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  Self-Esteem When I first started researching this episode I thought it would be a bit of a slam-dunk.  Self-esteem is a good thing, right? I was really surprised to find that there’s little evidence that self-esteem helps children to do better in school, or even be happier, so there’s a good deal of disagreement among psychologists about whether encouraging self-esteem is necessarily a good thing. This episode digs into these issues to understand (as much as scientists currently can) the benefits of self-esteem – and what qualities parents might want to encourage in their children in place of self-esteem to enable better outcomes.  It also touches on our self-esteem as parents – because don’t we all want to think that our child is just a little bit special, so we know we’re good parents?   Jump to highlights 00:31 Introduction of episode 01:45 What research says about self-esteem 03:41 Stages on how children develop self-esteem 06:01 3 Conditions that children experience social success when outside the family 10:06 The link between violence and self-esteem 13:23 The link between self-esteem and school performance 16:04 Role of self-esteem in interpersonal relationships 18:17 What conclusion can parents make in this episode 23:46 Self-compassion affects self-esteem   References Bachman, J.G. & O’Malley, P.M. (1986). Self-concepts, self-esteem, and educational experiences: The frog pond revisited (again). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 50, 35-46. Baumeister, R.F., Campbell, J.D., Krueger, J.I., & Vohs, K.D. (2003). Does high self-esteem cause better performance, interpersonal success, happiness, or healthier lifestyles? Psychological Science in the Public Interest 4(1), 1-44. DOI: 10.1111/1529-1006.01431 Beggan, J.K. (1992). On the social nature of nonsocial perception: The mere ownership effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 62(2), 229-237. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.62.2.229 Bretherton, I. (1992). The origins of attachment theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. Developmental Psychology 28(5), 759-775. Retrieved from: http://cmapspublic2.ihmc.us/rid=1LQX400NM-RBVKH9-1KL6/the%20origins%20of%20attachment%20theory%20john%20bowlby%20and_mary_ainsworth.pdf Brummelman, E., Thomaes, S., Orobio de Castro, B., Overbeek, G., & Bushman, B.J. (2014). “That’s not just beautiful – that’s incredibly beautiful!”: The adverse impact of inflated praise on children with low self-esteem. Psychological Science Online, 1-8. DOI: 10.1177/0956797613514251 California State Department of Education (1990). Toward a state of esteem: The final report of the California task force to promote self-esteem and personal and social responsibility. Full report available at: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED321170.pdf Coleman, P.K. & Karraker, K.H. (1997). Self-efficacy and parenting quality: Findings and future applications. Developmental Review 18, 47-85. DOI: 10.1006/drev.1997.0448 Cvencek, D., Greenwald, A.G., & Meltzoff, A.N. (2016). Implicit measures for preschool children confirm self-esteem’s role in maintaining a balanced identity. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 62, 50-57. DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2015.09.015 Dweck, C. (2007). Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York: Ballantine. Forsyth, D.R., & Kerr, N.A. (1999, August). Are adaptive illusions adaptive? Poster presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, Boston, MA. Guindon, M.H. (2010). Self-esteem across the lifespan. New York: Routledge. Harter, S. (1993). Causes and consequences of low self-esteem in children and adolescents. In R.F. Baumeister (Ed.), Self-esteem: The puzzle of low self-regard. New York: Plenum. James, W. (1983). The principles of psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1890) Joslin, K.R. (1994). Positive parenting from A to Z. New York: Ballantine. Kutob, R.M., Senf, J.H., Crago, M., & Shisslak, C.M. (2010). Concurrent and longitudinal predictors of self-esteem in elementary and middle school girls. Journal of School Health 80(5), 240-248. DOI: 10.1111/j.1746-1561.2010.00496.x Mruk, C.J. (2006). Self-esteem, research, theory, and practice (3rd Ed.). New York: Springer. Neff, K.D. (2011). Self-compassion, self-esteem, and well-being. Social and Personality Psychology Compass 5(1), 1-12. DOI: 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00330.x Neff, K.D., & McGehee, P. (2010). Self-compassion and psychological resilience among adolescents and young adults. Self and Identity 9, 225-240. DOI: 10.1080/15298860902979307 Vohs, K.D., Bardone, A.M., Joiner, T.E., Abramson, L.Y., & Heatherton, T.F. (1999). Perfectionism, perceived weight status, and self-esteem interact to predict bulimic symptoms: A model of bulimic symptom development. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 108, 695-700. DOI: 10.1037/0021-843X.108.4.695   Read Full Transcript Transcript Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast – today’s episode is about self-esteem.  Now I have to say that when I first started researching this episode I thought it would be a bit of a slam-dunk.  Self-esteem is a good thing, right?  So I could find some studies talking about the detrimental effects of not having self-esteem, and some others talking about the benefits of having it, and conclude with studies on how to get more of it. But, you know, I actually enjoy these episodes a lot more when the findings are counter-intuitive.  It turns out that the concept of self-esteem has been very well studied – I saw an estimate of 23,215 articles, chapters, and books on this topic, and that was a decade ago– and the reason for that is it’s actually a bit of a hard topic for us to get our arms around.  It’s difficult to even get a definition of what self-esteem is – you can try this yourself by defining it and then asking someone else to define it, and by trying to rationalize the two definitions into one statement – it’s very difficult to incorporate different opinions into one defensible definition.  It’s also hard to study, because people tend to fib when you ask them about their self-esteem.  And I was really surprised to find that there’s disagreement among psychologists about whether encouraging self-esteem is necessarily a good thing.  So let’s see what the research says… It seems like virtually every article I found on this topic begins by citing an essay that the psychologist William James wrote in 1890 that purportedly describes what self-esteem is, and it is a bit dense: “So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.  It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities; a fraction of which our pretensions are the denominator and the numerator our success, thus: self-esteem = successes/pretentions.  Such a fraction may be increased as well by diminishing the denominator as by increasing the numerator” – in other words, self-esteem increases when your successes are greater than your pretentions, and you can increase your successes or decrease your pretentions – or both – to increase your self-esteem.  And it’s important that those successes be successes that are important to you – if you have “pretensions” of being good at something then it’ll be more important to you that you be successful in that arena than in a field that you know you don’t know much about.  So for James, self-esteem is fundamentally related to competence, but other researchers see it as being related to worth, or value as a person, which introduces new things that can help us (for example, if self-esteem is an attitude then it can be measured) as well as things that make the definition more difficult (for example, it may be different in different cultures and we’d need to find out if any of the factors that make it up are found across all cultures).  The most recent work puts these two together and say it’s about both competence and worthiness – we have a need to feel worthy and we achieve that need by feeling competent, so that’s the definition we’re going to go with for now, and we’ll have to live with some of the squishiness around self-esteem being related to two qualities, like the fact that it can be higher from one moment to the next or when the person thinks about one specific trait rather than another. So how do children develop self-esteem?  An influential psychologist named Erik Erikson developed what he called a series of psychosocial stages that all people pass through as they go through their lives.  It’s kind of like Freud’s psychosexual stages except Erickson focuses on our interactions with culture and society rather than Freud’s emphasis on the conflict between the id and the superego within the individual’s brain.  Erikson says that our ego develops as it resolves crises that it goes through.  The first stage runs from birth to about 18 months and is concerned with developing a trusting relationship with parents as the child resolves the trust vs. mistrust crisis – two other prominent psychologists, John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth would call this the attachment relationship.  The next stage is autonomy vs. shame which runs from 1 ½ to 3 years, where children develop physical skills – success results in autonomy, while failure results in shame and doubt.  Between ages 3 and 5 children achieve greater independence and must resolve the initiative vs. guilt crisis as they take on self-directed activity and achieve a sense of direction and purpose.  And between ages 5-12 children must resolve the industry vs. inferiority conflict by managing the demands of learning school-based and other skills to achieve a sense of competence or a sense of inferiority if they fail.  There are other stages as well that are relevant to individuals in later stages of life but we’ll stop here for our purposes.  As I read through these stages I could see how the ideas of competence and worthiness could be superimposed on each stage – as the individual goes through the stage (except maybe the first one) she receives signals about her competence and her need to feel worthy that are either positive and reinforce her competence and worthiness or are negative and undercut them. Very young children, between the ages of about three and five, can develop ideas about their strengths and things they find difficult, but they don’t generalize this to a global self-evaluation.  Sometime between the ages of five and seven this generalization does occur, possibly as repeated successes, probably combined with parental encouragement to keep developing those skills, that becomes a self-fulfilling loop that promotes the development of self-esteem.  One study noted that children are more likely to experience social success outside the family when three conditions are met – firstly they have an unwavering sense of acceptance by their family, second that they feel confident that they can meet age-appropriate expectations, and thirdly that they value their own autonomy.  They compare their successes with those of friends and seek out friends who reinforce their self-esteem.  This does seem to me to be a very western-centric definition of self-esteem – very focused on comparing oneself to others and being better than others in at least some domains.  The majority of self-esteem research has been done on White children in North America, but it does make me wonder how children in cultures where this individual success is less important and may actually be frowned upon develop self-esteem – or if they do.  A brand new study from 2016 actually measured self-esteem in five year-olds, which is something that hadn’t been done before because five year-olds don’t normally have the cognitive maturity or the vocabulary to discuss abstract concepts like the ‘self.’  Some researchers at the University of Washington set up an experiment where children were given flags to represent themselves (and some stickers representing the flags that they could take home after the experiment).  They used flags because children understand what flags are; the fact that they used flags is sort of irrelevant, but it’s based on the idea that once you own something – whatever it is – you become associated with it.  The children had to sort icons on a computer screen to state which flags on the computer were like their own flags, and then make associations between their own flags and “good” and “bad” flags.  Overall children associated their own flags with “good” flags more than “bad” ones, meaning that they had fairly high self-esteem the researchers didn’t collect any other data about the children’s life circumstances that could help us to understand whether we should have expected this result in these or other children because their main objective was to see if it was even possible to test for self-esteem in five year-olds. So now we’ve determined what self-esteem is and that young children can have it, let’s talk about whether it’s a good thing.  Perhaps it should come as no great surprise that my own home state of California actually led the charge in promoting the idea of self-esteem as a “social vaccine” – the state created a task force which released a report in 1990 that defined self-esteem rather more broadly than we have defined it: “appreciating my own worth and importance and having the character to be accountable for myself and to act responsibly toward others.”  I have no quibbles with the first part of the definition, which is pretty much the one we’ve been working with, but being accountable and acting responsibly is much more in the interests of the state – which wants to increase social goods and reduce social ills – than any specific individual.  The research report – which is available in full online; there’s a link in the references – say that low levels of self-esteem are linked to academic success, drug and alcohol abuse, crime and violence, poverty and chronic welfare dependency – all factors that cost the state an enormous amount of money.  The study was based on a literature review, which means the researchers read a lot of books and papers by other authors, much like I did for this episode.  But I should note that the average Your Parenting Mojo episode has a longer reference list than the average chapter in the task force report.  The report’s authors also relied mostly on other reports and on books rather than original research papers.  The reason I use so many journal articles in my references is because articles published in journals go through a peer review process, which means that probably three people not involved in the research read the article and try to make sure the methods make sense, that reasonable conclusions were reached, and so on.  It’s not a foolproof system, but it is an extra layer of corroboration that doesn’t exist when you reference books and other reports. Perhaps it was inevitable that the pendulum would swing the other way.  In 2003, Roy Baumeister and his colleagues published a 44-page literature review (which is really long, in the journal world) that contained almost five full pages of references, the vast majority of them original research published in peer-reviewed journals, which basically called into question all of the findings of the California Task Force report.  Let’s go through the findings.  Firstly, the link between violence and self—esteem is very unclear, because people who are narcissistic – that is, they have an inflated sense of their own self-importance – score highly on self-esteem measures.  Some people with low self-esteem are violent, but so are some of the narcissists, which makes the non-narcissists with high self-esteem look bad.  Some studies from the 1980s looking at prejudice found that people with low self-esteem expressed more negativity about people who weren’t like them than people with higher self-esteem.  Then other researchers noticed that the low self-esteem people also expressed negativity about people who *were* like them – and once you they took that into account they could see that people with high self-esteem were actually more prejudiced toward people in other groups than people with low self-esteem.  Several studies have looked at global self-esteem (so, the kind that’s not linked to a specific task) and its connection with attractiveness.  It’s not hard to believe the results that self-esteem is mostly linked to how attractive a person thinks they are – one study found a correlation of 0.85, which is extremely high.  But if we try to introduce a more objective assessment of assessing attractiveness than just asking people how attractive they are by having judges rate full-length photographs of the same people, the correlation between attractiveness and self-esteem dropped to 0.06.  Photographs of just the individuals’ heads and shoulders fared slightly better with a correlation of 0.14, but then the researchers realized that people who were rated as more attractive were often wearing nice jewelry and clothes.  Take those away, and the correlation dropped to precisely zero.  So people with high self-esteem think they are attractive, even if other people don’t. Given our society’s focus on body weight you might also think there would be a high correlation between actual body weight and self-esteem.  Just a quick primer on correlations in case you haven’t looked at a math textbook for a while: a correlation of 0 represents no alignment between two variables in question and -1 and 1 represent perfect correlations, the first negative and the second positive.  It turns out that there is a correlation of about -0.24 between actual body weight and self-esteem, but there’s a much stronger link between how people rate their own weight and self-esteem – that correlation was -0.72.  So people with high self-esteem are a bit thinner than the rest of us, but not by as much as they think.  When we turn our attention from “normal” people to those with diagnosable eating disorders, we actually find quite a strong link between self-esteem and bulimia although again, we do not fully understand which causes which and so we don’t know that interventions to improve self-esteem can reduce the symptoms of bulimia.  It seems that the combination of low self-esteem plus having perfectionist standards for yourself (i.e. a slim body) which you can’t possibly meet (exhibited by feeling overweight) is predictive of bulimic symptoms.  One study found that teasing about an elementary school girl’s weight was more important than the girl’s actual weight in predicting self-esteem, and girls who were teased about their weight had lower self-esteem even if they believed the teasing had no effect on how they felt about themselves.  This research implies that school-based efforts to improve self-esteem are likely to fall flat if they don’t address other causes of low self-esteem related to body weight like teasing. Let’s look at a topic that’s pretty important to us parents: the link between self-esteem and school performance.  Since the California Task Force...

Have you ever wondered why your child acts up?  Is it because they really want to annoy you or because they’re trying to tell you something? In this conversation Dr. Claudia Gold helps us to understand that what we call ADHD – an extreme example of a child’s “acting up” – is not a known biological process but rather a collection of behaviors that often go together.  We might call them “symptoms,” but they aren’t symptoms in the way that a cough is a symptom of pneumonia. Instead, Dr. Gold argues that by medicating the symptoms (i.e. the “difficult behavior”) we ignore the underlying problems that are causing them which ultimately doesn’t help the child – or the family. Whether your child has been diagnosed with ADHD, whether you suspect it, or whether you’re struggling with run-of-the-mill behavior problems, Dr. Gold has practical advice to help you. Taming Your Triggers If you need help with your own big feelings about your child’s behavior, Taming Your Triggers will be open for enrollment soon. We’ll help you to: Understand the real causes of your triggered feelings, and begin to heal the hurts that cause them Use new tools like the ones Katie describes to find ways to meet both her and her children’s needs Effectively repair with your children on the fewer instances when you are still triggered It’s a 10-week workshop with one module delivered every week, an amazing community of like-minded parents, a match with an AccountaBuddy to help you complete the workshop, and mini-mindfulness practices to re-ground yourself repeatedly during your days, so you’re less reactive and more able to collaborate with your children. Sign up for the waitlist and we'll let you know once enrollment re-opens. Click the image below to learn more.     Dr. Claudia Gold's Book The Silenced child: From labels, medications, and quick-fix solutions to listening, growth, and lifelong resilience - Affiliate link   Reference Gold, C.M. (2016). The silenced child: From labels, medications, and quick-fix solutions to listening, growth, and lifelong resilience. Boston, MA: Da Capo Press. Read Full Transcript Transcript Jen: [00:30] Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. In today’s episode, we’re going to learn a lot about the science of what’s going on behind a child’s difficult behavior, including the behavior that is often described as a symptom of ADHD. I’d like to extend a warm welcome to my guest, Dr. Claudia Gold MD. Dr. Gold is a pediatrician and writer with a longstanding interest in addressing children’s mental health care in a preventive model. She’s practiced general and behavioral pediatrics for 25 years and currently specializes in early childhood mental health. Dr Gold’s latest book is The Silenced Child: From Labels, Medications, and Quick Fix Solutions to Listening, Growth, and Life-Long Resilience. Welcome Dr. Gold. Thank you so much for joining us. Dr. Gold:   [01:11] Thank you for having me. Jen:  [01:12] So you spent a while running an ADHD practice earlier in your career, right? Dr. Gold: [01:17] Well, as part of a general pediatrics practice, yes. Jen: [01:20] Okay. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that experience and how it contributed to your feeling the need to write this book? Dr. Gold: [01:27] Well, um, I think it was because there were the visits allotted were generally 30 minutes long. Kids came in not with a plan to just listen to them but rather for what was termed in ADHD evaluation. So it was almost like we had decided what was the problem before we even spoke to them and it was, I found that it was really not sufficient time to understand what was going on in the family and then the kind of standard of care for treatment of ADHD is to see kids every three months and to just have them have their medication refilled. And again, it was not nearly enough time to really understand all the complexities in their lives. So then when I practiced behavioral pediatrics so that I was able to have appointments that were longer and I would sit with these families and, and listen in more depth, I would really come to appreciate all of the factors that were impacting on the child’s behavior and able to have a much broader view than the opportunities given me by the kind of standard of care in pediatrics. Jen: [02:39] And what might some of those factors be that could influence behavior that’s like ADHD? Dr. Gold: [02:44] Oh, well there are, for example, um, I had one family where, uh, there was significant amount of a substance abuse in the family that was untreated and unaddressed, one child who actually had experienced the death of a parent and was being raised by a step parent with things that had never been addressed or acknowledged stresses on kids, that people just felt didn’t really impact on kids that were young. Which of course we know is not the case. So I think so there were, you know, dramatic things like that. Other things that I began that I, in the course of my practice, I began to have a great respect for, um, challenges of sensory processing, not to say that kids have a sensory processing disorder per se because I don’t really like to think in terms of disorder, but I really have gained an appreciation of how a kid’s sensory experience of the world is very intimately intertwined with the way their emotional experience and a lot of kids who have the ADHD label based on just sort of a basic checklist have for much of their lives, had challenges in this area that have not been addressed. So those are a couple of the things that I was able to uncover. Jen: [04:12] It seems as though the traditional approach to ADHD like a lot of other childhood behavioral problems is really to just focus on the behavior and if you fix the behavior, you’ve fixed the problem. Can you tell us how you think differently from that; what do you think difficult behavior really is? Dr. Gold:  [04:28] Well, I think again, what the science shows us is that behavior is a form of communication and babies actually, even from birth have the ability to communicate with us through their behavior. So and when we look at the meaning of their behavior, again, in my first book, I talk a lot about the decades of research showing us that when, when the people who care for children are curious about the meaning of behavior, then we help them to develop the ability to think about their own feelings, to have better capacity for emotional regulation, to have better social skills, to have better thinking skills and really develop the capacity for resilience. So to kind of be concrete about it. I would have a family come in and say, well, we can’t get our child ready to go out the door. And so he’s very disorganized and loses things and all those very typical ADHD symptoms so that, uh, if we. Yeah, and you know, it’s true that the medications for ADHD are very effective at getting, eliminating me symptoms at least in the short term. but then when you dig a little deeper, you find, for example, a kid is very disorganized, is extremely anxious and so they are so focused on, let’s say, whether or not their parent is going to pick them up because a lot of kids who experienced a lot of anxiety or have separation anxiety. So let’s say that kid is worried the entire day and spending all of their energy worrying about whether or not their parent is going to pick them up so they don’t have the ability to spend the time to put the right piece of paper in the right folder so that underlying their disorganization is some significant issue in relationships. And so when we just treat the symptom, that’s just one of a gazillion examples I could give you. We just treat the symptom. We don’t get to hear what the child’s behavior is communicating and it’s when we hear that, what it’s communicating that we know what to do about it. Jen:  06:42 And it seems to me as the central thesis of the book, is that our healthcare system is really geared towards this treating of the symptoms. And if you’ll indulge me, I just want to read a paragraph from the book you say, “I recently had the opportunity to teach a seminar and infant mental health to the child psychiatry fellows at a major teaching hospital of just spending an hour giving an overview of contemporary research on infant mental health. I presented a case of a seven year old boy with a very complex family and developmental history. I then turned to the group and the how they would make sense of his behavior. A fellow responded without pause, ‘I would see if he met the DSM, the diagnostic and statistical manual I think it is, criteria for a mood disorder, and then consider prescribing an SSRI. A similarly complex case was met by this question from the head of psychiatry: ‘Do the parents need parent training or does the child have ADHD and need medication?'” And it almost seems as though the medical professionals in the system that we’ve set up for ourselves don’t have any time or energy or something to understand these underlying symptoms. And instead, the treat that behavior is, is the first thing that that happens. Dr. Gold: [07:52] Right. I mean, I think time is certainly lacking. I also think that a basic understanding is lacking because, and a language to talk about this because in child psychiatry training, there’s really minimal to no discussion of development and relationships. I know that sounds shocking. It’s very much based on diagnosis, and treatment often with medication so that there’s no language, there’s no way to think about, well, how do we make sense of what happened to this person in their infancy and how that connects with who they are today at the age of seven, and that’s what we need in order to really understand what’s going on for a kid, how kids develop the ability to regulate their attention, to regulate their emotions, to regulate their behaviors. And then once we understand that, then we know again, what kinds of things to do to help. But the psychiatrists don’t even have a way to ask about that or to think it. And that’s why they ended up with a very limited toolbox, which is just to look at the behavior and then eliminate the behavior. Jen: [09:04] Yeah, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about how we transition from childhood to adulthood and how we treat adults and how we treat child children and how those two are different than you and I tend to think we have something going on between our ears. We agree and acknowledge that we have feelings and that sometimes it’s nice to have someone listen to these feelings and acknowledge them and also that those feelings impact our behavior. But it seems as though a lot of people feel as though children don’t and that all that matters is their behavior. And I guess I’m curious as to your thoughts as to when we make that shift, to the child is a person who, who has feelings that really impact what their behavior is as they get older. And whereas in the beginning it was just the child has behavior. How does that shift occur, do you think? Dr. Gold:   [09:55] That’s a great question. I mean, it really should occur when the baby is born. Jen: [10:01] I agree. Dr. Gold: [10:03] Yeah. I mean, I, and that’s what, and in fact, the work I do is with something called a newborn behavioral observation system where we go in and work with parents and babies from birth because of baby, even a very young baby can communicate. For example, I was talking about the sensory issues. A baby who is born with a particular intense response to touch, let’s say for example, not that there’s anything wrong with them, but that baby may cry and cry and cry when they’re swaddled and then when you put them down, they stop crying. So that’s how they’re communicating through their behavior. And they have tremendous capacity to do that from very early on, but we just need to be paying attention to it and take the time to listen to what their behavior is communicating. And it takes what it means to listen to a child takes different forms at different ages. Dr. Gold: [10:58] So for example, with toddlers, a toddler with out of control behavior may may seem like he’s trying to make your life miserable, but what he actually made me communicating is that he feels out of control and he’s looking for you to help him to set limits to, to contain his big angry feelings. So depending on where the child is developmentally, the way they communicate is different. But the idea is the same that when we take the time to listen to what the behavior is communicating, then we help them to get through it in a way that’s much more effective than if we just put kids in time out, for example. Jen: [11:41] Yeah. I actually just yesterday interviewed Julie King, who is the coauthor of a new book, How to Talk so Little Kids Will Listen based on How to Talk so Kids Will Listen, and Listen so Kids Will Talk. They are producing a new edition for the two to seven crowd. Um, and so that, that interview will be on hold until the book is released in January and yours will probably go out before this. But I think that what you’re saying is very much in line with what she is saying, which is that that behavior isn’t just, what you said is it’s not just a way to annoy you or something, that children do to drive you crazy as a parent that it is designed to communicate something or maybe even not designed. It’s, it just does communicate something. Um, if we can pay attention to that, you know, may, maybe we can respond better in the moment, but even if we can’t, as a parent of a young child, I understand that sometimes it’s really hard to take that step back in the moment, but maybe after the fact, what could we do to, if we see something that’s gone wrong, what could we do to try and make it go better next time? Dr. Gold: [12:51] Right. And I think that’s an incredibly important point to highlight, which is that often we don’t know, can’t do the right thing. We don’t do the right thing. And that’s fine. In fact, kids develop in a healthy way when just that process is that things go wrong and we go back and say, wow, that didn’t work out well. So let’s say, you know, the sort of typical scenario of being in the grocery store where your kid is grabbing at, everything and you’re embarrassed and you know, and it’s just a totally impossible thing and you lose your cool because you feel kind of humiliated and you scream at your kid and finally you just leave. And then either you yourself reflect. And if it’s a child who’s old enough to have a conversation about it, you can say, well that didn’t Go well and you can reflect on the fact that maybe the child was overtired and, and you are overtired and perhaps it would have been better to recognize that ahead of time and not go to the store at that time. But you know, you got through it. It was a bad moment. You learn from it and you move on. Jen:  [13:53] Yeah. Yeah. And it seems as though I’ve heard from other sources that, that that acknowledgement process within yourself. But also with the child, if they’re old enough to understand is really a critical...

Do you think your child may be introverted?  Or are you not sure how to tell?  Around one in three people are introverted so if you have two or three children, chances are one of them is introverted.  While Western – and particularly American – society tends to favor extroverts, being an introvert isn’t something we can – or should – cure.  It’s a personality trait, not a flaw. Join me as we walk through a topic near and dear to my heart, and learn the difference between introversion and shyness, and how to support your introverted child – no matter whether you yourself are introverted or extroverted.   References Aron, E.N. (1996). Are you highly sensitive? Retrieved from: http://hsperson.com/test/highly-sensitive-test/ Belsky, J., Jonassaint, C., Pluess, M., Stanton, M., Brummett, B., & Williams, R. (2009). Vulnerability genes or plasticity genes? Molecular Psychiatry 14, 746-754. DOI: 10.1038/mp.2009.44 Cain, S. (2013). Quiet: The power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking. New York: Broadway. Dobbs, D. (2009). The science of success. The Atlantic. Retrieved from: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/12/the-science-of-success/307761/ Kagan, J., & Snidman, N. (2004). The long shadow of temperament. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Keogh, B.K. (1986). Temperament and schooling: Meaning of “Goodness of Fit”? In J.V. Lerner and R.M. Lerner (Eds). Temperament and social interaction in infancy and children. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass. Laney, M.O. (2002).  The introvert advantage: How to thrive in an extrovert world. New York: Workman. Markway, B.G., & Markway, G.P. (2005). Nurturing the shy child: Practical help for raising confident ans socially skilled kids and teens. New York: St. Martin’s. McCrae, R.R., & Terracciano, A. (2006). National character and personality. Current Directions in Psychological Science 15(4), 156-161. Pluess, M., & Belsky, J. (2009). Differential susceptibility to rearing experience: The case of childcare. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 50(4), 396-404. DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-7610.2008.01992.x Pluess, M., & Belsky, J. (2010). Differential susceptibility to parenting and quality child care. Developmental Psychology 46(2), 379-390. DOI: 10.1037/a0015203 Similarminds.com (a version of Eysenck’s Personality Inventory). Retrieved from: http://similarminds.com/eysenck.html Swallow, W.K. (2000). The shy child: Helping children triumph over shyness. New York: Warner. Swann, W.B. & Rentfrow, P.J. (2001). Blirtatiousness: Cognitive, behavioral, and physiological consequences of rapid responding. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81(6), 1160-1175. DOI: 10.1037//0022-35I4.81.6.1160 Thomas, A., & Chess, S. (1977). Temperament and development. New York: Brunner/Mazel.   Read Full Transcript Transcript Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  Before we get started today I’d like to take a few minutes to chat with you about the podcast.  Firstly, I’d like to thank you so much for listening to the show.  I’ve been really honored over the last few weeks since I started the show to hear from so many of you about how much the show is helping you in your parenting.  Because at the end of the day, I’m getting a masters degree in Psychology focusing on child development to be a better parent myself, and to help you be better parents as well.  There’s just too much good information out there about how this whole parenting thing works for us to kind of bumble along and not know any better.  And I put myself in the same boat as you here; I’m literally learning this stuff with you as I go.  I don’t always handle things in the best way but when I learn better I do better, and I forgive myself for having done things “the old way.”  I’m growing and becoming a better parent because of what I’m learning with you, and I’m honored that those of you who have left me reviews on iTunes and have written to me and told me how much the show is helping you are finding it useful too.  So I have a four (yes, four!) specific favors to ask of you.  Firstly, if you enjoy this episode, and especially if you’ve enjoyed several episodes, please subscribe to the show so you don’t miss an episode.  Because I’m learning in the same way that you are we often build one episode on top of another.  I regularly refer back to the episode on scaffolding, for example, and if you’ve already listened to that one then you’ll be able to follow right along as I describe how to scaffold behavior in a certain situation in the episode related to tantrums.  You can subscribe on iTunes or if you go to YourParentingMojo.com you get a little freebie for signing up – a list of seven relationship-based  strategies that I use to support my daughter’s development – and also make parenting just a little bit easier on me.  Secondly, while you’re over on iTunes, I’d love it if you would leave a rating and write a review of the show.  It doesn’t have to be super long; just decide how many stars you think it’s worth (five is always a good numberJ) and jot down a couple of lines about what you think about the show.  Shows that have more ratings and reviews appear higher in the iTunes listings, which will encourage more people to listen, which makes me happy.   Thirdly, if you know of other parents who could benefit from learning what we’re learning, please let them know about the show.  Send them a link in an email or put it up on your Facebook or twitter feed (if you’re on twitter you can find me at A kid is for life).  And finally, I really do love hearing from listeners, especially if you have an idea for a topic for the show.  If you do, then please drop me a line at jen@yourparentingmojo.com and if there’s enough scientific research available on the topic then I’ll do an episode just for you.  Also drop me a line if you have any other feedback for me or would just like to chat. Alright, on to today’s topic, which is called “how to support your introverted or shy toddler.”  Unlike the episode I did recently on tantrums, which was mainly for you guys since we haven’t struggled with them too much, this episode is very personal to me.  I have a triple whammy of personality characteristics that are socially undesirable (in the U.S. at least) – I’m an introvert, I’m shy, and I’m also a highly sensitive person (and I never even knew the last one was a “thing” until a few weeks ago). Since my daughter is only two and is in the stage where children tend to play alongside each other rather than *with* each other it can be a bit difficult to tell which personality traits are really hers and which are just a function of her current stage of development.  But I’m starting to see some signs of introversion and shyness, so I wanted to get a handle on the research not so much so I can diagnose her, but more so I know what to watch for and how I can support her, because American culture is very much geared toward the success of extroverts.  Somewhere between a third and half of the population in this country may be introverted so if you have two or three children then chances are one of them is introverted. Listen on to hear more about how introversion and shyness are not the same thing, and what the research says about how we can support our introverted and shy children. I got the idea for this episode after I read the book “Quiet” by Susan Cain.  I’ve known I’m an introvert for a long time – I took classes in Psychology after finishing high school in England and we took Eysenck’s personality inventory – there’s a link to a free online version you can take yourself in the references for this episode – and I was basically off-the-charts introverted.  So I’d heard of the book “Quiet” when it was published in 2012 but didn’t pay it much attention because I figured I didn’t need to be diagnosed – I already knew I was introverted.  But someone recommended it to me as an example of a book that makes scientific research very accessible to a non-scientific audience, so I read it from that perspective – and I ended up learning a lot about myself in the process. The first point that I want to make is a very important one, and that is that introversion and shyness are not the same thing.  Because it is so important and kind of non-intuitive, I’m going to say it again – introversion and shyness are not the same thing.  The basic meaning of an introvert is that it’s a person who gets their energy from being in environments that provide low levels of stimulation, which often means being alone rather than being with other people, whereas extroverts find being in environments with high levels of stimulation, like when there are a lot of other people around, very energizing.  Introverts might have good social skills and can participate in parties and events but after a while they wish they were at home tucked up on the sofa with a cup of tea and a good book.  Susan Cain lists characteristics of introverts in the book.  Some of these are that they prefer to devote their social energies to close friends, colleagues, and family.  They listen more than they talk, think before they speak, and often feel as if they express themselves better in writing than in conversation.  They tend to dislike conflict.  Many have a horror of small talk but enjoy deep discussions.  The part of this that caught my attention was that I hadn’t realized my introversion affected parts of how I deal with the world that aren’t directly related to going to parties.  While I often have five or six books on the go at once (virtually all of them child development books these days!), I do prefer to dig deeply into one.  And I work in consulting, where it’s common for someone to call a meeting and show you some powerpoint slides and get you to react to it immediately, whereas I would really prefer them to send the deck in advance so I can take notes and have some time to process before I give my thoughts. So what’s the difference between introversion and shyness?  The book “Quiet” says that while introversion is a preference for environments that aren’t overstimulating, shyness is a fear of social disapproval or humiliation.  Shyness is inherently painful, while introversion is not.  A lot of people get them confused because they overlap to some extent; I’d always thought that my shyness is part of my introversion.  But it’s possible to be a shy extrovert (like Barbara Streisand who has a massive stage presence and apparently awful stage fright), or a non-shy introvert (like Bill Gates, who prefers his own company but isn’t afraid of the disapproval or humiliation of others that is the hallmark of shyness).  And a key point is that while shyness and introversion are very different to the person experiencing them, to the outside world they look much the same.  A shy person may be afraid to talk to other people at a party while an introvert may just be overstimulated – but the other people at the party can’t tell which it is, and all they see is someone who isn’t interested in talking, and thus must not be very interesting themselves either.  Or maybe they’re just stuck up.  Or both.  What makes shyness “painful” and problematic is that it can get in the way of achieving things that we want to do.  I might wish I could go to a networking event to advance my career, but maybe I’m too afraid of what people there would think about me.  In that case, my shyness is getting in the way of something I want to achieve, especially if I’m looking for a new job. I was actually surprised that there is a decent amount of research available on introversion and shyness, and quite a bit of it is longitudinal which is even more surprising – it’s pretty unusual for researchers to follow children for any length of time because it makes a study so expensive.  It seems as though most of the research on both introversion and shyness in children eventually comes back to the work of two doctors named Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess, who worked out of the New York University Medical Center from the 1950s through the 1970s.  Their study is considered to be a classic assessment of the idea of temperament, which underlies many other personality traits like introversion and shyness.  We have to take their results with a bit of a grain of salt because while 141 children is quite a lot for one study it isn’t much compared to the population of children in the world, or a country, or even New York – and these children were drawn from 85 families, 78% of which were Jewish, the rest Protestant or Catholic, with 60% of the fathers and 40% of the mothers having both college and postgraduate degrees.  The researchers don’t say *why* their population was so homogenous but they did attempt to validate the findings using a sample of 85 low-income children in Puerto Rico some years later.  Thomas and Chess identified nine dimensions of temperament which they grouped into three major categories.  “Easy” children were characterized by having regular bodily functions like sleeping and bowel movements; they were adaptable, usually in a positive mood, and would approach rather than withdraw in a new situation.   The “difficult” child was described as having irregular bodily functions, not very adaptable, withdrawing rather than approaching in new situations, intense, and often irritable or fussy.  The third category was the “slow to warm up” child who seemed much like an easy child except that he would initially withdraw in response to a new situation and would be slow to adapt but would come around eventually.  About 35% of the children in the study didn’t fit into one of these patterns.  Of the remaining 65%, 40% were classified as “easy,” 10% were “difficult,” and 15% were “slow to warm up.” The famous psychologist Jerome Kagan moves the research one step further by doing some tests on 500 White infants (although he doesn’t say what religion they were) at age 4 months, 2 years, 4 years, 7 years, and 11 years of age, with the sample size dropping to 237 children by the time they were 11 years old.  The central thesis of the study was that in the test at four months, children who kicked their arms and legs around or cried when they were presented with unusual things to look at, hear, and smell did this because they had inherited a trait that made a certain part of their brains very excitable.  About 20% of the children did pump their arms and legs and cried, and these children were called “high-reactive.”  40% of the children showed the opposite pattern- minimal arm and leg movements and no crying – these were called “low-reactive.”  25% didn’t move around but did cry a lot and were called “distressed.”  10% moved around a lot but didn’t cry; these children were called “aroused.”  And the remaining 5% of children were difficult to classify.  The theory goes that children whose brains quickly become highly stimulated (which is indicated when they move around and cry) will seek out situations where they don’t get too much stimulation – in other words, they will become introverts.  And the children whose brains need more stimulation before they get to an optimal level of arousal become extroverts, because they need more stimulation, both social and non-social, to get to that optimal level.  Now I should note that Jerome Kagan is interested in the biological basis of temperament, and even he acknowledges that your genetic predisposition to prefer or avoid stimuli is not your destiny.  About 33% of the high and low-reactive children displayed the pattern of behavior they were “supposed to” as predicted by their infant temperament when they were interviewed at age 11, while 16% behaved in ways that were inconsistent with expectations – a ratio of 2-1, but much less than 100%.  The researchers noticed that the infants who had been high-reactive were mostly serious and didn’t smile at every one of the assessments from 4 months to 11 years.  More low reactives smiled and laughed  frequently at every age.  Many low-reactives, but few high-reactives, smiled and laughed within the first minute of entering the lab at 11 years of age, and smiling at 11 years was predicted by smiling at two years.  So if not all of the high-reactive children become introverts, what’s going on?  It’s called the moderating effect of the environment, and a lot of that is the moderating effect of parents. So how do these parents support introverted and shy children?  Regarding introversion, it’s really a matter of setting up your child’s life so he gets the amount of stimulation – both social and otherwise – that he needs.  There’s evidence that many introverts are also highly sensitive people – people who notice and perceive things more strongly than others do.  There are quizzes you can do to test this in yourself and your child as well – there’s a link to one in the references.  I had no idea I was a highly sensitive person until just a few weeks ago when my husband handed me one of those checklist articles from Buzzfeed or somewhere similar that described the characteristics.  I usually hate those things so I tried to make him take his phone back but he insisted I read it, and I was shocked to find that it basically described me.  I cut the tags out of my clothes because I can’t stand them itching me.  I always want him to turn the TV down.  I regularly notice continuity errors in films.  I notice manners.  I’m sensitive to criticism.  Now not all introverts are also highly sensitive, but when we talk about supporting an introvert we should also consider the possibility that she experiences things more acutely than you might as a parent, and thus if you think you’ve ratcheted down the stimulation enough then consider the possibility that it’s still too much for her. I think my two year-old may be an introvert because a lot of the time she seems to prefer staying home to going out or doing other activities.  Sometimes when we have music on she asks me to turn it down because she thinks it’s too loud, even though I don’t think it’s that loud (and I’m highly sensitive!).  So when I put music on I make sure not to put it on too loud.  And we don’t keep a busy schedule here – she does go to daycare while I’m at work, but on the weekends we do a lot of relaxing around the house.  We don’t rush from one class to the next; a busy day for us would be to go to another child’s birthday party *and* go grocery shopping on the same day.  I get my need for alone time in the weeks I work from home, while my husband gets his need for socialization by going to the office most days.  I do wonder whether my daughter is getting her need for alone time met during her time at daycare; the school does have a quiet nook where a child could pull curtains around himself and be alone for a bit but I’m guessing that the structure of the school day means that most of the time the children are engaged in some activity.  It’s something I plan to discuss with her teachers. I have to say that while the majority of the book “Quiet” was exhaustively referenced, the chapter on how to support an introverted child was

The American Academy of Pediatrics just updated its screen time recommendations – and, for the first time, we can actually see and understand the research on which the recommendations are based. They’re a bit more nuanced than the previous versions, so join me as we walk through what the recommendations mean for parents of babies and toddlers – whether or not your children have been using screens until now. We’ll look at the impact particularly of TV on cognitive development, obesity, and prosocial vs. antisocial behavior. News flash: if you’re not watching and discussing shows WITH your child, he may be learning antisocial behavior from even the most innocuous of PBS programming. This is the first in a two-part series on screen time. Here we focus on what science says about the impacts on development. In the second part we’ll examine what we can do about mitigating these impacts and on harnessing some of the good that digital media can do for our kids, since they are growing up in a world where the use of digital media is a fact of life.   References Alade, F., Rasmussen, E., & Christy, K. (2014). The relation between television exposure and executive function among preschoolers. Developmental Psychology 50(5), 1497-1506. Full article available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259845495_The_Relation_Between_Television_Exposure_and_Executive_Function_Among_Preschoolers American Academy of Pediatrics (n.d.) Media and Children. Retrieved from: https://www.aap.org/en-us/advocacy-and-policy/aap-health-initiatives/Pages/Media-and-Children.aspx?rf=32524&nfstatus=401&nftoken=00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000&nfstatusdescription=ERROR%3a+No+local+token Barr, R. (2013). Memory constraints on infant learning from picture books, television, and touchscreens. Child Development Perspectives 7(4), 205-210. Full article available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259074650_Memory_Constraints_on_Infant_Learning_From_Picture_Books_Television_and_Touchscreens Beales III, J.H., & Kulick, R. (2013). Does advertising on television cause childhood obesity? Journal of Public Policy & Marketing 32(2), 185-194. Blankson, A.N., O’Brien, M., Leerkes, E.M., Calkins, S.D., & Marcovitch, S. (2015). Do hours spent viewing television at ages 3 and 4 predict vocabulary and executive functioning at age 5? Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 61(2), 264-289. Bronson, P. & Merryman, A. (2009). Nurtureshock. New York: Twelve. Christakis, D.A., Gilkerson, J., Richards, J.A., Zimmerman, F.J., Garrison, M.M., Xu, D., Gray, S., & Yapanel, U. (2009). Audible television and decreased adult words, infant vocalizations, and conversational turns. Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine Journal 163(6), 554-559. Full article available at: https://sites.oxy.edu/clint/physio/article/AudibleTelevisionandDecreasedAdultWordsInfantVocalizationsandConversationalTurns.pdf Gentile, D.A., Coyne, S., & Walsh, D.A. (2010). Media violence, physical aggression, and relational aggression in school age children: A short-term longitudinal study. Aggressive Behavior 37, 193-206. DOI: 10.1002/ab.20380 Halford, J.C.G., Gillespie, J., Brown, V., Pontin, E.E., & Dovey, T.M. (2003). Effect of television advertisements for foods on food consumption in children. Appetite 42, 221-225. DOI: 10.1016/j.appet.2003.11.006 Halford, J.C.G., Boyland, E.J., Hughes, G., Oliveira, L.P., & Dovey, T.M. (2007). Beyond-brand effect of television (TV) food advertisements/commercials on caloric intake and food choice of 5-7-year-old children. Appetite 49, 263-267. DOI: 10.1016/j.appet.2006.12.003 Healthychildren.org (n.d.). Family media plan. Retrieved from: https://www.healthychildren.org/English/media/Pages/default.aspx#home Janz, K.F., Levy, S.M., Burns, T.L., Torner, J.C., Willing, M.C., & Warren, J.J. (2002). Fatness, physical activity, and television viewing in children during the adiposity rebound period: The Iowa bone development study. Preventive Medicine 35, 563-571. DOI: 10.1006/pmed.2002.1113 Kim, M. (2016, October 25). American Academy of Pediatrics says some screen time is OK for kids under two. Replay available at: https://ww2.kqed.org/forum/2016/10/24/american-academy-of-pediatrics-says-some-screen-time-is-ok-for-kids-under-2/ Mares, M. -L., & Acosta, E. E. (2008). Be kind to the three-legged dogs: Children’s literal interpretations of TV’s moral lessons. Media Psychology 11, 377–399, DOI: 10.1080/15213260802204355 McClure, E.R., Chentsova-Dutton, Y.E., Barr, R.F., Holochwost, S.J., & Parrott, W.G. (2015). “Facetime doesn’t count”: Video chat as an exception to media restrictions for infants and toddlers. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction 6, 1-6. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijcci.2016.02.002 McKean, C., Mensah, F.K., Eadie, P., Bavin, E.L., Bretherton, L., Cini, E., & Reilly, S. (2015). Levers for language growth: Characteristics and predictors of language trajectories between 4 and 7 years. PLoS ONE 10(8), 1-21. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0134251 Ostrov, J.M., Gentile, D.A., & Crick, N.R. (2006). Media exposure, aggression, and prosocial behavior during early childhood: A longitudinal study. Review of Social Development 15(4), 612-627. Full article available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222094715_Media_Exposure_Aggression_and_Prosocial_Behavior_During_Early_Childhood_A_Longitudinal_Study Ostrov, J.M., Gentile, D.A., & Mullins, A.D. (2013). Evaluating the effect of educational media exposure on aggression in early childhood. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 34, 38-44. DOI: 10.1016/j.appdev.2012.09.005 PBS Parents (n.d.). TV and kids under age 3. Retrieved from: http://www.pbs.org/parents/childrenandmedia/article-faq.html Reddy, S. (2015, October 12). Pediatricians rethink screen time policy for children. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from: http://www.wsj.com/articles/pediatricians-rethink-screen-time-policy-for-children-1444671636 Viner, R.M., & Cole, T.J. (2005). Television viewing in early childhood predicts adult body mass index. The Journal of Pediatrics 147(4), 429-435. DOI: 10.1016/j.jpeds.2005.05.005 Wen, L.M., Baur, L.A., Rissel, C., Xu, H., & Simpson, J.M. (2014). Correlates of body mass index and overweight and obesity of children aged 2 years: Findings from the healthy beginning trial. Obesity 22(7), 1723-1730. DOI: 10.1002/oby.20700   Read Full Transcript Transcript Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today’s episode is called “really, how bad is screen time for my over two year old?”. So this episode had some remarkably fortuitous timing – I was actually half way through writing it when the American Academy of Pediatrics updated its guidelines on screen time for children. Cue the scramble to update my research – I was just grateful I hadn’t already recorded and released an episode that became instantly out of date! The old guidelines said that “Television and other entertainment media should be avoided for children under age 2.” In my mind that was a bit of an anemically worded recommendation given that it follows a paragraph stating that “Studies have shown that excessive media use can lead to attention problems, school difficulties, sleep and eating disorders, and obesity. In addition, the internet and cell phones can provide platforms for illicit and risky behaviors.” When I looked around I found that the AAP’s policy had been much more restrictive until just May of last year – it used to recommend that parents avoid screen time completely for children under the age of 2, and to limit screen time to no more than two hours a day for children older than two. But apparently the AAP realized that 38% of children under age 2 had used a mobile device and 74% of children under two have watched TV before the age of 2. 43% of children under the age of 2 watch TV every day and 18% watch videos or DVDs every day, so clearly parents mostly weren’t following the guidelines, which I’m guessing is what prompted the new guidelines that seem to try to walk a narrow line of recommending less rather than more screen time, but also acknowledging that parents do let their children use these devices in spite of the AAP’s recommendations. So what do the updated guidelines say? They’re considerably more nuanced than the old ones, which had previously been explained in just a few short paragraphs, and it’s also a bit harder to figure out exactly what the recommendations are because they’re buried below a bunch of preamble BUT I was excited to find that the preamble is fantastically well-referenced, rather than just consisting of a few statements that seemed to appear out of thin air with no basis in any research, which is what the old version seemed like. So here’s the really important stuff: For children younger than 18 months, discourage use of screen media other than video chatting. The scientists who wrote the recommendations cite a study showing that even parents who tended to adhere strictly to the previous “avoid screen time for under twos” statement would permit the use of video chatting, and while there’s no evidence of benefit from video chatting there’s no evidence of harm either, so given that video chatting tends to be a social interaction – which is usually associated with cognitive development – researchers seem to be sort of assuming that video chatting is probably OK. I heard an interview on NPR with one of the lead authors of the guidelines a couple of weeks ago and she said they are designed to be “realistic and broadly applicable,” which seems to account for the use of the word “discourage” when describing screen media use for under 18 month olds – the researchers don’t want to encourage anyone to introduce screens before age 18 months, but they also don’t want to alienate the parents who do decide to do it. Alright, so for the 18-24 month olds, again, there’s no pressure to introduce screens but if you do use them, the researchers advise using them as a teaching tool and as an activity you do together, not as something you use to help them calm down or something to keep them occupied. The idea behind not using media to calm them down and avoid tantrums is that using media as a calming strategy could lead to problems with limit-setting if children don’t learn to develop their own emotional regulation and always look to devices to help them calm down. The researchers cite the websites Common Sense Media, PBS Kids, and Sesame Workshop as examples of quality programming. In children older than two years, the recommendations say that parents should limit media to one hour or less per day of high quality programming. The limit addresses the idea that children need other activities in their lives as well, and that screen time can displace these activities if children are on their devices for too long. Again, the ideal is for high-quality children’s programming that you watch together rather than it being a solo activity. Parents may need to help children understand what they’re watching, and help them apply what they learn to the world around them – so if you watch a program on bugs and then you go out and look for bugs, you could talk about what you learned in the program that can help you understand the bugs in real life. Children may not understand the things they see in two-dimensional environments as much as they do if someone explains it to them – the same holds true for books as well as TV, but because a parent is usually reading the book the child gets a chance to ask questions which improves their understanding. Parents should also monitor what children are doing on their devices, test apps before the child uses them, and engage in conversation about the child’s screen time. Finally, the guidelines talk about when devices *shouldn’t* be used – that includes meal times, times when you’re playing with your child (and that goes for parents too). Screens in bedrooms are not recommended, and children shouldn’t use devices within an hour of bedtime.       We’ve generally followed a “no TV” policy with our toddler until she was two. She also isn’t allowed to play with our phones – she doesn’t have any apps on them. She does watch videos with her Dad on his phone; usually videos of herself but there’s also one of our friend’s drone that she is strangely attached to. But that’s five or ten minutes a day on weekends. Recently she had an ear infection and had to stay home from school unexpectedly, so I had to stay with her, and I still needed to get work done. I offered to put on the movie Penguins which she was quite interested in for five minutes, but then she got bored and asked me to turn it off, but then she wanted it on again, and then off again…and for several days afterward she campaigned to watch it. It gave me a taste of what we might be getting into if we started to allow her to watch TV, so we backed off it again and haven’t let her watch it since. But I know some parents approach this differently and do allow TV watching so I wanted to try to understand what really are the impacts of TV on children’s physical and cognitive development? Does some kind of switch flip at age 2 where it suddenly becomes “less bad”? And a neighbor of mine asked whether having TV on all the time as ‘background noise’ might be better than just watching a few shows because then children might get desensitized to it and stop paying attention? There’s a lot to untangle when it comes to the research on TV viewing in children so let’s dive in. Cognitive Development The impact of TV on children’s development may differ at different points in the lifespan, so there may be a “sensitive period” for the effects of TV viewing on children’s cognitive development. Executive functioning is a term that means a set of related skills involving working memory, cognitive inhibitory control, and attentional focusing and flexibility. Now let’s go through what each of *those* mean. Working memory is the way you hold multiple pieces of information in your mind at once and manipulate this information. Cognitive inhibitory control means suppressing dominant information in favor of not dominant information. Attentional focusing and flexibility refer to the ability to focus and shift attention in response to change. I think about this in terms of an example – maybe you’re watching a complicated movie on TV; the kind with multiple plot lines and you’re trying to figure out what’s going on. Your child wakes up upstairs and starts crying quietly. You need to suppress your thinking about the movie to assess the noises you hear from your child and decide whether it’s the kind of crying that needs your attention or not. In making that shift you demonstrated attentional focusing and flexibility. So both executive functioning, which is all of those concepts taken together, plus vocabulary development, are really important in the preschool years because they’re among the strongest predictors of early academic achievement. One study found that watching child-directed programs at ages 2 and 3 was associated with better word comprehension at age 3, but the very same study found that children who viewed more general education programs at ages 2-5 had lower word comprehension at ages 4-7. The authors of another study suggest that children already have to have a good store of vocabulary to be able to pick up new words from watching TV – in other words, they have to understand what they’re watching, which I suppose is why children’s programming is associated with an increased vocabulary but general educational programming isn’t. The evidence for or against the impact of TV on executive function development seems to be pretty mixed. One study found that children have a shorter focused attention span when a TV is on in the background, even though they didn’t have more episodes of focused attention with the TV off. Four year olds living in homes with more adult television programming were rated as having lower executive functioning skills by their parents than children who lived in homes with less adult TV watching, but children’s programming didn’t seem to have the same effect. And another set of researchers had children wear a digital recorder on random days for up to 24 months, which recorded the amount of TV they watched, as well as the words they said and the words other people said to them. IT turned out that each hour of TV the children were exposed to, even if it was just background noise, was associated with less talking by the child and also less talking by the parents to the child. There are some days where I might wish my daughter didn’t talk as much and this study shows that TV would be a good way to keep her quieter, but at the end of the day the more she talks and the more I talk with her, the better her language development gets. And, finally, a third study found that a greater cumulative number of hours of watching TV, starting to watch TV at a younger age, and watching media that wasn’t explicitly developed for children are all linked with poor executive functioning in preschoolers, although the study authors noted that they were able to show correlation, not causation – they couldn’t prove that watching TV causes these detrimental effects. Because it seems as though having a TV on or not having a TV on are not the only factors at play here. It’s also important to...

Are you pregnant?  Thinking about getting pregnant?  Do you love Your Parenting Mojo and wish there was a show that could help you to understand how scientific research can help you make decisions about your pregnancy?  Well, there is! In this episode we chat with Vanessa Merten, who hosts The Pregnancy Podcast.  She uses scientific research to examine – sometimes controversial – issues from all sides to help you decide what’s best for you. And best of all, she goes beyond looking at individual issues to really synthesizing the outcomes of the research in a way that will make your decision-making much more powerful.  Do you know how receiving IV fluids during your delivery could lead to a pediatrician making the judgment that breastfeeding is not going well and you should supplement with formula? If you want to understand this as well as the links between all kinds of other issues related to your pregnancy, listen in to this interview with Vanessa and then head on over to The Pregnancy Podcast at pregnancypodcast.com.   Reference Dominguez-Bello, M.G., De Jesus-Laboy, K.M., Shen, N., Cox, L.M., Amir, A., Gonzalez, A., Bokulich, N.A., Song, S.J., Hoashi, M., Rivera-Vina, J.I., Mendez, K., Knight, R., & Clemente, J.C. (2016). Partial restoration of the microbiota of cesarean-born infants via vaginal microbial transfer. Nature Medicine 22(3), 250-253. Full study available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5062956/   Read Full Transcript Transcript Jen: [00:22] Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today’s guest, Vanessa Merten wrote to me after she heard my podcast to telling me about her podcast and as soon as I listened to it, I knew we had to work together. Her show is called The Pregnancy Podcast and let me say right now that this is an altruistic episode for you, dear listeners, because I am not pregnant and not planning to get pregnant either, but when I listened to the pregnancy podcast, I realized that Vanessa is essentially doing the same thing that I’m doing in Your Parenting Mojo, but for the stage before the baby is born and just after, which is to say that she looks at a particular issue and examines it from all sides using scientific research as her guide, so while my listeners are probably here because they already have a child, I realize that many of you may be thinking about having another one. Maybe you didn’t have the time to do much research before your first baby or maybe you didn’t know there was research out there that could guide your choices, or maybe you did the research, but it was several years ago now and you’re not sure how things might’ve changed in the intervening years if so, the pregnancy podcast is for you. Welcome Vanessa. I’m so excited to have you on the show. Vanessa: [01:36] Jen, thank you so much for having me. I am really excited to be here. Jen:  [01:41] Thank you. So tell us a bit about yourself. Why did you start the pregnancy podcast? Vanessa:  [01:45] Oh, I am a mom to my son Reef who is two; he’s just a few months younger than your daughter and when I was pregnant I felt like there was so much pressure to do what everybody else was doing and it was like, well, if everybody does things this way then this must be the right way to do things and like you, I’m very research minded and I really believe strongly in making informed decisions. So that mentality pretty much ruled my pregnancy and I just dove into as much research as I could find about everything and it really set me out on a different path than I had started from and made me make some different choices and… Jen:  [02:26] Like what, what kind of choice did you make that was different? Vanessa: [02:28] Well, I ended up doing a natural birth in a birth center which was different than every other person that I knew at the time. And it’s challenging. I think, you know, some parents that do choose to go that route. You have friends telling you, well that’s awesome, but you’re crazy. There’s absolutely no way I would consider that I’m getting an epidural as soon as I walk in the hospital… Which is completely fine. You know, there’s no, no one size fits all for birth. Jen:  [03:01] Yeah, I remember when I was doing the tour of one of the hospitals, all the mothers there were new mothers and we’re all, you know, natural birth is we’re going to do. And there was one mother who had had a baby before. He was new to the system and she was like, tell me what paperwork I need to sign to get the epidural as soon as I walk in the door and we’re looking at her like, what do you know that we don’t know? Vanessa: [03:23] Yeah. So the more. But the more research I did on everything, you know, the more confident that I became in the decisions that I was making, even though they happen to be different than everything that my friends and family around me were doing. But it was hard to find good research and evidence that doesn’t have a bias behind it. Jen: [03:43] So how do you do it? Vanessa: [03:45] You know, kind of like, like I think you do with your podcast. I just start out with, if I’m doing a topic on inducing labor, you know, I start off with, let’s go to the very basics like what is inducing labor, what are the different methods available and then go back and look at research for different methods and look at what there is showing evidence that yes, this is a possible thing or what are the possible side effects and just really trying to look at all sides of those issues. Jen:   [04:18] So in the podcast, how do you decide what topics to focus on? Because for some episodes I know you do a q and a format and you have the little short ones at about five minutes. And then you also have full episodes at about 20 minutes. So how, how do you sort of decide which topic you want to put into which type of episode? Vanessa: [04:35] The Q and As I kind of added… I have so many listeners email me questions and I love. Jen: [04:42] Oh, that’s awesome. Vanessa:  [04:42] I love being able to help them get their questions answered and help them find research on questions that they have, but I can’t do 10 episodes a week. I wish I could, you know, there’s so much content out there, but it takes time and, and like your podcast, every episode I have the full episodes…it’s a master class. It’s very research intensive and, and that just takes time. So if it’s a question that applies to probably the majority of expecting moms and there’s a lot of content out there on it that I liked to do a full episode if it’s, you know, a mom has a question about, I have like an abnormality with my placenta and I’m not sure how that’s going to affect my birth. Then if it’s a specific question that maybe won’t apply to everyone, it still gives me an opportunity to answer that question and you know, maybe there’s another mom out there with the same question and that answer can kind of help her out too. Jen: [05:39] Right. And you also have the 40 Weeks podcast, right? Vanessa: [05:42] Yeah, I do. I’m like, I am a little bit of a podcast junkie. The 40 Weeks, there’s just a five minute episode for each week of pregnancy. And it’s just kind of, you know, what’s going on with you, what’s going on with baby and, and then a tip for Dad at the end of that episode. Jen:  [06:01] Okay. And I should mention to my listeners that if you search The Pregnancy Podcast on iTunes, the 40 weeks prep podcast actually tends to be the first thing to pop up and that is static, is that right? You’ve, you’ve recorded those things and that doesn’t change, whereas you’re adding new episodes to The Pregnancy Podcast, right? Right. Yeah. So, um, so if you, if you search for the pregnancy podcast on itunes and you see that 40 weeks, then by all means go ahead and listen. But if you want to see the stuff that’s updated regularly, you have to just, I think scroll over to the right hand side and you’ll see the pregnancy podcast and it has a similar logo. So that should help you find it. So I think a lot of moms kind of start with the, you know, the typical What to Expect kind of sites and Baby Center because we don’t really know where else to look. Uh, so I’m curious as to what you think about the information that’s posted on those sites and whether you’ve noticed anything being promoted on their sites that maybe goes against some of the scientific research you’ve read? Vanessa:[06:55] Yeah, I think sites like what to expect when you’re expecting and baby center. They do a good job of providing a lot of information on a lot of topics and, and they explained things in pretty simple terms, which is fine if that’s what you’re looking for, but I don’t think that they do a great job of really painting the complete picture and really diving into the research and evidence behind a lot of things. And I also don’t think they do a great job of really connecting all the pieces. You know, an example of this would be you have, you can read in one section about getting IV fluids during your birth. And that’s something that’s really common and then you know, and another section you’re reading about breastfeeding, well they’re not linking up that there’s a connection between the two and a few get IV fluids during your birth, your baby is going to be retaining some of those fluids, those fluids are going to be lost in the first 24 hours and it’s a possibility that it’s going to look to your care provider, like your baby is losing weight too rapidly and breastfeeding is not going well. Vanessa:[08:00] And then suddenly they’re saying, you know, well maybe we should consider supplementing with formula and mothers just aren’t getting this information. So I think that that, those type of websites, they’re good for, you know, just a skim-the-surface kind of understanding of a lot of things going on with birth. But I don’t think that they do a great job of really connecting the pieces together well and, and giving parents a good idea of how everything pregnancy birth is really so interconnected and how one thing can affect another. Jen: [08:34] Yeah. I learned that from your show, that specific piece of information. And, and that would have been very relevant to me. I had a natural birth but had IV fluids and yeah, my daughter lost a lot of weight in the first few days and the lactation consultants were pretty worried and we were struggling with latch as well. So maybe there was a secondary issue there too, but it’s definitely possible that it could have been just that she was losing some of the fluid that she got during the delivery. Vanessa: [09:01] Yeah. And there’s, there’s been a lot of push to get the medical community to start looking at the 24 hour weight of the baby after birth. And you know, there is research that backs this up, but research, you know, even once it’s done for it to get out, to make changes, especially in the medical community, that does not happen overnight. Jen:  [09:25] I’m, I’m wondering also how often you found the scientific research that you read goes against common wisdom and the people that. The things that people just think are the way it is. What are some findings that have really surprised you? Vanessa: [09:38] The findings that surprised me most are the ones that really go against what we’ve accepted is just part of kind of routine care. So, you know, we have ultrasounds which are amazing. It’s, it’s great technology; we can use ultrasound to diagnose things that we couldn’t decades ago, but it’s become this routine part of prenatal care and you have a lot of expecting moms getting multiple ultrasounds that aren’t necessarily medically indicated, and there’s quite a bit of research and some animal studies showing that there is potential for some negative effects from the ultrasounds. And I think what surprises me most is that, you know, these aren’t being talked about and they’re not challenging our current way of doing things. Jen:   [10:27] No, they’re really not. It’s like, you want to see what’s happening with the baby today? Oh, let’s do an ultrasound. Vanessa:  [10:32] Yeah. And it’s, you know, having that little sonogram picture, it’s a hallmark part of being pregnant, you know. But, and like I said… Jen:  [10:41] I had a lot of my pregnancy, I had a low lying placenta, so every time I went in and they want to take a look at it, see if things had lengthened out. So yeah, I had no idea that there’s such a thing as too many ultrasounds. Vanessa:   [10:54] Yeah. And, and like I said, you know, there is certain things where it is, it could be medically necessary if you have a low lying placenta, that’s definitely something that your care provider is going to want to keep an eye on. And you know, ultrasounds can be helpful in that. But you also have, I think a lot of expecting moms that every time they go in it’s, you know, well let’s see the baby, and they’re using it to check things like heartbeat that, that you don’t need an ultrasound to do that, you know, there are some other methods. Jen: [11:23] Yeah, I read somewhere an interesting piece of advice that was to always ask, you know, what happens if we don’t do this procedure? Do you use that piece of advice? Vanessa: [11:35] Do and that, you know, for any intervention, a great question is what happens if we don’t do it, and I think, oh, this is going to escape me at the moment, but um, I do talk about kind of a line of questions like, okay, you know, what are all the outcomes if we do this? And then like you’re saying, what are the possible outcomes if we don’t do this? And then another good question to ask is, well, what if we wait, you know, if you’re talking about an...

Does your child eat any food under the sun...as long as it's cheese? Do you find yourself worrying that you'll never get all the nutrients into her that she needs? Dr. Dina Rose approaches eating from a sociologist's perspective, which is to say that It's Not About The Broccoli (which also happens to be the name of her book), it's about habits and relationships. Join Dr. Rose as she counsels the parent who struggles with her almost four-year-old "highly spirited" son's eating habits. There is hope for getting this child to eat something other than cheese, and Dr. Rose walks us through the steps to make it happen. Not to be missed even if your child isn't (currently) a picky eater: every worm will turn, as they say, and you may find these strategies helpful to head off any pickiness that starts to emerge in the future. And listen up for Dr. Rose's offer of a free 30 minute coaching session for parents!   Jump to highlights 00:33 Introduction of episode 04:55 3 habits that translate nutrition into behavior 06:11 Nutrition approach vs. habit approach 07:35 Taste preferences are shaped by exposure 08:45 Rotation rule on serving food 15:56 3 categories of issues that J.T had when feeding her son 29:35 Strategies for your child to eat 32:40 Rotation rule is really important 34:27 External reasons for making eating decisions 49:20 Build links to new foods   Dina Rose's Books: It's Not About the Broccoli: Three Habits to Teach Your Kids for a Lifetime of Healthy Eating. (Affiliate link)

  So, does your child ever throw tantrums?  Yes?  Well, the good news is that you’re not alone.  And this isn’t something us Western parents have brought upon ourselves with our strange parenting ways; they’re actually fairly common (although not universal) in other cultures as well.   What causes a tantrum?  And what can parents do to both prevent tantrums from occurring and cope with them more effectively once they start?  Join us today to learn more.   Taming Your Triggers If you need help with your own big feelings about your child’s behavior, Taming Your Triggers will be open for enrollment soon. We’ll help you to: Understand the real causes of your triggered feelings, and begin to heal the hurts that cause them Use new tools like the ones Katie describes to find ways to meet both her and her children’s needs Effectively repair with your children on the fewer instances when you are still triggered   Sign up for the waitlist and we'll let you know once enrollment re-opens. Click the image below to learn more.   Jump to highlights 00:35 Introduction in today’s episode 01:00 The 1st, last and only detailed research about this subject was published in 1931 then the research went quiet until the 1980’s even since then there’s only little information about this subject because tantrums can be hard to study at home 01:56 Age bracket of children that have tantrums and this is the most common childhood behavior according to parents 02:30 Tantrums may occur in other cultures according to Robert and Sarah LeVine’s recent book Do Parents Matter? 03:12 David Lancy’s book The Anthropology of Childhood cites several studies of other cultures that mention tantrum-like behavior. 04:55 Florence Goodenough wrote a book that was published in 1939 that described tantrums implied that this is not a new phenomenon 06:30 Children who have older siblings have more frequent outbursts than first-born children 09:29 Goodenough asked parents at the beginning of the study what methods of controlling tantrums 12:15 Negotiation is considered to be a valued ability because it can bring about solutions to problems that come as close as possible to satisfying everyone 13:45 The studies found that maternal use of induction techniques was related to social competence, even across time, during the preschool period 14:58 Wrapping up the discussion   References Denham, S.A., & Burton, R. (2003). Social and emotional prevention and intervention programming for preschoolers. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers Green, J.A., Whitney, P.G., & Potegal, M. (2011). Screaming, yelling, whining, and crying: Categorical and intensity differences in vocal expressions of anger and sadness in children’s tantrums. Emotion 11(5), 1124-1133. DOI: 10.1037/a0024173 Goodenough, F. (1931). Anger in young children. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lancy, D.F. (2015). The anthropology of childhood: Cherubs, chattel, changelings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levine, L.J. (1995). Young children’s understanding of the causes of anger and sadness. Child Development 66(2), 697-709. LeVine, R., & LeVine, S. (2016). Do parents matter? Why Japanese babies sleep soundly, Mexican siblings don’t fight, and American families should just relax. New York: Public Affairs. Lieberman, M.D., Eisenberger, N.E., Crockett, M.J., Tom, S.M., Pfeifer, J.H., & Way, B.M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science 18(5), 421-428.

In just a few years, today’s children and teens will forge careers that look nothing like those that were available to their parents or grandparents. While the U.S. economy becomes ever more information-driven, our system of education seems stuck on the idea that “content is king,” neglecting other skills that 21st century citizens sorely need. Backed by the latest scientific evidence and illustrated with examples of what’s being done right in schools today, Becoming Brilliant (Affiliate link) introduces the “6Cs” collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creative innovation, and confidence along with ways parents can nurture their children’s development in each area. Join me for an engaging chat with award-winning Professor Roberta Golinkoff about the key takeaways from the new book.   Jump to highlights 00:35 Introducing the guest 02:11 Reason for writing the book Becoming Brilliant 03:49 Mission statement of the book 05:32 6 Competencies in the book 16:19 Teachable places are everywhere 24:42 Talk to your children 25:48 How do you have a conversation around the book 28:05 Books are important for children 29:08 How can we encourage our children to develop grit 33:42 2 Ways to view intelligence significant   Read Full Transcript Transcript Jen: 00:33 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today’s episode is called Becoming Brilliant. I’m so excited to welcome my guest today, Roberta Golinkoff. I reached out to her because I’d read her book, Einstein never used flashcards, which advocated for a young children’s learning through play rather than through expensive toys or high pressure classes. So when her new book Becoming Brilliant came out, I knew I had to read it and I absolutely dance a jig the day that she agreed to join us here on Your Parenting Mojo. I’m so excited. Thank you so much for joining us. Roberto. Dr. Golinkoff: 01:02 You know, it’s funny, but I danced a jig too! I’m so happy to able to talk about these issues and it’s such a pleasure to meet you, Jen. I hope I get to see you next time I’m out in California. Jen: 01:12 That would be great. All right, well let me formally introduce you. Dr. Golinkoff is the Unidel H. Rodney Sharp Professor of Education, Psychology, and Linguistics at the University of Delaware. She has won a fellowship and many prizes for her work and she served as an Associate Editor of Child Development, which really is the premier journal in her field and she’s also authored over 150 journal Publications, book chapters, and 14 books and monographs. Her official bio says that she has appeared on numerous radio and television shows and in print media and never turns down an opportunity to spread the findings of psychological science to the lay public so I can vouch for her on that front at least. Thank you again for joining us. Dr. Golinkoff: 01:49 When do I sleep? Jen: 01:51 I don’t know. I wondered that too. Dr. Golinkoff: 01:54 Some days I wonder that. Jen: 01:56 Yeah, I can imagine. So I wonder if you could start a bit by telling us about the premise of Becoming Brilliant. Why did you write this book? Dr. Golinkoff: 02:04 So we know that many parents are struggling and trying to figure out what their children should be receiving by way of schooling and by way of parenting in the home. And the reason they’re struggling is because we are in a new era. You know, there has never been a time like this technology is advancing so rapidly. It’s really changing all our lives. Many of the parents who you speak to know that places like National Economic Forum have said that 47 percent of our jobs are going to go the way of computers and robots. The statistics of very clear that many, many jobs will be vanishing. So how do we protect our children for the future? So when we started to think about this, we knew it was going to be about education, but we didn’t just want it to be about reimagining education in the classroom because we recognize that kids spend only 20 percent of their time in school. Jen: 03:05 It seems like way more than that. Dr. Golinkoff: 03:08 But it’s not if you actually do the numbers on it, and that means that the kinds of activities that children engage in outside of school and at home and be crucially important for their education. Many people are not thrilled with the kind of education that their children have. And we also wanted to broaden what we think of as education because if your kid is just smart but a junky person, what good did you do? Right? You want to create kids who will be happy in their personal lives and who will take the perspective of others. Otherwise, you know, how can you have partners? How can you work in the workforce if you can’t get along with people? So our book actually has a mission statement and we created this mission statement by modifying a mission statement from Ontario, our neighbors to the north. I love Canada. Dr. Golinkoff: 04:02 I want to be a poster child because they get education. They know how important playful learning is and they minimize the drill-and-kill. So our mission statement is society thrives when we craft environments both in and out of school that support happy, healthy thinking, caring and social children who become collaborative, creative, competent, and responsible citizens tomorrow. Jen: 04:35 That’s quite a mission. Dr. Golinkoff: 04:37 It is a big mission. It is true. And in order to fulfill this mission, it’s just a good thing that Kathy and I are steeped in the psychological literature because between us, we read and incorporated thousands of studies into this book and while that may sound incredibly dense and boring… Jen: 05:00 …it’s actually not because I read it! Dr. Golinkoff: 05:07 …we really try to write in a way that invites people into our thinking, into the laboratory, into the school, into the home so that they can see the principles that we extract from the research visible before your eyes? Jen: 05:23 Yeah. I did notice that it’s really full of stories that really helped to get your points across. So let’s dive into the book a little bit. So the setup of the book is that you described the six Cs, which are Collaboration, Communication, Content, Critical thinking, Creative innovation and Confidence. And each of those competencies has four levels of mastery from basic up to pretty high; the kind of level that some people never achieve in their lifetime. And so you actually have it set out on a table format. And as I looked at the table, the building of the levels made immediate sense to me, but it wasn’t until I got to the end of the book that I realized how you can kind of move across the table as well and the competencies themselves build on each other and reinforce each other. Can you talk a little bit about that? Dr. Golinkoff: 06:08 Oh yeah. That was a brilliant presentation of how this is presented. So the idea is that skills that we talk about emerge in development and we tried to put them in sequence by development. And in addition there is development along each of the six Cs. So probably the way to make it clearer would be to give an example, let’s say from collaboration, the first one. Think about the fact that humans are born ultra social. We we will smile to faces and lock onto eyes at birth and this is often a startling recognition that people have. When the new born baby comes out and looks you in the eyes, it’s like, oh my God, there’s a little person in there. So collaboration is basically two heads are better than one. Easy to remember, and in order to collaborate and work with others, so this is our first C. We have to learn to control our emotions and take others’ points of view. We also sprinkle the book with business examples because Peter Drucker, who was the father of modern management, has written about how companies today have to live in a Lego world where the bricks can be combined and recombined as collaborations occur inside and outside the company. Jen: 07:47 Yeah. Yours is the first book I’ve ever seen that does that, that kind of looks ahead to what, what comes out the other end. I’m particularly from a business viewpoint and says these are the kinds of skills that you’re going to need. You know, you’re not going to need to be able to recite the capitals of the 50 states in your career. You’re going to need a whole different set of skills that is not being addressed by schools today. Dr. Golinkoff: 08:07 You know, you, you really get it. I feel like you should be giving this interview! You so get it! So it is absolutely true that what we did in the 20th century, in the 19th century, and unfortunately even in some of this century, is engaged children in a lot of memorization. Now, look, I’m not going to say memorization isn’t important. I’m giving a test tomorrow in one of my classes and not going to have open book, they’re going to have to memorize stuff. Okay? But unless you can make it your own, unless you can engage in deep learning so you can generate examples and you can talk about why this concept is important. You’ve only learned in a very shallow way. And with being able to get at our fingertips now on the computer, I mean, you could go ask any second grader, what’s the tallest building in the world? And they can tell you if they have computer access in about 13 seconds, right? Dr. Golinkoff: 09:09 So there are many things available to children today that weren’t available in the past when we did rely so heavily on memorization. Now what we need to develop in our children is the ability to adapt and be flexible and be able to change. Because seven out of 10 jobs have not been invented yet for the future and our children. Jen: 09:32 Isn’t that a weird thought? Dr. Golinkoff: 09:32 It is! It’s true. We already see all around us how we’re being replaced by…. Oh, oh, he’s a great example. So I spoke at the evolution institute and United Way in Tampa, Florida. It was held in the building owned by Valpack. We get these coupons, I don’t know, monthly is it? Jen: 10:00 Yeah, we get them in the mail too. Dr. Golinkoff: 10:00 And they produce these things. They had a community room where we had the meeting, so they had these giant windows so you could look down into the factory. I was literally blown away. I felt like, oh my God, I have seen the future. This was maybe a 200,000 square foot factory loaded with equipment. There were moving vehicles with no human in them. They were all conducted by robots and this giant working factory had about four humans in it. I was blown away, so this is the future for which we are preparing our children. That means we have to give them the skills, help them develop the skills, that robots and computers aren’t so good at. So collaboration is certainly one of them. Communication is essential. It’s the grease that keeps international commerce alive because now we’re collaborating with people all over the world. One of my fondest expressions is the world is the size of a walnut. You know, 25 years ago even I couldn’t have had a dinner at my house with somebody on my left from Bangladesh, somebody on my right from Ireland, somebody in front of me from India. Dr. Golinkoff: 11:27 I mean it just goes on and on, right? So we have to figure out how to communicate with people from cultures all over the world. We have to learn to speak, we have to learn to write. And all this entails, again, taking the perspective of the other. You have to have content, no question about it. You ain’t going to get away without content, okay. And there are different ways to learn content. Then we would like to move away from a lot of the drill and kill that we’re seeing in school because we want kids to be able to gain, retain and use content in new ways. That’s what they’re going to be asked to do in life to apply what they know to problems and again, we don’t want them replaced by those computers. Critical thinking: we can think of it as question everything. Dr. Golinkoff: 12:20 You have to have some content to be able to engage in critical thinking and you have to be able to synthesize and select the information you need from this deluge to solve the problem at hand. So I don’t know about you, but I’m sitting in my office looking at my desk loaded with journals, papers and books and I like to tell people this is not my fault. This is because we see daily encounter the equivalent: are you ready for this of 174 newspapers? One hundred and 74 newspapers… Jen: 12:57 Worth of content… Dr. Golinkoff: 12:58 Per day is the amount of information by one estimate that we encounter. So how could I possibly keep up and keep my place neat? Jen: 13:07 Yeah. It’s not my fault! I’ll tell my husband that. So let’s talk a little bit about how that content C applies to two very young children. We’re not quite there yet with our toddler. She’s just a little over two. But I’ve certainly met children who are slightly older who sort of latch onto a topic and learn all of these kinds of esoteric facts about it. And I know that they tend to kind of just memorize these little nuggets of information and I’m wondering is there any way that we can, that we can know that we would want to kind of scaffold that knowledge into a more cohesive whole or if it’s just part of being a toddler that you memorize 300 facts about dinosaurs and then you move onto fish and then you move onto something else. Dr. Golinkoff: 13:54 So it’s a wonderful thing that our kids are so curious and it’s an unfortunate thing that school tends to stamp it out of them unless it’s a certain kind of school that really encourages curiosity and questioning. So, you know, my favorite place when my kids were little was the public library. It’s such a gift to go with your kids and let them pick out the books. And then if you know they’re interested in spiders, you know, you take out books on spiders, right? So why not feed into the things that your kids are interested in? It doesn’t mean they have to become entomologists, ultimately, and study spiders for living. But if they’re fascinated about something in the world, let’s build on it. Why not? Right? And this is also where media can come in. In today’s even though there are many junky educational apps out there, and even though we don’t want our kids on television 24 slash seven, you know, you may well be able to find cool videos about spiders. I opened up one of my talks once with a little piece from the New York Times on jumping spiders who can jump like five times their body, you know, and it’s just fascinating once you start to dig in and I wouldn’t worry so much about what your kid is getting out of it as long as they continue to ask questions and they want to know and your feed into this by providing them with opportunity to learn more. Why not? Jen: 15:29 That’s an interesting twist on it. So you’re saying that a measure of success is not how much they know or how well it goes together, but how well they continue to ask questions. Dr. Golinkoff: 15:38 Yeah. And you know, I’m not telling much worried about assaying what my kids know about dinosaurs per se. I just want to feed into their curiosity. And the more we do that, the more they learn about the world and they learn how to learn. So in content is also included, learning to learn. So if we help children know how to find the information they’re interested in, you know, that starts by going to the library, maybe going online. We’re already helping them for the future because they need to know how to find information and teachable moments are everywhere. So we tell parents to take their children to really exotic places like the supermarket. I mean, you know what’s more typical for a family, you go to the supermarket, you go to the pharmacy, you go to the cleaner’s right? And I’ve always loved in the cleaners the button that you press that makes the clothes come down… Jen: 16:47 Yeah, I bet that will be every toddler’s field day… Dr. Golinkoff: 16:52 So this is how do we help our kids learn about the world. We ask them questions and they ask us questions and it’s not like giving a test. It’s like open ended questions where you talk about things. So for example, say you see an eggplant for the first time in the supermarket, you can tap into all the Cs. You can say, this is one of the only purple vegetables. You know, why don’t you feel it? It’s so smooth. It’s amazing how it feels on the outside, should we buy, should we take it home and cook and make something with it. You know, you get, you get all excited about an eggplant, right, and this is what it’s like if you’re excited about taking your child out in the world, you can just share these little tidbits with them and then if you actually take it home and make something with them, they’re not only learning content about the category of vegetables, but they’re learning to collaborate with you. They’re learning about communication because they’re asking you questions and having a conversation with you and all these things come together in creating children who are curious and who want to know more and he takes the perspective of others. It’s like no big secret here. Jen: 18:11 Yeah, in a way that kind of is the secret I in my mind because when my toddler started getting a little bit older, I started to set up all these learning activities for her and you know, what am I, what am I missing out on by not doing a learning activity today? And it’s through reading books like yours that I realize that going to the grocery store is a learning activity. When you’re looking at your collaboration C you’re talking about things like stacking firewood together and I’m packing groceries together because those kinds of activities build collaboration, you know, can you pass me the grapes or whatever and where do these go? Could you put those away for me please? And so I really appreciate just the understanding that I can bring my toddler along just by going through my daily life that I don’t have to set up learning activities for her unless I want to or unless she wants to or there is something outside of that. But I don’t have to. Dr. Golinkoff: 19:08 I’m so happy you’re saying this, Jen, because sometimes I think that I’ve been steeped in this stuff for so long that I, that I need to hear you. You feel the pressure to set up learning activities for a child who is just two. And I think it’s a shame and that’s why we wrote Einstein Never Used Flash Cards… Jen: 19:32 I love that book. Dr. Golinkoff: 19:34 Thank you so much. Because we wanted to tell parents also at that time that they didn’t have to fall prey to the marketolace telling them that they have to buy at the time it was

I’ve never said the words “good job” to my toddler. I was lucky – I stumbled on Alfie Kohn’s book Punished by Rewards early enough that I was able to break the habit before my daughter had really done anything much that might be construed as requiring a “good job.” I’m going to be absolutely transparent here and say that this episode draws very heavily on Alfie Kohn’s book Punished by Rewards, which – along with one of his other books, Unconditional Parenting, are a cornerstone of my approach to parenting. If you have time, you should absolutely buy the book and read it yourself. But assuming you don’t have the time for 300 pages of (really, very good) writing plus a hundred more of notes and references to explain why both physical and verbal rewards are just as harmful to your children as punishing them, this episode will help you to get to the crux of the issue much faster. I’ll also get into the research that Kohn draws on, as well as relevant research that’s been published since the book came out in 1993. Kohn’s thesis is that saying “good job” is really no different than punishing your child, since rewards are essentially the same thing – stimuli designed to elicit a response.  He argues that while this approach is actually quite effective in the short term, not only is it not effective in the long term but it doesn’t mesh well with the kinds of relationships that many of us think or say we want to have with our children.   Parenting Membership  If parenting feels really hard, and it seems like you’ve read all the books and you’ve asked for advice in free communities and you’re tired of having to weed through all the stuff that isn’t aligned with your values to get to the few good nuggets, then the Parenting Membership will help you out.   Join the waitlist and we'll let you know when enrollment reopens in May 2026, Click the banner to learn more.     Jump to highlights 00:38 Introduction of episode 03:57 What do the parent’s wanted to achieve when praising their children 09:23 4 Reasons why giving rewards fail 16:27 5 Reasons to stop saying “Good Job” to a child 20:53 Suggestions of Alfie Kohn for parents not to say “Good Job” to their children   References Birch, LL., Marlin, D.W., & Rotter, J. (1984). Eating as the ‘means’ activity in a contingency: Effects on young children’s food preferences. Child Development 55, 432-439. Retrieved from: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1129954?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents Brummelman, E., Tomaes, S., Overbeek, G., Orobio de Castro, B., van den Hout, M.A., & Bushman, B.J. (2014). On feeding those hungry for praise: Person praise backfires in children with low self-esteem. Journal of Experimental Psychology 143(1), 9-14. Condry, J. (1977). Enemies of exploration: Self-initiated versus other-initiated learning. Personality and Social Psychology 35(7), 459-477. Dweck, C. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York: Ballantine. Eisenberger, R. & Rhoades, L. (2001). Incremental effects of reward on creativity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81(4), 728-741. DOI: 10.1037//0022-3514.81.4.728 Gottfried, A.E., Fleming, J.S., & Gottfried, A.W. (1994). Role of parental motivational practices in children’s academic intrinsic motivation and achievement. Journal of Educational Psychology 86(1), 104-113. Gray, P. (2016). Children’s natural ways of educating themselves still work: Even for the three Rs. In D.C. Geary & D.B. Berch (Eds.), Evolutionary perspectives on child development and education (67-93). Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. Jeffery, R.W., Drewnowski, A., Epstein, L.H., Stunkard, A.J., Wilson, G.T., Wing, R.R., & Hill, D.R. (2000). Long-term maintenance of weight loss: Current status. Health Psychology 19(1 Suppl.), 5-16. DOI: 10.1037//0278-6133.19.1(Suppl.).5 Kazdin, A.E. (1982). The token economy: A decade later. Applied Behavior Analysis 15, 431-445. Full article available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1308287/ Kohn, A. (1993). Punished by Rewards. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. (Affiliate link) Kohn, A. (2001). Five reasons to stop saying “Good Job!”. Retrieved from: http://www.alfiekohn.org/article/five-reasons-stop-saying-good-job/ Pomerantz, E.M., & Kempner, S.G. (2013). Mother’s daily person and process praise: Implications for children’s theory of intelligence and motivation. Developmental Psychology 49(1), 2040-2046. Rietzschel, E.F., Zacher, H., & Stroebe, W. (2016). A lifespan perspective on creativity and innovation at work. Work, Aging and Retirement 2(2), 105-129. Schwartz, B. (1982). Reinforcement-induced behavioral stereotypy: How not to teach people to discover rules. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 111(1), 23-59.

  I’m afraid this is an episode I wish I didn’t have to record. When I launched the podcast I asked anyone who has a question about parenting or child development that I might be able to answer by reviewing the scientific literature to reach out and let me know, and someone got in touch to ask about the impact of domestic violence on children. I was a little hesitant to do an episode on it at first because I was hoping that this would be something that wouldn’t really affect the majority of my audience. But as I did a search of the literature I found that domestic violence is depressingly common and more children are exposed to it than we would like. And if you’re getting ready to hit that ‘pause’ button and move on to a different episode, don’t do it yet – there’s also research linking exposure to domestic violence dragging down the test scores of everyone else in that child’s class. So even if you’re not hitting anyone or being hit yourself, this issue probably impacts someone in your child’s class, and thus it impacts your child, and thus it impacts you. Listen on to learn more about the effects of stress in general on children, and the effects of domestic violence in particular. National Domestic Violence Hotline: 800.799.7233.   Jump to highlights: 00:38 Prelude of the episode 01:37 The general impact of stress in the unborn baby, as well at the infants and the pre-school children 05:00 Domestic violence is a common problem across the world 09:14 Abused women may deny their children the sense of basic trust and security that is the foundation of healthy emotional development 10:54 67% of children experienced violence 14:24 What can parents do to protect their children from domestic violence and stress   References Anda, R.F., Felitti, V.J., Bremner, J.D., Walker, J.D., Whitfield, C., Perry, B.D., Dube, S.R., & Giles, W.H. (2006). The enduring effects of abuse and related adverse experiences in childhood: A convergence of evidence from neurobiology and epidemiology. European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience 256(3), 174-186. DOI: 10.1007/s00406-005-0624-4 Carrell, S.E., & Hoekstra, M.L. (2009). Externalities in the classroom: How children exposed to domestic violence affect everyone’s kids. University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research Discussion Paper Series, DP2009004. Retrieved from: http://www.ukcpr.org/Publications/DP2009-04.pdf Edleson, J.L, Ellerton, A.L., Seagren, E.A., Kirchberg, S.L., Schmidt, S.O., & Ambrose, A.T. (2007). Assessing child exposure to adult domestic violence. Children and Youth Services Review 29, 961,971. DOI: 10.1016/j.childyouth.2006.12.009 Essex, M.J., & Klein, M.H. (2002). Maternal stress beginning in infancy may sensitize children to later stress exposure: Effects on cortisol and behavior. Biological Psychiatry 52, 776-784. Full article available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11086641_Maternal_stress_beginning_in_infancy_may_sensitize_children_to_later_stress_exposure_Effects_on_cortisol_and_behavior?enrichId=rgreq-a2830462f2af5d60e71eb7b48c03e971-XXX&enrichSource=Y292ZXJQYWdlOzExMDg2NjQxO0FTOjEwMjE5ODc5Mjk0OTc3M0AxNDAxMzc3NTAwNDM3&el=1_x_3 Evans, S.E., Davies, C., & DiLillo, D. (2008). Exposure to domestic violence: A meta-analysis of child and adolescent outcomes. Aggression and Violent Behavior 13, 131-130. DOI: 10.1016/j.avb.2008.02.005 Holt, S., Buckley, H., & Whelan, S., (2008). The impact of exposure to domestic violence on children and young people: A review of the literature. Child Abuse and Neglect 32, 797-810. Lupien, S.J., McEwen, B.S., Gunnar, M.R., & Heim, C. (2009). Effects of stress throughout the lifespan on the brain, behavior and cognition. Nature Reviews: Neuroscience 10, 434-445. DOI: 10.1038/nrn2639 Martinez-Torteya, C., Bogat, G.A., von Eye, A., & Levendosky, A.A. (2009). Resilience among children exposed to domestic violence: The role of risk and protective factors. Child Development 80(2), 562-577. Obradovic, J., Bush, N.R., Stamperdahl, J., Adler, N.E., & Boyce, W.T. (2010). Biological sensitivity to context: The interactive effects of stress reactivity and family adversity on socio-emotional behavior and school readiness. Child Development 81(1), 270-289. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2009.01394.x. Rossman, B.B.R, & Rosenberg, M.S. () Family stress and functioning in children: The moderating effects of children’s beliefs about their control over parental conflict. Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry 33(4), 699-715. Starcheski, L. (2015, March 2). Take the ACE Quiz: and learn what it does and doesn’t mean. Shots: Health News from NPR. Retrieved from: http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/03/02/387007941/take-the-ace-quiz-and-learn-what-it-does-and-doesnt-mean