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

  (Believe it or not, this is Carys’ “I freaking love homemade spinach ravioli with broccoli” face!)   I was sitting in a restaurant recently with half an eye on a toddler and his parents at the next table. The parents were trying to get the toddler to eat some of his broccoli before he ate the second helping of chicken that he was asking for. All of a sudden a line from Pink Floyd’s album “The Wall” popped into my head: If you don’t eat yer meat, you can’t have any pudding. How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat yer meat? This is the way I was raised; you finish everything on your plate and you certainly don’t get dessert if you don’t finish your meal. But as is the custom with the Your Parenting Mojo podcast, I want to use this episode to question why we do this and find out what scientific research has to say about it all. We want our toddlers to eat a balanced diet, and we assume we have to teach them what a balanced diet means. But do we really? Or can we trust that our children will eat the foods that they need to be healthy? These are some of the questions we’ll set out to answer in this episode.   Jump to highlights 00:36 Introduction of episode 01:39 The first book to be published about children's eating behavior was 1939 by Clara Mae Davis 03:25 Current dietary guidelines from 2010, state that children with some specific age range should get an applicable calory supply 04:57 The children didn't have the availability of all kinds of food 07:37 What causes children to like fruits and vegetables 09:27 The more we control what our children eat, the less control we seem to have over it 12:59 How would parents deal with this discussion   References Benton, D. (2004). Role of parents in the determination of the food preferences of children and the development of obesity. International Journal of Obesity 28, 858-869. DOI: 10.1038/sj.ijo.0802532 Birch LL. (1980). Effects of peer models’ food choices and eating behaviors on preschoolers’ food preferences. Child Development 51, 489–496. 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 Birch, L.L., & Fisher, J.O. (1998). Development of eating behaviors among children and adolescents. Pediatrics 101 Issue supplement 2. Retrieved from: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/101/Supplement_2/539 Birch, L.L., Fisher, J.O., Grimm-Thomas, K., Markey, C.N., Sawyer, R., & Johnson, S.L. (2001). Confirmatory factor analysis of the Child Feeding Questionnaire: A measure of parental attitudes, beliefs and practices about child feeding and obesity proneness. Appetite 36, 201-210. DOI: 10.1006/appe.2001.0398 Davis, C.M. (1939). Results of the self-selection of diets by young children. Canadian Medical Association Journal 41, 257-61. Full article available at: www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=537465&blobtype=pdf Fisher, J.O., & Birch, L.L. (1999). Restricting access to foods and children’s eating. Appetite 32(3), 405-419. DOI: 10.1006/appe.1999.0231 Hughes, S.O., Power, T.G., Orlet Fisher, J., Mueller, S., & Nicklas, T.A. (2005). Revisiting a neglected construct: Parenting styles in a child feeding context. Appetite 44(1), 83-92. DOI: 10.1016/j.appet.2004.08.007 Jansen, E., Mulkens, S., & Jansen, A. (2007). Do not eat the red food!: Prohibition of snacks leads to their relatively higher consumption in children. Appetite 49(3), 572-577. DOI: 10.1016/j.appet.2007.03.229 Jansen, E., Mulkens, S., Emond, Y., & Jansen, A. (2008). From the Garden of Eden to the land of plenty: Restriction of fruit and sweets intake leads to increased fruit and sweets consumption in children. Appetite 51(3), 570-575. DOI: 10.1016/j.appet.2008.04.012 Newman, J., & Taylor, A. (1992). Effect of a means-end contingency on young children’s food preferences. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 64, 200-216. DOI: 10.1016/0022-0965(92)90049-C Pink Floyd (1979). Another brick in the wall – Part 2. London, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Lyrics retrieved from: http://www.pink-floyd-lyrics.com/html/another-brick-2-wall.html Savage, J.S., Fisher, J.O., & Birch, L.L. (2007). Parental influence on eating behavior. Journal of Law, Medicine, & Ethics 35(1), 22-34. DOI: 10.1111/j.1748-720X.2007.00111.x U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2010). Dietary guidelines for Americans: 2010. Full report available at: https://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/dga2010/dietaryguidelines2010.pdf Ventura, A.K., Gromis, J.C., & Lohse, B. (2010). Feeding practices and styles used by a diverse set of low-income parents of preschool-age children. Journal of nutrition education and behavior 42(4), 242-249. Retrieved from: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S149940460900284X   Read Full Transcript Transcript Hello and welcome to episode 7 of the Your Parenting Mojo podcast, which is called Help!  My toddler won’t eat vegetables!  I decided on the theme for this episode when I was sitting in a restaurant with half an eye on a toddler and his parents at the next table.  The parents were trying to get the toddler to eat some of his broccoli before he ate the second helping of chicken that he was asking for.  All of a sudden a line from Pink Floyd’s album “The Wall” popped into my head: “If you don’t eat yer meat, you can’t have any pudding.  How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat yer meat?”  This is the way I was raised; you finish everything on your plate and you certainly don’t get dessert if you don’t finish your meal.  But as is the custom with the Your Parenting Mojo podcast, I want to use this episode to question why we do this and find out what scientific research has to say about it all.  We want our toddlers to eat a balanced diet, and we assume we have to teach them what a balanced diet means.  But do we really?  Or can we trust that our children will eat the foods that they need to be healthy?  These are some of the questions we’ll set out to answer today. Perhaps you might be as surprised as I was to find that the single study that grounds virtually all current research on children and eating was published in 1939 by a pediatrician named Clara Mae Davis.  She convinced unmarried and widowed mothers who couldn’t support their families to place their children into an orphanage in Chicago.  Davis then recorded every single thing 15 children ate over the first 4 ½ years of their lives after they were weaned.  In addition she recorded their height, weight, bowel movements, bone radiographs and blood tests at various intervals during those years. But the really interesting part of the study is what she offered the children to eat and how she offered it.  She created a menu of 34 different foods, all procured fresh and minimally prepared.  Some of the foods were milk, apples, turnips, lettuce, oatmeal, barley, beef, bone marrow, brains, and haddock.  The 34 foods were selected because collectively they offered the complete set of nutrients needed by a growing person although of course they weren’t all served at once – about 10 were prepared and served at once to offer a wide variety of foods at each meal. The nurses feeding the children were not allowed to directly offer or even suggest that the children try a particular food.  Only after the child reached for or pointed to a dish could the nurse put some food on a spoon and, if the child opened his mouth, put it in.  The nurse wasn’t allowed to comment on what the child ate or didn’t eat, attract his attention to food or refuse him any food.  The child could eat with his fingers if he wanted and no correction of his manners was offered.  The tray of food was taken away when the child had definitively stopped eating, usually after 20-25 minutes. As Clara Mae Davis noted, the remarkable thing about the results in this study is that nothing remarkable happened.  All of the children had hearty appetites.  Constipation was never an issue and other than mild colds, they rarely got sick. Five children were malnourished at the beginning of the study and all were healthy by the end.  The children ate, on average, roughly the caloric intake recommended by both the nutritional standards in place at the time as well as the standards we use today.  Current  dietary guidelines published in 2010 state that children aged 1-3 should get 5-20% of their calories from protein, 45-65% from carbohydrates, and 30-40% from fat; the percentages shift slightly in favor of protein and away from fat for children 4-18 years old.  In Davis’ 1939 study the average distribution of calories per kilogram of body weight was 17% protein, 35% fat, and 48% carbohydrates.  Individual children might have had protein intakes as low as 9% or as high as 20% – all still within the dietary guidelines.  So the children in Davis’ study met dietary guidelines developed sixty years afterwards, with all of the knowledge we have now and didn’t have then about how the body works, and they did this by themselves with no information or encouragement at all from anyone else, which I think is absolutely remarkable. I should also say that, as you may have observed with your own children, the children in the study were consistently inconsistent with the types and amounts of foods that they ate.  One child had a pint of orange juice and liver for breakfast; another had several eggs, bananas, and milk for dessert.  No single meal was what we would think of as “balanced” when we put a plate of meat, potatoes, and vegetables down in front of our child – but the children’s diets were on average extremely well-balanced. Now the kicker in all of this for us, of course, is that the children didn’t have unlimited availability of all kinds of food.  Vegetarians and vegans might argue with me about the health properties of animal products but the foods presented to the children in the study were selected because together they provided the complete set of nutrients the children needed.  Cereals were whole grains; no sugar or salt was added, butter, cream, and cheese weren’t used, and no canned foods were allowed.  Does that sound like the kind of food you eat at your house?  We do pretty well on the whole grains, but we certainly use all of the other foods that Davis banned from her study.  So if we accept that children can eat a healthy diet if they are presented with only healthy food, our task now is to try to understand how to apply this knowledge in the real world of our everyday lives today. I did a literature review for a paper for the Masters degree in Psychology that I’m working on and I couldn’t find any study that definitively shows what kind of behavior or actions parents can use that will have the outcome of children eating balanced diets in the short- and long-terms, largely because longitudinal studies are really rare (because they’re expensive and you don’t get to publish the results for a long time) and they generally don’t establish causation either.  But I did find a slew of other studies that can help us to understand how to support the development of healthy eating habit in our children. Leann Birch at the University of Georgia seems to be a luminary scholar in this field; if you check out the references for this episode you’ll find that around half of them have her name attached to them – and I wasn’t specifically searching for her work.  She and Jennifer Fisher at Temple University conducted a review of studies related to the development of eating behaviors in children that I’ll delve into in detail, pulling in the results from other studies as well.  Birch and Fisher start by noting the prevalence of obesity in children, some – but not all – of which can be explained by genetics; some of the rest of the explanation could be related to similarities in diet of parents and children: so if parents eat a lot of high-fat food then children are likely to have high-fat food available to them as well..  They note that very little research has been conducted that looks both at energy intake and expenditure, and it takes both sides of that equation to really understand obesity.  Children in the U.S. tend to eat too much fat and not enough complex carbohydrates, which is why public health messages now focus on increasing the amount of fruit, vegetables, and whole grains instead of just eating less fat. But other studies have found that the only significant predictor of increased fruit and vegetable consumption is a preference for fruits and vegetables – in other words, children who like fruits and vegetables eat fruits and vegetables.  So what causes children to like fruits and vegetables?  There’s evidence from several studies that these preferences are formed very early on in children (and also rats) who are breastfed, as children are exposed to the flavors of their mother’s diet through the milk, and as a result breastfed infants initially show greater acceptance of new foods than formula-fed infants. Once children start to wean they are predisposed to prefer sweet and salty tastes, and reject sour and bitter tastes.  They quickly learn to associate flavors with how they feel after eating (and they prefer foods that leave them feeling full).  I’m sure most parents realize that children are predisposed to reject new foods but one study found that 5-10 repeated opportunities to consume new foods can lead to increased acceptance.  So if your child says she doesn’t like a food the first time you offer it to her, keep trying.  Keep trying 5-10 times, and maybe one day she’ll just eat it. Another big topic is modeling of eating behavior.  Since eating tends to be a social occasion for children, the social context of meals becomes a model for the child.  One study showed that when preschoolers watched other children choosing and eating vegetables that the observing child didn’t like, the observing child began to like the vegetable more and ate more of it.  Another found that toddlers put foods in their mouths more readily when their mothers put the same food in their mouths compared to when a stranger did, which may not come as a surprise to any parent whose child wants whatever they’re eating.  When my toddler sees me come out of the kitchen with a bowl in my hands she immediately says “Want some.  What is it?” – because she wants whatever I have before she even knows what it is.  Children also look to their parents to understand what is the right amount to eat.  Studies have shown that dieting daughters are more likely to have dieting mothers, and parents who eat a lot are more likely to have children who eat a lot. I want to delve fairly deeply into the idea of parental control because I think it’s a strategy that a lot of parents try to use without knowing just how completely it can backfire.  Leann Birch has been active in this research as well and in general has found that the more we try to control children’s eating, the less control we seem to have over it.  For example, child-feeding strategies that encourage children to consume a particular food increase children’s dislike for that food, so by encouraging your child to eat more broccoli you decrease their liking for it, and we already saw that the only factor that predicts whether a child eats broccoli is whether she likes broccoli.  A survey of parents found that 40% spontaneously reported that restricting or forbidding the consumption of a certain food would decrease their child’s preference for that food, but research shows the exact opposite: when parents withhold a “bad” food children’s preference for that food increases and intake of the “bad” food can sometimes increase as well.   Esther Jansen and her colleagues at Maastrict University in The Netherlands managed to move beyond the correlations that these types of studies usually offer to demonstrating a causal link between parental control over children’s eating and children’s consumption of snack foods by testing whether prohibiting children from eating snack foods would lead to an increased desire for that food, followed by over-consumption once the restriction was removed.  The researchers provided children with two bowls of M&Ms (one containing yellow and the other red M&Ms), and two bowls of salty chips (one yellow; the other red).  Some children were instructed not to eat the red foods, were then asked how much they wanted to eat the red foods an how full they felt, and in a later test they were allowed to eat as much as they liked from any bowl.  These results were compared with those from children who were allowed to eat freely throughout the experiment.  The children who weren’t allowed to eat the red food consumed more of the red food in proportion to yellow foods, although they didn’t actually consume more food altogether.  And we should note that the authors of this study should be commended for demonstrating causation rather than just correlation, it isn’t clear to what extent the findings of this highly controlled lab study are applicable in a home setting where a wider variety of foods that may be equally unpalatable (like broccoli AND green beans) might the things children get to choose between. And what about the issue of the amount children eat?  It turns out that even infants are capable of regulating their caloric intake.  One set of researchers added more or less formula to the bottles of six week-old infants, and found that the infants drank more of the formula that was more watery so their overall caloric intake was the same as the infants who drank less of a stronger solution.  But parents who bottle feed might inadvertently pressure their child to override the child’s hunger cues by getting the child to finish the last bit of liquid in the bottle – I remember doing this with my daughter as well when she drank pumped milk from a bottle.  You don’t want to waste something that’s such a hassle to get in the first place!  Leann Birch did another study that essentially replicated this with children who were eating solid food – they adjusted the fat and carbohydrate content of the first course of a meal to make it more or less energy dense, and then tested how many calories were eaten in a second course and in subsequent meals.  She, too, found that children were able to self-regulate their caloric intake both within the same meal and also across the remainder of the 24-hour period.  But when researchers asked parents to reward children for cleaning their plates, the children stopped responding to the different energy density of the foods and began eating more in response to the rewards.  Another set of researchers noticed that parental prompts to eat were correlated with both time spent eating and the level of obesity in children, and also that these prompts to eat almost always followed food refusals by the child.  So the child says she’s not hungry; the

This episode is part of a series on understanding the intersection of race, privilege, and parenting.  Click here to view all the items in this series. I’d always assumed that if I didn’t mention race to my daughter, if it was just a non-issue, that she wouldn’t grow up to be racist. Boy, was I wrong about that. It turns out that our brains are wired to make generalizations about people, and race is a pretty obviously noticeable way of categorizing people. If your child is older than three, try tearing a few pictures of White people and a few more of Black people out of a magazine and ask him to group them any way he likes. Based on the research, I’d put money on him sorting the pictures by race. So what have we learned about reversing racism once it has already developed? How can we prevent our children from becoming racist in the first place? And where do they learn these things anyway? (Surprise: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”)   Jump to highlights 00:37 Introduction of episode 02:03 The premise of Vedantam's book The Hidden Brain 02:51 Brain processors that happened using unconscious awareness 05:05 What happens to people after being caught making racist comments 08:36 Colorblind approach socialization 15:00 The literature on attempts to reverse bias in children 23:07 Advice for parents about the episode   References Aboud, F.E. (2003). The formation of in-group favoritism and out-group prejudice in children: Are they distinct attitudes? Developmental Psychology 39(1), 48-60. Bigler, R. (1999). The user of multicultural curricula and materials to counter racism in children. Journal of Social Issues 55(4), 687-705. Castelli, L., Zogmaister, C., & Tomelleri, S. (2009). The transmission of racial attitudes within the family. Developmental Psychology 45(2), 586-591. Faber, J. (2006). “Kramer” apologizes, says he’s not racist. CBS News. Retrieved from: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/kramer-apologizes-says-hes-not-racist/ Frontline (1985). A class divided. Available at: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/class-divided/ Hebl, M.R., Foster, J.B., Mannix, L.M., & Fovidio, J.F. (2002). Formal and interpersonal discrimination: A field study of bias toward homosexual applicants. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28(6), 815-825. Full article available at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mikki_Hebl/publication/252443069_Formal_and_Interpersonal_Discrimination_A_Field_Study_of_Bias_Toward_Homosexual_Applicants/links/55a760f108ae410caa752c8c.pdf Hebl, M.R., & Mannix, L.M. (2003). The weight of obesity in evaluating others: A mere proximity effect. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 29(1), 28-38. Full article available at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mikki_Hebl/publication/8436667_The_Weight_of_Obesity_in_Evaluating_Others_A_Mere_Proximity_Effect/links/55a760fb08aeb4e8e646e81f.pdf Hebl, M.R., & Xu, J. (2001). Weighing the care: Physicians’ reactions to the size of a patient. International Journal of Obesity 25, 1246-1252. Pahlke, E., Bigler, R.S., & Suizzo, M.A. (2012). Relations between colorblind socialization and children’s racial bias: Evidence from European American mothers and their preschool children. Child Development 83(4), 1164-1179. Full article available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224853709_Relations_Between_Colorblind_Socialization_and_Children%27s_Racial_Bias_Evidence_From_European_American_Mothers_and_Their_Preschool_Children Piaget, J. (1950). The child’s conception of the world. New York: Humanities Press. Piaget, J. (1970). Piaget’s theory. In P.H. Mussen (ed.), Carmichael’s manual of child psychology (p.703-732). New York: Wiley. Priest, N., Walton, J., White, F., Kowal, E., Baker, A., & Parides, Y. (2014). Understanding the complexities of ethnic-racial socialization processes for both minority and majority groups: A 30-year systematic review. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 43, 139-155. TMZ (2012). Michael Richards spews racist hate. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoLPLsQbdt0 Vedantam, S. (2010). The hidden brain. New York: Spiegel and Grau. von Hippel, W., Silver, L.A., & Lynch, M.E. (2000). Stereotyping against your will: The role of inhibitory ability in stereotyping and prejudice among the elderly. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 26(5), 523-532. Full article available at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/William_Von_Hippel/publication/255604292_Stereotyping_Against_Your_Will_The_Role_of_Inhibitory_Ability_in_Stereotyping_and_Prejudice_among_the_Elderly/links/5475035a0cf245eb43707162.pdf Weber, S., & Meilan, I. (2015). Michael Richards: My racist outburst during 2006 stand-up gig was a “reality check.” Us Magazine. Retrieved from: http://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/michael-richards-my-racist-outburst-in-2006-was-a-reality-check-20152310 Weiner, M.J., & Wright, F.E. (1973). Effects of undergoing arbitrary discrimination upon subsequent attitudes toward a minority group. Journal of Applied Psychology 3(1), 94-102.   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] It seems like I hardly ever read for pleasure any more. With this master’s degree in Psychology that I’m doing plus writing podcast episodes the stack of books next to my bed is getting so high that I have to climb around them to get in and out. But someone I contacted about research on toddlers’ eating habits was kind enough to give me some unsolicited advice in addition to the information on who’s doing current work on toddlers and food – a couple of books to read to give me insight into authors who are able to take scientific work and make it accessible. One of them is Shankar Vedantam; he’s a columnist at the Washington Post and his book is called The Hidden Brain, and in reading it I got an idea for this podcast episode. I and a lot of parents I know are interested in bringing up our children not to be racist. But how do we go about doing that? My assumption was that if you just don’t talk about racism; if it becomes a non-issue, then my daughter won’t grow up to be racist. Shankar Vedantam tells me I’m dead wrong, so in this episode I’ll dig into the reasons behind that and what we really should be teaching our children if we want to teach them how to build this post-racial society that we’d like to have one day. I should say now that I’ll examine the issue from the perspective of a White parent looking to try to avoid her half-White daughter from becoming racist; the way Black parents approach this may be quite different due to their history as the discriminated-against group rather than the group “in power,” as it were. The premise of Vedantam’s book is that our actions are controlled in large part by our unconscious brains. We like to think we’re making conscious decisions based on our knowledge and rational interpretation of information but in fact a large part of the decisions we make are based on what Vadantam calls Unconscious Bias. He’s not using that term to mean prejudice, but rather any situation where people’s actions are at odds with their intentions. Now you, like me, might think this doesn’t describe you. I’m sure you think *your* decisions are based on rational information just like I do. But scientific research has shown that for the vast majority of the population – and really, there’s no reason to believe that you and I aren’t like the vast majority of the population in most aspects – have unconscious biases and don’t even realize it. I’m assuming you’re going to need some convincing of this (just like I did) so here are a few examples. So there are brain activities that lie outside of your conscious awareness – you don’t have to think about breathing; you just do it. You *can* think about it if you want to, but you don’t stop breathing if you stop thinking about it. When you first learned to read you probably read very slowly, sounding out each letter and gradually combining them in to words – k-a-t becomes cat. You’ll likely be able to revisit this process with your own toddler soon if he or she isn’t reading yet. Over time reading became more fluid to you as the process got embedded into your unconscious brain – you don’t have to sound out each letter any more and you might even be able to skim whole sentences or paragraphs and understand their meaning. Have you ever gotten angry at someone without realizing how it happened so quickly? Or locked eyes on someone from the other side of a bar and had your heart leap – not because you mentally compared a list of that person’s features to the features you find attractive but just because there was some spark between the two of you? A researcher named Mikki Hebl has been especially active in producing research on unconscious bias. She sent actors with hidden tape recorders to stores to apply for jobs, either pretending to be straight or homosexual. None of the “homosexuals” experienced overt discrimination but the potential employers were more verbally standoffish, nervous, and hostile with the gay candidates. The employers spent less time with the gay candidates and used fewer words when interacting with them. She gave charts of fictitious patients who complained of migraines to doctors; some of the patients were average weight, some were overweight, and some were obese. The doctors indicated they would send less time with the heavier patients and viewed them significantly more negatively on 12 of 13 criteria related to their feelings about and behavior toward the patients. And you don’t even have to be fat yourself to be negatively impacted – a male job applicant was perceived to have lower professional and interpersonal skills when he sat in the waiting room next to an overweight woman rather than a normal weight woman. I was interested to see that in none of Hebl’s experiments did she try to go back to the people who were experimented on and ask them why they might have acted the way they did – maybe because the subjects would have been less than thrilled to know they were part of an experiment that was going to show them as biased in some way. But one way we can try to understand the impact that the unconscious brain has in these kinds of situations is to see what happens after people are caught making racist comments. It seems that these people aren’t especially racist and, when asked, explicitly say that they are not racist. In their conscious minds they probably aren’t racist but when some kind of stressful situation occurs, their unconscious brains take over and the truth comes out. Some of you might remember that Michael Richards, who played Kramer on Seinfeld, was recorded making an extraordinary tirade against a Black man who had heckled him (there’s a link to the video in the references; just make sure your kids aren’t around when you watch it). When he appeared on the David Letterman show not long afterward he apologized and said. An article on CBS news said “Richards seemed baffled by his own reaction on stage. “I’m not a racist, that’s what’s so insane about this,” he said.” Talking about the incident some years later he said “I’d only been doing stand-up at the time that situation happened about seven or eight months and I just lost my patience that night because people were heckling me and not letting me work on my material and I lost my cool.” – this was the stressful situation that caused his conscious brain to get distracted and the thoughts in his unconscious brain to come out. But Shankar Vendantam says that “Most Americans think of Richards’ views as abhorrent – and they are. But unpleasant and inaccurate associations lie within all of us, which is why when we see someone slip, or reaction should not be “We finally caught that racist bastard!” but “there, but for the grace of God, go I.” We convince ourselves that biased attitudes are the exception when actually they’re the norm – among all of us, not just White people. We often see elderly people as more biased than us, and a scientist named William von Hippel did some experiments to find out why that is. He found evidence for bias coming from the fact that elderly people grew up in a time when bias was more acceptable, but they express their racism because as people get older their brains get worse at inhibiting behaviors that we might think of as undesirable. Their conscious mind might know that it’s “wrong” to express racist thoughts but as soon as their conscious mind gets distracted, the unconscious ideas come out. So all of this brings us now to children. A researcher named Frances Aboud at McGill University in Montreal showed preschoolers drawings of Black, White, and what she called “Native Indian” people. She gave them cards with statements on that were either positive or negative – things like “this person is clean; they never forget to wash their hands before eating.” “This person is kind – they bring flowers to their teachers.” “This person is cruel –they sometimes throw rocks at little cats.” “This person is naughty and does things like draw on the wall with crayons.” Who does these things?  Aboud found that 70% of the children assigned nearly every positive adjective to the White faces, and nearly every negative one to the Black faces. Remember, these were preschoolers tested in a daycare – the children were aged between 3 years 9 months and almost 7. Shankar Vendatam goes on to describe more research that Frances Aboud has conducted where she told children a story about two White boys and one Black boy who played on a boat, and the Black boy rescued the White boys, children misremembered the story and thought that one of the White boys did the rescuing. She also found there was no correlation between the views of the children and their parents, and neither was there one between the children and their teachers. They weren’t being drip-fed racist attitudes (at least as far as the researchers could tell; it would take a pretty bold parent to report racist views on a study of racism). So where were these racist attitudes coming from? And what can parents do to try to instill non-racist attitudes in children? I looked beyond The Hidden Brain book for answers to this question because I didn’t want to assume that Vendatam was right in his assumption that it was the children’s hidden brains at work. I also wanted to know more about how to circumvent the inevitability of racist toddlers and he doesn’t give us much information about how to do that. Most White parents think that if they just don’t mention race, then their children won’t be racist. It’s called the “colorblind” approach to socialization. In one study I found the researcher asked White American mothers to read race-themed books to 4 and 5-year old children to see how the mothers would explain ideas about race to their children. One of these books was “What if the Zebras lost their stripes,” which is a book that was specially written to help children think about racial issues – one page asks “Could Black and White friends still hold hands?” As they were reading the book, only 11% of mothers mentioned interracial interactions among people. Far more drew analogies between the black and white zebras and different colored animals. The mothers reported that they didn’t often provide race-related messages to their children. When the children reading the books were asked if the different colored zebras could still be friends and the children said “no,” the mothers usually just kept reading the book. This could explain why children don’t understand that their parents don’t hold different beliefs about race from them – because their parents don’t say anything to indicate that that may be the case. On the flipside, the mothers expressed shock that their children could even differentiate people by race – but 83 of 84 children were able to correctly label a group of photos as being of European American or African American people (the one child who didn’t said all people had “yellow” skin). Phyllis Katz, who has been studying the process through which children develop racist attitudes, has commented that “people unfamiliar with the psychological literature typically hold two beliefs about racial prejudice. First and foremost, they believe that young children are inherently color-blind and do not notice racial differences unless they are pointed out. The second popular belief is that children would never develop race bias if they were not explicitly taught this by their parents.” As I’m sure you’re by now willing to believe, the research shows popular belief to be wrong on both counts. Katz found that babies develop some understanding about race at a very early age. The typical way to test what an infant is capable of doing is to see how long they look at something. Katz conducted an incredible longitudinal study of 200 children, half Black, half White, following them from age 6 months to 6 years. She showed White and Black babies a series of pictures of people of their own race followed by one of the other race, and found that the babies looked for longer at the opposite-race faces. She hypothesized that it has something to do with the diversity of the child’s environment – Black children in Colorado, where she works, have a greater chance of living in a racially diverse environment than Whites. Between 18 and 30 months of age, she saw a liner increase in the preferences of both Black and White children to self-label, sort dolls and pictures by race, and select Black or White dolls in response to instructions. White children continue to do this as they got older but Black children actually did this less. At age three, both Black and White children showed a mild same-group preference, meaning they would prefer to socialize with members of their own race, and this increased at ages five and six for White children but drastically decreased for Black children. Katz and her colleagues asked children to select potential playmates from photographs. At 30 months old, Black children chose more same-race potential playmates than Whites. But at three years, 86% of the White children wanted same-race playmates compared with 32% of Black children. At every age that was tested, the White children had more same-race friends than Black children, and this disparity only increased with age. When children were asked to sort pictures of Black and White people in any way they liked, 68% of the children sorted into racial groups, while 16% sorted into gender groups. But it wouldn’t be right to say that all of the six year-olds in Katz’ study were racists at age 6. She found a lot of variables that were correlated to increased bias, which means the actual reason why children develop racist beliefs is dependent on a complex series of issues,...

When I started talking with people about the idea for this podcast, one theme that came up consistently was the idea of supporting our children’s growth and development. A friend of mine summed it up most concisely and articulately by asking “how do I know when to lead and when I should step back and let my daughter lead?”   This episode covers the concept of “scaffolding,” which is a method parents can use to observe and support their children’s development by providing just enough assistance to keep the child in their “Zone of Proximal Development.”   This tool can help you to know you’re providing enough support…but not so much that your child will never learn to be self-sufficient.   Learning Membership Do you want to turn your child’s interests into learning opportunities? The Learning Membership is here to help you. Make learning a fun adventure that not only strengthens your bond, but also nurtures your child’s intrinsic love of learning—an essential foundation for success in an AI-driven world. Get tools and strategies to support your child’s love of learning and future-proof their success in navigating whatever comes their way. No special skills needed—just a willingness to explore alongside them. All the usual stuff applies - sliding scale pricing, money back guarantee. Enrollment will open again soon. Click the banner to learn more!     Jump to highlights 00:38 Introduction of episode 01:27 3 Theorists of learning and development 04:49 Example of scaffolding 08:55 To many cultures scaffolding is neither needed nor used 09:37 Difference between experience expectant behavior and experience-dependent behavior 13:55 Components on how to scaffold learning 17:06 Conclusion of the episode   References Berk, L.E., & Winsler, A. (1995). Scaffolding children’s learning: Vygotsky and Early Childhood Education. Washington, D.C.: National Association for the Education of Young Children. Brown, J.S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher 18(4), 32-42. Courtin (2000). The impact of sign language on the cognitive development of deaf children: The case of theories of mind. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 5,3 266-276. Retrieved from: http://jdsde.oxfordjournals.org/content/5/3/266.full.pdf Greenough, W.T., Black, J.E., & Wallace, C.S. (1987). Experience and Brain Development. Child Development 58, 539-559. Full article available at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/James_Black11/publication/20116762_Experience_and_Brain_Development/links/552b9d830cf21acb091e4d90.pdf Hirsh-Pasek, K. & Golinkoff, R.M. (2003). Einstein never used flash cards. Emmaus, PA: Rodale. Johnson, J.S. & Newport, E.L. (1989). Critical period effects in second language learning: The influence of maturational stage on the acquisition of English as a second language. Cognitive Psychology 21, 60-99. Full article available at: http://www.psy.cmu.edu/~siegler/JohnsnNewprt89.pdf Lancy, D.F. (2015). The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press McCarthy, E.M. (1992). Anatomy of a teaching interaction: The components of teaching in the ZPD. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, April, San Francisco, CA. Pratt, M.W., Green, D., MacVicar, J., & Bountrogianni, M. (1992). The mathematical parent: Parental scaffolding, parent style, and learning outcomes in long-division mathematics homework. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 13, 17-34. Retrieved from: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/019339739290003Z Roberts, R.N. & Barnes, M.L. (1992). “Let momma show you how”: Maternal-child interactions and their effects on children’s cognitive performance. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 13, 363-376. Retrieved from: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/019339739290036H Thompson, R.A., & Nelson, C. (2001). Developmental science and the media: Early brain development. American Psychologist 55(1) 5-15. Full article available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12089227_Developmental_Science_and_the_Media_Early_Brain_Development

I’m so excited to welcome my first guest on the Your Parenting Mojo podcast: Professor Tara Callaghan of St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia.   Professor Callaghan has spent a great number of years studying the emergence of artistic ability in young children and she shares some of her insights with us.  This is a rather longer episode than usual so here are some places you might want to skip ahead to if you have specific interest: [03:55]: The connection between individuality and creativity, especially in Western cultures [09:00]: What is “symbolic representation” and why is the development of symbolic representation an important milestone for young children? [12:10]: Is it helpful for parents to ask a child “What are you drawing?” [15:25]: When do children understand symbols? [31:15]: What can parents do to support children’s development of symbolic representation in particular and artistic ability in general?   Dr. Tara Callaghan's Book Early social cognition in three cultural contexts - Affiliate link   References Brownlee, P. (2016). Magic Places. Good Egg Books: Thames, NZ (must be ordered directly from the publisher in New Zealand; see: http://penniebrownlee.weebly.com/books.html) Callaghan, T.C., Rackozy, H., Behne, T., Moll, H, Lizkowski, U., Warneken, F., & Tomasello, (2011). Early social cognition in three cultural contexts. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 76(2), Serial Number 299. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mono.2011.76.issue-2/issuetoc Callaghan, T. & Corbit, J. (2015). The development of symbolic representation. In Vol. 2 (L. Liben & U. Muller, Vol. Eds.) of the 7th Edition (R. Lerner, Series Ed) of the Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science (pp. 250-294). New York: Wiley. Callaghan, T., & M. Rankin (2002). Emergence of graphic symbol functioning and the question of domain specificity: A longitudinal training study. Child Development, March/April 2002, 73:2, 359-376. Callaghan, T., P. Rochat & J. Corbit (2012). Young children’s knowledge of the representational function of pictoral symbols: Development across the preschool years in three cultures.  Journal of Cognition and Development, 13:3, 320-353. Available at: http://www.psychology.emory.edu/cognition/rochat/lab/CALLAGHAN,%20ROCHAT,%20&%20CORBIT,%202012.pdf DeLoache, J. S., (2004).  Becoming symbol-minded. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, 66-70. Retrieved from: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661303003346 Frith, C., & Frith, U. (2005). Theory of mind. Current Biology 15(17), R644.R645. Full article available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982205009607 Ganea, P.A., M.A. Preissler, L. Butler, S. Carey, and J.S. DeLoache (2009). Toddlers’ referential understanding of pictures. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 104(3):283-295. Full article available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2865246/ Golomb, C. (2003). The child’s creation of a pictoral world. London: Psychology Press. Jolley, R.P. (2010). Children and pictures: Drawing and understanding. Wiley-Blackwell, Cichester, England. Jolley, R. P. & S. Rose (2008). The relationship between production and comprehension of representational drawing. In Children’s understanding and production of pictures, drawings, and art (C. Milbrath & H.M. Trautner (Eds)). Boston, MA, Hogrefe Publishing.  Chapter available at: http://www.staffs.ac.uk/personal/sciences/rj2/publications/Jolley%20and%20Rose%20chapter.pdf Kellogg, R. (1970). Analyzing Children’s Art. Mayfield Publishing Company, Mountain View, CA. Preissler, M.A., and P. Bloom. Two-year-olds use artist intention to understand drawings. Cognition 1[06:51]2-518. Full article available at: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.522.4017&rep=rep1&type=pdf Rochat, P. & T. Callaghan (2005). What drives symbolic development? The case of pictoral comprehension and production. In L. Namy (Ed.) Symbol use and symbolic representation. Mahwah, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc. Chapter available at: http://www.psychology.emory.edu/cognition/rochat/lab/WhatDrivesSymbolicDevelopment.pdf Winner, E. (1985). Invented worlds: The psychology of the arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"]   Jen: 00:35 Hello! This is Jen Lumanlan of Your Parenting Mojo and I’m here with episode four on Creativity and Artistic Ability in Young Children. So the question that’s lovely, what is it seems to be one of the most asked by parents of children related related to young children’s drawings, but she’ll do children even know what IT is? I’m really excited to welcome my first guest on the Your Parenting Mojo podcast today, Professor Tara Callaghan. I went to start by introducing her by telling you a little bit about how we met. So I visited Reggio Emilia Italy in April 2016 because I wanted to learn more about the approach to early childhood education that was founded in that city. And before I went, I read a book called Magic Places by Penny Brownlee, which says that a parent shouldn’t ask what a scribbling child is drawing because they’re not drawing anything, they’re just scribbling. But in contrast, the people in Reggio Emilia, I believe that the children are “fully aware of the representative process” and that’s actually a quote from one of the practitioners there after I witnessed a group of under two year olds, I think they were about 18 months who had been given in a real orange and a set of orange paints and the toddler is we’re making orange paint marks on the paper because that was the only color that was available to them. Jen: 01:45 And based on my reading of Magic Places, I queried whether the toddlers could possibly understand that they were being asked to represent the orange on the paper and clearly the director thought that they could. Her position was that even if the marks don’t look like an orange to us, the toddlers understand the marks as a representation of an orange. When I returned home, I started digging into the research on this topic and ultimately found a chapter that Professor Callahan authored a book called Children’s Understanding and Production of Pictures, Drawings and Art, and it was the most comprehensive, really insightful piece I’d read on that topic and she expressed a view that was quite different from what the Reggio practitioners believe. So I reached out to her and she was kind enough to actually spend quite a bit of time patiently answering my questions so I could write a very long blog post about it on my personal blog, which was actually the thing that made me realize that I should start a podcast. Jen: 02:33 So it’s a formally introduce her: Professor Callaghan is Professor of Psychology at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia. She’s a developmental scientist working in the fields of symbolic and pro-social development from a cultural perspective. She received her Ph.D in psychology from Brown University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University and she served as consulting editor for the journal Child Development, and she also coauthored a chapter on symbolic development in the new 2015 edition of the Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science, which if you don’t happen to be familiar with, it is a pretty seminal work on the psychological development of young children. So thank you so much for joining us Dr Callaghan.   Dr. Callaghan: 03:11 Oh my pleasure, Jen. My pleasure. So, thanks for the introduction. I might add to that that I am also very interested in cultural developmental psychology and so maybe some of that will come up as we talk a little bit more today, but one of the things that I’ve been doing for about the past decade is, is looking across cultures to help understand what children know, uh, as a result of the socialization that they get from parents and others in their culture compared to what, how we are built as humans, I guess. What is our human nature? Jen: 03:54 Yeah. I’m actually very interested in that as well so do feel free to sprinkle that in as it comes up. Awesome. Okay. Well the first thing I wanted to ask you about is something that I hadn’t even considered until you kind of mentioned it as an offhand comment, as part of a larger discussion that we were having when we were emailing and you said that “creativity is highly valued in our society and is part of our individualistic orientation. Creativity that makes a difference in art, depends on the ability to do and see things differently and also have a command of the medium.” And it was the first part of that that, that really blew my mind. I really hadn’t considered the possibility that not all cultures value creativity equally. I just figured that if everybody had access to crayons and paper, everybody would give their child crayons and paper and we pretty much do the same thing as I do with my child. So I wonder if you could tell me a bit more about this. Dr. Callaghan: 04:44 Yeah, I think that what, what I was focused on was, was thinking about how we define creativity in our own society and by our own, I’m talking about a kind of middle class, North American, European, Euro-centric kind of um, uh, what is typically called the Western orientation. So in the West we’re well known for valuing independence and independent thought and if you are in a society that values that, then a lot of different things including creativity, get defined in a way that meets those societal goals. And then if you’re a parent, you’re trying to, without really even being aware of this, you are instilling the cultural values in your children as you parent them. So I think in different art forms it’s maybe more or less true, but I, my observation of, of art and my experience with art in our culture is that to get ahead, you have to be different from somebody else. Dr. Callaghan: 05:52 You have to be contributing a new perspective or a new discovery, that sort of thing. And that’s also the case in science really, that we really are pushing to individuals to contribute something that’s brand new. So when I say that it’s highly valued, I think creativity is highly valued in probably every culture, but it may be defined and what, what constitutes or how the process of creativity may be seen to be a different. Back to your issue about creativity and crayons and giving. It really comes down to what the parents’ goals are in that society. And India is not a society, it’s a multitude of societies. Canada, likewise; U.S. likewise. So when you try to think about a parent helping a child become creative, you’ve got to know what that parents’ aims are, what are their parenting goals there? And part of that, uh, those goals will be shaped by the society they find themselves in and you may find more of a, um, a goal in, in the US and Canada in counteracting the larger society goals. So you might want to do things differently than you feel the larger society may hold children back or or whatever. And so you see a lot of that kind of independence in Canada and I, and I think that’s, that’s really valuable, but probably becoming aware of your own goals, how they’re influenced by society, the society we live in and as a parent we want our children, uh, I would say to become contributing members to the society that they find themselves in and so shaping our child to fit in well with an individualist society where that’s going to bring them the most success in their lives in terms of happiness, and feeling that they are valued and making a contribution I think is probably behind a lot of the shaping or parenting practices that we do. Dr. Callaghan: 08:00 Like how do you prepare your child if you want to foster creativity, which I think is a really great thing to do, in any individual, regardless of culture, then how do you go about that and how do you predict what your society is going to be like in, you know, when your child is becoming an adult and a launching off to make their contribution to life. And so I think keeping tabs on what’s going on in other cultures is a really good way to keep a handle on what your child’s going to need and creativity I think is a great way because the more adaptive we are to change and to new things and to seeing things from different perspectives, I think that that’s where I’d put my money – the better able we will be to adapt to whatever’s coming down the road. Jen: 08:58 Great. So let’s start digging a little bit into your research. Can you tell us about what symbolic representation means and why it’s important? Dr. Callaghan: 09:06 A symbol is something that stands for something else and as a symbol can be, as you know, many forms that can be a child, a naive kind of drawing of a person, what we call the tadpole, which is a little head body with a couple of stick legs coming out of it. And sometimes, an eye, and a smile as my grandson called the mouth… Dr. Callaghan: 09:30 Just one eye? Dr. Callaghan: 09:31 Yeah, sometimes sometimes multiple eyes, when he really gets into that form! So that visual or very simple graphic can be a shorthand if you like, or, or an image that stands for something else. So a symbol is something that stands in for or represent something else. And representation…when you put those together, symbolic representation is really about a process that you are intentionally creating, a symbol in order to stand for something else. Dr. Callaghan: 10:13 Now, why would humans even want to do that? Well, the ultimate goal of all symbols is to communicate with other humans. So that’s it. Symbolic representation is at the very basic foundation, it’s about communication. And I, I, I said intentionally, forming that because of the scribbles. And you talked about the book that you had read, Magic Places where she said no, these scribbles don’t mean anything. They very likely don’t. And they very likely are… Sometimes children happen upon something that looks like it and can recognize a shape; their form perception is excellent for sure. And their color perception is excellent by the time they’re two. But their cognitive ability to understand such an abstract concept as ‘stand for,’ ‘stand in for’ or ‘represent’ is not there yet. And that’s a very strict criteria. Dr. Callaghan: 11:24 So somebody will say, well, my two year old drew something as you know, and said this is a dog. And then when I looked at it, it really looked like a dog and sure… Those kinds of perceptual similarities labeled after the fact precede genuine symbolic understanding. And it’s all part of that process of how we help children and how we scaffold them to this understanding of these very complex terms. So if a child brings you a picture and you say, what is it? Then right away the child’s getting the message that there’s meaning here. So you know, you’re helping them to understand by that question, that meaning is involved when we do these kinds of things. Jen: 12:10 So do you think it is helpful for parents to ask the child “what is it?” Does it, does it scaffold that knowledge? And if you, if parents are listening to and understand what the term scaffolding is, I have a whole episode coming up on that in a couple of weeks…but is it something that helps the children’s developmental process or does it make them aware of something that, you know, it might be better if they were naive about for a little bit longer. Dr. Callaghan: 12:36 I think that’s almost an individual choice. I’m careful about how I ask questions, but I don’t see a problem whatsoever of parents saying, “Hey, what’s that? That’s so cool.” And, and, and, you know, having a discussion with the child but not pushing it. If a child is a parent can really tell whether the child’s really grasping what they’re asking them or not. And so that’s where, in your episode on scaffolding, you’ll be talking no doubt about, you know, you, uh, children are in this zone of understanding and there’s some things they are capable of and some things are not. You had like this little boundary around you where you can understand some things not. And in that sweet spot you can help children, uh, understand with particular questions like that. Oh, what’s that? And let me draw something and look what I’m drawing and then the child can see that when you have an object you can make a figure look like it with a certain amount of motor control and intention and and then they’re sort of getting at that process what that process is all about and scribbling is great fun for kids and you know, it’s very enjoyable for children to work with the medium of paint or or marker or whatever it is, color and shape and make all…and the graphics and graphic motor actions are really fun for them to do as well. Dr. Callaghan: 14:05 So these, I see all as important precursors. And then if you wrap that all up with an attentive parent who is not imposing their own understanding on the child, but reading from the child’s reactions, what is it that they understand? I think that if I, if I were training as a…and I do train lots of students, I’m asking them to be completely open minded and not to have an idea ahead of time of what this child understands. Just try to see, try to probe lightly without giving them the answer… Jen: 14:47 So what kinds of things do you say to… What do you tell your students to say in that situation? Dr. Callaghan: 14:52 You would follow up but not lead the child down the path that you want them to go so you mostly when we do experiments we don’t have any kind of dialogue with children when we’re done the experiment we might follow up with when you did that, what did you mean? Or what is this part? And I noticed that you did this and and and so on. So mostly we would, we would keep our experiments really pristine and not influenced by by an adult input whatsoever. Jen: 15:27 So you’ve done a lot of research on when children understand that pictures are actually symbols for a real object. And I know you’ve spent many, many years, they hear about this. Can you tell us just a little bit about it and specifically I’m interested in the fact that there are people who believe that maybe symbolic representation develops a little bit earlier than you do, and so what leads you to think that it comes in later than some other people do? Dr. Callaghan: 15:53 Well, there’s a big move in developmental psychology, always has been really toward finding the earliest onset of something which is a really valuable goal. It’s really important to do that because of that question that we talked about just briefly at the beginning. What do we have as part of human...

So did you teach your toddler to read yet? And if not, why not? I’m just kidding, of course. I wanted to write this episode on encouraging literacy in middle to older toddlers, but the more I researched the more I found the issues go much further back than what you do in toddlerhood. Then I found – and read! – a 45,000 word essay by Larry Sanger, who taught his baby son to read.  I’m not kidding.  Check out the link to the video on YouTube in the references. My two-year-old can’t read yet.  Did I miss the boat?  Would her learning outcomes have been better if I had taught her as a baby? Is TV a good medium to teach reading and vocabulary? What are some of the things parents of young toddlers can do to encourage reading readiness when the child is ready? We talk about all this and more in episode 3, and there’s more to come for older toddlers in a few episodes time.   Jump to highlights 00:38 Introduction of episode 02:43 Vocabulary development 07:36 Academic instruction at an early age 08:10 2 things that stood out in the research 10:09 What should you be doing to encourage future literacy in children 10:54 6 principles of word learning development 12:00 Interactive and responsive context   References American Academy of Pediatrics (2016). Media and Children. Accessed August 19th, 2016. 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 Carlsson-Paige, N., G. Bywater McLaughlin, and J. Wolfsheimer Almon (2015). Reading instruction in kindergarten: Little to gain and much to lose. Available online at: http://www.allianceforchildhood.org/sites/allianceforchildhood.org/files/file/Reading_Instruction_in_Kindergarten.pdf Christakis, D.A. (2008). The effects of infant media usage: What do we know and what should we learn? Acta Paediatrica 98, 8-16. Full article available at: http://echd430-f13-love.wikispaces.umb.edu/file/view/Pediatrics+article.pdf Federal Trade Commission (2014). Defendants settle FTC charges related to “Your Baby Can Read” program. Available online at: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2014/08/defendants-settle-ftc-charges-related-your-baby-can-read-program Gray, P. (2010). Children teach themselves to read. Blog post on Psychology Today available at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201002/children-teach-themselves-read Gray, P. (2015). Early academic training produces long-term harm. Blog post on Psychology Today available at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201505/early-academic-training-produces-long-term-harm Harris, J., Golinkoff, R.M., & Hirsh-Pasek, K. (2011). Lessons from the crib for the classroom: How children really learn vocabulary. In S.B. Neuman & D.K. Dickinson (Eds.) Handbook of early literacy research Vol. 3. (49-65). New York: Guilford. Hirsh-Pasek, K., Golinkoff, R.M., & Eyer, D. (2003). Einstein never used flash cards. Emmaus, PA: Rodale. National Center for Education Statistics (2016). Status dropout rates. Available at: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_coj.asp Neuman, S., Kaefer, T., Pinkham, A., & Strouse, G.A. (2014). Can babies learn to read? A randomized trial of baby media. Journal of Educational Psychology 106(3), 815-830. Full article available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273814238_Can_Babies_Learn_to_Read_A_Randomized_Trial_of_Baby_Media Sanger, L (2010). How and why I taught my toddler to read. Available online at: http://blog.larrysanger.org/2010/12/baby-reading/ Sanger, L. (2010). 3-year-old reading the Constitution – reading progress from age 2 to age 4. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIu8BGFqMm4 WatchKnowLearn (2016). Reading Bear. Website available at: http://www.readingbear.org/# Zimmerman, F.J., Christakis, D.A., & Meltzoff, A.N. (2007). Associations between media viewing and language development in children under age 2 years. Journal of Pediatrics 151, 364-368.   Read Full Transcript Transcript So is your toddler reading yet?  And if not, why not? I’m just kidding, of course. I will say that this episode has been the hardest one yet to research and write, just because there is *so much* information out there on the topic, which is “How to encourage literacy in preschoolers.”  Each time I thought I knew what my research question was I had to step back and consider an issue further back in the information chain. I started by reading textbooks for teachers on how to teach children to read, including the theoretical background behind this work and how approaches have shifted over the years.  I like to start with textbooks because they tend to be rigorously researched and have lots of citations to spark my own research. I also found – and read – a 45,000 word essay by Larry Sanger, he who co-founded Wikipedia, who successfully taught his own son to read – in the show notes for this episode on my website (at Your Parenting Mojo.com) you can find a link to a video of his son reading a book at 2 years 5 months, and reading the Constitution at 3 years 10 months.  Sanger did this using a video called Your Baby Can Read (which is available on Amazon even though Dr. Titzer, who started the program, settled a claim with the FTC and is not allowed to use the term “Your Baby Can Read” any more because it is an unsubstantiated claim.)  Basically the child watches programs from a DVD, reads the books, and looks at the flash cards and develops an ability to “read.” So I was actually reading these things – Larry Sanger’s essay and several books – in parallel, using one answer questions raised by the other.  It’s safe to say that the preponderance of scientific evidence does not advocate for teaching your baby to read.  Indeed, the only study I could find on the topic was one conducted to test specifically whether Your Baby Can Read works, and found that it does not.  Another study that focused on vocabulary development rather than reading found that for each hour of “educational” DVDs that babies watched, they knew on average 6-8 fewer words, although the effect did appear to be transitory and was mostly gone by age 17-24 months.  Even Peter Sanger acknowledges that plonking your child in front of a DVD isn’t really the “ideal” way to learn to read. I should also note that Sanger has developed a free set of tools called Reading Bear, based on the ones he used to teach his son – I’ll include the link in the references for this episode.  I was amused to see, though, that “Reading Bear is aimed mainly at children learning to read at the traditional ages of 4-7….But even younger children do enjoy and get something out of Reading Bear.”  Sounds like someone has read the FTC ruling on the Your Baby Can Read set and doesn’t want to get on the wrong side of that argument to me But what about Sanger’s son? He is clearly reading the Constitution in the video, if not understanding it.  Can *some* babies be taught to read?  Should they be taught to read?  As a parent of a toddler, have I missed out on something by not teaching my daughter to read? These were the questions I set out to answer for this episode. I think ultimately it goes back to what we as parents want for our kids, and what our kids want for themselves.  Sanger says that he aims to give his son “a deep, serious liberal arts education”, which he characterizes as having substantial knowledge about many different subjects, being able to write well, being able to read difficult texts, being comfortable with numbers (or excellent, if one is in a technical field), being able to speak a few languages, and generally having a sophisticated outlook on human life and our place in the universe.  He argues that his goal is not to get his kid to graduate by age 12 and out into the working world sooner so his son can get a big richer at the end of his longer career, it’s the opportunity to have more years to spend on learning general knowledge like literature, history, and science, before specializing and getting into a profession. To me, it seems as though Sanger has missed a step.  He’s assuming that a liberal arts-style of education is a good goal for all kids, and I don’t believe it is.  I’m still thinking this through so my approach may change in the future, but if I had to pinpoint what I want for Carys it would be that she lives a life that she considers to be satisfying and fulfilling.  I would really love for her to have a love for learning as well, but to me that’s a secondary goal. As a reasonably well-educated parent it would of course make *me* happy if that involved her learning a lot about some of the subjects I consider important.  *But it might not make her happy*.  She may be perfectly fulfilled as an auto mechanic who never listens to NPR.  She might become a master plumber and be the person who can finally teach me how to install a hammer arrester on an existing water line (I failed at that a couple of weekends ago).  She might want to work in an oil field, undoing all the work I’ve tried to do in my corporate career, getting companies to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.  None of those occupations *require* a liberal arts education, although it’s possible she could get that education and still find one of those jobs fulfilling.  As a reasonably well-educated parent it might make me cringe a bit to tell people at parties that my daughter was doing one of those jobs.  But ultimately it’s *her* choice to make, not mine.  Sanger talks about how some of his happiest and most rewarding times in high school and college were when he was really learning, and he wants his child to do more of that sort of learning, and enjoy it.  But what if his son doesn’t enjoy it?  I wonder what Sanger will do then. But Jen, I hear you thinking, what could be the harm in it?  Clearly at least one baby has learned to read using Your Baby Can Read, even if a statistically significant sample in a scientific study didn’t learn to read using that method.  Shouldn’t you and I be trying to make up for lost time? The scientific community does seem to have some consensus around the idea that *pushing* kids to learn skills like reading before they are ready and when they don’t really want to, can have harmful effects on later learning outcomes.  A 2015 literature review called “Reading instruction in kindergarten: Little to gain and much to lose” found that many children are not developmentally ready to read in kindergarten, yet the Common Core State Standards require them to do just that – read in kindergarten.  No research documents long-term gains from learning to read in kindergarten.  Studies have shown that early academic training can increase children’s immediate scores on specific tests that the training addresses, but these initial gains are lost within 1-3 years and may eventually be reversed.  It’s also possible that academic instruction at an early age can produce long-term harm in the realms of social and emotional development. Just like with every other aspect of children’s development, there appears to be a wide range of “normal” development related to reading.  Some children learn to walk at nine months; some walk at 15 months.  Some children learn to read as toddlers (it’s probably safe to say that babies wouldn’t learn to read without adult intervention); some children in a Sudbury-school type model where there is no direct instruction unless the student requests it, may not learn to read until age 14 or 15. Two other things stood out in my research: firstly, that children will learn to read when they want to read to accomplish some other goal.  Peter Gray, who writes a blog on Psychology Today, asked parents who were in alternative forms of education when and how their children learned to read.  One woman wrote that her daughter had been telling people she couldn’t read until she was about age 7.  One day the daughter wanted to eat brownies and neither the mother nor the father wanted to bake them.  A while later the daughter asked the mother to turn on the oven and find her a “9 ex 11 pan” and, later, to put the brownies in the oven.  The daughter said “Ma, I think I can read now.”  The daughter read a few books out loud to the mother until the brownies were done. A 19 year-old blogger who had been homeschooled said that her mother would read the first Harry Potter to her and her younger sister.  But the mother was busy and if she read too long her voice would get hoarse so, being frustrated at the delay and impatient to know what happened next, the blogger picked up the book and started reading.  Clearly these children had a reason to start reading, so they did it.  Not every child can just “read,” though – some of them do need explicit instruction. Secondly, if you’re in the U.S. and your child isn’t reading by the end of kindergarten, he or she is officially “behind” according to the Common Core standards.  And now we find ourselves with a problem: we know that some children may not be able to read until much later than kindergarten age, but if they’re not reading by the time they enter first grade they’re going to get more and more “behind” as they can’t keep up with material that’s presented in a written format. This puts parents whose children will go into a traditional school model in a bit of a bind.  You’ll be OK following your child’s lead as long as he’s not a late bloomer (because there is some evidence that boys develop reading ability later than girls).  Perhaps that’s one factor explaining why boys drop out of high school at a higher rate of girls – from the very beginning some of them are pressured to learn things before they’re ready and that just continues to cascade throughout their school career.  I’m just speculating on that one. So assuming you haven’t yet taught your toddler to read, what should you be doing to encourage future literacy in your child without pushing it on them?  I’ll go into much more detail on this in a future episode, but I want to leave you with some things to get you started.  I should acknowledge here that different cultures have different ways of thinking of literacy.  Some cultures prioritize things like oral stories, songs, and music.  Others prioritize the written word but mainly use print for religious purposes (like reading religious texts) or practical purposes (paying bills and writing shopping lists). One thing that anyone can do to prepare a child for reading readiness, no matter how you use literature, is talk with your child in a way that enhances their vocabulary.  So no need for flash cards or new word memorization, but you can follow six principles of word learning developed by the authors of the book Einstein Never Used Flashcards, although these specific principles are found in a journal article they wrote with one of the graduate students.  The principles are are: Frequency – children learn the words they hear the most Children learn words for things and events that interest them Interactive and responsive contexts (like conversation) are more conducive to vocabulary learning than passive contexts (like TV viewing) Create meaningful contexts – rather than offering flashcards, learn words about baking while baking. Learn colors and textures while folding laundry. Tell children the definitions of the new words. When the child points to a toaster and says “what’s that,” instead of just saying “it’s a toaster,” say “that’s a toaster.  It’s cooking your bread for your breakfast.” Use words in sentences. Children’s learning of grammar feeds off their learning vocabulary, and vice versa. They learn how to use grammar correctly when they hear adults using grammar correctly. I want to expand a bit on point number 3 because it connects back to the Your Baby Can Read program, which is presented in a series of DVDs.  The American Academy of Pediatrics officially discourages TV viewing in the first two years of life (although only 6% of U.S. parents are even aware of these guidelines which may partly explain why 90% of parents appear to ignore this advice).  The AAP states that its guidelines are based on the detrimental effects of “excessive” media use, and because “young children learn best by interacting with people, not screens.”  So while Larry Sanger taught his son to read using a DVD set, he describes his process very explicitly – he always sat with his son while his son watched the DVDs and they talked about what they saw, and this interaction could have been responsible for some of Sanger’s success.  But, as Dimitri Christakis of the University of Washington points out, “the fundamental research question is not *can* infants learn from a screen under ideal circumstances, including an interactive parent, but is that learning somehow superior to alternative means of advancing child development?” Many researchers agree that reading books to children is very important, but so is surrounding children with literacy in their everyday lives.  Following a recipe together as you bake a cake counts as a “literacy activity.”  So does sorting junk mail.  And discussing road signs you see while out on a walk. One way to figure out a path is to let your child lead, which is something I stumbled on accidentally myself.  We were waiting outside a restaurant about three months ago (so my daughter, Carys, would have been about 22 months old).  It was a seafood restaurant and there was a humorous slogan along the bottom of the window – something like “fish or cut bait.”  Carys pointed to the “F” and said “what’s that?” I said “It’s an F.”  She moved along each letter asking “what’s that?”.  Not long after that my husband was at the mall and picked up an alphabet book at a bookstore so he could get his parking validated.  Carys and I went on a backpacking trip in Wales a couple of weeks after that and she made me go through that book every single night – even though I specifically requested we read a different book.  She knew about three letters of the alphabet before we left, and now she knows about half of it.  The whole thing is led by her: we read to her when she asks; we tell her letters when she asks.  Your child may well not be asking these questions yet and *that’s OK*.  Continue reading books – vary the books, as much as your toddler will allow, anyway – test him with longer books but mix in shorter books as well.  Consider running your finger under the line of print to see if she’s interested in what the print *does* – but be ready to back off if she finds it irritating.  Follow her lead.  My next question is “now that...

Imagine this: you’re with your toddler son or daughter at a playground on a Saturday afternoon so there are a lot of people around.  You’re sitting on a bench while your child plays in the sandpit where several others are playing as well.  You’re half paying attention while you catch up with some texts on your phone.  You hear a scream and when you look up you see a child you don’t know clutching tightly onto the spade your child had been playing with, and your child is about to burst into tears. Or this: You’re at the playground on a Saturday afternoon and your child is in the sand pit, but when you hear the scream you look up to see your child holding the spade, and a child you don’t know has clearly just had it removed from his possession. What do you do? Assuming you want your children to learn how to share things, what’s the best way to encourage that behavior?  What signs can you look for to understand whether they’re developmentally ready?  Does praising a child who proactively shares something encourage her to do it again – or make her less likely to share in the future?  We’ll answer all these questions and more.   Jump to highlights 00:37 Introduction of episode 02:10 Drastic steps to promote sharing behavior 02:54 The key goal for resting parents 03:28 Concepts for sharing behavior 04:55 Concept of ownership 07:07 Understand the thing for you to be yours 07:29 Understanding of time 08:20 Impulse control 11:42 Shaming a child into sharing 14:55 Five sharing strategies you can teach children   References Brownell, C., S. Iesue, S. Nichols, and M. Svetlova (2012). Mine or Yours? Development of Sharing in Toddlers in Relation to Ownership Understanding. Child Development 84:3 906-920.  Full article available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3578097/ Crary, E. (2013). The secret of toddler sharing: Why sharing is hard and how to make it easier. Parenting Press, Seattle, WA. Davis, L., and J. Keyser (1997).  Becoming the parent you want to be. Broadway Books, New York, NY. Klein, T (2014). How toddlers thrive. Touchstone, New  York, NY. Kohn (1993). Punished by rewards: The trouble with gold stars, incentive plans, As, praise, and other bribes. Houghton Mifflin, New York, NY. Lancy, D. (2015). The anthropology of childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings. Second Edition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England. Warenken, F., K. Lohse, A. Melis, and M. Tomasello (2011). Young Children Share the Spoils After Collaboration. Psychological Science 22:2 267-273.  Abstract available at: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/22/2/267.abstract

This discussion dives into the chilling realities of child treatment throughout history, contrasting it with today's parenting. It explores how cultural differences have shaped child development, from social skills to academic focus. The role of play versus emotional well-being is examined, inviting reflection on personal parenting choices. Listeners learn about the importance of being conscious of inherited values and how to integrate traditional practices with contemporary methods for better outcomes.

I always thought the infant phase would be the hardest part of parenting, when all the baby does is eat and sleep and cry.  Now I have a toddler I’m finding it’s harder than having a baby, some of the support systems that I had when she was a baby aren’t there any more, and the parenting skills I need are totally different.  How do I even know what I need to learn to not mess up this parenting thing?  Should I go back to school to try to figure it all out? In this episode I’ll tell you the history and principles behind the podcast and what we’ll learn together. Note: When I revamped the website I decided that after two years of shows, some of the information in this episode was out of date.  I recently re-recorded it to highlight the resources I’ve created for you. Please do subscribe to the show by entering your name and email address in the box below to receive updates when new podcast episodes and blog posts are published, as well as calls for questions and occasional requests for co-interviewers.  And if you’d like to continue the conversation, come join us in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook Group!   Read Full Transcript Hello and welcome to episode 000 of Your Parenting Mojo – the podcast that aims to bring you rigorously researched information and distill it into a toolkit you can actually use to support your child’s development, and make parenting easier on yourself. I’m your host, Jen Lumanlan, and I originally recorded this episode in August of 2016 when the show launched. But by the time October 2018 rolled around I’d been recording for two years and a lot of the information in this episode was out of date so I decided to re-record, keeping the parts that are still relevant and adjusting the parts that had changed. So in this episode, called Parenting Philosophy, I’ll share a bit about my background and what I believe about parenting, because I find that most people who put information out there make you do the work of trying to see how your beliefs and theirs fit together, and instead I want you to understand where I’m coming from and how this fits with your approach to parenting. I never thought I’d be a parent, but it happened on purpose and not by accident. My daughter is named Carys, which means “one who loves and is loved.” She was born in June 2014 (in case I forget to mention how old she is in future episodes). Before Carys was born I spent a lot of time on my birth plan, figuring I had 18 years to work out how to be a parent. When I finally got my act together I discovered the wealth of information about babies that’s available when your main concerns are related to feeding and sleeping, and our first year progressed fairly uneventfully. Carys slept through the night early, was not at all resistant to trying new foods, and after she got over some initial gassiness, was generally fairly easy to be around. A lot of the advice on parenting an infant expires around age 12 months when the child is really mobile and interested in investigating the world and I was left feeling “now what?” So I started to do a lot of reading, and in the process of doing that reading and telling other people about it (but only when they asked me!) I realized I was having fun. So I decided to start a podcast so I could share what I’m learning with other people in a format that you can do while multitasking – commuting, working out, walking the dog, whatever – because goodness knows, you don’t need something *else* to read about how to be a parent. Two principles underlie this podcast. First – respectful parenting, also known as Resources for Infant Educarers or RIE. I actually held off on doing an episode on RIE for a long time because I didn’t want my listeners to think I was some kind of crazy hippy before I had many episodes out, but I did finally record two episodes on this – the first one is an overview of what RIE is, and since it actually wasn’t designed based on scientific research, the second episode takes a deep dive into what aspects of it are supported by the research base. RIE’s advice officially runs though age 2, when most adults find it easier to treat kids with respect anyway – maybe partly because they can answer back. But even though I felt like RIE provided solid ground underneath me, what is above me? What is the universe of issues I need to know about and make decisions about? This brings me to the second principle behind this podcast: scientific research wherever it is available. There are a lot of ways of knowing the world – for example, those related to our culture and our beliefs and even the things we know about ourselves and about the people we’re close to. But science offers us a LOT of information on parenting and child development, if we can read it critically and understand its limitations as well as its strengths. So in the show we call out small sample sizes and bias caused by sampling middle class White children and extrapolating the results as if they were applicable to children everywhere, and papers where what’s said in the conclusions section doesn’t match what’s said in the results section, which happens more often than you might think. I also try to layer the importance of culture onto these two principles, which we typically do using anthropological studies on people outside of Western cultures in an attempt to understand whether the problems we face with our children are related to the way we raise our children, or whether they’re inherent to how children develop. As an example, encouraging artistic ability is a very affluent western cultural thing to do. It’s closely linked with individuality, which in some cultures is seen as less desirable than promoting group cohesion. Increasingly we borrow from other cultures – baby wearing and elimination communication are two things that come to mind – without always fully considering the implications of how to incorporate these ideas into our lives. Traditional baby wearers come from cultures where lots of people wear the baby, not just the mother, and the baby has an attachment to many people, not one primary person. EC is practiced in countries where diapers are not available or affordable and where a five-year-old child may be the infant’s main caregiver. I’m not critical of any approach to parenting or anyone who uses a particular approach (actually the only thing I’m critical of is selling things that are “necessary” for a child’s wellbeing or development), but I do think we should consider the implications of our choices. Some mothers who try baby-wearing in places where there aren’t 10 other family members around to take turns can become exhausted. EC doesn’t always but can lead to chronic holding of poop. Why do we people from “western, educated, industrialized, rich democracies” (WEIRD) countries look to science and to other cultures for our parenting advice? I think it is in large part because we are so physically, mentally, and emotionally separated from our own parents and extended families. Nobody is telling us how to parent, so we have to figure it out for ourselves – and relying on the scientific approach seems like a good way to do it. Also importantly, I think many people of my generation don’t 100% agree with the strategies their parents used to raise them – probably much as our parents disagreed with our grandparents. So science can help us to understand our child’s development so we can support that process in a way that aligns with our values. One thing I see is that there are SO MANY parenting books available, all coming from different positions, some supported extensively by scientific research and others formed by nothing more than someone’s opinions; how do I as a parent figure out how to integrate them? They often have tactics that might work, but I always need to keep in mind how the tactics relate to the strategy. And there’s so much research being done in the academic arena that never makes it to parents because it just sits in a journal unless it can be ‘spun’ by the media into something clickbait-worthy. To put a framework around all this research I decided to go back to school and get a Masters in Psychology, focusing on child development, which was still underway when I started the show but which I’ve now finished. The lessons I learned during my degree help me to make sure that I’m not missing anything major as I look to understand – and help you understand – the deep dive into the research that we do in each episode. I did an episode on why we shouldn’t ban war play relatively early on, and the conclusion of that episode was that there are good developmental reasons that children engage in war play so I suggested, along with the expert whom I interviewed, that we allow children to engage in this type of play. Some time later I realized that it may not be safe for all children to engage in war play, and I was embarrassed to say that I didn’t consider that issue at the time. Since then I’ve made a much more conscious effort to consider issues related to race in my episodes, which can take the form of acknowledging when research results simply might not be applicable to how people from certain cultures raise their children, to noting when even the research questions that are asked don’t consider important cultural issues. I’m also planning a series of episodes on racial issues that intersect with parenting, starting with what it means to be a White parent in America and how we can navigate issues of race with our children. I’m the first to admit that I’m not an expert in this regard, so I hope that people of color will forgive any missteps that I might make as I attempt to cast a light on something that I think most parents of the dominant culture – myself included – haven’t given as much thought to as we probably should have done. The show focuses on the period starting just beyond the infant’s first year, because most parents are concerned with eating and sleeping and pooping in that year and there’s a *lot* of advice already available on those topics. Information related to toddlers usually focuses on discipline and getting the child to do what you want – and I think there’s a much larger scope of conversation to be had than this. By now I have over 70 episodes on topics like building early literacy skills, encouraging artistic ability, how to tell whether your child is lying to you, how to raise girls with a healthy body image and how to raise emotionally healthy boys, and how you can do what’s called “scaffolding” your child’s learning. My episodes are rigorously researched, with citations included on the show notes page of each individual episode on my website at Your Parenting Mojo.com. They usually take me between 10 and 40 hours to research – the interview ones tend to be on the shorter side because we’re looking at a defined body of work, while the longest one so far has been about two weeks of work sorting out the mess of claims and research related to self-regulation. I won’t ever tell you about some amazing study just published that says we’ve been parenting wrong all these years without linking it to the rest of the literature and examining it from all sides. I won’t ever send you an email with the subject line “developmental delays” (like I received from one parenting website that will remain unnamed) designed to scare you into clicking through to see if your child has signs of developmental delays. Instead I’ll tell you what the literature says and will suggest some tools coming out of that research that you might consider using with your own children. Since I finished the Master’s in Psychology I also picked up another Master’s in Education because I wanted to learn more about that as well. My thesis for the psychology degree was on how children learn in the absence of a curriculum, and coming out of that I became convinced that homeschooling would be the right approach to learning for Carys. Enough people asked me the same questions about homeschooling that I actually created a course to help parents decide whether homeschooling could be right for their family. But not everyone can or wants to homeschool, and in recognition of that my thesis for the Master’s in Education was on what parents can do to support their children’s learning in school by working within the existing school systems and outside of them as well. I offer consults to parents who are struggling with a specific issue related to parenting or child development and, as with all of my work, apply scientific research to this as well. When you sign up for a consult you actually receive a couple of hours of my thinking and reading on the topic, and then we talk for 50 minutes which usually generates a substantial number of ideas and insights to address the problem. Then afterward you receive a recording of our session (if you decided it would be helpful to you), and a summary sheet describing the major action items we discussed so you can quickly refer back to it when you need a refresher but don’t want to watch the whole recording again. You can find information about all of these extra products on the Resources tab on my website – there’s a page linking to more information on the courses, and another on consults. I’ve also launched a membership group for parents who want to see something between an adjustment and a transformational shift in their approach to parenting in a group called Finding Your Parenting Mojo. In the first three months we dramatically reduce the incidence of tantrums at your house, then we take a step back and look at our goals for parenting so we can make sure our daily interactions with our children support those goals (it’s surprising how often there’s a disconnect there!) and work on getting on the same page with our co-parent. After that we pick topics to work on based on the group’s interests. The group opens to new members about every 4-6 months. There’s a link on the Resources tab to the Membership group as well; if you go to that page and the sign-up link is active, then do feel free to join us. If there’s no sign-up link then the group is currently closed to new members, but do feel free to download the free guide called How to stop using rewards to gain your child’s compliance, which will give you a taste of how the group operates. If you do nothing else after you finish listening to the show, do subscribe on my website (rather than through iTunes or another platform). If you’re subscribed through another platform then I actually never know who you are and I can’t reach you with the blog posts that cut across the issues we discuss on the podcast, the calls for questions, and occasional calls for co-interviewers that I send out on the weeks when I don’t publish a new podcast episode. So to subscribe, just head over to yourparentingmojo.com and enter your name and email address and hit the ‘subscribe’ button – you’ll also get a free gift for doing it, which is currently a cheat sheet on seven parenting myths that are still perpetuated in the popular press all the time, and which the scientific research quite clearly indicates that we can leave behind and stop worrying about! Finally, do come on over and join the Your Parenting Mojo group on Facebook, where we talk about issues related to parenting and child development as they intersect our real lives. All of my courses and groups are judgement-free zones. I’m not here to judge you or lecture you, or make you feel inadequate as a parent because you haven’t been doing XYZ critical activities with your kids for the last year. Instead, I want to research and tell you about information you can use to help your children thrive as human beings, and hopefully to make your life as a parent a bit more confident – and maybe even a bit easier – at the same time. If you disagree with something I’ve said, let me know! If you know of an angle on a certain topic that I should have considered and didn’t, please tell me and if there’s research on it, I’ll cover it in a future episode. You can leave a comment on the episode’s page or drop me an email at jen@yourparentingmojo.com. This is a journey, so I hope we can enjoy the ride together.   References (On the topic of Reggio Emilia): Edwards, C., Gandini, L., & Forman, G. (Eds). (2012). The hundred languages of children. Santa Barbara: Praeger (On the topic of Resources for Infant Educarers/RIE): Gerber, M. & Johnson, A. (1988). Your self-confident baby. New York: Wiley