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

This episode is on a topic that I find fascinating – the cultural issues that underlie our parenting. I actually think this issue is so important that I covered it in episode 1 of the podcast, which was really the first episode after the introductory one where I gave some information on what the show was going to be about. But recently I read a book called Generation Me (Affiliate link) by Jean Twenge, a Professor of Psychology at San Diego State University, which discusses some of the cultural contexts that have led to the generation of people born since 1970 to develop a certain set of characteristics that sometimes seem very strange to those who were born before us, and may be leading us to raise children who are just a bit too individualistic. In this episode I discuss some of those characteristics and what implications they have for the way we parent our own children, and offer some thoughts on how we can shift that our approach if we decide we want to.   Other episodes referenced in this show: 001: The influence of culture on parenting 020: How do I get my child to do what I want them to do?   References Abeles, V., & Rubenstein, G. (2015). Beyond measure: Rescuing an overscheduled, overtested, underestimated generation. New York: Simon & Schuster. Associated Press (2005, July 22nd). White House footwear fans flip-flop kerfuffle. US News on NBCNews.com. Retrieved from: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/8670164/ns/us_news/t/white-house-footwear-fans-flip-flop-kerfuffle/#.WO_bH_nyvIU Gardner, H. (1991). The unschooled mind: How children think and how schools should teach. New York: Basic Books. Lansbury, J. (2012, May 3). Setting limits with toddlers: The choices they can’t make. Retrieved from: http://www.janetlansbury.com/2012/05/setting-limits-with-toddlers-the-choices-they-cant-make/ McCabe, D.L., Trevino, L.K., & Butterfield, K.D. (2012). Cheating in college: Why students do it and what educators can do about it. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Remley, A. (1998, October). From obedience to independence. Psychology Today, 56-59. Thomas, E. (1997). Social Insecurity. Newsweek. Retrieved from: http://www.newsweek.com/social-insecurity-171878 Trinkaus, J. (1988). Compliance with a school zone speed limit: Another look. Perceptual and motor skills 87, 673-674. Trinkaus, J. (1997). Stop sign compliance: A final look. Perceptual and Motor Skills 85, 217-218. Trinkaus, J. (2006). Honesty when lighting votive candles in church: Another look. Psychological Reports 99, 494-495. Twenge, J. (2014). Generation Me: While today’s young Americans are more confident, assertive, and entitled – and more miserable than ever before. New York, NY: Atria. (Affiliate link)   Read Full Transcript Transcript Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  We have an episode coming up today on a topic that I find fascinating – the cultural issues that underlie our parenting.  I actually think this issue is so important that I covered it in episode 2 of the podcast, which was really the first episode after the introductory one where I gave some information on what the show was going to be about.  But recently I read a book called Generation Me by Jean Twenge, a Professor of Psychology at San Diego State University, which discusses some of the cultural contexts that have led to the generation of people born since 1970 to develop a certain set of characteristics that sometimes seem very strange to those who were born before us.  Today I want to discuss some of those characteristics and what implications they have for the way we parent our own children. I should be clear that as Dr. Twenge defines it I am a member of Generation Me – she says Generation Me starts in 1970 and I was born in 1979.  I do think that some of the characteristics she defines as being integral to Generation Me apply to me, but I also think that these have become stronger over time and so are more pronounced in people who are younger than me.  I should also remind you (in case it isn’t obvious from my rather strange accent) that I was raised in England and not the U.S..  I think that the Generation Me characteristics apply to some extent to people who weren’t raised in the U.S. but they are based on surveys of Americans so Americans are definitely at the core of the Generation Me characteristics.  Dr. Twenge doesn’t discuss non-American countries but we can probably assume that English-speaking, Westernized countries exhibit these characteristics to a slightly lesser degree, with “non-Westernized” cultures perhaps looking a bit different, depending on the extent to which American culture has permeated them. I also want to use this episode to poke a little bit at some of the decisions I’ve made as a parent, and think through whether the ways in which I parent are in line with the goals I have for parenting, because reading the book made me realize that I need to be a little more conscious in this regard. So what really characterizes Generation Me? Firstly, members of Generation Me feel as though they don’t need anyone else’s approval.  People used to wear uncomfortable suits to many workplaces simply because it was expected – and because a person aimed to ‘fit in’ with the expected social norms.  People dress up to make a good impression on others and to seek approval, but members of Generation Me don’t feel required to seek anyone’s approval – about half of the members of the Northwestern University women’s lacrosse team wore flip flops with their quote demure skirts and dresses for their 2005 meeting with President George W. Bush at the White House.  One of the student’s mothers, though, was quoted by the Associated Press as saying “Don’t even ask me about the flip-flops – it mortified me” – a clear example of the difference in standards across generations. Adults who wanted to get divorced 50 years ago would have worried about what others would think of their decision and they would have been ostracized, and in some cultures today that is still the case – but today a couple will divorce if they think it’s the right thing to do – and it’s not that they do this in the face of society’s disapproval; it’s that society in general doesn’t really have an opinion on the issue. One aspect of this lack of concern for societal approval that concerns me is the lack of manners I notice in children and young people, and I know I sound like an old fuddy duddy when I say this, but it really does get to me.  And I’m not just talking about saying “please” when you ask someone to do something or “thank you” when someone holds the door open for you, but a general concern for other people’s comfort and even safety.  Perhaps this is most obvious when we’re driving; it isn’t just in New York any more that the person behind you will honk if you wait more than a second after a red light changes to green, and speeding up the inside lane and then cutting off someone passing a truck is now commonplace on the freeways where I live. One researcher by the name of John Trinkaus found that 92% of cars observed going through a school zone in 1998 were speeding, with the highest percentage speeding in the morning when children were likely to be walking to school than in the evening, when they had probably gone home for the day.  89% of drivers sped through the same school zone when it was surveyed three years earlier, so I wonder if that number is now up to 100% given that two decades have passed since it rose to 92%.  The same researcher found that in 1979, 37% of cars made a full stop and 34% made a rolling stop at a certain stop sign in a suburb in a New York suburb, but by 1996 only 1% of cars came to a full stop, 2% made a rolling stop, and the other 97% didn’t stop at all.  Now when I first read these statistics in Dr. Twenge’s book I felt kind of indignant and that not stopping at an intersection was pretty irresponsible.  But when I went and found the paper for myself I saw that the stop signs had been put up to discourage the flow of through traffic on local streets the one that was surveyed wasn’t at an intersection at all (and Dr. Twenge never tells us it is, but she doesn’t tell us it isn’t either) – so they’re the kind where if you look all around but don’t stop, the chances of getting into an accident are essentially nil.  And then I realized that those are exactly the kinds of stop signs I routinely roll through myself after first slowing down and making sure I’m not going to hit anyone or anything. We cheat more often now as well, even when you might least expect it – in 1998, about 90% of church-goers who lit a votive candle paid for it; by 2005, only 26% paid, so 74% of people who are religious feel it’s fine to cheat the church!  Cheating is also on the rise in high schools and colleges, and students in the late 1990s just seemed resigned to it when they were surveyed; three times as many high school students in 1969 said they would report someone they saw cheating compared to 1989. This was somewhat recent data when Dr. Twenge’s book was written in 2006 and data published since then indicates that the rate of cheating may have fallen more recently, although that’s probably due to an increase in the use of tools to detect cheating rather than a change in the overall view of whether cheating is right or wrong.  And it’s not like people stop cheating as soon as they get out of college; Dr. Twenge cites the Enron scandal as a prime example of people going to work for a corporation that cheated other people, but even more recent is the effort of staff at Wells Fargo bank to boost their sales numbers by opening accounts in people’s names that they didn’t ask for.  Some people at Wells Fargo knew it was wrong and spoke up or tried to speak up, but plenty of others went along with it or encouraged it, apparently including the CEO.  And even where no legal wrongdoing occurs, corporations now essentially seem to see employees as a disposable resource rather than as a person worthy of respect.  I’m always shocked when I hear examples of companies treating employees like crap because, really, companies are made up of employees – none of whom likes to be treated like crap, and yet different standards seem to apply as long as it isn’t *us* that is getting treated like crap.  And I don’t fully excuse myself here – my day job is to work for a large consulting company trying to reduce our client’s environmental impacts, but there are branches of my company that outsource American’s jobs to India and make the American employees train the new Indian ones as a condition of getting severance pay.  I find the indignity of that absolutely astounding, and yet I still work for the company because it helps to pay my mortgage and take care of my family and I believe I do good work myself.   And it’s not just large-scale cheating that’s on the rise, it’s the little everyday things that niggle me – when you travel reasonably often for work it doesn’t take long to see this in action.  People cut in front of you in line to get onto a plane earlier when the plane won’t leave until everyone is on it.  And in the crush to get off the plane at the other end people will squeeze by someone struggling to get a bag out of the overhead bin in the rush to get off ten seconds earlier instead of helping the person to get the bag down.  People wander, shouting, down hotel hallways in the middle of the night and slam doors as if nobody else on the floor was sleeping. I’ve actually been thinking about this issue for a while now, and wondering what kind of decisions we make as parents lead children to grow up with this sense of their own importance.  As I searched around for answers I would keep coming back to Japan, because I have the impression that Japan has a very much more interdependent culture than the U.S. at the moment, where people do still have manners and more value is placed on the ability of a society to succeed than of any one individual to succeed more than everyone else.  When I met a Japanese parent at a gathering recently she said that my impression was pretty accurate, but that Japanese society achieves this interdependence by not allowing anyone to stick out and be different, and that if anyone does stick out they are hammered down until they don’t stick out any more.  And as I was reading Generation: Me, I also realized that it’s not just Japan who has this interdependent society – the U.S. had it as well until about the 1950s, when things started to shift, although perhaps to a slightly lesser extent than Japan had it as succeeding on one’s own does seem to have been a valued trait here since the Protestants came over from jolly old England, at least.   Second on Dr. Twenge’s list of things contributing to the characteristics of Generation: Me is that children today are told they can do their own thing, whatever that thing is, and not care what everyone else does.  In a psychology experiment that was first conducted in 1951, a psychologist called Solomon Asch asked seven people sitting in a room to identify which of three lines of different lengths drawn on a chalk board are the same length as a fourth line.  One of the first three possibilities is the same length as the fourth line; the other two are clearly not the same.  The six people who go first are called confederates, which means they’re in on the experiment, and they all say the much longer line is the same length as that fourth line.  What would you do if you were the seventh person to answer the question?  In 1951, 74% of people sitting in that seventh seat would go along with the group and say that the long line is the same length as the fourth line on at least one trial, and 28% of people would go along with the group on the majority of trials – the researchers explained that the social nature of humans and our need to conform overrode our need to be individual, or even just to be right.  When researchers replicated the experiment in 1980, the results were completely different, and far fewer people were willing to conform to what the group thought.  Solomon Asch, who designed the experiment, thought that the willingness to go along with others was an immutable indicator of our nature as a social species, but it turned out that the need to go along with what other people thought was a child of its time – and today’s children have been taught that they don’t need to do this. And the third important characteristic of Generation Me-ers is that children today are told they can be anything they want to be.  American children today are taught from birth that being different is good – that the obedience, loyalty to church, and good manners that were so important back in the 1920s are now essentially irrelevant, replaced by a much higher value placed on independence and being open-minded.  This individuality is celebrated from before they are even born, as we decorate expensive nurseries with decorations that spell out the child’s name in 12-inch tall letters.  Dr. Twenge cites a passage in the book Culture Shock USA, which is a non-satirical guidebook to American culture for foreigners, and I did look it up to check because I’ve seen satirical guidebooks to American culture before that are pretty funny.  So the non-satirical guide says “Often one sees an American engaged in a dialogue with a tiny child.  “Do you want to go home now?” says the parent. “No,” says an obviously tired, crying child. And so parent and child continue to sit discontentedly in a chilly park. “What is the matter with these people?” says the foreigner to himself, who can see the child is too young to make such decisions.” It’s just part of American culture, the book says: “The child is acquiring both a sense of responsibility for himself and a sense of his own importance.”  Dr. Twenge goes on to point out that we ask one-year-olds if they want milk or apple juice, and that as they get older we let them pick their clothes out in the morning and if the kid ends up wearing red polka dots with green and blue stripes then it’s OK because they are “expressing themselves” and learning to make their own choices. Now I have to say that this one hit home for me more than many of the observations in the book, because giving choices is something we have done from a very young age.  In fact, an article by Janet Lansbury – who is probably the most well-known advocate of the respectful approach to parenting that we practice has a blog post on setting limits for children which opens “Children need lots of opportunities to be autonomous and to have their choices respected.”  Now respect for my daughter is one of the founding principles of my parenting, and I’m not saying I’m going to give it up anytime soon.  But it’s not the first time that I’ve noticed that this respectful approach to parenting is very much rooted in the child’s individual growth and development and their rights as people.  And strangely enough, it isn’t even a modern American idea – it was brought to the U.S. by a Hungarian immigrant, Magda Gerber, who learned about it from the Hungarian pediatrician Emmi Pikler in the 1940s. Professor Duane Alwin at the University of Michigan believes there are a couple of key reasons for this shift toward greater individualism, including that parents see how complex the world is today and want their children to not just survive, but to succeed in it.  Every day we’re told in the newspapers of more jobs being outsourced, and the jobs that stay are the ones that require that a person can think for themselves.  Secondly, more parents today have a higher education, which – nominally, at least – encourages you to think for yourself so you go on to see that as a valued trait in your child.  A Psychology Today article that summarizes Dr. Alwin’s work describes a mother from Michigan who says “I’ve treated Alexis as if she had a mind of her own ever since she was a baby.  When she was six months old and sitting in her crib, I used to ask her what she wanted to do next, what she wanted to eat or to wear.  But now that she’s four, sometimes I really want her to mind me.  The other day I told her, “Alexis, you’re going to do this right now because I say so!” She looked up at me astounded – as if to say “What’s going on here?  You’re changing the rules on me!”.  Dr. Alwin himself said “For years, my wife and I have urged our kids to think for themselves.  Now, when we want them to do something, we have to appeal to their self-interest, their sense of fairness and logic.  I probably use the word “obey” once every six months.  But sometimes it’s frustrating when you want them to go along with you.” I already argued in episode 20 of the podcast, called “How do I get my child to do what I want them to do?” (which, I should note, I titled a bit facetiously), I don’t believe it’s possible to have a child who can both think for themselves AND who will be obedient 100% of the time.  But what I want to know is whether it is...

This is the second of a short series of episodes on issues related to divorce.  The first was our “All Joy and No Fun” episode, where we talked about how parenting today can be the most joyful thing in our lives – even if it isn’t always a whole lot of fun from moment to moment. The series was inspired by a listener who sent me an email saying: “I was divorced when my husband was 2 ½ years old.  He is now 5 years old and has a very hard time expressing his feelings.  I have an intuitive “gut” feeling that it has to do with the fact that he went from being with me every day (I was a stay at home mom) to suddenly spending 7-10 days away from me and with his father, and also away from me as I set up a career.  Do you know of any research on this?”   Well, I didn’t, but when I started looking around I realized there’s actually so much of it that it makes sense to break it down into two episodes which is what we’re going to do.  So today’s episode focuses very much on the factors leading to divorce and the impact of divorce itself on children, and the final episode in the series will look at how what happens after divorce – things like single parenting, ongoing contact with both parents, ongoing arguments between parents, and remarriages and stepparents impact children.     Other podcast episodes mentioned in this show: 020: How do I get my child to do what I want them to do.   References Amato, P.R. (1999). Children of divorced parents as young adults. In E.M. Hetherington (Ed.)., Coping with divorce, single parenting, and remarriage: A risk and resiliency perspective (p.147-163). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Brody, G.H., & Forehand, R. (1988). Multiple determinants of parenting: Research findings and implications for the divorce process.  In E.M. Hetherington & J.D. Arasteh (Eds.). Impact of divorce, single parenting, and stepparenting on children. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Deater-Deckard, K., & Dunn, J. (1999). Multiple risks and adjustment in young children growing up in different family settings: A British community study of stepparent, single mother, and nondivorced families. In E.M. Hetherington (Ed.)., Coping with divorce, single parenting, and remarriage: A risk and resiliency perspective (p.47-64). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Emery, R.E. (1988). Mediation and the settlement of divorce disputes. In E.M. Hetherington & J.D. Arasteh (Eds.). Impact of divorce, single parenting, and stepparenting on children. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Forehand, R., Long, N., & Brody, G. (1988). Divorce and marital conflict: Relationship to adolescent competence and adjustment in early adolescence. In E.M. Hetherington & J.D. Arasteh (Eds.). Impact of divorce, single parenting, and stepparenting on children. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Hetherington, E.M. (1989). Coping with family transitions: Winners, losers, and survivors. Child Development 60(1), 1-14. Hetherington, E.M. (1999). Should we stay together for the sake of the children? In E.M. Hetherington (Ed.)., Coping with divorce, single parenting, and remarriage: A risk and resiliency perspective (p.93-116). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Grall, T.S. (2009). Custodial mothers and fathers and their child support: 2007. U.S. Census Bureau. Retrieved from: https://www.census.gov/prod/2009pubs/p60-237.pdf Miller, C.C. (2014, December 2). The divorce surge is over, but the myth lives on. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/upshot/the-divorce-surge-is-over-but-the-myth-lives-on.html?_r=0 Twaite, J.A., Silitsky, D., & Luchow, A.K. (1988). Children of divorce: Adjustment, parental conflict, custody, remarriage, and recommendations for clinicians. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Wolfinger, N.H. (2005). Understanding the divorce cycle: The children of divorce in their own marriages. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.   Read Full Transcript Transcript Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  Today’s episode is another that comes to us via a question from a listener, and it’s the second in our three-part series on how the adult relationships in a family affect the child.  We kicked off a couple of weeks back with an episode called All Joy and No Fun, which is about the book of the same name and discusses how parenting today can seem very joyful when you look at it as a whole thing, but if you ask yourself during an average moment with your toddler or preschooler whether you’re having fun, I think many parents might say ‘no.’  And I don’t mean to suggest that having all joy and no fun is a leading cause of divorce but it could certainly be a contributing factor, and that’s our topic for today.  The listener who sent me an email said “I was divorced when my husband was 2 ½ years old.  He is now 5 years old and has a very hard time expressing his feelings.  I have an intuitive “gut” feeling that it has to do with the fact that he went from being with me every day (I was a stay at home mom) to suddenly spending 7-10 days away from me and with his father, and also away from me as I set up a career.  Do you know of any research on this?”  Well, I didn’t, but when I started looking around I realized there’s actually so much of it that it makes sense to break it down into two episodes which is what we’re going to do.  So today’s episode focuses very much on the factors leading to divorce and the impact of divorce itself on children, and the final episode in the series will look at how what happens after divorce – things like single parenting, ongoing contact with both parents, ongoing arguments between parents, and remarriages and stepparents impact children. I also want to say before we get going that I have no position on whether or not you should get divorced if you haven’t already done it, or whether your divorce was a good thing or not (if you have); I’m not arguing for divorce to be outlawed in the interests of our children or that we should all try it once just to see what it’s like.  I have nothing against divorce – I’ve done it myself, although not with children involved – but I’m also not going to try to persuade you to stay in a marriage.  My goal here is simply to help you to understand the impacts of divorce on a child’s development so you can better support that child through the changes that might one day happen or have already happened in your family. Throughout this episode we’re going to examine a number of factors at play when we talk about divorce and the impact that these have on a child’s development, but the one idea I want to leave you with (and so I’m going to tell you about it now so you can keep it in mind as you’re listening) is that the research paints a picture of a series of risk factors that exist in the child, the family, and the larger society that make a particular child more or less vulnerable to the kinds of disruption that occur through divorce.  These risk factors interact in ways that aren’t always expected; we might see some children with a lot of risk factors who sail through a divorce and adjust relatively well afterward.  And there are others whom we might expect to do fairly well who fall apart after a divorce and have a hard time recovering.  But the one that seems to be more important than all the others is the quality of the parent’s – and particularly the custodial parent’s relationship with the child, and whether that is warm and loving while setting and maintaining appropriate limits. So let’s dive in.  California enacted the first modern no-fault divorce law in 1970 which, for those who don’t live in the U.S. is the idea that you can get divorce just because you want to, without having to prove that one party was at fault – by committing adultery or abuse or something like that.  Popular wisdom says that the divorce rate has skyrocketed since then, although actually it has slowed down over the last twenty years.  There’s a nice graphic on it in a New York Times article that I’ll link to in the references which shows that about 70% of marriages that began in the 1990s reached their 15th anniversary (excluding those in which a spouse died), up from about 65% of those that began in the 1970s and 1980s, and those who married in the 2000s are so far divorcing at even lower rates.  The Times cites later marriages, birth control, and the rise of so-called “love marriages” as some important factors in the drop in the divorce rate.  In some states (including Louisiana, Arizona, and Arkansas) couples can *choose* to have a “covenant marriage,” which can only be divorced under fault-based circumstances, although only about 2% of couples in Louisiana opt for it.  Nevertheless, politicians and family activists continue to advocate for the modification or repeal of no-fault laws, and the rhetoric around this tends to focus on how divorce affects children, although it tends to take a simplistic view along the lines of “divorce leads to single parenting, and single parenting leads to an increased juvenile crime rate and costs taxpayers a lot of money in the form of welfare subsidies. The breakdown of the family is a result of no-fault divorce laws, which must be repealed.”  We’re going to take a bit more of a nuanced view today and examine what really are the impacts of divorce on a child’s development, as best as science can help us to understand them at the moment.  What is fairly well understood is that the children of divorced parents have, on average, more behavioral and emotional problems than children in intact families – but the reasons for this are quite complicated. The first thing we’re going to look at is the idea that divorce is not a single event in time, with the child being fine before and falling apart afterward; people tend to divorce because of longstanding problems that may have been simmering (or boiling) for months or years; there may have been one or more separations within the marriage, and even after the legal divorce has occurred there are still ongoing negotiations and transitions.  It is also possible that “difficult” children can put stress on a marriage and may contribute to parental conflict that eventually precipitates parental separation, but it’s very hard for researchers to untangle these factors and say how much of the negative behavior they see in the child after the divorce might have been caused by the divorce itself, and how much preceded it. Many researchers believe that the interparental conflict that precedes the divorce (and, in many cases, follows it as well) is a very important variable related to the child’s adjustment to the divorce – in fact, it might be a more important factor than the divorce itself in regard to child behavior problems, particularly aggression.  Some studies suggest that the frequent expression of parental conflict appears to be more strongly associated with childhood aggression than the absence of the father.  This becomes especially problematic when the divorce itself becomes a drawn-out conflictual process, particularly where one parent doesn’t want to disengage from the relationship and sees an ongoing conflictual relationship with the spouse as preferable to a complete disengagement.   What looks on the surface looks like a custody dispute may actually represent the efforts of one or both of the spouses and remorse about the dissolution of the marriage, and the custody dispute becomes the vehicle that one partner uses to serve as an avenue that one partner uses to remain in contact with the other.  The extent to which one member of the couple is unable to disengage from the relationship is associated with increased problems in their post-divorce adjustment, particularly depression. Contrary to popular belief, parental conflict doesn’t always decrease following divorce and may actually increase.  One study found that 66% of the exchanges between ex-spouses two months after a divorce were conflictual, mostly related to finances, visitation, childrearing, and intimate relations with others.  But many couples do manage to have a nonconflictual relationship after the divorce and several studies have found that children from relationships where conflict is avoided or at least quickly resolved have fewer problems than children from high-conflict divorced families.  Other studies have found that it isn’t necessarily the presence or absence of conflict per se that it’s important, it’s whether or not that conflict occurs in the presence of the child that is associated with the most detrimental effects on children.  So the take-home message here is fairly simple – try to avoid or quickly resolve conflicts with your spouse, and at the very least, don’t fight in front of your child. The second major factor is the adverse impact that divorce tends to have on family finances, and particularly those of the mother.  The U.S. Census bureau actually puts out some nice statistics on this issue, although unfortunately the most recent ones available are from 2007, and were published in 2009.  83% of mothers receive custody of their children in divorces, proportions that were statistically unchanged since the government last published data in 1994.  Just over three quarters of custodial parents who were due support received at least some payments in 2007; 47% got the full amount and an additional 30% received some support.  Child support represented almost half of the average income for custodial parents below poverty who received full support.  One quarter of all custodial parents had incomes below poverty, while 18.2% of those who received some child support payments were below poverty; the overall poverty rate for the total population in 2007 was 12.5%.  The poverty rate of custodial mothers actually fell from 36.8% in 1993 to 27% in 2007, which is something to be thankful for, although it is still more than double the poverty rate for custodial fathers, at 12.9%.  Custodial parents who are under age 30, Black, or never married tended to have higher poverty rates (of 35%) than older, non-Black, formerly married people.  Custodial parents with full-time, year-round employment had a poverty rate of 8.1% while custodial parents who didn’t work or were participants in public assistance programs had poverty rates of 57% in 2007.  Even among parents who are doing relatively well financially when they’re together, the expense of maintaining two households virtually guarantees some decrease in the family’s standard of living. The reason all this economic information is important is because socioeconomic status is a key indicator of post-divorce adjustment.  Low income has been shown to predict anxiety and depression among preschoolers from both divorced and intact families.  Other researchers have shown that it’s the change in socioeconomic status after a divorce that’s very important.  Girls seemed to fare especially poor psychological adjustment when the income of the custodial mother was much less than the non-custodial father, whether that resulted from a drop in the mother’s income or an increase in the father’s. And why is socioeconomic status linked to poor adjustment outcomes?  Well, there are a variety of reasons.  Parents who have more money are able to offer their children more privileges than parents with more meager family incomes, which provides children with the opportunities to achieve social competency and personal goals.  It’s also possible that the drop in income might necessitate a move to a new neighborhood, perhaps with more affordable housing and schools of lower quality.  Fitting in at a new school can be hard under the best of circumstances, but fitting in at a new school you’re your whole life is being turned upside down makes everything more difficult.  Parental divorce, parental income, and school quality have all been shown to affect eighth-grader’s achievement test scores.  Doing poorly in a new school, particularly a new school in a not-so-good neighborhood that might not have much in the way of support sets a child up for potential missed educational opportunities, which can even become a factor a child’s deviant behavior, timely high school graduation, premarital fertility, and possibly the child’s own early marriage and possible following divorce. Socioeconomic status also impacts the mother’s psychological adjustment, which is a key predictor of the child’s psychological adjustment.  In other words, if the loss in the mother’s household income causes the mother to feel depressed, her ability to provide effective, authoritative parenting may be compromised which can lead to poor adjustment outcomes for the child. Regarding which gendered child is more severely impacted by divorce – a variety of studies have shown that boys are more severely impacted by divorce than girls.  Another variety of studies have shown that girls are more severely impacted by divorce than boys, and a third set shows no gender differences in children’s adjustment to divorce.  The one thing that does seem fairly clear in all of this is that you can design a study that will show that either boys or girls or neither are most severely impacted by divorce.  It is possible that boys more often respond with externalized responses (like aggression, school behavior problems, and stealing), and girls may respond by demonstrating anxiety and withdrawal – which may not even be noticed by teachers and parents but may have more serious implications for long-term adjustment than the externalizing behavior problems exhibited by boys. The age of the child at the time of the divorce may also be an important factor, and many studies have been done on this, with mixed results from which we can still draw some conclusions.  Overall, the research suggests that divorce has a particularly negative impact on very young children, and that the impact is less if the child is a teenager when the divorce occurs.  Children whose parents divorce in the preschool years will be acutely aware of the departure of one parent, and will fear the possibility of abandonment by the other parent which may be manifested in extreme anxiety when the child is temporarily separated from the custodial parent.  The child may become very clingy and unwilling to go to daycare or preschool when they were previously happy to go.  They may also see bedtime as a separation, and may experience terrifying nightmares.  They may experience disruptions in their normal ability to resolve inner conflicts through play and fantasy, or may even stop playing altogether.  They might be restless, noisy, and irritable. Very young children might experience a loss of recently acquired motor skills, and because slightly older children can’t fully understand the...

Today’s episode is about a book I read way before I started the podcast, called All Joy and No Fun (Affiliate link) by Jennifer Senior. I actually got a question from a listener recently asking me whether there’s any research on whether and how her divorce might have impacted her son’s development. It turns out that there is, and quite a lot – so I decided to make a series out of it. We’ll have one episode on how divorce impacts children, and a second on single parenting and step families, and we’ll open the whole lot up with this one on All Joy and No Fun, which is basically about the idea that if you ask a parent what is their greatest joy they will invariably say “my kids,” but if you ask them moment-by-moment if they’re having fun with their children then unfortunately the answer is pretty often “no.” I know that a lot of factors can lead to divorce but surely “all joy and no fun” is among them, so it sort of seemed like it fit with the other two topics. Since I first read the book several months ago I’ve had a chance to think about it a bit, so I’ll start as usual with the research and will end with some ideas on how we can change our approach so we can have “some joy and some fun too.”   References Campos B., Graesch, A.P., Repetti, R., Bradbury, T., & Ochs, E. (2009). Opportunity for interaction? A naturalistic observation study of dual-earner families after work and school. Journal of Family Psychology 23(6), 798-807. DOI: 10.1037/a0015824 Cherry, K. (2016). What is flow? Retrieved from: https://www.verywell.com/what-is-flow-2794768 Cowan, C.P. & Cowan, P.A. (1995). Interventions to ease the transition to parenthood: Why they are needed and what they can do. Family Relations: Journal of Applied Family & Child Studies 44, 412-423. Csikszentmihalyi, M., Abuhamdeh, S., & Nakamura, J. (2005). Flow. In A. Elliot (Ed.), A Handbook of Competence and Motivation. (pp. 598-698). New York: The Guilford Press. Doss, B.D., Rhoades, G.K., Stanley, S.M., & Markman, H.J. (2009). The effect of the transition to parenthood on relationship quality: An 8-year prospective study. Journal of Personality and Social Psychiatry 96(3), 601-619. DOI: 10.1037/a0013969 LeMasters, E.E. (1957). Parenthood as crisis. Marriage and Family Living 19(4), 352-355. Mitchell, T.R., Thompson, L. .Peterson, E., & Cronk, R. (1997). Temporal adjustments in the evaluation of events: The “Rosy View.”  Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 33(4), 421-428. Nakamura, J., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2001). Dlow theory and research. In C.R. Snyder, E. Wright, & S.J. Lopez (Eds.), Handbook of Positive Psychology. (pp. 195-206). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rossi, A.S. (1968). Transition to parenthood. Journal of Marriage and Family 30(1), 26-39. Senior, J. (2014). All joy and no fun: The paradox of modern parenthood. New York: HarperCollins. (Affiliate link)   Read Full Transcript Transcript Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. Before we get going today, I’d like to ask you for a favor.  I’ve been doing some reading about goal setting lately and I’ve read that if you set a goal you should both tell other people about it and ask for help in achieving it, so I’d like to do that today.  I’ve set a goal for myself to double the number of subscribers I have to this podcast – subscribing doesn’t cost anything at all; it just means that new episodes show up in your podcast feed when they’re released on a weekly basis, so you don’t have to remember to go and look for them.  Weekly podcasts on science-based parenting advice delivered straight to your feed?  What could be better?  The trick here is that if you subscribe through iTunes, I’m afraid I can’t count that as meeting my goal – iTunes never actually tells podcasters that a person has subscribed or how many subscribers I might have in iTunes at any given time.  Let’s just say it’s yet another way that iTunes doesn’t help podcasters out.  So to count toward my goal, new subscribers have to go to my website at YourParentingMojo.com, enter your email address in the box at the top, and hit ‘subscribe’ – you actually get a gift for doing it that way too, which is a package of seven relationship-based strategies to support your child’s development – and maybe make life a bit easier for you.  So if you haven’t yet subscribed to the show on my website I’d be grateful if you wouldn’t mind doing that, and if you have already subscribed then would you consider telling a friend (or perhaps many friends) about the show?  I’ll let you know when I reach my goal – thanks so much for your support! Now on to today’s episode, which is about a book I read way before I started the podcast, called All Joy and No Fun by Jennifer Senior.  I actually got a question from a listener recently asking me whether there’s any research on whether and how her divorce might have impacted her son’s development.  It turns out that there is, and quite a lot – so I decided to make a mini-series out of it with one episode on how divorce impacts children, and a second on single parenting and step families, and we’ll open the whole lot up with this one on All Joy and No Fun, which is basically about the idea that if you ask a parent what is their greatest joy they will pretty much invariably say “my kids,” but if you ask them moment-by-moment if they’re having fun with their children then unfortunately the answer is pretty often “no.”  I know that a lot of factors can lead to divorce but surely “all joy and no fun” is among them, so I’m going to lump these three together in a sort of mini-series.  Since I first read the book several months ago I’ve had a chance to think about it a bit, so I’ll start as usual with the research and will end with some thoughts on how we can change this idea to “some joy and some fun too.”  And because I think I’m an especially interesting case study for this phenomenon, I’m going to illustrate today’s episode with some personal experience.  Because, why not? Before we get going I should pause and say that if you are not a family that looks like a mother and a father with children then I’m sorry, but there is not a ton of research on your kinds of families which does suck.  I imagine it’s possible that one of you might work longer hours than the other and take on the more “father-ish” role and the other works shorter or no hours and spends more time with the kids that looks like a more “mother-ish” role.  If so, there will still be plenty here for you.  And even if not (and if you really do split everything evenly then you should send me an email and you can be a guest on the show), if you’ve ever found yourself wishing there was as much fun as joy in your life then there will still be something for you to learn. A sociologist named Alice Rossi was one of the first people to study the effect of parenting on the parents, rather than just on the child.  She describes four factors that inhibit our abilities as parents: firstly that preparation for the role of parent is virtually non-existent, in large part because our educational system provides for children’s cognitive development, but not for emotional development or the subjects most relevant to successful family life, which Rossi says are “sex, home maintenance, child care, interpersonal competence, and empathy.”  I’d say this was doubly so for me because I never really liked children that much, so while I had few opportunities to engage with children as a teen and young adult I actually went out of my way to avoid those opportunities I did find simply because I wasn’t interested – and anyway, babies cried whenever I held them. Secondly there is limited learning available during pregnancy – I was among the lucky ones here in the U.S. to have health insurance that provided a couple of prenatal classes, so I had actually changed a diaper on a doll before my daughter’s birth, even if not on a real baby.  I spent a great deal of time reading about pregnancy and labor and delivery and was determined to have a natural birth for two reasons – firstly because I was afraid I would struggle to bond with the baby and secondly because I wanted to do a 10-day backpacking trip around Mont Blanc a few weeks after the delivery, which would have been impossible if I’d had a C-section.  So let’s just say that I was highly motivated to avoid that recovery from surgery, but that means I spent virtually no time trying to think through what it’s like to be a parent.  I figured I had 18 years to work on that part, although I will say that I don’t have too many regrets in parenting so far, but one of the few I do have is that I didn’t find the idea of respectful parenting until my daughter was about four months old, and I now look back on those first few months with a bit of sadness that I wasn’t able to begin our relationship in a way that really respected her needs rather than just assuming that no crying = good, so do whatever you can to stop the crying. The third of Rossi’s four factor is the abruptness of the transition to parenthood – there simply is no internship for parenting as there would have been in our society in centuries past, or that still exists in other societies today where young adults see others in their families with young babies and can ‘practice’ their own skills in advance, and today more than ever our lives totally and permanently shift when we have our first child, and I would argue are irrevocably changed once we have two.  My husband and I had a pretty nice life before we had our daughter – we rode bikes on mountains or on the road most weekends during the summer and skied 15-25 days over the winter, and I hiked a lot, and I did yoga classes pretty much whenever I felt like it.  Life was busy and full and pretty fun.  In fact, even though it was my husband who wanted children whenever I would ask him “are you ready yet?” he would say “let’s just get through bike season first” and then at the end of bike season he’d say “let’s just do one more ski season first,” so finally I said “if you keep saying that, there’s never going to be a baby.”  To which he responded “well then I’m ready now” – famous last words, as it turned out.  With one child we are still able to do some of these things; one of us can cover while the other goes out for a road ride, although we haven’t mountain biked in months.  I’ve been able to do a lot of hiking with our daughter on my back, although now we’re at the unfortunate age where she is too heavy to carry and also won’t walk in a straight line.  But if we had two children as I know many of you do, so I’m probably preaching to the choir – the chances of you being able to engage regularly in things you used to find interesting and enjoyable are pretty slim. Fourthly, there is a lack of guidelines to successful parenthood, by which Rossi means that it isn’t too hard to figure out what are nutritional and clothing and medical needs and follow the general advice that a child needs loving physical contact and emotional support, but what else is needed to help a child develop into a successful adult?  Surely there must be something?  Well it turns out that there are just one or two things, which is a major reason I started this podcast in the first place, to fill that gap between all the books about how to support an infant’s growth and development, and the changing skillset a parent needs once the child becomes a toddler and preschooler. This suddenness of transition is the major theme in an even earlier paper by E.E. LeMasters, who found that thirty eight of forty six couples he interviewed in urban middle-class Wisconsin between 1953 and 1956 reported “extensive” or “severe” crisis, the two most severe criteria on a five-point scale, in adjusting to the arrival of their first child.  89% of these couples rated their marriages as “good” or better, ratings that were confirmed by close friends in all but three cases, and thirty five of thirty eight pregnancies in the crisis group were either planned or desired – so it wasn’t that the couples were in crisis because of an unplanned pregnancy.  The parents didn’t have major psychiatric disabilities and were, in general, of average or above average in what LeMasters called “personality adjustment,” but all of the couples in the crisis group seemed to have romanticized parenthood and felt ineffectively prepared.  As one mother said: “We knew where babies came from, but we didn’t know what they were like.”  The couples’ descriptions of early parenthood could have been lifted from any Facebook parenting forum today – the mothers reported loss of sleep, chronic tiredness or exhaustion, confinement to the home and loss of social contacts, giving up the satisfactions and income of a job, having endless laundry to do, feeling guilty about not being a better mother, being “on” 24/7 in caring for an infant, the decline in their housekeeping standards (although I have to say I wasn’t personally afflicted by this problem) and worry over their appearance (including increased weight after the pregnancy).  The fathers apparently echoed most of these adjustments and added a few of their own – the decline in the wife’s sexual responsiveness (which I’ll just leave right there without further comment), economic pressure from becoming the only breadwinner at a time when expenses are increasing, worry about a second pregnancy in the near future, and a “general disenchantment with the parental role.”  These are sobering statistics, and are among the more dire ones that have been reported – subsequent studies have confirmed the sudden deteriorations in the relationship between couples after the birth of the couples’ first baby, but have found smaller to medium-sized effects rather than the large-scale crisis event that LeMasters reported. As several researchers have noted and Jennifer Senior comments as well, one is more likely to be happy raising children as part of a couple rather than raising them alone, and also that the level of happiness in marriages tends to decline over time whether a couple has children or not.  But at no point in a marriage does it seem to decline as far and fast as after that first baby is born, and while we can debate the extent of the decline there is little doubting its pervasiveness. And what causes this erosion in happiness?  It seems as though there are two factors.  Between the parents themselves, there is one topic that causes more arguments than any other, and if you don’t know what it is then you haven’t been living in my house lately: it’s the division of work between parents.  Men and women work, on average, about the same numbers of hours each day but women, on average, still do about twice as much “family care” – which is defined as housework, child care, shopping, and chauffeuring – as men.  My husband would be quick to add that he commutes for 2 ½ hours a day, which is true – a situation he chose for himself over my objections for precisely the reason that I knew he would walk in the door most nights shortly before bedtime expecting the child to be fed and bathed and his own dinner on the table.  And he’s not alone – in a study that analyzed a set of video recordings of families in Los Angeles on weekday evenings, mothers were found most often in shared spaces with the children, while fathers were observed most often alone.  The least frequently observed configuration was the couple together without children.  And we all know that there’s a reason why doing the dishes after dinner, that once loathed task, is now seen as the ‘plum’ assignment over supervising bath time – it’s because doing the dishes is far mentally easier than wrangling a two-and-a-half year-old into the bath “But I don’t WANNA bath!” followed after shampooing and soaping by “But I don’t WANNA get out!”.  But most nights I end up doing bath AND the dishes anyway, so the choice isn’t so bad.  And at my house we see this pattern repeated on the weekends as well – if my daughter and I are in the living room together then my husband sees himself as “relieved” and free to read drivel on the internet at his leisure.  I will say that he may be better than most husbands at making some effort to protect a small amount of leisure time for me; he will suggest that I go out for a bike ride some weekend mornings, as long as it’s not more than an hour and I don’t expect things to be any further along at home by the time I get back than when I left – things like getting either of them dressed, for example.  He’s quite happy to just enjoy his time with her and leave the ‘chore’ aspect of childcare to me – unless I set expectations about what I’d like to have done while I’m gone, which I’ve started to do even though I wish I didn’t have to. A subset of this first factor causing the erosion of marital happiness is the overscheduled nature of our children’s lives these days.  Recall that “family care” includes chauffeuring the kids around to various activities, often one or more each night of the week (especially when you factor multiple children into the equation).  This never-ending series of activities is apparently a uniquely middle-class affliction – it’s what middle class parents do (in the short term) to try to expose their child to a variety of experiences, and (in the long term) to give them the ‘edge’ they’ll need to get into an elite college.  And it’s exhausting for both the parents and the children. So the second main factor I see in the decline of marital quality is more related to the children and, specifically, what it’s like to spend time with children – especially young children.  Now I have to say that I’ve been very lucky to have a relatively easy-going child, although she has just, over the last few weeks, started saying “No, I don’t WANT to [insert activity here],” no matter what the inserted activity is and how much she really wants to do it – if I want her to do it then it’s enough for her to say she doesn’t.  And a side-effect of being over-scheduled when children are young is that they don’t know how to tolerate boredom, and they look to us to alleviate it when it occurs.  While our parents were cooking, cleaning, hanging out with their neighbors, and running a network of nonprofit organizations, they would typically tell us to go clean their rooms if we were bored.  We are more likely to ship our own children off to a gymnastics class. I want to digress here for a moment to discuss the concept of “flow” – please trust me that it will all come together in just a couple of minutes.  This term was coined by the psychologist Mihaly Cheeks-sent-mi-halyi, although the idea has existed in other forms, most notably in some Eastern religions, for thousands of years.  When you’ve achieved “flow,” you’re in the zone.  The original six characteristics of flow are: (1) intense and focused concentration on the present moment; (2) merging of action and awareness, (3) a loss of reflective self-consciousness, so you’re not easily distracted, (4) a sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity, (5), a distortion of temporal experience – some people say time seems to slow down; others say it seems to speed up; and (6) an experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding.  These...

We have a pretty cool mini-mini-series launching today. I’ve been seeing a lot of those “chores your child could be doing” articles showing up in my social media feeds lately, and I was thinking about those as well about how children in other cultures seem to be MUCH more willing to help out with work around the house.  I’m not saying we want to train our children to be slave laborers, but why is it that children in Western cultures really don’t seem to do chores unless they’re paid to do them? We’re going to hold off on the “getting paid” part for now, and we’ll talk about that very soon with my guest Ron Lieber, the Money columnist of the New York Times who wrote a book called The Opposite of Spoiled. But today we’re going to discuss the chores part with Andrew Coppens, who is an Assistant Professor of Education in Learning Sciences at the University of New Hampshire. If you’ve ever asked your child to do a task in the home only to have them say “No,” then get comfy and listen up, because I have a feeling that our conversation is going to surprise you and give you some new tools for your toolbox.   References: Coppens, A.D., & Acala, L. (2015). Supporting children’s initiative: Appreciating family contributions or paying children for chores. Advances in Child Development and Behavior 49, 91-112. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/bs.acdb.2015.10.002 Coppens, A.D., Acala, L., Rogoff, B., & Mejia-Arauz, R. (2016). Children’s contributions in family work: Two cultural paradigms. In S. Punch, R.M. Vanderbeck, & T. Skelton (Eds.), Families, intergenerationality, and per group relations: Geographies of children and young people (Vol 5). New York, NY: Springer. LIFE Center (2005). “The LIFE Center’s Lifelong and Lifewide Diagram.”  Retrieved from: http://life-slc.org/about/citationdetails.html   Read Full Transcript Transcript Jen:    [00:37] Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We have a pretty cool mini mini series launching today. I’ve been seeing a lot of those Chores Your Child Should Be Doing articles showing up in my social media feeds lately and I was thinking about those as well as some of the ethnographic research that we’ve discussed on previous episodes of the podcast where I’ve read about six year olds cooking for a group of adults who were on a trip for a week and willingly helping to care for younger siblings and cleaning up around the house without being asked and as I often do when these kinds of things come up, I started to wonder why don’t our children cook meals at age six and willingly help to care for younger siblings and clean up around the house without being asked? I’m not saying that we want to train our children to be slave laborers, but why is it that children in western cultures really don’t seem to do chores unless they’re paid to do them? Jen:     [01:29] So we’re going to hold off on the getting paid part for now and we’ll talk about that very soon with my guest, Ron Lieber, who’s the money columnist of the New York Times and wrote a book called The Opposite of Spoiled. But today we’re going to discuss the chores part with Andrew Coppens, who is an Assistant Professor of Education and learning sciences at the University of New Hampshire. Dr Coppens’ work examines how children from a number of cultural communities learn to help collaborate and how they get motivated to learn and the everyday activities of their families and communities. He’s focused on cultural practices regarding children’s everyday family contributions. What kids think about helping out and mothers ways of getting there. Children involved. If you ever asked your child to do a task in the home, only to have them say no, then get comfy and listen up because I have a feeling that our conversation is going to surprise you and also give you some new tools for your toolbox. Welcome Dr Coppens! Dr. Coppens:   [02:21] Thanks. It’s really nice to speak with you. Jen:    [02:22] All right, so let’s start by defining chores. What kind of work constitutes chores in your research? Dr. Coppens:   [02:29] So, uh, I think we make one what seems to be a critical distinction and that seems to give us a window into a lot of cultural differences regarding how voluntarily kids do chores. And that distinction is between what we refer to as family household work, which is activities like helping with cooking a meal where other people are involved and where the benefits of doing that chore are shared across a number of people and we make that distinction be doing those kinds of activities and we call self-care chores, so things regarding my stuff, so making my bed or my mess, you know, some toys that I left out and where people tend to work in self-care chores a little bit more individually. So there’s a lot of different kinds of work around the house, but those two types tend to focus on those two types, tends to be pretty instructive. Jen:                                      [03:21]                   Okay. So it’s the idea of taking care of yourself as in things like brushing your teeth and cleaning up your own mess versus something that has some kind of contribution to how the rest of the household runs? Dr. Coppens:   [03:33] Yeah. And of course self care chores have a contribution because it’s something that, you know, maybe a parent doesn’t have to do if a child does it. But where the distinction becomes important. I think is what motivates the child to get involved, so family, household work, things like, uh, you know, other things like sweeping the kitchen versus just sweeping my room or helping out with all the laundry versus just folding my socks. The family household work is a bit more social. So it’s that sociality of family household work, which I’m sure we’ll talk about a little bit more that seems to support kids’ voluntary engagement. Jen:   [04:09] Okay. So you’ve alluded to my next question which is about money, which we’re only going to talk about really briefly because we will do a whole episode on that coming up in a couple of weeks. But the reason I want to talk about it is because it does seem really common in Western societies to pay children for doing chores. And I’m wondering how is this working out for parents? Because all the way back in episode seven of this podcast, we talked about how parents use some foods like vegetables as a gateway to other kinds of foods like desert and the children end up liking the vegetables less and the dessert more. And then in a subsequent episode, I think it was episode nine, we actually discussed how rewarding children with praise – but I can sort of see money as being a different kind of praise; it makes them want to do the thing right now – but as soon as the praise stops, they stopped wanting to do the thing that you praise them for. So I’m curious about how all those things that we’ve already talked about on the podcast fit together and how that is associated with the whole paying children to do chores thing and how that’s working out for parents. Dr. Coppens:  [05:13] Yeah. So this is a really interesting question. In one study that a colleague of mine, Lucy Alcala and I did a regarding basically different cultural approaches to encouraging children to get involved in chores. We ask college students about their experience with receiving allowances. So an alternative to allowances might’ve been in a indigenous heritage in Mexican-American families. And what was really common among the middle class students perspectives and backgrounds and what seems to be supported by a lot of the research is that one, I think there’s a wide range of ways that kids are rewarded or ways that kids are paid for getting involved in chores and one doesn’t really seem to emerge as a clear leader in comparison to the others. So a lot of approaches to paying kids are rewarding kids for doing chores. I think fundamentally what they do is they change the meaning of the activity for kids, um, and, and make what is potentially a multidimensional activity involving social aspects involving, Hey, I get to learn how to do this sort of cool thing that adults seem to think is important that it can in the perception of kids sort of change the activity into something that’s solely about if I do this, then I get that. Dr. Coppens:    [06:30] And I think that among many of the approaches of middle class families and not just in the US, this is throughout Mexico and other sort of European heritage communities. It’s that approach, it’s that basic contingency rooted approach, this, this quid pro quo assumption that is far more pervasive even if kids aren’t literally being paid or rewarded for chores. And so the alternative really removes some of these market principles from at least this particular child rearing practice all together. So removes this contingency frame completely from the equation, which I mean, if you grew up, you know, I grew up in the U.S. in middle class communities and, and that’s actually, that’s a hard thing to imagine even; those principles really pervade our lives. Jen:   [07:12] And so you have studied how people in different cultures approach chores, right? So I think you looked at two different kinds of communities in Mexico. Can you tell us about those and how are they similar to and different from how Americans and people in Western cultures think about chores and children doing work around the house? Dr. Coppens:   [07:31] Yeah, sure. So maybe I’ll start with an example. So I lived and worked as a teacher in rural Nicaragua for a couple of years and so in my role as a teacher, I taught in the afternoons. So this was sort of, you know, sort of cowboy country and there were dairy farms and things like that and in the small towns and so really early five in the morning, you know, kids would come running by and knocking on my door, you know, wake up, wake up, and so, so I would go to the dairy farms and just sort of hang out and watch what was going on and, and so it was really, really struck by how kids, I guess learned and how they contributed in those contexts. And so what was most striking to me is that they weren’t asked or they weren’t required or paid to be there, but, but they woke up every morning at five and were dying to do it. Jen:  [08:18] Which may be surprising to the average Western parent. Dr. Coppens:    [08:22] No, it was surprising. It was surprising to me in that I had those same kids in my classroom and in the afternoon and in some cases they were sort of my worst students, you know, they were just bored, you know. So, so my experience there, I, I, uh, I just became very interested in the kinds of learning and the kinds of motivation that characterize this, what we might refer to as an informal context or this sort of everyday context and how that differed from school based or maybe classroom based type. So I got really in the initiative the kids, the kids were showing in the morning and decided I wanted to go to Grad school and to learn a little bit more about that and that really built into a series of studies focused on household work in an indigenous heritage community, uh, that this is near Guadalajara and what we referred to in a cosmopolitan community, but really a middle class community with several generations of experience with formal schooling. And those studies looked at cultural differences between those two communities in how much kids were doing around the house to help. And then how voluntarily they were doing those chores. And in the indigenous heritage community, kids were both helping more extensively in a in a wide range of activities. But I was really most interested in, in the fact that they were doing that voluntarily, and in fact it seemed to be that the more voluntary contributions, the more they did, which, which again, you mentioned a sort of paradoxes, from the perspective of… Jen:     [09:52] Might be shocking to Americans. Dr. Coppens:    [09:55] Yeah. And, and you know, since then that’s really been my focus. Jen:  [09:59] Yeah. So let’s probe on that in a variety of different ways. As I was reading your research, one thing that occurred to me that kind of seemed to be at the heart of the difference between the views of the chores in the indigenous Mexican communities that you studied compared with the more cosmopolitan communities in Mexico and also in the U.S., was that there seemed to be two very different kinds of views of what chores are in those communities. And when I think about doing chores and potentially assigning my still toddler, but she’s, she’s going to be doing chores soon, I imagine if I think about assigning work to her, it’s, it’s just saved me from doing something to free up time for myself to do something that I need to do or even that I want to do or even so that we can free up some time for the two of us to go and do something fun together. But it seemed as though, to me at least, in the indigenous community, it was almost like there wasn’t the same distinction between work and leisure and that to some extent leisure can be had by doing chores in the company of people whose company you enjoy. Am I misinterpreting that or was that kind of what you saw? Dr. Coppens:  [11:05] No, I think that’s. I think that’s spot on. I think that’s a part of the picture and many of the indigenous heritage communities and I think one of the things that supports this, this permeability between what in many middle class communities is a relatively strict line between time for work and time for play or time for educational activities is the autonomy that’s afforded for two kids, for engaging in work. So this connotation that many of us grew up with and in many cases still have around household chores being sort of onorous and we’re looking to do them as efficiently as possible and so that they’re over with and we can move on to other more enjoyable things. I think part of the lack of enjoyment of that kind of work have the ability to make a contribution in a shared contribution with others is that our engagement in those when we were growing up wasn’t so voluntary. Dr. Coppens:  [11:55] It was maybe coerced or it was sort of this uni-dimensional thing where we just did it for pay or to avoid punishment and sort of moved on. So in, in many of the indigenous Indian indigenous heritage communities that myself and colleagues have studied in Mexico, there is this permeable line between types of time, but I think related to that as a permeable line between really in a, in a broader sense, adulthood and childhood. So all around the world, there are adults in children that that much is pretty straightforward. But the extent to which adulthood defines a set of activities that are separate from childhood, that’s really quite a unique cultural phenomenon. And so to the extent that adults in children’s sort of social, and sort of their worlds, the worlds that they live in or defined as sort of interconnected, I think kids can, can make contributions and then seamlessly blend into playing and all of those kinds of activities are really shared by both adults and children. Jen:   [13:02] Yeah. I’m thinking about when I took a trip to Guatemala, which I’m sure you would say much more elegantly than me. We took a hiking trip out of town and it was just a friend and I and a guide and they took us to this tiny village and I got up early because the kids were going to show me how to make tortillas and they were around and then they disappeared and I heard a motor running and then 20 minutes later they came back in the corn had all been pulverized and they’re making these tortillas for the family to eat that day by...

Well this took a bit longer than I’d planned…  WAY BACK in episode 11 I did Part 1 of a two-part series on tantrums, and was expecting to release the second episode in short order.  Then I got inundated with interviews from awesome guests, which I always wanted to release as soon as I could after I spoke with them, and months have gone by without releasing that second episode.   Episode 11 provided a lot of background information on tantrums: a seminal study in 1931 really forms the basis for all the research on tantrums that has been done since then, so we went through it in some depth to understand what those researchers found – I was surprised that so much of the information was still relevant to parents today.   This episode considers the more recent literature – of which there actually isn’t a huge amount – to help us understand what’s going on during a tantrum, how to deal with them once they start, and how to potentially head them off before they even fully develop (don’t we all want that?!).   If you know you want to show up differently for your child but you don’t know how (or you know how and you still can’t do it!), the Taming Your Triggers workshop will help.   Sign up for the waitlist and we'll let you know once enrollment re-opens. Click the image below to learn more.   References Denham, S.A., & Burton, R. (2003). Social and emotional prevention and intervention programming for preschoolers. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum. Green, J.A., Whitney, P.G., & Potegal, M. (2011). Screaming, yelling, whining, and crying: Categorical and intensity differences in vocal expressions of anger and sadness in children’s tantrums. Emotion 11(5), 1124-1133. DOI: 10.1037/a0024173 Levine, L.J. (1995). Young children’s understanding of the causes of anger and sadness. Child Development 66(2), 697-709. LeVine, R., & LeVine, S. (2016). Do parents matter? Why Japanese babies sleep soundly, Mexican siblings don’t fight, and American families should just relax. New York: Public Affairs. Lieberman, M.D., Eisenberger, N.E., Crockett, M.J., Tom, S.M., Pfeifer, J.H., & Way, B.M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science 18(5), 421-428. Parens, H. (1987). Aggression in our children: Coping with it constructively. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Potegal, M., & Davidson, R.J. (1997). Young children’s post tantrum affiliation with their parents. Aggressive Behavior 23, 329-341. Potegal, M., & Davidson, R.J. (2003). Temper tantrums in young children: 1. Behavioral composition. Development and Behavioral Pediatrics 24(3), 140-147. Potegal, M., Kosorok, M.R., & Davidson, R.J. (2003). Temper tantrums in young children: 1. Tantrum duration and temporal organization. Development and Behavioral Pediatrics 24(3), 148-154.

Professor Peter Gray was primarily interested in the motivations and emotions of animals before his son Scott started struggling in school, at which point Professor Gray’s interests shifted to developing our understanding of self-directed learning and how play helps us to learn.  He has extensively studied the learning that occurs at the Sudbury Valley School in Sudbury Valley, MA – where children are free to associate with whomever they like, don’t have to take any classes at all, and yet go on college and to satisfying lives as adults.  How can this possibly be?  We’ll find out.   Reference Gray, P (2013). Free to learn: Why unleashing the instinct to play will make our children happier, more self-reliant, and better students for life. New York, NY: Basic Books. (Affiliate link) Also see Professor Gray’s extensive posts on learning and education on the Psychology Today blog.   Read Full Transcript   Transcript Jen:     [00:00:39] Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Before we get going with our awesome guest Professor Peter Gray, who’s going to talk with us about self-directed learning, I wanted to let you know that if what Peter says resonates with you, then I’m on the verge of launching a course to help parents decide whether homeschooling might be right for their family. I first started to think about homeschooling after I realized that I’d been doing everything I could to help my job to pursue learning for its own sake and engage in self-directed learning. But the more I read about school, the more I realized that at schooled, there really is no such thing as self-directed learning. Children learn what they’re told to learn when they’re told to learn it because that’s just how schools work. I mentioned in the episode on Betsy DeVos that I actually wrote my master’s thesis on what motivates children to learn in the absence of being told to do it and I was shocked to find that the system used in schools is pretty much the opposite of one that would really nurture children’s own love of learning. Jen:    [00:01:36] I did a lot of reading about learning and also about homeschooling and I developed the course because I realized that nobody had really collected all that information up in one place in a way that helps parents to understand the universe of information that needs to be considered to make this decision and also to support them through that process. Right now I’m recruiting people who’d be interested in helping me to pilot test the course. You get full access to all the research I’ve done on homeschooling based on over 50 books and 150 scientific research papers as well as interviews with more than 20 families who are already homeschooling and seven experts in the field. If you’d like to learn more, then please drop me an email at jen@yourparentingmojo.com And I’ll send you some information about it with no obligation to sign up. The cost to participate in the pilot will be $99, which will be half the cost of the course once it’s released to the general public and all I’d ask you to do in exchange is to share your honest thoughts of how the course worked for you, so please let me know if you’re interested. Again, that email address is jen@yourparentingmojo.com. Jen:  [00:02:35] Now, let’s get going with our interview. Today we’re joined by Peter Gray, who is a research professor of psychology at Boston College. Professor Gray was primarily interested in the motivations and emotions of animals before his son Scott started struggling in school, at which point professor Gray interest shifted to developing and understanding of self directed and how play helps us to learn. Professor Gray is the author of a textbook on general psychology that’s now in its seventh edition, as well as the book Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Better, Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. Welcome Professor Gray. Dr. Gray:    [00:03:17] I’m glad to be here. Jen:    [00:03:19] Thank you. So let’s start with kind of a thorny question. Why, why do we have schools? I went to school and I think you went to school and in many ways it seems like it’s just something that is part of our lives. How did we get to this point? Dr. Gray:    [00:03:34] Yeah, that’s exactly right. It is part of our lives. It’s been part of our parents’ lives most, most for most of us, our grandparents; some of us, our great grandparents all went to school. It’s really, you know, schools as we know them today first appeared really in the late 17th century during the Protestant reformation, the Protestant reformers believed that it was very important for children to learn how to read so they could read the Bible. They believed that it was important for every human being to read the Bible for themselves. And so teaching reading was part of it, and in fact, the Bible or some primer version of the Bible was sort of the text that children learn from, but beyond teaching reading, at least as important to these reformers was to teach obedience, and not just to teach to read the Bible, but to teach children to believe the Bible, indoctrination, biblical indoctrination. Dr. Gray:    [00:04:52] So obedience training, indoctrination, reading: these were the primary purposes of, um, of the early schools. The leader in the formation of such schools was the German Republic of Prussia. And the person, if, if there’s a single father, if you will, of a modern day schooling, it would be August Hermann Francke, who was a pietist priest, a pietist or one of the, one of the, uh, the sect, of Protestantism, who was really in charge of starting schools in Prussia. So this was really the first, a widespread compulsory school system where children had to go to school. Uh, it wasn’t nearly as extensive as today. It wasn’t nearly as many days of the year or years of a child’s life, but for a certain number of years, children were expected to go school for a certain number of weeks. Dr. Gray:   [00:05:59] Um, the goal, the stated goal by Francke of his schools was to suppress children’s will remember, remember that at that time, willfulness was regarded as sinfulness. Children, human beings are born in sin. And a primary goal of education is to sort of, if you will beat the sinfulness of children. And that was very clearly the goal of these schools and so today, of course we don’t, most of us don’t think of that as the purpose of schools. But the fact of the matter is those schools founded by, by Francke and by other Protestant leaders elsewhere, including in the United States, in the colonies, I should say. And again, in the 17th century, Massachusetts was the first colony to have a compulsory schooling for at least some of its children. And again, they were Protestant schools. The reader was called the Little Bible of New England. It was based on biblical stories and the whole purpose of the tax was to insert the fear of God into little children. Dr. Gray:   [00:07:15] All kinds of ditties about how you will go to hell if you tell a lie and all sorts of things and the importance of obedience to your parents and to the school master and ultimately of course to God. So obedience was the big lesson and um, and that’s really where schools began and schools were well designed to teach obedience and to indoctrinate children in Biblical doctrine. They, the many number of children all in the same class, all doing the same thing at the same time. The primary job is to do exactly what you’re told to do. You don’t question the assignment, here are your job is to do the assignment, no questions asked. In fact, it’s quite impertinent to ask why you should be doing this. And that’s still true today. The mode of punishment has generally changed. Dr. Gray:    [00:08:24] In the early days, the primary mode of punishment was to beat the child. If the child didn’t learn what he or she was supposed to do; today we’re more likely in one way or another to shame the child by comparison, comparing them with other children and giving them the oppression that they’re stupid compared to other children we grade them. And so on and so forth. Although physical beating still does really occur in some American schools, is not nearly as prevalent as it was at that time, but we’re stuck with this system that was designed to teach obedience and to indoctrinate children. When the schools were taken over by the states, is the power of religions declined and power states increased, the method of schooling remained the same and more or less the goals of schooling remained. The the same; it was still obedience training; the states wanted to be and subjects, if you will, uh, and um, and the doc in the doctrine nation was not a doctrine of the Bible, but the doctrine of the state. Dr. Gray:  [00:09:33] So nationalism, belief in the, in the wonderful history of the culture that you are growing up and, and, uh, about how you’re surrounded by enemies became part of the doctrine, certainly in Germany and certainly in much of Europe and to a considerable degree in the United States as well. Over time the curriculum changed in various ways and we now look at schools for teaching all kinds of things. But the methods did not change. We still have the system of a bunch of kids, you know, somewhere between 20 and 40 kids in a classroom. They’re all sitting in rows looking at the teacher in front of them. And the job is to unquestioningly do what the teacher tells you to do. And in fact, it’s still the case today that really and truly the only way you can fail in school is by not doing what you’re told to do. Dr. Gray: [00:10:32]             A nd so obedience is absolutely still the primary lesson of school. It may not be consciously what teachers think is the primary lessons, but it clearly is. You cannot pass in school if you don’t do what you’re told to do, nor can you fail if you do what you’re told to do. The lessons are never very difficult, but they are tedious and it requires a lot of willingness to go through them and do what you’re told to do. And so still obedience is the primary skill that’s being taught in school. So here we are, interestingly, we’re in a world in which many people at least believe that the characteristics that are important for children to develop are things like creativity, critical thinking, curiosity, lifelong interest in learning and so on, but we have schools that were the not developed for those purposes. Dr. Gray:      [00:11:31] In fact, they were developed quite explicitly to suppress those characteristics and promote obedience and the memorization and feedback of doctrine. So that’s where we are. It’s a historical…there’s no good scientific reason for why we have such schools, given most people’s beliefs about what education should be about today, but it’s a historical reason. We human beings are creatures of social norms so we tend to do what was done to us and over, um, over historical time, schools have increased in their influence, in the sense that they take more and more of children’s lives. They take more and more of their day, more and more of, of their year, more and more years are spent and compulsory schooling. Um, but the basic system has not changed. Jen:   [00:12:30] It’s almost mind boggling to me that we didn’t choose this system; those of us who are today or the last generation or even the generation before that; that it came from something so long ago that had such a different purpose. And I’m reminded of the William Faulkner quote: “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” Dr. Gray:    [00:12:53] Exactly. Jen:     [00:12:53] It’s almost like we don’t really fully understand why we got here and while we’re in it, until we’re out of it and can kind of look back on it. So you raised a number of points in and your kind of introductory remarks and I went to get into a couple of them a little bit. I had always thought/assumed. I guess that the purpose of schools was to help young people develop to their full potential, um, I guess intellectually/academically and socially as well to some extent, and to help even out the discrepancies in opportunities that children have when they come from different backgrounds. But it seems as though that was not the purpose of schools. And so I guess maybe we shouldn’t be surprised when they don’t do that very well, right? Dr. Gray:   [00:13:39] Yeah, I think that’s right. That was certainly was not the original purpose of schools. I think for some time what you just described is the stated purpose of schools and, and certainly I don’t want to be too harsh on people who go into teaching or become educators. My mother was a school teacher, really have a sister who was a school teacher. Jen:    [00:13:59] My father was a school teacher… Dr. Gray:    [00:14:00] And so on. These are wonderful people. These are people who, you know, who went into this because they really want to help children and so on. But as I say, they’re stuck with this system. I do think that, for decades really, even for certainly more than probably since the, since the beginning of the 20th century, most people talking about schools in the United States talk about them as sort of the great equalizer. Dr. Gray:   [00:14:35] I mean, ideally the great equalizer, you know, whether you’re rich or poor, you have a public school to go to. And the ideal at least is that the public schools should provide the same education to everybody, whether you’re rich or poor. It shouldn’t be the great equalizer. I think also many people, um, you know, today, this doesn’t ring so ideal as it did sometime ago, but the idea of schools as, as homogenizers, you know, we are a country of immigrants. People come from different, came from different parts of the world with different sets of beliefs, different languages and so on. And part of the belief supporting schools was that we want to make everybody into an American. You know, there’s, there’s both the good and the bad side of that depending on how you look at it. But the idea that we, we have a common language, everybody’s going to speak English if they go through the public school, everybody’s going to have sort of the same concepts of history, everybody’s going to learn a little bit about the principles of American democracy. Everybody’s going to read some of the same literature and so on, and we will have a common culture as a result of that. I know people even today who strongly defend the public school system on grounds like that, and I can relate to that. I can understand why people would feel that the problem is that it, um, whether or not it ever worked very well for those purposes, it clearly isn’t working very well for those purposes today. And I don’t think it ever worked very well for those purposes. It does in some sense of homogenize, but I think that the acquisition of American culture is going to require going to come for people who live in America anyway. Dr. Gray:    [00:16:26] And the idea that, um, that it’s the great equalizer has certainly not panned out very well. It’s very clear that… Everybody, everybody in education is, and for long time has been concerned about the so called education gap. Kids from poor families do not do as well in school, do not succeed as well in school. The school system in some sense fails them compared to kids from Richard families. There is always exceptions. There’s always that rare kid you know, who grew up in the ghetto, if I may use that...

Today I join forces with Malaika Dower of the How to Get Away with Parenting podcast to interview Dr. Christia Brown, who is a Professor of Developmental and Social Psychology at the University of Kentucky, where she studies the development of gender identity and children’s experience of gender discrimination. Dr. Brown’s book, Parenting Beyond Pink and Blue (Affiliate link), helps parents to really understand the scientific research around gender differences in children, which is a harder task than with some other topics because there’s just a lot of bad research out there on this one.  I ask about theories of gender development while Malaika keeps us grounded with questions about how this stuff works in the real world, and we both resolve to shift our behavior toward our daughters just a little bit. Related Episodes Interview with Yarrow Dunham on how social groups form Interview with Kang Lee on children’s lying (yep – your kid does it too!)   References Brown, C.S. (2014). Parenting beyond pink and blue. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press. (Affiliate link) Taylor, M.G., Rhodes, M., & Gelman, S.A. (2009). Boys will be boys and cows will be cows: Children’s essentialist reasoning about gender categories and animal species. Child Development 80(2), 461-481. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2009.01272.x   Read Full Transcript Transcript Jen: 00:30 Hello and welcome to Your Parenting Mojo. We have a pretty cool show lined up for you today. So those of you who are subscribed to my podcasts by my website at YourParentingMojo.com might've seen a notification go out just before the holiday, letting you know that had been interviewed by Malaika Dower, who is the host of the podcast, How to Get Away with Parenting. And as a side note, I'll say that Malaika is interested in a lot of the same issues as I am. So you should go and check out her show and if you're the parent of a child of color then you should pause this show and go and check out her show at howtogetawaywithparenting.com right now because there are very few podcasts for this audience and hers is a really good one. So right after we recorded our episode, Malaika texted me and said, did you ever think about doing an episode on gender-neutral parenting? Does it even make a difference if I put barrettes in my daughter's hair and put her in pink dresses or if she only wears pants and I always say "yes, our neighbor is writing down his riding down the street" on her bike rather than "he or she is riding her bike." So like I always do, I looked around to see who's doing really good work on the subject by which I mean work that is actually based on the outcomes of real scientific research and not a study saying that girl babies hear about one decibel better than boy babies for very high pitch noises and that this is enough justification for gender segregated classrooms where we never let the noise get too loud in the girls classroom and I wish that I was kidding you about that, but I'm really not. So when I read the book, Parenting Beyond Pink and Blue and I found that it critically examines the relevant scientific literature on this subject, much like we do here on the show, I knew that I had to ask the author to talk with us. Dr. Christia Brown is professor of development and social psychology at the University of Kentucky where she studies the development of gender identity and children's experience of gender discrimination among other topics. Dr. Brown received her Ph.D from the University of Texas at Austin where her research focused on how and why children form gender and race stereotypes and how they understand gender discrimination. As I mentioned, Dr Brown's book is called Parenting Beyond Pink and Blue: How to Raise your Kids Free of Gender Stereotypes. Welcome Dr Brown, and also welcome to Malaika Dower, who's going to be our co-interviewer today. Malaika: 02:36 Hi! Dr. Brown: 02:36 Thank you. Jen: 02:37 All right, so let's start with the big question. Jen: 02:41 Is there a genetic difference between the brains of very young boys and girls? Can you talk us through that a little bit please? Dr. Brown: 02:47 I can. I mean there are, I mean obviously there are genetic differences between boys and girls, is that when you start to really look at brain differences, there aren't very many and there definitely aren't many when you look at young children. So yes, there are some differences between adults. The problem is they've had an entire lifetime of different experiences and there's lots of evidence that all those experiences shape the brain in very concrete structural ways. So when you're talking about what are these of biological differences early in life, there are very, very few and there's far more differences between individual boys and individual girls then between boys and girls as a group. Jen: 03:31 Wow. Uh, okay. So you said two really big things there. Firstly, that the experiences that we have in our lives physically shape our brains, so that adults have very different brains than they did as children. Is that right? Dr. Brown: 03:45 That's exactly right. Jen: 03:46 Okay. And then secondly that there are some differences between boys and girls, but the overall difference between boys and girls is far less than the difference between two individual boys or an individual boy and an individual girl, is that right? Dr. Brown: 04:05 Right. So I mean the idea that knowing someone's gender doesn't help you very much predict even what their brain looks like structurally. So it definitely doesn't help you predict what kind of behaviors or interests or activities they're going to like doing. Neuroscientists even say their brains don't look different. I mean they talk about it as more of like a brain mosaic and that there's parts of kind of stereotypical boy parts and parts of girl parts all within every individual's brain. It's not this pink and blue dichotomy that we often like to think it is. Jen: 04:38 Hmm. Okay. So when we start to think about some of the topics where we imagine this being important; I'm thinking that start with temperament, temperament and emotion...what does that mean for differences if there are any. Dr. Brown: 04:55 There aren't any when it comes to emotion. And I'll say Janet Hyde does really great research, so she's a developmental psychologist, and she has done a lot of meta-analyses on these. So when I say that there aren't differences, it's not based on like one or two studies, not finding differences. She's taking kind of every study that's ever been done looking for a gender difference and puts them all into one pot and then kind of analyze as across...She has one study, looked across a million something kids. So when I say there's no difference, it's really based on hundreds of studies and they found that there aren't differences in emotion, there aren't differences in temperament in between boys and girls. The one difference you see that's, it's not big, but it is, I think what I would say, you know, an actual difference is boys have a little bit of a higher activity level like infant boys and they're a little bit more impulsive, so a little bit more likely to kind of reach out and grab something when they're infants compared to girls. Again, it's a small difference and it's just a mean level difference. So it doesn't really predict my individual daughter who's going to reach out and grab something in the grocery store so doesn't really help me as a parent. But as new looking at lots of groups, you see a little bit of a difference there but not when it comes to like emotional expression or who feel sad or who feels happy and how upset you get that, there's not a difference at all. Jen: 06:22 And so when we think about math, I've been doing a lot of reading on this right now, in terms of girls' ability to do math and that their ability actually seems fairly congruent with a boy's ability to do math, but the boy's confidence in his ability to do math is much higher. Why is that? Dr. Brown: 06:42 Well, I mean kids really early. No, the stereotype that boys are good at math. I mean there've been studies that show it was like five and six know that stereotype. So by the time they're starting school, when they're actually doing math, they know that boys are supposed to be good at this and girls are less good at it. So I think when you think that you're going to be good, that does a lot to increase your own competence and reduce your anxiety about the subject. Whereas girls kind of go in thinking, yeah, might be doing well in class, but I'm not really good at math. Malaika: 07:14 Just generally sort of the intervention of that. So if we're parents that are trying to intervene in that, where should we step in? And does reinforcement help, so I have a daughter and I want to make sure that she feels like she is good at math or that that's not even a question of being good or bad, just here's math, I will do it, kind of thing. Where if we know already that by five or six they, they have that feeling for me, trying to either counteract that sentiment in girls. Where would I start on? How would I start to, to counteract that. Would I start when she's now she's not yet two by saying isn't math fun! And a kind of overflowing it or do I just kind of like figure out a way to show her women who are doing great at math and math is just the thing that we all have. How would you go about an intervention? Dr. Brown: 08:11 Yeah, I mean I think all of the above. I mean, honestly, I mean we get this really cool study in that it was really cool because I wasn't the one who designed it, but I kind of came on later and it looked at how much parents of toddlers talk to their kids using just like the kind of numbers you used when you have toddlers. Like, oh look, you have four apple slices left. Oh there's three blue cars in a row. Look, there's five trees, that kind of thing. Let's count the stairs as we walk up them. Then that just kind of everyday casual number use. And what we found was that parents of toddlers, so parents of boys used numbers three times more than parents of daughters. And so in the world of psychology, a huge difference. I mean three times the amount is a lot and it's that casual use of early math. Dr. Brown: 09:03 And so part of what I think for parents of toddlers is to be aware of how much you use math in just daily life. I think that's one of the reasons boys are more competent in math, is it's just part of their daily life all the time. So whatever you're doing, you're turning it into and just kind of casual math problem and the way that you just talked to your toddlers. I think that's part of it. I think, by the time they were about four and five, that's when I chose to really start talking about stereotypes about when they go to school and they start doing math in preschool or kindergarten and saying, you know what, I've heard that some people think boys are really good at math and girls are not good, but that is so wrong. So really explicitly addressing it that way when there's a boy in the second grade, that makes a comment because he's also absorbed the kind of stereotype that girls have a lens for understanding where that comment is coming from. Dr. Brown: 10:02 So part of it's just like addressing it head on, but it is, it's also showing role models. It's talking about math. The other thing we know parents do is they assume that even when girls do well at math, it's because the girls worked really hard, whereas the boys are just naturally good. Parents try to offer help to the girls in math more than they offer it to boys. So partly I think for parents it's also just kind of being aware of your own kind of baggage you have about your own math ability and making sure that that's not filtering out into some presumed difference that you're how you're treating kids. Jen: 10:39 I was actually just reading a study on that last night. There's a woman named Sian Blaylock out of...I think the University of Chicago who's done some research on this and found that if the mother particularly has a lot of emotional baggage around math, it can actually really impact the way the daughter particularly learns about math. So Malaika, were you confident with math when you were in school and do you feel confident with it now? Malaika: 11:05 I wasn't, but my mom was. My mom is very good at math. She's a scientist, she's a doctor. She's so, she instilled in me a sort of love of figuring out and solving problems, but I still hold, I do hold that baggage of like, well, I'm not as good as my mom was. So, but I, I've heard studies like this before, so I've recently been sort of like, I'm going to get okay with it being good at math or I'm in an almost basically I've decided I'm going to lie to my daughter and say I love that. That's great because I don't want to... Even though my mom genuinely did feel that I still had, I think maybe the, the impact of others around me saying that I probably wasn't good at math maybe it might have affected me not being good at math or not liking that or math or being afraid of, of, you know, pursuing it further. I ended up doing advanced math and stuff in school, but that was more of a sort of track that I was on, but it wasn't something... I had a fear of it. And so yeah, my, my plan is just to lie to my daughter. Jen: 12:06 It makes sure she doesn't catch you. I have an episode coming on lying to children and if they catch you it's bad news. Malaika: 12:15 Well then my plan is to get good with math. New Speaker: 12:16 Okay. Or get or get good at lying. Yeah. Okay. So that's really helpful. In terms of the math and the verbal abilities, I think there's a really definite stereotype that girls are better at reading and particularly better at talking as well. Is that it's kind of an inherent difference or how did, how it goes even get that idea in the first place. Dr. Brown: 12:38 I'm not sure. It's actually has been in popular culture for a long time, but there have also been meta-analyses on that that show there are really no differences in, for example, who's more talkative boys or girls. We really talk the exact same amount. Where are the difference does seem to be is that girls develop language and kind of first words a little bit earlier than boys do. So you know we're talking months, not a year, but girls say their first word a couple of months on average before boys do, but that's just really the starting point. Boys catch up so there aren't reliable differences between verbal abilities between boys and girls. It's really just that kind of first words is where you see it. Jen: 13:29 I wonder if that leads parents to, you know, when the girl is the first one to speak and oh, she's a girl, she's really chatty, and then it kind of just snowballs from there and becomes a self reinforcing stereotype. Is that possible? Dr. Brown: 13:41 It's completely possible. I think that's where most mean, that's really where most of these differences eventually come from is that parents kind of presume that there's this difference and there's this little morsel of a difference, but parents are...it feeds into kind of what they think boys and girls are like. And so very accidentally they kind of play out these stereotypes. So we see that parents talked to infant girls more than they talk to boys. They just use more language with them so they just get more verbal input than sons do. And so, you know, of course they're going to have kind of differences then in terms of some types of language tasks later on. Jen: 14:22 Hm. Wow. That's, that's incredible. I mean, I only have one child and that's the way I'm planning on having it stay, so I can't make a case study on this, but the fact that, that I might have unconsciously treated my daughter differently than I would have treated a son is sort of mind boggling to me. Malaika, what do you think about it? Malaika: 14:43 Yeah, I mean, I definitely have. My daughter is talkative. She's not yet two when she's speaking in full sentences. And I definitely been like, oh, well I'm talkative and my mom's talkative and so it's just the women in our family... I've just, that example alone kind of stuck with me. But I have found that there's times when I. where I wonder, um, I think I told you Jen about just the time that she knew my daughters, so almost bald. She doesn't have much hair so I don't have to do her hair. But one time I put a barrette in her hair, and I generally dress her...in what would be, what are, what are boys clothes because I buy them from the boys section, but I consider them just like plain clothes. I don't particularly dress her in any colorful dresses unless we're maybe going to church or something, but for the most part she's always wearing boys clothes and I put a barette in her hair once and I immediately felt internally this sense of femininity, like coming from her a 20 month old child and I was like, oh my gosh, she looks like a girl now and I now I see the difference and I didn't realize that I had, I think I have been treating her like a boy because I dress her like a boy. And I wondered, you know, kind of like, oh, I, I think you mentioned before a lot of this stuff is the baggage the parent has. And I didn't even realize I had all of this baggage about femininity and masculinity in a toddler, you know, so I don't know how to undo it, I guess. Dr. Brown: 16:09 Yeah. I mean there's a great kind of classic study where they brought a baby into a lab and they dress. This is the exact same baby. They dress in the baby and pink clothes and called her Beth and then they had these participants come in and just interact with the baby and then they coded what it looks like. Then the other time they would dress it in blue and I think they named the Baby Adam. Again, the exact same baby. All that was different was what clothes they put them in and yeah, the adults that were interacting with the baby were talking about how cute and pretty and delicate at what this child was dressed in pink, but when the exact same child was dressed in blue, they made comments about how strong and tough and we're more kind of physical with the baby. Jen: 16:49 Wow. Dr. Brown: 16:50 And it's really subtle. I don't think any parent goes into it thinking, oh, I'm going to treat my daughters differently than my sons. I think it's just we're also products of the culture. I mean I wrote a book on it. I'm still a product of the culture. I have to fight it, like aware of it myself because we also lived here and we grew up hearing in the same kind of messages and internalizing it and we have our own implicit biases even though we don't really believe them, they're just embedded in that part of our brain that, you know, internalized I'm not very good at math. I mean I have that and my husband jokes because I have my minor, my Ph.D Minors and Statistics, but I would say I'm not very good at math and so you could, you know, it's like this internalized idea I had as a

I’ve thought about doing this episode for a while but I sat on it for a few weeks because it’s still in motion.  But now Betsy DeVos is confirmed as Secretary of Education I wanted to offer some thoughts on her work on educational issues, charter schools, as well as on the topic of schools more broadly. Spoiler alert: I graduated from my Master’s program!  And I wrote my thesis on what motivates children to learn in the absence of a formal curriculum, so we also talk a bit about whether schools as we know them, and specifically curriculum-based learning, is the best way to serve our children’s learning.   References Achieve (2015, May 14). New report highlights large gaps between state test results and 2013 NAEP results. Retrieved from: http://achieve.org/new-report-highlights-large-gaps-between-state-test-results-and-2013-naep-results Angrist, J.D., Cohides, S.R., Dynarski, S.M., Pathak, P.A., & Walters, C.D. (2013). Charter schools and the road to college readiness: The effects on college preparation, attendance, and choice. Full report available at: http://www.tbf.org/~/media/TBFOrg/Files/Reports/Charters%20and%20College%20Readiness%202013.pdf Bitfulco, R., & Ladd, H.F. (2006). The impacts of charter schools on student achievement: Evidence from North Carolina. Education Finance and Policy 1(1), 50-90. Full article available at: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/edfp.2006.1.1.50 Bruni, F. (2015, May 30). The education assassins. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/opinion/sunday/frank-bruni-department-of-education-assassins.html?_r=1 Camera, L. (2016, May 17). More than 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, discrimination still exists. Retrieved from: https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-05-17/after-brown-v-board-of-education-school-segregation-still-exists Camera, L. (2017, February 17). DeVos: I’d be fine ditching the education department. Retrieved from: https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2017-02-17/betsy-devos-id-be-fine-if-we-could-ditch-the-education-department Center for Research on Education Outcomes (2015). Urban charter school study report on 41 regions. Full report available at: https://urbancharters.stanford.edu/download/Urban%20Charter%20School%20Study%20Report%20on%2041%20Regions.pdf Doyle, W. (2016, February 18). How Finland broke every rule – and created a top school system. Heching Report. Retrieved from: http://hechingerreport.org/how-finland-broke-every-rule-and-created-a-top-school-system/ Gill, B.P. (2016). The effect of charter schools on students in traditional public schools: A review of the evidence. Education Next. Retrieved from: http://educationnext.org/the-effect-of-charter-schools-on-students-in-traditional-public-schools-a-review-of-the-evidence/ Gleason, P., Clark, M., Tuttle, C.C., Dwoyer, E., & Silverberg, M. (2010). The evaluation of charter school impacts. Full report available at: https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20104029/pdf/20104029.pdf Goldman, J.A. (1981). Social participation of preschool children in same- versus mixed-age groups. Child Development 32, 644-650. Gray, P. (2013). Free to learn: Why unleashing the instinct to play will make our children happier, more self-reliant, and better students for life. New York: Basic. Greenberg, D. (1995). Free at last: The Sudbury Valley school. Sudbury, MA: Sudbury Valley School Press. The passage I cited in the episode is freely available here: http://sudburyschool.com/content/free-last Mack, J. (2012). Weighing the pros and cons of charter schools (Julie Mack blog). Mlive. Retrieved from: http://www.mlive.com/news/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2012/01/comparing_charters_and_regular.html National Association of Colleges and Employers (2015). Job outlook 2016: Attributes employers want to see on new college graduates’ resumes. Retrieved from: http://www.naceweb.org/s11182015/employers-look-for-in-new-hires.aspx Preble, L. (n.d.). Classroom overcrowding: It’s not just a numbers game. Teachhub. Retrieved from: http://www.teachhub.com/classroom-overcrowding Prothero, A. (2016, December 8). Trump’s education secretary nominee’s school choice record in Michigan. Retrieved from: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/charterschoice/2016/12/trump_education_secretary_betsy_devos_school_choice_record_michigan.html?r=1922064904 Selbe, N. (2016, April 29). The states ranked by test scores. Startclass. Retrieved from: http://public-schools.startclass.com/stories/13054/states-ranked-test-scores#12-Michigan Suggate, S.P. 2012. “Watering the garden before the rainstorm: The case of early reading.” Edited by Sebastian Suggate and Elaine Reese. Contemporary debates in child development and education. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, Taylor & Francis. pp. 181-190. The Education Trust – Midwest. Accountability for all: 2016; The broken promise of Michigan’s charter sector. Retrieved from: http://midwest.edtrust.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2013/10/The-Education-Trust-Midwest_Accountability-for-All-2016_February-11-2016.pdf Wermund, B. (2016, December 2). Trump’s education pick says reform can ‘advance God’s Kingdom’. Politico. Retrieved from: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/betsy-devos-education-trump-religion-232150 Zernike, K. (2016, June 18). A sea of charter schools in Detroit leaves students adrift. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/us/for-detroits-children-more-school-choice-but-not-better-schools.html   Read Full Transcript Transcript I had the idea to do this episode a few weeks back, but I sort of sat on it for a bit – in part because it’s such a complex issue.  Not that I’m any stranger to researching and writing and talking about complex issues, but because this one is still in motion and no-one really knows yet how it will turn out.  So today we’re going to talk a bit about the education system in the U.S. and how it got to be where it is at the moment, and what Betsy DeVos might do with it.  The point I want to make with this episode is ‘what if the focus on which kind of school is the right kind’ is the wrong question to ask? And, not entirely coincidentally, I also wanted to let you know that I’m launching a course to help parents who are thinking about homeschooling their children to decide whether homeschooling could actually be the right thing for their families.  It’ll cover all the aspects of making that decision, from understanding whether homeschooling is legal in your area to how you’ll still be able to afford your mortgage; from whether you need to understand everything your child needs to know before you even begin to whether homeschooled children can get into college.  Right now I’m looking for a few people who are interested in this to help me pilot test the course – so you would take the course and let me know what you think of it, through email feedback or a phone conversation with me.  In exchange for your opinions I’m offering a steep discount – the cost for the pilot will be $99, which will be a 50% discount on the full price of the course once it’s finished.  If you’d like more details, with no obligation to sign up, do send me an email at jen@yourparentingmojo.com. I should probably also mention that I graduated from my master’s program; for those of you who haven’t been following along since the beginning I launched this podcast as a way to share some of the information I was learning as I worked toward a Master’s in Psychology focused on Child Development.  So I’m all done with school – again, for now, at least – although I should note that I reserve the right to go back and get a third master’s in Education in the not too distant future if I decide it’s warranted.  But anyway, here’s my celebration for the one just finished: yay!.  That’s more celebrating than I’ve done for any of my previous degrees, so I hope you enjoyed being part of it. Moving swiftly on – I wrote my thesis on the topic of “what motivates unschooled children to learn?”.  Unschooling is a specific kind of homeschooling where the parent doesn’t directly teach the child anything (unless the child specifically requests it): instead the child is permitted to engage in self-directed learning, which means the child decides what he or she wants to learn and the parent supports the child in that effort.  Now before you say “that sounds like a crazy idea!,” let me tell you about some of the research on schools that I delved into as a foundation for my work, which I felt was needed before I started trying to understand an alternate model. I’d always assumed that the purpose of school is to help students develop to their full potential – and maybe to help even out some of the disparities in circumstances that separate people at birth.  I was actually really surprised to find that that wasn’t at all the case.  We live in a capitalist economy.  And schools produce the workers for that capitalist economy.  It’s the schools’ job to turn out workers capable of participating in this capitalist economy, so they can produce goods for people to buy, so the employers can keep making profit.  To do this, the school system uses grades and test results to determine individuals’ position in the system that they will find themselves in once they graduate.  An Austrian philosopher called Ivan Illich pointed out that “the pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.  His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value.” There is a close correspondence between the hierarchical nature of a workplace and the hierarchical nature of a school; a student has about as much power in a school as a worker does in the workplace.  The extrinsic motivators of grades and approval from teachers (as well as the threat of failure) closely mirror the external motivators in the workplace – positive performance reviews and increased wages (as well as the prospect of unemployment).  The highly rule-governed world of high school mirrors the type of supervision a blue collar worker can expect to receive; the freedom from continual supervision in elite colleges mirrors the work environment of white collar workers, while moderate amount of freedom granted to students in state colleges and community colleges reflects the amount of supervision people in low-level technical or supervisory roles can expect in the working world. It’s a bit depressing, isn’t it?  As a product of the school system myself, who didn’t learn to think critically at all until about age eighteen – and that was something I stumbled on when I realized that my psychology teacher was telling us about one theory one day and another the next day, presenting each as fact, and I said “wait, didn’t the guy from yesterday say the opposite?”  I did well in what would generally be called “elite” schools, so I have the luxury of doing the majority of my work while sitting on my couch at home because I have “earned” this right.  Yet I am, to some extent, trapped in this role by a hefty mortgage in a high-cost-of-living area and the trappings of middle class life. I want to be clear that I don’t think anyone is conspiring against us.  I think that the majority of teachers go into teaching because they want to help children.  And the majority of people working in companies that contribute to things like the Common Core standards (because a lot of companies do have a lot of stake in developing the Common Core standards) don’t have nefarious interests; they’re just doing what they’re supposed to do, which is to make money for their company, and the individuals involved probably think they are doing something to help children as well.  But these individuals are working within that system that is all about creating workers for the economy, and is not at all about helping individuals to achieve their own personal goals. And the school system is really great at one thing: preparing children for the kinds of jobs that existed in the U.S. between about 1880 and 1960, in the height of the manufacturing era when factories needed people to sit in a row and churn out widgets that looked exactly like the widgets their neighbor was making.  But in a world where employers look for leadership, the ability to work in a team, communication skills, problem-solving skills, and a strong work ethic, the memorization of facts starts to look markedly less important.  Even now, the system is not designed to help children achieve their learning goals.  I read a great article in The Atlantic describing how the school system doesn’t want to change, because it serves the needs of its adult stakeholders quite well – both politically and financially.  Politicians find schools useful for providing placement opportunities for important constituents, the means to get favored community and business programs adopted and funded, and patronage hires for individuals who have performed some kind of favor for the politician.  Politicians get support from teacher’s unions, who are among the top spenders in politics, and who can get a person elected or stop a person they see as being unfavorable to the union from being elected.  The unions want more money and power which means getting more members, and to get more members they need happy members, and to get happy members they need to help members get what they want, which includes job security, pay related to seniority rather than performance, less work, and early retirement with pension and healthcare.  So as Joel Klein writes in The Atlantic: “whether you work hard or don’t, get good results with kids or don’t, teach in a shortage area like math or special education or don’t, or in a hard-to-staff school in a poor community or not, you get paid the same, unless you’ve been around for another year, in which case you get more. Not bad for the adults.”  Klein thinks that three things are necessary to make schools successful: rebuild the entire K-12 system on a platform of accountability, attract more top-flight recruits into teaching, and use technology very differently to improve instruction.  I have no objections at all to attracting and hiring better teachers, and I think there is the potential to use technology to improve instruction although Klein admits that he is now paid by the News Corporation to work on exactly this, so it would be more surprising if this topic *didn’t* make his top three.  My main objection to his proposal is to rebuild the K-12 system on a platform of accountability, by which he means getting children to take standardized tests and tying teacher pay to children’s performance on those tests.  In my pre-Master’s days before I started researching this topic I would see news articles on the Obama administration’s Race to the Top and think that tying teacher pay to student performance sounded like a good idea – why *wouldn’t* you pay teachers better when their students get better test scores?  Then when I started to learn more about this I realized *how* some teachers were achieving better test scores – they were sacrificing real, deep learning on subjects the students were interested in in favor of simple fact memorization to improve student test scores. Finland has taken the opposite approach, professionalizing teaching requiring a master’s degree for entry into the system, paying new recruits more (unlike the system in the U.S. which pays new teachers horrifically badly and back-loads the compensation into the early retirement and pension with health benefits for those teachers who hang on for 25 years even though they’re burned out and just going through the motions), and giving teachers a great deal of freedom to determine what they teach and how they teach it.  Finland’s children are only tested once, at the end of high school, but when they are tested they far out-score American children.  For several years Finland was at the very top of international league tables of student performance, although those numbers have dropped a bit in recent years as they go through a period of budgetary pressure. Finally, the more I learned about standardized testing, the more I realized that standardized testing isn’t a very good way to assess what children know.  Firstly, it’s possible that the tests used to assess children’s performance may be biased against poor, non-White children because they tend to require a set of skills and knowledge that is more likely to be possessed by children of higher socio-economic backgrounds.  Secondly, the socio-economic gap is widened because children from rich families get test preparation outside of school, which children from poor families cannot afford.  Thirdly, standardized tests tend to measure, as much as anything else, a child’s ability to take a standardized test – which is usually a different skillset from that needed to engage in deep learning and critical inquiry.  In fact, researchers at the RAND Corporation looked at standardized tests from seventeen states – and picked the states whose tests are regarded as the most demanding.  0% of students were assessed on deeper learning in mathematics, 1-6% were assessed on deeper learning in reading, and 2-3% were assessed on deeper learning in writing through these tests (Yuan & Le 2012).  Fourthly, many educators are leaving the field because they are frustrated by the difficulty of trying to produce high quality teaching in a political environment that prizes test results above all else.  Fifthly, it is especially the teachers of struggling children who are affected, as these children are branded “failures,” along with their teachers, when required test outcomes are not met (Kohn 2004).  So who are the main beneficiaries of increased reliance on testing?  Well, the companies that produce the tests for one.  Standard & Poors, the financial rating service, has been contracted by Michigan and Pennsylvania (to the tune of $10 million each), to publish the performance of every school district in a state, based largely on test score results – and on the assumption that test score results are an appropriate metric of school performance.  But Standard & Poors has a vested interest in this conclusion: it is owned by McGraw Hill, which is one of the largest creators of...

This episode comes to us by way of a suggestion from my friend Jess, who told me she had joined an outing with some children in her three-year-old son’s preschool class. She said some of the slightly older children were running around playing that their hands were guns and shooting at each other, and the teachers were pretty much just ignoring it, which really shocked her. So I thought to myself “I bet some smart person has done some research on this” and so I went out and found us just such a smart person to talk with. Diane E. Levin, Ph.D. is Professor of Education at Wheelock College in Boston, Massachusetts where she has been training early childhood professionals for over twenty-five years. She teaches courses on play, violence prevention, action research. Her book, The War Play Dilemma, provides a theoretical view of why children engage in war play and how parents and teachers can support the development that occurs when children engage in this kind of play – and do it in a way that doesn’t make us feel queasy.   Dr. Diane E. Levin's Book The war play dilemma: What every parent and teacher needs to know - Affiliate link   References Dunn, J. & Hughes, C. (2001). “I got some swords and you’re dead!”: Violent fantasy, antisocial behavior, friendship, and moral sensibility in young children. Child Development 72(2), 491-505. Fehr, K.K. & Russ, S.W. (2013). Aggression in pretend play and aggressive behavior in the classroom. Early Education and Development 24, 332-345. DOI: 10.1080/10409289.2012.675549 Ferguson, C.J. (2007). Evidence for publication bias in video game violence effects literature: A meta-analytic review. Aggression & Violent Behavior 57, 348-364. Hart, J.L., & Tannock, M.T. (2013). Young children’s play fighting and use of war toys. Encyclopedia on Early Childhood Development. Retrieved from: http://www.child-encyclopedia.com/play/according-experts/young-childrens-play-fighting-and-use-war-toys Holland, P. (203). We don’t play with guns here: War, weapon and superhero play in the early years. Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press Levin, D.E. & Carlsson-Paige, N. (2006). The war play dilemma: What every parent and teacher needs to know (2nd Ed.). New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Lober R., Lacourse, E., & Homimsh, D.L. (2005). Homicide, violence, and developmental trajectories. In R.E. Tremblay, W.W. Hartup, & J. Archer (Eds.), Developmental origins of aggression. New York, NY: Guilford Press. Teachers Resisting Unhealthy Children’s Entertainment (n.d.). Website. http://www.truceteachers.org   Read Full Transcript Transcript Jen:  [00:30] Hello and welcome to today’s episode of Your Parenting Mojo, which is called The War Play Dilemma. This episode comes to us by way of a suggestion from my friend Jess, who had told me that she had joined an outing with some children in her three year old son’s preschool class and she said that some of the slightly older children were running around and playing, that their hands were guns and shooting each other and the teachers were pretty much just ignoring it, which really shocked her. Jen:   [00:54] So I thought to myself, I bet some smart person has done some research on this. And I went out and found us just such a smart person to talk with today. So Diane Levin, Ph.D Is Professor of Education at Wheelock College in Boston, Massachusetts, where she’s been training early childhood professionals for over 25 years. She teaches courses on play violence prevention and action research and her book, The War Play Dilemma, provides a theoretical view of why children engage in war play and how parents and teachers can support the development that occurs when children engage in this kind of play and also do it in a way that doesn’t make us feel queasy. Professor Levin has a BS in child development from Cornell University, an M.S. In special education from Wheelock College and an interdisciplinary Ph.D in Sociology of Education and Child Development from Tufts University. Welcome, Professor Levin. Dr. Levin: [01:42] Hello. It’s a pleasure to be with you and being able to talk about this issue. Jen:   [01:46] So let’s set the stage here. So war games aren’t found in all cultures, but they are found in many, both today and also historically. And I read in your book that archeologists have found the remnants of what might have been toys used for war play by the ancient Egyptians. So I’m wondering if kids had been playing at war for ever, apparently, why the sudden concern what’s changed recently? Dr. Levin:   [02:07] Well, I think there’s always been some concerns from parents who were thinking that they didn’t want their boys to be aggressive, didn’t want them to focus on violence, wanted them to grow up and be humane citizens. But I, I think one of the things that’s happened in our culture in the last say 30 or 40 years as media has become a bigger and bigger force in children’s lives, in as marketing of toys has become a bigger force in children’s lives, violence is one of the one that the items that’s used to market to boys war toys, guns there, there were. They used to be cowboys and Indians; that was one of the first ways they were marketed and some people worry about that and the messages that taught about Indians, but it was a big…I grew up in Texas and count cowgirls and Indians was something I played. Dr. Levin:    [03:02] It’s always been an interest of children to figure out what does it mean to be a boy? What does it mean to be a girl? Violence and weapons has been something that’s been marketed to boys and I’m sure we’ll talk about that more, but children look in the world around them to figure out what to play and how to play and they’ll look for some of the things that seem the most dramatic, the most confusing, the most exciting, and when they see violent weapons and things, that’s one of the things that boys find for them Jen: [03:36] Hm. And so why is that? Why are boys more attracted to war play than girls? Dr. Levin:   [03:41] Because boys learn already by around a year and a half that they fit into one category, the male category and girls fit into the female category. Children tend to think in dichotomies when they’re young, good and bad, right and wrong. Boy and girl, mom and dad, they tend to think that way and what’s for me and what’s not for me, and so when they learn, I’m a girl, I’m not a boy, or I’m a boy, I’m not a girl, they then start looking at what goes to me, what doesn’t go to me, and they see very quickly. I mean they might start at immediately thinking princesses because that’s what already girls will see pink and you know, and rosy colors and princessy things. That’s what’s there for me because that’s what they see in their environment often in their rooms and the toys they get. And boys will see, you know, tough and red and blue and green and and tough and fighting and superheros and so forth and so that’s what they’re drawn to. And in part our culture has created that and in part marketers do that because they do make it very different because they can market more things to have a whole culture and a whole boys culture and if you have a girl and a boy child will end up having to get solely different things. Dr. Levin:   [04:59] Even a boy’s bike and a girl’s bike. They can’t have the same bikes, the same baby carriages, which you get a pink one and a blue one. It affects parents, it affects children, but children are drawn to the things that they very quickly learn of their colors or their objects are their toys and so forth. It makes a big impression on them when they are looking for concrete things that are for them and even when kids get to preschool or to toddler school that they’ll look in the environment to the things that are for them. A former preschool teacher, it was something, you know, we thought a lot about his teachers. I entered the field at the beginning of the women’s movement when we first started thinking about these issues and first started studying these issues and we saw at very young ages, kids where we received the great divide and we started documenting it. Dr. Levin:    [05:54] And that’s when suddenly when I was interested in this topic, the war play dilemma gotten written when I was already teaching a little bit about this topic and how to help teachers encourage girls and boys to play together more. And suddenly teachers were saying they started having boys obsessed with war play and shooting. And why was that happening? And they had taught for many years and thought they were making progress with having things less stereotyped and suddenly it had gotten worse and we couldn’t figure out why. Nancy Carlsson Paige, who I worked with on this book, we started trying to figure it out, why would we, why are teachers saying this? And what we found out was television had been deregulated, children’s television had been deregulated under the Reagan administration. Sounds like a long time ago well it was, but within one year of deregulation, nine of the 10 best selling toys had a TV show before that time you were not allowed to market products that are exact replicas of TV products. Dr. Levin:   [06:59] You could do it with movies and Star Wars had done it and it was a huge success and it was all products for boys and it was mostly fighting toys. TV wanted to do it. They managed to get the Federal Communications Commission to deregulate television for children and within one year of deregulation, nine of the best selling toys had TV shows. And it was like power rangers, GI Joe Transformers; all fighting things. For girls it was Care Bears and My Little Ponies. They use gender to do the marketing and the teachers started seeing the effects. Boys going around karate, chopping, pretending to shoot; much harder to get girls and boys to play together again and more and more kind of let less gender neutral play became a big problem for teachers who really were trying to have gender neutral classrooms or as gender neutral as possible. And teachers started trying to ban war play. Dr. Levin:  [08:00] They family had guerrilla wars in their rooms where kids were sneaking around, know gradually know things… I haven’t done direct research lately, although I teach a lot; I hear a lot from teachers about what’s going on now and you know that they’re still being the gender divisions going on, but things have changed around play as kids spend more and more time glued to screens and less time playing teachers are finding different problems she’s play rather than just the fighting and the princesses. So that’s what they focus on more. Dr. Levin:    [08:35] What are some of those different problems? Some of the different problems are now they have children who just aren’t interested in play as much. Maybe not when they’re two, but sometimes even then they come to the classroom and look for screens, if there’s a couple of screens, that’s what they want to play with. Dr. Levin:    [08:53] One teacher even talked about, she put out Play Doh and a kid poked it and said, what does it do? Like they were trying to push a button, you know, they, they just didn’t know where the, you know, what the Play Doh was all about. But you know, in the days that I was talking about earlier on when kids were not as screen dependent, even though they were getting more and more involved with screen content like power rangers, teachers would have children, boys taking the Play Doh and making toy guns and going pow pow, pow. And helping teachers and parents think about how do you deal with that was something that we had to deal with a lot. Now that you know, two year olds, three year olds like in the story start running around shooting. A lot of teachers haven’t thought about it as much now. It’s not part of teacher training, it’s not part of the standards the teachers have to meet when they’re being trained to be teachers and it’s not an issue I hear talked about that much, but people will then like you come to me when they suddenly see problems, and have questions and concerns and um, I think it’s a really important issue for us to think about what lesson, you know, kids, if they’re not playing it still very quickly get involved in violent video games. Dr. Levin:   [10:14] There’s all kinds of messages about violence being fun, violence is exciting, Violence is what you do to have a good time that children, boys especially are getting. And it’s really important that we think about it and it’s great you’re taking on this topic. Jen:   [10:32] Thank you. What you said brings up something: you said that teachers are not trained on how to deal with children playing with pretend guns in a school environment. And I had no idea. I assumed someone was talking to teachers about this stuff and what that connects to is the idea that well, why of course we wouldn’t want our children to play at guns. And so would that sort of, it reinforces something I read elsewhere that was a book by Penny Holland out of the UK I think wrote hers just before you did. And she talked about how there were pretty much blanket bans on playing at guns in the UK and nobody really had any idea why nobody had put any thought into it or done research on it or based on any kind of theoretical grounding. It was just a “common sense” thing as, as it were. And so you’re saying that teachers are not trained in any way on how to deal with this? It makes me feel as though were where we are where the UK was, you know, a decade or so ago. Dr. Levin:  [11:38] Actually, if you read the second edition of my book in the first edition came out about 15 years and I actually was in England and studied the issue there and compared it to the US when I was finishing up that and in England they were much further along. I mean they didn’t have to think about it in the same way television wasn’t deregulated there in the same way that… It was just beginning. They were just beginning to bring American television over there, so it was just beginning to be an issue and I studied it there as it was beginning to enter the lives of children in schools and families and I interviewed teachers about suddenly then becoming aware of it as an issue which I couldn’t study here; it had already taken over when I became aware of an issue here. So when will it help me a lot come to understand it, but what I say about it here is teachers have never had a lot of training in children’s play, but now they don’t impart because what they need training in is how do you teach the alphabet and reading to four year olds, you know, how do you, there’s much more testing, the common core standards, I’m so forth and there’s more and more pushed to get accredited as a teacher to get more and more formal courses on testing, evaluation, skills teaching, math literacy and so forth. And so there’s, it’s harder and harder to fit it in. I’m even more. I teach, which is known for training developmentally train teachers for over a century now. We worked very, very hard to be able to fit into a students courses given all the other mandates for them to be able to pass the state certification tests that our teachers have to take. So it’s very hard. So that it’s very unusual for it to happen. But the issue of gun play, a lot of people think, oh, it’s bad and I don’t think, oh, it’s bad. I think, oh, well it depends on the nature of the play. Jen:   [13:42] All right, let’s, let’s not get into that yet because I know we have a ton to talk about on that. Um, and I know that that your position and opinion is going to be so different than what parents might assume is the default position, but I want to lay some groundwork first in terms of thinking about theory so that your position is well understood by the time we get to it. So first I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit more about how children’s brains are wired. You talked a little...

This episode is part of a series on understanding the intersection of race, privilege, and parenting.  Click here to view all the items in this series. How social groups are formed has profound implications for what we teach our children about our culture. Professor Yarrow Dunham of Yale University tells us how we all group people in our heads according to criteria that we think are important – in many cases it’s a valuable tool that allows us to focus our mental energy. But when we look at ideas like race and gender, we see that we tend to classify people into these groups based on criteria that may not actually be useful at all. This episode will shed further light on Episode 6, “Wait, is my toddler racist?” and will lay the groundwork for us to study groupings based on gender in an upcoming episode. References Baron, A.S. & Dunham, Y. (2015). Representing “Us” and “Them”: Building blocks of intergroup cognition. Journal of Cognition and Development 16(5), 780-801. DOI: 10.1080/15248372.2014.1000459 Baron, A.S., Dunham, Y., Banaji, M., & Carey, S. (2014). Constraints on the acquisition of social category concepts. Journal of Cognition and Development 15(2), 238-268. DOI: 10.1080/15248372.2012.742902 Dunham, Y., Baron, A.S., & Carey, S. (2011). Consequences of “minimal” group affiliations in children. Child Development 82(3), 793-811. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01577.x Dunham, Y., Chen, E.E., & Banaji, M.R. (2013). Two signatures of implicit intergroup attitudes: Developmental invariance and early enculturation. Psychological Science Online First. DOI: 10.1177/0956797612463081 Dunham, Y., Stepanova, E.V., Dotsch, R., & Todorov, A. (2015). The development of race-based perceptual categorization: Skin color dominates early category judgments. Developmental Science 18(3), 469-483. DOI: 10.1111/desc.12228 Rhodes, M., Leslie, S-J, Saunders, K., Dunham, Y., & Cimpian, A. (In Press). How does social essentialism affect the development of inter-group relations? Developmental Science. Retrieved from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/306482087_How_does_social_essentialism_affect_the_development_of_inter-group_relations Richter, N., Over, H., & Dunham, Y. (2016). The effects of minimal group membership on young preschoolers’ social preferences, estimates of similarity, and behavioral attribution. Collabra 2(1), p.1-8. DOI: : 10.1525/collabra.44   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"]   Transcript Jen:   [00:30] Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We’ve already talked quite a bit about the development of racism on Your Parenting Mojo and if you missed it, you might want to go back to episode six, which was called Wait, Is My Toddler Racist, and in that episode we talked about some of the unconscious psychological processes that are at work in all of us that can lead our children to develop racist attitudes and we learned that some of the concepts we might hold to be true if we hadn’t specifically learned about them – things like the fact that children just don’t notice racial differences unless they’re pointed out and the children won’t become racist if they aren’t explicitly taught to be – really aren’t true at all. Today I’m joined by an expert in social group formation who’s going to help us to understand how social groups form and specifically how we formulate our ideas about racial groups and will give us some practical tools we can use in our attempts to raise children who aren’t racist. Yarrow Dunham is Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Yale University. He received his doctorate in education and also his masters from Harvard University and his BA from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Professor Dunham leads the Social Cognitive Development Lab at Yale where he and his colleagues look for answers to questions about how and why we affiliate with social groups, how we evaluate those groups, and how the concept of fairness develops in children and how all of this varies across cultures. Welcome Professor Dunham. Dr. Dunham: [01:49] Thank you. Great to be here. Jen:   [01:50] All right, so let’s dive in. Can you tell us what is psychological essentialism and why it’s so important to our work? Dr. Dunham: [01:58] So psychological essentialism is the view that differences between people are based in deep internal property is probably the easiest way to think about them. In the modern view is something like genes, so what makes to people different or two groups of people different is that something inside of them is different and a key part of this idea is we think those differences are there in that essence is there, even if we can’t see it, so that creates situation in which I can get it wrong about what group. You’re right, I can think you’re in one group based on say the way you look, but I can find out something. Say something about your essence, something about your genes or maybe your ancestry that will lead me to overrule my initial idea and say that I got it wrong. So really at the end of the day of essentialism is that view that group differences are based in sort of natural and deep differences within people. Jen:   [02:48] And that came up, I think in our previous episode on racism. It’s the idea that we all kind of form these ideas about people based on perhaps a split second view of, of what we see of them. Is that right? Dr. Dunham: [03:01] Yes, that’s right. So we can form categories of people very quickly, we can decide that someone belongs to, in particular, certain categories, what we might think of as the most salient ways in which we group people, things like age, gender, race, these things tend to come to mind quite quickly. And even as you talked about in that last episode, even kind of automatically, in terms of as soon as we encounter someone even for the first time Jen: [03:25] And is it right that it’s kind of a survival mechanism that we, we wouldn’t physically be able to process the information that we needed to process. If I looked at you and try to think about who you are on an individual trade by trade basis, I wouldn’t also be able to conduct this conversation with you. Dr. Dunham: [03:41] I mean at least it would certainly be much more difficult. And the way I think about it as categories of people are really just one kind of category and we have categories of all kinds of other things. We have categories of objects in the room, you know, tables and chairs, and we have categories of animals and plants and in all of those domains, these are really, really useful. These really simplify the job of thinking about the world. You know, if you tell me there’s a chair in the other room, I don’t have to think that hard about what the thing is like that you have in the other room and I can occasionally be surprised if it’s, you know, some fun midcentury modern thing, but I have a pretty clear idea of what’s going to be in the other room and what it’s going to be good for – sitting on say. And that’s super useful and this is true for people as well and in many domains it doesn’t bother us at all and needn’t, right? when you will go see a dentist. We have a lot of ideas about what skills this dentist ought to have and how we’re going to interact with that dentist. And that’s, as you’re pointing out, immensely useful and just kind of smoothing the interactions we have. I don’t have to go in there wondering how it all works. Right. I have a lot of prior knowledge I can draw on. Jen:  [04:41] All right, so since we’re talking about, you know, what are some different social groups, tell us about who were the Zarpies and who were the Gorps and what did you find children’s relationships with Zarpies and Gorps? Dr. Dunham:  [04:52] So both my lab and some of my collaborators and some of this research was in collaboration with a bunch of other people, but I’ll just mention Marjorie Rhoads, a professor at NYU who has done a lot of work in the same vein and those are basically Zarpies and Gorps – those are just nonsense labels that we use to introduce children to some brand new social group that we, the researchers have made up. The reason we do this is while we do a lot of research on groups like race or gender, it gets a lot more complicated because different kids have such a different range of background experiences. They may have learned different things, experienced different things and so there’s just a lot more variability and what kids might think about those groups. But if we use these groups that we’ve created, like as Zarpie, we know that what kids know about it is absolutely nothing right when they come into our lab, they had no prior knowledge because we made them up and that way we can get a clearer view of children’s more intuitive or natural ways of thinking about groups when you pull out or abstract away from prior knowledge. Dr. Dunham: [05:50] So that’s a little background for why we might use these kinds of funny sounding groups that are just designed to be intriguing to children. Right. And kind of fun sounding to children. And in the research that we did, basically we introduced children to a group like the Zarpies and in one case we induced them to essentialize the group. In other words, to think about the Zarpies as really being something deep and important about who you are. And another case we didn’t. We didn’t lead them to think about Zarpies and such and such an essentialized manner. And then we asked, did this manipulation – did the extent to which we lead kids to be centralized. The group change how they felt about the group that if for example, lead them to dislike the group more or to share less resources, less of the child’s own resources with them, and we did this because there’s been a long standing series of arguments about the relationship between essentialism and prejudice with a lot of people, assuming that essentialism will lead to prejudice, that if you essentially as a group, you’re more likely to consider it to be prejudice towards that group and maybe not to go on for too long, but just to motivate that intuition, why might we think that if you think groups are really, really deeply important and based on internal properties of of the people and you had learned that a group has some bad property. Dr. Dunham: [07:07] Maybe take an example with gender. Let’s say you hold a stereotype that boys are better at math than girls. If you essentialize that category, you’re very likely to think, well, that must be something about the nature of boys and girls. That’s what it’s like to be a boys, is to be better at math, to be a girl is to be worse at math. In fact, in that case we think that’s probably not true. It’s probably much more likely that it’s cultural factors, but the danger of essential, as I think comes out pretty clearly here, if you essentialize the group and you now know that the groups differ in some way, you’re likely to think that that difference is very deep and kind of natural rather than cultural or environmental. So this is what we wanted to test in a more experimental fashion with the Zarpies. And what we found is it actually didn’t in our study, lead to more prejudice. So kids were actually pretty positive about these cartoonish Zarpies that we introduced them to. However it did lead them to not be as willing to share with them to be in some sense less generous when they were sharing resources with the Zarpies. Jen:  [08:06] And this is when they are a member of the Zarpie group or when they are a member of the Gorp group? Dr. Dunham: [08:10] So in this one, children are not actually members of either groups or just learning about this as another group, but in that sense the Zarpies are kind of an outgroup as a group to which they do not belong and this was a little bit surprising to us. So we sort of replicated it a few times to make sure we really had it right. But what we think is going on now as if you think about it a little more, there can be a really good or really bad or really positive or really negative group that you might have essentialize. So there’s not a necessary connection. We think now between sort of valence like how good or bad the group is and whether you essentially it, but we think that essentialism essentially maybe a bad choice of words, but essentialism leads us to really think of the boundary between groups as very rigid and strong. And when you do, it seems that kids elect to not share as much as they think about that group is really distinct and different from them. They think, well, I’ll keep my resources to myself rather than sharing, but they don’t necessarily think the group is bad. Jen:  [09:07] Okay, alright. And then didn’t you do a follow up experiment where you made the children a part of the Zarpie group and tell them that they were also Zarpies. Dr. Dunham: [09:16] So we’ve done studies a lot like this. Not always using things like Gorps and Zarpies; sometimes just using something even simpler like a blue group and a red group. And in these kinds of studies we and lots of people have done these studies now with children going all the way down to about age three. And so for example, in some of the studies I’ve done in this line, if you simply tell a child you’re going to be in the red group, why don’t you put on this red shirt so you really remember which group you’re going to be in. We find that actually that in and of itself is enough to get kids to like their own group more. So that’s enough to get kids to think. Yeah, the red group seems like it’s probably better. And also to even be willing to share more with members of their own group and so on. Jen: [09:55] Yeah. I’ve noticed that this phenomenon is alive and well in adults as well. Dr. Dunham:  [10:00] Absolutely. Jen:   [10:01] Yeah. I remember sitting in a. I actually went to Yale for my first masters and I did some classes in the business school and I remember one of the professors saying, you know, you guys are all here; you’ve come from disparate walks of life. You don’t have very much in common. I mean obviously in business school you do have some things in common, but you are going to be enticed to think of each other as a sort of a cohesive unit and do favors for each other and help each other get ahead in your careers based on the fact that you’re all sitting together in the classroom, which really to a large extent is pretty arbitrary. Dr. Dunham: [10:35] Yeah, absolutely. I think this is an immensely important point. Thinking about how humans, reason about groups and even about the development of racism, because what it says is we’re really flexible in what groups we decide to care about or affiliate with and we’re not just flexible. Some of them are essentially things that...