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

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

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

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

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

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

This episode is the final in our mini-series that I hope will help you to think through the options you might have for your child’s preschool. In previous episodes we looked at Waldorf and Montessori approaches to early childhood education; today we examine the Reggio Emilia-based approach with Suzanne Axelsson, who studied it for her Master’s degree in early childhood education and is well-respected in the Reggio field.  She helps us to understand how the “concept of the child” impacts how we see the child and support their learning, and what are the “hundred languages of children”… Suzanne Axelsson's Book The original learning approach: Weaving together playing, learning, and teaching in early childhood - Affiliate link References Bodrova, E., & Leong, D.J. (2006). Tools of the mind: The Vygotskian approach to early childhood education (2nd Ed.). New York, NY: Pearson. Edwards, C., Gandini, L., & Forman, G. (Eds.). (2012). The hundred languages of children: The Reggio Emilia experience in transformation.   Read Full Transcript Transcript Jen:   [00:27] Hello and welcome to today’s episode of Your Parenting Mojo, which is called Is a Reggio Emilia Preschool Right for My Child. So this is the third in our mini series about different approaches to preschool education and today’s episode is going to be a little bit odd for me because I actually know a fair bit about the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education, but I went out and found us a real expert to talk with and I’m going to pretend like I don’t know very much so that we can ask the kinds of questions that people here are new to Reggio Emilia might ask. Our guest today, Suzanne Axleson received her master’s degree in early childhood education at Sheffield University in England, where she specialized in Reggio Emilia language and communication and documentation as a tool to aid memory and deepen children’s learning. She has 20 years of experience teaching in a variety of early years settings including traditional Swedish preschool and Montessori. Suzanne recently worked at Filosofiska, which I hope I’m pronouncing correctly, Sweden’s first preschool with a philosophical profile where she developed an approach to use philosophy as a pedagogic tool for young children, but she recently decided to spend some time collecting her thoughts in preparation for writing a book on how to use listening to improve pedagogical outcomes. Welcome, Suzanne. Suzanne:    [01:39] Thank you. Jen: [01:40] Thanks so much for joining us today. I wonder if you could tell us about how you first learned about the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education and what about it spoke to you? Suzanne: [01:49] It was round about 2007 when I was working in a preschool and there were teachers talking about that this is a new approach to this preschool should take and we looked into it so we realized this was something we were going to do and so I looked more into it and realized it spoke to me because it’s more or less what I’ve been doing all the time. It was about observing the children and listening to the children and making sure that the learning was happening appropriately for them. So it felt like a natural contraction of how I was working as an educator but to deepen that, to learn more about it. Jen:     [02:27] Okay, and what specific elements of the practice were you referring to there? Suzanne:   [02:32] When working with projects the children will find something of interest and then you will go into their interest and deepen their understanding of this by if for example, it was dinosaurs, it would not just be looking at everything that was dinosaurs and learning facts about dinosaurs. Why was it they were interested in dinosaurs and quite often it was finding out more about their fears and finding out more about how they themselves build things or created things or drew things and interacted with what was scary or it was different depending on the group of children, so dinosaurs was never – I’ve done it many different times, but he’s never been exactly the same. Jen:  [03:13] Hm. And is never exactly the same because the children are never exactly the same. Right? Suzanne:   [03:18] They all have their different approaches. Some children have been – they’ve wanted to be paleontologists, so they wanted to go and pretend that we’re finding fossils and it’s all been about the bones and connected to the bones in their own body, so it was like an exploration of their own body through the dinosaur bones while others, It’s been definitely the fear. There’s something was those big scary teeth was what was fascinating them. There were more of the fear exploration during that time. Jen:   [03:45] Okay. Suzanne:   [03:46] It’s always been an interesting way to… It gives us the opportunity to look at, to, to discover what children are learning, but they give me a new perspective on the same thing. So I never go and see dinosaurs and exactly the same way. Jen:    [03:59] Mm. Yeah. Okay. Um, so I wonder if for somebody who’s never seen a Reggio classroom before, can you walk us through what one looks like in your mind? What does the room look like and what are the children doing and and how do they move through their day? Suzanne:   [04:13] In my mind, the classroom would be one would inspire learning now look around and I would know the children were interested in and know what they’ve been doing recently because there’d be documentation on the wall and that everything would be accessible for the children or most things will be accessible for the children because sometimes you can’t have everything out all at once. The children will be busy. They will be engaged. It would have freedom, freedom to move around and the classrooms from what I’m used to, when I’ve observed classrooms in the U.S. Have been more like a classroom while I’m used to the children being exposed to a whole series of rooms that they can move in and out of, so they have even more freedom here in Sweden and then what they do in the US, so um, aesthetic, it would be beautiful, but then what beautiful is, is can be quite different from preschool to another preschool because you’ve got to include your own culture and your own context. Suzanne:  [05:17] I think when I’ve observed schools in the US, they’ve had an awful lot of things on the walls while here in Sweden and not quite so many things on the walls, so there’s huge differences in how Reggio is being interpreted, but it’s not just the beautiful classroom is not enough is how the classroom is designed to create interactions with the teacher, with the materials, with children, with each other. So it’s not so much about a beautiful looking classroom is it’s very much about a room that is created with consideration for children and consideration for their interactions and consideration for the interests and learning of the children. Jen:    [06:07] Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I am a member of a couple of different Reggio-based groups on facebook and I think that especially the teachers who are newer to it tend to get hung up on the beauty of the classroom and it tends to be a lot of wood in the classroom and a lot of wicker baskets and I think sometimes think that if they were doing the wood and the wicker baskets, they’re “doing Reggio” and I think it’s important to remember that the beauty of the classroom is sort of a way of grounding us, but it’s not what. It’s not what Reggio is, right? Suzanne:  [06:38] Absolutely. Jen:    [06:40] Yeah. I wonder if you can help us understand a bit about the origination of the Reggio approach because this is… When I’ve spoken with in a Montessori and Waldorf educators this is the point in the interview where I normally talk about certifications and school accreditation, but that, that doesn’t exist for Reggio, right? Suzanne:    [06:56] Not in the same sense, no. Jen:    [06:58] So can you. Can you help us understand that? Suzanne:   [07:01] It started as an approach because at the end of the Second World War, they basically wanted a kind of education for their young children in Italy, the city of Reggio Emilia that would allow a more critical thinking, a more democratic approach that you wouldn’t just follow leaders blindly, they would actually question so that the children had the ability as adults to choose the right direction for their lives and not just follow. So it was always an approach. Malaguzzi was a very young man; and it was kind of surprising, I think he was only 24 when he started it Jen:   [07:37] Oh, I didn’t know that! Suzanne:   [07:38] I know; it kind of shocked me. This was a man who was very humble in his approach because he understood that he only knew a certain amount, so he wants to learn together with the children. So it’s always been this approach of learning together with the children and the children would be his teacher and he will be their teacher. Suzanne:    [07:56] And we would be co-researchers. So it’s more of an approach rather than a method. So it’s hard to become accredited in an approach, while a method is much easier to teach. Like the Montessori method, you learn the method of learning. Then you can apply this. While Malaguzzi really did not want to method because he felt this approach will be evolving all the time, like children, like society and culture is always evolving so we can’t have something that is fixed because if it’s fixed then it’s not going to be adjusting to the needs of our time and the needs of the culture that it finds itself in. A big part of why it appeals to me because it’s a pedagogy that is evolving rather than just this is the way it is and this is the way it should be. Jen:  [08:47] Yeah, and it also, in my mind, makes it more relevant to different cultures. I think when you go to Reggio Emilia and you talk to the teachers there, they’re adamant that you know, you don’t go in and look at their what they’re doing in their classrooms and take and take that home with you and aim to copy it in your classroom because it’s not relevant in your culture. The idea is to kind of extract the way that they’re thinking about the issue and then go and apply that in some kind of topic relevant to learning that is relevant in your culture. Is that right? Suzanne:  [09:20] Exactly. The view of the child not as an empty vessel to be filled with information but the child is competent and to reach their own potential and we’re just scaffolding that learning; they’re building their own education. So I also appreciate that we don’t see the children as something that we have to fill and we are responsible for in that sense, but we are responsible in supporting this child to reach their own potential. Jen:   [09:51] Yeah. Okay. So you brought up a couple of ideas there and I think one of those is the idea about constructivism, which is sort of the opposite of the way that school exists in the U.S., where you assume that the child is basically an empty vessel into which the teacher pours knowledge. Whereas Reggio views learning as a process that is co-constructed between two people and I think the example that you gave of Malaguzzi is great. You know, the idea that this person who was really the bedrock of the Reggio Emilia approach didn’t say, you know, this is my approach and I will teach it to you. He said, children, I will learn from you and you will learn from me. It seems as though that’s an awesome example of constructivism. Suzanne:    [10:36] Yes, yes. Jen:   [10:37] Yeah. And so the other, the other idea that you mentioned was scaffolding. Can you tell us a bit more about that? And I should, I should, I should mention to listeners, we did a whole episode back on scaffolding. I think it was about episode four or five. So if you want an in-depth understanding of it, go back and check that out. But um, can you help us understand how scaffolding is used in a Reggio-based classroom? Suzanne:   [10:56] Well instead of just telling the children how to do it or what to do, you’re asking them open ended questions to do that open problem solving. It can take little bit longer, but then the children’s learning is that own learning and they can be proud of how they achieve this. I think it’s very easy for us to fill in the gaps for them, but the idea is that the children make that leap themselves and we just kind of give them the tools to be able to do that leap, or create the safe space for that learning to happen. Jen:    [11:29] I wonder if you could give us an example of how that might work is there a situation that you’ve kind of scaffolded a child through recently that you could talk us through? Suzanne: [11:38] I think a lot of things with outdoors and climbing, for me. I will not lift the child onto a swing. I will not lift the child to a climbing frame and I’m quite happy for them to be and to look at me with angry stares as if I’m the worst teacher on the planet because I know that they can do it and I will give them the tools and I will give the encouragement to keep trying. I’ll ask another child come in, I know that you can climb up here. Can you show them that the technique that you’ve used to climb there and to be with that child and to help them through that frustration until they get there and they get to the top of the climbing frame and they have this enormous pride that they have achieved this themselves. Jen:   [12:25] Yeah. It seems to me as though you’re touching on a variety of different theories here. Jen:     

Your kids don’t lie, right?  And if they did, you’d be able to tell, right? News flash: they do.  And you probably can’t. Dr. Kang Lee – who is one of the world’s experts in lying – tells us why children lie, how we can (try to) reduce the incidence of lying, and how we should handle it when we catch our children in a lie. And here’s the one story that Dr. Lee says can help to prevent your child from lying…   Dr. Kang Lee's Book Children and lying: A century of scientific research - Affiliate link Reference Dr. Lee’s TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/kang_lee_can_you_really_tell_if_a_kid_is_lying   Read Full Transcript Transcript Jen:    [00:30] Welcome to today’s episode of Your Parenting Mojo, which is called My Child is Lying to Me! I became interested in this topic after I researched the episode on symbolic representation in art, which relies on the child’s understanding of what I know might be different from what she knows and that turns out that that concept is also important in lying because if I’m a toddler and as far as I know what’s in your head is the same as what’s in my head, why would I bother lying to you? And so I also started to wonder about the connections between lying and joking. After my one year old started telling me jokes: she would point to a pig and say “ats cow” and I’d say “really?” And she’d say “no.” So lying is a really pervasive human behavior, but I’m wondering how do children learn how to lie and why do they do it and is there anything we can do to encourage them to be more truthful more often. So let’s dive right into that topic in a conversation with Dr Kang Lee, who’s a University Distinguished Professor at the University of Toronto, Dr Lee received his B.S. and M.A. from Hangzhou University in China and his Ph.D from the University of New Brunswick in Canada. Dr Lee has been studying lying for a really long time, but we hope he’s going to tell us the truth today because we need the help. Welcome Dr Lee. Thanks for joining us. Dr. Lee: [01:44] Hi. Thanks for inviting me to be part of your program. Jen:     [01:48] Alright, so let’s start at the beginning. What are some of the reasons that people lie and do all people lie? Dr. Lee:   [01:54] So as far as I can tell, among the kids we have seen, we have seen possibly over 10,000 kids from all ages as young as two years of age, all the way up to 16, 17 years of age. The majority of them would lie in various kinds of situations. The first kind of like kids tell, tend to be motivated by self protection and typically what happens is when they have done something wrong, they haven’t done something I’m not supposed to do and then they have to cover that up and that’s one of the most frequent kind of lies kids tell. And the one of the earliest kind of lies kids tell. Jen:   [02:37] Okay. And so I’m just thinking through what are the logical consequences of what you just said, if, if I try and set up my home so that there are fewer things that my child is not supposed to do so that I put things out of reach that she’s not supposed to play with. And you know, kids get into stuff and sometimes things happen, but am I reducing the possibility that my two year old is going to lie to me if I…no. We have our video on and you’re shaking your head. Dr. Lee:  [03:08] You know, the kids, the jobs of a child is to learn the various rules of our society. We actually have a lot of rules. You know, you should do this, you should do not do that. But you know, during the learning process, you know, the child does not always listen to you and they say do not touch this. It’s not going to be good. And then, but the child sometimes it has this problem we call a deficit in inhibitory control because they are learning to control their behaviors, but they are not quite there yet. That the brain is not matured to a point that, that the way wherever you tell a child not to do the immediately do not do it. It’s not going to happen. So then the child would do something even for adults and say don’t do this. Dr. Lee:    [03:54] And the adults also find it difficult to not do certain things that you tell them not to do. So because of this struggle, sometimes the kids would violate the rules, violate the things you know, you set out for kids, and then what they’re going to do. So because kids, they do not have political power, they do not have the physical power. So one of the things that they can turn to really is to, using their mind, their ability to use the language. So they discover very quickly, as soon as they learn how to speak basically, and they say, Oh yes, you know, if I just simply move the lips of my mouth, I actually can get mom to believe that I have not done something that I’m not supposed to do. And that actually happens around two and two and half years of age. Jen:   [04:47] Okay. So, okay, so this starts really early then I’m thinking about, you know, why, why do people lie in general? And it seems as though there are a lot of reasons and we typically say, Oh, I want my child to be truthful all the time, but we’re not truthful all the time, right? Dr. Lee:    [05:05] No, no. And so the first kind of lies I call for self protection, right? So that happens all the time to just not sure, just make sure we do not get into trouble. And, and lying is a very, very efficient way of getting us out of trouble. So that’s the first kind of license. So I called self protection lies. Another kind of lines is for self personal benefits to gain something. For example, you know, you sometimes you want to get the toy you want, but you may have to lie to your brother or sister so that they will not touch the toy you really want. So that’s another kind of lies to win competition. And that happens all the time in the adult environment as well. But the third kind of lies interesting one that is the I call white lies. Dr. Lee: [05:55] These are the lies we tell to avoid hurting another person’s feelings. And these are kinds of lies actually we are socialized to do, you know, we as parents, we want to raise our kids to be polite kids and in order to do that we actually sometimes teach our kids not to tell the truth. And the kids actually learn very quickly as soon as they turn three years of age, they would learn to not to say certain things that are going to hurt other people’s feelings. For example, if the child sees a person who, who has a facial anomoly, or the person is overweight. You don’t want any child to see, you know, see something like, “oh, you are fat,” or “you have something strange on your face.” Rather you want your child not to say anything. And then sometimes they even have to lie about it. And so, so these kinds of politeness kind of lies or white lies are actually socialized by us, by the society. So we do that all the time. You know, when we say oh, your hair cut looks great. You know, your dress looks great, your food looks great, you know, because just think about this. If you don’t tell white lies in some situations you’re not going to have any friends. Jen:   [07:08] Your hair looks great by the way. Dr. Lee:   [07:13] I hope it does! Jen:     [07:14] And that that makes a ton of sense. But as a two year old, three year olds. I wonder how do they figure out the difference between the lies that we want them to tell and the lies that we don’t want them to tell. Dr. Lee:     [07:23] This is very confusing for kids. I mean we parents always say, tell the truth, you know, I want you to be the honest job and they do everything they could tweak, kind of convey this message. But at the same time when your child tells the truth and the parents actually don’t encourage them, for example, the child says, oh, that person is fair to right in front of the person. And the parents really get very embarrassed by that. And they say, you shouldn’t do this. You shouldn’t say that. And then the child gets confused and you said I have to be honest. Now you say no, so that kind of situation becomes an issue and a lot of parents are not prepared to teach their kids about different situations one are to tell the truth and sometimes you have to not to tell the truth all the time. So I think this kind of socialization should start early. Jen:    [08:16] And when you say that what you mean is you should help the children to understand when they should tell a white lie and when they should tell the truth and how do you do that? Dr. Lee:    [08:25] Exactly. So when you are encouraging your child to tell a white lie, for example, you have to tell them why that’s important, the rationale behind it. And then when you ask your child not to tell a lie, you don’t say, do not tell her like don’t say it generically, but say, if this happens, I want you to tell me the truth. And that’s very important for the child to know from the very beginning in what kinds of situations lies are not permissible and in what kinds of situations lies are permissible. Jen:    [08:58] That’s an awesome little nugget of wisdom for parents. And how old do you think children can be when they understand that, you know, my toddler is two and a half right now. Is that too early? Dr. Lee: [09:07] Not really. So the, the are the studies showing that the kids are abroad this age are able to know that what is the true state of affairs and what is false. So the truth and false is understandable by about two yields by three and four years of age. They actually can tell the difference between a lie and the truth. So they are very sophisticated. And then another thing, you know, you mentioned about children’s representation of things in the world. We always, you know, thought kids under six years of age are unable to tell the difference between what’s imagined and what’s magical about what’s real and true. And they actually can tell very, very well. So something they have imagined in their brain and they can talk about that and something. They actually come up as a lie. They can tell the difference under six years of age. So they are very sophisticated. Jen:   [10:04] Okay. So let’s jump to that topic a little bit and that was actually one of the reasons that I first reached out to you because if this kind of discrepancy in the literature that I was finding, you know, I had read the theory of mine doesn’t normally develop until around age four, but the children as young as two can tell lies and so can you tell us a bit about what theory of mind is and why it matters and where this discrepancy plays out in your work. Dr. Lee:     [10:26] So let me just backtrack a little bit. So we have been looking for various factors that make a child more likely to lie or less likely to lie. So we have looked at almost everything. We looked at gender; we wanted to know are girls more likely to lie the boys or vice versa. It turns out that there’s no difference. It’s boys and girls are equally likely to lie, and they equally lie well or not very well. So their skills of lying is also very similar. Then we say, okay, what about parents? Right? You know, do parents with different kinds of parenting styles, would they produce kids who like earlier or later it turns out that that also doesn’t matter. So no matter whether or not you are permissible parents or you are a very strict parents, your kids are still as much as likely to lie as the next kid. Jen:    [11:18] There’s no hope! Dr. Lee:     [11:20] No hope. What about, let’s see, religion, right? So you’re more religious. Would a more religious family produce more truth tellers and turns out that’s not true either, so regardless of what religion, how much you practice it, your kids are still as likely to lie as the next kid in the next family. So I see. What else are we looked at? The children’s personalities all can maybe, you know, personality, right? Some kids are more shy than the others; will the more outgoing kids be more likely to lie more than the shy kids? It turned out that also is irrelevant. So we looked at at many, many factors and turn out there are two important factors I call ingredients for lying. So one is theory of mind. So this is the idea that I, you know, different people have different beliefs and knowledge about the world because it’s a very essential for lying because the point of lying is I know you don’t know what I know and therefore I can lie to you. And children actually understand this at about two years of age, if not earlier. Therefore it’s very likely your child is going to live very soon or has already. Jen:    [12:31] Well, she already told me that a cow is a pig or a pig is a cow. Dr. Lee:     [12:38] They actually can tell the difference between what I know and what you know. Jen:     [12:41] Okay. So before you move on from that, I want, I want to just tease that out a little bit. So there is sort of a classic test of theory of mind, which is that you go with your child into the kitchen maybe and you take some cookies out of the cookie jar where they normally are and you put them in the fridge and you say, okay, Daddy’s going to come into the kitchen in a minute and he wants a cookie. Where is he going to look for the cookies? And if your child says that he’s going to look in the cookie jar, then the idea is that your child doesn’t realize that daddy couldn’t know that we put the cookies in the fridge. And so I’ve read that if you do that test that you shouldn’t expect to see a child have theory of mind until around age four. So are there different tests that you can do to find it earlier or what’s going on here? Dr. Lee:   [13:28] Yes. So, so the different stages of learning about theory of mind. So they, the first one you need to know is like, I want something and you want something and what I want differs from what you want. That’s something the child already and stands around two years of age. Jen:     [13:46] Yeah. Dr. Lee:    [13:47] The other thing a child is able to understand around two years of age is what I can see is different from what you can see. What I know differs from what you know. So these are the two ingredients we already...

In this discussion, Beverly Amico, Executive Director at the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America, shares insights from her extensive experience in Waldorf education. She highlights the unique philosophy, emphasizing simplicity, beauty, and the transformative power of play. Listeners learn about a typical day in a Waldorf preschool, the value of free play, and the importance of storytelling in child development. Beverly also addresses common concerns, like the compatibility of Waldorf principles with modern lifestyles and the significance of teacher certification and school accreditation.

We talked a while ago about sharing, and how you can understand the developmental processes that your child needs to go through before s/he truly understands what it means to share. One of the inputs to sharing behavior is an understanding of what is fair, and Drs. Peter Blake and Katie McAuliffe talk us through what we know about what children understand about fairness.  This episode will help you to understand how much of the idea of fairness is naturally culturally transmitted to children and what you can do to encourage a sense of fairness in your child, which is important for their own social well-being and for the benefit of our society – this has implications for ideas like the development of perceptions about race and gender that we’ll be talking more about in upcoming episodes.   References Blake, P.R., Corbit, J., Callaghan, T.C., & Warneken, F. (2016). Give as I give: Adult influence on children’s giving in two cultures. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 152, 149-160. DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2016.07.010 Blake, P.R., McAuliffe, K., Corbit, J., Callaghan, T.C., Barry, O, Bowie, A., Kleutsch, L., Kramer, K.L., Ross, E., Vongsachang, H., Wrangham, R., & Warneken, F. (2015). The ontogeny of fairness in seven societies. Nature 528, 258-261. DOI:10.1038/nature15703 Blake, P.R., Rand, D.G., Tingley, D., & Warneken, F. (2015). The shadow of the future promotes cooperation in a repeated prisoner’s dilemma for children. Scientific Reports 5, Article number 14559. DOI: 10.1038/srep14559 Blake, P.R., & McAuliffe, K. (2011). “I had so much it didn’t seem fair”: Eight-year-olds reject two forms of inequity. Cognition 120, 215-224. DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.04.006 Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chernyak, N., & Kushnir, T. (2013). Giving preschoolers choice increases sharing behavior. Psychological Science 24, 1971-1979. Jordan, J.J., McAuliffe, K., & Warneken, F. (2014). Development of in-group favoritism in children’s third-party punishment of selfishness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 111(35), 12710-12715. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1402280111 McAuliffe, K., Blake, P.R., Steinbeis, N., & Warneken, F. (2017). The developmental foundations of human fairness.  Nature (Human Behavior) 1 (Article 00042), 1-9. McAuliffe, K., Jordan, J.J., & Warneken, F. (2015). Costly third-party punishment in young children. Cognition 134, 1-10. DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2014.08.013 Schmuckler, M.A. (2001). What is ecological validity? A dimensional analysis. Infancy 2(4), 419-436. Full article available at: http://utsc.utoronto.ca/~marksch/Schmuckler%202001.pdf   Read Full Transcript Transcript Jen:  [00:30] Hello and welcome to today’s episode of Your Parenting Mojo, which is called What Do Children Understand About Fairness? And I have two very special guests with me to discuss this topic. Dr Peter Blake earned has doctorate in education at Harvard University and is currently an Assistant Professor at Boston University’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. His research focuses on three important foundations of human life, cooperation, fairness and ownership, and so he asks questions in his research like when should you share and when should you compete for resources? Is equal always fair or can you sometimes keep more for yourself? And how do you know when a toy is owned and what does that mean? Right now he’s working on extending projects, the different cultures, so we can better understand whether children in all cultures develop in similar ways at similar times and what cultural variables influence that development. Welcome Dr Blake. Dr. Blake: [01:21] Thank you. Jen:   [01:22] And Dr. Katie McAuliffe is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Boston College, which I just learned as different from Boston University. She two studies, the development and evolution of cooperation in humans with a special focus on how children acquire and enforced fairness norms. She’s made the rounds of Harvard, Yale, and Cambridge, and her educational career. I think the only one she’s missing is Oxford. Welcome Dr McAuliffe. Dr. McAuliffe:  [01:44] Hi; nice to be here. Thanks. Jen:     [01:45] Thank you so much for being here. So let’s start with a question that seems really simple, but I’m guessing there’s probably more to it than, than maybe I might imagine. Can you tell us what fairness is? Dr. Blake: [01:56] Yeah, that’s, that’s the big question and it is a very complicated answer. So fairness is a, is a very complex concept, particularly for adults and we know that equal is not always fair, but equality does provide a kind of starting point for us to understand how children figure out what is fair and what is not. So we tend to focus our research in a couple of ways. One way is that we focus on the allocation of resources which has also been called distributive justice, how you distribute resources between people. So we focus on that aspect of fairness as opposed to social status and things like that. And we also focus around this idea of equality and particularly what happens. How did children respond when they get less and get more than other kids. Dr. McAuliffe: [02:51] And I think studying how fairness develops in childhood is a nice way of showing how flexible the concept is. Because when we look at how children begin to think about fairness, you can see that what it means to be fair really varies depending on whether you’re a two year old or an eight year old. Jen:    [03:08] How does that change? Dr. McAuliffe:  [03:09] Well, we can kind of get into that with lots of different studies, but maybe a sort of broad way to characterize the change, and this is based on work that was really done in the seventies is that fairness tends to start out as being quite self focused. So I want to make sure that I’m getting a good deal, and it goes through a period of sort of really caring about equality as Peter said, as a sort of benchmark of justice and then it becomes much more nuanced or you can take different perspectives into account and understand that sometimes someone is more deserving or more needy and therefore inequality is acceptable under certain situations. Jen:  [03:46] Most of the parents listening to this show are parents of toddlers and, and some parents of preschoolers. And I know that you start to study children kind of around about age four or five years. Why don’t you study children younger than that? What is it that makes that difficult? Dr. Blake:   [04:01] It’s primarily that there’s very different methods that are used for, for infants and toddlers, largely because they don’t have the verbal skills yet to do some of the tasks. We have tried to test children as young as three in some of our experiments. That works fine, but younger than that, we’ve found that they don’t do well on our tasks, but other people do research…have done research on infants. And one key thing that they found going back to this idea of equality is that even at about 15 months of age, infants expect resources to be distributed equally between two people. And they expect adults to divide things like food and toys equally. They’re surprised when this doesn’t happen. And this has been shown in several different infant studies now. So that goes back to this idea of equality is a kind of foundation now where that comes from. This could have been learned through experience 15 months of age is still quite a long time of life, but they’re learning just by observing this, this isn’t based on their own behavior. So they’re not constructing this idea of equality from their own experience. Jen:   [05:13] So are you saying that if I always make sure that I get a bigger piece of chocolate cake than my husband does, that my daughter might not understand fairness to mean equal? Dr. Blake:    [05:22] I wouldn’t go that far. But by the time we get up to about three years of age you can ask it explicitly what they think is fair. And one of the things that we’ve found in some of our studies is that when we give children a set of stickers, for example, and we asked them, how should you divide this up with another child? They’ll say, yeah, I should give half. But then when we give them a chance to actually give to the other child, they’ll keep more for themselves. So they, they recognize that there’s this norm of an equal split in that context, but they don’t follow it; they tend to favor themselves. And this is, uh, this idea of a bias to favor oneself is something we see in other variations of studies, including the big ones that Katie and I have worked on together. Dr. McAuliffe:   [06:10] And I think Peter is pointing to a really important distinction in the types of studies that are done looking at fairness sort of this children’s expectations of what ought to be done versus what they actually do. And so most of our work really focuses on children’s behavior, so we put them into these games inspired by behavioral economics where they’re making decisions that affect both their own payouts as well as a partners payout. And I think this is part of the reason why we tend to start around for those contingencies and the payoffs and the structures of the games are just hard to understand for children younger than than that age. Dr. Blake:     [06:45] And when we say economics to kids, we use candy and stickers as our currency. Jen:    [06:53] Both things that are very attractive to kids. And so I’ve seen a bunch of, you know, I’ve read a lot of your papers and I’ve seen a bunch of diagrams of how you do these experiments. Can you just maybe talk us through one of these experiments and how you actually test this kind of thing? Dr. McAuliffe:  [07:08] Yeah. So the one that Peter and I started back when we were Grad students at Harvard is called the inequity game and this game that we developed that we’ve subsequently used across a lot of different papers and the way this works is we go out to different public areas and we recruit two children, typically children that do not know one another to play a face to face game. And in this game, one child makes all the decisions so they have control of this apparatus and they are making decisions that affect both how many Skittles they get as well as how many Skittles their partner gets. So they’re called the actor. They’re the one who’s making the decisions that we care about. Then the other participant is assigned the role of recipient. They’re sort of passive in this game. They just get whatever they get based on the actor’s decisions. Dr. McAuliffe: [07:52] Uh, and then from there the structure is really very simple. So an experimenter, we’ll put different amounts of candies on two trays, one for the actor, one for the recipient. And essentially the actor just decides, do I want to accept that allocation or do I want to reject it? And now if they accept it, they’ll get some candy and the recipient will get some candy. But if they reject it, and this is the interesting part, the candy gets put into a middle bowl and nobody gets to take those candies home. So it’s an all or nothing game. And we use this game to, to kind of understand what distributions children will accept and which ones they’ll reject. And sort of the simplest distinction is one where they’re either getting an equal pay off. So the actor is getting one candy and their partner is getting one candy. Dr. McAuliffe:[08:35] And as you might imagine, children tend to be very happy to accept those allocations, but then we can put them in a situation where they’re getting less than their partner. So let’s say they’re getting one candy and their partner is getting four. So this is an interesting dilemma because now you know, presumably the actor wants that one Skittle, but you know, they don’t really want the partner to get more than them. So they have to decide, am I okay accepting one thing and letting my partner have more than me or would I rather we both get nothing. And what we find is that even children at the bottom end of our age range, so four year olds will reject those allocations. Jen:  [09:09] Really? Dr. McAuliffe: [09:10] Yeah. That means effectively they’re paying the price of one Skittle to prevent their partner from getting more than them. So that’s what you might’ve seen in our papers as that’s labeled disadvantageous inequity aversion. So it’s an aversion to pay off where I’m getting less than someone else. And then we can also in using this exact same game, look at the reverse form of this allocation. So one where the actor gets for candies and their partner gets one. So now you know, they get this amazing payoff. Their partner is getting less and now they face this sort of different dilemma, which is now I really want these four candies, but maybe I know it’s unfair to my partner. So should I accept them and let them get less than me or should I reject it and make, make us both get nothing? And they’re, what you might expect having interacted with children, is that young children are totally fine with those outcomes. Jen:   [10:00] Did they ever take the four Skittles and then away from the game, give one to the other kid? Dr. McAuliffe:[10:05] So that kind of behavior actually doesn’t happen spontaneously, but part of that might be that these children don’t know one another, like those things that would happen more organically in the relationship that’s established, just don’t happen that much in this. And we also tried to discourage talking and things like that to the best of our ability. But the interesting thing about this form of reaction is that children by about eight or nine, at least in America or the U.S. populations that we studied and tend to reject those. So here is a case where they’re sacrificing for candies to prevent a partner from getting less than them, which is really costly adherence to a norm of equality. Jen:  [10:46] Yeah, for sure. So you alluded to a question that I had in my mind about, you know, you do these experiments and you find children that don’t know each other and get them to divide candies across them. But most of the time if I have to share something, it’s probably with somebody that I know, you know, it’s not like I get one shot to take candy from you and then I never have to see you again. So how do we mesh the economic models that talk about how I’m supposed to try and get as much as I can for myself or the fairness models that say an equal split is the best thing with the idea that, you know, I have to see you again tomorrow. Well I don’t have to see YOU again tomorrow but I have to see my daughter again tomorrow and if I give her the short end of the stick, then she, she might end up remembering that. Dr. Blake:

It’s that time of year: daycare and preschool tours start ramping up and parents have to try to figure out which is the right option for their child.  And many parents are overwhelmed by the options.  Montessori?  Waldorf?  Reggio Emilia?  How are they different?  Will my child be messed up if I pick the wrong one? This episode is the first in a mini-series to help us think through the questions you might have as you explore the options that are available in your community. Today we’re going to learn about Dr. Maria Montessori’s approach to early childhood education and what it’s like to have a child in a Montessori preschool with Mary Ellen Kordas, the President of the Board of Directors at the American Montessori Society.   References Gray, P. (2011). The special value of children’s age-mixed play. American Journal of Play 3(4), 500-522. Full article available at: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ985544.pdf Isaacs, B. (2012). Understanding the Montessori approach: Early years education in practice. New York, NY: Routledge. Lillard, A.S. (2005). Montessori: The science behind the genius. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Lillard, P.P. (1996). Montessori today: A comprehensive approach to education from birth to adulthood. New York, NY: Schocken. Louv, V. (2008). Last child in the woods: Saving our children from nature-deficit disorder. New York, NY: Algonquin. Montessori, M. (1971). The Montessori Elementary Material (Trans. A. Livingston). Cambridge, MA: Robert Bentley, Inc. Wentworth, R.A.L. (1999). Montessori for the new millennium. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.   Read Full Transcript Transcript Jen:  [00:05] Hello and welcome to today’s episode of Your Parenting Mojo, which is called Is a Montessori Preschool Right for my child? I sort of skipped the whole preschool touring and decision making thing. It turned out we had a nanny at the time and I had planned to actually to work with her friend the somewhat long term, but she decided to work with a family with a younger child. So we found ourselves rather abruptly in need of care and I’d been doing a lot of research on the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education at the time. And we were actually lucky enough to find a daycare that had space for her on short notice. And so we just kind of went with that. But I know a lot of parents are able to plan ahead and spend a bit more time choosing between the different options that might be available to them. And so to help with that process, I wanted to do a little mini series of episodes where we learn about some of the options that might be available in your community and today we’re going to learn about Dr Maria Montessori’s approach to early childhood education and what it’s like to have a child in a Montessori Preschool with Mary Ellen Cordis. Mary Ellen is the incoming President of the Board of Directors of the American Montessori Society and has over 40 years of experience as the head of a Montessori school in the San Francisco Bay Area, and as an advocacy champion of Montessori. Mary Ellen’s school was the first accredited Montessori school in the state. Welcome Mary Ellen. Mary Ellen:  [01:43] Thank you very much. It’s wonderful to be here. Jen:    [01:45] Thank you. So I wonder if you could first start off and tell us a little bit about how you learned about Montessori and what about it called to you and how you went through that process of becoming a leader in the Montessori movement. Mary Ellen:   [01:56] If I’d only had you in my life, I may not have had to do all the research that I did, but this is exactly how I got involved is I had a three year old and I was looking around for what type of program I might enroll him in. Although I had come from the Midwest and preschool wasn’t that popular. People went to kindergarten and then they went to elementary school and that was pretty much how it was. So when a neighbor came around and said to me, I’m going to send Kathy, my son’s best friend, to the Montessori school. I said, what’s a Montessori school? And that began this journey. So the school had just opened. There were six children. My son was now going to be one of them and I fell in love. I found what really I thought was exactly what children needed. I was working with abused and neglected children at the time, and so I walked into a place where children were honored and respected and treated well and it just made my heart sing, so that was really my beginning. Jen:  [03:02] Wow, that’s awesome. And so you’ve been at this for awhile now and I understand that there’s probably not one single Montessori experience, but I wonder for those of us who haven’t been to a Montessori school, can you kind of walk us through in your mind what it’s like to be in a Montessori classroom? What does the room look like? What are the children doing and how do they move through their day? Mary Ellen:    [03:24] Sure, absolutely. Because it’s what drew me when I saw them in action. So first let me tell you that there are different levels in Montessori education. So what I’m going to choose to walk you through is a three to six classroom and that’s ages three years to six years, which is typical because there’s multiple ages in Montessori classrooms. So when you first enter a classroom, I think what you’re struck by first is the beauty that has been very intentionally created in the classroom. Mary Ellen:  [03:56] The furniture is child-sized. There’s often plants or flowers on the table. The classroom is not cluttered on the walls with a lot of pictures of things. It’s usually tastefully done pictures, if they’re hung it all, are hung low enough for the children. It’s definitely designed for the children. There’s low shelves, often made of wood that surround the whole classroom and materials, that’s the usual, the working apparatus in the classroom are on those low shelves so that the children have free access to them. So what you would see in the classroom is children moving about the classroom freely, taking something off a shelf, taking it to a rug. The reason that you see rugs in the classroom is it just sort of defines a space for a child. There’s nothing magical about it, but because there’s usually 24 children or so in a classroom of mixed ages, it just helps define a space. Mary Ellen: [04:53] So they’ll take the material that they’re going to work onto a rug. They may work alone, they may invite a friend, you may look across the room and see a teacher sitting with five or six children doing a presentation. You probably would see a table with two children or three children sitting at it, having a snack and conversing amongst themselves. It feels very peaceful and when I hear people comment on what they see, when they see a classroom for the first time, they’re struck by the calm, and yet there’s a real energy because the children are working at their own pace. They’re taking things off the shelves as they want to work on them, and so it feels peaceful, yet you can feel the energy and the spirit of the children. Jen:     [05:38] Wow, that sounds really awesome. Is there a kind of a set structure of the day that they do certain things for certain amounts of time? Mary Ellen:   [05:47] So that’s an interesting question. So what you would often see is upon entry to a classroom, let’s assume that the class goes from nine to 12. That’s a three hour classroom. That’s very popular. You see it all over in many schools as well as full day classrooms, but say it’s a nine to 12. You’ll see the children arrive and there’ll be greeted at the door by the teacher. There’s usually two teachers in a classroom, but they would be greeted probably they would shake hands. They would say hello, just have a few words and the children would go put their things away and they usually would go right to finding something to do. Then after the gathering of the group has occurred, they would bring the children together often for a group setting so that they… It’s sort of what you think about circle time, that more traditional word that you think because community is vital to the whole process in a Montessori classroom, they build a community of children with these two adults in the classroom that’s spend often three years together because a child coming in at three would often stay with those same teachers and as they matriculate, if you will, into an older level. That would be the natural progression, but they often have the same teacher. So you’d see maybe group time, then they would go off again to do some individual work where a teacher may have a presentation for a particular number of children, not necessarily all the same age, but they might, they might be choosing all the three year old and they might be mixing it up because the goal is to work at your own level and so the day then would usually end at noon, usually transition time for young children is done in group setting. So you might have them together again at the end of the day and then the parents would come to pick them up. So there isn’t 20 minutes for math and 10 minutes for language. It very much is a flow. Jen:    [07:39] Okay. And are they typically half day programs? Or do they do full day programs as well? Mary Ellen:    [07:44] They’re both I think in the current culture where so many of our families are, both parents are working and they really need a full day of the majority of programs you see now definitely are full day. Jen:    [07:56] OK. Alright. So let’s talk a bit about certification and accreditation is, it’s not fully clear to me how this works. I think there’s a certification for Montessori teachers, but I guess probably not all teachers are certified and I think there’s an accreditation system for schools, but there are different organizations that do that accreditation. Right? Can you help us make sense of all of that and how parents judge the quality of a school that calls itself Montessori. Mary Ellen:  [08:20] Oh, now we have three questions. So yes, there’s many accrediting bodies for schools, the American Montessori Society… And please know that my underpinning is all the AMS, the American Montessori Society because that’s the thing organization to which I’m affiliated primarily so we do accreditations of schools and so we are able to send a team in and look over self studies, review the school and then you often can become an AMS accredited school. The school that was at when I was in northern California also had accreditation through the Western Association of Schools and Colleges are better known as WASC, just like many high schools, colleges, public schools. There’s also the California Association of Independent Schools; that’s another accreditation. The school I was at had all three of those and that’s pretty much that runs the gamut of what you would do. Now if you’re outside of the state, of course there would be other organizations that would accredit. Mary Ellen:    [09:24] So that’s the accreditation piece for schools. What you get when you look at an accredited school for the American Montessori Society is, you know, the standard has been met with teacher training that has, that’s checked that box, that’s a done deal. The materials are in the classroom, the school has gone through all of the standards that are set and so that does give parents comfort. Now there’s other things we’ll look at in a minute, but let me address the teacher piece of it. So there’s a credential that is given to teachers when they go through training, but it isn’t as simple as just getting trained to be a Montessori teacher. You get trained at a level. So if it’s an infant-toddler teacher or an early childhood teacher, an elementary teacher all the way through high school. So you have to be in the classroom at the level to which you were accredited where you got your credential. Mary Ellen:   [10:23] Teacher training programs are offered either in universities or colleges or sometimes in standalone programs. So both can can happen. The teacher training programs themselves are also accredited. The AMS teacher training programs are accredited through MACT, which is the Montessori Accreditation Council for teacher training, teacher education. So that’s another piece. Now, if I haven’t lost you totally by this time, one of your other questions that was the most insightful of all I think is the one. How do you tell when you’re in a really good school, and I say to parents who sometimes waffle in their confidence in their ability to choose the right school at that moment, they may have Ph.Ds on hanging on the wall, but they sometimes at that point worried that they aren’t going to make the right choice and I think you have to have the confidence that it sort of the gut reaction. Mary Ellen: [11:23] You walk into an environment, you see respectful interactions between teachers and children. You see them paying attention to the children in a way that feels very respectful and of course you do want the school to meet certain standards. You want to see the children engaged in what they’re doing, not staring off into space. Although everybody does deserve the opportunity to stare off into space for a few minutes. We can’t be busy all the time. So that’s sort of I say trust your gut, you know, walk into school and see how it feels to you and then do some of the research. Definitely sit in a classroom. Definitely experience what it’s like to watch the children because it’s different. It’s very free-form. Different than when we were children. I will say me not huge and because there were a much more rigid look to schools where you went in, you didn’t speak to the teacher unless you were spoken to. You often sat in desks that fased one way in a Montessori classroom, the furniture is all over the room. Children are sitting on the floor, they’re sitting on a chair, they’re sitting in a library looking at books quietly and there’s so….there’s all kinds. So that’s, that’s really a little bit of a bird’s eye view at 30,000 feet of accreditation and credentialing and how to trust yourself. Jen:    [12:41] Great. Thank you for that. So let’s, let’s go into some of the nitty gritty of what really makes Montessori Montessori and I know that one of the first things that I think of when I think of Montessori is the concept of work and the, the idea that there’s a correct way to use materials in it often in a progressive sequence. Can you tell us about that? Mary Ellen:  [13:00] Sure. This is one of those very challenging aspects of Montessori because it gets misunderstood a lot. Mary Ellen:   [13:08] So the, the materials are arranged in a sequence order in the classroom. Now that isn’t obvious to the children, it doesn’t have a number one for the first material you’re supposed to use because there are many areas in the classroom. There’s practical life, there’s sensorial, there’s cultural subjects, there’s math, there’s language, there’s all of those. The materials within those groupings are on the shelves left to right and top to bottom. You probably know because our culture reads left to right and top to bottom. That’s one of the very small indications of the deep thought that was put into this. The children begin to know, oh gosh, I moved through these materials sequentially. Now the reason you move through them sequentially is they build upon one another in terms of challenge. So the first thing, maybe a very simple thing, the next thing on the shelf would take what was on the first piece of material and then build on that to make it more complicated. There’s also something called isolation of difficulty. So children can self correct the materials themselves. They do not need to say to a teacher, did I get this right? Is this okay? They know because everything fit together perfectly....