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

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

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

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

Mark Leather, a Senior Lecturer in Adventure Education at Plymouth Marjon University, brings his expertise to the table as he critiques forest schools. He explores the origins of these programs, comparing them to traditional education and revealing the cultural significance of outdoor learning. The conversation dives into the potential benefits of forest schools, such as encouraging creativity and personal growth, while also flagging the limitations of current research. Leather even shares insights on whether he would choose this type of schooling for his own child.

Parent-Teacher conferences are about to be underway in many places, so I thought it might be helpful to give you some resources to make these as productive for you and your child as possible. In this episode we talk with Dr. Margaret Caspe and Dr. Elena Lopez of the Global Family Research Project, which develops authentic partnerships to support children’s learning in the home, school, and community.  I actually used Dr. Lopez’ textbook for my Master’s in Education, so I’ve been familiar with her work for a while and knew she and her colleagues at GFRP were just the right people to help us learn more about Parent-Teacher conferences (for example, did you know that teachers find them just as scary as parents?!) and understand how to advocate for our child – and for all of the children in our community. The resource guide on Parent-Teacher Conferences that we reference throughout this episode can be found here.     References Civil, M., & Quintos, B. (2009). Latina mothers' perceptions about the teaching and learning of mathematics. In B. Greer, S. Mukhopadhyay, A. B. Powell, & S. Nelson-Barber (Eds.), Culturally responsive mathematics education (pp. 321-343). New York: Routledge. Charney, R. (2002). Teaching children to care. Greenfield, MA: Northeast Foundation for Children. [note: Dr. Caspe misremembered the title as “The Responsive Classroom.”] Dweck, C. (2007). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York: Ballantine. [Note: check out my episode on this topic before buying this book…] George Lucas Educational Foundation (2015, August 24). Having students lead parent conferences. Author. Retrieved from https://www.edutopia.org/practice/student-led-conferences-empowerment-and-ownership Loewus, L. (2017, August 15). The nation’s teaching force is still mostly White and female. Edweek. Retrieved from https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2017/08/15/the-nations-teaching-force-is-still-mostly.html McWayne, C. M., Melzi, G., Limlingan, M. C., & Schick, A. (2016). Ecocultural patterns of family engagement among low-income Latino families of preschool children. Developmental psychology 52(7), 1088. Small, M.L. (2009). Unanticipated gains: Origins of network inequality in everyday life. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press Strauss, V. (2014, August 21). For first time, minority students expected to be majority in U.S. public schools this fall. 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=.3752d0eeddd7 TeacherVision (n.d.). Parent-teacher conferences: Before, during, and after. Author. Retrieved from https://www.teachervision.com/parent-teacher-conferences-during-after U.S. Department of Education (July 2016). The state of racial diversity in the educator workforce. Author. Retrived from https://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/highered/racial-diversity/state-racial-diversity-workforce.pdf   Read Full Transcript   Transcript Jen: [00:21] Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today we’re going to take another look at a topic related to school and it’s one that you’re going to be able to use very soon. We’re looking at parent teacher conferences. Your conferences in your new school or preschool or maybe classroom within the same school are likely coming up within the next couple of weeks. And these things can be stressful!” We get 10 minutes with a teacher whom we may or may not have had any interaction with beyond, hi, how are you?” And we really have no idea what to expect, so ideally parent teacher conferences shouldn’t just be a one shot opportunity to discuss your child’s progress in school. They should be part of an ongoing conversation about progress in school, but maybe also things happening outside school that are affecting that progress. But how can we know what to expect from these conferences and how can we prepare for them, how can we think about them in the context of all the other interactions that we are or could be having with our child’s school? Jen:  [01:54] So we have not one but two guests here today to help us figure this out. We have Dr Maggie Caspe. She’s the director of research and professional learning and the global family research project. She had her masters in education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a Ph.D In applied developmental psychology from New York University and Dr Elena Lopez, co-director at the Global Family Research Project. She received her doctorate in social anthropology from Harvard University. Both Dr Caspe and Dr Lopez conduct research on how families, early childhood programs, schools and communities and the relationships between these support children’s learning. The Global Family Research Project prides itself on doing work that is scientifically based, cutting edge, accessible, and practical. It sounds a lot like the goals of this podcast, so I’m so excited to have them here with us. Welcome Dr. Caspe and Dr Lopez. Dr. Caspe: [02:45] Thanks for having us. New Speaker: [02:46] So let’s start with a little empathy here. It would be a good place to start. When I was researching this episode, I did a general search for parent teacher conferences just to see what would pop up and several resources for teachers were first on the list. One of the top hits contained this quote. “If there is one part of the school year that strikes fear into the heart of any teacher, it’s parent teacher conference time.” Why are teachers afraid of parent teacher conferences? Dr. Lopez:  [03:13] We’re so glad you started with this question because it lies at the heart of a lot of what we do in our work, which is in part to help prepare school and community educators for family engagement and maybe I can take a quick step back and define what we mean by family engagement. Research shows that family engagement is composed of three main pillars. The first is that it’s a shared responsibility among families, schools, and community to support children’s learning for success in school and in life. In other words, it’s all about relationships and trust and ongoing communication and conversation. Not just families blindly supporting school goals and mandates; it’s more than raising money and joining PGA. It’s the way that families promote and advocate for dirty and it’s the way that schools and other organizations open up their doors to support families in getting the information and support they need and also listening and understanding what parents and families desire. Dr. Lopez:  [04:34] And we also know that family engagement takes place everywhere all the time. Not just in school. There is a statistic we like to quote, which is that of the 6,000 hours of awake time children have available to them and really only 1,000 of those hours are spent in school, so children are learning in a lot of spaces outside school: parks, libraries and the home, so it’s not fruitful or productive to think of family engagement as just taking place in school, but we broaden our notion of family engagement to all these settings as well. And the third pillar is that family engagement, bath waste begin early in birth really and continue all the way through high school. Although the ways in which families are engaged in their children’s learning and social and emotional development will change as children mature. So family engagement is really complex. It is nuanced. It exists across time and space and it’s constantly spiraling so you can picture a big wide ocean of family engagement and parent teacher conferences are just one ripple of it. They are part of a larger ongoing conversation that is happening between parents and other adults that care for a child. The parent teacher conference ideally is not the first interaction that a parent is having with a teacher, but instead is part of an ongoing dialogue across space and time making. Maggie, do you want to add to that? Dr. Caspe: [06:27] Thanks for that introduction because I think, Jen, it sort of brings us back a little bit to your original question of why teachers might be afraid of parent teacher conferences and I think what we know is that there are a few things going on. First, you know, we sort of know that for the most part educators are not prepared for family engagement in their foundational coursework and they’re not given a lot of opportunities to learn about how to make families the central part of their practice. It’s funny, so I began my career as a kindergarten teacher and I remember really feeling nervous and petrified during my first parent teacher conferences and in a large part it was – I wasn’t exactly sure what to do. I was really well trained to run reading blocks and engage kids in math and I really felt like I had behavior management strategies down, but the parent teacher conference with something more elusive and for new teachers and even experienced ones I think how you talk with families about what kids are doing, but how they’re doing I think is really hard. And then once you get into the classroom, we know that teachers don’t get a lot of support either in their continuing education around working with families. Dr. Caspe: [07:43] There’s often very little support from administrators or colleagues to pick up and improve their practice along the way. But I want to reflect on the third problem and I think this really gets to the heart of what makes parent teacher conferences a little bit difficult. And this is that parent teacher conferences really weren’t designed to be a conversation of listening. They were really set up as a hierarchical structure of teachers reporting to families. As you know, quote unquote the professional. What children know and can do. So if you could picture it in your mind. Parents often come to meetings, they sit face to face with a teacher and a chair that their child probably sits in every day in a weird, contorted way, and your goal as the parent is often to talk about your child’s individual experience and development within the school. But as Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot writes in her seminal work, “The Essential conversation,” Dr. Caspe: [08:48] She looks at how these conversations make parents feel really raw and exposed, and they hear echoes and murmurs of their own past in their own school histories which often leads to these feelings of nervousness and anxiety that you mentioned and teachers maybe not to the same extent. Also feel uncertain, exposed and defensive because this is the place probably more than any, that their confidence in their professionalism might be the most directly challenged. And the other thing that Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot also draws out is during these conversations were actually replaying some of the larger tensions that exist around family engagement in terms of child rearing, race, class culture, language, gender. Who gets to talk and who needs to remain silent and what makes quote unquote a good parent. So all of these things are playing out in this 10 minute conversation and that makes it a little tough. Dr. Caspe: [09:55] I will say though, I don’t want to end on such a downer, right? A lot of the work that Elena and I do is to reimagine and rethink with family and school communication and the parent teacher conference can look like and you know, there are bright spots and we can talk about those. We know that some places home visits go on or we know that in some school districts there’s been a massive restructuring, so parent teacher conferences are in done individually, but maybe in groups and teams or even text messaging and digital media have really helped support this process. So it’s not all big and nervous. There are bright spots, but there’s a lot that goes on in those 10 minutes. Jen: [10:37] Yeah. Thanks for drawing that out a little bit. I think it can really help parents who might have this perception of teachers as sort of a monolithic and to see that are the experts and they know what’s going on and they’d been trained to do this and actually quite possibly they haven’t. And they’re, they’re just as nervous as you are for a variety of the reasons that you mentioned. So going into this conversation with a very open mind and open heart I think can be very helpful thing. So let’s get into some specifics then because before this conversation you sent me an awesome resource that’s called Parent Teacher Conferences: Strategies for Principals, Teachers and Parents, and we’re going to discuss that a lot more in the show and it’s actually available on your site. We’ll put a link in the references to the parents can go and find it. It’s super short, really easy to read and use. And so in it you described the five R’s. Can you tell us what the five R’s please? Dr. Caspe: [11:27] Yeah, so the five R’s are: Reach Out, Raise Up, Reinforce, Relate and Reimagine. I sometimes pretend I’m doing yoga poses while I say them, but really they’re our way of helping ourselves and others organize and think about the ways to help educators and families share responsibility across time and space. And these really grew out of really in depth interviews and conversations we’ve had with educators over the past few years in a variety of spaces as well as librarians after-school staff to really understand some of those best family engagement strategies and you know, quite simply reaching out means that family engagement programs and resources are accessible to those who often have the most difficulty taking advantage of them. Raising up means that practices, teachers, families work together on two-way communication. Families have an opportunity to share what they know about their children and co-design action plans with teachers. Dr. Caspe: [12:36] And then the third R is really this notion of reinforce and it comes from this idea that we as parents are children’s first teachers and that family’s cultural values, norms, language and contexts always need to be integrated into these types of conversations that families and teachers have. The fourth R is about relationships and it really highlights the value of supporting families in building peer-to-peer networks as well as relationships with their children and finally reimagine is about ways to increase families access to an understanding of information on children’s progress and using really community agencies to help with that. Jen: [13:18] Okay. Super. Thanks for that overview and I would like to delve into each of those a little bit more so that we can really get an understanding of what are the tools that we can use to make these parent teacher conferences more productive for everybody. So the first R you said is reaching out and sometimes parents have scheduling problems and they can’t get childcare so they can attend a conference or maybe they can’t get transportation or maybe English isn’t their first language and they just don’t feel comfortable interacting with the teacher. So I’m curious what kinds of reaching out should parents expect to see from their child’s school and what can they do if the resources they need aren’t forthcoming? Dr. Lopez: [13:54] I’m going to start with what teachers can do and they can be flexible by being available by phone or holding a video conference when an in person meeting doesn’t work for the family and teachers can also spend part off the meeting with parents just getting to know the family better before even talking about a student’s academic progress. So one thing that teachers can consider us long as the proper releases are signed is still allowed parents or guardians to bring another family member or friend, if that helps them feel more comfortable, especially if that person that they are taking along with them can help with translation and principals also have a role in...

This podcast explores the controversial topic of rewarding children for good behavior. The host discusses the differing opinions on rewards and their impact on children's development. Research studies are examined, highlighting the negative effects of rewards on intrinsic motivation and the parent-child relationship. The flaws in the theory of using rewards and punishments are also discussed. The podcast provides insights on the pros and cons of using rewards and praise in parenting, with specific focus on potty training and developing independent qualities in children.

Arietta Slade, a Clinical Professor at Yale Child Study Center and expert on reflective parenting, dives into the intricacies of attachment theory. She clarifies misconceptions around bonding, babywearing, and co-sleeping, emphasizing that healthy attachments can form through various practices. The conversation highlights the importance of nonverbal communication and emotional expression in child development, while also addressing parental challenges like separation anxiety. Slade reassures that nurturing a bond is about connection, not perfection.

We’re a couple of weeks into the new school year by now and I hope that for most of you the morning drop-offs have gotten a bit easier than they were in the beginning. But some of you may still be struggling with a child who doesn’t want to go to school, who resists you leaving at drop-0ff time, and who might be suddenly suffering from stomachaches and headaches (particularly on Sunday nights or weekday mornings) that had not previously been a problem. Today’s interview with Dr. Jonathan Dalton, director of the Center for Anxiety and Behavioral Change in Rockville, MD is going to help us understand whether our child is having a ‘normal’ amount of difficulty transitioning to school or if they are struggling enough that they might need extra help – and if so, what to do about it.   References Bergin, C., & Bergin, D. (2009). Attachment in the classroom. Educational Psychology Review 21, 141-170. Dalton, J., & Beacon, V. (2018). School refusal. In D. Driver & S.S. Thomas (Eds.), Complex disorders in pediatric psychiatry: A clinician’s guide (pp 11-22). St. Louis, MO: Elsevier. Egger, H.L., Costello, J., & Angold, A. (2003). School refusal and psychiatric disorders: A community study. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry 42(7), 797-807. Hallinan, M.T. (2008). Teacher influences on students’ attachment to school. Sociology of Education 81, 271-283. Hamre, B.K., & Pianta, R.C. (2001). Early teacher-child relationships and the trajectory of children’s school outcomes through eighth grade. Child Development 72(2), 625-638. Houts, R.M., Caspi, A., Pianta, R.C., Arseneault, L., & Moffitt, T.E. (2010) The challenging pupil in the classroom: The effect of the child on the teacher. Psychological Science 21(12), 1802-1810. Jerome, E.M., Hamre, B.K., & Pianta, R.C. (2009). Teacher-child relationships from kindergarten to sixth grade: Early childhood predictors of teacher-perceived conflict and closeness. Social Development 18(4), 915-945. Kearney, C.A. (2016). Managing school-based absenteeism at multiple tiers: An evidence-based and practical guide for professionals. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press. Kearney, C.A., & Albano, A.M. (2007). When children refuse school: A cognitive-behavioral therapy approach, Therapist guide (2nd Ed.). Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press. Kearney, C.A. (2006). Dealing with school refusal behavior: A primer for family physicians. Family Practice 55(8), 685-692. Kearney, C.A. (2002). Identifying the function of school refusal behavior: A revision of the school refusal assessment scale. Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment 24(4), 235-245. King, N., Tonge, B.J., Heyne, D., & Ollendick, T.H. (2000). Research on the cognitive-behavioral treatment of school refusal: A review and recommendations. Clinical Psychology Review 20(4), 495-507. Ladd, G.W., & Dinella, L.M. (2009). Continuity and change in early school engagement: Predictive of children’s achievement trajectories from first to eighth grade? Journal of Educational Psychology 101(1), 190-206. Ladd, G.W., & Buhs, E.S., & Seid, M. (2000). Children’s initial sentiments about kindergarten: Is school liking an antecedent of early classroom participation and achievement? Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 46(2), 255-279. Last, C. G., Hansen, C., & Franco, N. (1998). Cognitive-behavioral treatment of school phobia.  Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 37, 404–411. Pianta, R. C., Belsky, J., Vandergrift, N., Houts, R. M., & Morrison, F. J. (2008). Classroom effects on children’s achievement trajectories in elementary school. American Educational Research Journal 45 (2), 365–397   Read Full Transcript   Transcript Jen:     [00:00:37] Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today we are going to help a whole lot of parents who are in the middle of a massive transition, and that is the transition to kindergarten or school. Many people, adults included, don’t love change. It’s certainly much easier to keep doing the same things we’ve been doing with the people we know and love than it is to go to a completely new place with people we mostly don’t know whoever new expectations for us that we don’t know if we can meet and we also have to start getting up really early in the mornings, which can introduce all kinds of new power struggles at bed time so we might not be able to solve all of these problems today, but we’re going to take a specific look at what is known as school refusal, which is pretty much what it sounds like when a child says “I don’t want to go to school.” Jen:    [00:01:24] To help us understand this and figure out what to do about it, we’re here today with Dr Jonathan Dalton, who is a licensed psychologist and the Director of the Center for Anxiety and Behavioral change in Rockville, Maryland. He received his BA in psychology from Villanova University an MA in psychology from the Catholic University of America and this PhD in Clinical Psychology from Fordham University. Dr Dalton specializes in treating anxiety and behavioral disorders with particular expertise in the treatment of anxiety-based school refusal. Welcome Dr. Dalton! Dr. Dalton:  [00:01:53] Thank you so much. Dr. Dalton:   [00:01:54] So I wonder…firstly we should probably get clear on some terms that we’re going to use today because when I started reading your work, there were a whole bunch of terms and I want to be sure that we use them clearly. Dr. Dalton:  [00:02:03] Sure. Jen:  [00:02:04] So you use absenteeism and truancy, school refusal, and so can you define these for us and then perhaps also help us understand how common these issues are. Dr. Dalton:   [00:02:12] Sure. Yeah. So just thank you again for inviting me. This is something that I care a great deal about, and I treat many, many kids with these problems. Absenteeism is a global term. It’s an umbrella term that just defines kids who are not in school for any reason. It could be transportation, it could be illness, it could be anything. Truancy is more in line with delinquency; t’s against the law. These are kids who might leave in the morning and then never show up to school because they’re having too much fun in the parking lot or in the woods behind school. Oftentimes that’s more of a criminal justice issue, where school refusal or school avoidance is a more of a psychological development where kids often because of anxiety do not believe they are able to attend school, and so they literally refused to go. It could be kids won’t get out of bed in the morning. I do a lot of home visits for these kids and I’ve seen kids barricaded in bathrooms with their mastiffs guarding them and sending me off with hairspray when I get there and different things so it can be quite significant for some kids. Jen:   [00:03:13] Okay. So in general we’re talking about slightly older children here, right? Because most of the parents who are listening to this are parents who are just sort of in this kindergarten phase, maybe some of them on the high end are in the transition phase. Some of them were toddlers transitioning into preschool for the first time, and this is probably not such a relevant thing for them. Is that right? Dr. Dalton:    [00:03:33] It really depends, because the research says that there’s kind of a two different ages where we most often see the onset and one of them is five and six years of age, so it’s when kids have to first separate from their family and go into a novel circumstance. It is a time when we really see that now it’s obviously easier to get a five year old in school than it is a 15 year old just physically and logistically it’s a different ballgame, but we do see a lot of that along with a lot of parent tiers on the first day of kindergarten. It’s not just the kids who have separation, anxiety. Jen:   [00:04:03] No, no, it’s definitely not, and when we’re talking about that preschool transition, at least I found it was… It was difficult for sure, but there were three teachers for 18 kids, so if you need someone to hold your child and give your child a hug and hold your child up to the window so that you can be high fived as you’re walking out the door, then that’s something that can be accomplished in that environment, right. Whereas in a kindergarten you’re kind of moving on from that. Dr. Dalton:    [00:04:29] Yeah, I mean we’re looking for kind of the BAND-AID approach. A lot of schools use that so that the parents don’t even walk their kids into the building for kindergarten and then it just eases with the transitions are everyone’s saying goodbye at the door. All the moms are wearing dark sunglasses so no-one can see their tears and then the kids just kind of pivot into what’s happening next. That the separation, physical separation is a hard thing for everybody involved because it’s so novel for the family very often. Jen:   [00:04:56] Yeah. Okay. Alright. So you’ve written that school refusal is a behavior rather than a diagnosis. So I wonder if you can help us understand the difference there from a clinical perspective and also does it make a difference for parents from their perspective and if it’s not a formal diagnosis, does this school refusal typically coworker with other disorders that are diagnosable? Dr. Dalton:    [00:05:19] Yeah. Great questions in there. So you separation anxiety is one of the more common ones that we see. So in one study, 38 percent of the kids who refused school had that as their primary diagnosis. Our job is to think of kids who refuse school…we liken it to someone who breaks out in hives after eating a casserole and you wouldn’t go to the doctor and say, “oh well my kid is allergic to casseroles.” You have to know which ingredient they’re allergic to. And same thing with school refusal. It can look the same but for very different reasons. So some kids are afraid of getting sick or being near someone who throws up or weather is a big one for the younger kids that we say… Jen:   [00:05:54] Weather? Dr. Dalton:   [00:05:54] Yeah, you know, if there’s a thunderstorm, a lot of kids are afraid of being apart from the caregiver if there’s a thunderstorm. Dr. Dalton:    [00:06:01] So we, we see a lot of that. We see kids who might have panic disorder so they feel like they’ve been struck by lightning from the inside rather than the outside. I don’t know why that happens. And so they try and seek proximity to a caregiver or just to their home environment. It could be social anxiety. We see a lot of younger kids with a phenomenon called selective mutism where they don’t talk in a school environment often for the first time. And so parents don’t know this because at home they’re a chatterbox and they get to their first teacher conference and say, yeah, um, you know, your kid doesn’t ever talk and they say, what are you talking about? They never shut up. And in school environment they literally don’t talk. And so that can morph into social anxiety and some cases school avoidance there as well. Jen:    [00:06:45] So we just wanted to go back to something you said at the beginning of that. You mentioned separation anxiety disorder. My child doesn’t love being separated from me, but I guess what would be helpful to understand would be where do you draw the line between separation anxiety and separation anxiety disorder? Dr. Dalton:   [00:07:02] It’s really coming down to functional impairment. So obviously you know, kids like all mammals, they seek out proximity to protectors, you know, in, in just the way other other species do. And so it’s a very normal response if you are a little one and you are used to being with a parent that’s been your go-to response for a long time. And so trying to seek out proximity. So that makes perfect sense. The difference with anxiety disorders, it’s not the severity of the anxiety, it’s the appropriateness for the situation. So a lot of kids will fear you’re separating and they’ll maybe been clinging behavior when they’re being dropped off. I had a neighbor throw a lunchbox at the kindergarten teacher the first day of school last year because she said, don’t take me from my mom, and that lasts only usually minutes, and then the kids can kind of reorient themselves to a new situation Dr. Dalton:  [00:07:53] Separation anxiety disorder is chronic and impairing. It gets in the way of their ability to fully do the things that otherwise they want to do so they don’t do sleepovers, that cannot babysitter sometimes. Sometimes they don’t go to school, clearly. It can really interfere and even within separation anxiety disorder, it can look very different so some kids have a fear of being alone and so they won’t sleep in their own bed, which drives parents crazy as you can imagine, or they don’t want to be in a different floor than where their parents are and they’ll kind of follow them like shadows throughout the house. Other kids have more of a fear of abandonment where they’re afraid of what if mom gets sick or dad and they can’t come and pick me up and they begin to worry a lot about what may happen down the road. They might fear the horrible things that the grownups fear like, you know, being abducted or school shootings or the horrible things like that. So it really does vary even within that diagnostic category greatly in terms of the way it presents itself. Jen:  [00:08:52] Okay. All right. Thanks for helping us understand that little bit better. So you mentioned a lot of different reasons why a child might refuse school and in the reading that I did to prepare for this episode, I think they fit into four main criteria or sort of categories. Is that right? Dr. Dalton:   [00:09:09] Yeah, that’s what the research shows. Jen:     [00:09:09] Okay. And would you mind just reviewing those so that we can help to understand what those are and decide whether a child might meet one of those? Dr. Dalton:   [00:09:16] Sure. So what you’re referring to aren’t diagnoses, they are functions. So behavior is many things. The one thing it’s never is random. It’s very complicated and confusing, kind of like meteorology with lots of different interacting variables, but it is fundamentally lawful and so when we do our assessment, we don’t just look at what is the diagnosis that someone might have in the DSM V or the ICD 10. We’re looking for what are the dimensions of their suffering, like how is it they experience the world, but also what are the functions of the behavior and there are basically four usual suspects that we can look for and they fall under two broad categories. The first one is positive reinforcement, which most parents have come across during their training somewhere along the way and it just means that if this event were to follow a behavior, that behavior is more likely to occur in the future. Dr. Dalton:   

This episode revisits the concept of the 30 Million Word Gap concept, which we first covered in an interview with Dr. Doug Sperry a few weeks back. After she heard that I was going to talk with Dr. Sperry, Dr. Roberta Golinkoff – with whom we discussed her book Becoming Brilliant almost two years ago now – asked to come back on to present a rebuttal. We’re going to learn a lot more about the importance of child-directed speech! This episode serves two purposes: it helps us to understand another aspect of the 30 Million Word Gap, and it also demonstrates pretty clearly that scientists – both of whom have the best interests of children at heart – see very different ways of achieving that end. Jump to highlights (04:17) The origin of the 30-million-word gap (06:32) Addressing children directly is important (11:47) Kindergarten has become the new first grade. (17:19) The difference between infant-directed and adult-directed speech. (39:08) Children also need to be responded to in terms of things that are of interest to them   References Adair, J.K., Colegrave, 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. Avineri, N., Johnson, E., Brice‐Heath, S., McCarty, T., Ochs, E., Kremer‐Sadlik, T., Blum, S., Zentella, A.C., Rosa, J., Flores, N., Alim, H.S., & Paris, D. (2015). Invited forum: Bridging the “language gap”. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 25(1), 66-86. Bassok, D., Latham, S., & Rorem, A. (2016). Is Kindergarten the new first grade? AERA Open 1(4), 1-31. Baugh, J. (2017). Meaning-less difference: Exposing fallacies and flaws in “The Word Gap” hypothesis that conceal a dangerous “language trap” for low-income American families and their children. International Multilingual Research Journal 11(1), 39-51. Brennan, W. (2018, April). Julie Washington’s quest to get schools to respect African American English. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/04/the-code-switcher/554099/ Correa-Chavez, M., & Rogoff, B. (2009). Children’s attention to interactions directed to others: Guatemalan and European American Patterns. Developmental Psychology 45(3), 630-641. Craig, H.K., & Washington, J.A. (2004). Grade-related changes in the production of African American English. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 47(2), 450-463. Gee, J.P. (1985). The narrativization of experience in the oral style. Journal of Education 167(1), 9-57 Genishi, C., & Dyson, A. (2009). Children, language, and literacy: Diverse learners in diverse times. New York: Teachers College Press. Golinkoff, R.M., Hoff, E., Rowe, M.L., Tamis-LeMonda, C., & Hirsh-Pasek, K. (in press). Language matters: Denying the existence of the 30 Million Word Gap has serious consequences. Child Development. Lee-James, R., & Washington, J.A. (2018). Language skills of bidialectal and bilingual children: Considering a strengths-based perspective. Topics in Language Disorders 38(1), 5-26. Long, H. (2017, September 15). African Americans are the only U.S. racial group earning less than in 2000. Chicago Tribune. Retrieved from http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-african-americans-income-census-20170918-story.html NAEP (2017). National student group scores and score gaps (Reading). NAEP. Retrieved from: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading_2017/#nation/gaps?grade=4 Rogoff, B., Mistry, J., Goncu, A., ,& Mosier, C. (1993). Guided participation in cultural activity by toddlers and caregivers. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development Series No. 236, 58(8), v-173. Ward, M.C. (1971). Them children: A study in language learning. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Washington, J.A., Branum-Martin, L., Sun, C., & Lee-James, R. (2018). The impact of dialect density on the growth of language and reading in African American children. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 49, 232-247.

We recently did an episode on the impact of intergenerational trauma, which was about how the ways we were parented, and even the ways our parents were parented, ends up influencing the relationship we have with our children – and often not in a positive way. But there’s another side to this story: relationships between the generations can actually have enormously beneficial effects on children’s lives, even when these are affected by issues like radically different parenting styles, and mental illness. Today we explore the more positive side of intergenerational relationship with Dr. Peter Whitehouse, who (along with his wife, Cathy) co-founded The Intergenerational School in Cleveland, OH, which is now part of a small network of three schools that use this model. Have you ever thought about how you talk about ageing effects what your children think about older people? (I hadn’t, but I have now!) Do you struggle to navigate the difference between the things your parents want to say to and buy for your child, and your own values? Do you worry about what your child might think of their grandparent’s absent-mindedness or volatility? Join us as Dr. Whitehouse and I navigate a path through these and other issues. Jump to highlights (03:07) The definition of intergenerativity. (09:04) how people and other cultures interact with the elderly generally, and specifically with grandparents in particular (13:49) When kids have a good relationship with elders in their own family, they are more open to relationships with adults and elders in society at large. (16:56) The underlying principle of the intergenerational school and how it differs from a typical school. (19:35) What an intergenerational playground looks like. (35:15) The tension we feel in life about the security of the same and the danger of difference. (39:11) How can families encourage intergenerational relationships? (51:46) The more we compartmentalize people and categorize them as sick or diseased, the more we're afraid of them.   References Babcock, R., MaloneBeach, E.E., & Woodworth-Hou, B. (2016). Intergenerational intervention to mitigate children’s bias against the elderly. Journal of Intergenerational Relationships 14(4), 274-287. Bessell, S. (2017). The role of intergenerational relationships in children’s experiences of community. Children & Society 31, 263-275. Bostrom, A-K., & Schmidt-Hertha, B. (2017). Intergenerational relationships and lifelong learning. Journal of Intergenerational Relationships 15(1), 1-3. Even-Zohar, A., & Garby, A. (2016). Great-grandparents’ role perception and its contribution to their quality of life. Journal of Intergenerational Relationships 14(3), 197-219. Flash, C. (2015). The Intergenerational Learning Center, Providence Mount St. Vincent, Seattle. Journal of Intergenerational Relationships 13(4), 338-341. George, D.R., & Whitehouse, P.J. (2010). Intergenerational volunteering and quality of life for persons with mild-to-moderate dementia: Results from a 5-month intervention study in the United States. Journal of the American Geriatric Society 58(4), 796-797. Geraghty, R., Gray, J., & Ralph, D. (2015). ‘One of the best members of the family’: Continuity and change in young children’s relationships with their grandparents. In L. Connolly (Ed.), The ‘Irish’ Family (pp.124-139). New York, NY: Routledge. Hake, B.J. (2017). Gardens as learning spaces: Intergenerational learning in urban food gardens. Journal of Intergenerational Relationships 15(1), 26-38. Hawkes, K., O’Connell, J.F., Jones, B.G.B., Alvarez, H., & Charnov, E.L. (2000). The grandmother hypothesis and human evolution. In Adaptation and Human Behavior: An Anthropological Perspective, edited by L. Cronk, N. Chagnon & W. Irons, pp. 231-252. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Kirkwood, T., Bond, J., May, C., McKeith, I., & Teh, M. (2010). Mental capital and wellbeing through life: Future challenges. In C. Cooper, J. Field, U. Goswami, R. Jenkins, & B. Sahakian (Eds.), Mental capital and wellbeing (pp. 3–53). Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Low, L-F., Russell, F., McDonald, T., & Kauffman, A. (2015). Grandfriends, an intergenerational program for nursing-home residents and preschoolers: A randomized trial. Journal of Intergenerational Relationships 13(3), 227-240. Murayama, Y., Obha, H., Yasunanaga, M., Nonaka, K., Takeuchi, R., Nishi, M., Sakuma, N., Uchida, H., Shinkai, S., & Fujiwara, Y. (2015). The effect of intergenerational programs on the mental health of elderly adults. Aging and Mental Health 19(4), 306-316. Schwartz, L.K., & Simmons, J.P. (2001). Contact quality and attitudes toward the elderly. Educational Gerontology 27(2), 127-137. Senior, E., & Green J. (2017). Through the ages: Developing relationships between the young and the old. Journal of Intergenerational Relationships 15(3), 295-305. Sun, Y., & Jiang, N. (2017). The effect of grandparents’ co-parenting on young children’s personality and adaptation: Chinese three-generation families. Asian Social Science 13(5), 7-15. Whitehouse, P.J. (n.d.). Intergenerativity: Imaging between to imagine beyond. Taos Institute. Retrieved from https://www.taosinstitute.net/Websites/taos/files/Content/5694536/Whitehouse_-_Intergenerativity_presentation.pdf Whitehouse, P.J. (2010, Spring). Taking brain health to a deeper and broader level. Neurological institute Journal. 17-22. Whitehouse, P.J., Bendezu, E., Fallcreek, S., & Whitehouse, C. (2000). Intergenerational community schools: A new practice for a new time. Educational Gerontology 26, 761-770.