‘child-directed speech’ or ‘motherese;’ the high-pitched speech with drawn-out vowels that parents typically use.  As someone who has always found child-directed speech to be kind of annoying I was relieved to learn about this when my daughter was an infant, although I will say that when I mentioned this to Dr. Roberta Golinkoff recently she said she had done a study with one of her students which found that even parents who think they don’t use child-directed speech actually do use different intonation with their child than with other adults, even if it isn’t *quite* as exaggerated as the speech that some adults use when talking to babies. Another important part about talking with your child is telling your child what you’re going to do.  I’ve seen video of a pretty young infant, no more than a few months old, and when the parent says “I’m going to pick you up now,” the baby’s neck stiffens because she understands what is about to happen.  So we might think that an infant is just a helpless thing but observations like that help us to understand that actually they do listen to us and watch us and they can respond to us if we know how to look for their response. Gerber says we also need to think about what we say through our hands, which are the primary way that our babies feel our intentions and our love.  If we rush through diapering silently and with rough hands, it conveys a very different message to the baby than if we participate in these interactions slowly and gently. Gerber has a pretty interesting stance on babies’ crying – she views it as a child’s language, that communicates her needs to her parents.  Rather than trying to stop a child from crying by distracting her, Gerber says we need to try to figure out why she is crying so we can help her.  She says that crying is the only way a child can express her feelings or discomfort, and that babies also cry to discharge energy, so just because a baby is crying doesn’t necessarily mean they want us to fix something.  We should absolutely address anything we can think of that we *can* fix, but if we’ve done those things and the baby is still crying, we should just hold the baby, tell her quietly that we’re trying to understand hat she wants, and don’t try to rock or bounce the baby, which really communicates more of our nervous energy than doing anything to help the baby. So as you can see, these are two pretty disparate views of a child’s first three months.  Dr. Karp sees a baby as pretty helpless in the first three months: they really aren’t capable of doing much for themselves, least of all regulate their own crying, so we need to do it for them.  Importantly, Dr. Karp bases his observations on colicky babies but then applies them to all babies, as if all crying is a bad thing and the parent’s only goal is to extinguish the crying. Gerber, by contrast, sees an infant as a fully capable being right from the moment of birth.  I was surprised that the concept of the fourth trimester doesn’t have more support in the research literature, given how pervasive it has become in popular culture.  There are a number of papers suggesting the concept of the fourth trimester, but nobody really providing much evidence either for or against it.  In reality, I think this is going to differ by the individual child, the reality may lie somewhere between the two, and as much of the concept of the fourth trimester is about the parents as about the child.  Some children come out much more ready to spend time alone than others; I see pictures in online communities of parents practicing RIE of babies just a few days old spending quite a bit of time alone on a comfy blanket watching the sunlight move on a wall or waving their hands in front of their faces.  Other babies scream as soon as the parent puts them down, and seem to want to be held.  And some parents have a higher tolerance for apparent discomfort in the baby than others – some parents can let a baby fuss for a minute or two to see if they can solve their own problem, while others feel as though they *must* pick up the baby immediately.  To find some kind of balance, I would encourage you to observe your baby and learn their different cries – this will enable you to understand which kinds of cries indicate needs that should be met as soon as possible, and which might just be frustration that they can work through by themselves if you give them a minute. In her book Your Self-Confident Baby, Gerber offers 8 qualities of a good parent and I’ll go through each of these. Firstly, feel secure but don’t become rigid.  Your child changes over time, so your parenting needs to change over time too.  Make sure your own needs are met so you can relax into flexibility. Secondly, be accepting, but set limits.  This one can be really hard for parents – acknowledging ALL of our child’s emotions not just the positive ones.  It’s OK for your child to be tired or frustrated or angry some of the time.  It’s even OK for the child to express these emotions, but what is NOT OK is for the child to express them in ways that you consider to be unacceptable – for example, through hitting.  Gerber says “Desires should be acknowledged and accepted, but rules enforced.”  As the child gets older, this idea extends to aggressive behavior that is a normal part of toddlerhood: if she tries to hit you, block her by gently holding her arm, and say “I don’t want you to hit me.  Hitting hurts me.”  You may choose to offer her a pillow or something else to hit, or you could offer that she goes outside to throw a ball hard.  If she continues to hit, move away.  You can say “I’m going to sit over here because I don’t want you to hit me.  I’m here for you when you are ready.” It’s OK to not be 100% calm all of the time.  If you overreact when a child hits then they will do it to get a rise out of you, but you don’t have to pretend like something doesn’t irritate you when it does, or the child will be confused by your face and your tone of voice not matching your words.  If your child hits another child, you can ask your child to look at the other child to see the effect of his actions.  With a neutral voice that doesn’t inflict guilt or blame, you can say “look at Zachary.  He’s crying.  When you hit him, it hurt his arm.”  Helping a child to develop this awareness of other feelings is a much more effective route to empathy than forced apologies.  To the child who was hit, you can say “Mackenzie hit you.  Yes, it looked like it hurt.”  If you reflect rather than offering sympathy, the child won’t learn to seek attention by becoming a victim. Thirdly, be available but not intrusive.  This means spending time with your child without dictating what they do.  One way I’ve seen this described is “Wants Nothing Quality Time.”  It’s different from “Wants Something Quality Time,” which is a way of describing caregiving acts like diapering as a form of quality time.  But in Wants Nothing Quality Time you are just spending time with your child with no agenda, using the time to observe and participate in the child’s play if the child chooses to involve you, and in the way that the child chooses to involve you, without you providing direction. Fourthly, be patient, but be true to yourself.  This means trying to be as patient as you can with your child, but if something really bothers you, then set a limit on that behavior.  So a limit might be “no screaming in the house,” because it really really annoys you, or “no shoes on the couch” because then the couch will get dirty.  In addition to being patient, I would add “say yes unless there’s a good reason to say no.”  This will allow your child a framework or boundary that they know they must not stray beyond, but within this framework or boundary they have a great deal of freedom to spend their time as they wish.  It also means you don’t have to say “no” all the time, and that any limit you do set will be an easy one to hold – and it’s the waffling on limits (e.g. saying “no, don’t do that…child whines…”OK; you can do it”) that makes children test us so much.  If you do need to say ‘no,’ offer your child a couple of choices about what they can do instead – and make sure both of the choices are acceptable to you. Fifthly, be realistic but consistent with your expectations, which means adjusting your expectations according to what the child can deliver.  Don’t expect an eight-month-old to keep all food on the table, but do expect an eighteen-month-old to do it – and don’t be afraid to end a meal if they start throwing food.  It can be harder to do this when you’re tired or frustrated, and one of the reasons I love RIE so much is because Gerber acknowledges the parent’s needs and that the parent will be a better parent if those needs are met.  So try to get enough sleep, relaxation time, and time away from your child so you don’t feel drained when you are with them. Sixthly, have the wisdom to resist new fads.  One thing we often see on the show is some new study publicized with a clickbait title that implies there’s a radically different way we should be parenting our children and we should start immediately.  And my Facebook feed is inundated with things I can buy for my child, from Mindset journals to Montessori-based toys for infants, so you don’t have...

We all have goals for our children, even if these are things that we’ve never formally articulated and are ideas we’ve inherited from half-remembered bits of parenting books and blogs (and the occasional podcast) and the way we were parented ourselves. But do you ever find that the way you’re parenting in the moment doesn’t necessarily support your overarching goals?  So, if you have a goal to raise an independent child but every time the child struggles with something you step in and “help,” then your daily interactions with your child may not help your child to achieve that independence. In this episode Dr. Joan Grusec of the University of Toronto helps us to think through some of the ways we can shift our daily interactions with our children to ones that bring our relationship with them (rather than our need for compliance) to the fore in a way that supports our longer-term parenting goals.   Dr. Joan Grusec's Book Parenting and children's internatlization of values: A handbook of contemporary theory - Affiliate link   References Coplan, R.J., Hastings, P.D., Lagace,-Seguin, D.G., & Moulton, C.E. (2002). Authoritative and authoritarian mothers’ parenting goals, attributions, and emotions across different childrearing contexts. Parenting: Science and Practice 2(1), 1-26. Dix, T., Ruble, D.N., & Zambarano, R. (1989). Mothers’ implicit theories of discipline: Child effects, parent effects, and the attribution process. Child Development 60, 1373-1391. Grusec, J.E. (2002). Parental socialization and children’s acquisition of values. In M.H. Bornstein (Ed.). Handbook of Parenting (2nd Ed)., Volume 5: Practical issues in parenting (p.143-168). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Hastings, P.D., & Grusec, J.E. (1998). Parenting goals as organizers of responses to parent-child disagreement. Developmental Psychology 34(3), 465-479. Kelly, G. A. (1995). The psychology of personal constructs (2vols.). New York: Norton. Kuczynski, L. (1984). Socialization goals and mother-child interaction: Strategies for long-term and short-term compliance. Developmental Psychology 20(6), 1061-1073. Lin, H. (2001). Exploring the associations of momentary parenting goals with micro and macro levels of parenting: Emotions, attributions, actions, and styles. Unpublished Master’s thesis. Stillwater, OK: Oklahoma State University. Meng, C. (2012). Parenting goals and parenting styles among Taiwanese parents: The moderating role of child temperament. The New School Psychology Bulletin 9(2), 52-67. Miller, P. J., Wang, S. H., & Cho, G. E. (2002). Self-esteem as folk theory: a comparison of EA and Taiwanese mothers’ beliefs. Parenting: Science and Practice, 2, 209-239.   Read Full Transcript Transcript Jen:  [00:22] Hello and welcome to today’s episode of the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today we’re going to dig into the literature on something I’ve been doing a bit intuitively for a while now, which is on setting goals for our parenting. Something that Dr Rebecca Babcock Fenerci said during our conversation on Intergenerational Trauma really stuck with me. She said, nobody sets out to be a terrible parent. In other words, all parents are doing the best that they can. Now everyone has parenting goals, whether we fully articulated them or whether they’re circulating somewhere in our subconscious that are formed by relationships we had with our parents and half remembered bits of parenting books and punk post, but what if we could bring all this stuff out of our subconscious and articulate it so that we can work towards achieving these goals? I’m not saying we should set goals like ‘by next month my introverted son is going to love going to parties,’ but if we understand what high level qualities we want our children to have as they grow up, will have a much better chance of actually achieving those goals. Jen:  [02:17] So here with us today to think through all this is Dr Joan Grusec, who’s professor Emerita at the University of Toronto and have spent decades thinking about and researching this topic. Dr. Grusec received her Ba from the University of Toronto and her PHD from Stanford University before she returned to Toronto. She notes on her website that effective parenting does not involve simply the application of specific strategies and techniques or the adoption of specific styles of interaction, but the interaction of parenting strategies and children’s features like temperament, age, sex and mood, as well as something called the domain that the child is operating and that we’re going to discuss a lot more today. So don’t expect to come out of this episode with a tidy template for goal setting, but rather a framework to think about the goals that you have for your child and some ideas on how to apply it. Welcome Dr. Grusec; thanks so much for joining us. Dr. Grusec:  [03:05] Thank you. Jen:  [03:08] All right. Let’s go back to, well not the beginning here, but kind of a long time ago now. So you and one of your students did a study that has become something of a classic, I think it was published in ’98 in which you looked at parents’ goals when they imagined interactions with a child that could lead to conflict in a short vignette or in a previous experience with their own child. And I think you found that the parent use different strategies to work with their child depending on whether the parents’ center of control was themselves, the child or their relationship with the child. Can you tell us some more about that study? Dr. Grusec: [03:44] Well, I think what we were trying to do, Paul Hastings and I and in that study was to look at the situation where a child has misbehaved and the parent is responding to that misbehavior, presumably wanting to improve things for the future. But we wanted to emphasize that there isn’t one response that can be made or that all parents make and parents have different things that they want to achieve in this same situation. So some parents or at some time and not at other times. Some parents may just want immediate compliance. They want good behavior, the child is throwing a temper tantrum and they want the child to stop, and those were, what we’d call parent-centered goals. Sometimes parents are interested in teaching a value or in trying to do something that will ensure or make it less likely that the child will misbehave in this way in the future, or sometimes they’re focused on the child’s emotional needs and why is the child so distressed and so upset or what’s bothering my child? Or how does this look for my child’s perspective? How does my child see this situation? Maybe I should take that into account when I’m responding. And the, uh, the last goal that we identified, and this was us asking parents, “what are the goals that you have when you’re interacting with your children in a situation where you want to change their behavior?” So last goal we call relationship-centered. And basically this is just a desire on the part of parents, particularly mothers, I must say mothers reported this more often than fathers did just to make sure that everybody ends up feeling happy and satisfied with the outcome of the interaction. Jen:[05:47] Okay. And so what strategies did parents use in each of these kinds of situations? How did they differ? Dr. Grusec:[05:53] Oh, they differ in the, “I just want you to obey me” focus, a parent centered focus. It was mostly some sort of power assertive approach. Taking advantage of greater physical strength to move the child physically out of the situation or just to speak sharply to the child and say, “don’t do that.” So there were more of what we call these power-assertive interventions. In the case of child-centered goals. It was more some power assertion, some setting of rules. This is not the way we behave, but with an explanation or with reasoning or was some attempt to explain to the child why this was not acceptable behavior. In the case of relationship-centered goals that would be more like a taking the child’s perspective, trying to convey to the child that parent understood what the problem was even though the behavior needs to be changed and to see if they could work out some sort of compromise if that seemed appropriate. Jen:  [07:08] Okay. And so it occurs to me that parents’ goals probably shift; the strategies that they use really shift depending on the situation. And so I’m thinking if the child has a tantrum at home, then maybe I can use more child centered in relationship centered strategies like staying calm… Dr. Grusec:  [07:28] Absolutely, yes. In the grocery store it’s more likely to be a parent-centered. Jen: [07:34] And so, okay. So what I’m curious about then is firstly the effectiveness of these strategies. Is it just as effective to say, you know, to use the power assertion method in the grocery store. Even if you wouldn’t do that if the child was at home. And secondly, you know, is it ever a good thing to use these strategies or should we be using more child centered relationship centered strategies? Dr. Grusec: [07:58] Well, I think that a combination of child centered and relationship centered strategies are probably best. And when we get to talking later on about domains, I’ll explain why this is the case. Parents who want obedience and who are just focused on “I want my child to salute when I ask for it,” they’ll get obedience when the parents there, but they’re not going to get that same kind of good socially acceptable behavior if there’s no one there to demand that. So although obviously picking a child up and taking them out of the supermarket when they’re behaving badly is probably about the only thing you can do in the final analysis, it’s the other relationship centered and child-centered goals that probably are going to pay off. Jen: [08:50] Okay. And so that leads me to something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, which is what parents have for parenting their children. I’m thinking both at a high level and at sort of daily interaction levels. So in the US particularly, there’s a high value placed on independence of people of all ages and so that might be a high level parenting goal that a lot of parents have is to raise a child who is independent, but there’s also a really big trend even beyond helicopter parenting to what I think is now known as lawnmower parenting where a parent attempts to mow down any potential obstacles in the child’s way. And it seems to me is there that kind of runs counter to the goal of independence. So I’m curious about what you’ve noticed about the goals that parents state about their child rearing kind of on a day to day level when you know obedience isn’t necessarily thing in all cases and these higher level goals and how parents, interactions with their children affect these goals. Dr. Grusec:[09:47] Well, I think the problem here is that we as parents often do one thing, manifest one kind of behavior, but we talk in a different way about it. And so we send out confusing signals. So we may value independence. We may talk about independence, we may talk about its importance, but then if we behave in a different way in a way in which we’re encouraging a child to be dependent, then it’s a very confusing situation. Jen:[10:25] And so I’m curious about the cause and effect direction of this and a fairly recent study that was done in 2012 found that parents in a Taiwanese sample with children who express negative emotions, we’re more likely to be authoritarian, which means to use these power and coercive strategies to achieve compliance. But the study didn’t help us to understand whether having emotional children leads parents to be more coercive or whether coercive parenting leads to the child expressing more emotions. So I’m curious about whether you know of any research that’s been done that can help us to understand this direction of causality. Dr. Grusec:[11:02] There’s a lot of research. I think the direction of causality is a question that every researcher faces. There are a number of methodological approaches that at least try to deal with the question of is the parent affecting the child or is the child’s behavior driving the parent? So one way of trying at least to get a little bit better, greater insight into this issue is to do what we call longitudinal studies. So we take measures at two points in time. So let’s say you’re interested in the effect of a given parenting behavior on the child. You would collect data about the child’s behavior two time points, one month apart, six months apart, two years apart, whatever, five years apart, you collect that data and you have measured the parent’s behavior at the first time point so that if you find a change in the child’s behavior that is related to, or correlated with a child’s behavior at the first time point, then you have a little bit more information, a little bit more permission for suggesting that there might be a causal relationship. Dr. Grusec: [12:27] That’s one approach. Another approach is to do an experiment, but this is very hard in the child rearing research area; I can’t tell you to spank your child and tell another parent to speak kindly to their child and see what happens. So not too many experiments can be done, but intervention studies are another way of trying to get at some notion about whether the parenting behavior is having an effect on the child’s behavior so that presumably in an intervention study would have one group that received training in responding to the child’s wishes or whatever the variable was that you thought was important and another group was usually a wait list group because you think your intervention is going to work, so you come back, you measure the two groups at the beginning of one group’s intervention, and then with the waitlist control, there shouldn’t be any change in their behavior in comparison to the group that received the intervention. Dr. Grusec: [13:40] So that is another way I think that ultimately the answer to your question is that parenting and child rearing is bi-directional. Parents influence children and children influence parents. There’s a recent study by Swedish group, for example, in which they looked at direction of the effect using a longitudinal study with Swedish adolescents and there they found a much greater effect of the adolescents on the parent’s behavior than vice versa. Now this is an older group, adolescents are something different from younger children. Then I think there’s, again, lots of evidence that parents do have an effect on the…parenting has an effect on the behavior of younger children, but as I say, I think it really. It’s both ways. Parents are people too. They have feelings, they respond to reinforcement, so it’s not surprising that they can be affected as well. Jen:  [14:50] Yep. We have goals and failures and these things just like children as well, so staying with the topic of using these different techniques. I think the parents often use these parents-centered techniques when you just kind of want short term compliance, but maybe they use more child in relationship-centered techniques when they want longer term compliance and perhaps even at a later date. And I read one study that tested the techniques that mothers used to get their child to sort out some spoons and forks when there are some attractive toys close by and found that when the mothers tried to instruct their child to comply, the child actually resisted complying and they were more likely to say something like, “do it yourself.” But when the mothers knew they were going to have to leave the child and attended to sort the cutlery, they were more likely to reason with a child which turned out to be more effective. And so the research concluded that sometimes we do choose, we would make a mental choice about how we’ll ask our child to do something, but sometimes we don’t necessarily do that. We don’t go through that process; our automatic pilot just comes on and in those cases we might use more of the parent center techniques which are less...