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

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

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

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

Does play really matter? Do children get anything out of it? Or is it just messing around; time that could be better spent preparing our children for success in life? Today we talk with Dr. Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play, about the benefits of play for both children and – I was surprised to find – adults. This is the first in a series of episodes on play – lots more to come on outdoor play (and how to raise kids who love being outdoors), risky play, and imaginative play.   Dr. Stuart Brown's Book Play: How it shapes the brain, opens the imagination, and invigorates the soul - Affiliate link   References Bjorklund, D.F., & Brown, R.D. (1998). Physical play and cognitive development: Integrating activity, cognition, and education. Child Development, 69, 604-606. Brown, S. (2009). Play: How it shapes the brain, opens the imagination, and invigorates the soul. New York, NY: Penguin. Christakis, D. A., F. J. Zimmerman, and M. Garrison. (2007). Effect of block play on language acquisition and attention in toddlers a pilot randomized controlled trial. Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine,161 (10), 967-971. Csíkszentmihályi, Mihály (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York: Harper and Row. Duckworth, A.L. (2016). Grit: The power of passion and perseverance. New York, NY: Scribner. Elkind, D. (2003). Thanks for the memory: The lasting value of true play. Young Children 58(3), 46-51. Lancy, D.F. (2015). The anthropology of childhood: Cherubs, chattel, changelings (2nd Ed.). Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.   Read Full Transcript Transcript Jen:  [00:40] Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We’re kicking off a series of episodes today on the topic of play. Now I hear you wondering: play? There’s enough research about play to be able to do one episode, never mind a series of episodes?! And my response to that would be, Oh yes, there is just you. Wait, so we’re going to kick off today with an overview of the topic and then we’ll delve into various aspects of play with a particular focus on outdoor play because it’s important to me and just sometimes that’s how we pick topics around here. So today we have is our very special guest Dr. Stuart Brown, MD. I first learned of his work when I heard the National Institute for Play mentioned during a show on NPR. I thought to myself, there is a national institute for play. I have to talk to somebody from there, and so Dr. Brown, who’s the founder and director of the National Institute for Play is here to share his research and work. I was fascinated to read his book play, how it shapes the brain, opens the imagination and invigorates the soul because I was expecting it to tell me how important play is to my daughter’s development, but I wasn’t expecting it to tell me how important play is to my own wellbeing as well. So we’ll get into that to welcome Dr. Brown. Dr. Brown: [01:51] Glad to be here Jen. Jen:    [01:53] So let’s start with something that seems kind of obvious, but then you think about it a bit and you realize that you’re actually not quite sure what it is. So I’m wondering, can you please define play for us? Dr. Brown: [02:04] Well, it’s very hard to define; it’s a little like love in that play is an experience and it is often prompted by pre-verbal sorts of impulses. But having said that, we always like to think of it as something that is definable, although I think most of us, if we see a puppy or kitty playing in front of us, we know that what they’re doing is play, but it’s voluntary; it’s done for its own sake. It appears purposeless. It takes one out of a sense of time. There is a diminished sense of self importance. You’re just engaged in what you’re doing. It’s fun and pleasurable. It can be interrupted. It’s not driven like addictive or other kinds of activities in general. Like to go back to it and experience it again and it is something that’s deeply instinctively embedded in the humans. So that’s a start anyhow. Jen:   [03:11] And I’m wondering if you can talk us through, Scott Eberle, I think is how you say his name. He has a six step process of play that you describe in your book. Can you walk us through those six steps? Dr. Brown:  [03:22] I don’t know if I can go through all six steps butt Scott Eberle was the distinguished editor of the American Journal of Play from its start until just recently when he retired and he has established what he considers the elements of play, kind of like the periodic table of elements define the atomic structure. Then he goes from anticipation to poise and describes there’s anticipation, surprise, increased strength, agility, curiosity, and takes these elements, and if I had them listed in front of me. I could read them off, but he has a whole array of gradations that go from, as you anticipate, for example, an experience of play, whether it’s playing a sport or reading a novel that you’re looking forward to. There is that heightened sense of anticipation. Then once you get into the various elements of play, they establish a kind of a “state of play.” Then he and I have gone back and forth. It had lots of really sort of discussions about his play elements fit very well into the burgeoning neuroscience of play. Jen:     [04:46] Mmmm. And I’m also wondering as you were reading, as you were talking through some of the elements of play, I was thinking about Czikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow, but it seems to me as though that might be more applicable to when people are working more than playing because they have goal-directed behavior and you said that the play doesn’t have goal-directed behavior. Can you help us to tease out what are the connections between play and flow? Dr. Brown:   [05:11] I don’t know that it’s correct to say that it doesn’t have goal direction. It is at the time one is experiencing it, the outcome of the experience is less important than the experience itself. That doesn’t mean that the experience doesn’t have purpose. I think one can enjoy a hike or a job and say, oh, well, you know, I’m just doing this for its own sake, and yet it increases physical fitness and personal health, so there is an outcome. Dr. Brown:   [05:45] So this is not to say that the experience of play itself doesn’t have outcome and deep purpose. It’s just that at the moment, if you’re terribly anxious about performing, you’re probably not playing as much as if you’re just doing something for its own sake. Jen:   [06:04] And so you alluded to something there that I wanted to get into a bit more deeply and that is about the purpose of play and specifically how that differs for children from different cultures. Dr. Brown:  [06:16] Well, I don’t know that it differs; I think there are cultures that foster and cultures that suppress it, but I think particularly developmentally that the value of play and the necessity of play for wholeness and wellbeing at a full use of curiosity and engagement in the world, those are universals and they apply both to the human experience cross-culturally and they apply to social mammals at play, and so you see the necessity of particularly early developmental play, whether you’re a coyote or a dolphin or a horse or a human. Jen:   [07:03] Okay. So this is sort of very common experience then for mammals. And is it right to say that humans have sort of perfected it and taken it to another level, or is it much the same as you see in humans as in other animals? Dr. Brown:   [07:20] We’re different in that we have language, imagination, curiosity, the search for novelty, but the patterns of play that we see in kids and in highly intelligent animals really quite similar. Then we can learn from animal play a lot about its value because laboratory scientists can objectify that and study it and suppress it and then see the benefits or the effect of a lack of play on development and in highly social mammals and that’s not an ethical thing we could do or want to do with humans. Jen: [07:54] Right, and I know that your work has actually focused on children and adults where children experienced play deprivation. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Dr. Brown:    [08:05] Well, in a long, long time ago, over 50 years ago, I got involved in studying a mass murderer who had gone to the top of the Texas tower after killing his wife and mother. He was a 25 year old ex-Marine Eagle Scout, no legal history and [unintelligible] killed 14 people and wounded 32. It was then the largest mass murder in the U.S., which unfortunately has been superseded by may that we’ve seen in our recent time. Anyhow, we looked closely at this individual’s life and he was killed on the top of the tower by vigilante gunfire to stop his outpouring of violence, but we did a very, very detailed study of his life history going back three generations and I won’t go through the whole story, but we found – we being the commission – and we found that his father had systematically suppressed play again and again and again, so that literally this young man grew up without the experience of free play and with the need to conform to the demands and control of this sadistic and disturbed father. Dr. Brown:   [09:30] So that initial study which was done very carefully and included a very detailed review of his physiology, sort of opened my eyes to what’s going on here that play is so important, particularly in this young man’s life? And it appeared to be necessary for him to have suppressed his violent impulses, which were hidden in part of his diaries and imagination, but not been evident until this moment and the tragedy on the top of the tower. So that then led to a formal study of homicidal males and the Texas prison system for a year or so with a team and we found that the homicidal individuals who were very violent men compared to match controls had very different play history. They there were isolated or bullied or tortured or they were themselves bullies. They didn’t have a normal play background, so we found in that and some other research following, I won’t go through all of it, that have a normal rough and tumble play and the kinds of activities that most of us engage in spontaneously as children were not experienced in general by the populations of violence and social man and so that led me in the course of my long clinical career to review the play histories of everyone that I saw and the psychiatric interns and residents and psychology intern, social workers and the like that were part of my teaching career also collected these detailed…as detailed as possible play histories and one from that long and involved anecdotal history and again, they get a sense that when play is adequate, it really leads to a more fulfilled and meaningful life in one play is seriously deprived life that it has consequences and they’re not obviously homicide or murder, but there are consequences that I think are significant, so it’s from that long base that led to my, when I left clinical practice, led to my independent scholarship and establishment of the National Institute for Play. Jen:     [12:06] Okay. So I’m curious as to some of the methodological issues with understanding the importance of play history as you’ve just described it and I imagine that people when they were children who had sub-optimal play, history’s probably also had other things going on in their homes as well. You mentioned the Texas murderer having a difficult relationship with a sub-optimal father. How do you tease out the importance of play compared to everything else that might be going on in a family where play is not valued? Dr. Brown:   [12:37] I think it’s difficult. And I think the fact that these anecdotal reviews were not all established with a rigorous research design means that one can make generalizations about that, but what you see from the lives, particularly where play is intensely, where there’s real deprivation, let’s say the child is isolated or they’ve got a psychotic mother and father, so that there’s no verbal interchange and playfulness and you begin to see the really severe deprivations, then from that and from the murderers, once you get a sense that even if there is abuse and poverty and other kinds of mayhem in the family background, still what stands out as different from a lot of other individuals who had some of those same difficulties, but were able to play, we do see that play has a nourishing, developmentally important component that leads toward wellbeing and resiliency and self organization and things that are otherwise don’t seem to happen in the absence of play. Dr. Brown:   [13:56] So I can’t tell you that you know, this is. I can write an article and a peer review group would say, okay, we can now pinpoint exactly what play does. I don’t think one can do that and separate it from some of the other issues, but when you then take a look at the animal world and then objectify and limit play highly playful, playful rats, for example, and see the effect on their development and brain function, you begin to get a sense that the experience of play among the playful social mammal is necessary for competency and wellbeing. Jen:   [14:43] Alright, so that helps us to understand why play is important. So let’s talk about some of the hows we revisit pretty often on this show David Lancy’s book, The Anthropology of Childhood. And so I went back to that book and saw that there was a whole listing of entries in the index for play. And so I went through and read them and I found that in many cultures parents just don’t play with their children at all, particularly if you’re in a culture where there’s a high child mortality rate and the parents just aren’t supposed to get attached to their child. And in many cultures parents aim to raise children who are compliant. And so they do this by wearing the baby, by anticipating the child’s needs. And essentially by not interacting with the child unnecessarily, but in our culture, It’s pretty common for parents to actually play with children, but I was sort of amused to realize that children in other cultures will often play independently for hours by themselves and American parents do sometimes play with their children, but they also expanded quite a bit of energy trying to get their children to play independently, which children and other cultures have mastered perfectly well without being prompted. So I’m curious as to your thoughts on the value of parental play with children to the child. Dr. Brown:    [15:57] Well, I think parental play is extremely valuable and has a exploration of the possible, searching on novelty, being secure and safe in a protected environment so that there is, I think, enrichment that occurs with culturally approved parent child play. I do think there are almost no cultures that suppress play enough where’s there’s almost no child-child or peer-peer play. And I think many cultures there’s not parent child play, but there’s a lot of mixed age play where the older kids play with the younger kids and there really is a kind of a natural parenting among the play styles that take place. And I’m not an anthropologist, so I don’t claim to cultural expertise. I think there’s some general principles that indicate play is really important developmentally and it is a natural experience for child-child exposure to each other. There’s an onset of play when that happens, when your kids will play, whether they’re Eskimos or Aborigines, they will still play. Or live on the upper...

I hear a huge crash. It’s my favorite glass vase.  I hear “I didn’t mean to hurt it, Mommy!  It just fell!” as I run full-pelt from the other end of the house. It was a family heirloom passed down by my grandmother.  I’ve asked her not to touch it a hundred times.  I am beyond furious.  “Please don’t be mad, Mommy.  It was an accident.” I clench my teeth.  “I’m not mad.” _______________________________________________________   What does my daughter learn from this exchange?  How does my own emotional regulation affect what she learns about how to regulate her own emotions?  We’ll learn about this in today’s episode. Note that this episode is the second in the ill-fated experimental short episodes – we’ll be back to the regular length hereafter!  In case you missed it, the first episode in this series was Three Reasons Not To Say You’re OK.   Taming Your Triggers If you need help with your own big feelings about your child’s behavior, register for the Taming Your Triggers waitlist. We’ll help you to: Understand the real causes of your triggered feelings, and begin to heal the hurts that cause themUse new tools like the ones Katie describes to find ways to meet both her and her children’s needsEffectively repair with your children on the fewer instances when you are still triggered   Join the waitlist and we'll let you know when doors reopen. Click the banner to learn more!       Other episodes mentioned in this show How parenting affects child developmentThe impact of divorce on a child’s developmentHow to scaffold children’s learning to help them succeed   References Bariola, E., Hughes, E.K., & Gullone, E. (2012). Relationships between parent and child emotion regulation strategy use: A brief report. Journal of Child and Family Studies 21(3), 443-448. Butler, E.A., Egloff, B., ,Wilhelm, F.H., Smith, N.C., Erickson, E.A., & Gross, J.J. (2003). The social consequences of expressive suppression. Emotion 3(1), 48-67. Christenfeld, B., Gerin, W., Linden, W., Sanders, M., Mathur, J., Deich, J.D., & Pickering, T.G. (1997). Social support effects on cardiovascular reactivity: Is a stranger as effective as a friend? Psychosomatic Medicine 59, 388-398. Cohen, S., & Wills, T.A. (1985). Stress, social support, and the buffering hypothesis. Psychological Bulletin 98(2), 310-357. Gershoff, E.T., & Grogan-Kaylor, A. (2016). Spanking and child outcomes: Old controversies and new meta-analyses. Journal of Family Psychology 30(4), 453-469. Gottman, J.M., & Levenson, R.W. (1992). Marital processes predictive of later dissolation: Behavior, physiology, and health. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 63(2), 221-233. Gross, J.J., & John, O.P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85(2), 348-362. Gunzenhauser, C., Faasche, A., Friedlmeier, W.& von Suchodoletz, A. (2014). Face it or hide it: Parental socialization of reappraisal and response suppression. Frontiers in Psychology 4, 992. Kiel, E.J. & Kalomiris, A.E. (2015). Current themes in understanding children’s emotion regulation as developing from within the parent-child relationship. Current Opinions in Psychology 1(3), 11-16. Kopystynska, O, Paschall, K.W., Barnett, M.A., & Curran, M.A. (2017). Patterns of interparental conflict, parenting, and children’s emotional insecurity: A person-centered approach. Journal of Family Psychology 31(7), 922-932. Krantz, D.S., & Manuck, S.B. (1984). Acute psychophysiologic reactivity and risk of cardiovascular disease: A review and methdologic critique. Psychological Bulletin 93(3), 435-464. Lansbury, J. Unruffled Parenting. Author. Retrieved from http://www.janetlansbury.com/2015/08/respectful-parenting-podcasts-janet-lansbury-unruffled/ Laurenceau, J.P., Barrett, L.F., & Pietromonaco, P.R. (1998). Intimacy as an interpersonal process: The importance of self-disclosure, partner disclosure, and perceived partner responsiveness in interpersonal exchanges. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75(5), 1238-1251. Meeren H.K.M., van Heijnsbergen, C.C.R.J., & de Gelder, B. (2005). Rapid perceptual integration of facial expression and emotional body language. PNAS 102(45), 16518-16523. Pennebaker, J.W. (1989). Confession, inhibition, and disease. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 22, 211-244. Rutherford, H.J.V., Wallace, N.S., Laurent, H.K., & Mayes, L.C. (2015). Emotion regulation in parenthood. Developmental Review 36, 1-14. Tiedens, L.Z. (2001). Anger and advancement versus sadness and subjugation: The effect of negative emotion expressions on social status conferral. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 80(1), 86-94. Tromssdorff, G., & Heikamp, T. (2013). Socialization of emotions and emotion regulation in cultural context. In S. Barnow & N. Balkir (Eds.), Cultural variations in psychopathology: From research to practice (pp.67-92). Cambridge, MA: Hoegrefe Publishing. Rime, B., Mesquita, B., Boca, S., & Philippott, P. (1991). Beyond the emotional event: Six studies on the social sharing of emotion. Cognition and Emotion 5(5-6), 435-465. Roomer, L., Williston, S.K., & Rollins, L.G. (2015). Mindfulness and emotion regulation. Current Opinion in Psychology 3, 52-57. Wang, M-T., & Kenny, S. (2015). Longitudinal links between fathers’ and mothers’ harsh verbal discipline and adolescents’ conduct problems and depressive symptoms. Child Development 85(3), 908-923.

Is your child ‘spirited’?  Even if they aren’t spirited all the time, do they have spirited moments?  You know exactly what to do in those moments, right? No? Well then we have a treat for you today.  Dr. Mary Sheedy Kurcinka, author of Raising Your Spirited Child, walks us through the ins and outs of her book on the same topic.  Best yet, we do the interview as a consult with a parent, Kathryn, who has read and loved the book, but struggled with implementing the ideas. Warning: we spend quite a bit of time brainstorming very specific problems that Kathryn is having with her daughter.  You may not be having exactly the same problem with your child, but the brainstorming method we use is one you can do with a friend – take the approach with you to address your own problems, rather than the specific ideas. Read more about Dr. Mary’s books and other work on her website.   Reference Kurcinka, M.S. (2015). Raising your spirited child (3rd Ed.). New York, NY: William Morrow. (Affiliate link)   Read Full Transcript   Transcript Jen:    [00:39] Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. I know we’re going to help a lot of parents out today because we are here with Dr. Mary Sheedy Kurcinka, who wrote the book Raising Your Spirited Child, which I know is an absolute classic read for any parent of a spirited child. I read the book because a listener had requested an episode on it and what surprised me about it was that I don’t think my daughter is particularly spirited, but I definitely saw elements of her behavior described in the book and what I took out of that was that probably pretty much any child can have spirited elements of their personality or even just spirited moments. And so both the book and this episode are really for anyone who raises a child and who has ever had a moment where they think, “why won’t he or she just do what I ask.” Jen:    [01:26] So Dr. Mary has a bachelor’s in early childhood education, a Master’s in family social science, and a doctorate in education. She has written four books on various aspects of raising children, which have been translated into 23 languages. Her son and daughter are now fully fledged adults and she lives with her husband in Bozeman, Montana. Welcome Dr. Mary. Kathryn:     [01:46] Thank you. Jen:   [01:48] And so when I mentioned in my fortnightly newsletter, which you can actually receive by subscribing to the show YourParentingMojo.com, that I was looking for a coat interviewer to help me interview Dr Mary and really dig into the ways to apply the wisdom in the book. I received a number of responses, but one really stuck out. Kathryn is based in London and she has a four year old daughter who we’re going to call Jane in this episode and a son who’s a little over a year old and we’re going to call him George. Jen:    [02:14] I asked Kathryn to help us with this interview because she’d actually read and love the book, but had been struggling with the application of some of the strategies. She’s tried hard to support her spirited daughter as she grows and develops, but has found a particularly challenged in some areas since the birth of her son. So we’re here today to really get into the book, but also go beyond the book and get the real lowdown on how to implement the strategies in the book when the first attempt has maybe been a little bit less than successful. Welcome Kathryn. Kathryn:  [02:41] Thank you. Jen:   [02:42] All right. So Kathryn, let’s start with you. I wonder if you could please describe your daughter and how she fits into your family dynamic and I know you’ve read the book so you know that the words that are used to describe spirited children are very important. So what words do you use to describe her and what words do people around you who might not have read the book use? Kathryn:   [03:01] So after reading the book, I would say that in particular it was the intense and persistent elements that really struck a chord, but also she’s sensitive, very perceptive, a very high energy introvert, I would say. And just very articulate about what she wants, funny, enthusiastic, that kind of thing. And in terms of other peoples, there’s never been so much the label’s put on her I would find, but it’s just kind of when people talk, when they’d see something happening, you know, as if, oh, so and so that I know that they’re spoiled and oh well people don’t treat me like King Tut, or you know, just, it’s more in people’s tone. And I, I noticed as well since her brother was born that it’s more she falls into a particular persona kind of in contrast as the main older sibling almost. Jen:    [03:54] Is that pretty common? Dr. Kurcinka? Dr. Mary:    [03:57] As the mean older sibling? Well, certainly one of the things we know about spirited children is their intent. So every emotion is intense, including jealousy, they’re also slow to adapt. So a shift in the family dynamic is certainly going to affect them, but they’re also incredibly perceptive of the stress levels within our family and so often it’s the spirited child who I refer to them as our stress barometers because they’ll often start acting out because they’re taking in the stress around them. And obviously a new baby brings a great deal of stress to a family dynamic. Jen:    [04:42] Yeah. Do you feel as though that’s really impacted your family dynamic, Kathryn? Kathryn:    [04:46] Yes, I would say that has made a huge difference because I think, you know, when people talk about age two and age for as being particularly noteworthy in our family, it was really age three. But I think that’s because that was, you know, in the leadup my pregnancy and then the birth of her, her brother, the starting of preschool. So many things kind of happened at that period of time and therefore also our resources were that much less to kind of cope with it. And whereas I had kind of taken everything on with her, largely myself, because I stayed at home, I didn’t go back to work after my maternity leave and had kind of tried to protect her a little bit there because she had very distinct needs as far as I could see it in terms of being a little bit more sensitive to stimulation and to situations and things I had kept her under my wing a little bit in that respect. Whereas I couldn’t obviously do that with a newborn and also just adjusting to letting go a little bit in terms of preschool, you know, and no longer being her whole world anymore. That kind of rattled things a little bit and of course changed the family dynamic quite a bit and then adding an extra person. Jen:   [05:58] And these are all fairly natural things to happen, right? Brothers and sisters are born and their children tend to go up to some kind of care or preschool or something. Dr. Mary, how can we help children and prepare them for the kinds of transitions that Jane’s been going through? Dr. Mary:    [06:15] Well, there’s several things. One is, as you said, with the starting preschool, there’s also a change in routine in one of the things I talk about and work with families on in my private consultants, there’s two aspects to effective discipline, there’s structure, which is the routine, the rules, the expectations, they’re the things that remain pretty stable and then there’s the emotion coaching and the challenge with a new baby and starting preschool is the structure gets disrupted and so if you think about it’s kind of like all of a sudden moving or changing jobs or changing bosses at work that all of a sudden there are…what you expected in the past is no longer occurring. Things are different, so in preparing them, one is reforming that structure and creating predictability for them, which will then reduce the frequency and intensity of the meltdowns, leaving you the patience and energy to do the emotion coaching when it needs to be done. Jen:    [07:25] Yeah, Dr. Mary, you just said something really profound there that helped me to understand the gravity of these kinds of changes in a child’s world. When you talk about being comparable to moving for an adult or changing a boss for an adult, you know, I think if there was a big deal, I need to figure out what a new boss wants for me and how I interact with that person and you know, even as something as simple as changing a child’s teacher at preschool, you might think, well all the other teachers are still there and all the other children is still there, but that’s a very different interaction and it makes me feel as though, oh yeah, I can understand that. I can understand why that would be difficult for a child. Does that help us to bring more compassion to it, do you think? Dr. Mary:   [08:02] Well, I think it is important to look at that and look at this situation, yes, very compassionately. And that’s another thing that we can do is actually reduced expectations on that older child, which can be hard because it’s like, okay, now you’re the older one and I need to be taking care of the baby. But one of the stress reactions you’ll see is shut down. And shut down behaviors are, I can’t dress myself, I can’t walk, I can’t feed myself, and the natural reaction to those responses are you could do it yesterday or you could do it an hour ago and we push to have them do what they’re capable of doing, but what they’re actually telling us is I’m so overwhelmed, I’m shutting down. And so one thing that we can do as a parent is proactively say to them before they’re demanding, carry me, dress me, feed me, is, “is today a day that you can dress yourself or do you need help?” And if they say I need help, we help them because we recognize, wow, they’re dealing with a lot of stuff here. And so instead of fighting and struggling, we help them, but we also nudge them by saying, okay, you know, today I’ll help you, but pretty soon maybe even tomorrow you’re going to surprise me and do it yourself again. So we let them know we’re not doing this for ever, but we can see that right now, you need a little extra support. Kathryn:     [09:46] Do you see that dynamic in Jane, Kathryn? Yes, and I think some of those kinds of things about the dressing herself and things like that, that was a little bit easier for me or when we had in meal times the returned to kind of wanting to be fed for a little while or when my son was weaning than wanting to be on our laps as well and so some of that we definitely saw and I think I was used to a little bit more doing things at her own pace beforehand, so that part of it was a little bit easier for me, but I struggled a little bit. I think with things that were just suddenly new in those transitions, so transition around having the new sibling created a kind of a new level to my own intensity. I think in terms of a protectiveness over the small person than she had never shown aggression really before then to see some of those behaviors being targeted towards him specifically rather than wanting to be baby. But something that kind of felt like a bit more of an emergency in the moment kind of thing. That was triggering to me in a way that I hadn’t really been triggered as much in the past, Dr. Mary:   [10:54] And you’re absolutely right, Kathryn, you know, as a mom who are very protective of our children. It’s kind of the mother bear syndrome and one of the things I think that’s important to recognize, especially with a four year old, four year old and many spirited children, tend to be very bright and have excellent language skills and so we often assume that they have an understanding of things that they don’t because they are so verbal and so when we see behaviors that are potentially dangerous to the baby or a safety issue for the baby, the question becomes what is Jane feeling and needing in this situation? So is it an issue that she actually doesn’t realize, you can’t hug a baby that firmly. And so it’s teaching her how to hold and touch the baby. Is she feeling jealous? So instead of pushing the baby, teaching her to say I want him to go away, and that when she uses the words, we actually at that…because we’re teaching the words at this point, set the baby down and hold her because she used words instead of action. So it’s in those situations stopping to think what is she feeling or needing. Is it a skill issue? Is it a feeling she doesn’t know how to express appropriately. But as a four year old she has no idea that she can harm the baby. Jen:    [12:39] Wow. I would never have thought that. Wouldn’t you think that if you hit something it might hurt. But no, that’s a very profound realization I think to understand that a four year old can’t think that. Kathryn: [12:51] And I think sometimes if there are kind of two elements to it and like for, it’s the intensity piece around just that kind of out of control, excitement/anxiety, kind of that, you know, in the beginning in particular, if I’m trying to spend time just one on one with her to have a little bit of that, she actually would reject that for quite awhile. And she always wanted to know where he was and oh, if he was asleep she wants to be there waking up. Like she just really didn’t want to take her eyes off him. Like really was affectionate to like overzealously affectionate, but you know, in a way you would expect. But just couldn’t. It was like, yeah, simultaneously just out of control, affection and anxiety around the situation that she just couldn’t quite get to grips with, it felt like. Dr. Mary:   [13:42] And, and I think that’s an interesting choice of words when you say kind of anxiety about it. And again with the energy and that frenzied energy, we look at the fuel source because that frenzied energy is saying she’s overstimulated, she’s over aroused. And so one question I would have is actually about sleep because if the meltdowns are happening like after school or late in the afternoon or that frenzied behavior, that actually is an indication that can be an indication of, oh, we’re tired. So what time does she wake in the morning? Kathryn:   [14:25] She wakes up about [7:00] usually. Dr. Mary:    [14:27] And is she napping? Kathryn:  [14:29] No, and she can’t now because she’s in school. Dr. Mary:   [14:33] Okay. And what time does she fall asleep at night? Kathryn:    [14:39] Uh, she’ll be actually asleep by about [8:30]. Dr. Mary:   [14:43] Okay. So if we look at the averages and these are only averages, which means some children will have more, some people less. But this time of the year, the winter, when the...

“I hear parents on the playground all the time saying “You’re OK!” after their child falls over. Often it does make the child stop crying…but doesn’t it invalidate the child’s feelings?” It turns out that this question is related to a skill that psychologists call emotional regulation, and learning how to regulate emotions is one of the most important tasks of childhood. This to-the-point episode is a trial of a shorter form of episode after listeners told me this show is “very dense.”  It’s hard to back off the density, but I can back off the length.  Let me know (via email or the Contact Me, page – not the comments on this episode because I get inundated with spam) what you think…   Other episodes referenced in this show How parenting affects children’s development How divorce impacts children’s development How to scaffold children’s learning   References Brookshire, B. (2013, May 8). Psychology is WEIRD: Western college students are not the best representatives of human emotion, behavior, and sexuality. Slate. Retrieved from www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/05/weird_psychology_social_science_researchers_rely_too_much_on_western_college.html Duncan, L.G., Coatsworth, J.D., & Greenberg, M.T. (2009). A model of mindful parenting: Implications for parent-child relationships and prevention research. Clinical Child & Family Psychology Review 12, 255-270. Keane, S.P., & Calkins, S.D. (2004). Predicting kindergarten peer social status from toddler and preschool problem behavior. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology 32(4), 409-423. Kopystynska, O., Paschall, K.W., Barnett, M.A., & Curran, M.A. (2017). Patterns of interparental conflict, parenting, and children’s emotional insecurity: A person-centered approach. Journal of Family Psychology 31(7), 922-932. Roemer, L., Williston, S.K., & Rollins, L.G. (2015). Mindfulness and emotion regulation. Current Opinion in Psychology 3, 52-57. Rotenberg, K.J., & Eisenberg, N. (1997). Developmental differences in the understanding of and reaction to others’ inhibition of emotional expression. Developmental Psychology 33(3), 526-537. Sasser, T.R., Bierman, K.L., & Heinrichs, B. (2015). Executive functioning and school adjustment: The mediational role of pre-kindergarten learning-related behaviors. Early Childhood Research Quarterly 30(A), 70-79. Swain, J.E., Kim, P., & Ho, S.S. (2011). Neuroendocrinology of parental response to baby-cry. Journal of Neuroendochrinology 23(11), 1036-1041. Trommsdorff, G. (2010). Preschool girls’ distress and mothers’ sensitivity in Japan and Germany. European Journal of Developmental Psychology 7(3), 350-370.   Read Full Transcript Transcript Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. While I was still pregnant with my daughter, a friend showed me a video of a toddler falling down a flight of stairs.  Once he has tumbled all the way to the bottom he immediately bounces up and announces loudly for anyone who might be around: “I’m OK! I’m OK!” At the time I thought that was pretty cool.  Who wouldn’t want a child who can roll with the tumbles of life and be fine with it? I was working on some mental and emotional pregnancy exercises from a book at the time, one of which instructed me to write down my hopes for my yet-unborn daughter.  In the beautiful book that I made for her by hand (and that I hope to one day give to her), the third entry on my list of “My hopes for you” was “I hope you’ll be the kind of kid who gets up after a fall and says I’m OK!” Fortunately, through studying for a Master’s in Psychology and through researching podcast episodes for you, my wishes for my daughter, as well as my skills, have evolved – but I’m still learning all the time. Recently, one of my podcast listeners emailed me with a question: “I hear parents on the playground all the time saying “You’re OK!” after their child falls over.  Often it does make the child stop crying…but doesn’t it invalidate the child’s feelings?” It turns out that this question is related to a skill that psychologists call emotional regulation, and learning how to regulate emotions is one of the most important tasks of childhood. There are three major ways that children learn about emotional regulation.  The first of these is through direct teaching of emotional regulation – for example, by saying things like ‘you’re OK!.’  The second is through parental modeling of emotional regulation, and because I’ve been getting feedback from listeners saying that they LOVE my show but find the content to be very dense, we’re going to try a little experiment here and break these two topics down into two episodes.  They’re not actually going to be any less dense than my regular episodes (although I really make no apology for that), but hopefully making them shorter will help them to be a bit more digestible anyway.  I’d like you to let me know what you think about this, so do drop me a line at jen@yourparentingmojo.com with any feedback. The third way children learn about emotional regulation is the emotional climate of the family, which includes parent-child attachment, the romantic attachment of the parents, and the presence/absence of marital conflict (and how this is resolved).  We’ve covered a lot of this information in other shows already – like in our interview with Dr. Laura Froyen on how parenting affects child development, as well as in the episode related to how divorce impacts children, which contained a lot of information on how conflict affects children, and how resolving conflict productively can actually be very helpful for children to observe.  For that reason we’re not going to do a third show on this particular aspect of emotional regulation but go ahead – show affection to your partner!  Be romantic!  Your kid is watching… So there are three critical reasons we need to support our children’s emotional regulation.  Firstly, emotional regulation directly impacts an individual’s wellbeing, because emotions have a physical impact on both children and adults.  Stress can have direct physiological effects on a person, like increasing blood pressure, it can impact behaviors related to wellbeing like alcohol and substance use and abuse, and can contribute to mental wellness or illness, for example, depression (Butler 2013). Secondly, emotional regulation helps children to make (and keep friends) – aggressive boys and girls who fail to share and who get peers in trouble find it hard to make friends. And finally, emotional regulation is really important for academic achievement – pre-kindergarten skills related to emotional regulation actually predict later academic skills probably because children who can sit still even when they want to fidget and ignore a taunting classmate are more likely to stay on-task with the lesson. What I wanted to know next was “can scientists help us to understand how our actions as parents impact our children’s emotional regulation?”  It turns out that there’s no one “aha!” study that neatly addresses these issues.  But a whole slew of studies cast light on different pieces of the puzzle.   There are two key ideas behind the incongruence of saying “You’re OK” to Western children: Firstly, emotional expression is culturally driven.  We Westerners tend to think that pretty much everyone thinks (or should think) like us.  While differences between individuals in a culture do, of course, exist, in general researchers assume that “people strive for independence, self-fulfillment, and authentic expression of emotions based on autonomy” (Trommsdorff & Heikamp 2013, p.70) – but in many Asian societies this is not a goal for raising children. Instead, Asian parents aim to know what their child needs before the child even says it (Tromsdorff & Heikamp 2013).  Chinese children see this control as an expression of warmth and support, whereas European-American children find it stifling. Most psychological research that makes it into journals is conducted on Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (or WEIRD)  WEIRD college students, and then researchers assume it’s applicable to all Americans, and maybe even people everywhere.  But the ‘hot’ way of studying the cultural issues behind emotionally-driven behavior is to put some Western and some Japanese people in an uncomfortable situation and see what happens – they use Japanese people because the Japanese are typically considered the paragon of the Asian interdependent cultures. When researchers gave Japanese and German preschool girls a task that they could not possibly complete, German girls experienced distress associated with their failure for much longer than Japanese girls, whose distress quickly disappeared – to be expected in a culture where such expression is typically avoided.  The girls’ mothers were present during the experiment: German mothers expressed warmth to their daughters after the girls failed at the task, and the more sensitive the mother the more distress the girls expressed – in other words, the girls cried more, perhaps because the German mothers felt as though the girls were expressing their authentic emotions and so did not try to get the girls to stop crying. So if we put all this together, we see that telling a child how they feel (or should feel) is a strategy that is really not well-suited to raising children in a society where autonomy and independence are prized.  We are attempting to control their experience of the world, which would help to build warmth between Chinese-American children and their parents, but which European-American children see as overly controlling.  German mothers seem to have it figured out – their children might cry more as a result, but they learn the validity of their own emotions.  It seems as though if American parents really do prize autonomy and independence, it would be a whole lot less confusing for their children if they were also a bit more tolerant of the expression of emotions that can be seen as negative, like crying.   The second reason why it’s incongruent for Westerners to tell their children “you’re OK” is that children’s emotional regulation develops as they age. Perhaps this won’t be terribly surprising to parents: emotional regulation before age three months is thought to be driven largely by innate processes – things like turning toward pleasant stimuli like a parent’s face, and away from aversive stimuli like a loud noise.  By age one, babies know that other people can help them to regulate their emotional states, and by age two they can use specific strategies to manage their own feelings (although they aren’t always successful, which is why they have tantrums) (Calkins & Hill 2007). The way children think about controlling emotions also changes as they get older.  Young children seem to believe that parents can actually change children’s emotions simply by saying “stop crying,” but older children and adults recognize that you don’t stop feeling something just because someone else tells you to – you just stop expressing the emotion.  As we’ll see in our next episode, this can have very negative impacts on a person’s mental and physical wellbeing. So we do need to adjust our approach as our child gets older, and we can use what psychologists call scaffolding to offer our children more support when they are younger (or hungry, or tired) and gradually withdraw that support as they get better at regulating their own emotions.  As a reminder, we did a whole episode pretty early on in the show on how to use scaffolding to increase children’s abilities.   So what should we understand from these studies? Firstly, we socialize our children to succeed in our culture, and we should use strategies to help our children succeed in our culture (unless we might think that our culture relies just a touch too much on individualism, in which case we might want to adjust our approach slightly…). Telling Western children “You’re OK!” when they’re clearly not flies in the face of all the other lessons we try to teach them about living their own experience and respecting their feelings.  It might stop them from crying, but it’s incredibly conflicting for them – we’re suddenly using strategies more suited to socializing in Asian cultures for no apparent reason. Secondly, while our youngest children might think that we can change how they feel just by telling them, but eventually they figure out that we can’t, and they feel gypped. Finally, by supporting our children as they develop their own emotional control skills (rather than just telling them they’re OK) we equip them with critical skills they need to succeed in learning and in life. So why do we continue to tell our children they’re OK when they clearly know they’re not (and, if we’re honest, so do we)?  The only explanation I can come up with is that we really hate to hear our children cry.  We’re wired to make it stop as fast as we can, which we do by soothing our infants, and when they get old enough that we can’t easily soothe them any more we try to get them to stop using whatever means we can – even if it doesn’t benefit our children at all, and may instead impede their emotional regulation skill development.   Al well and good, I hear you say, but what should we do instead of saying “You’re OK?” So next time your child falls at the playground, consider taking these four actions: And Watch Don’t go running over.  Cement yourself to that park bench if necessary. Look to see whether your child is really hurt.  If he really is, go over immediately.  If it’s more likely to be just a bump, sit tight a little longer.   Set an Intention Use this time to check in and see how you’re feeling.  Bring your full awareness to the moment and set an intention to respond with your child’s best interest in mind.  Are you anxious?  Take a breath.  Resolve to not say “You’re OK.”   Act Reassess what your child needs.  If he’s not already up and running around, walk over and sit next to him.  Say something like “Ouch – that looked like it hurt.  Do you need a hug?” (for younger children).  “Is there anything I can do to help you feel better?” (for older children).  Provide a hug (or not) accordingly. Sit quietly until your child seems to calm himself.  When your child is ready, consider replaying the incident without judgment: “It looked like you were walking along the beam and you lost your balance.”  Empathize and acknowledge any new feelings that occur.   Move on When your child is ready, ask a question.  “Would you like to sit here with me for a bit longer or are you ready to play again?” or “Would you like to play some more or would you rather go home now?”  He may have other ideas about what he wants to do, but you may find giving him ideas to be more effective than just asking “what do you want to do now?,” which may simply elicit an “I don’t know.”     When you have time, you may find deeper reflection on this topic helpful.   You may find that saying “You’re OK!” has become reflexive for you – you don’t even think about it before you say it. If this is the case, try first simply to notice when you say it – without judging yourself.  Then try to institute the pause that gives you the time you need to think and say something different.   Spend some time thinking about what skills you think feel are important for your child to learn, and how you can support those through your relationship. If emotional awareness is high on the list, think about the messages you send your child when you discuss those emotions.  If you find that you frequently invalidate those emotions (e.g. “Of course you want to go to school!  You love your teacher!” or “Why wouldn’t you want to go to the party?  All your friends will be there!”) then your words may contradict your intention.  Don’t be afraid to let your child experience her own sadness, frustration, and anger, even as you support her by empathizing with her.  Your child learns more by experiencing them and dealing with them than by suppressing them because you don’t want to hear about them.   Cultivate a practice of mindfulness – of being in and experiencing the present moment, which can help you to institute that all-important pause, as well as develop your own healthy emotional regulation skills. I’m working on finding someone who might be interested in talking with us about bringing a practice of mindfulness to our parenting, so stay tuned for that.   As always, the references for today’s show can be found on my website at www.yourparentingmojo.com/youreok, and please do let me know your thoughts on this shorter episode format by sending an email to jen@yourparentingmojo.com  

“HOW DO I GET MY CHILD TO SLEEP THROUGH THE NIGHT?!” is the thinly-veiled message under the surface of many of the emails that I get about sleep.  And I don’t blame you.  I don’t claim to be a magician in this regard, although I did get incredibly, amazingly lucky – my daughter put in her first eight-hour night at six weeks old, and has regularly slept through the night for longer than I can remember.  I’m really genuinely not sure I could parent if things weren’t like this. But today’s episode is about the data, not about anecdata. Zoe in Sydney wrote to me: A hotly debated topic with my friends has been “sleeping through the night.” My daughter never was great at napping and still wakes up once a night, coming into our bed. We have never been able to do controlled crying etc – I would love to know what science says about sleeping through the night! And what is best for your child (vs the parent). My close friend is a breastfeeding counselor and said they are taught that lots of children don’t sleep through until 4 years old! Other mothers I knew were horrified if their child wasn’t sleeping through by 6 months – and the French talk about their children ‘having their nights’ much earlier… As I started researching this topic it became clear that sleep is driven to an incredible extent by cultural preferences.  Some (Western) psychologists advocate for letting children Cry It Out, while people in many cultures around the world see putting a child to sleep in their own room (never mind allowing them to cry) as tantamount to child abuse. So: can we get our children to sleep more?  Is bed-sharing inherently bad?  Does Cry It Out harm the child in some way?  Let’s find out!   References Amoabeng, A.O. (2010). The changes and effect of stress hormone cortisol during extreme diet and exercise. Unpublished Master’s thesis. Boston, MA: Boston University. American Academy of Pediatrics (2016). SIDS and other sleep-related infant deaths: Updated 2016 recommendations for a safe infant sleeping environment. Author. Retrieved from http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2016/10/20/peds.2016-2938 Bernier, A., Carlson, S. M., Bordeleau, S., & Carrier, J. (2010). Relations between physiological and cognitive regulatory systems: Infant sleep regulation and subsequent executive functioning. Child Development, 81, 1739–1752. Blampied, N.M. (2013). Functional behavioral analysis of sleep in infants and children. In A. Wolfson & H. Montgomery-Downs (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of infant, child, and adolescent sleep and behavior. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press. Burnham, M.M. (2013). Co-sleeping and self-soothing during infancy. In A. Wolfson & H. Montgomery-Downs (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of infant, child, and adolescent sleep and behavior. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press. Chess, S., & Thomas, A. (1984). Origins and evolution of behavior disorders. New York, NY: Brunner/Mazel. Crncec, R., Matthey, S., & Nemeth, D. (2010). Infant sleep problems and emotional health: A review of two behavioral approaches. Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology 28(1), 44-54. Ferber, R. (1985). Solve your child’s sleep problems. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. France, K.G. (1991). Behavior characteristics and security in sleep-disturbed infants treated with extinction. Journal of Pediatric Psychology 17(4), 467-475. Gaddini, R. (1970. Transitional objects and the process of individuation: A study in three different social groups. Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry 9(2), 347-365. Germo, G.G., Goldberg, W.A., & Keller, M.A. (2009). Learning to sleep through the night: Solution or strain for mothers and young children? Infant Mental Health Journal 30(3), 223-244. Giannotti, F., & Cortesi, F. (2009). Family and cultural influences on sleep development. Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America 18(4), 849-861. Hale, L., Parente, V., & Phillips, G.K. (2013). Social determinants of children’s sleep. In A. Wolfson & H. Montgomery-Downs (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of infant, child, and adolescent sleep and behavior. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press. Healey, D., France, K.G., & Blampied, N.M. (2009). Treating sleep disturbances in infants: What generalizes? Behavioral Interventions 24, 23-41. Hiscock, H., Bayer, J., Gold, L., Hampton, A., Okuomunne, O.C., & Wake, M. (2006). Improving infant sleep and maternal mental health: A cluster randomized trial. Archives of Disease in Childhood 92, 952-958. Hupp, S., & Jewell, J. (2014). Great myths of child development. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons. Jenni, O.G., & O’Connor, B.B. (2005). Children’s sleep: An interplay between culture and biology. Pediatrics 115(1), 204-216. Lushington, K., Pamula, Y., Martin, J., & Kennedy, J.D. (2013). The relationship between sleep and daytime cognitive/behavioral functioning: Infancy and preschool years. In A. Wolfson & H. Montgomery-Downs (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of infant, child, and adolescent sleep and behavior. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press. McKenna, J.J., Ball, H.L., & Gettler, L.T. (2007). Mother-infant cosleeping, breastfeeding, and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome: What biological anthropology has discovered about normal infant sleep and pediatric sleep medicine.  Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 50, 133-161. Meleva-Seitz, V.R., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M.J., Battaini, C., & Luijk, M.P.C.M. (2015). Parent-child bed-sharing: The good, the bad, and the burden of evidence. Sleep Medicine Reviews. Full article available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/298427230_Parent-child_bed-sharing_The_good_the_bad_and_the_burden_of_evidence Mindell, J.A., Du Mond, C.E., Sadeh, A., Telofski, L.S., Kulkarni, N., & Gunn, E. (2011). Efficacy of an internet-based intervention for infant and toddler sleep disturbances. Sleep 34(4), 451-458B. Neff, J. (2016, February 24). Time to a mobile sleep app – More products in carts. AdAge. Retrieved from http://adage.com/article/digital/j-j-research-led-bath-time-a-mobile-sleep-app/302776/ Pantley, E. (2002). The no-cry sleep solution. New York, NY: Contemporary Books. Price, A.M.H., Wake, M., Ukoumunne, O.C., & Hiscock, H. (2012). Five-year follow-up of harms and benefits of behavioral infant sleep intervention: Randomized trial. Pediatrics 130(4), 643-651. Santos, I.S., Bassani, D.G., Matijasevich, A., Halal, C.S., Del-Ponte, B., Henriquez da Cruz, S., Anselmi, L. Albernaz, E., Fernandes, M., Tovo-Rodriguez, L., Silveira, M.D., & Hallal, P.C. (2016). Infant sleep hygiene counseling (sleep trial): Protocol of a randomized controlled trial. BMC Psychiatry 16(1), 307. Sears, W., Sears, R., Sears, J., & Sears, M. (2005). The baby sleep book. New York, NY: Little, Brown & Company. Super, C.M., & Harkness, S. (2013). Culture and children’s sleep. In A. Wolfson & H. Montgomery-Downs (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of infant, child, and adolescent sleep and behavior. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press. Teti, D.M., Kim, B.R., Mayer, G., & Countermine, M. (2010). Maternal emotional availability at bedtime predicts infant sleep quality. Journal of Family Psychology 24(3), 307-315. Weinraub, M., Friedman, S.L., Knoke, B., Houts, R., Bender, R.H., Susman, E.J., Bradley, R., & Williams, J. (2012). Patterns of developmental change in infants’ nighttime sleep awakenings from 6 through 26 months of age. Developmental Psychology 48(6), 1511-1528.   Read Full Transcript Transcript Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  Before we start today, I just wanted to take a minute and mention what happens around here on the weeks when you don’t hear an episode, because I have a suspicion based on my download patterns that most of you are subscribed to the show through iTunes rather than through my website, which means you’re kind of missing out.  On the weeks when I don’t publish an episode, I send out a newsletter instead – and this is not just any old newsletter.  I keep track of new research and articles related to both child development and education over the previous couple of weeks, and I select the best of them for the newsletter.  Then I don’t just tell you about the new studies and articles, but locate them in the rest of the literature on the topic by helping you to understand how the new work adds to our understanding, and what we’re still lacking.  I also post calls for questions on topics I’ve already decided to do episodes on (and your questions not only get onto the list of questions that I end up asking the interviewee, but also help me to decide which interviewee to ask in the first place), and mention ideas I’m considering for future episodes to see whether you all are interested in them or not.  Finally, I also use the newsletters to do a Q&A on difficult or controversial topics – so after I did the episode on potty training recently, listeners emailed me with their questions and I answered them in a newsletter a few weeks later.  Pretty often I end up in an email conversation with the people who write to me about the topics they’re interested in, which I really enjoy and I hope is useful to them as well.  So if you’re really interested in this research and in having me do all the work in terms of keeping on top of it for you, you really should head over to yourparentingmojo.com and enter your email address in the box at the top of the screen to subscribe there.  As I’ve mentioned before, if you’re only subscribed through iTunes I never get your email address and I actually never even find out that you subscribed, so there’s no way for me to send a newsletter to you.  So head on over to yourparentingmojo.com and subscribe to the show!   Seems like we’re on a roll lately with topics that I’ve resisted doing for a while – we did an episode recently on potty training, or ‘toilet learning,’ as I prefer to call it.  And I’ve been getting quite a lot of questions over the last few months about sleep – mostly around how to get more of it.  I’d resisted doing an episode on this for much the same reason as the potty training episode – there are books out there on this topic as well, and Facebook groups, and plenty of people making a living from doing nothing but advising parents on how to get their children to sleep.  But the questions kept coming!  And so we’re going to talk about them today.  We’ll do what we usually do with these kinds of episodes – take a tour through the anthropological literature and find out just how weird our Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic societies are, and from there we’ll reframe how we look at children and sleep before we discuss ways that we can all get more of it.  And I should say that as is typical with the show, we’ll look at sleep primarily through the lens of caring for toddlers and preschoolers.  We’ll detour perhaps a little more than usual into learning about younger babies just because that’s the population on whom a lot of research has been done, but we’ll focus primarily on the types of problems that parents of toddlers and preschoolers tend to have, and what we can do about them.   Let’s talk just a little first about why children sleep – it’s because they really do need to do it!  Just a couple of the amazing things that happen during sleep is that memories are consolidated, stabilized, and perhaps enhanced (which has obvious implications for a child’s performance in school), and memories may actually be assimilated into the child’s cognitive matrix, which allows a cohesive view of the individual’s world to develop.  Pretty cool stuff.  Sleep problems in childhood are associated with memory and learning impairments, difficulty in regulating mood, attention and behavioral problems, as well as hyperactivity and impulsivity.  Short sleep duration is associated with overweight in childhood, although I should caution that for many of these issues we aren’t sure whether sleep problems cause these effects or whether these effects cause the sleep problems.  So not getting enough sleep is a problem because when you don’t sleep as much you miss out on all the benefits of sleep that we’re really only just starting to understand. So the first place I looked when I wanted to learn more about how children sleep in other cultures was David Lancy’s book The Anthropology of Childhood, and I was absolutely shocked to find that there’s nothing at all in it about sleep.  Luckily there is some published literature about it and all the studies seem to pretty much give the tour of the same cultures and their approaches to sleep.   For something that is such a biological NEED as sleep, I was surprised to find the extent to which sleep patterns are culturally determined.  I’m sure many of you are aware of the differences in sleep patterns between Japanese and Western societies – in the West, we encourage children to sleep in their own beds in their own rooms from a very young age, while children in Japan share a bed with one or both parents for many years.  Bed-sharing is typically frowned on in Western cultures; I regularly see signs on buses in my town discouraging parents from bed-sharing, which is more common in African American than White communities in the U.S.  In 2011 the Milwaukee Health Department ran an advertising campaign that showed a beautiful sleeping baby with a large knife lying next to her, with the tag line “your baby sleeping with you can be just as dangerous.”  The American Academy of Pediatrics specifically recommends that infants sleep in the parents’ room, close to the parents’ bed but on a separate surface designed for infants, ideally for the first year of life, but at least for the first six months.  The recommendations go on to list a variety of bed-sharing arrangements that increase the risk of SIDS or unintentional injury or death while bed-sharing, including the child’s age being less than four months, bed-sharing with a current smoker, with anyone who is not the infant’s parent, including nonparental caregivers and other children, and with soft bedding accessories like pillows and blankets.  If we follow the AAP’s guidelines, which I have to say are extremely well-referenced, we’d all be terrified of bedsharing and we would think that nobody in the world would ever do it.  Which would be rather strange, because it turns out that a lot of people in the world do do it, probably in part because bed sharing was very much the norm as our species evolved.  Infants have a need for food (which was historically delivered solely from the mother’s breast) at regular intervals as well as the sensory maternal-infant exchange involving touch, smell, movement, sound, and taste – together, this package represents the only physiological and behavioral environment that the infant is adapted to.  This is not to say that infants aren’t resilient and can’t adapt to new circumstances but we should acknowledge that it’s a cultural shift in Western countries that has precipitated a desire to have children sleep through the night in their own rooms.  So when we read studies that discuss giving parents literature to read that discusses “normal sleep patterns at 6-12 months,” we should be very cognizant that the definition of “normal” is culturally-bound, and that in many cultures what we think of as “normal” is actually thought of as “not normal” and even “unkind.”   Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to find that there’s a link between cultures that value interdependence between people and co-sleeping, and cultures that value independence and individualism and sleeping alone.  In non-western countries, cosleeping is very much more common than in western countries. Ninety-three percent of Indian children aged 3 to 10 years cosleep, as do 80% of Japanese infants, who typically stay in the parental bed until at least school age.  45% of Korean children aged between 1 and 7 bed share, as do 45% of Egyptian families where the bed typically has up to four sleepers.  Cosleeping is common in Brazil: from isolated communities of indigenous people to the urbanites in Sao Paolo, not less than 80% of children under 10 years of age co-sleep with parents.  So in almost all cultures around the world, babies sleep with an adult, while older children sleep with parents or other siblings.   I should also be clear that I’m not for or against co-sleeping; we didn’t do it in our household primarily because I found I couldn’t sleep with my daughter in our bed.  She spent her first four months in a bassinet right next to our bed and most of the time she could be lifted back into it after nursing in the night.  Occasionally in the early mornings she would fuss and seem like she might not settle so I would leave her in bed with us, with her taking up over a third of the bed next to the bed rail, my husband taking up over a third on the other side, and me jammed in the middle unable to move for fear of waking someone up or squashing them.  I could sleep with just her in the bed if my husband was out, but he’s not really the type to relocate himself out of the marital bed so we stuck with the bassinet.   So why the huge disconnect between Western cultures and the rest of the world when it comes to bed sharing?  Well, there are a number of factors at play which are reviewed in an excellent paper by Professor McKenna at the University of Notre Dame, who holds pretty interesting dual appointments in the Department of Anthropology as well as in the Behavioral Sleep Laboratory.  He tells the following story: apparently during the last 500 years in major European cities, a relatively sizeable number of poor women with no access to birth control confessed to Catholic priests that they had deliberately laid on and smothered their infants as a way of controlling their family size.  The priests threatened excommunication, fines, and imprisonment, and infants were at some point in this period “banned” from parental beds.  The legacy of these events have converged with other changing customs and values such as the rise of privacy, self-reliance, and individualism that support the children’s place of rest being in a different room and not just a different bed in the parental bedroom.  The rise of romantic love made a further contribution to prevent the child from intruding on the conjugal bond; Freud was a proponent of the idea that children should not watch their parents’ sexual activities, although more recent research has shown that children are not harmed by seeing these activities early in life.  The role of fathers shifted as well, as the father-figure became authoritarian figures who engaged in limited physical contact with their children.  In the early part of this century, psychologists, pediatricians, and new-found ‘parenting experts’ promoted allegedly science-based sleep patterns that were compatible with the western cultural values of individualism and autonomy.  In the second half of this century we became especially enamoured of technological solutions to...

In Professor Angela Duckworth’s TED talk, she says of her research: “One characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success.  And it wasn’t social intelligence.  It wasn’t good looks, physical health, and it wasn’t IQ.  It was grit.” The effusive blurbs on the book cover go even beyond Professor Duckworth’s own dramatic pronouncements: Daniel Gilbert, the author of Stumbling on Happiness, says:  “Psychologists have spent decades searching for the secret of success, but Duckworth is the one who has found it…She not only tells us what it is, but how to get it.”  Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking (which we’ve looked at previously in an episode on supporting your introverted child) says: “Impressively fresh and original…Grit scrubs away preconceptions about how far our potential can take us…Buy this, send copies to your friends, and tell the world that there is, in fact, hope.  We can all dazzle.”  Don’t we all want to dazzle?  Don’t we all want our children to dazzle?  Is grit the thing that will help them do it? It turns out that Professor Duckworth’s own research says: perhaps not.  Listen in to learn how much grit is a good thing, how to help your child be grittier, and why it might not be the factor that assures their success.   Other episodes mentioned in this show How to support your introverted child Why you shouldn’t bother trying to increase your child’s self-esteem   References Crede, M., Tynan, M.C., & Harms, P.D. (2017). Much ado about grit: A meta-analytic synthesis of the grit literature. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 113(3), 492-511. Del Giudice, M. (2014, October 14). Grit trumps talent and IQ: A story every parent (and educator) should read. National Geographic. Retrieved from http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/10/141015-angela-duckworth-success-grit-psychology-self-control-science-nginnovators/ Denby, D. (2016, June 21). The limits of “grit.” The New Yorker. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-limits-of-grit Duckworth, A.L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M.D., & Kelly, D.R. (2007). Grit: Perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92(6), 1087-1101. Full article available at https://www.ronaldreaganhs.org/cms/lib7/WI01001304/Centricity/Domain/187/Grit%20JPSP.pdf Duckworth, A.L., & Yeager, D.S. (2015). Measurement matters: Assessing personal qualities other than cognitive abilities for educational purposes. Educational Researcher 44(4), 237-251. Duckworth, A.L. (2016). Grit: The power of passion and perseverance. New York, NY: Scribner. (Affiliate link) Eskreis-Winkler, L., Shulman, E.P., Young, V., Tsukayama, E., Brunwasaser, S.M., & Duckworth, A.L. (2016). Using wise interventions to motivate deliberate practice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 111(5), 728-744. Farrington, C.A., Roderick, M., Allensworth, E., Nagoka, J., Keyes, T.S., Johnson, D.W., & Beechum, N.O. (2012). Teaching adolescents to become learners: The role of noncognitive factors in shaping school performance: A critical literature review. The University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research. Retrieved from https://consortium.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/publications/Noncognitive%20Report.pdf Forsyth, D.R., & Kerr, N.A. (1999, August). Are adaptive illusions adaptive? Poster presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, Boston, MA. Hannon, B. (2014). Predicting college success: The relative contributions of five social/personality factors, five cognitive/earning factors, and SAT scores.  Journal of Educational and Training Studies 2(4), 46-58. Heckman, J.J. (2013). Giving kids a fair chance (A strategy that works). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kamenetz, A. (2016, May 25). MacArthur ‘genius’ Angela Duckworth responds to a new critique of grit. NPR. Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/05/25/479172868/angela-duckworth-responds-to-a-new-critique-of-grit Kapoor, M.L. (2017, June 27). 12 books expelled from Tucson schools. High Country News. Retrieved from http://www.hcn.org/articles/education-tucsons-mexican-american-studies-ban-goes-back-to-court Kohn, A. (2014). Grit: A skeptical look at the latest educational fad. Author. Retrieved from http://www.alfiekohn.org/article/grit/ No byline. (1998, March 15). Weddings; Jason Duckworth, Angela Lee. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/15/style/weddings-jason-duckworth-angela-lee.html Sparks, S.D. (2015, June 2). ‘Nation’s Report Card’ to gather data on grit, mindset. Education Week. Retrieved from http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/06/03/nations-report-card-to-gather-data-on.html The Leadership Conference. (2015, May 5). Civil rights groups: “We oppose anti-testing efforts.” Author. Retrieved from https://civilrights.org/civil-rights-groups-we-oppose-anti-testing-efforts/ The Learning Project Elementary School. Website. Author. Retrieved from http://www.learningproject.org/ The Nation’s Report Card (n.d.). Percentage of fourth-grade students at or above Proficient not significantly different compared to 2013. Author. Retrieved from https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading_math_2015/#reading/acl?grade=4 Tough, P. (2016). Helping children succeed: What works and why. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Useem, J. (2016, May). Is grit overrated: The downsides of dogged, single-minded persistence. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/is-grit-overrated/476397/ Zernike, K. (2016, February 29). Testing for joy and grit? Schools nationwide push to measure students’ emotional skills. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/01/us/testing-for-joy-and-grit-schools-nationwide-push-to-measure-students-emotional-skills.html?_r=0   Read Full Transcript Transcript Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  We have a pretty interesting topic lined up for today, or I think so at least: we’re going to talk about grit.  If you’ve heard about grit over the last couple of years it’s probably because of one woman named Angela Duckworth, who is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and who invented what she calls The Grit Scale – she won a MacArthur Genius award for her research on grit in 2013.  She tells a story about how she developed this scale that goes like this: several years ago the U.S. Army was having trouble figuring out which of their 1200 new cadets were going to make it through the grueling 7-week training program at West Point, and which were going to flunk out.  They had developed their own measure called the Whole Candidate Score, which was a weighted average of SAT or ACT exam scores, high school rank, expert appraisal of leadership potential, and performance on physical fitness tests, but it turned out that the Whole Candidate Score actually wasn’t very good at predicting who would make it through the 7-week training.  In 2004, Professor Duckworth gave the Grit Scale that she’d been developing to the incoming class of West Point cadets which asks questions like how likely you are to get discouraged by setbacks and how often your interests change, and it turned out that while the quitters had indistinguishable Whole Candidate Scores from the cadets who made it through the training, the Grit Scale was an “astoundingly reliable” predictor of who made it through training and who did not. At this point you might be wondering how gritty you are yourself which is easy to test: just Google “Grit Scale” and hit the first link that pops up; I’ll put the link in the references as well.  (I just took it and I scored 4.5 on a scale of 1-5, which is apparently higher than 90% of the population “in a recent study” that isn’t named).  I guess I’m not enormously surprised; I think of myself as a pretty determined person; I think carefully before signing up to a project or a goal but once I sign up I’m *in* and am 100% committed to the end.  So grit isn’t about talent or luck or how intensely you might want something *in the moment,* but instead it’s about your passion and perseverance for long-term goals.  The test is pretty easy to fake, though – it’s not hard to guess what the ‘right’ answer is when you have to rate your response to the statement “I am a hard worker” or “I am diligent. I never give up.” Professor Duckworth wrote about all this in her 2016 book “Grit: The power of passion and perseverance,” which I read recently.  My first instinct after reading a book that seems pretty good and is well-referenced is to reach out to the author and ask if she might like to be interviewed, but then I started doing some reading around.  The first thing I found was a long profile of her in National Geographic, of all places, saying that she routinely declines requests for interviews, including the one from the National Geographic journalist, who finally tracked down her personal phone number and reached her directly – apparently the journalist’s grittiness persuaded Professor Duckworth to do the interview.  And then secondly I found some studies saying that maybe – just maybe – grit isn’t quite such the big deal that Professor Duckworth makes it out to be – she hopes it will be the thing we can teach poor children that will help them to succeed in school, and it turns out that that is far from clear.  So ultimately I decided we could have more fun by digging into this ourselves and seeing, by the end of the episode, whether grit is a trait we want to try to encourage in our children – or not.   So we’ve said that grit is about passion and perseverance.  Professor Duckworth spends most of her book talking about the perseverance side of the equation, so we’ll just touch briefly on passion first.  Passion is sparked by an interest; an intrinsic enjoyment in what you do.  I wrote my psychology master’s thesis on what motivates children to learn so I can say she’s right on the mark here; we don’t know much about what it is that get us interested in a topic, but once we are interested in it if we learn more about it (and are encouraged to learn more about it by the people we love), that interest can blossom into a passion.  Professor Duckworth provides case studies throughout the book of highly successful people she’s interviewed, as well as some highly successful people who she apparently wasn’t able to interview but she read their books and quotes them as if she had interviewed them, and I think it’s fair to say that all of them were passionate about their work.  This isn’t too hard to wrap your head around; a lot of studies have come to the conclusion that people are not only happier but they perform better when they are interested in their work.  For many people, this interest is linked to the concept of purpose – the idea that their work somehow matters in the world, because it’s connected to the wellbeing of others (or, I suppose to another thing, like the planet).  As a side note, the book never resolves the tension between applying the concept of grit to classroom-based learning, and the fact that interest and passion are a key component of grit.  Unfortunately, much of learning in school is not based on students’ interest; it’s based on what other people say they think students *should* find interesting.  So in a way, if we’re looking at grit as a way of improving student outcomes (which Professor Duckworth apparently hopes we can do), we’re trying to improve students’ perseverance on things they don’t care much about.  It seems like that could be a problem.  But we’ll come back to that later. In addition to passion and purpose, Professor Duckworth briefly mentions that hope is apparently important as well; a rising-to-the-occasion kind of perseverance that keeps us going when things get tough, and to get back up when we get knocked down. But the bulk of the book is dedicated to the perseverance component of grit, so that’s where we’re going to spend the most time as well.  Professor Duckworth describes perseverance as the capacity to practice – after you’ve developed an interest in an area, it’s the devotion to a rigorous, committed, never-ending practice that leads to mastery.  It’s finding your weaknesses and addressing them, day after day, and saying “whatever it takes, I want to improve!.”  Our society is actually quite biased against the kind of practice it takes to be great.  We want to believe it happened because a person was deeply talented.  Professor Chia-Jung Tsay at University College London conducted an experiment where she had professional musicians listen to clips of two musicians playing the piano – one is described as an innately talented player while the other is a ‘striver’ who has worked hard.  The professional researchers didn’t know that the two players were actually the same player, playing different parts of the same piece.  In direct contradiction to their stated beliefs about the importance of effort versus talent, the professional musicians said the naturally talented pianists to be more likely to succeed and more hireable.  In a follow-up study, a set of adults read a profile of a ‘striver’ entrepreneur, while another set read a profile of a ‘naturally talented’ entrepreneur.  All participants then listened to the same audio recording of a business proposal and were told it was made by the entrepreneur they’d read about.  Again, the naturally talented entrepreneur was judged as more likely to be successful and more hireable.  When the participants were asked to back one entrepreneur or the other, the striver had to have four more years of leadership experience and an additional $40,000 in start-up capital before the participants were as likely to invest with the striver than with the natural.  As a profile of Professor Duckworth in The Atlantic so eloquently put it, “We don’t like strivers because they invite self-comparisons.  If what separates, say, Roger Federer from you and me is nothing but the number of hours spent at “deliberate practice” – as the most extreme behaviorists argue – our enjoyment of the U.S. Open could be interrupted by the thought There but for the grace of grit go I.”   So as a society we value natural talent, but if hard work gets people to the same place and they can just hide the hard work, we can be accepting of that as well.  We don’t want to see those hours of practice or the mistakes that went into making something great (the Atlantic article author, Jerry Useem, did as Professor Duckworth suggested and tried to find video footage of people practicing, and wasn’t able to find much at all.  He said the closest he got was the discovery of an early Rolling Stones draft of “Start Me Up,” which apparently does not work at all well as a reggae tune). The attractiveness of the perseverance narrative, of course, cannot be underestimated for an American audience.  We might prioritize talent above all else, but the country’s story is built on the idea of the value of hard work and its ability to lift you out of whatever circumstances you might find yourself in.  It’s the old Protestant work ethic in new clothes.  The narrative isn’t always true, of course: there are plenty of people who find themselves in circumstances that hard work cannot get them out of, despite what conservative politicians might have us believe.  But I think the idea that they should *try anyway* is very American – perhaps this partly explains why Professor Duckworth’s book is ranked number 286 in all books on Amazom.com, but only number 764 on Amazon.co.uk.  Hardly a scientific study, of course, since Professor Duckworth is American and does a lot more publicity work here, but perhaps the difference in culture is one factor. Professor Steven Maier at the University of Colorado has done a lot of work on understanding how rats respond to stress.  He found that if he gave young rats electric shocks that they could switch off by turning a wheel, they grew up to be more adventurous than normal rats.  But young rats who had no control over the duration of their electric shocks grew up with what psychologists call “learned helplessness” – if they were shocked as adults, they behaved very timidly.  When I think about the cultural implications of this, I imagine American children in disadvantaged circumstances pushing against the sides of the box in which they find themselves, getting shocked over and over again, and learning not to push any more.  But being English myself, I imagine English children looking at the box in which they find themselves and thinking “yup, it’s a box.  I’m supposed to be in a box.”  And they don’t even try to touch the sides. So there are a number of ideas to explore here.  Professor Duckworth was a math teacher before she went back to graduate school; first she taught in a private school (although its website says it is not and has never been a “fancy private school” that is “chiefly interested in serving whoever wishes to enroll.” Later, she taught in the only public school in San Francisco that admits students on the basis of academic merit.  As an aside here, Professor Duckworth doesn’t mention that the school in New York was private and actually implies it was a pretty gritty public school when she says that most of her students “lived in the housing projects clustered between Avenues A and D” in Manhattan, which made me think that her students were from a disadvantaged background but then I found out that the tuition is listed on the school’s website as $20,500/year for incoming kindergarteners.  When she got to San Francisco, one of her students was in her ‘regular’ math class rather than ‘Advanced Placement’ math class but he turned in consistently perfect work, so she got him transferred to the AP class.  He didn’t always get As in the AP class, but he went to the teacher and asked for help when he needed it, and he ultimately ended up getting a PhD in mechanical engineering from UCLA – he quite literally became a rocket scientist.  This is just one example of how some of Professor Duckworth’s former students appeared to be using effort to overcome potential deficiencies in talent and effort.  Now isn’t that an attractive idea?  That just through persistent, dogged, hard work, students who are at some kind of disadvantage can overcome the shadow of their backgrounds?  Even though the public high school in San Francisco

“I don’t want to play with you.” “You’re not my friend.” “We’re playing families.  If you want to play, you have to be the dog.” Seems like everyone can remember a time when something like this happened to them as a child, and how much it hurt.  Children still say these things to each other – and we see how much it hurts them, too.  When researchers ask them, every child can remember a time when they were excluded – yet no child ever reports being the excluder! One of my listeners recommended that I read the book You Can’t Say You Can’t Play, in which the author (who is a teacher) proposes and then introduces a rule that you can’t say “you can’t play.”  A few researchers (including Professor Jamie Ostrov, with whom we’ll talk today) have since tested the approach: does it work?  If not, what should we do instead? Since most of these situations occur in preschool and school, teacher Caren co-interviews Professor Ostrov with me: we have some great insights for teachers as well as lots of information for parents on how to support both children and teachers in navigating these difficult situations.   Dr. Professor Jamie Ostrov's Book The development of relational aggression - Affiliate link   References Allen, S.S. (2014). Narratives of women who suffered social exclusion in elementary school. Unpublished Ph.D dissertation. Antioch University, Culver City, CA DeVooght, K., Daily, S., Darling-Churchill, K., Temkin, D., Novak, B.A., & VanderVen, K. (2015, August). Bullies in the block area: The early childhood origins of “mean” behavior. Child Trends. Retrieved from https://www.childtrends.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/2015-31BulliesBlockArea.pdf Haney, M., & Bissonnette, V. (2011). Teachers’ perceptions about the use of play to facilitate development and teach prosocial skills. Creative Education 2(1), 41-46. Helgeland, A., & Lund, I. (2016). Children’s voices on bullying in kindergarten. Early Childhood Education Journal 45(1), 133-141. Ostrov, J.M., Gentile, D.A., & Crick, N.R. (2006). Media exposure, aggression and prosocial behavior during early childhood: A longitudinal study. Social Development 15(4), 612-627. Ostrov, J.M, Godleski, S.A., Kamper-DeMarco, K.E., Blakely-McClure, S.J., & Celenza, L. (2015). Replication and extension of the early childhood friendship project: Effects on physical and relational bullying. School Psychology Review 44(4), 445-463. Ostrov, J.M., Murray-Close, D., Godleski, S.A., & Hart, E.J. (2013). Prospective associations between forms and functions of aggression and social and affective processes during early childhood. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 116(1), 19-36. Perry, K.J., & Ostrov, J.M. (2017). Testing a bifactor model of relational and physical aggression in early childhood. Journal of Psychopathology & Behavioral Assessment. Online first. doi 10.1007/s10862-017-9623-9 Swit, C. S., McMaugh, A. L., & Warburton, W. A. (2017). Teacher and parent perceptions of relational and physical aggression during early childhood. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 1-13. DOI: 10.1007/s10826-017-0861-y Werner, N. E., Eaton, A. D., Lyle, K., Tseng, H., & Holst, B. (2014). Maternal social coaching quality interrupts the development of relational aggression during early childhood.  Social Development 23, 470-486.  doi: 10.1111/sode.12048 Weyns, T., Verschueren, K., Leflot, G., Onghena, P., Wouters, S., & Colpin, H. (2017).  The role of teacher behavior in children’s relational aggression development: A five-wave longitudinal study.  Journal of School Psychology 64, 17-27.  doi: 10.1007/s10826-017-0861-y   Read Full Transcript Transcript Jen:  [00:39] Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We’ve done a couple of episodes in the past on social groups. There was one where we interviewed Dr. Yarrow Dunham on the topic of how social groups form and then another on how children develop prejudices. Today we’re going to talk about a book that was recommended to me by a fabulous listener, Jamie in Los Angeles, who sends me a long email every time she finishes listening to an episode to tell me what she thought of it and what kinds of issues and ideas that brought up for her. So the book that she recommended I read is by a teacher, Vivian Paley, and it’s called You Can’t Say You Can’t Play. It’s a really lovely little book. It’s not more than around 100 pages and it describes how Paley thinks about an ultimately implements a rule called you can’t say you can’t play, which is to say that child A can’t say that child B can’t play with whatever child a is doing. Jen:    [01:28] It seemed to me there that there’s a lot more at play here as it were than the simple making up of a role and so I found a professor to talk through these issues with us. Professor Jamie Ostrov is a developmental psychologist at the State University of New York at Buffalo, who is working to understand the development of both relational and physical aggression in children. As part of this work, he has conducted research on how media exposure impacts children’s aggression and that’s where I first met him, quote unquote. I cited some of his work in our episode on understanding the American Academy of Pediatrics’ new screen time guidelines, but media exposure is just one small part of his interest and so I’m really excited today to speak with him about his work more broadly and to understand how relational aggression develops in children and what we know and to do about it to reduce incidence. Welcome professor Ostroff. Dr. Ostrov:   [02:13] Hello. Jen:    [02:15] And so because so much of social exclusion is primarily something that occurs in group settings like preschool and kindergarten in school. We also have a teacher here to help us take the theory and make it really practical. So Caren is a teacher at a preschool in British Columbia that’s inspired by the Reggio Emilia approach to learning, which has a specific focus on what it means to be a friend and on social inclusion. So my hope is today that we’re going to give the teachers among us some really practical suggestions about handling social inclusion in their schools and that parents can get an understanding of what happens in schools and how they can support teachers and creating inclusive environments. Welcome Caren. Caren:  [02:52] Hello everyone. Jen:    [02:53] Alright, so let’s start with a little memory test for Professor Ostrov. Could you tell us a little bit about, for those of who haven’t read it, the book you can’t say you can’t play, so what’s the story about and how did you find it and what did you take out of it? Dr. Ostrov:   [03:07] Sure, so thanks for having me today. You know, the story is a… It’s an interesting story. It was recommended to me by one of our school partners by one of the directors of the childcare centers that we were doing research in and she saw a lot of parallels between what’s conveyed within the book, the overall message, the challenges within the book and some of our own work. And so for me, I definitely will, after reading this very short, very lovely book, I saw some clear connections to our work on social exclusion or what we call relational aggression. A key takeaway for me after reading this book about her struggles to implement this new golden rule. You Can’t Say You Can’t Play within her kindergarten classroom and talking to older children about some of their own peer rejection and pure exclusion experiences and the challenges that they envisioned in implementing this kind of new golden rule. Dr. Ostrov:  [03:59] A key takeaway for me was first, it’s too late to intervene in kindergarten, which in some ways reinforced my view that if we want to intervene, we should intervene when these behaviors are coming online developmentally, and we’ve known for a number of years now that really it starts back in preschool, so that was the first takeaway. The second takeaway was that if we are going to try to intervene even in the preschool environment, it was going to be challenging and it would be really challenging to implement a golden rule like this that you can’t say you can’t play. In part because Vivian Paley talks about the struggles of implementing this rule. The children didn’t like it. There were some real challenges in getting them to adhere to the overall rule and even using fairytale magical story. This character Magpie this bird that can talk to the characters. Even doing all these things in a very developmentally appropriate way didn’t seem to really convince the kids in the end and so without that except ability without the buy in from the kids, I really didn’t think that this program was going to be all that effective, although I was clearly intrigued and it certainly planted a seed that later in my career I would come back to and try to address with the development of our own program. Jen:  [05:11] Okay. And so you’ve mentioned a couple of things there. The first thing that I want to just touch on with Caren is I wonder if Caren, when you first start to see these kinds of behaviors appearing in children, because my job is just a little bit over three and as far as I can tell, she pretty much plays with anyone who walks up to her at this point, but I guess that must shift somewhere probably in the next year. How does that start to manifest itself from what you see in your preschool setting? Caren: [05:34] We find that now with our three year olds that are just coming in, it appears as though they’re, you know, doing more of the solo type play and just getting to know sort of how to be with other children and how to be in the same space and share toys and then later as the friendships form and the connections get stronger, that’s when we start to see more of the exclusion start to happen. Jen:    [05:55] Ah. So it’s more to, I have a real relationship with you and this I want to play with you and you alone and nobody else can play with you. Dr. Ostrov:     [06:04] Right. You know, a lot of sentences like, you know, we asked children like how can you be a friend with child A, but also Child B, and what does that look like? Jen:     [06:13] Okay. A limited amount of love to spread around. Okay. So Jamie, I wonder if we could just talk for a minute about physical and relational aggression and also we’ve used the term social exclusion and social inclusion. Do they have different meanings or can we use them interchangeably and can you just define what those are please? Dr. Ostrov:    [06:30] Sure. So first, I think it’s important to define what we mean by aggression. Aggression is the intent or children, individuals, adults, anybody who has the intent to hurt, to harm or to injure another person, and then that can manifest in different forms and so the typical forms that we study would be physical aggression and another would be what we call relational aggression. So physical aggression is the easiest to define. That’s using physical force as the means of harm and that’s the usual suspects of hitting, kicking, punching, pushing, pulling, taking things away from others. If you would ask somebody on the street what is aggression, they probably would say, oh, I know it’s hitting, kicking. The other form of aggression of what we call relational aggression is using the same overall definition of aggression, the intent to hurt, to harm or to injure another, but it manifests in a different way. Dr. Ostrov:   [07:18] It uses the relationship or the threat of the removal of the relationship as the means of harm. It looks a little differently at different points in development, but some of the prototypical examples would be threatening the removal of the relationship by saying, I won’t be your friend anymore. You can’t play with me. You can’t come to my birthday party. You’re not my friend. Right? You can’t come. My birthday party is a great example because you know, the very young child doesn’t know when their own birthday party is, let alone anyone else’s, so they use that all, all year round. But we can, we can also see, uh, the use of the silent treatment or malicious ignoring. We see evidence of spreading secrets, malicious rumors, gossip and lies about others. These are all part that’s part of the construct that we call relational aggression. So social exclusion is one component of this behavior, but you know, I have no problem with using that interchangeably with the term relational aggression. When we talk about inclusion, I consider that to be part of prosocial behavior or this kind of genuine desire to help others to share with them or to include them in games or activities. Jen:    [08:25] Okay. Wow. It sounds just delightful. A number of ways you can exclude somebody that you don’t want to play with, so I’m wondering how this shifts over the course of a child’s life. Do children start off being more physically aggressive and then maybe as they develop more sophisticated mental and verbal skills, they shift to relational aggression and is the process the same for boys and girls? Dr. Ostrov:   [08:49] It’s a great question. So we know that developmentally physical aggression is actually quite common during the early years, but it typically drops off. There’s a sharp decline in physical aggression such that by the time we approach kindergarten and formal school, for most children, physically aggressive behavior is really relatively low and that in part is related to increases in their social cognitive capacity, their emotion regulation capacity, but also sanctions. Sanctions are higher and children appreciate that, I mean certainly as they get to formal schooling, they understand that there are serious costs to engaging in physically aggressive behavior. Relationally aggressive behavior, we’ve seen the emergence of that to occur around 30 months so that two and a half year old can start engaging in some exclusionary behavior, but it really seems to be picking up between that three to four year old period that we were talking about before and we don’t have a whole lot of longitudinal studies studies that have followed children across long periods of time to really understand the trajectory that changes in behavior or across time, but what we do know is that it certainly is quite common to engage in relational aggressive behavior during this preschool period, the three to five year old period and for many children to continue to engage in these behaviors and in some cases to shift their behavior from physically aggressive behavior to this arguably more covert form of aggression, relationally aggressive behavior as we transition into school and when we move into later periods in development, when we move into the middle childhood years and into adolescence, it’s much more common to see relationally aggressive behavior is occurring. Dr. Ostrov: [10:29] It’s interesting that as far as gender goes, the typical form of aggression, the modal form of aggression for girls is relationally aggressive behavior and that probably has something to do with their social goals which tend to be more about fostering dyadic relationships and intimacy with others, so the best way to harm a girl is to destroy a relationship that you have with her or she has with others. Whereas for boys there modal form, the more common form of aggression is physical aggression and that might be linked to their social goal of social dominance, of instrumentality, of being on top and somebody else on the bottom, and so the best way to knock somebody down is literally to knock them down from that power position. And this does change a bit throughout development such that boys and girls in early childhood, for the most part are operating within a gender segregated world where boys are playing primarily with boys and girls with girls and they’re being...