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The Marshmallow Test is one of the most famous experiments in Psychology: Dr. Walter Mischel and his colleagues presented a preschooler with a marshmallow.  The child was told that the researcher had to leave the room for a period of time and the child could either wait until the researcher returned and have two marshmallows, or if the child couldn’t wait, they could call the researcher back by ringing a bell and just have one marshmallow.  The idea was to figure how delayed gratification develops, and, in later studies, understand its importance in our children’s lives and academic success.   Dr. Mischel and his colleagues have followed some of the children he originally studied and have made all kinds of observations about their academic, social, and coping competence, and even their health later in life. But a new study by Dr. Tyler Watts casts some doubt on the original results.  In this episode we talk with Dr. Watts about the original work and some of its flaws (for example, did you know that the original sample consisted entirely of White children of professors and grad students, but the results were extrapolated as if they apply to all children?).  We then discuss the impact of his new work, and what parents should take away from all of this. As a side note that you might enjoy, my almost 4YO saw me open my computer to publish this episode and asked me what I was doing.  I said I needed to publish a podcast episode and she asked me what it was about.  I told her it’s about the Marshmallow Test and asked her if she wanted to try it. She is, as I type, sitting at our dining room table with three marshmallows on a plate in front of her, trying to hold out for 15 minutes.  We’re not doing it in strictly; we are both still in the room with her, although we’re both typing and ignoring her and asking her to turn back toward the table when she asks us a question. She keeps asking how many minutes have passed, which I imagine (as I tell her) is quite helpful to her in terms of measuring the remaining effort needed.  She seems most torn between wanting to continue building her Lego airport and the need for the three marshmallows.  She has sung a bit, and smelled the marshmallows a bit, and stacked them into a tower, but she is mostly trying to ignore them and is counting as high as she can. 14 minute update [quiet, despairing voice]: “I’ve been waiting for so long…” She did make it to 15 minutes (that’s her devouring the third marshmallow in the picture for this episode), although I wonder if she might not have without the time updates.  We’ll have to try that another day:-)   References Bembenutty, H., & Karabenick, S.A. (2004). Inherent association between academic delay of gratification, future time perspective, and self-regulated learning. Educational Psychology Review 16(1), 35-57. Bennett, J. (2018, May 25). NYU Steinhardt Professor replicates famous Marshmallow Test, makes new observations. New York University. Retrieved from https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2018/may/nyu-professor-replicates-longitudinal-work-on-famous-marshmallow.html Berman M.G., Yourganov, G., Askren, M.K., Ayduk, O., Casey, B.J., Gotlib, I.H., Kross, E., McIntosh, A.R., Strogher, S., Wilson, N.L., Zayas, V., Mischel, W., Shoda, Y., & Jonides, J. (2013). Dimensionality of brain networks linked to life-long individual differences in self-control. Nature Communications 4(1373), 1-7. Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Calarco, J.M. (2018, June 1). Why rich kids are so good at the Marshmallow Test. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/marshmallow-test/561779/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=family-weekly-newsletter&utm_content=20180602&silverid-ref=MzYwODc2MjE4MjE4S0 Carlson, S.M., Shoda, Y., Ayduk, O., Aber, L., Schaefer, C., Sethi, A., Wilson, N., Peake, P.K., & Mischel, W. (2017). Cohort effects in children’s delay of gratification. HECO Working Paper Series 2017-077. Duckworth, A.L., Tsukayama, E., & Kirby, T.A. (2013). Is it really self-control? Examining the predictive power of the delay of gratification task. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 39(7), 843-855. Imuta, K., Hayne, H., & Scarf, D. (2014). I want it all and I want it now: Delay of gratification in preschool children. Developmental Psychobiology 56, 1541-1552. Kidd, C., Palmeri, H., & Aslin, R.N. (2012). Rational snacking: Young children’s decision-making on the marshmallow task is moderated by beliefs about environmental reliability. Cognition 126, 109-114. Michaelson, L.E., & Munakata, Y. (2016). Trust matters: Seeing how an adult treats another person influences preschoolers’ willingness to delay gratification. Developmental Science 19(6), 1011-1019. Mischel, W., & Ebbesen, E. (1970). Attention in delay of gratification. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 16(2), 329-337. Mischel, W., Ebbesen E.B., & Zeiss, A.R. (1972). Cognitive and attentional mechanisms in delay of gratification. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 21(2), 204-218. Mischel, W., & Baker, N. (1975). Cognitive appraisals and transformations in delay behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psycholgy 31(2), 254-261. Mischel, Q., Shsoda, Y., & Peake, P.K. (1988). The nature of adolescent competences predicted by preschool delay of gratification. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54(4), 687-696. Mischel, W., Ayduk, O., Berman, M., Casey, B.J., Gotlib, I.H., Jonides, J., Kross, E., Teslovich, T., Wilson, N.L., Zayas, V., & Shoda, Y. (2011). ‘Willpower’ over the life span: Decomposing self-regulation. SCAN 6, 252-256. Schlam, T.R., Wilson, N.L., Shoda, Y., Mischel, W., & Ayduk, O. (2013). Preschoolers’ delay of gratification predicts their body mass 30 years later. The Journal of Pediatrics 162(1), 90-93. Shoda, Y., Mischel, W., & Peake, P.K. (1990). Predicting adolescent cognitive and self-regulatory competencies from preschool delay of gratification: Identifying diagnostic conditions. Developmental Psychology 26(6), 978-986. Tangney, J.P., Baumeister, R.F., & Boone, A.L. (2004). High self0control predicts good adjustment, less pathology, better grades, and interpersonal success. Journal of Personality 72(2), 271-324. Watts, T.W., Duncan, G.J., & Quan, H. (2018). Revisiting the Marshmallow Test: A conceptual replication investigating links between early delay of gratification and later outcomes. Psychological Science 1-19.  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618761661   Read Full Transcript   Transcript Jen:    [00:38] Hello and welcome to today’s episode of the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Following on from our recent episode on the 30 Million Word Gap, today we’re going to take another close look at a piece of classic research. This time we’re looking at The Marshmallow Study. You’ve probably heard of the study because it’s one of the most famous ones in the field of psychology. Dr Walter Mischel and his colleagues presented a preschooler with a marshmallow. The child was told that the researcher had to leave the room for a period of time and the child could either wait until the research he returned and have two marshmallows, or if the child couldn’t wait, they could call the researcher back by ringing a bell. But then they’d only get to have one marshmallow. The idea was to figure out how delayed gratification develops and in later studies to understand its importance in our children’s lives and academic success. I was actually surprised to find that the marshmallow study consisted of a series of studies starting in the early 1960s and continuing for over a decade, and my guest today, Dr Tyler Watts of New York University, has just published a new study with his colleagues to try and help us understand whether the impacts of delayed gratification really are as large as that body of research indicates. Dr Watts as a research assistant professor and postdoctoral scholar and the Steinhardt School of Culture Education and human development in New York University. He received his Ba from the University of Texas at Austin and his PhD From the University of California Irvine. Welcome Dr Watts. Dr. Watts:  [02:00] Thank you. Jen:   [02:01] So I wonder if you could start out just by sending a bit of context for us. Can you describe this series of experiments that’s become known as the marshmallow study and what was the basic procedure that was used and what did the researchers find? Dr. Watts:   [02:13] Sure. You had the exact same experience that I did. Jen:    [02:17] Yeah. Okay, good. Dr. Watts:  [02:21] I first heard about these studies when I was an undergraduate at UT, the University of Texas. I was a psychology student and I think I probably first heard about it in the intro to psych course and then some sort of developmental class. We probably covered it there too, and then when we started, me and Greg, the second author on this paper is trying to kind of sniffing around to decide if we wanted to to look into this. I started going back and reading Mischel’s original papers and then of course I realized the same thing. This was done over probably a decade and there were a series of different studies as he was kind of tweaking the marshmallow test and sort of figuring out what it was telling him along the way. So I think people first have to realize kind of where the state of psychology was in the sixties when Mischel first started doing this work. Dr. Watts:  [03:10] It was a whole nother time we were, we were coming out of, of course the sort of classic psychoanalysis, Freud and Jung and those guys. So that era had kind of ended and then we were, we had gone through this sort of behavioral scientists aspects like the behavior period, which is sort of the kind of rigid rules of sort of human learning and conditioning. And then we were, you know, cognitive psychology was really sort of coming online and we were really starting to sort of have a new approach to probing at people’s thinking and figuring out sort of how human beings, what are the kind of like limits to human cognition and the ways in which we can…we were really coming up with kind of new ways to study it. So Mischel is really kind of coming into this discussion and a really interesting time and people had I think assumed and predicted that being able to delay gratification was this kind of important life skill that probably set aside or differentiated sort of what we think of as successful adults from less successful adults. Dr. Watts:    [04:12] And people didn’t know if children could really do this and if they could do it, they didn’t really know how to measure it. And so in psychology, you know, measurement is, is everything. So Michelle started coming up with this test to be able to actually produce variation and kids’ ability to delay gratification and the test is known as the Marshmallow Test and he figured out that if you sat a four year old – a kid around the age of four – in front of a marshmallow and you told them that if they wait to eat the marshmallow or to touch the marshmallow until the experimenter returns to the room, then there’ll be rewarded with a second marshmallow. So basically the kid is given this test right where they have something sitting in front of them that they want and they’re told by an adult that if they can wait to engage with it or wait to eat it, that they’re going to be rewarded with a second thing, right? Dr. Watts:   [05:08] With the double double the amount of, of that reward. And he very kind of wisely figured out that this test illuminated all sorts of interesting stuff about the way kids think and the way they behave under kind of a sort of stressful, somewhat stressful situation. And he realized that from a measurement standpoint that the test did exactly what he wanted, which is it produced variation, right? So some kids were better at this than other kids, so there would be some kids who couldn’t wait at all. And as soon as the experimenter left the room, they reach out and grab the marshmallow. Then there are some kids who will be able to wait for a couple minutes and then there are some kids who would be able to wait for whatever length of time they were left alone. Dr. Watts:  [05:46] And in some of the trials I think he capped it at a pretty short amount and kids weren’t able to wait for very long and longer and longer periods of time. He would kind of test longer and longer periods of time as he went along. And then he also hadn’t figured out. And I think this is one thing that a lot of people don’t realize is he kind of put a lot of different constraints on the test as he went along. So he was interested in like, you know, what happens if you obscure the marshmallow from a kid’s vision, so are kids able to to wait longer if you don’t force them to look at the marshmallow right in the room; what if you suggest to them before they do the task sort of strategies to help distract them from the marshmallows. So if, if, if you give them strategies to help them wait longer, are they able to do it? Jen  [06:37] What kind of strategies would he use? Dr. Watts:    [06:39] Yeah, so I’m trying to remember exactly. But he would sort of give them, I think sort of ways to distract themselves. So he would sort of suggest sort of like cognitive sort of tricks for distracting. Think about something else. Jen:    [06:53] Okay. Think about something fun or something like that. Dr. Watts:   [06:55] Yeah, yeah, yeah. The kinds of things that we try to tell ourselves to do today. And so he kind of put the kids through all sorts of different constraints on this measure. And you know, it’s sort of similar to the research. I don’t know if the people that listen to your podcasts would be familiar with Milgram’s famous obedience studies, right. But we always talk about sort of one condition of that, which is where the experimenter would tell the person, keep shocking the person on the other end of the line if they’re getting these questions wrong and that’s what they would do, but actually Milgram I think spent maybe 15 years or something like that, studying all sorts of different conditions around which that experiment was given and that’s. And that’s exactly what Walter Mischel did too. Jen:    [07:37] Yeah, and Angela Duckworth who we’ve actually done an episode on her book Grit. She did a paper on this I think a while back now, and I thought that the points that she pulled out about why this test was so successful, we’re really salient and we call it the marshmallow test, but actually the child got to choose whether they had a marshmallow or a pretzel or sometimes some other food, I think in another study. So the fact that they get to choose means that they get…if they, if they like sugar, they get to show you retweet. If they like salt, they get assaulted, treat, but they only get a really small amount. We’re only talking about one or two marshmallows, one or two pretzels. And so even if the child is really hungry, they know that this isn’t going to satisfy that hunger. So it’s not like we’re seeing the impact of their hunger on the test and (we hope anyway.) Dr. Watts:   [08:22] Yeah, and I think, you know, Angela Duckworth studied a few different samples of kids doing this and one of the things that she did was on the same sample that we actually used for our, uh, our replication too. So it’s important to point out that when Mischel was doing this, he was at Stanford. Jen:    [08:39] Yeah. It was already fairly successful from my perspective. And he was sampling kids from the Stanford Business school community primarily. I think there were some kids that were, that were from outside of it too, but basically it was that community, predominantly kids of professors. So they were fairly well off kids obviously, whose parents, at least one of their parents was…had...

You all know that on the show we pretty much steer clear of the clickbait articles that try to convince you that something is wrong with your child, in favor of getting a balanced view of the overall body of literature on a topic. But every once in a while a study comes along and I think “we really MUST learn more about that, even though it muddies the water a bit and leads us more toward confusion than a clear picture.” This is one of those studies.  We’ll learn about the original Hart & Risley study that identified the “30 Million Word Gap” that so much policy has been based on since then, and what are the holes in that research (e.g. did you know that SIX African American families on welfare in that study are used as proxies for all poor families in the U.S., only 25% of whom are African American?). Then, Dr. Doug Sperry will tell us about his research, which leads him to believe that overheard language can also make a meaningful contribution to children’s vocabulary development. I do want to be 100% clear on one point: Dr. Sperry says very clearly that he believes parents speaking with children is important for their development; just that overheard language can contribute as well. And this is not Dr. Sperry out on his own criticizing research that everyone else agrees with: if you’re interested, there are a host of other issues listed here. The overarching problem, of course, is that our school system is so inflexible that linguistic skills – even really incredible ones of the type we discussed in our recent episode on storytelling – have no place in the classroom if they don’t mesh with the way that White, middle-class families (and, by extension, teachers and students) communicate. But that will have to be an episode for another day.   References Adair, J. K., Colegrove, K. S-S., & McManus, M. E. (2017).  How the word gap argument negatively impacts young children of Latinx Immigrants’ conceptualizations of learning. Harvard Educational Review, 87(3), 309-334. Akhtar, N., & Gernsbacher, M.A. (2007). Joint attention and vocabulary development: A critical look. Language and Linguistic Compass 1(3), 195-207. Callanan, M., & Waxman, S. (2013). Commentary on special section: Deficit or difference? Interpreting diverse developmental paths. Developmental Psychology 49(1), 80-83. Dennett, D. (1995). Darwin’s dangerous idea: Evolution and the meaning of life. New York, NY: Touchstone. Dudley-Marling, C., & Lucas, K. (2009). Pathologizing the language and culture of poor children. Language Arts 86(5), 362-370. Gee, J.P. (1985). The narrativization of experience in the oral style. Journal of Education 167(1), 9-57. Genishi, C., & Dyson, A. H. (2009).  Children, language, and literacy: Diverse learners in diverse times.  New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Hoff, E. (2013). Interpreting the early language trajectories of children from low-SES and language minority homes: Implications for closing achievement gaps. Developmental Psychology 49(1), 4-14. Johnson, E.J. (2015). Debunking the “language gap.” Journal for Multicultural Education 9(1), 42-50. Miller, P.J., & Sperry, D.E. (2012). Déjà vu: The continuing misrecognition of low-income children’s verbal abilities. In S.T. Fiske & H.R. Markus (Eds.), Facing social class: How societal rank influences interaction (pp.109-130). New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation. Sperry, D.E., Sperry, L.L., & Miller, P.J. (2018). Reexamining the verbal environments of children from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Child Development (Early online publication).  Full article available at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Peggy_Miller3/publication/324839950_Reexamining_the_Verbal_Environments_of_Children_From_Different_Socioeconomic_Backgrounds/links/5aec67fda6fdcc8508b77912/Reexamining-the-Verbal-Environments-of-Children-From-Different-Socioeconomic-Backgrounds.pdf Walker, D., Greenwood, C., Hart, B., & Carta, J. (1994). Prediction of school outcomes based on early language production and socioeconomic factors. Child Development 65(2), 606-621.   Read Full Transcript   Transcript Jen:[00:38] Hello and welcome to today’s episode of the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. I think today we’re going to blow a few holes in some classic research. You might have heard of what’s known as the 30 Million Word Gap, which at a high level is the idea that middle class parents talk so much more to their young children on a daily basis than poor parents do, and that this accumulates a gap of 30 million words by the time the children are four years old. So I took a brief look at this study a while back and I noticed that the researchers, Professor Betty Hart of the University of Kansas and Professor Todd Risley at the University of Alaska Anchorage, conflated a couple of important variables in the study, those of wealth and education, which is why I haven’t done an episode on it and whenever anyone asks me about it, I mentioned that the study’s results might be a little bit shaky, but I owe a debt of gratitude to listener Kim from Boston who has a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction and who works to support African American boys and developing literacy for sending me a research paper that describes a replication of the incredibly time consuming study that professors, Hart and Risley did back in the seventies and which came to rather different conclusions. I’m here today with Dr Douglas Sperry, who is Associate Professor of Psychology at St Mary of the woods college in Indiana who coauthored this paper with his wife and colleague, Dr Linda Sperry of Indiana State University and also Dr Peggy Miller of the University of Illinois. It isn’t often that we take the time to dig so deeply into a single paper on this show, but the original study has become such a part of how we think about what it means to be a good parent, so I’m delighted that Dr Barry is here with us today to really dig into these results. Welcome Dr Berry. Dr. Sperry: [02:12] Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate very much the opportunity to talk with you and your listeners. Jen:  [02:18] Thank you. So for those listeners who have sort of heard of the 30 Million Word Gap and they kind of know it’s important to talk with their children, but they might not really know what the study is, could you please describe the parameters of the original Hart and Risley Study? Dr. Sperry:  [02:31] Yes. The original study was a longitudinal investigation of 42 families, and they were divided by social class. Six of the families were in a welfare group. Twenty three of the families were in a group that Hart and Risley ended up calling the working class group, although there is mention of 10 of those families being middle class and 13 being working true working class, but they ended up combining them and that another top 13 families and children who were in the so called professional group, they undertook this study after really a decade or more of work and the Kansas City area around the University of Kansas. Betty Hart in particular had been working in the Turner House Preschool, which is part of the Turner housing project in Kansas City and she also had some of her university students working and the laboratory preschool at the University of Kansas itself. The Turner Housing Project and it’s preschool, was well. The preschool was entirely African American…composed of African American children. Dr. Sperry: [03:42] Whereas the laboratory preschool at the University of Kansas had all children of professors, as is quite common. Anyway with her work at the Turner House Preschool. She noticed that the vocabulary of African American children in that preschool was lagging considerably behind that of the professor’s children at the laboratory preschool. And so in the late sixties and early seventies, she began a series of other interventions expressly aimed at teaching the African American children at the Turner House, more vocabulary, and she noticed that that was quite successful and I should say I neglected to say the first intervention was just to get them to talk more and be more comfortable talking and she got them to talk more, but she still noticed that the vocabulary itself was lacking in the same diversity that the professors’ children had. So they had several other interventions, one of which was, for example, taking the children on various field trips to museums, etc. And still nothing seemed to increase the actual diversity or complexity of the vocabulary, even though the children were talking more. And to quote their 1995 monograph, she writes, the professors’ children simply seemed to know more about everything. so that provided then the impetus for her to begin and for, for her and Todd Risley to begin their very elaborate longitudinal study. Jen: [05:07] Okay. So what they’re basically saying is that they’re trying to reach children in preschool with these interventions and that they’re seeing that maybe they have an effect in the short term, but in the longer term they get washed out. Right? Dr. Sperry: [05:17] Right. And their conclusion was that they had to start in the homes and so they wanted to see exactly what was going on then in these, these different homes. So they began this very lengthy, protracted data collection. It’s still kind of a monument in terms of the amount of data they collected. And I have often stressed when talking about this report that although we’re, I’m sure going to get a chance to dig into some of the problems with the study. I don’t want to just be entirely critical of the study either because it was, it was a very important work and it has obviously fueled a lot of new research and information. But like any study it happens in a context. And the context of this study was the late seventies and the methods that we used in our study weren’t really current then in language acquisition studies. And so those were some of the issues that we’ve taken issue with. Jen:[06:12] So what are some of the contexts, what are some of the things that you saw as as not being really just done then that you that are more current practice now that you were able to incorporate? Dr. Sperry: [06:23] Let me actually correct a little bit. Something I said. We are psychologists. All three of us consider ourselves to be psychologist, but we don’t use relatively typical psychological methods. Our methods from anthropological studies and from our paradigm that we work within is called language socialization and using those methods we adopt them more ethnographic approach to data collection. And this, this represents, I think the first major point of difference between our data collection process and that of Hart and Risley and every case for our five communities that we describe in our recent study, each set of recordings of the actual children and their families. We’re only be gone after extensive field work of probably a year or more working in the communities. So when my wife and I were working in Alabama, for example, for over a year, one or the other of us observed in preschools we taught and the community education center that was entirely African American. Dr. Sperry:  [07:22] We tutored children in various school subjects and also in giving them piano lessons and we tried to locate ourselves within the community. That obviously was particularly critical, we felt for the reason that we are European American and we were trying to study African American children in that particular case, but in all cases for our research, we do not try to be a fly on the wall and that’s pretty much what Hart and Risley encourage their families to do. And I think that’s more consistent even with current purely psychological inquiries into language acquisition. Researchers are trying to not be part of the scene. Owing a debt to anthropology, we realize that there’s never a point in time where we’re not going to be part of the scene as long as we’re there, we’re going to be noticed as observers and people are going to be taking us into account and so we make every opportunity then to try to become welcome guests in the environs and one particular difference I think that that may have impacted is that, for example, in the Hart and Risley is case their research, their data collection assistants were asked to not speak unless spoken to and that I think by contrast when we’re in a data collection process, obviously we speak when spoken to, but we also might speak at other times that a regular friendly visitor to your house might speak. Dr. Sperry: [08:54] We don’t in any way attempt to direct the activity of the observations. We try to let the family flow occur as it’s happening, but we don’t try to act as if we’re not there. I think that – well, we’ll never know obviously for sure, but our guests, our intuition is that that might have mostly affected. In particular Hart and Risley’s welfare group. These were six families who were living in the Turner Housing Projects. It was the seventies. The housing projects were not all that wonderful. We can only imagine that a research assistant coming in with a video camera and sitting there for an hour recording their child was very unfamiliar and possibly very uncomfortable for those families and… Jen: [09:40] Despite Hart and Risley’s claim that they essentially blended into the furniture, I think was the one of the phrases they used in one of their papers. Dr. Sperry: [09:47] Exactly, exactly and I don’t think it’s possible to blend into the furniture and we don’t know…Hart and Risley did have both European American and African American data collection assistants and they did try to pair African American assistants with African American families, but that’s not really the point for us, I mean, obviously, as I said, we are European American. We did a large study in an African American community. It’s more just a matter of are you familiar enough with the family and are they familiar enough with you that they can trust you to be doing your best? And I also then contrast how we can imagine the welfare mothers may have felt with how the professional families feel. I think many of your listeners are probably professionals and I think they probably share with me the idea that if I was asked and agreed to have somebody come in and record my children, I would so-called put on the dog when they came. I would, you know, be very talkative and I would be trying to put my child in the best possible light because I would know the data that were being collected Jen:  [10:56] For sure. So how much of this data was collected and what kind of data do they analyze? Dr. Sperry: [11:03] In both cases, both their study and our study, we collected videotaping recordings, although probably for us it was easier because of the size of the machines involved in the seventies. They collected for the 42 children, 25 samples on average per child. So they began their data collection and when the children were 12 months of age and they concluded when they were 36 months and they had a total of 1,318 samples. Our data collection was not that extensive. We analyzed 150, seven and a half hours, I should say. They had 1318 hour-long samples. We have various ages, various amounts of sampling, for example, all of our communities were sampled longitudinally, but we analyzed 157 and a half hours total. Our communities…well, this is what’s called the corporate study. What we did, we did not set out to collect these data expressly to do a study that we just published. Dr. Sperry: [12:03] In fact most of the data were collected for our interest in the narrative development of young children. So the South Baltimore children were about 18 or 19 months when their data collection began. Both our Black Belt, Alabama group and the Jefferson Indiana group, were 24 months… The children are 24 months when the data collection began. And Then the two Chicago groups,...

“Storytelling? I’m already reading books to my child – isn’t that enough?” Your child DOES get a lot out of reading books (which is why we’ve done a several episodes on that already, including What children learn from reading books, How to read with your child, and Did you already miss the boat on teaching your toddler how to read?. But it turns out that storytelling benefits our relationship with our child in ways that reading books really can’t, because you’re looking at the book rather than at your child. If you ask your child what kind of story they’d like you to tell, you also get incredible insight into both their interests and concerns – I can attest to this, as I’ve been singing story-songs about poop and various kinds of baby animals who can’t find their mamas on and off for several weeks now (we had an incident a few months back where she couldn’t find me in a store). In this episode we also discuss the ways that people from different cultures tell stories, and what implications this has for them as they interact with our education system. Other episodes mentioned in this show: 035: Is your parenting All Joy and No Fun?   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] 00:01 If we want our children to have the best chance to live fulfilling lives, that can you keep up with all the books and scientific research on parenting, and fit the information into your own philosophy on how to raise kids. Welcome to Your Parenting Mojo, the podcast that does the work for you by investigating and examining respectful research-based parenting tools to help kids thrive. Now welcome your host, Jen Lumanlan. Jen Lumanlan 00:38 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Before we get going with today’s topic on the subject of storytelling, I wanted to let you know about a little something I’ve been working on for a while now.  I think I’ve mentioned before that I was working on a Master’s in Education – well, I’ve finished that now and I’m actually not in school at the moment which is both amazingly freeing and rather strange.  I’ve mentioned before that after we made the decision to homeschool our daughter, whenever anyone asked me about homeschooling, they would always ask me the same questions, so I created a course to help families figure out whether homeschooling could be right for them – you can find more info on that at yourhomeschoolingmojo.com if you like.  But a lot of friends said “homeschooling sounds awesome, but I could never do it,” or “homeschooling sounds awesome but I don’t want to do it,” or just “we’re committed to public schools.”  When I asked them to tell me more about this they invariably expressed some kind of anxiety about this decision – kind of a “we’re committed to public schools but….” – they’re worried about class sizes and a lack of funding and the quality of the education their child will receive. And I thought to myself: “hmmm…what if there was a way to take everything I’ve learned during a master’s in psychology and another in Education and make it relevant to people who are committed to public school for whatever reason, but who recognize the limitations in the system and want their children to come out of public school among the 40% of 12th-graders who can read and do math at or above a proficient level, and not among the 60% who are at a basic or below-basic level.  Parents want to imbue their children with a love of learning, but research has shown that the toddlers who couldn’t stop asking questions basically stop being curious by about third grade.  Instead of asking why things happen or how things work, they learn that their job is to answer the teacher’s questions, rather than to ask their own.  And when I interviewed parents, I also found they didn’t know where to start in supporting their child’s learning – they’ve been reading to their child since birth, and they taught their child how to count, but they just have no idea what to do next. Jen Lumanlan 02:34 So I took what I learned during those degrees, and I did a whole lot of research outside of them, and I talked with Principals and teachers and parents and I asked them what challenge they had had.  What challenges they had in teaching, and in parenting children in school, and in teachers and parents working together, and in catching small problems before they become really big problems, which I found actually doesn’t happen all that often – it was way more common than I’d thought for something to go unnoticed for quite a while and even once it was noticed, to take quite a while to fix.  It really wasn’t uncommon for a student to lose the better part of a year of learning waiting for testing for learning disabilities, or while being bullied, or simply because they had a personality mismatch with their teacher.  I took all of the research on those topics, and a number of others besides, and I made a course for you lovely people that will give you the tools and support you need to prepare yourself and your child for the transition to and first year or two of school.  It helps you to understand the different ways parents can participate in their child’s education in school and which are associated with better learning outcomes.  It digs into the neuroscience of learning, and especially of learning reading and math, so when your child stares at you blankly after you try to show them a new concept you understand what connection is missing in their brain. It looks at homework and whether children should be getting any of it, and gives you the data you need to work with administrators to establish homework policies that are actually grounded in research.  It shows you the critical components of a life-long love of learning, and shows you how to support the development of these through activities connected to school as well as those outside of school.  And best of all, it does all this in a way that doesn’t make you think “Holy cow, here are another 300 things I need to teach my kid; I can’t keep tabs on it all or do it all and it’s stressing me out just thinking about it,” but rather “If your child is having problems with X, here are some things you can try.”  It helps you to see what things you might be able to change in schools if you want to put the energy into it, and which ones are probably here for the long haul.  And we have an awesome group on Facebook that thinks through these issues together in a supportive way. Jen Lumanlan 04:35 So what’s it like to be in this course?  Well, I’ll quote a couple of the people who have been through it: Kesha from Oklahoma, who is actually a Your Parenting Mojo listener, sent me an email after she finished the section on the neuroscience of learning and said “I LOVED this section on the neuroscience of learning, it made so much sense, provided so many pointers, and gives tools I can definitely use to find better ways to make new things we learn relevant to my son. I had a really hard time doing that before but I think using his interests, then finding ways to tie different subjects to them, and letting him lead me through how he’d like to demonstrate his learning are concrete, easy to apply tactics. This course is amazing!” And Kathryn in the U.K. said: “I had been worried about the transition to school but this course was both tremendously reassuring and inspiring. It both makes very clear the limitations of the school setting but empowered me to see what I can individually do to make the most of the experience. It also, refreshingly, makes clear that perfection is not the goal. Instead it provided me with the knowledge and ideas to find and make the most of opportunities to extend my daughter’s learning according to her own unique needs and interests.” Jen Lumanlan 05:44 I’m looking for a few more people to test the course for me before I launch it out into the wider world and I wanted to give my listeners a first shot at doing that, and also to give you a special discount on it as well.  The first twenty people who go to JenLumanlan.com, that's L u m a n l a n, and click on supporting your child's learning in school chorus can use discount and use discount code BETA-60-OFF will get $60 off the $199 price, so the price is just $139.  Once again, that’s Jen Lumanlan - L u m a n l a n .com. Click on supporting your child's learning in school, enter the discount code BETA-60-OFF at checkout.  If you subscribe to the show via my website then you actually got the link and the discount code in your newsletter last week, so you can find it there, and if you’re hearing this for the first time on this episode then just click over to the page on my website for this episode at yourparentingmojo.com/storytelling and all the information is right there for you.  I’m looking forward to getting to know a lot more of you in the course! Jen Lumanlan 06:52 On to our topic of the day: we’re working on a couple of different series of episodes at the moment – I like to mix them up a bit in case you’re not interested in a particular topic so at least you only get bored every other week rather than every week… We’re currently in the middle of two series of episodes – one on the importance of play, and the other on storytelling. This topic hadn’t even been on my radar until I did a paper on discourses in education for my master’s in Education. Today we’re going to cover why we should tell stories, and in an upcoming episode, we’ll talk about how to learn and tell stories which we differentiate from reading stories because we do learn them and tell them rather than reading them.  If you’re anything like me, you might think that you’re not sure you really need this episode.  It wasn’t until I started researching it that I learned about the powerful impact that storytelling can have on our children’s lives, and even on their academic outcomes, and why I wanted to share this with you. I also want to give you a heads-up episode has some content that you might not want children to hear.  No swearing; just some concepts that are more suitable for adult ears only. Jen Lumanlan 07:55 Let’s start with the story of stories – how did stories orginate?  Researchers think that at one time everyone was a storyteller, but as human society became more complex, people started to specialize in one form or another of the arts – like drama, dance, or music.  People who had a good sense of timing, a good command of language, and a memory to hold it all together became a community’s storytellers.  One theory holds that the stories became so exaggerated that they had to be told in the third person for the teller to retain some sense of modesty, which gave rise to the hero tale.  Storytellers weren’t just entertainers – they were geneologists, historians, and keepers of culture. The first written record of an activity that appears to be storytelling comes from what is known as the Westcar Papyrus, recorded between 2,000 and 1,200 BC, in which three sons entertain their father, who had built the pyramids, with strange stories.  Stories wended their way through history – the first known heroic epic, (Gilgamesh), Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, through the traveling master storytellers of Ireland and Wales who knew would each have known 350 stories during the period of the Roman Empire, to the height of storytelling in Western Europe when professional organizations of storytellers would hold storytelling competitions in the Middle Ages.  After the printing press was invented in 1450, storytelling in Western cultures started on a down-slide from which it really hasn’t recovered.  The written word is now the primary way Western people communicate with each other, and oral traditions (as well as the people whose cultures rely on them) are really looked down upon. Jen Lumanlan 09:27 The one use we seem to still have for stories is telling them to children – librarians told stories to children to integrate immigrants into the U.S. in the early twentieth century and to inculcate the new residents with their new country’s values, and a history of storytelling in this period is basically a series of life histories of notable children’s librarians.  What was once a way that culture was transmitted to all people had become a way to, in the words of Russian author Kornei Chukovsky: “foster in the child, at whatever cost, compassion and humaneness – this miraculous ability of man to be disturbed by another being’s misfortunes, to feel joy about another being’s happiness, to experience another’s fate as one’s own.”  Sharing a story is a very different experience than reading it by oneself, and in general all people, even adults, enjoy these experiences – which is why we go to the theater and attend concerts, but Westerners have mostly gotten out of the habit of getting together to share stories.  Sharing a story may make the story more enjoyable and also enhance the relationship because the story is an object of shared attention. Jen Lumanlan 10:28 And what kinds of stories do we share?  Parents sometimes wonder at the unsavory ideas expressed in folk tales – including one-dimensional good and evil characters and stereotypical depictions of women and people of color, as well as violence.  Psychologists believe, though that the confines of the story – the “once upon a time” at the beginning and the “The end” at the end help children to know that what is happening in the story is not real, and that children can safely experience ideas and emotions through stories that they couldn’t do in real life.  Folk tales actually weren’t originally intended for children; even the Brothers Grimm’s original edition of fairy tales published in 1812 was intended for adults.  Almost immediately people started to read them to children, so the Grimms edited the stories for children by censoring out some of the violence and sexuality.  For example, in the 1812 version of the story The Frog Prince, the frog just wants to get into bed with the princess – the story is openly sexual.  Psychoanalysts subsequently imposed their own ideas about why children find these stories appealing: because they give children permission to express “complex, unconscious, infantile fantasies about sexual wishes, anger, guilt, and fear of punishment within the family.  It is unacceptable to consciousness for these to be explicit so they are expressed symbolically.”  The frog in the story represents the princess’s revulsion toward the male member, which she must overcome before she gets married. Some authors note that the Grimms thought that sex was unsuitable in stories for children but violence was perfectly acceptable, although some changes have to be made – it wouldn’t be appropriate for a mother to starve her children to death in the forest so the mother became an evil stepmother in Hansel and Gretel. Jen Lumanlan 12:06 Now I have to admit that I got to this point in researching this episode and I thought to myself “what the heck are we teaching our children in these fairy tales?”  That’s when I reached out to Dr. Deena Weisberg of the University of Pennsylvania; you heard my interview with her a few weeks ago.  I was surprised to learn that, in general, she’s not a huge fan of censoring the stories we read to our children, although I do think there are a few approaches you could take with this.  One would be to read the stories anyway – some researchers believe that hearing a scary story from a trusted adult leads to intense feelings of anxiety and excitement, with a happy ending enabling relief and a return to safety.  This can allow traumatic experiences to be portrayed and intense emotions to be experienced safely.  I would think, though, that the suitability of this approach very much depends on the child – my own almost four-year-old cries when one friend might not see another friend again in a story, so I don’t think we’ll read original fairy tales anytime soon – but some children *enjoy* being scared and might get a lot out of this experience even at a young age. Another approach would be to share the Disney-type versions of the stories which are fairly effectively sanitized for the worst of the sex and violence, as long as you don’t think too deeply about how the parts of the story that are edited out – things like how Sleeping Beauty gets pregnant (she was raped by a married man) or that Quasimodo’s master has Esmeralda hanged in the Hunchback of Notre Dame, or that the sea witch cuts out the Little Mermaid’s tongue in the original version of the story.  You could read original versions of stories but change the worst-offending ideas on the fly as you go, although to my introverted, slow-thinking brain this would be more stressful than anything. Jen Lumanlan 13:41 The other thing you can do is just pick different stories.  There are *so many* stories out there that you can choose one with messaging that you support and that your child will enjoy.  There’s plenty of time down the line for your child to get to the gory stuff, when they decide they’re ready for it.  This actually fits with the way that stories were used in previous generations, which is as one more tool in our toolbelt of ways we can support our personal development, and this means we can select a story for a particular purpose in a particular context.  These stories can take a couple of different forms – firstly, we might choose to learn a particular story in which we find a lot of meaning that is important to us.  The other thing we can do is to tell what is called family stories, which are the stories of our own families, and I should acknowledge here that I’m indebted once again to Dr. Laura Froyen for introducing me to this term because I hadn’t previously heard of it.  We’ll talk about family storytelling in our next episode in this series. So what are the benefits of storytelling, given that it currently is not prioritized in our culture?  Storytelling isn’t as common among Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (or WEIRD) families as it is in families from some other cultures, and I believe that this is because people in WEIRD cultures have chosen to prioritize the ability to read above the ability to share stories.  Because schools happen to also prioritize the ability to read, likely because the systems in schools were set up by and primarily for the benefit of the dominant culture in WEIRD societies, which are white children, white families’ preparation of their children thus dovetails nicely with the skills their children will need once they get to school. Jen Lumanlan 15:16 Families from other cultures value different kinds of information sharing, and I want to tell you about an incredibly powerful lesson I learned during my Master’s of Education.  I had the opportunity to choose one of five theorists who work on the topic of discourses, and in this context a discourse is the vocabulary and symbols that are used when thinking about and understanding a specific topic.  It’s like a “kit” of ideas that surround a concept and the way we think about it, and we can show ourselves as members of a group or as people who are outside a group using the way we describe that group. I actually had the option to pick a theorist who is working in the area where I come from in England, which would have been personally interesting to me, but I chose instead to focus on a theorist named James Paul Gee, who gives the Barbie Doll discourse as an example of what a discourse is, which you can recognize even if Barbie doesn’t have...

“Social and Emotional Learning” is all the rage in school these days, along with claims that it can help children to manage their emotions, make responsible decisions, as well as improve academic outcomes. But what if those programs don’t go nearly far enough? What if we could support our child in developing a sense of compassion that acts as a moral compass to not only display compassion toward others, but also to pursue those things in life that have been demonstrated – through research – to make us happy?  And what if we could do that by supporting them in reading cues they already feel in their own bodies, and that we ordinarily train out of them at a young age? Dr. Brendan Ozawa-de Silva, Associate Director for the Emory University’s Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics, tells us about his work to bring secular ethics, which he calls the cultivation of basic human values, into education and society Learn more about Breandan’s work here: www.compassion.emory.edu https://www.facebook.com/emoryseelearning/   We also mentioned the Yale University course The Psychology of Wellbeing, which is available on Coursera here.       References Desbordes, G., Negi, L.T., Pace, T.W.W., Wallace, B.A., Raison, C.L., & Schwartz, E.L. (2012). Effects of mindful-attention and compassion medication training on amygdala response to emotional stimuli in an ordinary, non-meditative state. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 6(1), 1-15. Frey, K.S., Nolen, S.B., Edstrom, L.V., & Hirschstein, M.K. (2005). Effects of a school-based social-emotional competence program: Linking children’s goals, attributions, and behavior. Applied Developmental Psychology 26, 171-200. Lantieri, L., & Nambiar, M. (2012). Cultivating the social, emotional, and inner lives of children and teachers. Reclaiming Children and Youth 21(2), 27-33. Maloney, J.E., Lawlor, M.S., Schonert-Reichl, K.A., & Whitehead, J. (2016). A mindfulness-based social and emotional learning curriculum for school-aged children: The MindUP program. In K.A. Schoenert-Reichl & R.W. Roeser (Eds.), Handbook of mindfulness in education (pp.313-334). New York, NY: Springer. Ozawa-de Silva, B., & Dodson-Lavelle, B. (2011). An education of heart and mind: Practical and theoretical issues in teaching cognitive-based compassion training to children. Practical Matters 4, 1-28. Pace, T.W.W., Negi, L.T., Adame, D.D., Cole, S.P., Sivilli, T.I., Brown, T.D., Issa, M.J., & Raison, C.L. (2009). Effect of compassion meditation on neuroendocrine, innate immune and behavioral responses to psychosocial stress. Psychoneuroendocrinology 34, 87-98. Rovelli, C. (2017). Reality is not what it seems: The journey to quantum gravity. New York, NY: Riverhead.   Read Full Transcript   Transcript Jen:    [00:40] Hello and welcome to today’s episode of Your Parenting Mojo, which is on the topic of compassion. I actually need to thank Dr Tara Callahan, whom I interviewed way back in episode four of the show on encouraging creativity and artistic ability for bringing us this episode. She met today’s guest Dr Brendan Ozawa-de Silva at a conference and was kind enough to put us in touch. Dr Ozawa-de Silva is the Associate Director for the Emory University Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics, where he’s responsible for Emory’s Social, Emotional, and Ethical learning program, or SEE Learning; a worldwide kindergarten through twelfth grade educational curriculum based on compassion and secular ethics. He received his doctorates from Oxford and Emory universities as well as master’s degrees from Boston and Oxford Universities; I think you’ve actually got more degrees than I do. His chief interests lies in bringing secular ethics, which he calls the cultivation of basic human values into education and society. I’m excited to learn more today about his work and the benefits that it has for children. Welcome Brendan. Dr. de Silva:   [01:42] Thank you Jen. Jen:   [01:43] So can you start by telling us what are secular ethics, what do these have to do with social and emotional learning that parents might already be familiar with? Dr. de Silva:   [01:51] So secular ethics means basic human values, so things like compassion, gratitude, sense of common humanity, a recognition of our responsibility to one another and to the environment. And if we look at the two words, the word secular means that we approach these ethics not on the basis of any one religion or ideology, but in a broad way on the basis of science, common Sense, common experience. So what we have in common with each other rather than what kind of separates us, which religion and ideology can do, but it doesn’t mean secular in the sense of anti-religious. So secular ethics doesn’t mean anything against religion, but it’s rather what we all have in common despite our religious national cultural differences. And then when we talk about ethics, it’s important to state that we’re not talking about ethics as a set of rules or principles that are being handed down by an authority that this is right and that is wrong; this is good and that iss bad, but really exploring the dimension of what contributes to individual and social flourishing. So what’s beneficial for us, what are the kinds of common values that we would share that will be beneficial to us. So we agree on those values politically and legally. For example, we have laws saying, you know, you can’t steal and you can’t murder people. And those reflect our common values independent of religion. So that’s what we’re approaching it. And the connection to SEL is that we believe that the cultivation of these basic human values is very linked to social and emotional intelligence and social emotional skills. So these moral emotions are actually social emotions, just emotions that involve how we relate to one another. So it’s a kind of different approach to ethics. Jen:    [03:40] Yeah. And as you’re listing off those components, compassion, gratitude, responsibility, individual and social flourishing, I’m going down that list thinking, Yep, I want that. I want that for my daughter. So that gives us a framework to think within and to me, that sounds. Yes. I want to know more about that. So can you tell us why this kind of learning is important for children? And specifically I’m interested in it seems as though not all of these concepts are a component of the existing SEL programs. And by SEL we mean social and emotional learning programs as they’re typically taught in schools. Dr. de Silva:   [04:15] Yeah. Well, I’d like to just very briefly give a story of myself when I was a child when I was growing up because it’s kind of a funny story and it kind of explains why I’m doing this. I remember when I was probably 10 or 11 maybe I first had these thoughts. Even earlier I was kind of thinking and I know what children think about this. Even at a much younger age, I was thinking about what’s important in life and what am I doing here and what am I supposed to be doing? What’s going to happen when I grow up? And I was asking these questions and wondering when in school we would actually be learning about these things. So I thought, well, they’re going to teach us. The adults are going to teach us about the meaning of relationships and loves and meaning in life and what life is about and all these things. Dr. de Silva:    [05:03] And I thought you know; we’re too young right now, so they’re going to teach us later. So maybe when we get to middle school, they’re gonna teach us these things and got to middle school and I said, no, they’re not teaching us that. And then I thought, well maybe in high school they’ll be teaching us those things and know it’s the same thing. Math, history, biology, you know, and by then I was old enough to realize that even looking at college that we would never be taught these things. So not only are we not taught them, but there’s no space in the school day to even talk about them or discuss them. But I think that as human beings, we all have a need to find meaning in life as you said, as parents. We always want the best for our children. We want our children to have happy lives and we know that there’s a connection between character and flourishing; being a good person, however we define that. Dr. de Silva:    [05:47] We know that there’s a relationship between that and leading a happy life. So why don’t we make space for that in education and maybe in previous times that’s a space that would have been held by the family or extended family, the community churches, but what we’re seeing in today’s pluralistic society is that increasingly these things aren’t talked about and so kids don’t have a space to talk about them and since all children go through school in some form or another, why not allow school to be the place where we do that. Social and emotional learning is a step in that direction because it creates a space in the curriculum and in the school day for kids to talk about emotions, talk about relationships, but SEL has stayed away from the kind of more thorny question of values and things like compassion and things like meaning because you know that’s moving in the direction of ethics and to some people that starts sounding like religion, but we think that there’s a way to talk. Jen:   [06:49] And dangerous, too… Dr. de Silva:   [06:49] Yeah, exactly. And we have a history of people trying to indoctrinate our kids in various ways and of course we should be very suspicious of that, but we believe that there’s a way of doing it, which is not about indoctrination at all, but about exploration. So our program is very much not about teaching children how to think or what to think, but creating a space where they can explore these questions for themselves to talk about their own anxieties, their fears, their hopes and these deeper questions of meaning so that they can kind of get a jumpstart on those things. And also we think it might be protective against some of the problems that we’re seeing among kids and in schools with regard to anxiety, bullying and just a host of various issues that we’re dealing with. Jen:   [07:33] Okay. Your anecdote reminded me of my own moment where I thought the grownups had it all figured out. I was in geography class when I learned about climate change and it was just before the 1992 Rio climate conference and my teacher told us about the conference and I thought, Oh okay, well the adults are going to go and figure out what to do about this and they’re going to come back and tell us and we’re going to do it and climate change will be solved. I believe that’s probably not what happened at the Rio conference or we wouldn’t still have climate change today, but yeah, so when that leads us to the broader issue of the fact that the grownups don’t always have all the answers and that can be uncomfortable I think for teachers and also for parents. And so what would you say to parents who are thinking, oh, I do not want to open this can of worms with my kid because I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what the answer is. Dr. de Silva:    [08:22] I think that’s a great point. I think there’s a moment in every child’s life. Probably when they have that Aha moment, they realized that the world is a lot crazier than it should be and that means that the, the grownups have not figured all things out. I remember going to school in the seventies and eighties and being taught stop, drop and roll. You know, what happens if a nuclear bomb falls on you learning things like MAD; Mutually Assured Destruction. So if the Russians fire warheads at us in the States, then that’s no problem because we will fire warheads back at them and everyone will die. So yeah, you learn this, you hear these horrifying things as a kid and you realize, yeah, the adults don’t have all the answers but there’s no place in school to talk about that. And for a lot of kids sometimes there isn’t even a place at home. Dr. de Silva:    [09:07] So I think it is very important for parents to make that space and be courageous enough. It also takes courage from our teachers also to walk into this space where they know they don’t have all the answers. You know, we haven’t figured out our own emotions, our own relationships certainly, but just creating that space is so important and to allow children to explore that. Children have an incredible amount of wisdom on their own and it never ceases to amaze us that when that space is created, the things that they come up with and the learning that takes place just through the conversations. And we also find that parents learn a lot. So a lot of children who go through our program…we’ll bump into the parents and the drug store or at a yoga studio if it’s a school here in Atlanta for example. And they’ll say, you know, my kid was teaching me this about stress and teaching me this about what I can do when I get upset. And, and you know, was seeing me stressed out and saying, know mommy, you can take a few deep breaths now or you can push against the wall. You know, we teach them all these various techniques and those, they get deeper and deeper and deeper. And so the parents, you know, that’s the funny thing is that the parents can also learn, so if parents are open to it, it’s a great opportunity for growth for themselves and their kids and their relationship with their kids. Jen:  [10:21] Yeah. And you know, your curriculum addresses kindergarten through age 12, but I think it’s important to note that this isn’t something you have to wait until school age to start. Actually in an astounding moment of coincidence. I was just browsing Facebook before we got on this call and a friend of mine posted a discussion he’d had with his son who’s four and his son, they were just eating lunch. His son said what’s the best thing to do Papa? And he said, I think the best thing is to keep asking questions and his son said Oh, why? And he said, because if you keep asking questions you understand more. And with understanding you become more compassionate. And his son said what’s compassionate? And he said, what do you think it is? And his son said Well, compassionate is when you hear more laughs and more crying and, and, and he said, yeah, that’s right. When you hear more laughs and more crying, you’ll understand yourself and the people around you better and with that more love goes around and I just thought, wow, this kid is four years old and he’s already having conversations like that with his father. So shout out to my friend – you know who you; are not going to out you on the show, but yeah. So yes, we’re talking about a curriculum that’s used in school, but this is also relevant to kids younger than this, right? Dr. de Silva:   [11:31] No, absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. It’s a grades K through 12 program, but children’s first learn about compassion from their home environment and from their parents and they first learned the sense of how to get along with others and how to interact with others in the home environment. So absolutely one can and should start earlier. And that little anecdote that you shared is exactly our approach. I mean, we want kids asking these questions. We see kids as little scientists, kids are little scientists, you know, trying to figure out the world and we can teach them one way and say this is the right way, but they’re going to learn pretty quickly that what we have taught them as the right way is only partially true and partially helpful and ultimately they’re going to have to find things out for themselves. So that attitude of questioning and exploring is very central to what we’re doing. Dr. de Silva:   [12:26] And it’s interesting because some teachers have…we’ve run several workshops over the past several years. We’re still in the pilot phase and the preliminary phase of our development, but we have about 460 counselors and teachers working with us; we’ve done trainings for around the world and are giving us feedback and some of the feedback that they’re

  "How much can there really be to learn about storytelling?" I thought when I started on this mini-series.   It turns out that there's actually quite a lot to learn, and that family storytelling can be a particularly useful tool for parents. We're all trying to figure out how to transmit our values to our children, and storytelling can be quite an effective way of doing this. Further, storytelling can be a really valuable way to support children in overcoming traumatic experiences - and even to repair relationships after difficult moments like yelling. In this episode we dig into the research on the benefits of family storytelling and look at how to do it effectively.   Questions this episode will answer What exactly is family storytelling and how is it different from just reading books to my kids? We often feel safest when we read books to our kids.  It seems like a ‘script’ that saves us from having to fully understand the situation and come up with our own words to describe it. Family storytelling involves sharing narratives about your own family experiences, values, and history. It creates a powerful connection between generations as you transmit important values. It can help children make sense of their place in your family relationships. The episode explores fascinating research about how these personal narratives shape children's identity in ways that storybooks can't match!   How can family storytelling help during difficult times or after traumatic experiences? When difficult emotions arise in our family, it can be tempting to pretend the situation didn’t happen. We hope our kids will just forget about difficult experiences. Instead, children may worry more when they 'can't talk about what happened. Family storytelling is a valuable tool for helping children overcome traumatic experiences. It helps them to make sense of what happened, and repair their family relationships. This can help children build resilience.   Do all families tell stories the same way, or are there cultural differences? There are fascinating cultural differences in how families engage in storytelling! American families often position children as primary narrators (like asking about their day at dinner). Israeli families tend to create more equal narrative participation between adults and children. The episode explores how these cultural storytelling styles impact child development differently. We offer insights into adapting techniques that might work best for your family.   How do family stories change as children grow older? Parents tend to share different types of stories as children mature. Parents of younger children tend to tell stories with stronger themes of affiliation and connection. Stories shared with older children often shift toward themes of achievement and striving for success. The podcast unpacks the developmental reasons for this progression. We offer ideas on ways to balance different types of stories.   How does the way the story is told affect children? The atmosphere during family storytelling matters a lot. Researchers have studied the factors that create a positive storytelling environment. These include: Courtesy Respect Agreement on story details The episode reveals surprising connections between these communication patterns and children's emotional development. We offer practical guidance for creating storytelling moments that strengthen family bonds.   What happens when family stories evolve into "legacies" over generations? Stories can combine over time and generations. Then they become family legacies that shape how family members view themselves and their place in the world. The podcast explores the profound impact these narratives have on children's identity formation and family relationships. We share strategies for creating meaningful family legacies even if you haven't established these yet.   How can I start family storytelling if it wasn't part of my own childhood experience? This might be one of the most valuable parts of the episode for many listeners! The episode provides practical, research-backed strategies to create meaningful family narratives. Even if you didn't grow up with family storytelling traditions. You'll learn specific prompts, timing suggestions, and approaches that feel natural rather than forced.   What you'll learn in this episode How family storytelling creates stronger emotional bonds between parents and children. Stories can incorporate difficult emotions that we want children to learn how to navigate effectively.  They help you build deeper connections that last a lifetime! Why storytelling is a powerful parenting tool for transmitting your family values. It creates meaningful legacies that shape your child's identity The fascinating differences in stories between families from different cultures, and how these impact child development How 'family formation stories' can boost your child's self-esteem and sense of belonging The research-backed benefits of using storytelling to help children overcome traumatic experiences.  Stories help to repair family relationships after difficult life events. Practical ways to incorporate regular family storytelling into your daily routines. You can do it even if you don't consider yourself a "natural storyteller"! How family stories evolve over time. Parents can share stories about closeness with younger children. These can shift to achievement-themed narratives as children grow older How respectful family communication during storytelling creates positive outcomes for children   If you see that your relationship with your child isn’t where you want it to be because you: Speak to them in a tone or using words that you would never let other people use with your child… Are rougher with their bodies than you know you should be when you feel frustrated… Feel guilt and/or shame about how they’re experiencing your words and actions, even though your intentions are never to hurt them…   …the Taming Your Triggers workshop will help you.   Click the banner to learn more     Other episodes mentioned in this show 027: Is a Reggio Emilia-inspired preschool right for my child? 041: Siblings: Why do they fight, and what can we do about it? 029: Why we shouldn’t ban war play   Jump to highlights 00:37 Introduction of today’s topic 01:44 Walter Fisher is a professor emeritus at the University of Southern California who theorized that narration can be divided into two types – “recounting” or “accounting for.” 02:41 Elizabeth Stone, is an author of the book that’s famous for storytelling called Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins, says the functions of family stories are firstly to persuade family members they are special, secondly to teach about the ways of the world and the family’s methods of coping with troubles and successes, and thirdly helping a person to know his or her own identity 03:35 Six qualities used to define family strength are: a commitment to the family and well-being of each family member, positive communication and an ability to resolve conflict constructively, regular expressions of affection among family members, a tendency to enjoy quality time together, a sense of spiritual wellbeing and an ability to effectively manage stress and unexpected crises 05:11 Mothers tell stories with stronger themes of affiliation than fathers, and affiliation themes are also more common with younger children than with preschoolers 05:47 American family stories often celebratory in nature, without an evident theme of hardship and trial that were present in both recently immigrated and fully assimilated Mexican American family according to Dr. Carma Bylund of the University of Iowa 11:58 Black children in Trackton had an inferior linguistic skillset to those of White children, but rather that their skillset is "different" and does not align well with the skillset that is valued in schools 15:22 Family stories can do is to help children to resolve strong feelings about something traumatic that happened in the family. 17:00 Storytelling can shift stressors from being things that just one family member experiences to a relational-level activity 18:24 Vygotsky believed that there is no such thing as a piece of knowledge that sits off by itself and we can grab hold and learn, and that instead learning is a thing that is constructed between two people 19:49 According to Professor Judy Koenig Kellas of the University of Nebraska that when stories are combined over time and generations, they become family legacies 25:45 Wrapping up the discussion   References Bylund, C.L. (2003). Ethnic diversity and family stories. Journal of Family Communication 3(4), 215-236. DeFrain, J., & Stinnett, N. (2003). Family strengths. In J.J. Ponzetti (Ed.), International encyclopedia of marriage and family (2nd Ed., pp.637-642). New York, NY: Macmillan Reference Group. Fiese, B.H., Hooker, K.A., Kotary, L., Schwagler, J., & Rimmer, M. (1995). Family stories in the early stages of parenthood. Journal of Marriage and Family 57(3), 763-770. Heath, S.B. (1990). The children of Trackton’s children: Spoken and written language in social change. In J.W. Stigler, R.A. Shweder, & G. Herdt (Eds.), Cultural psychology: Essays on comparative human development (pp.496-519). Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.  Full chapter available at: http://www.shirleybriceheath.net/pdfs/SBH_ChildrenTracktonsChildren.pdf Kellas, J.K., & Horstman, H.K. (2015). Communicated narrative sense-making: Understanding family narratives, storytelling, and the construction of meaning through a communicative lens. In L.H. Turner & R. West, The SAGE handbook of family communication. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Kellas, J.K., & Trees, A.R. (2006). Finding meaning in difficult family experiences: Sense-making and interaction processes during joint family storytelling. Journal of Family Communication 6(1), 49-76. Schrodt, P. (2009). Family strength and satisfaction as functions of family communication environments. Communication Quarterly 57(2), 171-186. Thompson, B., Kellas, J.K., Soliz, J., Thompson, J., & Epp, A. (2009). Family legacies: Constructing individual and family identity through intergenerational storytelling. Papers in Communication Studies (122), University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Retrieved from p://digitalcommons.unl.edu/commstudiespapers/122 Thompson, P.A., & Schrodt, P. (2015). Perceptions of joint family storytelling as mediators of family communication patterns and family strengths. Communication Quarterly 63(4), 405-426.  

We should protect our children from risks, right?  Isn’t that our job as parents? This episode comes mid-way in an extended series on the importance of play for children.  The first episode in the series was an interview with Dr. Stuart Brown of the National Institute for Play on the value of play, both for children and for adults.  Then we followed with a look at the research on the benefits of outdoor play, followed by an interview with Dr. Scott Sampson who wrote the book How to Raise a Wild Child, which had tons of practical advice for getting kids outside more, as well as getting outside more with your kids. Today we move on to the topic of risky play.  We’ll define it, and discuss its benefits and drawbacks, as well as things we as parents can do to encourage more risky play if we decide we want to do that. Because it turns out that insulating our children from risk may not be such a good thing after all.     Other episodes referenced in this show What is the value of play? The benefits of outdoor play How to Raise a Wild Child Free to Learn Grit   References Brackett-Milburn, K., & Harden, J. (2004). How children and their families construct and negotiate risk, safety, and danger. Childhood 11(4), 429-447. Brussoni, M., Brunelle, S., Pike, I., Sandseter, E.B.H., Herrington, S., Turner, H., Belair, S., Logan, L., Fuselli, P., & Ball, D.J. (2015). Can child injury prevention include healthy risk promotion? Injury Prevention 21, 344-347. Brussoni, M., Ishikawa, T., Brunelle, S., & Herrington, S. (2017). Landscapes for play: Effects of an intervention to promote nature-based risky play in early childhood centres. Journal of Environmental Psychology 54, 139-150. Christensen, P., & Mikkelsen, M.R. (2008). Jumping off and being careful: Children’s strategies of risk management in everyday life. Sociology of Health & Illness 30(1), 112-130. Hill, A., & Bundy, A.C. (2012). Reliability and validity of a new instrument to measure tolerance of everyday risk for children. Child: Care, Health, and Development 40(1), 68-76. Leviton, M. (2016, February). The kids are all right: David Lancy questions our assumptions about parenting. The Sun. Retrieved from https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/482/the-kids-are-all-right Little, H., Wyver, S., & Gibson, F. (2011). The influence of play context and adult attitudes on young children’s physical risk-taking during outdoor play. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal 19(1), 113-131. Niehues, A.N., Bundy, A., Broom, A., Tranter, P., Ragen, J., & Engelen, L. (2013). Everyday uncertainties: Reframing perceptions of risk in outdoor free play. Journal of Adventure Education & Outdoor Learning 13(3), 223-237. Norton, C., Nixon, J., & Sibert, J.R. (2004). Playground injuries to children. Archives of Disease in Childhood 89(2), 103-108. Plumert, J.M., & Schwebel, D.C. (1997). Social and temperamental influences on children’s overestimation of their physical abilities: Links to accidental injuries. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 67, 317-337. Poultona, R., Menziesb, R.G., Craskec, M.G., Langleyd, J.D., & Silvaa, P.Aa. (1999). Water trauma and swimming experiences up to age 9 and fear of water at age 18: A longitudinal study. Behavior Research and Therapy 37(1), 39-48. Sandseter, E.B.H. (2007). Categorizing risky play – how can we identify risk-taking in children’s play? European Early Childhood Education Research Journal 15(2), 237-252. Sandseter, E.B.H. (2009). Characteristics of risky play. Journal of Adventure Education & Outdoor Learning 9(1), 3-21. Sandseter, E.B.H. (2009). Children’s expressions of exhilaration and fear in risky play. Contemporary issues in early childhood 10(2), 92-106. Sandseter, E.B.H. (2010). “It tickles my tummy!”: Understanding children’s risk-taking in play through reversal theory. Journal of Early Childhood Research 8(1), 67-88. Sandseter, E.B.H. (2011). Children’s risky play from an evolutionary perspective: The anti-phobic effects of thrilling experiences. Evolutionary Psychology 9(2), 257-284. Sandseter, E.B.H., & Sando, O.J. (2016). “We don’t allow children to climb trees”: How a focus on safety affects Norwegian children’s play in early childhood education and care settings. American Journal of Play 8(2), 178-200. Storili, R., & Sandseter, E.B.H. (2015). Preschool teachers perceptions of children’s rough-and-tumble play (R&T) in indoor and outdoor environments. Early Child Development and Care 185(11-12), 1995-2009. Wyver, S., Tranter, P., Naughton, G., Little, H., Sandseter, E.B.H., & Bundy, A. (2010). Ten ways to restrict children’s freedom to play: The problem of surplus safety. Contemporary Issues in Eaerly Childhood 11(3), 263-277.   Other episodes mentioned in this show What is the value of play? The benefits of outdoor play How to Raise a Wild Child Free to Learn Can Growth Mindset live up to the hype? Grit: The unique factor in your child’s success?   Read Full Transcript Transcript Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  We’re mid-way through an extended series of episodes on play at the moment.  The first in the series was an interview with Dr. Stuart Brown of the National Institute for Play on the value of play, both for children and for adults.  Then we followed with a look at the research on the benefits of outdoor play, followed by an interview with Dr. Scott Sampson who wrote the book How to Raise a Wild Child, which had tons of practical advice for getting kids outside more, as well as getting outside more with your kids. Today we move on to the topic of risky play.  We’ll define it, and discuss its benefits and drawbacks, as well as things we as parents can do to encourage more risky play if we decide we want to. Before we get going, I want to acknowledge that this episode rests heavily on the work of Professor Ellen Beate Hansen Sandseter (I hope I’m pronouncing that somewhat accurately) at the Queen Maud University College of Early Childhood Education in Norway.  We’ve discussed quite a bit of research lately which relies on a single researcher’s work – I’m thinking of the Mindset and Grit episodes, and I’m also familiar with the take-down of the Power Poses research by Dr. Amy Cuddy, which is the idea that if you stand up straight and spread your arms out wide in a really physically open position before you do something scary like going to a job interview or giving a presentation, your performance will measurably improve.  After another study failed to replicate the findings of the original one, Dr. Cuddy’s own co-author ended up publishing a statement saying she didn’t believe that Power Poses were real and had any benefit.  What those researchers all had in common was a single paper or very few papers which formed the foundation for their work, and an incredible amount of exposure which, these days, is often measured in TED talk views.  Dr. Dweck of the Mindset research is the laggard in this group considering that her work has been around the longest, with only 7 million views; Dr. Cuddy leads the pack with 45 ½ million views. On the other hand, Dr. Sandseter has not given a TED talk.  The majority of her sample sizes are pretty small; she also almost exclusively works in Norway except where she occasionally collaborates with researchers from other countries so her findings may not be applicable to people in other countries where risk is viewed differently than it is there.  She has a blog but honestly it’s pretty dry reading, with most of the updates consisting of notifications about papers she’s published, which non-academics can’t access anyway because the actual papers are behind the publishing journal’s paywall.  I also haven’t found any papers criticizing her methodology or her results.  My overall impression is that she is a scholar who has slowly and patiently built up a body of research over the last decade and a half, and she’s interested in being a resource to educators in Norway rather than being a celebrity – all of which is to say that I generally trust her work. So how do we define risky play?  Dr. Sandseter tried to do exactly this in a 2007 paper, for which she followed 38 children aged 3-5 from two Norwegian preschools and also interviewed the teachers at those schools.  She selected the schools because of the variety of outdoor experiences available to the children in each of them – one of the preschools had a playground had what she calls a “typical” playground with swings, climbing tower, a play hut, switchbacks (she doesn’t say what these are) and a climbing tree.  My first thought was that I’ve never seen swings or a climbing tree in an American preschool playground because these are deemed too dangerous, so this paper is probably gonna be pretty interesting.  The other preschool was situated in a forest and had a typical playground as well as use of part of the forest that was surrounded by fences.  Both groups of students often hiked to nature areas like forests, the seaside, caves, and so on.  Dr. Sandseter observed six kinds of risky play that have since become the standard ways to define risky play – these are: play with great heights, play with high speed, play with harmful tools, play near dangerous elements like deep water, rough-and-tumble play, and play where children can ‘disappear’ or get lost.  I’m going to quote and sometimes summarize some of the parts of the paper that raised my eyebrows on some of these kinds of risky play. Regarding play from heights, when a group of 4- and 5-year-olds arrive at the beach, one of them sees some cliffs that are 7-10 feet high and says “Wow, I wanna climb up here,” so he does, and his friends follow.  They explore the cliffs, which are steep and slippery; they keep climbing over the cliffs and back into the woods above the cliffs, come down to the beach, and do it over again.  While the teachers did later describe this kind of play as risky, they watched this incident without interfering, from 20-30 feet away – so, too far away to do anything immediately if something bad happened to one of the children.  The children also described climbing to the roof of the climbing tower and jumping off, even though this was forbidden by adults in case they got hurt.  One girl said “Yes, it’s a little bit scary, but it’s great fun – I often land on my bottom, and that hurts a bit – but it’s great fun anyway.” The ‘play with dangerous tools’ section was particularly interesting – it reads “In both preschools the children were allowed to quite freely use tools that were potentially dangerous – for example, a knife for whittling, a saw for cutting down branches, or a hammer and nails for carpentry.”  Dr. Sanseter took field notes on three instances: “The fire pit is lighted and the children are gathered around it chipping with a knife each on some wooden branches.  The children use knives freely and seem used to whittling on their own.” “Alex, aged 4 and Tori, aged 5 have each got a hammer and nails and start nailing some wooden boats.  They have a great independence in their work, and the preschool teacher present seems completely relaxed even though they swing their hammers as they like.  Two younger children aged 2-3 years old also take part, and they get to play as equally independently as the two older children. “The children participate in building a wooden climbing tower.  They get to use the saws and knives as they like.  One of the boys saws into his hand but is fine after getting a band-aid.  The children also participate in tying the branches together, and then climbing on the construction when it’s built.” Sometimes the children were observed using an axe, although I was amused to see that the teachers did supervise this activity more closely than the others.  Overall, the teachers thought playing with these tools was somewhat risky, while some of the children agreed but some didn’t, although in a subsequent study Dr. Sandseter observed that the children were there quite closely supervised when playing with all kinds of dangerous tools, that the children tended to concentrate highly when using them, and also talked with each other about the importance of using tools correctly so as not to hurt themselves or others. What these quotes and anecdotes reveal to me, of course, is not what these Norwegian preschoolers and teachers thought about risk, but the deep gulf between their perception of risk and the perception in a country like the U.S., where a knives, hammers, nails, saws, axes, and especially fire pits would NEVER be allowed within ten yards of preschool-aged children.  While Dr. Sandseter believes that allowing children’s use of dangerous tools in preschool is probably a Scandanavian phenomenon, I have personally seen twenty sets of pruning shears in a basket on the ground under the covered porch of a preschool in Reggio Emilia, Italy – I only saw the children indoors, but I can only assume that since there were enough pairs for a class full of children to use them, and they were sitting out right next to the wellies the children used in wet weather, that a class full of children probably did and do use them. I’m reminded here of an interview with Professor David Lancy, the anthropologist whose work we refer to often on the show.  He says that parents in most societies don’t intervene when children investigate a sharp knife or stray near the fire.  When ethnographers ask parents why they allow this, the parents’ reply is often “this is how they learn.”  The interviewer asks “Do you think it’s wise to let children play with knives?”, and Lancy responds “I’ve found that there is a trade-off. If parents give their children such freedom, the kids may indeed get hurt, but serious injury is rare in village societies. Children there die most often of malnutrition and illness, not accidents. Meanwhile village children happily take the initiative in learning how to use common tools like knives, setting their own pace and keenly observing those who are more competent. If parents were to play a more active and protective role in their child’s development, the children might be safer from injury, but that sense of autonomy and ability to learn independently would be undermined. The children would cease to take the initiative to learn new things and instead wait for an adult’s permission, guidance, or instruction.”  To me, this says a lot about American society, where parents generally WANT their children to look to them for permission, guidance, and instruction.  We show them how to use toys, rather than letting them figure it out for themselves.  It’s almost as if we can’t fathom that they would manage without us, because we need to feel so central in their lives. Back to Dr. Sandseter’s paper, the final issue I want to give examples on is play where the children can disappear or get lost – on one field trip a five-year-old says “I’m going to go on a walk all by myself!” and the teacher responds “That’s all right; go ahead!”.  Two other children join the first.  They walk for a short while, then one of them goes back to the group while the other two crawl through some dense bushes and announce to Dr. Sandseter, who has been following them: “Good bye!  We’ll be back at twelve o’clock!”.  While the children thought this kind of play was risky because they might get lost, they did it anyway because of the joyful fear they experienced and the teachers actually did not feel as though it was risky at all and felt in control of the situations.  Again, my mind was boggled – in the U.S., children generally aren’t allowed out of a parent’s or teacher’s eyesight in a fenced area like a playground, and when they are away from these fenced areas the boundaries become even tighter. At the heart of all this is the idea of risk, and the type and amount and risk that children are willing to take, and that parents are willing to see children take. While environments can be inherently more or less risky because a hill is more or less steep, and trees can have branches that allow small children to climb up or don’t, but there are individual characteristics associated with risk as well.  Children can choose to climb more or less high up the hill or not; they can choose to ride a tricycle fast or not; they can choose to focus and concentrate while playing or not.  Children make these choices based on the risks they subjectively perceive, and the balance between their abilities and their fears about those abilities moderate their actions.  Studies have found that there are differences between children’s tolerance for risk, a statement which perhaps seems obvious to anyone with more than one child.  Even I can see the difference in risk tolerance between my 3.5YO who thinks that jumping off the next-to-last step is pretty risky and exciting, and her friend of exactly the same age who loves to snowboard and wants to know why he can’t go on a zip line by himself.  A high activity level and a desire to engage in daring behavior are important risk factors for accident proneness and injury incidence, although perhaps the overall rate of injuries does not increase for these children as much as they otherwise might because they, too, understand what their bodies are capable of and use their abilities and fear to regulate their risk-taking behavior.  Children do tend to overestimate their physical abilities; one study that wasn’t done by Dr. Sandseter observed the link between extroversion, impulsiveness, daring, and carelessness, implying that there is a link between temperamental characteristics and childhood accidents.  The study also found that children who watched a video of another child doing four physical tasks taking a toy off a high shelf and moving under a wooden bar resting on two posts without knocking the bar off or putting their hands or knees on the floor were more conservative in judging their own abilities when the child in the video failed, rather than when the child in the video succeeded.  This implies that children get a lot of information about whether they can do something from whether their friends can do it, although this ability overestimation was more of an issue for six-year-old males and temperamental characteristics were more at play for 8-year-olds.  The study was pretty tiny – only 32 children, so it would be good to see if the findings were replicated with a larger number of

Growth mindset is everywhere these days.  Dr. Carol Dweck’s research showing that a growth mindset can help children to overcome academic struggles is being incorporated to curriculum planning across the U.S. and in many other countries, and school districts in California are even using it to evaluate schools’ performance.  I get ads popping up in my Facebook feed every day for a journal that helps children to develop a growth mindset, and judging from the comments those folks selling the journal are doing very nicely for themselves. Which means that the science underlying the idea of growth mindset must be rock solid, right? Well, perhaps you might be surprised (or not, if you’re a regular listener) to know that this actually isn’t the case.  The main study on which the entire growth mindset theory is based has never been replicated, which is the gold standard for considering whether an effect that was found in a study is really real.  And a variety of subsequent studies supporting the findings of the original one were either so tiny as to be not useful or failed to find any relevant effect (although in some cases they went on to report their findings as if they did…). We’ll tease all this out in the episode, and will discuss whether growth mindset is something worth fostering in your child.     Other shows mentioned in this episode Don’t bother trying to increase your child’s self-esteem Do you punish your child with rewards?   References Adams, J.M. (2014, May 5). Measuring a ‘growth mindset in a new school accountability system. Edsource. Retrieved from https://edsource.org/2014/measuring-a-growth-mindset-in-a-new-school-accountability-system/63557 Bandura, A. (1981). Self-referent thought: A developmental analysis of self-efficacy. In J.H. Flavell & L. Ross (Eds.), Social cognitive development: Frontiers and possible futures. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Baumeister, R.F., Campbell, J.D., Krueger, J.I., & Vohs, K.D. (2003). Does high self-esteem cause better performance, interpersonal success, happiness, or healthier lifestyles? Psychological Science in the Public Interest 4(1), 1-44. Boykin, A.W., Albury, A., Tyler, K.M., Hurley, E.A., Bailey, C.T., & Miller, O.A. (2005). Culture-based perceptions of academic achievement among low-income elementary students. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology 11, 339-50. Briggs, D.C. (1970). Your child’s self-esteem. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Brown, N. (2017, January 14). In which science actually self-corrects, for once. Retrieved from http://steamtraen.blogspot.fr/2017/01/in-which-science-actually-self-corrects.html Burnette, J.L., VanEpps, E.M., O’Boyle, E.H., Pollack, J.M., & Finkel, E.J. (2013). Mind-sets matter: A meta-analytic review of implicit theories and self-regulation. Psychological Bulletin 139(3), 655-701. Chivers, T. (2017, January 14). A mindset “revolution” sweeping Britain’s classes may be based on shaky science. BuzzFeed. Retrieved from https://www.buzzfeed.com/tomchivers/what-is-your-mindset?utm_term=.oo0Razv2n#.ht5JOoZv9 Cimpian, A., Mu, Y., & Erickson, L.C. (2012). Who is good at this game? Linking an activity to a social category undermines children’s achievement. Psychological Science 23(5), 533-541. Claro, S., Paunesku, D., & Dweck, C.S. (2016). Growth mindset tempers the effects of poverty on academic mindset. PNAS 113(31), 8664-8668. Diener, C.I., & Dweck, C.S. (1978). An analysis of learned helplessness: Continuous changes in performance, strategy, and achievement cognitions following failure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36(5), 451-462. Full article available at http://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/dw1978_achievement.pdf Duckworth, A.L., & Seligman, M.E.P. (2005). Self-discipline outdoes IQ in predicting academic performance of adolescents. Psychological Science 16, 939-944. Dweck, C.S., Walton, G.M., & Cohen, G.L. (2014). Academic tenacity: Mindsets and skills that promote long-term learning. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Full report available at https://ed.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/manual/dweck-walton-cohen-2014.pdf Dweck, C.S., & Reppucci, N.D. (1973). Learned helplessness and reinforcement responsibility in children. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 25(1), 109-116. Full article available at http://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/dweck73_reinforcement.pdf Dweck, C.S. (1975). The role of expectations and attributions in the alleviation of learned helplessness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 31(4), 674-685. Full article available at http://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/dw1975_attributions.pdf Educuation Week (2016). Mindset in the classroom: A national study of K-12 teachers. Author. Retrieved from https://www.edweek.org/media/ewrc_mindsetintheclassroom_sept2016.pdf Edwards, B. (1989). Drawing on the right side of the brain. New York, NY: Tarcher. (Note: The Amazon reviews say the 1989 edition is better than the more recent editions…) Gunderson, E.A., Gripshover, S.J., Romero, C., Dweck, C.S., Goldin-Meadow, S., & Levine, S.C. (2013). Parent praise to 1- to 3-year-olds predicts children’s motivational frameworks 5 years later. Child Development 84(5), 1526-1541. Haimovitz, K., & Dweck, C.S. (2016). Parents’ views of failure predict children’s fixed and growth intelligence mind-sets. Psychological Science 27, 859-869. Lazowski, R.A., & Hulleman, C.S. (2016). Motivation intentions in education: A meta-analytic review. Review of Educational Research 86(2), 602-640. Li, Yue, & Bates, T.C. (n.d.). Does growth mindset improve children’s IQ, educational attainment or response to setbacks? Active-control interventions and data on children’s own mindsets. Retrieved from https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/tsdwy/download?format=pdf Mueller, C.M., & Dweck, C.S. (1996, April). Implicit theories of intelligence; relation of parental beliefs to children’s expectations. Poster session presented at Head Start’s Third National Research Conference, Washington, D.C. Noddings, N. (2005). The challenge to care in schools: An alternative approach to education (2ndEd.). New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Paunesku, D., Walton, G.M., Romero, C., Smith, E.N., Yeager, D.S., & Dweck, C.S. (2015). Mind-set interventions are a scalable treatment for academic underachievement. Psychological Science 26(6), 784-793. Pomerantz, E.M., & Kempner, S.G. (2013). Mothers’ daily person and process praise: Implications for children’s theory of intelligence and motivation. Developmental Psychology 49(11), 2040-2046. Schmidt, J.A., Shumow, L., & Kackar-Cam, H.Z. (2017). Does mindset intervention predict students’ daily experience in classrooms? A comparison of seventh and ninth graders’ trajectories. Journal of Youth and Adolescence 46, 582-602. Schmidt, J.A., Shumow, L., & Kackar-Cam, H.K. (2015). Exploring teacher effects for mindset intervention outcomes in seventh grade science classes. Middle Grades Research Journal 10(2), 17-32. Strauss, V. (2014, August 21). For first time, minority students expected to be majority in U.S. public schools this fall. Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/08/21/for-first-time-minority-students-expected-to-be-majority-in-u-s-public-schools-this-fall/?utm_term=.6d829f242036 U.S. Department of Education (2016). The state of racial diversity in the educator workforce. Author. Retrieved from https://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/highered/racial-diversity/state-racial-diversity-workforce.pdf Wentzel, K.R. (1997). Student motivation in middle school: The role of perceived pedagogical caring. Journal of Educational Psychology 89(3), 411-419. Wright, C.F. (2017). Teacher stress and curriculum reform: An illustrative example with the “Growth Mindset” movement. Unpublished Master’s Dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin. Retrieved from https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/62456 Yeager, D.S., Mueller, C., & Dweck, C.S. (n.d.). Revisiting descriptive statistics from Mueller & Dweck (1998). Unpublished manuscript. Retrieved from https://osf.io/sh353/ Yeager, D.S., Paunesku, D., Walton, G.M., & Dweck, C.S. (2013, June 10). How can we instill productive mindsets at scale? A review of the evidence and an initial R&D agenda. Unpublished white paper prepared for the White House meeting on Excellence in Education: The Importance of Academic Mindsets. Retrieved from https://labs.la.utexas.edu/adrg/files/2013/12/Yeager-et-al-RD-agenda-6-10-131.pdf   Read Full Transcript Transcript Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  Today we’re going to talk about Professor Carol Dweck’s work on Mindset.  We’ll walk through overview of what Mindset is and the study on which it is based, and then we’ll spend quite a bit of time evaluating the research to help us understand whether the effect that Professor Dweck describes is real and if it is, what implications it has for our children and students.   The topic of Mindset has been on my mind (as it were) as an episode topic for a while but I’m in the final throes of creating content for my course on how parents can support children’s learning in school, and one of the topics I wanted to address there was related to mindset, so I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone and cover it here too.  Professor Dweck began her research as a graduate student in the ‘70s so this idea has been around for a while now and I was once told that you’d have to have been living under a rock to not have heard of it (although I confess that I hadn’t until not long before that), but I’ll describe the theory anyway in case you haven’t heard of it. Psychologists have been studying motivation for a long time, and especially motivation to learn, and there are a variety of different theories on what does motivate people to learn. Research on mindsets work traces a line back to the famous psychologist Albert Bandura’s theory of self-efficacy, which is about how people think about what they can achieve.  Self-efficacy theory says that people evaluate their perceptions of their ability at a task, the difficulty of the task, how much effort it will take to complete, the amount of help that might be needed, situational circumstances, and whether or not they have succeeded or failed in the past when they determine how much effort they are going to put into a task in front of them. The research specifically on mindset stems from a paper published in 1998 by Professor Dweck and Professor Claudia Mueller, who were both then at Columbia University, on what motivates children to learn after they have experienced success or failure.  The professors conducted a series of six short studies on 128 fifth-graders, half of whom were mostly White and attended elementary school in a small mid-western town, and half of whom were from two racially diverse schools in a large northeastern city (and I will give them kudos for testing their work on a racially diverse sample rather than testing on middle-class White children and assuming the results are applicable to all children).  The professors wanted to find out whether children who were praised for being intelligent or for demonstrating effort and hard work would react differently to success or failure on a series of abstract verbal reasoning tasks taken from a standardized test. In the first test, children were asked to choose between “problems that aren’t too hard, so I don’t get many wrong,” “problems that are pretty easy, so I’ll do well,” “problems that I’m pretty good at, so I can show I’m smart,” and “problems that I’ll learn a lot from, even if I won’t look so smart.”  This was to test what type of problems the students preferred, but they were told they would only get to work on their choice problems if there was time after they worked on pre-selected problems, so they each had the same expectations about the difficulty of what they were about to do.  After four minutes of working on problems the experimenter scored their solutions and no matter what score they achieved, they were told they had solved 80% of the problems, which was a really high score, and were told either “you must be smart at these problems” or “you must have worked hard at these problems,” or a control group received no additional feedback.  Then the children were asked again if they wanted to work on easy problems so they would look smart or difficult problems where they would learn more, but all children really received a difficult set of problems and after four minutes of work they were told they had only solved about half of them correctly.  After receiving the negative feedback they were asked how much they wanted to keep working on the problems, how much they enjoyed the work, how well they thought they had done, and why they thought they hadn’t done well on the second set.  Then they worked for four minutes on a final set of moderately difficult problems to test how well they performed after the failure on the second set. The results showed that children who were praised for their intelligence after the first problem set considered their smartness to be significantly more important to their performance than children who were praised for their effort.  67% of the children who were told they were smart then went on to choose easier problems that they would get right so they could continue to seem smart, while 92% of those who received feedback about how much effort they had put in chose to work on difficult problems that they would learn from.  Children who were praised for their effort as well as children in the control condition were more likely to say that they hadn’t done well on the second set of problems because they hadn’t put in enough effort, while children who were praised for intelligence after their initial success attributed more of their failure to a lack of abililty.  Children who were praised for intelligence were less likely to want to keep working on problems than the effort or control groups, enjoyed working on the problems less than the other groups, and actually got one more problem wrong in the third set than the first, even though their familiarity with the problems should have led them to achieve higher scores by then.  Children in the control group only achieved an average of a tenth of a problem improvement in the third set, which children in the effort group got almost 1 ¼ more problems right on average.  So all this is to say that praise for intelligence doesn’t seem to teach children that they are smart, but rather teaches them that when they fail, they can’t change their performance because it’s due to an inherent ability rather than something they can change, like effort. So all of that was the first of the six experiments reported in this paper; the subsequent five elaborated on various aspects of the first one.  In the second study, children who were told they succeeded on a first set of problems and then immediately given a chance to choose what type of problems to work on next; the ones praised for intelligence still picked the easy problems, indicating that the effect holds true in success and in failure.  In the third study, children who were praised for their ability elected to read information about the performance of others after their second set of ‘failure’ problems, while 75% of the children who were told they must have worked hard chose to read information that might help them solve problems more effectively in the future.  In the fourth study, after doing problems children were asked to rate how true is the statement “You have a certain amount of intelligence and really can’t do much to change it,” and were then offered a folder containing information about the performance of other children or information on strategies to solve problems.  Children who were praised for intelligence were almost twice as likely to rate intelligence as being fixed than children praised for effort; the control group fell in between.  And it was the children who are most concerned with their performance who were most likely to handicap themselves by sacrificing an opportunity to gain information about problem-solving strategies that might have benefitted them.  Studies 5 and 6 attempted to eliminate two alternate explanations for the findings; that the experimentor’s perceptions of their abilities impacted their performance, and that the children praised for intelligence might have thought the second difficult set or problems represented an intelligence test, while the children praised for effort would not.  Both outcomes supported the original study’s results. I want to take a short detour here and give us a bit of historical context, because it turns out that this study was published at a very interesting point in our development of theories about how children learn.  You might remember that we did an episode a while ago on self-esteem, which was all the rage in the starting in the early 1970s.  A book called Your Child’s Self-Esteem that is actually still in print today advocated for increasing children’s beliefs that they “have the capacity” to succeed and that this will “turn on their go-power” and “help motivate them to learn.”  It can take a while for psychological trends to catch on but in 1990 the State of California released a report stating that low self-esteem is linked to a variety of negative outcomes like poor academic results, drug and alcohol abuse, crime and violence, poverty, and chronic welfare dependency – and as a result, schools began doing everything they could to boost students’ self-esteem.  By 1996, when Professors Mueller and Dweck surveyed parents about what they thought about children’s perceptions of their ability and motivation to succeed, 85% of respondents thought that praising a child’s ability and intelligence when they perform well on a test is necessary to make them feel they are smart. The pendulum began to swing the other way in 2003 when Professor Roy Baumeister and his colleagues published an immense 44-page meta-analysis of the research on self-esteem, which called into question all of the findings of the California Task Force Report and found little evidence that self-esteem causes the host of positive outcomes it is commonly believe to cause, and secondly that parents tend to praise children with low self-esteem even more than children with high self-esteem, and that this praise would lead the children with low self-esteem to choose easier drawing tasks just like the children who were told they were intelligent chose easier tasks in Professor Dweck’s test.  So self-esteem went out of favor right around the time when Professor Dweck’s work was ramping up, and Mindset theory was poised to take over the baton of the next parenting

We’ve done a couple of episodes on reading by now; episode 3 (which seems so long ago!) asked whether you might have missed the boat on teaching your toddler to read.  Of course, we know that you’ve only missed the boat on that if you think that sitting your child in front of a video so they can recite the words they see without really understanding them counts as “reading.” Much more recently in episode 48 we talked with Dr. Laura Froyen about the benefits of shared reading with your child and how to do that according to best practices from the research literature. Those of you who subscribe to my newsletter will recall that I’ve been working on an episode on storytelling for months now.  Part of the reason it’s taking so long is that books on storytelling technique say to use original stories wherever possible because the language in them is so much richer, but if you’ve ever read something like an original fairytale you know they can be pretty gory, and even the most harmless ones actually contain some pretty adult themes if you read between the lines. So I wanted to know: what do children really learn from stories?  How do they figure out that we want them to learn morals from stories but not that animal characters walk on two legs and wear clothes?  How do they generalize that knowledge to the real world?  And are there specific types of books that promote learning? Join me in a conversation with Dr. Deena Weisberg of The University of Pennsylvania as she helps us to help our children learn through reading!   Other shows mentioned in this episode 003: Did you miss the boat on teaching your child how to read? 010: Becoming Brilliant 048: The benefits of shared reading   References Cheung, C.S., Monroy, J.A., & Delany, D.E. (2017). Learning-related values in young children’s storybooks: An investigation in the United States, China, and Mexico. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 48(4), 532-541. Ganea, P.A., Ma, L., & DeLoache, J.S. (2011). Young children’s learning and transfer of biological information from picture books to real animals. Child Development 82(5), 1421-1433. Heath, S.B. (1982). What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and school. Language in Society 11(1), 49-76. Hopkins, E.J., & Weisberg, D.S. (2017). The youngest readers’ dilemma: A review of children’s learning from fictional sources. Developmental Review 43, 48-70. Ostrov, J.M., Gentile, D.A., & Mullins, A.D. (2013). Evaluating the effect of educational media exposure on aggression in early childhood. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 34, 38-44. Read, K., Macauley, M., & Furay, E. (2014). The Seuss boost: Rhyme helps children retain words from shared storybook reading. First Language 34(4), 354-371.   Read Full Transcript   Transcript Jen:   [00:38] Hi, this is Jen. Before we start on today’s episode, I just wanted to take a minute to let you know that as part of my research for this episode on what children learn through reading fictional books, I ended up looking at a lot of different kinds of books for children aged roughly between toddlerhood and elementary school, and I compiled them into a list of more than 100 books that you can use to support your children’s learning on a host of subjects related to math, science, empathy, being persistent in the face of failure, multicultural issues, and many other topics as well. If you already subscribed to the show and my website, then you actually already got the list with your newsletter from last week. Unfortunately, subscribing through itunes or other platforms doesn’t count because I don’t get any information from them on how to reach you, so if you don’t already subscribe or if you’re subscribed through another platform, then head on over to YourParentingMojo.com forward slash reading books and sign up on that page and then the report will be emailed right to you. Thanks again for listening and enjoy the interview with Dr Deena Weisberg. Jen:   [01:38] Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We’ve done a couple episodes on reading by now. Episode three, which seems so long ago, was one where we asked whether you might have missed the boat on teaching your toddler to read. Of course, we know you’ve only missed the boat on that if you think that sitting your child in front of a video so they can recite the words they see without really understanding them counts as reading much more recently in episode 48, we talked with Dr Laura Frye and about the benefits of shared reading with your child and how to do that according to best practices from the research literature I’ve mentioned to those of you who subscribe to my newsletter that I had been working on an episode related to storytelling for a while as in telling stories without books and also making up stories, but I realized I needed a bridge from where we’ve been to where we want to go. Jen:    [02:23] I wanted to know more about what children learn from the stories we read to them, and boy, do we have someone who can help us with that today. We’re here with Dr. Deena Weisberg, a senior fellow in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr Weisberg earned her PhD in Psychology from Yale University and in her postdoc work at Rutgers University and also at Temple with Dr Roberta Golinkoff, with whom we spoke in episode 10 on her book becoming brilliant when I started researching what children learn from reading, I found an absolutely epic paper that Dr Weisberg co-authored with five pages of references in tiny text that describes and how children learn from reading fiction, so I knew we’d found the right person to speak with us. She’s also the parent of a five year old and an 18 month old, and has gamely agreed to talk with us today even though her nanny called in sick, so she’s in the thick of this parenting thing with us as well. Welcome Dr Weisberg. Dr. Weisberg:   [03:15] Thank you so much, Jen. It’s really a pleasure to be here and talk with you this afternoon. Jen: [03:19] So it wasn’t until I started reading your paper that I realized what a really weird and strange thing it is that we ask of children. We read fiction to them and particularly fiction with some kind of message that we want them to internalize. And in your paper, you give the example of, I hope I’m saying this correctly, the Berenstain Bears visit to the dentist, which we assume is designed to help young children understand and get comfortable with what happens when they go to the dentist, but somehow we don’t want the children to retain the ideas that were bears wear clothes, live in houses, and speak like people. So how do children sort out these ideas when we read these stories or do they fully sort them out? Dr. Weisberg: [03:57] It’s a really interesting set of questions. And the first thing I want to point out is that it’s not just children that have this problem. So one of the things that fascinates me about this area of research is that this is something that we all do from very little children way on up to us grown people have the same problem. It’s called the reader’s dilemma is what you just described. It’s the idea of how do you sort out which parts of a fictional story need to remain nearly fictional within that fictional world in which parts of the story can fruitfully be applied to the real world. So I just want to start by pointing out that that’s not a problem that goes away. So it is a problem that we get…well in some cases we get better at solving. There’s some very famous cases and people making these sorts of confusions right up through adulthood that I enjoy talking about. Dr. Weisberg: [04:44] But in terms of children, there are really two main ways that children learn how to sort through this readers dilemma. One is that they use their existing background knowledge. So if you have a book where a character does something that they already know to be impossible, like blip out of existence in one place and suddenly reappear somewhere else, you know by some people would say even in infancy, but certainly by three, four or five years old, they know that that’s not something that can really happen. And so they’re pretty good at figuring out that those sorts of events should remain just in the fictional story. Now the problem with that method of sorting things out of course, is that their background knowledge is not as rich or deep or accurate as adults background knowledge. So that is where some confusion’s can sometimes creep in or they can start doubting a little bit their background knowledge if something is presented very vividly in a story, but that’s the first method and usually for the most part it works pretty well and also again the method that we tend to use as adults. You know, we sort of check it against your background knowledge. Does that pass the smell test? Is that something that seems like it happened in reality, you know? Okay, I’ll let that through. And then the second method is that they rely on the adults around them like they do for so many things. So often it’s the responsibility of parents, teachers or older siblings or other trusted adults to sort things out for kids in those cases where, I don’t want to say that they get entirely confused, but where they might start having doubts based on what they’re reading or seeing in a video. Jen: [06:13] Okay. So a couple things there. Firstly, you’ve tantalized us so effectively with those stories of how adults experience the readers dilemma. Can you give us one or two of those fabulous examples? Dr. Weisberg: [06:20] Yeah, absolutely. One of my favorite examples is from The Da Vinci Code; when that book was published, it’s now a number of years ago, so I’m not sure if your readers will remember, but the point of The Da Vinci Code is that the hero and heroine are on the search for the Holy Grail and there are some clues left in the text that the holy grail is located in this particular church in Scotland and the New York Times sent a reporter to this particular church and the staff, there reported this spike in visitor ship, that there are people who would go there having read the book and they would come there seriously reporting that they were looking for the Holy Grail. Now this is a little bit different than, Oh, you know, I heard about this interesting place in a book. Let me go see it in real life because it really does exist. Dr. Weisberg: [07:05] You know, they said there certainly was that and they got a bit of fame from the book and they saw some tourism increased because of just the mention of the place. But there were also people that the staff reported engaging with were very, very seriously engaged in the process of hunting for the grail based on the clues in this fictional book, you know, and that’s fairly extreme, right? You know, so these are mostly American tourists. This was a report from the Times as I said, so you have to go through some considerable time and expense to hunt for something on the basis of, you know, what on the cover it stated very clearly that this was a novel. So that’s one of the more famous cases from recent years. This is also something that happens a lot with actors and actresses. So you know, you watch a movie or an actor or actress will play a similar role a few times and people start thinking that that’s what that person is like in real life. Dr. Weisberg: [08:01] And I’m not saying that’s always false. That might be the case, but there are lots of famous cases like in the sixties, I believe one of the first medical dramas that was shown on TV Dr Marcus Welby md when the actor reported that he just got tons of mail asking him medical questions, you know, they thought that, well he might know something about medicine because he plays one on TV, which is ludicrous if you think about it, but again, it points out this really interesting continuity between what children are doing and the ways that they’re sorting things out and what adults are doing. Jen:[08:31] Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. As you were explaining about The Da Vinci Code, I was thinking the church in Scotland should have had the Monty Python and the Holy Grail video playing on repeat once they got there…. Dr. Weisberg: [08:40] Oh, that would have been brilliant. No – it’s not here. Wrong castle. And then we’ll just arrest everybody. And then stop. Jen: [08:47] Yeah, right then and there. Okay. Well cool. Thank you for that. That makes a lot of sense. So you said that there are two ways that children start to sort this out for themselves. The first is experience and it makes a lot of sense to me if they’ve never had the experience of walking through a wall, they sort of assume that nobody can walk through walls, which I guess is a reasonable way of thinking about the world. And the second thing you said is that they look to their parents to help sort this out, but I’m just thinking about the dentist thing. I might read that…I haven’t read the book, but I might read it to my daughter to explain what the dentist is like, but I wouldn’t necessarily go ahead and say. But you know, bears don’t really wear clothes and live in houses and I’m not sure she would ask me, “Mama do bears were clothes?” Because she’s never seen a bear. She has no experience with that. So how do they make that leap and how to parents help that process or, or it seems like I’m not helping that process. Dr. Weisberg: [09:34] Well, on the one hand I would say to you and to your listeners, this is not something to worry about. Jen: [09:39] Yeah. No, I’m not worried. I’m just curious. Dr. Weisberg: [09:42] So you know, kids don’t get to the age of 10 or 12 and still harbors sort of deep confusion about bears living in houses because again, the two processes are still at work, right? So your daughter might not have seen a bear, you know, live and in person, but she’s seen lots of animals. She probably knows kind of what a bear is from pictures and generally knows that they don’t tend to speak like humans or they’ve seen dogs even if you don’t have a pet at home or you’ve seen them out on the street and so you have enough experience with nonhuman animals I should say, to know that they don’t speak like we do or live in houses or wear clothes. So there is some of that prior knowledge that’s able to kick in there. And also on the converse, yes, it’s true that you’re not necessarily telling your child explicitly, okay, in this story, the bears live in houses, but they don’t really live in houses. Dr. Weisberg:  [10:28] But what you are doing is you’re emphasizing the message that you do want her to get from that story. So by the very things that you are saying and are not saying, so the things that you are emphasizing as opposed to things you’re not emphasizing, will send the message what’s important in this story for her to take out. And I know a lot of parents do that sort of thing. They’ll pick up books like this or you know, books on having a younger sibling for instance, and spend a lot of time talking about the theme from that book that you feel is really important for your child. And so they’ll learn that that’s the direction in which they should take their interpretation of the book based on your emphasis. Jen:  [11:02] Okay, got it. Yeah. And so, so often in parenting it seems we find that by focusing on one thing, we sort of automatically don’t focus on something else and that that focus of attention is a very powerful tool and signal to our children. Dr. Weisberg: 

So you listened to episode 58 and you’re convinced of the benefits of outdoor play. But you’re a grown-up. You don’t play outdoors. And you don’t know anything about nature.  How can you possibly get started in helping your child to play outdoors more? There are a number of books out there on getting outside with children – some arguably more well-known than this one, but I have to say that Dr. Scott Sampson’s book How to Raise a Wild Child is the BEST book I’ve seen on this topic because it balances just the right amount of information on why it’s important to get outside, with just enough pointers on how to do it, without overwhelming you with hundreds of options to choose between.  And it turns out that you don’t need to know a thing at all about The Environment to have a successful outing with children! If you’ve been wishing you could get outdoors more but just don’t know where to start, then this episode – and book! – are for you.   Other shows referenced in this episode 058: What are the benefits of outdoor play?   Dr. Scott Sampson's Book How to raise a wild child - Affiliate link   References Gopnik, A. (2009). The philosophical baby: What children’s minds tell us about truth, love, and the meaning of life. New York, NY: Picador. Sampson, S.D. (2015). How to raise a wild child: The art and science of falling in love with nature. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. (Affiliate link) Young, J., Haas, E., & McGown, E. (2010). Coyote’s guide to connecting with nature. OWLink Media.   Read Full Transcript   Transcript Jen:  [00:38] Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. For those of you who get my fortnightly newsletter, which you can receive by subscribing to the show YourParentingMojo.com, you know that I have a bit of a penchant for the outdoors. I went on a 10 day backpacking trip across North Cascades National Park in September, and I’m trying to pass on my love of the outdoors to my daughter, most of our newsletters have a photo at the top and pretty often they go out with an image of her sitting in a stream or clambering over boulders or up to her thighs and a pond wearing waders, of course. And so today we’re going to talk with Dr Scott Sampson, the author of how to raise a wild child, the art and science of falling in love with nature, which I have to say is the best book I’ve read on this topic in terms of balancing information about the science of children in nature with a not overwhelming number of actions that parents can take to raise a wild child. Dr Sampson has the honor of being the first paleontologist we’ve interviewed on this show. He earned both his master’s in anthropology and a phd in zoology from the University of Toronto. He’s currently the president and CEO of Science World British Columbia, which is a pretty cool hands on science museum in Vancouver. And if his name sounds familiar to the parents of preschoolers, it’s because he also hosts the PBS kids series dinosaur train. I’m so excited to discuss this topic that’s so close to my heart. Welcome Dr Sampson. Dr. Sampson:   [01:56] Thank you very much, Jen. Nice to be honest. Jen:    [01:58] All right, so let’s start with the science. You and your book site a raft of studies describing the really profound shift in children’s leisure time. That’s happened over the last 50 years or so. Can you briefly, if possible, summarize 50 years worth of literature and why does it matter that our children don’t spend as much time outside now as they used to? Dr. Sampson:  [02:18] Oh, let’s start with the first question and then we’ll go to the second one on the reason why this is important, so I wrote How to Raise a Wild Child because after doing a lot of thinking and research and talking with people, it just became clear to me that there was this dire need to reconnect kids with nature that over a single generation we’d gone from basically a free range childhood to an indoor migration that has limited children’s ability to be outside and the end result of this has been a health crisis for children and the places that they live. That one US surgeon general said not so long ago that this generation of children could be the first to have a life expectancy is shorter than that of their parents. We have these runaway conditions, obesity, attention deficit disorder, diabetes, depression, even conditions like Myopia and not only is the incidents of these conditions increasing, but they’re moving earlier and earlier into childhood and so that’s the health of children and then when you think about sustainability and moving towards, you know, a thriving green future, the reality is why would we ever become sustainable if we don’t care about where we live and why would we care if we never spend any time outside. A screen looks the same in Vancouver or Miami or Timbuktu as anywhere else. Dr. Sampson:    [03:42] So we have this need to reconnect kids with nature and bringing back these childhoods that had a lot of green time instead of just the screen time that we’re getting today. So that is the why. Then going to the science – in reading about this, I was struck that this nature connection was this pressing issue. So I said, well, “where’s the research on this?” It turns out there’s a lot. Most of it is actually over the past 15 years since this has become a real issue, sort of 15 to 20, but there is a lot of scientific literature and it’s growing every week, but as I looked around I saw that there was no general audience book that had put this information together and summarized it for parents and teachers and other caregivers. So that’s what I attempted to do with How to Raise a Wild Child. Jen:   [04:34] Yeah, and it was really that balance of what does the research say plus the practicality that spoke to me in the books very well. We’ll get more to the practicality in a minute, but I want to touch on something that you mentioned there about people caring about where they live and I had been doing a lot of thinking as I’m doing a masters in education at the moment and in the course of doing that, I’ve been thinking about place-based learning and the idea that you couldn’t really care about a place where you spend time outside if you do engage in outdoor-based activities and it was just thinking about things like the decline of rural towns where people move away from them because they don’t have any job opportunities there because the children are told they have to go to college to be successful and so they move away and then they don’t want to come back. And you know, there aren’t any companies there with viable jobs. And so I realized this is a bit off topic here, but what I realized is that really having this connection to a place can be an enormous factor in saving these small towns. The idea that getting to know a place intimately and learning about it both in school and in life, do you see that same connection? Dr. Sampson:    [05:40] I absolutely do, and you hit on a topic about which I am deeply passionate. In fact, I’ve begun work on a book about place based learning and so I think that it is one of the major directions and education to move in that right now, the primary model of education – of course there’s a great diversity of education types out there, but the primary model, that sort of industrial model of education is really all about standardization. It’s about standardized testing. It’s about everybody being evaluated across the board in the same way and when you think about that, it’s the antithesis of place-based education and it makes sense that place based education would struggle to gain a foothold within a system like this because everything that’s taught in school works against a specific knowledge of place, and it’s all about knowing these general things that you can regurgitate on a test and yes, there’s a lot of evidence to back up the fact that learning real, true engaged learning, is best when it is hands on. Dr. Sampson:    [06:50] This experiential and the place that we have these experiences is where we live. So right now the average kid leaves school at the end of the day and they don’t see anything that they’ve learned in the environment that they spend most of their lives in. Whether it’s science or art or social studies or you name it. They don’t really see that in place because they’re learning these topics from textbooks. They’re learning about how these topics affect faraway places, not their own place. So the notion of place-based education. People like David Sobel have really documented and written about the potential power of this kind of learning to deeply engage children and in particular, I think for me it comes down almost to one word and that word is wonder. All children are born with this deep sense of wonder and all you have to do is watch a baby crawling around to get it, but all children have this and by the time they’re six, most kids still have it intact, but by the time they get to be about 11 or 12 for many children, that sense of wonder is diminished and in some cases virtually gone and certainly by the teen years, learning is kind of a drag and that sense of wonder just isn’t there for the most part, at least when it comes to education. Dr. Sampson:    [08:12] So our challenge as as educators and communicators of knowledge is to foster – kindle, that sense of wonder and then keep it kindled, keep it burning. And if we do that, then we’ve given children this gift because they’ll want to learn the rest of their lives. Jen:    [08:29] Yeah. You’re reminding me of something that Professor Alison Gopnik talks about, which is how children’s attention is like a lantern and it illuminates everything around them, which is why they find this great sense of wonder and they’re also so easily distracted, but adults’ attention is more like a spotlight that shines on one thing at a time, which is why we can engage in goal directed behavior that children struggle with and in your book you argue that lantern attention isn’t just a stage that children have to get through before they come these sophisticated spotlights, but actually lantern attention is really valuable in and of itself and the adults would do well to try it too. Can you tell us some more about that? Dr. Sampson:   [09:10] Sure; I think we have come to weight that spotlight of attention and see that as critical because that’s what we use to read or look at screens or focus on any one thing, but that kind of lantern attention was critical for the vast majority of the 200 to 300,000 years that humans have been around. If you’re a hunter gatherer and you’re out somewhere hunting or trying to not be hunted yourself, you had better have that lantern attention on where you are aware of your surroundings, you know, how to open your senses and take the world and we have lost that to a great extent at our children are losing it too and so it’s the whole notion of almost relearning how to hear, how to feel, how to sense the environment around you and we all know that being outside has a different impact on us emotionally and on our sensory abilities, but we have to develop those skills over time and our brains, as you well know, are very malleable when we’re babies, but we tend to lay down pathways based on our experience and if our experience has only looking at screens then those are the types of things that will be laid down our brains and we won’t have those abilities, those sensory, those lantern like abilities and it turns out that those are critical for even relaxation and just general health and there’s lots of, you know, kids aside for the moment. There’s lots of scientific evidence that being outside in nature is critical for adult health as well. The Japanese, you know this very well, they have something called “shinrin-roku,” where they send employees out to these amazing forests to do something which translates as forest bathing, which is a wonderful concept and the employers do it because the health of their employees increases if they do this and therefore they’re not spending as much on healthcare for their employees. So it is something that children and adults absolutely need. Jen:    [11:09] And so what is it that people do in nature that makes this so beneficial to us? Is it, can we just walk around and not think about anything and get a benefit or do we have to think, oh wow, this is amazingly beautiful. Or do we notice specific things or what kind of processes are going on in the brain when we do this? Dr. Sampson:  [11:27] Oh, of course. What happens in the brain is very specific to individuals and mostly dependent on their experience. I’ve been to a tropical rain forest in Madagascar, and I’ve been with somebody who is from that area, born and raised looking for Lemurs and I’ve spent half a day looking for lemurs and found nothing and this person can take me out and in 10 minutes we’re looking at lemurs and it’s because he knows that place. He hears things, he can see signals and signs, so his experience allows him to understand and interact with that place in ways that I can’t even begin to understand. So what we do know is that our bodies, our heart rate slows down, our blood pressure drops when we’re outside, we breathe in these things, particularly in the forest it appears, that make us healthier, that allow us to focus better, to concentrate for longer, to regenerate ourselves. All of this, and it turns out that kids to have some of these effects and more that they’re more likely to play longer, to fight less, to collaborate more when they’re playing outside, especially in a nature based setting than in other kinds of indoor settings or even in standard metal and plastic playgrounds. Jen:   [12:52] Yeah, you reminded me a lot of Jon Young’s fabulous book Coyotes Guide to Connecting with Nature and I think that was a big inspiration for you as well and one of the key take homes from that book is the idea of developing a sit spot. And so I think a sit spot is a place where you go and you just sit and observe and I have to say I haven’t tried it yet because our garden is an absolute disaster and pretty much all I hear from the inside is Steller’s Jays and I see the hummingbirds and our hummingbird feeder out the window and I’m assuming I’m going to hear and see if those same things when I go out there. So I’m wondering, and I guess this sort of goes to the larger issue of I live in a city and a lot of people live in cities and is there something that people who live in cities can do to kind of cultivate this mindful awareness of nature, even though our experience and what we see might not be as pure as the forest bathers’? Dr. Sampson:    [13:48] Absolutely. Nature is everywhere. Including in cities, including in underserved communities, although it is often less common there and therefore more difficult to find and there’s things we can do about that and I’m happy to chat about that too, but to address your question, Jon Young’s notion of sit spot is a powerful one because it is actually a discipline that you can use to help reconnect with where you live and I have done this off and on for years. I have done it in urban settings and found it to be powerful and the notion is really simple. You just go and you sit outside for a minimum of he suggests 15 to 20 minutes and it will take usually a few minutes for the place to settle down and for the birds to sort of get active again because whether we know it or not, the birds are always watching us. They’re always watching everything that’s going on because their lives depend on it. Dr. Sampson:   [14:45] When we walk outside, we’re not worried about being attacked. Birds have to worry about this all the time. It appears that they’re flying around randomly, but birds don’t do anything randomly or if they do, they don’t last very long and so when they sing and they have multiple different calls and Jon Young encourages us to get to know the different calls of different species. After a while you will get to know the individual birds that live around your backyard because it turns out, of course most of these birds have territories and so you’re interacting with the same birds all the time and trust me, they know the individual cats in the neighborhood too because those cats are the biggest and most common predators on

This is the second in our extended series of episodes on children’s play.  We kicked off last week with a look at the benefits of play in general for children, and now we’re going to take a more specific look at the benefits of outdoor play.  Really, if someone could bottle up and sell outdoor play they’d make a killing, because it’s hard to imagine something children can do that benefits them more than this. This episode also tees up our conversation, which will be an interview with Dr. Scott Sampson on his book How To Raise A Wild Child, which gives TONS of practical suggestions for getting outdoors with children.   Other episodes referenced in this show How to scaffold children’s learning to help them succeed Is a Reggio Emilia-inspired preschool right for my child? Understanding the AAP’s new screen time guidelines Raising your child in a digital world   References Anderson, L. W. and Krathwohl, D. R., et al (Eds..) (2001) A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Allyn & Bacon. Boston, MA: Pearson Education Group Berman, M.G., Jonides, J., & Kaplan, S. (2008). The cognitive benefits of interacting with nature. Psychological Science 19(12), 1207-1212. Brussoni, M., Rebecca, G., Gray, C., Ishikawa, T., & Sandseter, E.B.H. (2015). What is the relationship between risky outdoor play and health in children? A systematic review. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 12(6), 6243-6454. Centers for Disease Control and Prvention (2016). Playground safety. Author. Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/safechild/playground/index.html Capaldi, C.A., Dopko, R.L., & Zelenski, J.M. (2014). The relationship between nature connectedness and happiness: A meta-analysis. Frontiers in Psychology 5, 1-15. Gregory, A. (2017, May 18). Running free in Germany’s outdoor preschools. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/18/t-magazine/germany-forest-kindergarten-outdoor-preschool-waldkitas.html?_r=0 Hung, W. (2013). Problem-based learning: A learning environment for enhancing learning transfer. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education 137(31), 27-38. doi 10.1002/ace.20042 Lund, H.H., Klitbo, T., & Jessen, C. (2005). Playware technology for physically activating play. Artificial Life and Robotics 9(4), 165-174. Mawson, W.B. (2014). Experiencing the ‘wild woods’: The impact of pedagogy on children’s experience of a natural environment. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal 22(4), 513-524. Moss, S. (2012). Natural Childhood. London: The National Trust. Nash, R. (1982). Wilderness and the American Mind (3rd Ed.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Natural Playgrounds Company (2017). Website. Retrieved from http://www.naturalplaygrounds.com/ Outdoor Foundation (2017). Outdoor Participation Report. Author. Retrieved from https://outdoorindustry.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/2017-Outdoor-Recreation-Participation-Report_FINAL.pdf Otto, S., & Pensini, P. (2017). Nature-based environmental education of children: Environmental knowledge and connectness to nature, together, are related to ecological behavior. Global Environmental Change 47, 88-94. Potvin, P., & Hasni, A. (2014). Interest, motivation, and attitude towards science and technology at K-12 levels: A systematic review of 12 years of educational research. Studies in Science Education 50(1), 85-129. Richardson, M., Cormack, A., McRobert, L., & Underhill, R. (2016). 30 days wild: Development and evaluation of a large-scale nature engagement campaign to improve well-being. PLOS ONE 11(2), 1-13. Roisin, H. (2014, April). The overprotected kid. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/04/hey-parents-leave-those-kids-alone/358631/ Scott, J. (2000, July 15). When child’s play is too simple; Experts criticize safety-conscious recreation as boring. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2000/07/15/arts/when-child-s-play-too-simple-experts-criticize-safety-conscious-recreation.html Sloan, C. (2013). Transforming multicultural classrooms through creative place-based learning. Multicultural Education 21(1), 26-32. Retreived from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1045830.pdf Ulset, V., Vitaro, F., Brengden, M., Bekkhus, M., & Borge, A.I.H. (2017). Time spent outdoors during preschool: Links with children’s cognitive and behavioral development. Journal of Environmental Psychology 52, 69-70. Waite, S., Rogers, S., & Evans, J. (2013). Freedom, flow, and fairness: Exploring how children develop socially at school through outdoor play. Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning 13(3), 255-276. Waller, T., Arlemalm-Hager, E., Sandseter, E.B.H., Lee-Hammond, L., Lekies, K., & Wyver, S. (2017). The SAGE handbook of outdoor play and learning. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Williams, F. (2017). The nature fix. New York, NY: WW Norton. Wyver, S. (2017). Outdoor play and cognitive development. In T. Waller, E. Arlemalm-Hagster, E.B. Hansen Sandseter, L. Lee-Hammond, K.S. Lekies, and S. Wyer (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of outdoor play and learning. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Young, J., McGown, E., & Haas, E. (2010). Coyote’s guide to connecting with nature. Owlink Media.   Read Full Transcript Transcript   Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  We’re part-way through a series of as-yet undetermined length on play at the moment.  We kicked off with a conversation with Dr. Stuart Brown on the overarching topic of why play is important not only to children, but also to adults.  Today we’re going to talk about outdoor play, and this is such a big topic that we’re going to split it up a bit.  Today we’ll talk about why outdoor play is so critical for children’s development, and then soon we’ll talk with Dr. Scott Sampson about realistic ways that real people can really get their children outside more (and, preferably, get outside more with their children).  Hopefully after that we’ll also look at risky play, and maybe even imaginary play…but let’s take things one at a time. The way we have defined “nature” and “wilderness” has changed a lot over the years.  Park Ranger Jen is going to come out for a few minutes here – perhaps it won’t surprise some of you who have seem pictures of us in my fortnightly newsletter grubbing around in the muck that I used to want to be a ranger for the National Park Service – and preferably at a park in the middle of nowhere.  A lot of days I still do, but you have to be realistic when you marry a guy who works in advertising. European settlers of the New World were familiar with wilderness even before they got here because at that time there was still quite a bit of wilderness on the continent.  The most notable idea they had was that wilderness is something different and alien from man, something that civilization can and should and must struggle against.  Judeo-Christian tradition is filled with this kind of symbolism, and it had an enormous impact on the settlers.  “Good” land is flat and fertile; “good” trees produce shade, or fruit, or preferably both; water is plentiful, the climate is mild, and animals live in harmony with man.  Picture the Garden of Eden – it’s a fecund place where branches are drooping with fruit, there’s no need to be afraid of any animal, and Adam and Even don’t need to do any work to survive – but after they sin in the garden they are driven out into the wilderness.  This view of wilderness in the Judeo-Christian religion is in stark contrast to the way wilderness was viewed in other places; many of India’s early religions, including Jainism, Buddhism, and Hinduism emphasize compassion for all living things because man is a part of nature, not apart from it.  The ancient Chinese sought out wilderness in the hope of more clearly understanding the unity and rhythm that they believed pervaded the universe.  Japan’s first religion, Shinto, was a form of nature worship that actually preferred mountains, forests, and storms over the fruitful, pastoral scenes so important to Westerners.  We grew intermittently softer and less-soft toward wilderness over the years until the 1960s and ‘70s, when the terms “environment” and “ecology” became household words.  For the first time in a long time we started to see ourselves as being a part of nature, although it’s a neater idea in theory than in practice.  We increased the pace of setting aside lands for conservation purposes, signing the Wilderness Act in 1964 which specifically provides for places that are “untrammeled by man.” This makes wilderness areas unlike the national parks which had been created sixty years earlier, because in parks people and nature had always uneasily coexisted, at least – White visitors and nature had, because all the natives had to be kicked out before the park was created.  Some of us now view wilderness as a place to go to feel renewed, but then we want to go back to our technology-centered lives and we sort of forget about wilderness until the next time we want to feel renewed.  Many children these days understand why we should recycle and can tell you about endangered species and climate change, but have no physical experience with nature themselves.  I’m going to argue today that if we can reframe the way we see wilderness and nature and see it as part of our everyday lives, rather than ‘that amazingly cool thing over there that we only visit very occasionally,’ that both we and our children will benefit. I also want to try to carefully acknowledge – without unintentionally stepping on anyone’s toes – that there are a lot of issues related to colonialist, industrialist, capitalist that we should acknowledge when we talk about nature and our relationship with it.  Indigenous and First Nations communities in many, many places around the world see a spiritual connection to nature as just part of how life is lived, as inextricable from human life.  While these cultures have this idea of a connection to nature in common, they are each unique in the way in which they express that connection – the cultures may have commonalities across them but they are not monolithic.  Colonization has obviously had what we can politely call a negative impact on native peoples in the U.S. and in many other countries, and I think we should acknowledge that for years now we’ve told indigenous peoples that their way of life is wrong and that they need to live the way we live and adapt to our customs and practices, and now we’re seeing that their cultural practices and the way in which they see themselves as a part of nature actually has a great deal of value, and that we should somehow try to understand these practices without appropriating them like we’ve appropriated things like dreamcatchers and headdresses and Pocahontas.  I’m the first to say that this is not my area of expertise and am not exactly sure where this line of appropriation lies, or whether we might cross it by accident, but I at least want to acknowledge that the line exists and also that, as usual, the vast majority of research on children related to the outdoors has been conducted on White children by White researchers, and the perspectives of people from non-dominant cultures are not well represented.   It won’t be a surprise to anyone who has read – or even heard of – Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods that children are spending less time than they were even just a generation ago – a LOT less time.  A raft of studies shows children spending less time outside, more time in front of the TV and computer, and a dramatic increase in the incidence of childhood obesity.  We’re beginning to understand why that is – nature is filled with inherently fascinating scenery which attracts our attention in a gentle, general way.  Urban environments (and digital media) demand our directed attention so we don’t get hit by a car, or so we can get better at whatever is the hot video game app this week, which is mentally tiring for us. A generation ago, children found nature everywhere – in vacant lots, in fields, in ditches – as they roamed with friends for hours at a time unsupervised.  Journalist Hanna Rosin wrote her seminal article The Overprotected Kid in The Atlantic in 2014 that when her daughter was about 10, her husband suddenly realized that in her daughter’s whole life, she had probably not spent more than 10 minutes unsupervised by an adult.  Not 10 minutes in 10 years. In the U.K., the area in which children roam without adults has decreased by almost 90% – half of all children used to regularly play in wild spaces a generation ago, and now it’s less than one in ten.  Children don’t walk to school alone any more, or play outside by themselves – instead they’re indoors and if they’re aged between four and nine they spend on average over 17 hours a week watching TV or playing video games.  The Outdoor Foundation (which is funded by the National Park Service and outdoor retailers) found that participation of all people over six years old in outdoor activities (not including organized sports) declined between 2006 and 2016, but the participation rate of 6-12-year-olds declined the most – 15%.  Most of that decline happened between 2006 and 2009, and it’s been pretty much flat-lined at around 62% of children participating for the last several years.  Journalist Florence Williams reports in her book The Nature Fix that two thirds of schoolchildren do not know acorns come from trees, and while she doesn’t source that particular nugget and I couldn’t find it independently, the overall feeling is one that is echoed in other reports. At the same time, academics are being pushed ever-harder in schools, in the name of helping individuals to ‘get ahead’ so companies can sell more stuff and our GDP can rise ever-higher.  As we see often in parenting, when we prioritize one thing we inherently de-prioritize something else – just because we can’t pay attention to everything.  If we prioritize academics, we de-prioritize spending time outdoors and engaging in unstructured play. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule.  There are more than 1500 forest kindergartens in Germany – some have a kind of ‘home base’ structure for bad weather but others just shuttle the children to a park on public transit, and keep them outdoors whatever the weather.  Children don’t play with toys, but with sticks, rocks, leaves, and whatever else they can find.  Far from being wild, uncivilized children who struggle in schools, forest kindergarten graduates have a “clear advantage” over the graduates of indoor kindergartens, outperforming their peers in cognitive and physical ability, as well as creativity and social development.  The Wild Network, an organization that tries to increase the amount of nature in children’s lives, has identified several barriers to what it calls Wild Time, which are categorized into four groups.  In the fear category are stranger danger, a risk-averse culture, and dangerous streets.  Time constraints include time-poor parents, a lack of nature in the curriculum, and a lack of unstructured free play in nature.  Spatial issues include vanishing green space and the commercialization of childhood seems to be lumped in here as well, while the rise of screen time is the primary technological concern.  It’s too simplistic to say that too much of all of these things is always terrible – for example, technology can be a great enabler of the outdoors.  My 3 ½-year-old is getting into geocaching, where you use a map on a phone to locate a small hidden object – I mostly use the technology at the moment but I’m sure she’s going to want to do it soon.  I would argue that our children can handle more risk than most of us let them experience, but how much is the right amount? As I mentioned earlier, part of the problem of getting children outside is that their parents have a perception that danger lurks around every corner, which is why playgrounds in Western countries tend to consist of a play structure, some rubberized flooring to prevent injuries, and a fence around the outside to keep people who aren’t supposed to be playing with their children out.  In the 1960s, children were safe wandering around New York City because neighbors and shopkeepers kept a collective eye out for children as they played.  Today that collective responsibility has been replaced by governmental actions (for example, putting signs on playgrounds saying that adults may not enter without a child) and quasi-governmental organizations like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which aims to safeguard children but also contributes to the feeling that stranger danger is a real thing.  In reality, children are almost never kidnapped from playgrounds.  Family members are usually involved when children are kidnapped, and even the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children is refocusing its attention away from putting missing children’s pictures on milk cartons and toward child molestation, which unfortunately remains an enormous problem. I only want to address injuries briefly, because we’ll cover them in greater depth in the episode on risky play, but I do want to make the point that while the Centers for Disease Control reports that more than 200,000 children are treated in emergency departments every year for injuries sustained at playgrounds, this number has remained steady as the population has increased and most of the injuries treated were minor with the child being sent home without being admitted.  40 children died on playgrounds in the eight-year period between 2001 and 2009, mostly from either strangulation related to swings, jump ropes, dog leashes, and the like, or falls.  While these deaths are tragic, we should put that into context: the same number of children are killed on our roads every two weeks.  The result of the focus on reducing injuries is the standardization of play equipment, which is why you can walk into pretty much any playground across the country and see the same bog-standard equipment – a metal pipe climbing structure, a slide, as few moving parts as possible, and a sea of rubber mat flooring.  I’m probably going to do an episode dedicated to risky play in this series so I won’t get into it too deeply here, but I do want to mention that the type of outdoor play that most Americans think of with the standard playground structure surrounded by a fence and with rubberized flooring underfoot isn’t really very interesting or challenging for children.  This model has developed through parents and cities trying to remove all risk from playgrounds and while playground standards have been effective at reducing