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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....

Have you read the now-classic book How to Talk so Kids will Listen and Listen so Kids will Talk?  Ever wished there was a version that would help you with younger children who perhaps aren’t quite ready for a detailed problem-solving session? Well now there is!  Adele Faber is a co-author of the original book; Adele’s daughter Joanna and Joanna’s childhood friend Julie King have teamed up to write the new version of How to Talk so LITTLE Kids Will Listen, packed with examples of how real parents have used the information they’ve now been teaching for over 30 years. Join me for a chat with Julie King as we work to understand the power of acknowledging children’s feelings and some practical tools to help engage your younger children to cooperate with you. Update 5/10/17: An eagle-eyed listener noticed that Julie mentioned her 10-year-old son wanting to sit on the front seat of her car, while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that children 12 and under should sit in the back seat.  Julie was recounting an episode that happened long before there were CDC recommendations on where children should sit in the car, so please don’t take this as an ‘OK’ to put your 12-and-under child in the front seat.  Thanks!   Reference Faber, J. & King, J. (2017). How to talk so little kids will listen. New York: Scribner.  (Affiliate link)   Read Full Transcript Transcript Jen:    [00:21] Welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. I’d like to welcome my guest today, Julie King, who is one half of the writing duo behind the new book, How to Talk so Little Kids Will Listen, and if that title sounds familiar, it’s because it’s part of what seems to have become a family of books around the classic How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and Listen so Kids will Talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish. Julie has been educating and supporting parents and professionals since 1995 and in addition to her work with individual parents and couples, she also leads How to Talk workshops and gives parent education presentations to schools, nonprofits, and parent groups. Julie received her AB from Princeton University and a JD from Yale Law School. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area and is the mother of three. Welcome Julie. Julie:  [01:13] Thank you. Jen:  [01:14] It actually does feel a little odd to welcome you when we’re in your own home. Julie was kind enough to invite me to her home today to have this conversation. So thanks so much for taking the time. Julie: [01:23] Oh my pleasure. Jen:   [01:24] So I wonder if you can tell me a little bit about the genesis of this book because it kind of runs in the family a bit, right? Julie: [01:30] Okay. So to tell you the whole story, I have to go back in time to when I was six months old. Jen:    [01:37] This is going to be a long story! Julie: [01:38] I’m not going to go through all the details, I promise, but when my parents moved into the house that they still live in when I was born, right before I was born and my mother didn’t know very many people in the neighborhood. I was six months old. She was looking out the kitchen window and she saw another mom with two little kids the same age as me and my brother and she invited that woman in. That was Adele favor and the two of them became very good friends. Joanna. Joanna was the baby and her brother Carl was the older boy and she and I went to nursery school together. Adele took these, what they call Child Guidance Workshops with Haim Ginott and used to call my mother daily and discuss what she was learning and they would talk about what they were going to try on Joanna and her older brother and her younger brother and me and my older brother and younger sister. Jen:    [02:27] So you were a Guinea pig for the original book? Julie:  [02:30] That’s right. I was a Guinea pig. Um, so she and I became very good friends. We went to school from nursery school all the way through high school together. And um, I was aware that her mother was writing these books as a teenager. I remember going to her house and seeing her mother and Elaime Mazlish writing on yellow legal pads on the kitchen table by hand, and in the eighties when the one of the books came out or was coming out. I got to copy edit the book and I think I found a coma out of place and I felt very proud of my contribution, but I never actually expected to be doing anything with the work until I had my own child and he was in preschool at the San Francisco JCC and they were looking for a more than one time event for parents. They used to bring people in to speak, but they wanted to do something that would be ongoing and I at the time was studying group facilitation and group development and of course I knew this material very well, having grown up with it. So I volunteered to lead a group which was originally scheduled as an eight week group and halfway through everybody said, well, we need another eight weeks to really learn this. At which point I panicked because I wasn’t quite sure what I would do. Well we turned it into an ongoing support group and that first group met for four and a half years. The other people heard about it and asked me to bring the workshop to private groups into nonprofits and that’s how I got into leading the groups originally and my friend Joanna, who is still a good friend of mine who still lives in New York, and I moved out to California…This will happen in New York originally. She started leading workshops in New York, so we would talk to each other about what we were doing and what we were discovering and quite a few years ago when I was still mostly working with parents of preschool-aged kids. People said to me, we love this book, but we need more examples, and so I said, I know what to do. I called Adele and I said, I have your next book for you. She’s written one for teens and she’s written ones for kids at school. I said, now you have to write one for little kids, and she said, more or less. I quote, Julie, I’m too tired. You have to write it. So I called Joanna and I said, Joanna, we have to write this book. So we’ve been collecting material for many years and working very hard for the past two years to really polish it up and create this book. Jen:    [04:49] Yeah. Awesome. I did a little comparison between the new book, which as we’re recording has not been released yet, but once, once you hear this interview, you will be able to get the book on Amazon and other bookstores. So I have an advanced copy and I did a little comparison between that and the classic How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and it seemed to me as though the overall concepts are quite similar. The certainly a big focus on handling emotions and engaging cooperation and praise. There’s a little less than the new book on encouraging autonomy, which surprised me a little bit, and you have a spanking new chapter on working with differently wired kids, which we’re going to talk more about in a little bit. I’m guessing that a fair number of my listeners have already read or maybe even own the original book. And maybe that was, you know, they bought it for their first child and maybe they have a toddler in tow now. And I’m wondering if you can help us understand what they would get out of this book that they wouldn’t necessarily get if they have already bought or read the original. Julie:    [05:48] Well, let me, let me address that autonomy question. And then the second question as well. Joanna and I talked quite a lot about whether to include a separate chapter on autonomy and we ultimately decided not to in part because we feel like every chapter is about how to encourage autonomy. You know, when we, when we respect a kid’s feelings, when we offer them choices, when we give them information and they get to decide what to do with that information, all of those give the child an opportunity to say to himself or herself, well, I’m going to put the toys away or I’m going to turn off the bathroom light. And we also see that kids have a natural drive to be autonomous and independent. And so a lot of the tools that we’re offering in our book are a way for parents to sort of use that natural drive. So that’s why we didn’t include a separate chapter also because our editor said it had to be under 400 pages and we just had to stop because I think we really could have included another chapter and maybe someday we will, but… Jen: [06:48] Or another book! Julie:    [06:49] Another book, right – no, not another chapter for this book; this book is done. So that’s the answer to the autonomy question. And your other question was, what’s different about this book? Jen:   [07:00] Yeah, yeah. Julie:     [07:01] There are a number of differences. I think the biggest reason for people to get this book is because every example is about little kids. If you get the original book, there are little kid examples are 10 examples. We, we just are offering you lots and lots of ways to use these tools from stories that were given to us by actual real life people, parents and teachers. And in my experience, the tools make sense to people. But when you’re in the heat of the moment, it’s hard to think of what to do. Yeah. And if you have somebody else’s example and when you have, when you can picture it in your mind, when you can sort of rehearse it a little bit ahead of time, that’s when you can pull up the tool more easily and use it in the moment. So I think that’s the biggest advantage of, of. I mean, I, I love the original book, obviously… People should read both probably, but if you have little kids that make sense to read a book, just about little kids. Jen: [07:56] Yeah, that makes sense to me. I often find when I read books that the principles are aligned with what I’m thinking, but you know, the, the examples and the language they talk through, I’m thinking what would really happen if I said that to my two and a half year old when she really get that? Would you understand it? And so what you’re saying is that because the examples in your book are geared towards younger children, they’re more easy for parents to apply, is that right? Julie:      [08:21] Yeah. Jen:     [08:21] Okay. Julie:    [08:22] And then there’s are several other differences. One of the, the differences that I think will be very helpful to parents is around the idea of taking action. So in the original book there’s a, there’s a skill called take action without insult and doing the workshops. What I found is a lot of parents get confused. Well, what actions should I take? How do I know what to do? I mean, I’ve tried acknowledging his feelings. You know, you’re in the mood to draw. I’ve given them information. Walls aren’t for drawing on; I’ve given him choices. You can, you can draw on this box, you can draw on this paper. But he still took the, took the Sharpies. One of my parents groups, you know, I don’t know why…and started drawing on the walls so, you know, so I felt like I had to say, no, I’ve told you, I’ve told you you can’t do that, you bad boy. I’m taking this away from you. You may not. Now you’re not going to get a chance to see. I’ve already told you that sort of language. And they’re like, well that’s taking action. Isn’t it? Well, the, and you’re nodding your head. Yes it is, and it’s, it’s also we want to offer an alternative, um, in which we protect ourselves or we protect property without attacking the child. So the action is going to look the same. I’m still going to take those Sharpies away, but, but what I’m going to say is I don’t like my walls drawn on. For now, the sharpies are going away and the child knows that I was drawing on the wall. Now I can’t, but you’re not doing it to me, the child. You’re not doing this to make me suffer. You’re doing to protect yourself and protect the walls. Right. So I think that’s, that’s. I think we explain that in the book in a way that’s a little easier for parents to figure out, okay, what do I do in this next situation? Jen:  [10:04] Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I’m wondering if I can selfishly talk a little bit about situation that I’m having around acknowledging feelings. Yes, because I think that that’s, it’s a really central theme in the book and Joanna actually wrote that chapter and she described a scenario where she videotaped to show for a five year old and a three year old wants to know why she didn’t a tape a show for him when he had asked her to tape it and she says to her, a missed TV show doesn’t really seem as though it’s qualifies as being worthy of a meltdown. But to her son it really was because it was important to him, or, it had become important to you and so it seems as though the best way to help him get over it was to help him get through it is the advice that’s given in the book. Julie:    [10:47] And so, you know, when my daughter’s having that kind of meltdown, let’s just clarify, to get, to help him means to say, Oh, you LOVE that show! You would have liked me to tape that one for you too. Jen:  [10:57] Yeah, yeah. Jen:  [10:58] Or a different show that wasn’t taped. Julie:    [11:00] Yeah. Yeah. Jen:  [11:01] Um, and so, you know, if, if my daughter is asking for ice cream at bedtime and I say you really, really want ice cream, she seems as though she gets kind of hopeful and it feels to me as though I’m sort of getting your hopes up and then, you know, sorry, you still can’t have ice cream and I’m, I doing something wrong when I’m doing that or…? Julie:   [11:18] No… Jen:    [11:18] Or partly no. Julie: [11:24] I think the point is what you do after that? So when you, when you acknowledge the feelings that that child has for something that you can’t grant, like I can’t make that TV show rebroadcast. Right? So that’s in a way easier. Jen:   

I was scrolling down my Facebook feed recently when I saw a post in a parenting group saying “My two year-old daughter seems to have a “special relationship” with her rocking horse.  Is she masturbating?”  And I thought to myself “Whoa, two year-olds masturbate?  I gotta do an episode on this!”  So I looked around to see who is writing about this and I found Saleema Noon, who has a Master degree in sexual health education, and who co-wrote the recent book Talk Sex Today (Affiliate link), which is chock-full of information on how to talk with children of all ages about sex. There are lots of resources available on Saleema’s website to help with these kinds of conversations, including a ‘what kids need to know and when’ list, a selection of books (for you and for your child), and other helpful tips and links.   Additional Recommended Resource: Outspoken Sex Ed     References Note: Books that Saleema recommends during the podcast are linked directly to Amazon via affiliate links. Albert, B (2004). With one voice 2004: America’s adults and teens sound off about teen pregnancy. The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. Retrieved from: https://thenationalcampaign.org/sites/default/files/resource-primary-download/wov_2004.pdf Brown, L.K., & Brown, M. (2000). What’s the big secret? Talking about sex with girls and boys. New York: Little, Brown. CBS Miami (2014, May 6). Broward school board approves sex ed overhaul. Retrieved from: http://miami.cbslocal.com/2014/05/06/broward-school-board-to-vote-on-new-sex-ed-policy/ Chicago Department of Public Health (2013, June). Sexual education policy in Illinois and Chicago. Retrieved from: https://www.cityofchicago.org/content/dam/city/depts/cdph/CDPH/HCPolicyBriefJune2013.pdf Guttmacher Institute (2016, November 1). Sex and HIV Education: State laws and policies. Retrieved from: https://www.guttmacher.org/state-policy/explore/sex-and-hiv-education Mayle, P. & Robins, A. (2000). Where did I come from? New York, NY: Lyle Stuart. Noon, S. & Hickling, M. (2016). Talk Sex Today: What kids need to know and how adults can teach them. Kelowna, BC: Wood Lake Publishing Scarry, R. (2008). This is me. New York, NY: Sterling. Schalet, A.T. (2011). Beyond abstinence and risk: A new paradigm for adolescent sexual health. Women’s Health Issues 21(3), S5-S7. Full article available at: http://www.whijournal.com/article/S1049-3867%2811%2900008-9/fulltext Silverberg, C, & Smyth, F. (2013). What makes a baby. New York, NY: Triangle Square. UNESCO 2009: International technical guidance on sexuality Education: An evidence-informed approach for schools, teachers, and health educators. Retrieved from: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001832/183281e.pdf Utah Administrative Code (2016, November 1). Rule R277-474. School instruction and human sexuality. Retrieved from: http://www.rules.utah.gov/publicat/code/r277/r277-474.htm#T3   Read Full Transcript Transcript Jen:    [00:30] Hello and welcome to Your Parenting Mojo. We have a fabulous guest lined up today and we’re going to talk about sex. No, not sex for you. I assume you probably figured that part out already by now, especially since you’re listening to a podcast for parents, but about your children and sex. So I was scrolling down my Facebook feed recently when I saw a post in a parenting group saying my two year old daughter seems to have a “special relationship,”with her rocking horse is she masturbating? And I thought to myself, Whoa, two year olds masturbate. I got to do an episode on this. So I looked around to see who’s writing about this and I found Saleema Noon, who has a master’s degree in Sexual Health Education and has been teaching the fields of sexual health, assertiveness, internet safety, healthy relationships and body image for a decade now. She co-wrote the recent books talk sex today, what kids need to know and how adults can teach them, which is absolutely chock full of information on how to talk with children of all ages about sex. And the book is so awesome that I knew I had to invite her on the show to help us understand what we should consider discussing with our toddlers and preschoolers about sex and sexuality and why we should do this as well. Welcome Saleema. Saleema:       [01:36] Hi. Thanks for having me. Jen:  [01:38] So can you tell us a bit about why you think we should start talking even with really young children about sexuality? What’s our overall goal here? Why are we doing this? Saleema:    [01:46] Well, the goal is to keep our kids educated and therefore protected and safe. I tell parents that there are three main reasons why we need start talking to our children early about sexual health and they all have to do with protection and prevention. The first one is that young children are easiest to teach because they haven’t learned yet that sexual health is still a taboo subject in our society. So for example, when we explained to even young children how babies are made or what their body parts are called using scientific language, they’re excited to learn about that stuff. They don’t have any emotional baggage around the topic, just like, older children and teenagers and even some adults have. So they’re really curious. Body scientists, we call them and they’re excited to learn everything they can about the topic. By the time they get to grade four or five, however we call these people that gross-me-out-ers because now they’ve learned they should be totally disgusted by anything to do with sex or sexual health or bodies. Saleema:  [02:48] You know. So the whole idea is for parents to teach their kids early, even before questions start coming up to capitalize on their natural curiosity and matter of fact nature in learning the information. The second reason why we as parents need to start talking about sexual health with our young children as early as possible is that our kids are exposed to so much to do with sexuality at younger and younger ages, even as toddlersi believe it or not. And so we always need to stay one step ahead of the game with accurate information so that our kids know how to interpret what they hear. They can think critically about it and if they hear something that doesn’t make sense to them or as upsetting or disturbing to them even they can come and ask us about it. We as parents want to be our kids’ number one source of sexual health information. Saleema:   [03:40] And the third reason why we need to start talking from an early age, I think is most important, and that is that studies from all over the world consistently show us that children who are educated about healthy bodies and healthy sexuality are protected from child sexual abuse. Children need information to keep themselves out of exploitative situations. And so when parents ask me, you know, when do I start teaching? Well, I have jokingly tell them the day your child is born by using technical terminology, you know, um, they can learn words like vagina and vulva just as easily as they learn any other word, you know, they’re like little sponges. And we have to be accurate too. For example, when a young child is in the bath, we’re not washing the vagina, the vagina does not need to be washed. It’s an opening. But what needs to be washed is the vulva. Saleema:  [04:31] And even seemingly small distinctions like this are important because if a child is abused and needs to report to a parent or in a court setting, God forbid, they need to have appropriate vocabulary so they can be very clear in exactly what they’re trying to express. Lots of research has been done talking to child predators and what they tell us is that they spend a lot of time grooming their victims, most have been abused themselves so they know exactly what to look for and what they say time and time again is that a child who is educated and knowledgeable and aware about sexual health at any age has probably been taught by a parent or another reliable adult and has also been taught to report should something exploitative happen. On the other hand, a child who doesn’t know anything, doesn’t have the vocabulary, doesn’t have that awareness, probably hasn’t been taught either and won’t report or at least will be less likely to report and therefore is an easier target. So teaching our kids even as toddlers using technical terminology and as they reach the preschool years, answering questions as they come up is really key from a safety perspective. Jen:    [05:46] Yeah. Yeah. We’re not going to dig too deep in the safety perspective. But before we move on, I just wanted to mention something, I can’t remember if I heard this in your book or read it somewhere else. I remember reading about a toddler who had been taught to call their genital genitalia a cookie jar and that they had been abused and had been trying to tell the teacher at school, you know, somebody’s touching my cookie jar and the teachers had no idea what was going on. And then the kid kept talking about it and talking about it finally called the parent and then figured out what was going on and this poor child had been trying to communicate this for weeks and couldn’t do it because they didn’t have the language to tell. Saleema:    [06:23] And that is a true story that a parent told me years ago. It just highlights the importance of being clear with our kids and teaching technical terminology from day one. Jen:   [06:32] Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, so we’ll sort of keep that in our minds is an important reason why we should do this, but we’re going to dig more into what children learn about sex and sexuality and how we can talk to them about it more in this show. So let’s jump ahead a little bit to school age. What do children learn about sex in school? Because it seems to me as though we’ve sort of reduced this huge, amazing topic of sex and sexuality to: Thou shalt not have sex before marriage because it’s wrong. And if thou does thou had better not get pregnant or get an STI. How does that happen? Saleema: [07:08] You know, much of what kids learn in school based sexual health education is fear-based and problem-focused, especially in the United States, I have to say. We here in Canada or are a lot more progressive and a lot more positive in how we address it. However, we still have a long way to go. I can’t speak to what the curriculum is in each area of California, for example, because it really does. I’m guessing it’s much like here in Canada where what our kids learn, even in elementary school about sexual health varies from school to school and even class to class, depending on who the teacher is. What I can tell you is that here in Canada, we do have a mandated curriculum for kids kindergarten to grade 10 in all schools, but what actually happens in the classroom is hit and miss because our teachers are not given adequate support. Saleema:   [08:02] They’re not given good resources. They may not have time and they may simply not feel comfortable teaching it and there’s no monitoring of it, and so it really is it we can’t be sure of what our kids are learning. Here in Canada, the bulk of the curriculum and the primary years, so kindergarten to grade three centers around abuse prevention, private parts on the body, really teaching consent. The idea that all kids are the boss of their bodies. They say who goes on them and who does not. And of course this is an important message of course when it comes to safety, but what our curriculum does not cover and what needs to be covered is basic reproduction and anatomy information. I can’t tell you how many times when I’m teaching grade one for example. So these are six year olds. How many times kids ask me what the word “sexy” means because they hear about it on commercials, they hear about it in music, they see it on…right now we have a bus ad campaign for extra gum and it says bad breath isn’t sexy. So I’ve got kids every week asking me about that and what it means. Jen:   [09:12] And what do you tell them? Saleema:   [09:13] Well, it really depends on the context in which they’re asking me. So I’m, a lot of kids are seeing, hey, sexy lady and songs for example, and they really have no idea what the word means. Just last week, a grade one girl came up to me and said, hey, I know what the word sexy means. And I said, Oh yeah, what does it mean? She said, it means cool. And then another girl interrupted and she said, no, it doesn’t mean cool. It means that you’re healthy and you make good choices about what you put in your body. So between what parents are telling them and what they’re interpreting for themselves, uh, there’s all kinds of miscommunication and confusion. Saleema: [09:51] What we want kids to know, for example, about the word sexy, is that because sex is only for grownups, it wouldn’t be appropriate for kids to use this word or even to sing it in a song. So when it comes up and your favorite song, maybe instead of seeing, hey, sexy lady, you could sing, hey, funny lady or hey, happy lady or you know, hey independent lady… I usually lose them when I, when I suggest that. But you know, the idea is just to sub out the word. And so they can still enjoy and sing their songs. But because sex is for grownups only, it wouldn’t be appropriate. In a literal sense, I explained to kids that to say that someone is sexy means that you want to have sex with them. And again, because sex is only for grownups, not appropriate. It’s not a bad word, it’s just not a word that kids should use. Saleema:     [10:35] The word sexy is one example of how much our kids are exposed to mostly through media at an early age. I’m also reminded of a time recently where I was in a kindergarten class and as we’re talking about the baby growing inside of the uterus, one of the girls blurts out, Oh yeah. And you know what else, Saleema? Sometimes grownups have sex when they’re drunk. So who knows where she got that from. My guess is that she overheard some adults talking or maybe she saw something on a movie, who knows, right? But this is proof that our kids are exposed to so much more than we think at such younger ages than we think. And so we have to be willing as parents to have those open conversations with them and help them make sense of what’s around them. Jen:   [11:21] Yeah. Because especially in the U.S., they’re not getting that in school. Knowing that you’re Canadian. I did a bit of background research on what is the state of sex education in the U.S. And I’m English and so it didn’t have any sex education here. And I found that 37 US states require that information on abstinence be provided at 26 percent, sorry, 26 states require that abstinence be stressed and in Utah absence has to be the dominant message given to students, educators and Utah aren’t even allowed to discuss, and I’m going to quote this, “the intricacies of intercourse, sexual stimulation or erotic behavior, the advocacy of homosexuality, the advocacy or encouragement of the use of contraceptive methods or devices or the advocacy of sexual activity outside marriage.” So that’s sort of the worst of that. Saleema:  [12:08] I hear that Jen, and I want to cry. Jen:     [12:10] Yeah. Yeah. But there are places that are getting better. You know, Chicago and Broward County have now some form of sex education in all grades starting in kindergarten. But yeah, that’s, that’s not the norm by any...