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

“Be a man.”  “Boys don’t cry.”  “Don’t be a sissy.” Boys hear these things all the time – from parents, from teachers, from friends and peers.  What does it do to their emotional lives when they crave close relationships but society tells them to keep emotional distance from others? Join my guest Alan Turkus and me as we quiz Dr. Judy Chu, who lectures on this topic at Stanford and was featured in the (awesome!) documentary The Mask You Live In. This episode is a must-listen if you’re the parent of a boy, and may even help those of you with girls to understand more about why boys and men treat girls and women the way they do. Don’t have a boy?  Check out How To Raise A Girl With A Healthy Body Image.   References Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chu, J. When boys become boys: Development, relationships, and masculinity.  New York, NY: NYU Press. (Affiliate link) Maccoby, E.E. (1990). Gender and relationships: A developmental account. American Psychologist 45(4), 513-520. Miedzian, M. (1991). Boys will be boys: Breaking the link between masculinity and violence. New York, NY: Doubleday. Pollack, W. (1998). Real boys: Rescuing our sons from the myths of boyhood. New York, NY: Random House.   Read Full Transcript   Transcript Jen: [00:40] Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Regular listeners may remember that a few weeks ago, I interviewed Dr Renee Engeln who wrote the book Beauty Sick on the topic of raising girls with a healthy body image. Even though I don’t have a son, I know a lot of you do, so in today’s episode we’re going to talk about some of the challenges associated with raising sons and how we can be better parents to sons, and specifically how fathers can be better parents to sons. So since I am not a father and don’t have a son, I figured I’d better find someone who is both of those things. So today I welcome a co-interviewer, Alan. Alan grew up in New Jersey with a comfortable middle class family whose father was physically present and not physically abusive, but who had what Alan calls embarrassing spasms of anger that came with yelling and throwing things and when he wasn’t angry, he was pretty emotionally absent, so Alan feels as though he didn’t really have a great model for this whole fathering thing, but he wants to parent his own son differently and it started to take some steps in that direction, but he isn’t really sure if it’s enough or what else he should be doing. Welcome Alan. Alan:    [01:42] Thank you. Jen:    [01:44] And to help Alan and I figure all this out. I’m so excited that we’re joined today by Dr Judy Chu. I first learned of her work on the documentary called The Mask You Live In, which you can rent on Amazon or on Netflix and I would highly encourage you to do that even if you’re the parent of a girl because it really helped me to understand some of the reasons why boys and men treat girls and women the way they do. Dr Chu is featured in that film and when I looked her up, I saw she’d written a book called When Boys Become Boys, which I devoured as soon as I got it, and I knew she was the right person for us to talk with. She also teaches a course on boys psychosocial development at Stanford University. Her work aims to support boys healthy resistance against societal constraints that undermine their connections to themselves and others. Welcome Dr. Chu. Dr. Chu:   [02:28] Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here. Jen:    [02:31] So Dr. Chu. I wonder if we could just start sort of in the weeds a little bit here about your research because a lot of the studies that we cover on this show are experimental in nature and that means that some researchers take some children to the lab and maybe they do something to make them uncomfortable and then they give the children a difficult task and see how they respond and then we try and generalize that behavior out to the real world and I’m familiar with the quote from the great psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner who called this the science of behavior of children in strange situations with strange adults for the briefest possible periods of time, but your research takes such a different approach from that. Can you just tell us a little bit about how you go about studying boys? Dr. Chu:    [03:11] Sure. Well, I guess the best way to describe my research is exploratory studies because like you at the time I hadn’t grown up as a boy and I didn’t have a son. And so in a way it was very much like anthropological research where I was going to learn from boys about what it was like for them to grow up as boys amidst, you know, a culture that has specific messages about what it means to be a real boy, quote unquote, or a real man. And I wanted to learn from the boys themselves, you know, what they’re capable of knowing and doing and relationships. So a lot of my methods really involved kind of like ethnographic observations. Just really trying to approach the boys as… I even told them that they’re my teachers because I don’t know what it’s like to be them. And so really looking to them as key informants and then kind of participating in their everyday lives at school as a participant observer. Dr. Chu:   [04:01] So watching what they were doing, but also asking them about it and kind of really centering everything around developing kind of trusting and comfortable relationships so that they would talk to me as I was, you know, obviously different. I was an adult, I was a woman and kind of letting them get to know me so that they could feel that they could tell me things or share with me or also tell me if they didn’t feel like sharing things with me, which was also a part of the process. So I really wanted to respect and honor their wishes and their levels of comfort and then following up those observations later in the year once we had established relationships with interviews that I did – conducted either one on one with the boys or the boys in groups and that just depended on their preference. I would ask them, do you want to meet with me on your own or do you want to meet with me with some of your buddies? Dr. Chu:    [04:45] And they would let me know what they preferred because I brought toys to my meeting and because they were some times more desirable character that each boy wanted to play with. That became a way of getting to meet with them one on one because they didn’t want to have to kind of negotiate who got to be which characters and whatnot. So, um, but it was really very much based on what’s called the relational approach to psychological inquiry, which really kind of tries to account for the fact that the stories people tell us or the things that they share with us about their lives really depends on how they see us and how they see our motives and really starts from a place of, you know, placing at the center of the relationship between the researcher and the participant. Jen:  [05:24] And so how many times did you meet with the boys roughly? Dr. Chu:  [05:27] Let’s see. I studied them throughout their pre kindergarten year and then followed up in their kindergarten year. I went at least once a week for two to three hours a week. And let’s see. I probably had about 48 days that I was there. And of those 48 I probably did interviews on 36 to 38 of those days. And so I met with them quite frequently and it was kind of eventually became on-demand, so I’d show up and the boys would kind of, you know, this was much later once they felt comfortable with me, but I’d show up and they’d come and request like, can you meet with me today, can you take me today? And then I’d try to make sure I met with everyone who had asked to be met with. And then also some of the boys who are a little more shy or hesitant, I also would ask them and when they didn’t feel comfortable, I’d let them pass and then if they wanted to then we eventually met in that way. So I tried to kind of, you know, more or less meet with at least everyone who wanted to. And eventually all of the boys did meet with me several times, so, you know, a handful but some more than others. Jen:   [06:24] So this is very different from pulling a kid into a lab and get spending them in a five minute experiment and generating a result at the end. And I know that with an experiment you can potentially reach a larger number of people. You studied a relatively smaller number of people and I’m curious about the generalizability of your results. Can you talk a little bit about that? Dr. Chu: [06:43] Oh no, that’s a great question. Yeah, of course. I’m happy to talk about that. One of the things that kind of drove my research was that at the time, and this was in the late nineties, nineteen nineties, a lot of the literature on boys was not really talking about their relationships and the centrality of relationships in their development because relationships were kind of deemed feminine. And so it’s like, Oh, if you’re going to study relationships then you should be looking at girls because that’s what girls do. And so the boys relational capabilities and kind of their styles and all those things were very much overlooked or underestimated or just kind of neglected. Like, you know, some of the books that had been written with just say, oh well boys don’t really hardwired to talk about emotions and relationships. And so there was really this missing discourse in the literature on boys. Dr. Chu:  [07:29] So what I really wanted to do is go in and focus on the boys perspectives to learn about their experiences and the relational approach that I adopted was very much based in studies that had emerged out of questioning traditional psychological methods which kind of approached experiments or studies as kind of what they call the black box approach where you think, okay, this person is this mysterious black thoughts. And like you said earlier, you know, we can manipulate situations and kind of see how they respond and try to guess at what they think about it. But my mentor at the time at Harvard, her name is Carol Gilligan. And one of the things that came out of her work in addition to the research on girls’ relationships and girls’ development that came out of the Harvard project on girls’ development and women’s psychology was this method that really said, you know, you can ask people about their experiences. Dr. Chu: [08:14] And if you create a context or a situation that is comfortable and familiar and trusting and inviting, people can tell you what they’re thinking, and you can trust that. And so the approach was really that the boys know something about their experience and they can tell me about it if I can create a situation that makes them able to be open and honest with me. And so yeah, in a way it’s probably seen as a little bit more of a radical approach to psychological inquiry. But in terms of the kinds of questions that I wanted to examine, it was really the most appropriate method as opposed to coming in and, you know, because one of the things that I document in my book is just how long it took, you know, several visits, maybe 10 to 15 visits before the boys started to feel comfortable with me because I was a stranger to them. Dr. Chu:    [09:00] And understandably what they wouldn’t know if they could trust me or if they even wanted to talk to me. And so really giving them time to feel like, okay, who is this person? What does she want to know is safe for me to talk to her, do I even want to talk to her? And then finally kind of realizing that, you know, because I was genuinely interested in what they had to say really coming out and sharing with me things that, you know, sometimes they would say, oh, you know, don’t tell the teachers that I told you this or, you know, don’t let the other boys know that this is happening. Because a lot of them often felt that they were the only ones kind of struggling with some of the messages and pressures that were coming into their lives. Even at the young age of four. Jen:   [09:37] Yeah. So you answered another of my questions, which is why did you get interested in this if you didn’t even have a son yet? Dr. Chu:    [09:46] That was a really wonderful question and if I could just, I’ll try to speak very briefly about it, but I was actually brought to this study by boys themselves and it actually started with work with adolescent boys because my first year at Harvard, after I went home. I was driving around my brother and his friends, they were all 13 years old so they couldn’t drive and one of his friends kind of said to me, Oh, Harvard, you know, tell us what you’re learning there, you know, basically sarcastically like “impress us.” And I said, well, one of the things I learned about was when you know, these studies of girls and how to support girls, and he, this 13 year old boy says to me, oh, everyone’s so obsessed with girls, they’re talking about girls and how to support them and that we need to support them. Dr. Chu:  [10:24] He goes, and that’s fine with me, but nobody’s talking to boys and we have something to say too. And he goes, “I know you should study boys; you should start with me.” And so I went back to Harvard that fall, told my advisor Carol about this, and she said, you should go back and study him. Clearly he has something to say. And so when I went home for winter break, that’s what I did. I started with an interview with this 13 year old. He talked for two hours about, you know, just kind of things that were, what was going on with him, what was hard, what was easy, what was on his mind. And I actually spent the first year of my studies studying adolescent boys, but what I found was that by adolescents they had already started to kind of reconcile the discrepancy between this is the way people think boys are and this is the way I experienced myself to be and the fact that there’s a gap between those things is just the way things are and you have to accept that gap as a part of growing up. Dr. Chu:  [11:22] So that was kind of what I was seeing and hearing from adolescent boys. And so Carol said, you know, you really need to start earlier when they’re still in the middle of struggling with that discrepancies when they’re not yet kind of reconciled to the fact that people just aren’t going to know what they’re really like. And so her hypothesis was that what she was observing or had observed in adolescent girls, which is kind of this heightening of pressures for girls to conform to these feminine ideals and stereotypes, that the girls then had healthy resistance against. She felt that, you know, in our patriarchal culture where men still have most of the privileges in terms of power and status, that she thinks that in patriarchy they go after the boys earlier at the boys start hearing things like, don’t be a sissy, don’t cry, don’t be a Mama’s boy. Dr. Chu:    [12:08] Those messages come in earlier. And her theory or hypothesis was that it came in at early childhood. So she said, why don’t you go in and find out, you know, what’s going on for these boys. And at first I was actually a little bit worried about that because I hadn’t been working with young children very much. And because I felt like, oh, I could talk to adolescents, I just finished adolescence, but I didn’t know what to expect with the younger kids. And they were amazing, you know, once we’re able to establish familiarity and comfort and trust. They were just as welcoming as the adolescent boys and it’s open to sharing. Once they knew they could trust me and that I really wanted to know what they had to say. Jen:

Folks, this one is personal for me.  As someone with an ~ahem~ family history of disordered thinking about body image, it is very, very high on my priority list to get this right with my daughter.  Dr. Renee Engeln, author of the book Beauty Sick, helps us sort through issues like: Should I tell my daughter she’s pretty? What should I say when she asks me if she’s pretty? Is teaching our daughters about media literacy – the ability to critique images they see in the media – enough to protect them, or not? …and so much more! I know there’s a lot more to raising a girl than just this issue, and in time I hope to find another expert to discuss how we can raise daughters who aren’t limited by broader societal expectations, but there’s enough on this topic to make it an episode by itself. In the show, we discuss a prompt you can use to write a self-compassionate letter to yourself as a way of recognizing all the amazing things your body can do. Professor Engeln actually sent me two of them; you can find these below. You’ll have to listen to the episode to find out why this picture is here:     Body-Compassion letter (based on Kristin Neff’s exercises available at self-compassion.org): For the next 10 minutes, you will be writing a letter to yourself. The letter should be all about your body, but it should be from the perspective of an unconditionally loving imaginary friend. Think about your body from the perspective of a friend who cares about you. What would your friend want to tell you about your body? If you run out of things to write, re-write what you already have, perhaps with different wording. Think about this imaginary friend who is unconditionally loving, accepting, kind and compassionate. Imagine that this friend can see all the strengths and all the weaknesses of your body, including any aspects of your body that you may view as flawed or imperfect. Reflect upon what this friend would say about your body, knowing that you are loved and accepted with your body exactly as it is, with all your body’s very human imperfections. This friend recognizes the limits of human nature and is kind and forgiving toward you. In his/her great wisdom, this friend understands your life history and the millions of things that have happened in your life to give you the body you have in this moment. Write a letter to yourself, about your body, from the perspective of this imaginary friend. What would this friend say about your body from the perspective of unlimited compassion? How would this friend convey the deep compassion he/she feels for you, especially for the pain you feel if you tend to judge the flaws and imperfections of your body harshly? What would this friend write in order to remind you that you are only human, that all bodies have both strengths and weaknesses? As you write to yourself from the perspective of this imaginary friend, try to infuse your letter with a strong sense of his/her acceptance of your body, caring, and desire for your health and happiness. Above all else, be kind, understanding, and compassionate toward your body.   2. Body Functionality letter: For the next 10 minutes, you will be writing a letter to yourself. The letter should be all about what your body does. Think about all your body does and how it helps you do the things you want to do each day. Focus on everything your body can do for you and write a letter to yourself about that topic. If you run out of things to write, re-write what you already have, perhaps with different wording. Think about all the strengths of your body in terms of everything it can do. What has your body allowed you to do throughout your life? Think about the different parts of your body and how they each play a role in helping you do what you need to do each day.   References Engeln, R. (2017). Beauty Sick: How the cultural obsession with appearance hurts girls and women. New York, NY: HarperCollins. (Affiliate link) Fredrickson, B.L., Roberts, T.A., Noll, S.M., Quinn, D.M., & Twenge, J.M. (1998). That swimsuit becomes you: Sex differences in self-objectification, restrained eating, and math performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 75(1), 269-284. Neff, K.D. (2011). Self-compassion, self-esteem, and well-being. Social and Personality Psychology Compass 5(1), 1-12. Neff, K.D., & McGehee, P. (2010). Self-compassion and psychological resilience among adolescents and young adults. Self and Identity 9, 225-240.   Read Full Transcript   Transcript Jen:  [00:39] Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today’s episode is going to be a difficult but an important one for me. So you all know that I have a daughter who’s heading towards being three and a half and a while back, we did an episode with Dr. Christia Brown where we talked about how the differences between boys and girls at a young age are almost entirely based on culture and socialization rather than on genetic factors and that’s still true, but I wanted to take the next step in thinking about this because it seems to me as there are the impacts of culture become magnified rather than diminished as girls get older. And the effects of that culture are really not kind to our girls. And I’ve seen this firsthand myself. Those of you who listen to my episode with Dr. Atle Dyregrov on the topic of talking with children about death know that my mother died when I was young and what I didn’t mention in that episode was that she was anorexic and she actually starved herself to death. Jen:    [01:32] So we talk about a lot of topics related to child development on this show. And for the most part I kind of feel as though I have some wiggle room and whether or not I get them right. But today we’re gonna talk about raising emotionally healthy girls, and I really feel as though this is one issue that I cannot and must not screw up. So this is a must listen episode if you have daughters, but if you only have sons I’d say don’t turn us off just yet because a lot of the things that make raising girls so difficult are related to how we raise our boys. So we’re going to cover a lot more detail on that topic in another episode very soon. Jen:     [02:06] So here to guide us through some of the issues related to helping girls develop a positive body. Image is professor Renee Engeln who is an award winning professor of psychology at Northwestern University. She’s the author of Beauty Sick: How The Cultural Obsession With Appearance Hurts Girls and Women. Her work has appeared in numerous academic journals and conferences and she speaks to groups across the country. Her TEDx talk at the University of Connecticut has more than 400,000 views on YouTube and she also blogs regularly for Psychology Today. Welcome Professor Engeln. Dr. Engeln:    [02:35] Thank you for having me. Jen:  [02:37] All right, so your book is called Beauty Sick. What is beauty sickness and what are some examples of it? Dr. Engeln:     [02:43] For me, beauty sickness is what happens when you get so worried about how you look when you get so caught up in the mirror that you don’t have the time and the energy and the resources left to put into the things that you really care about, to things that matter more to you than how you look. Jen:   [03:02] Is this really a thing that there are people who cannot literally focus on what they’re doing because they are spending so much time thinking about how they look? Dr. Engeln:   [03:11] So I think we want to think of it as a continuum, right? So I don’t know any woman who can never focus because she’s always thinking about how she looks, but I have yet to meet a woman who hasn’t had those moments where you get distracted in the middle of an important meeting or where you’re late to something because you just can’t get your clothes looking quite like you want them to look or where you’re exhausted because you had to get up earlier in order to do more makeup and put more effort into your hair. So we pay these costs and a lot of little ways throughout the day and throughout our lives, but they add up to a cumulative effect. Jen:    [03:48] Yeah. I remember an example from the book about, I think it was girls and boys together at a prom event and the girls were all dressed in something that has to be hitched up and hitched down or something would be revealed and that’s sort of a facetious example, but if you imagine that it happens on a somewhat lesser scale on a daily basis in offices when you’re wearing heels and a skirt that you have to make sure you sit in the right way and… Dr. Engeln:    [04:10] And it, it takes you out of the moment, right? Yeah. I always tell people when I give that example of those girls I saw in that restaurant, I don’t care that they’re wearing strapless dresses or skirts are short. That’s not the issue. The issue is that it kept pulling them away from what they were doing. It kept interrupting their conversations. It’s like carving a little piece of your consciousness off and then dedicating it to solely monitoring how you look to make sure everything’s in place and everything looks okay and we don’t really see men having to focus on that in the same way women do. Jen:   [04:46] And I’m thinking specifically of one of the examples in your book about a girl who’s… The pseudonym she chose is “Artemis.” Can you tell us about her? Dr. Engeln:   [04:55] Artemis was a high school girl when I talked to her. She was around 17 years old and Artemis estimated to me that she spent 50 percent of her mental energy thinking about how she looked and for her she was particularly focused on her body size. She thought she was too heavy. Dr. Engeln:   [05:12] She wanted to be thinner. She used the term brain space, which I really liked. So she said half my brain space is for thinking about my body; half of it slept for thinking about school. That’s how she experienced herself as being sort of carved up and this is the same girl who told me when I asked her about some of the goals she had, she said, well, I can’t really think about those goals. I can’t think about getting my brain where I want it to be until I get my body where I want it to be. That’s the kind of pressure we’re talking about. Jen:    [05:40] Okay. Because women tend to think that if I was just a bit thinner, my experience of the world would be different and better in some way. Right? Dr. Engeln:  [05:49] And let’s be honest, there’s a lot of stigma in this culture around weight. We focus on appearance a lot, but it’s not true that changing how you look is going to magically open the door to happiness. If there’s no evidence that that is the case. There’s a great big literature on that out there on happiness and well-being and finding meaning in your life and the things you can pursue to get there. None of them have to do with spending more time in front of the mirror and they all have to do with spending less. Jen:   [06:19] Okay. So I’m thinking social media probably plays a fairly large role in all of this these days. Is that true? Dr. Engeln:   [06:27] Absolutely. I say this in my book. I feel bad about it, but I mean it that I thank my lucky stars I did not have to be a young girl or an adolescent girl at a time when there was social media. Jen:   [06:38] Me too. Dr. Engeln:   [06:40] It is unbelievably hard and when I talk to young girls and teenagers and even young women through adulthood about what they face on social media, it is not a healthy scene out there. I had a girl who came to hear me talk, tell me that she posts a picture on Instagram and if she gets 50 likes then she can feel okay about how she looks that day, but if she doesn’t get 50 then she knows she doesn’t look okay and will spend the whole day worried about it. And this is not a healthy way to live. Right. Instagram likes are not a cure for low competence. If that worked, we’d only have to do it once; we’d throw a picture, you’d get some likes and you’d think, oh, right, I do feel good about how I look, but it’s never going to be enough and every time you post one of those pictures where you’re trying to look sexy or skinny or perfect or filtered or whatever you’re doing, it’s also making everyone who sees that picture, think about how they look and wonder if they look good enough and it perpetuates that cycle of focusing on how we look and how other women look. It takes up a lot of our mental energy. Jen:  [07:54] I was just watching your TED talk before I got on the phone with you and I saw you demonstrate the pose that women. Can you describe it? Dr. Engeln:   [08:05] I learned this from my students and it’s been a while, I think since they first showed me me; maybe even 10 years or so and it started with skinny arms, skinny arm. I feel like a lot of women know at this point when I see pictures of women online on Instagram or Facebook, it’s rare that they don’t have skinny arms, so that’s when you purchase your hand on your hip and get your arm out at a real sharp angle. Right? And my students tell me that so that your arm doesn’t smoosh against your body. Right? So it makes your arm looks skinnier and I think, oh, okay, that’s one thing. Dr. Engeln:    [08:34] And then they tell me there’s more, right? You have to turn slightly to the side, you have to pop your knee, you have to pull your chin out just a little to make sure you don’t have double chin, and then you need to tilt your head at just the right cant. And what they told me is that they do this automatically now when someone pulls out a phone. Someone’s going to take a picture. It’s just the pose you get into. It is hard. If you know people who are going to prom or homecoming or things like that and you see pictures online, it will be hard for you to find a picture without skinny arm. Jen:    [09:04] Yeah. I don’t look at a ton of prom pictures, but I had noticed there are a few younger people that I’m friends with on Facebook and I had seen them in this sort of standard position and hadn’t realized it had become so common and once you know what it is and you know all the components of it. You see it everywhere. Dr. Engeln:   [09:21] You see it everywhere and I think some people say, well, what’s so wrong with that? When I got headshots done for my book, the photographer told me of course, “At all weddings we tell women to pose like that because they’re just happy with how their arms look.” Jen:   [09:32] I was happy to see in your jacket and cover that you do not do skinny...

Waaaay back in Episode 3, we wondered whether we had missed the boat on teaching our babies to read (didn’t you teach your baby how to read?). We eventually decided that we hadn’t, but given that many parents have a goal of instilling a love of reading into their children, what’s the best way to go about doing that? And what if your child is the kind who wriggles out of your lap at the mere sight of a book? Our second-ever repeat guest, Dr. Laura Froyen, helps us to delve into the research on this topic. We conclude by talking through some of the things parents can do to promote a love of reading, because it turns out it’s not as intuitive as one might think! Dr. Froyen's  11 Ways to Support Your Child in Learning to Read PDF guide.   References Bus, A.G. (2001). Joint caregiver-child storybook reading: A route to literacy development. In S.B. Neuman & D.K. Dickinson Handbook of Early Literacy Research. New York: Guilford. Bus, A.G., van IJzendoorn, M.H., & Pellegrini, A.D. (1995). Joint book reading makes for success in learning to read: A meta-analysis on intergenerational transmission of literacy. Review of Educational Research 65(1), 1-21. Full article available at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Marinus_Van_IJzendoorn/publication/230853169_Joint_Book_Reading_Makes_for_Success_in_Learning_to_Read_A_Meta-Analysis_on_Intergenerational_Transmission_of_Literacy/links/53f05d6f0cf26b9b7dcdfe58.pdf Burchinal, M., & Forestieri, N. (2011). Development of early literacy: Evidence from major U.S. longitudinal studies. In S.B. Neuman & D.K. Dickinson Handbook of Early Literacy Research (Vol. 3). (85-96). New York: Guilford. Bus, A.G. (2003). Social-emotional requisites for learning to read. In A. van Kleeck, S.A. Stahl, & E.B. Bauer (Eds.), On reading books to children: Parents and teachers (3-15). New York: Guilford. Butterworth, G. (2001). Joint visual attention in infancy. In G. Bremner & A. Fogel (Eds.). Blackwell handbook of infant development. (213-240). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Carlsson-Paige, N., G. Bywater McLaughlin, and J. Wolfsheimer Almon (2015). Reading instruction in kindergarten: Little to gain and much to lose. Available online at: http://www.allianceforchildhood.org/sites/allianceforchildhood.org/files/file/Reading_Instruction_in_Kindergarten.pdf Evans, M.A., & Saint-Aubin, J. (2011). Studying and modifying young children’s visual attention during book reading. In S.B. Neuman & D.K. Dickinson Handbook of Early Literacy Research (Vol. 3). (242-255). New York: Guilford. Fletcher, K.L., & Reese, E. (2005). Picture book reading with young children: A conceptual framework. Developmental Review 25, 64-103. Full article available at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kathryn_Fletcher2/publication/223236320_Picture_book_reading_with_young_children_A_conceptual_framework/links/0912f503ce1f9d05ec000000.pdf Landry, S.H., Smith, K.E., Swank, P.R., Zucker, T., Crawford, A.D., & Solari, E.F. (2011). The effects of a responsive parenting intervention on parent-child interactions during shared book reading. Developmental Psychology 48(4), 969-986. Full article available at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Paul_Swank/publication/51831766_The_Effects_of_a_Responsive_Parenting_Intervention_on_Parent-Child_Interactions_During_Shared_Book_Reading/links/0912f5097cf5ddf41c000000.pdf McBride-Chang, C. (2012). Shared-book reading: There is no downside for parents. In S. Suggate & E. Reese (Eds.), Contemporary debates in childhood education and development (pp.51-58). Abingdon, U.K.: Routeledge. Morow, L.M. (1993). Literacy development in the early years: Helping children read and write (2nd ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Notari-Syverson, A., (2006). Everyday tools of Literacy. In Learning to Read the World: Language and literacy in the first three years (61-78). Washington, D.C.: Zero to Three. Otto, B. (2008). Literacy development in early childhood: Reflective teaching for birth to age eight. Long Grove, IL: Waveland. Phillips, L.M., Norris, S.P., & Anderson, J. (2008). Unlocking the door: Is parents’ reading to children the key to early literacy development? Canadian Psychology 49(2), 82-88. Reese, E. (2012). The tyranny of shared book-reading. In S. Suggate & E. Reese (Eds.), Contemporary debates in childhood education and development (pp.59-68). Abingdon, U.K.: Routeledge. Rosenkotter, S.E., & Wanless, S.B. (2006). Everyday tools of Literacy. In Learning to Read the World: Language and literacy in the first three years (81-100). Washington, D.C.: Zero to Three. Scarborough, H.S. (2001). Connecting early language and literacy to later reading (dis)abilities: Evidence, theory, and practice. In S.B. Neuman & D.K. Dickinson Handbook of Early Literacy Research. (97-110). New York: Guilford. Schickedanz, J.A. (1999). Much more than the ABCs: The early stages of reading and writing. Washington, D.C.: National Association for the Education of Young Children. Senechal, M. (2011). A model of the concurrent and longitudinal relations between home literacy and child outcomes. In S.B. Neuman & D.K. Dickinson Handbook of Early Literacy Research. (175-188). New York: Guilford. Whitehurst, G.J., & Lonigan, C.J. (1998). Child development and emergent literacy. Child Development 69(3), 848-872.    

Do you have to start teaching a second language from birth?  Does it help to get a nanny who speaks a second language?  Is there any way your child will retain the language you speak even though you’re currently in a country where another language is dominant?  Does learning a second language lead to any developmental advantages beyond just the benefits of learning the language? Several listeners have actually written to me requesting an episode on this topic, and one has been particularly insistent (you know who you are!), so I was very glad to finally find an expert! Dr. Erica Hoff leads the Language Development Lab at Florida Atlantic University and studies language development and bilingualism in children.  She gives us the lowdown on the best ways to raise a bilingual child (and doesn’t mince words on how difficult it is) – and also answers my burning question: I’m not planning to teach my daughter a second language at the moment, so am I a terrible parent?   Dr. Erica Hoff's Book Language development - Affiliate link   References Bridges, K., & Hoff, E. (2014). Older sibling influences on the language environment and language development of toddlers in bilingual homes. Applied Psycholinguistics 35, 225-241. Core, C., Hoff, E., Rumiche, R., & Señor, M. (2013) Total and conceptual vocabulary in Spanish-English bilinguals from 22 to 30 months: Implications for assessment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 56, 1637-1649. Hammer, C.S., Hoff, E., Uchikoshi, Y., Gillanders, C., Castro, D.C., & Sandilos, L.E. (2014). The language and literacy development of young dual language learners: A critical review. Early Childhood Research Quarterly 29, 715-733. Hoff, E., Rumiche, R., Burridge, A., Ribot, K.M., & Welsh, S.N. (2014). Expressive vocabulary development in children from bilingual and monolingual homes: A longitudinal study from two to four years. Early Childhood Research Quarterly 29, 433-444. Hoff, E. & Core, C. (2013) Input and language development in bilingually developing children. Seminars in Speech and Language, 34, 215-226. McCabe, A., Tamis-LeMonda, C., Bornstein, M. H., Cates, C. B., Golinkoff, R., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Hoff, E., Kuchirko, Y., Melzi, G., Mendelsohn, A., Paez, M., Song, L. Wishard Guerra, A. (2013) Multilingual children: Beyond myths and towards best practices. SRCD Social Policy Report. vol 27, No. 4. Retrieved from: https://www.fcd-us.org/multilingual-children-beyond-myths-and-toward-best-practices/ Menjivar, J., & Akhtar, N. (2017). Language experience and preschoolers’ foreign word learning. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 20(3), 642-648. Ramirez, N.F., & Kuhl, P. (2017). Bilingual baby: Foreign language intervention in Madrid’s infant education centers. Mind, Brain, and Education (online first). DOI: 10.1111/mbe.12144 Ribot, K.M., & Hoff, E. (2014). “Como estas?” “I’m good.” Conversational code-switching is related to profiles of expressive and receptive proficiency in Spanish-English bilingual toddlers. International Journal of Behavioral Development 38(4), 333-341.   Read Full Transcript   Transcript Jen:    [00:37] Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. I’m very excited today to welcome my guest, Dr Erika Hoff, who is Professor and the head of the Language Development Lab at Florida Atlantic University. Several of my listeners have emailed over the last few months and I’ve asked questions about raising bilingual children, but I was having a hard time finding someone with expertise in this area. One listener has been particularly insistent with his questions on this topic; you know who you are. So when a friend of mine forwarded in New York Times article about raising bilingual children that quoted Dr. Hoff, I reached out that very same evening to ask her to be a guest on the show and I was delighted when she wrote back immediately and agreed to speak with us. Dr Hoff obtained her Ph.D from the University of Michigan on the topic of Developmental Psychology with a thesis that focused on the influence of maternal speech on children’s language development. Her Language Development Lab studies, the human abilities and experiences that contribute to language development. Jen:  [01:31] Our main focus is a longitudinal study of English monolingual and Spanish English bilingual children from two and a half to 10 years of age and she’s looking for evidence of factors in children’s early language experiences and early language development that predict successful oral language and literacy outcomes. Welcome Dr Hoff. Dr. Hoff:    [01:50] Thank you very much. Jen:    [01:51] So I guess let’s kind of start down in the weeds here a little bit. I want to ask it a bit of a methodological question because I know a lot of the research on dual language learners is on individuals who are perhaps the children of immigrants and who are learning English as a second language, maybe out of necessity as part of living in an English speaking country and I’m curious as to how much of the research is on those kinds of bilingual children and how much is on native English speakers who are interested in exposing their child to a second language that maybe is not quite necessary, not quite as necessary as learning English. Does the research transfer back and forth easily? Or are there some findings that are applicable to one of those populations and not the other? Dr. Hoff:  [02:31] Well, to answer that question, I have to tell you a little bit about the different populations who are bilingual and the different fields that study bilingualism. There is a big field of second language acquisition. Most of that looks at older children and adults and studies foreign language instruction, and you’re not talking about that. If you’re talking about young children acquiring a second language or even more to the point of your question, if you’re talking about babies becoming bilingual by being exposed to two languages, then really none of the systematic research is about the group that you’re talking about. It’s not about middle class children born in the United States whose parents try to organize a bilingual experience for them and the reason is that there is no common experience that these children have. There are books written by parents who have done this with their children. Dr. Hoff:     [03:44] There are books written about other people’s experience with this, but they are really a collection of anecdotes. The systematic research is either on immigrant populations because there are enough people in the same circumstance that you can do a study. There are also studies of bilingual development in more bilingual parts of the world. So in Wales where there are many Welsh-English bilinguals; in Spain where there are Spanish-Cataln bilinguals; in Canada where there are French-English bilinguals. So the research is not just about immigrant populations, but in the United States. The people who are bilingual are either immigrants, children of immigrants, or are these one off kinds of circumstances that don’t admit of systematic research very well. We just have stories of what’s possible and what works. But in terms of a study with large numbers of children, it simply doesn’t work. Jen:    [04:54] Yeah. Anecdata is my favorite kind of data. So then how can we extrapolate from the kind of research that you do on immigrant bilingual children and it, is it possible to extrapolate that to a middle class audience is looking to give their child a different experience? Dr. Hoff:   [05:11] Well, I think there are some findings that should inform the effort to raise a child that’s bilingual. So one of the findings from the children I study, and these are children who are exposed to two languages from the time they are born and some people might think and some people even say, well, if you’re exposed to two languages from birth, then of course you will become a bilingual because babies have this amazing ability to acquire language. Now, I don’t disagree about the amazingness of babies, but it turns out from my research and other people’s research agrees with this, that just because you’re exposed to two languages from birth doesn’t mean you’re going to end up speaking two languages as a bilingual adult. You really have to have an environment that supports both languages and that continues to support both languages over the course of development. A little bit from birth, doesn’t result in adult kinds of proficiencies in two languages. Dr. Hoff:   [06:26] And what we see and children who come from Spanish, English bilingual homes is they started out much more bilingual than they end up. A very, a very common pattern is for the children’s Spanish to be pretty minimal by the time they are adults. Even among people who you would call bilinguals, that is they use both languages. There are many people here in south Florida who use both languages on a regular basis, but if they only heard Spanish at home, they never went to school in Spanish, their Spanish skills are not at the same level as their English skills. They’re not at the same level as a person who’s been educated in a Spanish speaking country. Jen:   [07:08] Because you never picked up that vocabulary around all the topics. You were educated in; is that right? Dr. Hoff:   [07:14] Yes. That’s certainly one component of it, but we also see before children are five. We see them becoming less bilingual than they were when they were two, simply because the amount of English they hear starts too overwhelmed with the amount of Spanish they here because the children know that English is sorta cooler, more prestigious event Spanish and so the children would prefer to speak English and all these things contribute to English, kind of swamping a Spanish and there are other environments where this doesn’t happen so much. If you look in Wales or in Canada where the difference between the two languages in terms of prestige is not quite as stark as the Spanish-English contrast is here. You see that to kind of environment that seems to support bilingual development better, but but it’s always the case that to acquire a language, you need a great deal of exposure to that language. You need to use that language and you need to do so on a continuing basis. Jen:   [08:29] Okay. All right. Well thank you for that helpful overview. I wonder if we can kind of go back and start at the beginning now. So how do children start to learn language? Because I read that infants can essentially perceive sounds from all languages, but by around a year or so, they’ve kind of tuned out the languages that they don’t hear around them and I’m wondering if if a non-native speaker speak to second language to a child, does the child grew up with pronunciation errors? Does it matter what language do siblings use to speak to each other? How does that come together in very young children? Dr. Hoff:    [08:59] Oh, okay. You’ve asked many questions there, so let me try to tackle them. How could children start to learn the language? Well, they start to learn a language to the extent that we understand the process by hearing it and by analyzing the patterns in it. Okay. To take a huge body of research and summarize it in one sentence: children learn patterns. They learn patterns of sounds that are different sounds that are tied to different circumstances, which means the different towns have different meanings and those are the building blocks. Now, in order to do that, you have to be able to tell sounds apart. If all sound sounded the same, there would be no language and we all know when we hear accent, someone who speaks with an accent, a foreign accent, that different languages make use of different sound contrasts. Dr. Hoff:    [09:53] So probably the most famous and hilarious example in the movie Lost in Translation is Japanese speakers who learned English as an adult have a hard time with the contrast between the L sound and the R sound. Because in Japanese there are no words that differ just in terms of that sound. This is the kind of thing that babies learn to to now. So babies do not learn to tune out a whole language, but they do learn to ignore little differences that don’t matter for their language. And of course that’s very important. That is the differences between speakers. So when your father says baby and when your mother says, baby, the sounds are a teeny bit different and it’s crucial that babies learn to ignore those differences. So babies are very good at picking up the differences that matter and the differences that don’t matter. And if a difference doesn’t matter in your language, you sort of learned to not hear it, but you don’t tune out the whole language at all. Dr. Hoff:   [10:59] Now in terms of non native speakers, it’s interesting. I think we don’t really know how a non-native accent effects early speech sound learning. It could, but children of immigrants do not end up speaking with accents. Children who are bilingual have a little bit of a bilingual accent. I mean it’s a subtle thing, but children sound like their peers and that’s an interesting phenomenon right there. Jen:  [11:30] My daughter asked me the other day, a Mama, is it tomato or tomato? Yes. Well she must. She’s hearing tomato all day at school. New Speaker:   [11:39] Yeah. Right. So. So she must be small. Jen:    [11:43] Yeah, she’s three. Dr. Hoff:   [11:44] Okay. Well, when she’s a teenager she won’t ask you. She will tell you that you’re saying it wrong. Jen:    [11:49] I know, yes, I’m. I’m ready for that day. Dr. Hoff:    [11:54] Perhaps even a little bit sooner, but to go back to the topic of non native speakers, one of the things that we have learned from our research is that it’s very important to hear a language from native speakers. If you asked the question, what are the circumstances that promote language development? Hearing a lot of the language is important, but hearing it from a native speaker is also important and it’s not just because of the accent. I don’t know if the accent is that important to tell you the truth, but when someone speaks a language that’s not their native language, they don’t use it in quite the same way. Even talking to a small child, we have research that is has been published and evaluated by outside reviewers that shows that hearing the language from native speakers is important and now what we’re working on right now is looking at what are the characteristics of native and non-native speech to children that explain this difference and it’s really interesting. Dr. Hoff:    [13:03] We find even in fairly proficient non native speakers, the grammar is not quite as complex. The vocabulary is not quite as diverse. Even talking to a two-year-old, you don’t model as rich a language if it’s not your native language, so, so we think a really important conclusion from this work is that not that you should never speak your non-native language to your child, but that you should speak the language that you’re most comfortable speaking. Often parents – the parents in the research I do who are immigrant parents get told by classroom teachers and by pediatricians that they should...

When should I start potty training?  What books should I read?  Can I do it in a day (or a week)?  Do I need stickers (for rewards)?  Does it have to be stressful? I get these kinds of questions pretty often, and I’d resisted doing an episode on potty training because there are so many books on it already, and everyone has their opinion, and I really didn’t want to wade into it.  But ya’ll kept asking and my resolve has finally crumbled, so today we’re going to talk all about what the research says, what the books say, and how there’s essentially no correlation between the books and the research.  We’ll review the “do it in a day!” methods and what makes them successful, and we’ll also look at child-led methods.  You’ll leave this episode with a clear picture of which is probably going to work best for you, and some concrete tools you can put to work (today, if you need to!) to start what I prefer to call the “toilet learning” process.     Other episodes references in this show 021: Talk Sex Today 009: Do you punish your child with rewards? 020: How do I get my child to do what I want them to do? (Unconditional parenting) 042: Manners   References Au, S. &; Stavinoha, P.L. (2008). Stress-free potty training: A commonsense guide to finding the right approach for your child. New York, NY: AMACOM. Barone, J.G., Jasutkar, N., & Schneider, D. (2009). Later toilet training is associated with urge incontinence in children. Journal of Pediatric Urology 5, 458-461. Benjusuwantep, B., & Ruangdaraganon, N. (2011). Infant toilet training in Thailand: Starting and completion age and factors determining them. Journal of the Medical Association of Thailand 94(12), 1441-1446. Blum, N.J., Taubman, B., & Nemeth, N. (2003). Relationship between age at initiation of toilet training and duration of training: A prospective study. Pediatrics 111(4), 810-814. Butler, J.F. (The toilet training success of parents after reading Toilet Training In Less Than A Day. Behavior Therapy 7, 185-191. Duong, T.H., Jansson, U-B., & Hellstrom, A-L. (2013). Vietnamese mothers’ experiences with potty training procedure for children from birth to 2 years of age. Journal of Pediatric Urology 9, 808-814. Fertleman, C., & Cave, S. (2011). Potty training girls the easy way: A stress-free guide to helping your daughter learn quickly. Philadelphia, PA: Da Capo. Fertleman, C. & Cave, S. (2009). Potty training boys the easy way: Helping your son learn quickly – even if he’s a late starter. Philadelphia, PA: Da Capo. Gerber, M. (2002). Dear parent: Caring for infants with respect (2 nd Ed.). Los Angeles, CA: Resources for Infant Educarers. Glowacki, J. (2015). Oh, crap! Potty training: Everything modern parents need to know to do it once and do it right. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. Goode, E. (1999, January 12). Two experts do battle over potty training. The New York Times. Retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/12/us/two-experts- do-battle- over-potty- training.html Gross-Loh, C. (2007). The diaper-free baby: The natural toilet training alternative. New York, NY: William Morrow. Horn, I.B., Brenner, R., Rao, M., & Cheng, T.L. (2006). Beliefs about the appropriate age for initiating toilet training: Are there racial and socioeconomic differences? Journal of Pediatrics 149, 165-168. Kaerts, N., Van Hal, G., Vermandel, A., & Wyndaele, J-J. (2012). Readiness signs used to define the proper moment to start toilet training: A review of the literature. Neurology and Urodynamics 31, 437-440. Kimball, V. (2016). The perils and pitfalls of potty training. Pediatric Annals 45(6), 199-201. Koc, I., Camurdan, A.D., Beyazova, U., Ilhan, M.N., & Sahin, F. (2008). Toilet training in Turkey: The factors that affect timing and duration in different sociocultural groups. Child: Care, Health and Development 34(4), 475-481. Martin, J.A., King, D.R., Maccoby, E.E., & Jacklin, C.N. (1984). Secular trends and individual differences in toilet-training progress. Journal of Pediatric Psychology 9(4), 457-468. Matson, J.L., & Ollendick, T.H. (1977). Issues in toilet training normal children. Behavior Theraly 8, 549-553. Shaikh, N. (2004). Time to get on the potty: Are constipation and toileting refusal causing delayed toilet training? Journal of Pediatrics 145, 12-13. Taubman, B. (1997). Toilet training and toileting refusal for stool only: A prospective study. Pediatrics 99(1), 54-58. Vermadel, A., Van Kamepn, M., Van Gorp, C., & Wyndaele, J-J. (2008). How to toilet train healthy children? A review of the literature. Neurology & Urodynamics 27, 162-166.   Read Full Transcript Transcript Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  I had actually resisted doing an episode on today’s topic for quite a while but listeners kept emailing to ask me about it so my resistance has crumbled and today we’re going to talk about potty training.  I prefer to call it toilet learning, but we’re going to look at a lot of different studies on this topic and I’m going to use the language that the individual authors use in their work. There are SO MANY books about it and everyone seems to have their own opinion about it and I kind of didn’t want to stir the pot. Or even put my oar in it, to mix metaphors.  But you, my dear listeners, have spoken, and so I, your humble research assistant, have listened, and so today we are going to talk about potty training.  And toilet learning.  And we’re going to look at all of this through the lens of respectful parenting, because practitioners of respectful parenting have a fair bit to say on this topic.   So for those of you who listen to the show regularly, it probably won’t be enormously surprising for you to hear that toilet learning is profoundly impacted by cultural considerations.  Starting with the earliest possible age for toilet learning, we come to the concept of Elimination Communication, abbreviated to EC, which was popularized anew in Christine Gross-Loh’s book The Diaper-Free Baby, and I’m going to spare you the $13 on Amazon or even the three week wait in your library’s hold queue and tell you that the method basically involves watching for and learning a baby’s signals that he or she needs to pee or poo and providing opportunities to go at that time, providing opportunities to go at regular intervals even when the baby doesn’t indicate readiness, and making a whistling or zzzzz sound while you hold the baby over a potty or a hole in the garden which tells the baby that it’s time to go.  Not much to it, right? This approach is, of course, most common in countries where interdependence, rather than independence, is prized – since it relies so heavily on reading signals given by others, it’s not surprising that this approach is used in countries like China and Vietnam where a big part of being a citizen in society is developing the ability to read signals given by other people.  The key to all of this is that it’s done when the baby is very young.  And I’m talking infant stage.  A study conducted by a joint Vietnamese-Swedish research team interviewed forty seven mothers about their potty training experiences from the time the babies were newborns until they were 24 months old; the researchers stopped interviewing the mothers when the babies were 24 months because all of the children were potty trained by then.  To a Western audience, that must sound incredible – I was certainly pretty surprised, and I even had some experience with EC. The Digo tribe in East Africa begins toilet training a few weeks after birth; they expect some dryness at night by around six months and complete dryness at one year.  The babies are in constant contact with the mothers for the first couple of months of the baby’s life and whenever the mothers sense that the baby needs to pee or poop the mother holds the baby between her knees.  When the baby is 3-5 months old a sibling or other female family member aged between 5-12 years takes over primary care of the baby during the day, and if an accident occurs it is actually the caregiver rather than the infant who is punished.  So in the Digo culture, it is primarily the responsibility of parents and caregivers to recognize and respond to the child after the child indicates their need to pee or poop.  This is in stark contrast to Western cultures where the responsibility is primarily placed on the child to indicate that they need to pee or poop and to get themselves to the toilet, undress, void, wipe, and re-dress.  One study looked at mothers from different backgrounds in Turkey, and found that the both the age of initiation of potty training as well as the age of completion was much earlier among rural families that lived in homes without an inside toilet, families using washable diapers, and families who punish children.  Mothers having an education of more than 12 years tended to initiate training much later and used a more child-led approach.   We had a pretty traumatic first few months with my own daughter’s peeing; she would cry as soon as she peed and would continue to cry until her diaper was changed.  She was also very gassy as well so she actually cried a lot of the time in those early days and we had the Pamper’s diapers with the stripe on them that turns from yellow to blue when it gets wet.  She would start to cry and we would quickly check the stripe to see if it was blue, and it wouldn’t be blue, and she would keep crying and twenty seconds later it would turn blue – she was actually more reactive than the wetness indicator stripe.  We wondered if she might have a urinary tract infection but sometimes she would pee mid-change and wouldn’t cry at all then.  We went through sixteen diapers a day in the first few months; I know this because I hiked around Mont Blanc with her when she was eight weeks old and I had to count how many diapers we were using each day before we went so we could be sure to carry enough. I think I read The Diaper-Free Baby when she was about five months old, because my in-laws were living with us from the time she was four through six months old to help take care of her while I went back to work.  I knew they would think I was crazy for trying EC so I waited until the day they left to start.  Within a couple of weeks she was doing pretty much all of her pees and about half of her poops on the potty, and when our nanny started work a few weeks later she was stunned to find a seven month-old mostly using the potty.  And the nanny was actually from Thailand, but I guess she had been in the States for entirely too long because a study out of Thailand reports that 80% of 50 infants who were followed by some Thai researchers were fully toilet trained by 12 months.  That study also found that children who weren’t the first child, and who were taken care of by a well-educated mother, were found to start toilet training late – perhaps exposure to more Western ideas, as well as having enough money to be able to afford diapers, were behind this trend. I read a few books on potty training to prepare for this episode, along with a whole host of empirical research, and I have to say that that’s where the correlation between the two ends – researchers publish the results of empirical studies, but the people who write books on potty training seem not to read that research – or at least, I’ve yet to meet a book that cites any of it.  So let’s start going through some of that research and I’ll bring in information from the books as it seems appropriate. If we missed the window for teaching through EC, which by all accounts has to be done early in the child’s life, then we have two-main choices for how to proceed – we can do a parent-led approach where we establish a date when we will “train” the child, and we train them on that day – we expect results the same day or certainly within the same week.  Or we can watch for signs that the child is ready to begin learning how to use the toilet, and allow the child to lead the process. This readiness is, like many of these kinds of things, something that is culturally determined.  A study of 779 parents visiting child health providers in and around Washington D.C. found that the average age at which Caucasian parents believed toilet training should be initiated was 25.4 months, significantly later than African American parents (18.2 months) and parents of other races at 19.4 months.  Higher income was also associated with later toilet training.  This is certainly later than parents have toilet trained in the past – I found an abstract for a study from 1983 (although I couldn’t find the full study) stating that the first appearance of toileting skills appeared between 18 and 36 months in a dataset from 1975, which itself is described as being much later than in a comparable cohort (we have to assume they mean “mostly white”) from 1947.  Another study found that when children start training at a younger age then toilet training takes longer, although these children do end up completing training earlier than children who start later.  Training before the age of 27 months is apparently not correlated with the earlier completion of training, suggesting that there is little benefit to starting before then. A variety of researchers have produced impressive-looking charts of signals that a child is ready to begin potty training.  One literature review graphed twenty one signs of readiness according to when the sign appears – some of these included the ability to sit and to walk, which appear between four and 18 months, acquiring voluntary control of the pelvic muscles which appears between 9-24 months, and understanding and responding to directions or questions and being able to follow simple commands appears between 9 and 26 months.  The majority of researchers as well as lay authors writing about potty training stress the importance of readiness, but there is no consensus whatsoever in the literature about how many of these readiness signs need to be present for the child to start potty training, which ones are more important in terms of judging an individual child’s readiness.  Many of the authors who say “a child must be ready” often give ages at which certain readiness signs should be present give different ages from each other.   So that gives us some information about when we might start thinking about toilet learning, but what do we actually do when we think that window has opened?  Well, it seems as though there are basically two approaches, and some people who attempt a middle ground between the two.  One approach seems to see toilet learning as the process of “getting urine and feces in the toilet,” as Magda Gerber, who founded the RIE approach to parenting, puts it.  Parents who see toilet training in this way will do whatever it takes to get the urine and feces in the toilet, typically making extensive use of rewards to make that happen. Let’s cover the with the parent-led approach to toilet training first, which was formally developed by two psychologists named Asrin and Fox in 1974.  Any book published since then that promises parents they can potty train in a defined and short period of time probably uses some elements of this approach, although what they invariably neglect to state is that it was actually developed for “retarded and brain-damaged children,” and then the researchers appear to have decided that it was also applicable to normally developing children as well.  I should be up-front here and say that I haven’t read the book; I couldn’t get it from the library and honestly I didn’t want to give the researchers any money by buying it.  So if you’re considering this approach you should certainly read the book, but the gist of it is that once children are 20 months old (I’m not sure why this is the magic number) and can meet a variety of other criteria like being able to walk, staying dry for a couple of hours at a time, and following simple instructions, you set aside a day for potty training.  You set up a potty in an area big enough to play in, like the kitchen, and you show the child how to use the potty by showing a doll “drinking” water and “urinating” on the potty after taking its diaper off.  You do this a couple of times, first successfully, so the doll “pees” on the potty and gets a reward, and then “unsuccessfully” so the doll wets its underwear and then has to do a practice drill of going to the potty even though they don’t need to go.  You make sure your child drinks lots of fluids so he needs to pee.  Then repeat the same process with the child – when the child pees on the potty, he gets a reward.  If the child pees in his underwear, he has to do the drill of sitting on the potty.  Azrin and Fox tested their method on 34 children with the average child completing training in 3.9 hours and having a 97% decrease in accidents the week after training.  Sounds good, right? Apparently there were so many reports about failures of parents to train their children using the book that people began to form classes to train parents in using the Asrin and Fox method.  One researcher noted that parts of the procedure are subtle (so don’t try to use this method just from my description; you’ll have to go and read the book) – and parents might lack the self-control required for this method.  It turns out that having extra support ends up being fairly critical for success – one admittedly very small study of ten children randomly assigned the children to either have a parent who would just read the book, or have a parent read the book as well as have an experienced trainer available for “supervision and prompting.”  Children whose mothers just read the book had about five accidents per day at the beginning of treatment, which dropped to about four over the course of five days of treatment, but actually rebounded to a peak of SEVEN accidents per day seven weeks after training before dropping again slightly to a level that was still above where they were when they started.  Children whose parents read the book and had “supervision and prompting” started with four accidents per day and dropped to an average of half an accident per day by day three, and maintained somewhere between half and one accident per day for the next ten weeks. Now a couple of things stuck out to me here.  Firstly, that the researchers said that ALL of the mothers reported “emotional side effects” in their children, primarily consisting of tantrums and avoidance behavior.  These behaviors were more evident in mothers who only read the book and didn’t get support, and among younger children and usually occurred after an accident when the child didn’t want to sit on the potty again when they didn’t need to go.  Four of the ten mothers felt so uncomfortable that they wanted to stop the training, but “encouragement” resulted in three of the four continuing. Does this remind you of anything?  Anything at all?  I’m thinking back to Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment on...

Isn’t it kind of a “well, duh?” that parenting affects child development?  But do we know how?  We know it’s not good to have really big fights in front of the kids, but do spousal quarrels screw them up too?  Are there really links between a family’s emotional expressiveness and the child’s later academic performance?  How does the marital relationship affect parenting, and how does parenting affect the marital relationship? Today we talk with Dr. Laura Froyen, who has a Ph.D in Human Development and Family Studies and seems almost as obsessed with research on child development issues as I am.  You can find much more about her work at www.laurafroyen.com.   References Bascoe, S.M., Davies, P.T., Sturge-Apple, M.L., & Cummings, E.M. (2009). Children’s representations of family relationships, peer information processing, and school adjustment. Developmental Psychology 45(6), 1740-1751. Belsky, J. (1984). The determinants of parenting: A process model. Child Development 55(1), 83-96. Bretherton, I., & Munholland, K. A. (1999). Internal working models in attachment relationships: A construct revisited. In J. Cassidy & P. R. Shaver (Eds.), Handbook of attachment: Theory, research, and clinical applications (pp. 89-111). New York: Guilford Press. Buehler, C., & Gerard, J.M. (2002). Marital conflict, ineffective parenting, and children’s and adolescents’ maladjustment. Journal of Marriage and Family 64(1), 78-92. Davies, P.T., & Cummings, E.M. (1994). Marital conflict and child adjustment: An emotional security hypothesis. Psychological Bulletin 116(3), 387-411. Full article available at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Edward_Cummings/publication/15390513_Marital_Conflict_and_Child_Adjustment_An_Emotional_Security_Hypothesis/links/0912f507fc3e02ce88000000.pdf Davies, P.T., Winter, M.A., & Cicchetti, D. (2006). The implications of emotional security theory for understanding and treating childhood psychopathology. Developmental Psychopathology 18(3), 707-735. Erel, O., & Burman, B. (1995). Interrelatedness of marital relations and parent-child relations: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin: 118(1), 108-132. Froyen, L.C., Skibbe, L.E., Bowles, R.P., Blow, A.J., & Gerde, H.K. (2013). Marital satisfaction, family emotional expressiveness, home learning environments, and children’s emergent literacy. Journal of Marriage and Family 75, 42-55. Gottman, J., & Gottman, J.S. (2008). And baby makes three: The six-step plan for preserving marital intimacy and rekindling romance after baby arrives. New York, NY: Harmony. Grych, J.H., & Fincham, F.D. (1993). Children’s appraisals of marital conflict: Initial investigations of the cognitive-contextual framework. Child Development 64(1), 215-230. Hindman, A.H., Miller, A.L., Froyen, L.C., & Skibbe, L.E. (2012). A portrait of family involvement during Head Start: Nature, extent, and predictors. Early Childhood Research Quarterly 27, 654-667. Lapierre, S. (2008). Mothering in the context of domestic violence: The pervasiveness of a deficit model of mothering. Child & Family Social Work 13, 454-463. Sturge-Apple, M.L., , Davies, P.T., & Cummings, E.M. (2006). Hostility and withdrawal in marital conflict: Effects on parental emotional unavailability and inconsistent discipline. Journal of Family Psychology 20(2), 227-238. Tronick, E. (2009). Still face experiment. UMass Boston. Video available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apzXGEbZht0 Vallotton, C. D., Harewood, T., Froyen, L., Brophy-Herb, H., & Ayoub, C. (2016). Child Behavior Problems: Mothers’ and Fathers’ Mental Health Matters Today and Tomorrow. Early Childhood Research Quarterly 37, 81-93. doi: 10.1016/j.ecresq.2016.02.006   Read Full Transcript Transcript Jen:     [00:38] Hello and welcome to the your Parenting Mojo podcast. Our guest today is Laura Froyen, who received her Ph.D In Human Development and Family Studies with an emphasis in Couple and Family Therapy from Michigan State University, where her research focused on how marital and family relationships influence parenting and child development. She continued this research as an Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Madison, Wisconsin, and while she loved her work as a new professor, she found that she missed working directly with families which had been doing while she was working on her Ph.D. When she was pregnant with her second daughter, Laura had a life-changing car accident, which luckily both she and her daughter came out in one piece, but the experience caused her to reevaluate what she wanted to get out of life and she realized that she really missed working with families. She now offers parent coaching as well as parent support groups in classes. Laura’s academic work focused on the intersection of parenting practices and child development outcomes and she’s here to chat with us about that today. Welcome Laura. Dr. Froyen:   [01:36] Hi Jen. Thanks so much for having me. Jen:   [01:38] So it does seem somewhat logical to me that a family’s emotional expressiveness might have connections to a child’s emotional development, but I’m wondering if you can kind of walk us through what are some of the linkages here and how is that emotional development linked with later academic performance? Dr. Froyen:    [01:55] Right, sure. So the family is seen as one of the primary ways that children learn about emotions and their expression and resultant behaviors. And as I’m sure you probably talked a lot about, modeling is considered one of the most powerful ways that children and humans in general learn, and emotions are no different. So when we talk about emotional expressiveness, we’re talking about the overall style of kind of the emotional state of the family and how they express emotion verbally and nonverbally and children are very much influenced by how their families are doing with the expressive expression of negative and positive emotions. So families can be high or low in both positive and negative expressiveness. So some families are high, some are low in both and some are high in one and high and the other families, but higher positive expressiveness tend to have children that display more prosocial behavior and families with higher negative expressiveness tend to have children that display more aggressive behavior. Dr. Froyen:  [02:54] And the working theory on this is that family emotional context influences children’s self-regulation skills, likely through parenting. And then that self regulation in turn drives their actual behaviors. And self regulation is also a key skill when it comes to learning. And so if we think about some of the skills that children need to do well in school – being able to sit still and pay attention, being able to minimize distractions, raise their hand… Those types of skills are all self regulatory skills and um, those self regulatory skills give children greater access to learning so they make them better able to learn in those learning environments. Jen:   [03:33] And so I’m just trying to think about what constitutes a very positive and a very negative environment. I assume a lot of yelling and screaming is very negative, but what is a very positive environment look like and what does a neutral kind of environment look like? Dr. Froyen:    [03:49] Yeah. So we don’t talk a lot about necessarily neutrals. The research on many topics in child development are done at the extremes and so highly negative things like screaming and yelling and criticism. Criticism is an incredibly toxic thing in almost all family relationships; marriages, parent relationships. So things like belittling those things are very negative for families in general. But then the positive pieces of it is warmth, expressing love for one another, acts of love or demonstrative acts of love. So given how the sun or if you’re not necessarily affectionate, telling each other how you appreciate each other, those types of things. Jen:     [04:35] Okay. And so when I was preparing for this episode, I was reading a lot about how conflict is not very good for children’s development, but I am trying to sort of get my arms around what kind of conflict is really bad conflict and I’m just thinking about, you know, my husband’s not listening to me again and I’m kind of irritated with him. Does that count as conflict or does it have to be like yelling and screaming? Dr. Froyen:   [05:03] Oh gosh, I think that this is such an important question. I think that many parents have this idea that kids should never see them fighting. Right? And so what research actually shows us that this isn’t the case 100 percent of the time. So kids are incredibly tuned into the emotional environment of their homes, particularly their parents’ relationship because they derive a lot of security from that relationship. So kids have a lot invested in that relationship going well because that’s where they get their security and stability from. So even when parents attempt to hide their disagreements, kids almost always know that they’re happening. Jen: [05:39] I’m just thinking back to a memory from childhood, we used to have a long driveway at our house and my dad would reverse out of it every morning past the kitchen window and my mom would wave to him and I do remember on at least one occasion even though they would always hide conflicts from us, I have no memory of them of having a conflict ever in front of us or even within auditory range. I have memories of my mother drawing the blind in the kitchen window in the morning. Dr. Froyen:  [06:11] Right? Non-verbal hostility! Jen:   [06:11] Yes, it was there even though I didn’t hear it. Dr. Froyen:   [06:15] What’s really interesting is that even verbal infants display behavioral changes when there is tension between parents after a conflict, what kind of changes, like more subdued affect or they might cry more depending on that child’s coping strategy. So there’s a whole set of… You of course are familiar with attachment theory and I’m guessing a lot of your listeners are, um, but there’s a whole kind of sister theory called emotional security theory that really views the couple relationship as a kind of a separate attachment figure. If we’re talking about it… And this is just kind of coming up now, but emotional security theory is really helpful in thinking about why kids intervene in parents conflicts and so attachment theory is based on…the way we measure it is by observing behaviors, right? So we measure a child’s law like security of attachment by putting them in a stressful situation and watching what they do and there are similar behaviors that children engage in. Their parents are arguing or disagreeing that signal kind of their feelings of security around that couple relationship. So kids who are feeling less secure or are kind of nervous when fighting starts to happen, we’ll do things like problem solved, the conflict for the parents or create a big distraction to distract the parents from the conflict. And so we see some of those behaviors in infants and they get more sophisticated as kids get older. Jen:    [07:48] And how severe does that conflict have to be before children start doing that kind of thing? Like is my irritation enough or… Dr. Froyen:    [07:56] Yeah. So it totally depends on the tactics that you’re using rather than the disagreement itself. So in the literature when they talk a lot about negative conflict tactics like belittling and criticism and yelling and then positive conflict tactics like problem solving, validating, showing empathy, those types of things. And so if you’re able to manage your irritation with your partner, I actually have an example. Jen:    [08:22] Oh please. I have some too, but… Dr. Froyen:   [08:26] So recently my husband stopped at the grocery store on the way home from work and, but he forgot an ingredient that I really needed for a recipe for a thing that was happening the next day and there was no replacement. That was nothing I could substitute. Right. And so when he got home and he didn’t have it, I was justifiably frustrated even though this is a common mistake that everybody makes us sometimes. But I was frustrated and in that moment I expressed the frustration to him and he was able to validate my feelings while offering to run back to the store after the kids were in bed. So he offered a solution, and in that moment I was able to take a deep breath and you know, validate that yes, we’ve all forgotten things. I’m and thank him for going to get it and then I was able to let it go. Dr. Froyen:    [09:09] I’m not always able to let it go and if I know going in that I’m not going to be able to let it go. I will say let’s talk about it later and then we’ll talk about it later because I know that at that point in time my conflict tactics might not be quite so positive, but if I know I’m going to be able to handle it well, I absolutely want to offer that as a learning opportunity for my kids so that they can see, see me expressing my feelings and having those feelings be validated by my partner. I think that that’s really important. And then see us work together to come up with solutions and then to see me being gracious and forgiving. I think that those are all wonderful opportunities to model for kids. Jen:   [09:49] It sounds lovely. Dr. Froyen:    [09:50] It can’t go that way every time. Right? Yeah, and so I mean I think that if you can be present enough to know when it’s not going to go well, making an effort to say, you know, I think we need to talk about this later. You know, let’s schedule a date to talk about it. That’s a great way to model to your kids as well. Being able to regulate yourself, not have to engage in the conflict in the moment and take time to cool off. Jen:   [10:19] Yeah, I was just thinking about an example and I wasn’t planning on sharing this but it just popped into my mind that my husband and I had a conflict. This was a few months ago now about…it was so stupid. It was about a package that he needed to mail to somebody and I was trying to make life easier for him by researching what are the flat rate shipping options and was asking him questions about it and he was not answering them in the way that I needed and I just found it so irritating and then he got irritated at me for asking questions that he thought were irrelevant. And once you get into that cycle, how do you get out of it again? That’s the part I struggle with. Dr. Froyen:   [10:58] Yes. So this is where mindfulness practices is super helpful. Yeah. Because a regular mindfulness practice is proven to change the structure of your brain and to get into these, like they call them neuronal groups, right? So we have these groups, these patterns that we have kind of worn in our brain where we start responding in very stereotypical ways, ways that are just very much guided by how we...

I can’t play any instruments (unless the recorder counts?).  I certainly can’t sing.  But my daughter really enjoys music, and there are a whole host of studies showing how playing music benefits children’s brain development.  So what’s a non-music playing, non-singing parent to do? Dr. Wendell Hanna’s new book, the Children’s Music Studio: A Reggio-Inspired Approach (Affiliate link), give us SO MANY ways to interact with music with our children.  I tried one of her ‘provocations’ with my daughter’s daycare class and I was blown away.  Give this episode a listen, and be inspired.     Other episodes referenced in this episode 027: Is a Reggio Emilia-inspired preschool right for my child? To hear my interview with math tutor Wes Carroll, go to www.yourhomeschoolingmojo.com, click any of the “sign up” buttons on that page, scroll down to see the curriculum of the course, and look for the interview with Wes which is available as a free preview.   References Allsup, R.E., & Benedict, C. (2008). The problems of band: An inquiry into the future of instrumental music education. Philosophy of Music Education Review 16(2), 156-173. Anvari, S.H., Trainor, L.J., Woodside, J., & Levy, B.A. (2002). Relations among musical skills, phonological processing, and early reading ability in preschool children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 83, 111-130. Bilhartz, T.D., Bruhn, R.A., & Olson, J.E. (2000). The effect of early music training on child cognitive development. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 20(4), 616-636. Catterall, J.S., & Rauscher, F.H. (2008). Unpacking the impact of music on intelligence. In W. Gruhn & F. Rauscher, Neurosciences in Music Pedagogy (pp.171-201). Happague, NY: Nova Science Publishers. Hallam, S. (2010). The power of music: Its impact on the intellectual, social and personal development of children and young people. International Journal of Music Education 28(3), 269-289. Hanna, W. (2016). The children’s music studio: A Reggio-inspired approach. New York, NY: Oxford. (Affiliate link) Heuser, F. (2011). Ensemble-based instrumental music instruction: Dead-end tradition or opportunity for socially enlightened teaching. Music Education Research 12(3), 293-305. Kirschner, S., & Tomasello, M. (2010). Joint music making promotes prosocial behavior in 4-year-old children. Evolution and Human Behavior 31, 354-364. Morehouse, P.G. (2013). Toddlers through grade 2: The importance of music making in child development. YC Young Children 68(4), 82-89. Rauscher, F.H. (1993). Music and spatial task performance. Nature 365(6447), 611. Rauscher, F.H., Shaw, G.L., & Ky, K.N. (1995). Listening to Mozart enhances spatial-temporal reasoning: towards a neuropsychological basis. Neuroscience Letters 185, 44-47. Rauscher, F.H., & Zupan, M.A. (2000). Classroom keyboard instruction improves kindergarten children’s spatial-temporal performance: A field experiment. Early Childhood Research Quarterly 15(2), 215-228. Rauscher, F.H. (2003). Can music instruction affect children’s cognitive development? ERIC Digest EDO-PS-03-12. Rauscher, F.H., & Hinton, S.C. (2006). The Mozart effect: Music listening is not music instruction. Educational Psychologist 41(4) 233-238. Schlaug, G., Norton, A., Overy, K., & Winner, E. (2005). Effects of music training on the child’s brain and cognitive development. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1060, 219-230. Scott, S. (2011). Contemplating a constructivist stance for active learning within music education. Arts Education Policy Review 112(4), 191-198. SEGMeasurement (n.d.). Effectiveness of ABC Music & Me on the development of language and literacy skills. Retrieved from: https://media2.kindermusik.com/website/2015/02/ABCMusicMe_ResearchStudy_FullReport.pdf Smithrim, K., & Upitis, R. (2005). Learning through the arts: Lessons of Engagement. Canadian Journal of Education / Revue Canadienne de l’education 28(1/2), 109-127. Standley, J.M., Walforth, D., & Nguyen, J. (2009). Effect of parent/child group music activities on toddler development: A pilot study. Music Therapy Perspectives 27(1), 11-15.   Read Full Transcript   Transcript Jen: [00:38] Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today I’d like to welcome my guest, Wendell Hanna, who is Professor of Music Education at San Francisco State University. Professor Hanna’s academic background includes a BA from the University of South Florida and a Master’s in music from Yale University in orchestral bassoon performance. After several years of teaching and performing in San Francisco Bay Area orchestras as a freelance musician, Professor Hanna then obtained her public school and teaching credential and taught elementary music in the Oregon public schools. Before obtaining a Ph.D At the University of Oregon. It was there that she shifted our attention to younger children and began researching and working musically with infants, toddlers, and preschool aged children. In 2002, she was offered a professorship at San Francisco State University where she researches and also teaches, early childhood musical development and local preschools. It was through teaching in a local corporate preschool that she encountered emergent learning and the Reggio approach. Now I discovered professor Hanna’s work not long after I heard a piece on NPR about the links between listening to music and learning grammar, so I was already looking for someone to talk with about the connections between music and child development, but today, dear listeners, we’re going to get so much more than that. Jen: [01:49] Professor Hanna has just published a new book called The Children’s Music Studio, a Reggio inspired approach and as soon as I read it, I knew that I had to ask her to do an interview with us because their interests coincides so neatly with my own. She brings a really rigorous evidence based view on the impact of music on a child’s development and she has also studied early childhood education in Reggio Emilia, Italy as I have done as well, and wants to bring that evidence-based view of music to Reggio inspired classrooms. Welcome Dr. Hanna. New Speaker:  [02:17] Thank you, Jen. Thank you for inviting me. New Speaker: [02:20] So I wonder if we can start kind of probably where parents already have had some exposure to information about music and related to child development. Can you tell us what is the Mozart Effect and how does what parents might have heard about it differ from what the study actually found? Dr. Hanna: [02:38] Sure, so the Mozart Effect was a research study and there have been many more research studies since the original one which was in 1993 in southern California, Rauscher and Associates and they, they looked at the effect of listening to a Mozart music and how that affected learning and their results were published in Nature magazine and they said that especially on spatial reasoning and a little bit on memory that listening to Mozart had positive effects on your ability to concentrate and learn. Fortunately, people got very excited about things, especially in my field of music education, we were like, Hallelujah. This is what we’ve been looking for. Scientific evidence of what we’ve always known to be true, and here it is. However, researchers, we were like, wow, let me look into this research, and then we discovered, wow, they listened to some Mozart for 15 minutes and then they became smarter. Hm, let’s replicate this just to make sure. And so it was replicated many, many, many times and the same results were not found and that’s a problem with research; it needs to be replicated in their same results, need to be found each time or most of the times it is replicated. Dr. Hanna: [04:02] So that was a problem. Many people have really jumped on. The idea of Mozart makes you smarter because it feels true. It just feels so right. New Speaker: [04:14] It’s so esoteric, isn’t it? It must be making me smarter. Dr. Hanna:    [04:19] So it’s actually fascinating from a researcher’s point of view that something that you know is right, you just haven’t been able to prove yet. And so that’s really what the Mozart Effect was about is just pure listening. And so there’s been a ton of research…neurological research and other types of research about this and so I would say the take-home point is that the Mozart effect is really likely to be an artifact of just arousal because you’re listening to the music and it makes you feel better. It heightens your mood. So that’s probably what the Mozart Effect is. You feel happier when you listen to Mozart and you feel a little more alert in your brain is a little more stimulated. Dr. Hanna:  [05:07] So those effects that were tested are likely because of that and have nothing to do with our dear friend, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the many other types of light and happy music that would have that same effect on your short term effect. Jen: [05:26] And so this study was also done with college students, right? Dr. Hanna: [05:30] It was done many, many times; people have been replicating it many different ways since 1993. Sometimes it comes out positive and but most of the time it doesn’t get strong statistical results because it just has to do with listening. And the real research is more when you’re doing active music making, especially playing instruments. Jen: [05:55] Alright, so let us all be warned about the dangers of reading one study and basing our entire approach to parenting on that. So okay. So if I’m a failure as a parent and I have not had my child listening to Baby Mozart for the last couple of years, I’m curious about how children approached music. If nobody’s teaching them about it, do they have some kind of innate sense of rhythm and a desire to produce music or are these things more culturally learned? Dr. Hanna:  [06:19] Well, yes. Children have an innate ability in music, just exactly the way that they have an innate ability to learn language. So there’s a really interesting study that came out of the Child Study Movement in the early 20th century called the Morehead and Pond study was done between 1937 and 1948. And it’s fascinating because it’s more of a longitudinal – not that long, but pretty long for a study. And they had children go into a room with beautiful musical instruments and by themselves with other children. And they videotaped, I guess they videotaped… Did they have that then? Anyway, they observed and they analyzed what the children did and they found that these children were understanding music without any adult supervision. They were creating music, they were understanding form. They were interacting, they were improvising, they were singing, creating their own original compositions and some pretty amazing stuff. So I would say that’s a real seminal study and there’ve been many others that have shown that children left to their own devices are extremely musically naturally musical. Jen: [07:34] Mmhmm. And where do you think that comes from? Dr. Hanna: [07:37] Well, it’s evolution. Jen: [07:39] And what what purpose does it serve? Dr. Hanna:   [07:42] Well, there’s a lot of theories on that. There’s definitely…. Music is definitely kind of brings the tribe together. It makes you feel more secure and protected. It gives you…and this answers your, your second part of the question which is about cultural learned. Whether music is culturally learned, but it. It helps you identify with your culture and children. They have an innate nature to respond to music, but there is a natural development that is occurring and that natural development can be further enhanced with exposure; parents exposing them to wide variety of music as well as direct instruction, so it’s kind of there’s an innate ability and children can do it on their own, but if adults give a very rich environment and exposure to music and some direct instruction, then that is really, really heightened because there’s so many neuronal connections in the brain for all kinds of learning and as we’ll talk a little bit more, language learning and music learning really out as one in the same in a baby, and then it splits later on. So if you’re encouraging language development, you’re also encouraging musical development and if you’re encouraging music development, you’re also encouraging some language development. Jen: [09:12] Okay. I’m wondering what my daughter is learning from the Maroon Five music that she has a preference for at the moment. Dr. Hanna: [09:22] I’m sure she’s learning a lot! Jen:  [09:22] I am sure she is. I hesitate to imagine what. So you mentioned a couple of times as you were explaining that, that if parents provide direct instruction as well as exposure to different kinds of music, what do you mean by direct instruction in that Dr. Hanna: [09:35] format? Well, purposeful interaction for music’s sake, if you take them to a, a child parent class and the Music Together classes are very popular here in the bay area and I think all over the country now. And those are wonderful classes, but there’s a variety of music. The children are playing instruments, you know, it’s tactile; it’s locomotor… They’re jumping up and down and they’re moving and they’re, they’re singing and they’re just participating in music with others and with adults and not passive, not just listening to music in the background. Jen:  [10:11] Okay. Okay. Alright. So now really starting to dig into the research here. I want to try and untangle what some of the research says on the benefits to children of being involved in music because I read through a bunch of abstracts of papers on this topic and you kind of get the impression that music is absolutely incredible at promoting children’s cognitive development. But then when you dig into the methodology and the results, you find things like children who attend music classes are able to look at a pattern of beads and replicate it from memory more effectively than children who didn’t attend classes and that kind of skill does have good implications, visual memory and chunking of information, both of which are very important in reading, but there was also no difference between the two groups on the other five subtests of a well known intelligence test. But the abstract to that study says “this study suggests a significant correspondence between early music instruction on spatial temporal reasoning abilities”. So I’m wondering, based on what you know of kind of the totality of the literature and not just honing in on one study’s results, is there a benefit to a child’s development from making music and what kind of music does the child have to do to gain this benefit? Dr. Hanna:  [11:22] Well, I would really recommend this wonderful book. It’s very easy to read by Daniel Levinson. He’s a neurologist up in Canada and it’s called This...

The topic of today’s episode comes courtesy of my good friend Sarah, who fortunately hasn’t yet had any reason to use this knowledge, but asked me to do an episode on how to help children cope with illness, death, and grief, so she can be ready in case she ever needs it. Dr. Atle Dyregrov joins us from Bergen, Norway. He graduated as a psychologist in 1980 and worked for five years in the Pediatrics department at Haukeland University Hostpital, helping families whose children had died. He also co-founded the Center for Crisis Psychology and served as its general manager for 25 years; he is now its academic director. He has worked particularly extensively with children who have experienced loss and trauma, as well as at the sites of major accidents and disasters both in Norway and abroad, and has written numerous books, book chapters, and research articles on children’s response to death and crises. It turns out that this ended up being a very timely episode for me indeed: you’ll hear in the show that my mum died when I was young.  Not even a week after I did this interview, my newly three-year-old daughter was playing with Legos in our living room when she asked – completely out of the blue – “Do you have a mama?”  Having done this interview I was well-prepared for a short but straightforward conversation, and was able to shift what would likely have been a very uncomfortable situation for me into something where I felt much more confident in explaining how people’s bodies stop working when they die. Subscribers to my newsletter will recall that we spent last week in Missouri visiting the very same Sarah who requested the episode, and I had given her a summary of the content and told her about my daughter’s question.  A couple of days later Sarah and my daughter found a dead bug on a playground and Sarah said “I think it’s dead,” and my daughter responded “Did it’s body stop working?”.  Sarah was taken aback…and amused…and was able to answer the question without losing her cool. Listen to this episode – we’re all gonna need it at some point!   Dr. Atle Dyregrov's Book Grief in children: A handbook for adults - Affiliate link   References Abdelnoor, A., & Hollins, S. (2004). The effect of childhood bereavement on secondary school performance. Educational Psychology in Practice 20(1), 43-54. Adams-Greenly, M., & & Moynihan, R.T. (1983). Helping the children of fatally ill parents. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 53(2), 219-229. Ayers, T.S., Wolchik, S.A., Sandler, I.N., Twohey, J.L., Weyer, J.L, Padgett-Jones, D., Weiss, L., Cole, E., & Kriege, G. (2013-2014). The family bereavement program: Description of a theory-based prevention program for parentally-bereaved children and adolescents. Omega 68(4), 293-314. Baker, J.E., Sedney, M.A., & Gross, E. (1992). Psychological tasks for bereaved children.  American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 62(1), 105-116. Berg. L., Rostila, M., & Hjern, A. (2016). Parental death during childhood and depression in young adults – a national cohort study. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 57(9), 1092-1098. Berg, L., Rostila, M., Saarela, J., & Hjern, A. (2014). Parental death during childhood and subsequent school performance. Pediatrics 133, 682-689. Bugge, K.E., Darbyshire, P., Rokholt, E.G., Haugstvedt, K.T.S., & Helseth, S. (2014). Young children’s grief: Parents’ understanding and coping. Death Studies 38, 36-43. Corr, C.A., & Balk, D.E. (2010). Children’s encounters with death, bereavement, and coping. New York, NY: Springer. Dyregrov, A. (2008). Grief in children: A handbook for adults (2nd Ed.). London, U.K.: Jessica Kingsley. Engarhos, P. (2012). The young child’s understanding of death: Early conversations and experiences with parents and caregivers. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. McGill University. Montreal, Canada. Kristensen, P., Dyregrov, A., Dyregrov, K., & Heir, T. (2016). Media exposure and prolonged grief: A study of bereaved parents and siblings after the 2011 Utoya Island terror attack. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy 8(6), 661-667. Renaud, S-J., Engarhos, P., Schleifer, M., & Talwar, V. (2015). Children’s earliest experiences with death: Circumstances, conversations, explanations, and parental satisfaction. Infant and Child Development 24, 157-174. Yang, S., & Park, S. (2017). A sociocultural approach to children’s perceptions of death and loss. OMEGA. [Epublication ahead of print.] DOI: 10.1177/0030222817693138   Read Full Transcript   Transcript Jen:   [00:37] Good morning and welcome to today’s episode of the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. This episode comes to us courtesy of my good friend Sarah, who fortunately hasn’t yet had any reason to use this knowledge, but she asked me to do an episode on how to help children cope with illness, death, and grief, so she can be ready in case she ever needs it. So my guest today is Dr. Atle Dyregrov, who joins us today from Bergen, Norway, and he’s actually the first knighted interviewee on the show, so we’re going to refer to him as Sir Dyregrov. He’s also a professor at the University of Bergen, Norway. He graduated as a psychologist in 1980 and worked for five years in the pediatrics department at Haukeland University Hospital, helping families whose children had died. He also co-founded the Center for Crisis Psychology and served as General Manager for 25 years and he’s now it’s Academic Director. Jen:   [01:29] He’s worked particularly extensively with children who have experienced loss and trauma as well as at the sites of major accidents and disasters, both in Norway and abroad, and has written numerous books, book chapters and research articles on children’s response to death and crises. Welcome Dr. Dyregrov. Dr. Dyregrov:   [01:45] Thank you. Jen:   [01:46] Thank you. It’s such a pleasure to have you here. Now. Before we get started on this topic, I just want to have a little word with my listeners because some of the episodes that I do on the show are episodes that I do for them and some of them are closer to my heart and this is one that’s a little closer to my heart as well. It’s not really a secret, but it hasn’t come up yet in the course of doing the show that my own mom died when I was 10. In a way that was both sudden and unexpected and it was so long ago now that it’s not really a difficult thing for me to talk about anymore, but I kind of wanted to make sure that people are aware of it because it does impact the way that I talk about death and also the way that I think about it. Jen:  [02:20] I’ve lived with it for so long now that I sort of think I’ve earned the right to have a bit of a dark sense of humor. I also use very frank language like death and dead rather than passing or lost, and whenever someone uses the word lost, when they actually mean someone died. I always think of a quote from that fabulous Oscar Wilde play The Importance of Being Earnest, where Jack Worthington says, “I have lost both of my parents,” and Lady Bracknell responds: “To lose one parent, Mr. Worthington, may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness.” So our goal today is to try and understand what children understand about death and how they experience grief and to give you some real tools you can use when you need to talk with them about it. So let’s get started. All right, Dr. Dyregrov. I thought we could begin on Canada. Easier end of the questions and work our way towards the harder ones. So death is everywhere around us, you know, it happens to all of us and our media is absolutely saturated with it, but we have such a hard time talking about it and particularly talking about it with children. So I’m wondering if you can tell us your thoughts on why this is and is it really because we’re afraid of saying the wrong thing and should we be afraid of that? Dr. Dyregrov:   [03:31] I think that’s part of the reason, but I also think that we are afraid of it because it has to do with our own vulnerability; the thought that maybe we will die away from our children to be left alone. That’s a hard thing for parents to think about and talk about. So it is a difficult topic for everyone. And I think it’s that some of the reasons for why we hesitate when we speak with children. Jen:   [04:01] And it just seems so strange to me that it’s, I mean it’s everywhere on TV and we watch it all the time, but even when we’re not talking with children, it’s such a taboo topic. Dr. Dyregrov:  [04:14] Yeah. But it’s getting gradually better, I think it said when I started in the field in the early eighties, children were not allowed into the hospital if there was a sibling who was very ill, are much more open about it now than we were and that happens everywhere. But, but it’s been a general movement across the world that we are more open with more direct and our responses to children. So I think we’re on the right way. Jen:   [04:46] Okay. Well that’s, that’s a good sign then. So I’m curious about what children understand about death. We were actually.. I was taking my daughter down to the car this morning so she could head off to daycare and she was talking about how the rosebuds on our tree outside our house had died. And I was curious about what her conception is of that. Does she know that dying is forever? Does she know they’re not going to come back into bloom again in two weeks? What do children in general understand about death and what are some of the transitions they go through in this understanding as they get older? Dr. Dyregrov:   [05:19] Well, in the preschool age, they have a problem understanding that when we’re dead, it’s irreversible; they can’t turn it back. They will ask you, well, in 14 days he’d be back! They also have difficulties understanding that all life functions cease when we die and they don’t understand that death is universal, that everyone will die. Sometimes depending on their actual experience, there is a transition when they get towards between four and six years, usually they would grasp more of this. My own son was…my youngest son was four and a half when his best friend and her and his sister were killed in a traffic accident as well as the mother and when we were going, and I took him to also see the three dead ones then, and before he saw them, he was saying that in 14 days he’d be back; after the summer, he’d be back. Dr. Dyregrov:    [06:18] He was sort of not grasping their irreversibility of it, and then when we had seen them and he had taken into concrete facts on the way back home, he said that now we can never do this, now we can never do this. So he sort of took a step because of his practical experience with death and you see that in many children, that they gradually come to grasp with this and they understand that when we’re dead we don’t think, and the hair doesn’t grow any longer but it depends on how much you’re exposed to death also. Jen:   [06:56] So you talked about the irreversibility there and then also the body is still a functioning after death. So it would be pretty common then to think that someone might have been buried but still be breathing or something in a way. Dr. Dyregrov:    [07:09] Yes, that’s exactly what happens. They wonder who will give a person water; what if they’re thirsty? So they have this sense that they go on living and they would feel pain. So when we explain. We have to be very concrete that might make them understand how the death is concrete than that we don’t feel anything and we don’t need the supplies we usually would have as persons. Jen:    [07:34] Okay. And so I, I know you wrote a book on this topic, it’s called Grief and Children: A Handbook for Adults and I found it very clearly written; the language is so concrete and it was so helpful to me in understanding ways to talk about this and you say in it that you should…or the parents should let the child experience the death in the same way that the family does and if there is a viewing of the body that the children should be allowed to see the body if they want to. That to me seems…I mean my mom was cremated so I didn’t have that option, but I’m just thinking about, you know, taking my three year old to see a body and it’s a very strange feeling for me and I’m not saying I wouldn’t do it, but it does feel strange. Dr. Dyregrov:    [08:15] It does, but we’ve changed the culture in Norway when we started out, it was very uncommon to have children even participating in the funeral now children are included in rituals and we’ve also done a study where we’ve interviewed children about this and they say that children should not be left out. That should be part of this. And they argue for why it’s important for them because this is something you cannot undo later. It is something that helps them understand that death is real. It can contract the fantasies they have about what death is and it is also an opportunity for expressing. They can bring into the coffin, drawings; they can have written a farewell letter. And I’ve lots of practical experience with this now, and of course there’s been some children who struggled with the image, they see the dead person and it’s different than they thought it would be, so, so that create, can create a sort of, a traumatic image for them, but we can always help with that. But it’s very hard if a child who’s eight asks, where were I; did I get the chance to see? And we have to say no and we cannot undo that they’ve been kept out of this. So I really tell parents that the best thing is to include them, but I also say never force them. Parents must also feel comfortable with bringing the children along and it demands that adults prepare them, that they follow them through and give them explanations for what they see for also the adults’ reactions they may observe and then follow up afterwards with conversation about what they’ve been part of. Jen:    [10:07] Yeah. It seems that that preparation is really key, right? I mean, if you don’t know what you’re going to see. And I, I’m actually not sure I’ve ever seen a dead body, so I don’t know how I would prepare someone, but I assume there are people you can talk to about that kind of thing. Um, and that you should have a conversation with the child in advance, right? About what they’re going to see. Dr. Dyregrov:    [10:25] Definitely. It’s, it’s the difference between something that can be experienced traumatic, and what can be therapeutic for you lies in the preparation. Jen:  [10:35] Okay. And so do you find that funeral homes are typically well equipped to have those kinds of conversations or how do you do it if you don’t feel comfortable doing it yourself? Dr. Dyregrov:   [10:45] In Norway we see that the, I don’t know what it’s called, the funeral and the undertaker? Jen:   [10:51] Yeah; same thing. Dr. Dyregrov:     [10:52] They are the ones that often introduce this to the families and also try to get the parents to include children. And so it’s more the rule that children will be part than they are excluded. And the same… If there’s damage to the body due to accidents or suicide, they will. If parents can’t be that children shouldn’t be there, but when parents can be there, children can be, and I have helped some who struggled with images, but it’s very few compared to how many will take part in this, but there are cultural differences here and

I actually hadn’t realized what a can of worms I was opening when I started the research for today’s episode, which is on the topic of manners and politeness. It began innocently enough – as an English person, for whom manners are pretty important, I started to wonder why my almost three-year-old doesn’t have better manners yet. It turns out that it was a much more difficult subject to research than I’d anticipated, in part because it draws on a variety of disciplines, from child development to linguistics. And at the heart of it, I found myself torn between two different perspectives. The parenting philosophy that underlies the respectful relationship I have with my daughter, which is called Resources for Infant Educarers, or RIE, advocates for the use of modeling to transmit cultural information like manners – if you, the parent, are a polite person, then your child will learn about manners. On the flip side of that is the practice of saying “what do you say?” or something similar when you want your child to say “please” or “thank you,” something that I know a lot of parents do. My general approach has been to model good manners consistently but I do find it drives me bananas when my daughter says “I want a [whatever it is]” without saying “please,” and RIE also says parents should set a limit on behavior when they find it annoying. So I have been trying to walk a fine line between always modeling good manners and requiring a “please” before I acquiesce to a demand, and I wondered whether research could help me to come down on one side or the other of this line and just be sure about what I’m doing. So this episode is going to be about my explorations through the literature on this topic, which are winding and convoluted – actually both the literature and my explorations are winding and convoluted, and by the time we get to the end I hope to sort out how I’m going to instill a sense of politeness in my daughter, and how you might be able to do it for your child as well.   Other episodes referenced in this show 004: How to encourage creativity and artistic ability in children (and symbolic representation) 026: Is my child lying to me? (Hint: yes!) 005: How to “scaffold” children’s learning to help them succeed 034: How do I get my child to do chores? 007: Help!  My toddler won’t eat vegetables 031: Parenting beyond pink and blue 006: Wait, is my toddler racist?   References Becker, J.A. (1988). The success of parents’ indirect techniques for teaching their preschoolers pragmatic skills. First Language 8, 173-182. Brown, P., & Levinson, S.C. (1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. De Lucca Freitas, L.B., Pieta, M.A.M., & Tudge, J.R.H. (2011). Beyond Politeness: The expression of gratitude in children and adolescents. Psicologia: Reflexao e Critica 24(4), 757-764. Durlack, J.A., Weissberg, R.P., Dymnicki, A.B., Taylor, R.D., & Schellinger, K.B. (2011). The impact of enhancing student’s social and emotional learning: A meta-analysis of school-based universal interventions. Child Development 82(1), 405-432. Einzig, R. (2015). Model graciousness. Retrieved from: https://visiblechild.wordpress.com/2015/09/02/model-graciousness/ (Also see Robin’s Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/visiblechildinc/) Ervin-Tripp, S., Guo, J., & Lampert, M. (1990). Politeness and persuasion in children’s control acts. Journal of Pragmatics 14, 307-331. Grief, E.B., & Gleason, J.B. (1980). Hi, thanks, and goodbye: More routine information. Language in Society 9(2), 159-166. Ely, R., & Gleason, J.B. (2006). I’m sorry I said that: Apologies in young children’s discourse. Journal of Child Language 33 (599-620). Gleason, J.B., Perlmann, R.Y., Grief, E.B. (1984). What’s the magic word: Learning language through politeness routines. Discourse Processes 7(4), 493-502. Kuykendall, J. (1993). “Please,” “Thank you,” “You’re welcome”: Teacher language can positively impact prosocial development. Day Care and Early Education 21(1), 30-32. Lancy, D.F. (2015). The anthropology of childhood: Cherubs, chattel, changelings (2nd Ed.). Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. Lansbury, J. (2014, January 16). They’ll grow into it – Trusting children to develop manners, toilet skills, emotional regulation and more. Retrieved from: http://www.janetlansbury.com/2014/01/theyll-grow-into-it-trusting-children-to-develop-manners-toilet-skills-emotional-regulation-and-more/ Lo, A., & Howard, K.M. (2009). Mobilizing respect and politeness in classrooms. Linguistics and Education 20, 211-216. Snow, C.E., & Gleason, J.B. (1990). Developmental perspectives on politeness: Sources of children’s knowledge. Journal of Pragmatics 14, 289-305. Suzuku, M. (2015, October 23). Bowing in Japan: Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about how to bow, and how not to bow, in Japan. Retrieved from: https://www.tofugu.com/japan/bowing-in-japan/   Read Full Transcript Transcript Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  I actually hadn’t realized what a can of worms I was opening when I started the research for today’s episode, which is on the topic of manners and politeness.  It began innocently enough – as an English person (honestly, despite the strange accent) for whom manners are pretty important, I started to wonder why my almost three-year-old doesn’t have better manners yet.  It turns out that it was a much more difficult subject to research than I’d anticipated, in part because it draws on a variety of disciplines, from child development to linguistics. And at the heart of it, I found myself torn between two different perspectives.  The parenting philosophy that underlies the respectful relationship I have with my daughter, which is called Resources for Infant Educarers, or RIE, advocates for the use of modeling to transmit cultural information like manners – if you, the parent, are a polite person, then your child will learn about manners.  On the flip side of that is the practice of saying “what do you say?” or something similar when you want your child to say “please” or “thank you,” something that I know a lot of parents do.  My general approach has been to model good manners consistently but I do find it drives me bananas when my daughter says “I want a [whatever it is]” without saying “please,” and RIE also says parents should set a limit on behavior when they find it annoying.  So I have been trying to walk a fine line between always modeling good manners and requiring a “please” before I acquiesce to a demand, and I wondered whether research could help me to come down on one side or the other of this line and just be sure about what I’m doing.  So this episode is going to be about my explorations through the literature on this topic, which are winding and convoluted – actually both the literature and my explorations are winding and convoluted, and by the time we get to the end I hope to sort out how I’m going to instill a sense of politeness in my daughter, and how you might be able to do it for your child as well.   So the first thing we should acknowledge as we set out on our journey, that both politeness and impoliteness are awfully difficult to define, they are contextually appropriate, and they are culturally appropriate as well.  In fact, politeness and impoliteness seem to be difficult to define *because* they are contextually appropriate and culturally appropriate.  So we might agree that it is rude to interrupt people when they are speaking, and yet I’m sure we can all imagine a time when we were excited to tell someone something and we interrupted them – perhaps repeatedly – so we could do it.  We might even be able to find a culture where interrupting people isn’t that rude at all. We might all agree that saying “please” and “thank you” form the basis of good manners and yet how many of us ALWAYS say these things at the appropriate times?  I pride myself on my manners and yet I know I don’t ALWAYS use them (although I do make an extra special effort to use them when my daughter is around).  And manners are, of course, highly culturally appropriate – you only need to think of how strange it seems to Americans to bow to someone else to show deference and respect, which is, of course, commonplace in Japan – there’s a helpful guide linked in the references to the exact number of degrees your bow should be in each of a variety of circumstances that require different levels of deference and respect in Japan.  But there are some countries in southern Europe where the translation of “please” into the local language is apparently a term that connotes begging and is seen to be rude, so even something as simple as that is not universal by any stretch.   If we start to think about the purpose of manners, I like to look first to the ethnographic literature to see how things are done in other cultures, because I think this helps to ground our explorations with a view on whether us Westerners are doing things in a way that the rest of the world thinks is crazy or not.  For this I turned to our old friend David Lancy, whose book The Anthropology of Childhood I’ve referenced many times on the show.  I was surprised to find that manners are actually quite universal in nature – what precisely are the social graces that one needs to master varies by location, of course, but the concept of manners does seem to exist in an awful lot of cultures  – and so does teaching children about those manners.  In a majority of cases it seems as though the mother teaches the child manners so it appears more attractive to other potential caregivers, which reduces the burden of parenting on the mother.  Kwara’ae mothers in the Solomon Island drill their children on terms to use for their relatives and polite ways of conversing with them, and these sessions contain not only information about family structure but also about values of delicacy and peacefulness.  Four-year-old Fijian children are expected to bend over in an exaggerated bow to show respect to passing adults, and will be scolded or hit if they don’t show sufficient respect.  Javanese mothers repeat terms of politeness over and over and correct their children’s mistakes, so one-year-olds can do a polite bow and say a polite form of “goodbye,” while an aristocratic five-year-old will have an extensive repertoire of graceful phrases and actions. David Lancy notes that there is actually considerable evidence that children will learn appropriate prosocial behaviors in time – despite the importance of social instruction in many areas of the south pacific, Samoan children begin to pick up the distinctive features characterizing people of rank and authority without being explicitly instructed.  Apparently there are many societies that value “proper” behavior a great deal and that don’t engage in any kind of enforced compliance or training since, after all, the success of the human species actually rests on our VOLUNTARY compliance with social norms.  The English well-known ethologist Desmond Morris claimed in his 1967 book The Naked Ape that there may be an instinctive basis for greetings and other similar rituals, but it seems to me that children would pick them up a lot more quickly than they do if this were the case.  Six years seems like an awfully long time to wait for a behavior to emerge that is so important in navigating social situations that the child encounters from much younger ages. French children are well-regarded for their table manners with wrists being held on the edge of the table when the hands are not being used for eating, for example. The gulf between French and American children’s manners prompted the bestseller Bringing up Bebe, which teased us with descriptions of French parenting that alternated between these strict mealtime rules and a great deal of laissez-faire parenting that permits a great deal more parental relaxation than under the typical American model.  David Lancy points out the supreme irony that Americans spend such a huge amount of time teaching their young children things – all kinds of things, in an effort to help them get ahead, much more time than we spend teaching them about things related to kin terminology, politeness, and etiquette (even though it might feel to you as if you spend quite a lot of time saying “what’s the magic word?”).  He attributes this discrepancy to the importance of kin terminology, politeness, and etiquette in interdependent societies where the whole is valued more than the individuals within it.  Western society, and particularly American society, values individuality to such a great extent that being able to recognize one’s feelings and expressing those feelings are far more important than what anyone else might think or feel.     I’ve been trying to think about what it is about these words “please” and “thank you” that are so meaningful for us as parents and that leave me, at least, so ticked off when they aren’t used.  Particularly “please” which I find much more triggering when it’s omitted than “thank you.”  Certainly it’s possible to be polite without using them – something like “would you kindly pass the salt?” is polite doesn’t use “please,” although perhaps the average three-year-old is less likely to come out with this variation that they probably don’t hear very often.  Maybe it’s because we feel taken for granted much of the time and once we’ve asked our preschooler to say “please” a number of times we feel as though they ought to remember the routine, and that if they can remember how to say “I want some banana,” surely they can remember to say “I want some banana please” – although one study did find that a polite request by a child was less likely to be granted than a neutral “I want some banana” kind of request, perhaps because mothers in particular are conditioned to comply with distressed or angry requests.  If the child is already distressed then we don’t want to escalate the situation by denying the request, but if the child says “please” and they’re asking for something we don’t want them to have they’re probably in a mood in which we can negotiate with them.  It does seem as though we’re shooting ourselves in the foot a bit, though, by denying more requests when they are accompanied by a “please” than when the child stamps their foot and says they want the thing. On the flip-side, though, I can imagine how frustrating it must be to be a child and not be able to reach the bananas, or the milk, or the scissors and glue, and to always have to ask for everything an adult thinks must be kept out of your reach.  So we use these phrases to get people to do things for us, and to show our appreciation for doing things for us, because in our society these things have become routinized.  As one researcher noted, routines are a way of guiding a person’s normal interaction in social situations, and if everyone shares the same “rules” about what those routines should be then the interaction goes more smoothly.  For this reason, researchers have found that young children who have improved social and emotional skills do better in school, although I would argue that so much of “doing well in school” in the early years pretty much does consist of being able to sit still and keep quiet when the teacher says “be quiet” and not get into disagreements with other children so in a way it’s kind of a “well, duh” that children with better manners do better in school.   So what I really want to get to the root of is: how much do our toddlers and preschoolers understand about all this?  Should we teach them the routines of politeness before they understand what the routines mean, or should we wait for the child to understand what it means to be polite and to feel grateful before we expect them to start saying “please” and “thank you”?   Professor Jean Berko Gleason did a fair bit of important work on manners, and we’re going to talk about several of her studies, although most of it was in the 1980s and I think we can assume social conditions have changed a bit since then.  In one study she and her co-authors wanted to understand HOW children learn politeness rules which, she says, are even more difficult to understand than rules of grammar, which children obviously struggle as well because, like with manners, grammar has lots of rules but also lots of exceptions to those rules.  The researchers use a definition of politeness which says that the amount of “work” that needs to be done when making a request is determined by three parameters – firstly, the degree of imposition of the request (so, “could you pass the salt?” and “could I borrow $1,000 from you?” require different levels of politeness, even if you’re asking both questions of the same person), secondly the social difference between the requester and the grantee, and thirdly the power differential between the requestor and the grantee.  The researchers wondered how children learn the rules of politeness in all of its many and varied forms when no parent ever says to them “you can be rude to me but you’d better be polite to your teacher because there’s more social distance between you and her than between you and me.”  But children do receive lots of information from two other sources – firstly parents teach by modeling, for example, by trying to minimize threats to their children’s social standing, or “face,” by making polite requests that help their children “save face” or using more polite forms of requests when asking for special favors from their children.  Secondly, parents do directly teach children about what forms of politeness to use in certain situations, usually taking the form of “say please” or something similar.  Unfortunately, the researchers didn’t make any attempt to analyze how effective were the different methods of teaching.   In another study, Professor Berko recruited eight families, four with girls and four with boys all aged between three and five.  With the families’ permission, she left a tape recorder in an inconspicuous spot in the dining room and recorded the conversation that occurred during the evening meal.  She points out that “it should be noted that the fathers had more occasion to say please or thanks since they were being served.”  One might hope that in modern families at least some men are participating in some cooking, or at least helping to get their own food, although I have to say that that’s not the case in our house.  Professor...

Hot on the heels of our last episode on whether only children really are as bad as their reputation, this week’s episode is for the 80% of families (in the U.S., at least) who have more than one child. How do siblings impact each other’s development?  What should we make of the research on how birth order impacts each child?  Why the heck do siblings fight so much, and what can we do about it?  (Turns out that siblings in non-Western countries actually don’t fight anywhere near as much…) We cover all this and more with my guest, Professor Susan McHale of Penn State University.   Note: Professor McHale mentions a helpful book written by Judy Dunn at the end of the episode but doesn’t specifically name the title; Dunn has actually written a number of books on siblings which can be found here.   References Bjerkedal, T., Kristensen, P., Skjeret, G.A., & Brevik, J.I. (2007). Intelligence test scores and birth order among young Norwegian men (conscripts) analyzed within and between families. Intelligence 35, 503-514. Branje, S.J.T., van Lieshout, C.F.M., van Aken, M.A.G., & Haselager, G.J.T. (2004). Perceived support in sibling relationships and adolescent development. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 45(8), 1385-1396. Dixon, M., Reyes, C.J., Leppert, M.F., & Pappas, L.M. (2008). Personality and birth order in large families. Personality and Individual Differences 44, 119-128. Dunn, J., & Kendrick, C. (1980). The arrival of a sibling: Changes in patterns of interaction between mother and first-born child. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 21, 119-132. Dunn, J. (1995). From one child to two: What to expect, how to cope, and how to enjoy your growing family. New York, NY: Ballantine. Feinberg, M.E., Solmeyer, A.R., Hostetler, M.L., Sakuma K-L, Jones, D., & McHale, S.M. (2012). Siblings are special: Initial test of a new approach for preventing youth behavior problems. Journal of Adolescent Health 53, 166-173. Healey, M.D., & Ellis B.J. (2007). Birth order, conscientiousness, and openness to experience: Tests of the family-niche model of personality using a within-family methodology. Evolution and Human Behavior 28, 55-59. Jensen, A.C., & McHale, S.M. (2015). What makes siblings different? The development of sibling differences in academic achievement and interests. Journal of Family Psychology 29(3), 469-478. Kristensen, P. & Bjerkedal, T. (2007). Explaining the relation between birth order and intelligence. Science (New Series), 316(5832), 1717. Lawson, D.W., & Mace, R. (2008). Sibling configuration and childhood growth in contemporary British Families. International Journal of Epidemiology 37, 1408-1421. McHale, S.M., Bissell, J., & Kim, J-Y. (2009). Sibling relationship, family, and genetic factors in sibling similarity in sexual risk. Journal of Family Psychiatry 23(4), 562-572. McHale, S.M., Updegraff, K.A., Helms-Erikson, H., & Crouter, A.C. (2001). Sibling influences on gender development in middle childhood and early adolescence: A longitudinal study. Developmental Psychology 37(1), 115-125. McHale, S.M., Updegraff, K.A., & Whiteman, S.D. (2012). Sibling relationships and influences in childhood and adolescence. Journal of Marriage and Family 75(5), 913-930. Palhaus, D.L., Wehr, P., & Trapnell, P.D. (2000). Resolving controversy over birth order and personality: By debate or by design? Politics and the Life Sciences 19(2), 177-179. Rohrer, J.M., Egloff, B., & Schmukle, S.C. (2015). Examining the effects of birth order on personality. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112(46), 14224-14229. Solmeyer, A.R., McHale, S.M., & Crouter, A.C. (2014). Longitudinal associations between sibling relationship qualities and risky behavior across adolescence. Developmental Psychology 50(2), 600-610. Updegraff, K.A., McHale, S.M., Killoren, S.E., & Rodriguez, S.A. (2011). Cultural variations in sibling relationships. In J. Caspi (Ed.), Sibling Development: Implications for Mental Health Practitioners. New York, NY: Springer.   Read Full Transcript Transcript Jen     [00:38] Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Regular listeners will recall that this is the second episode in a two part series, which was prompted by a listener emailing me to say that she and her partner don’t want to have another child, but they’re worried about the impacts of not having siblings on their daughter. We looked at that topic last week, but I didn’t think it was fair to the other 80 percent of the families in the country, assuming all of them are listening who have more than one child. So today’s episode is for all of you. I’d like to extend a warm welcome to my guest, Susan McHale, Distinguished Professor of Human Development and Family Ptudies and professor of Demography – among other things – at Penn State University. Research in her lab focuses on family systems, dynamics including youths and parents, family roles, relationships and daily activities, and how these are linked to family members’ psychological and physical health and development. Her lines of research includes sibling relationships, family, gender dynamics, and the sociocultural context of family dynamics. And since we’ve already done episodes related to those second two topics, I’m especially interested to learn about how all of these come together and are intertwined with the idea of siblings. Welcome Professor McHale. Dr. McHale:    [01:47] Glad to be here. Jen:   [01:48] All right, so I wonder if we could kind of start at the end in a way with the developmental outcomes of signaling relationships and then work our way back to the beginning because there’s way more research on the developmental outcomes than I could have imagined. I wonder if you could summarize some of the state of the current research on several different things and we can kind of work our way down a little list that I have here. I’m the first one being risky behavior like adolescent sex. I had no idea that siblings was related to that. Dr. McHale:  [02:17] Right. Most of the research has been on sibling resemblance and of course siblings are genetically related; it’s not just a social process and some work has been trying to disentangle the role of shared genetics and shared environments in sibling similarity and all kinds of risky behavior from substance use to adolescent sex. I don’t think there’s quite a definitive answer. Usually behaviors are complex and so multiply determined so there’s likely to be some genetic load and some socialization between siblings as well as growing up in the same family that all come together in helping to explain sibling resemblance. In our research, we’ve tried to study the processes through which siblings become more alike or more different from one another by actually asking siblings whether they try to be like one another or whether they try to de-identify or work to be different from their siblings, try to be different because they don’t want to be the same kind of person that their sibling is and what we see is that in sibling relationships that are warm and positive, siblings are more likely to say that they try to be like one another and so on the one hand a positive sibling relationship has good outcomes because siblings can be sources of support, affection and so forth. On the other hand, if you have a sibling who’s really into risky behavior, a warm and close sibling relationship isn’t always a good thing. Jen:   [03:56] And so you see the warm relationship leading the, I assume usually the younger child to model the older child’s behavior? Dr. McHale:    [04:04] Correct. So constructs like partners in crime, older siblings being gatekeepers to availability of substances or relationship partners. These are all ways that siblings can influence one another. Jen:     [04:20] Is that linked to the idea of gender development as well, and I’m just wondering if maybe there’s a younger boy who has an older girl sibling. Do you see that the boy is kind of more socialized to be around women and are there influences that the older girl has on that younger boy? Dr. McHale:  [04:38] Yes. Oftentimes our sample sizes are too small to study the four siblings constellations, brother, brother, sister, sister, and so forth. Older sister, younger brother, younger sister, older brother. But we have some emerging information. I’m one of the dyads that has some longstanding findings that warmth and affection can lead to problems is the brother, brother dyad. So an older brother who’s close and warm with a younger brother can lead that child into, or they can mutually influence one another, sort of playing off one another, getting into trouble, deceiving parents, doing things behind their parents’ backs and so forth. So, so the older brother really can be something of a risk factor. On the other hand, some of our studies have found that older sisters are are protective. This is a study of Mexican origin families that kids who have had both boys and girls who had older sisters were protected in their acculturation into U.S. society in terms of engaging in risky behavior. Dr. McHale: [05:49] One of the other, I think pretty interesting findings has to do with mixed-sex dyads, so brother, sister, sister, brother, where we found that in terms of romantic competence, being able to relate to the other sex possibly not surprisingly growing up with a sibling of the other sex and all that that involves, you know, having your siblings friends around just being used to having members of the other sex in your orbit, that by the time you reach the end of adolescence, kids who have the other sex in their lives by virtue of having a sibling of the other sex tend to feel more competent in the context of heterosexual relationships. So it’s a mixed bag. Like most things, it’s not all good things are related, but there are some good things and some potentially not so good things that come out of the same experiences. Jen:  [06:42] Yeah. And some of the ones that really surprised me were differences in health outcomes among siblings. How does, how can siblings impact your health? Dr. McHale: [06:51] Well, are you thinking about the study of Mexican origin? Jen:      [06:57] Yeah. Dr. McHale: [06:57] And that’s not necessarily about what siblings do, what it’s about being a girl or a boy, and the gender socialization that is involved in this, as I said, was a study of Mexican origin families were the findings showed and Kim Updegraff who’s at Arizona State University was the lead on this study, but the findings showed that when mothers had more traditional gender attitudes, you know, women’s place, whereas in the home, men are the ones in charge, that kind of thing, their daughters were substantially less likely to access healthcare in their young adult years. So this is predicting out over about eight years where early experiences in a highly gendered environment that put men, you know, at the forefront end put women as more subservient were, were linked to how these young women were taking care of themselves a number of years later. Jen:     [07:56] Wow. Uh, that is a very surprising finding. And so you’re, you’re speaking about a study of Mexicans; Mexican siblings, and that leads me to wonder if it’s possible to generalize, I know this is a big generalization, but how do sibling relationships differ across cultures in general? Dr. McHale:   [08:20] They do considerably and we’ve only directly studied sibling relationships in families living in the United States. So the Mexican origin live near the Phoenix area. We have a group of about 200 African American, two-parent families in the Baltimore/Philadelphia area. And then we have a sample of predominantly Anglo families in central Pennsylvania. So these families differ not just by ethnicity, but where in the country that they’re living in rural, urban and so forth. So it’s directly don’t make direct comparisons, but we’re much more interested in how cultural values and practices that we measured directly are linked to sibling relationship quality. And so for example, Mexican origin families have been described as being more gender stereotypical. And so therefore the traditional attitudes of mothers reflect the cultural orientation to discriminate between the roles and practices and daily activities of men versus women, girls versus boys and so girls may be more likely to pick up on these messages in those families leading to the differences in healthcare access. I should also mention that it’s not all good things for the boys and those families either in general, the young men in that sample access healthcare less than the young women, so we could explain the differences between the young women in that those Mexican origin families, by their mothers’ gender attitudes, but all it took for the boys was being a boy and they were less likely to access healthcare, which is, you know, what are sort of a stereotype of men refusing to go to the doctor. Jen:   [10:05] Right. Okay. So it’s not that they’re not accessing it because they’re not sick, it’s that they, they should be accessing it and they’re not. Dr. McHale:   [10:12] Well, they’re just not getting routine physical exams. Jen:  [10:14] Okay. Dr. McHale:   [10:15] Yeah. Jen:    [10:16] Okay. Dr. McHale:  [10:16] But in, in those families, also Mexican origin families are, are known for their families and values as are many minority groups in the U. S., African American families included and our studies of those African and Mexican origin families show that when siblings and their parents have stronger familism values, that is, they see the family as central to their lives and obligations and responsibilities to the family as being highly important, distinguishing between communal oriented or family oriented set of values and a more individualistic me-first, independence, individual achievement-oriented society like traditional mainstream U.S. culture, this orientation to family is linked to more positive sibling relationships. Jen:    [11:10] Okay. And so I guess we’re, we’re skipping ahead a little bit here is planning on winding up to this, but since since we’re there now, let’s go ahead and talk about it. So I’m curious about this kind of love-hate dynamic that seems to go on between siblings and when I put an email out to my listeners and said, you know, do you have any questions about siblings that I should ask my expert next week? I got some responses and it seemed like a lot of them were related to my siblings just can’t get along. One person gave an example of a three year old daughter snatching a toy out of a nine month old son’s hands, not because she wants the thing, but just because he has it and she doesn’t or she doesn’t want the younger child in her space, even when they’re just kind of in the same room. Is the older child looking for our attention because I’m thinking about the ethnographic...