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

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

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

Parenting is tough, huh? Sometimes it feels like we spend a lot of our time asking our daughter to do things…and asking again…and finding a more creative way to ask. We’re going to get some great advice on this next week from Julie King, co-author of the new book How to Talk so Little Kids will Listen – but for this week I want to set the stage and think about why we should bother with all of this. Why not just force our kids to do what we want them to do? And, is it possible to raise obedient kids who can also think for themselves? Reference Baldwin, A.L. (1948). Socialization and the parent-child relationship. Child Development 19, 127-136. Retrieved from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1125710 Baumrind, D. (1978). Parental disciplinary patterns and social competence in children. Youth Society 9(3), 239-267. DOI: 10.1177/0044118X7800900302 Collins, W.A. (Ed.) (1984). Development during middle childhood: The years from six to twelve. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press. Full book available as a pdf at: http://www.nap.edu/catalog/56.html Crockenberg, S.C., & Litman, C. (1990). Autonomy as competence in 2-year-olds: Maternal correlates of child defiance, compliance, and self-assertion. Developmental Psychology 26(6), 961-971. DOI: 0.1037/0012-1649.26.6.961 Hare, A.L., Szwedo, D.E., Schad, M.M., & Allen, J.P. (2014). Undermining adolescent autonomy with parents and peers: The enduring implications of psychologically controlling parenting. Journal of Research on Adolesence 24(4), 739-752. DOI: 10.1111/jora.12167 Lamborn, S.D., Mounts, N.S., Steinberg, L., & Dornbusch, S.M. (1991). Patterns of competence and adjustment among adolescents from authoritative, authoritarian, indulgent, and neglectful families. Child Development 62, 1049-1065. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.1991.tb01588.x Lansbury, J. (2014). Setting limits with respect: What it sounds like. Retrieved from: http://www.janetlansbury.com/2014/04/setting-limits-with-respect-what-it-sounds-like-podcast/ Kochanska, G. (1997). Mutually responsive orientation between mothers and their young children: Implications for early socialization. Child Development 68(1), 94-112. 10.1111/j.1467-8624.1997.tb01928.x Kochanska, G. (2013). Promoting toddlers’ positive social-emotional outcomes in low-income families: A play-based experimental study. Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology 42(5), 700-712. DOI: 10.1080/15374416.2013.782815 Kochanska, G., Kim, S., & Boldt, L.J. (2015). (Positive) power to the child: The role of children’s willing stance toward parents in developmental cascades from toddler age to early preadolescence. Developmental Psychopathology 27(4pt.1), 987-1005. DOI: 10.1017/S0954579415000644 Kohn, A. (2005). Unconditional parenting: Moving from rewards and punishments to love and reason. New York: Atria. Parpal, M., & Maccoby, E.E. (1985). Maternal responsiveness and subsequent child compliance. Child Development 56, 1326-1334. DOI: 10.2307/1130247 Spera, C. (2005). A review of the relationship among parenting practices, parenting styles, and adolescent school achievement. Educational Psychology 17(2), 125-146. DOI: 10.1007/s10648-005-3950-1   Read Full Transcript Transcript This episode actually grew out of an assignment for my master’s program. I’m in the middle of a class on child psychology, which is really at the heart of the curriculum for the masters in psychology with a focus on child development. We were presented with a case study for a child called Jeremiah whose mother was at the end of her rope in dealing with him because he basically refused to cooperate with her. He was having problems in school as well and I was tasked with writing a guide for his mother that that would help her to address some of his challenges. I’ve been reading two books that helped me with this assignment – the first is Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn, who also wrote the book Punished by Rewards that was the basis of the episode on not saying “Good Job.” The blurb on the back of Unconditional Parenting starts out “Most parenting guides begin with the question “How can we get kids to do what they’re told?” and then proceed to offer various techniques for controlling them. In this truly groundbreaking book, nationally respected educator Alfie Kohn begins instead by asking “What do kids need – and how can we meet those needs?” What follows from that question are ideas for working with children rather than doing things to them.” I read Unconditional Parenting a while ago and have been looking for an excuse to delve into the research behind it so this seemed to be about as good of an offer as I was going to get. But I have on my nightstand at the moment the provocatively-titled book “Do Parents Matter?” which is sort of like David Lancy’s book The Anthropology of Childhood that I’ve quoted many times on this show except that the authors actually lived in the communities and did a lot of the research themselves that the book cites, whereas Lancy’s book mostly cites other anthropologists’ work. At various points in Do Parents Matter? very young children in some African and Central American cultures are described as being highly cooperative and even obedient. They can and will sit still and quiet through long church services or car rides; they entertain their siblings rather than squabbling with them and they make valuable contributions to the running of a household. And I started to think about how to marry these two lines of inquiry together – what is it that parents in other cultures are doing to get their kids to cooperate in learning and in life? And are some of those things the kinds of activities that we should consider doing to get our own kids to cooperate more – or is the key really focusing on the child’s needs like Alfie Kohn suggests? So let’s start with the research on children in other cultures. Sarah and Robert LeVine spent two years studying how the GuSII people in Kenya take care of their infants, and compared these relationships with middle-class American mothers in Boston. The Gusii mothers would spend a lot of time soothing their babies. Mother and baby were in close bodily contact for much of the day, or if the mothers weren’t available then siblings were holding the baby. The mothers responded very quickly to a distressed cry, often by offering a breast – the LeVines showed some Gusii mothers a video of an American baby crying while having his diaper changed and the mothers were shocked that anyone would let a baby cry for even a few seconds. The Gusii infants rarely cry long enough to become aroused, and being in constant touch with another person and feeding as soon as they fuss helps to keep the baby calm. The Gusii mothers didn’t use toys or other objects to play with their baby, and would turn the baby away from them so the baby couldn’t make eye contact if they thought the baby was getting too excited so the baby would calm down again. The Gusii mothers want a calm infant and a compliant child because another child is probably on the way within a couple of years, since the average Gusii mother has ten children – so this continual “soothing” of the baby helps to set the stage for a toddler who prioritizes his mother’s wishes and doesn’t give her much trouble. Shifting gears a bit to slightly older children among the Mayans of the YucaTAN, we find that children older than two are asked to do chores quickly and efficiently. Beginning around age 6 the run errands, help older siblings with chores outside their compound, and take care of younger siblings. Girls learn to make tortillas by watching, and by the mother’s very judicious use of direction. I have personally watched children younger than ten in the highlands of Guatemala make tortillas – they left a bucket of corn to soak overnight and in the morning they took it up the hill to someone who had a generator and returned with the corn ground up. They would pat the tortilla into shape, passing it from hand to hand. I tried it myself, and they laughed at me because I couldn’t stop the dough from sticking to my hands and my tortillas were so thick they were virtually inedible. Children in many cultures WANT to learn and they are EXPECTED to learn; they stand stock-still watching someone do a task that they’re interested in, and they learn how to do it by watching the task over and over again. Their parents don’t have to train them or teach them to do a task; the child learns how to do it because he wants to, because what is being learned has some value – often a real contribution to the running of the household. If an adult offers instruction it’s during the course of doing work, not as a lesson specifically set up to teach the child something. And one set of researchers note that in learning outside of school there are virtually no failures. Some children might take longer than others to learn certain skills but almost all children become able to collaborate and contribute fully to family and community. Flunking isn’t really an option. Of course, you can also take the opposite approach like Chinese parents, as these mothers combine parental authority with love – if you love your child then you want to train him for the seven Confucian learning values, which are sincerity, diligence, endurance of hardship, perseverance, concentration, respect for teachers, and humility. Chinese parents consider the child’s school performance as part of their development as a moral person. They criticize their children without worrying about the child’s self-esteem because self-esteem is less important than being a diligent student. So I think the key point in all of this is that it’s possible to use a variety of methods to create a child who does exactly what he is told – you can keep him calm all the time by being in constant contact with him and not playing with him in an American sense of using toys to interact with him. You can teach him the importance of sitting quietly and observing to take advantage of his innate capacity to learn and contribute to the family. You can directly instruct the child on the qualities you think are important and berate them if they don’t measure up. You can threaten to beat them or actually beat them if they don’t do what you say – there are plenty of cultures where this happens although I’ll go on the record and say that I’m against it in the kinds of Western cultures of which I’m a member. But it seems as though the one thing you cannot do is raise a child to think for himself, to be independent, to take the initiative, to be self-confident, to think creatively, to talk from an early age – all typical goals of American parents – you can’t raise a child to be all of these things *and* obey your every word. The two things just don’t go together. I have yet to find information in a book or paper describing parenting practices in non-Western cultures that describes the mental health outcomes in the children who are in constant physical contact but otherwise ignored, who are berated, and who are threatened or beaten. It’s certainly possible that not all of these lead to negative mental health outcomes in children in cultures where these practices occur, but I do wonder. And secondly, I wonder what the relationship between the child and the parent is like when the child gets older. If the primary goal is obedience to the parent then as long as the child is obedient then everything is probably fine from the parent’s perspective. But I wonder how it feels from the child’s perspective. In Western cultures we try to achieve two goals that I haven’t seen mentioned in descriptions of other cultures – we try to ensure the positive mental health of our children, and we try to build a positive relationship between the child and the parent. And while some of the practices used in other cultures can be helpful to us – personally I plan to shift how I cook from keeping sharp knives away from my toddler to using them within her reach, but instructing her to keep her hands away so she can more closely observe how I prepare dinner every night. But in general if we are to meet our goals for developing what we consider to be well-adjusted children who grow into well-adjusted adults who have a good relationship with us then we need two things. Firstly, we need to redefine our expectations regarding getting a child to do what we want him to do, because an inherent part of raising a free-thinker is that they don’t always do what you want them to do. And secondly we need a different toolkit than the people in cultures who create compliant children through keeping them calm or training them to observe or berating them. We need to move beyond thinking about getting our children to do what we want them to do and start thinking about how we create the kind of relationship with them that makes THEM want to be in a positive working relationship with us as we go out on this journey of life. So why don’t we just control our children? Why don’t we just tell them what we want them to do and force them to do it? Diana Baumrind is a psychologist who described three different parenting styles. Authoritarian parents foster individuality, self-regulation, and self-assertion by meeting and responding to their children’s needs, and exert a fairly high level of control over their children to integrate them into the family culture. In White Western cultures, authoritarian parents are generally considered the “good” parents. Parents who exert a lot of control but don’t balance it with meeting and responding to their children’s needs are called “Authoritative.” (Because I always have to look it up to remember which is which I’ll restate these two – Authoritarian parents are the good ones that exert a high degree of control but are also responsive. Authoritative parents exert a high degree of control but are not responsive).  This style of parenting is more common in the African-American community in the U.S. and while it has been shown to cause negative effects on White children, that’s not necessarily the case with African-American children. Authoritative parenting is associated with better outcomes for African-American children, but the Authoritarian style isn’t terrible. The Permissive parenting style is linked to a high degree of responsiveness to the child, but a low degree of control. So the child gets what she wants, and doesn’t have to fit into the rest of the family – in fact, the family fits around her. A fourth style was added later by some other researchers, who noticed that low responsiveness and low control are basically elements of neglectful parenting. So, Alfie Kohn cites a number of studies that link authoritative – the bad kind – of parenting with really negative psychological outcomes, and several more have been done since that essentially find the same thing. A really early study from way back in 1948 noticed that when parents control children and don’t allow children any kind of say in how rules are made or who does what and when, then we get a “quiet-well-behaved, non-resistant child…conformity to cultural demands is not easily obtained without robbing the child of that personal integrity which gives him a mind of his own. Very controlling parenting obtains conformity but at the expense of personal freedom in areas which are not intended to be restricted.” Another of the studies that Kohn cites makes a distinction that I found really helpful, and that’s the difference between self-assertion and defiance. If a mother tells her child to pick up some toys and put them in a box, if the child say’s “No, still playing” then he is asserting himself. But if he takes more toys out of the basket or if he throws a toy across the room, he is defying her. So if the act is primarily geared toward resisting what the mother wants to do, then we call it “defiance.” But if the child really does want to keep playing not just for the sake of defying the mother, then that’s assertion. Now this is important because researchers associate self-assertion with competence in young children, but the same doesn’t hold true for defiance. Children who say “no” more often are more likely to have a secure attachment to their parents, engage in more negotiation with their mothers, and are more developmentally advanced that other children. Children who are defiant often hare parents who use highly power-assertive control strategies like anger, harshness, criticism, and spanking or hitting, and the mother’s use of these strategies after the child’s initial ‘no’ was more likely than other strategies to result in defiance, probably because she’s using these strategies to signal that she’s not willing to negotiate. If the child complies at this point he does so because his mother has more power than him, and his autonomy suffers. And asking a child “Could you pick up the toys now?” wasn’t effective at getting compliance either because the child feels like he has a choice, and he chooses not to pick up the toys.   I have to say when I started researching this episode that I didn’t realize where it was going to end up, which his pretty much directly supporting the Resources for Infant Educarers, or RIE, approach to parenting that I use. I haven’t talked too much about this in the podcast because I haven’t been able to find much information to say that its strategies are supported by science – I mainly did it because it advocates for respect in the relationship between the parent and the child and that just felt very RIGHT to me. But while there is no research out there that says “RIE parenting methods produce better children than non-RIE methods,” it’s pretty interesting to me to see strategies that RIE has taught me described in a paper on effective methods of gaining compliance. I’ll quote from the paper: “Mothers who were effective at eliciting compliance from their children and deflecting defiance were very clear about what they wanted, but in addition to listening to their children’s objections, they also accommodated them in ways that conveyed respect for the children’s autonomy and individuality. Often, the process of obtaining compliance was quite extended; mothers reasoned, persuaded, suggested, and adapted their requests to what they thought the child would accept. In doing so, they encouraged competent behavior on the part of their toddler.” If you want to hear this in action, go and check out Janet Lansbury’s podcast episode on setting limits with respect – there’s a link to it in the references for this episode. Janet has been a RIE parent educator since 1994, and I find it really helpful to not just read the language she uses but hear her demonstrate it. I do want to be super clear that respecting autonomy and individuality doesn’t mean being a pushover. I think of it as believing that I have rights as a person in the parenting relationship as well, and I place primary importance on the relationship between my daughter and I, and that it’s OK for us each to have boundaries about what is and isn’t OK. Sometimes my daughter doesn’t want to kiss me goodbye in the morning and that’s OK with me – that’s her boundary, her limit in that moment. I cheerfully wave goodbye to her as her Dad takes her to daycare and think nothing more of it. And also I have the right to set boundaries as well – I don’t want there to be water all over the floor in the bathroom after her bath. If she’s splashing a lot then I tell her “I don’t want you to splash water on the floor. You can splash...

  Did your child receive a digital device as a gift over the holidays? Have you been able to prise it out of his/her hands yet? Regular listeners might recall that we did an episode recently called “Really, how bad is screen time for my child?” where we went into the American Academy of Pediatrics’ guidelines on screen time for very young children, so if you haven’t listened to that one yet you might want to go and do it before you listen to this episode, because this one really builds on that one. Yes, we know we’re not supposed to give our babies under 18 months old access to screens. But at some point our children are going to start using screens – and we as parents need tools to manage that process, whether we’ve limited screens until now or whether we’ve been using them as a bit of a crutch. (If you’re in a third category of parents who is totally happy with the amount and type of screen time your children are getting and feel confident about managing this in the future then click along to the next episode, because there’s nothing for you here!) So all of this is what today’s guest is going to help us to figure out. Dr Kristy Goodwin is one of Australia’s leading digital parenting experts (and mum who also has to deal with her kids’ techno-tantrums!). She’s the author of the brand new book Raising Your Child in a Digital World (Affiliate link).  Dr Kristy arms parents, educators and health professionals with research-based information about what today’s young, digital kids really need to thrive online and offline. Kristy takes the guesswork and guilt out of raising kids in the digital age by arming parents and educators with facts, not fears about how screens are impacting on children’s health, wellbeing and development.   References Brewer, J. (2016). Digital Nutrition (website/blog). Retrieved from: http://www.digitalnutrition.com.au/blog Christakis, D., Zimmerman, F.J., DiGuiseppe, D.L., & McCarty, C.A. (2004). Early television exposure and subsequent attentional problems in children. Pediatrics 113(4), 708-713. Common Sense Media website: www.commonsensemedia.org (Also check your app store for their app) Goodwin, K. (2016). Raising your child in a digital world: What you need to know!. Warriewood, NSW: Finch. (Affiliate link) Kindertown website: http://www.kindertown.com/ (Also check your app store for their app)   Read Full Transcript Transcript Jen:    [00:30] Hello and welcome to today’s episode of Your Parenting Mojo, which is called Raising Your Child in a Digital World. Now, regular listeners might recall that we did an episode recently called really how bad his screen time for my child and we went into the American Academy of Pediatrics’ guidelines on screen time for very young children. So if you haven’t listened to that one already, you might want to go back and do that before you listen to this episode because this one really builds on that one. So we all know that we’re not supposed to give her a babies under 18 months old access to screens, but at some point our children are going to start using screens and we as parents need tools to manage that process, whether we have limited screens until now or whether we’ve been using them as a bit of a crutch. Jen: [01:10] And l say that if you find yourself in a third category of parents who’s totally happy with the amount and type of screen time that your children are getting and you feel confident about managing this in the future, then you should just click along to the next episode because there’s nothing for you here, but for the rest of us who are still trying to figure all this out that’s what today’s guest is going to help us do. So Dr. Kristy Goodwin is one of Australia’s leading digital parenting experts and she’s also a mom who has to deal with her kids techno tantrums. She’s the author of the brand new book, Raising Your Child in a Digital World, and Dr Christie arms parents, educators, and health professionals with research based information about what today’s young digital kids really need to thrive online and offline. Christy takes the guesswork and guilt out of raising kids in the digital age by arming parents and educators with facts and not fears about how screens are impacting children’s health, wellbeing, and development. Welcome Dr. Goodwin, thanks so much for joining us. Dr. Goodwin:  [02:05] My pleasure. It’s great to be here. Jen:    [02:08] So your book outlines seven building blocks for young children’s development. Can you tell us a little bit about what those are? Dr. Goodwin:    [02:15] Sure. So I draw on the neuroscience and the developmental science research and they have consistently identified that children have basic, unchanging developmental needs or priorities. And it doesn’t matter where the children were born in 2012 or whether they were born in 1950. Their developmental needs are fairly, pretty consistently the same. So I identified the seven basic developmental needs or as I refer to in the book as the building blocks. And kids need basic things like relationships and attachments. They need language exposure to as much language as possible, both hearing and using. They need sleep, they need opportunities for play, they need opportunities for physical movements, they need good quality nutrition. And the final one is a relatively new one that I’m looking at executive function skills and these are basically children’s higher order thinking skills at the part of the brain that’s responsible for executive function skills is sometimes referred to as the air traffic control system or CEO of the brain. So I draw on what the research because we’ve got a very robust, consistent body of research that says these are the basic needs that children have in order to thrive. And then what I do is look at how technology is intersecting with those basic needs. Jen:   [03:36] So I know we’ve, we’ve talked a lot already in the previous episode about how researchers are concerned with children’s screen time. So I, I want to spend a little bit of time on this just to make sure that we’re acknowledging it before we move into some of the more positive attributes. So can you tell us that some of the ways that screen time can hinder children’s development? Dr. Goodwin: [03:55] We do some preliminary research that tells us that excessive or inappropriate use of technology with children can have some adverse effects. In particular, the research has consistently identified but excessive or inappropriately used technology can have implications on children’s sleep. It’s also associated with obesity levels and some research, although not yet consistent, tells us that it has been correlated with attentional issues. This doesn’t necessarily mean that screens cause attentional issues, but there’s definitely a link there. More recently we’re seeing, and again, these are still in the preliminary stages because we need to remember, you know, the ipad is only six years old, and as a researcher in this field, I have to admit, we’re really hopeless at keeping up with the technology. The technology is growing exponentially by the time we conduct, publish, and then disseminate research, the technology is often been superseded. So we don’t yet have, you know, I’m often asked what’s the longterm impact of preschoolers and toddlers on the iPad. Dr. Goodwin:    [05:00] I hate to say we really don’t yet know. And in some regards we are conducting a bit of a living experiment. So that’s why I always fall back on what do we know, what does the science tell us? It’s those seven basic things. So we’re seeing with screens in particular, there’s a displacement effect, so when children are using a screen thing, not doing something else. So in particular we’re seeing the early signs that we were concerned about children’s fine motor skills. So children are learning to tap, swipe, and pinch before they’ve learned to grip a pencil and tie their shoe laces were also concerned with perhaps the use of screens to early on derailing or changing children’s brain architecture. We know, for example, in the first three years of life, brain development is predominantly focused on the sensory and the motor regions of the brain. Dr. Goodwin: [05:52] And then from that ages three to four, brain development shifts to that, the prefrontal, where they develop all those executive function skills. And we’re worried that if kids are spending too much time on screens and the sensory and motor regions of the brain, may be under-developed and then we’re placing them in a, you know, an online world that I call it, you know, it’s sensory seduction says things always trying to captivate their attention. Yet, they don’t have the impulse control that’s required in this prefrontal cortex where all their executive function skills…They don’t have those skills yet to manage their attention. So we can see there’s some of the potential concerns. Psychologists are very concerned with children’s self regulation skills that children are not learning how to manage some of their big emotions. Instead they’re being placated by a screen, you know, we give them the digital babysitter to calm them down. Dr. Goodwin: [06:44] We’re also seeing, you know, some preliminary research on the impact of screens on relationships and other relationships children have with parents, not so much because of the child screen use, but even more interestingly, it’s parental use, you know, we’re calling it parental digital distraction and the impact that’s having. There’s one study that’s been published already that’s looked at what they’re calling fractured maternal care. And they looked at rodents because obviously getting ethics approval to do studies like this with humans would be near impossible. But what they’ve actually found is that there’s some adverse social and emotional consequences if the maternal rat was chronically distracted. I’m saying, you know, we’re just, there’s so many potential risks, so that’s why I think it’s always safe to be until we have conclusive longterm evidence, which we gears away from, let’s fall back on, you know, my friends call me Cautious Christy; I always err on the side of caution, do we know what, you know, what are their basic needs, let’s make sure they’re met and if they are met and a little bit of screen time is unlikely to be harmful or detrimental to them. Jen:   [07:52] Okay. Okay. That makes sense. I just want to dig into a couple of things that you’ve mentioned. You talked about the correlative link between screen time and attention, and just wanted to clarify that you did say that that’s not causative, but just to clarify for listeners that I think what you’re saying here is that we know that there’s a link between screen time and attention and we’re not sure which causes, which is that right? Dr. Goodwin:   [08:15] Absolutely. Definitely A study by Dr Christakis was published a few years ago and um, some of the media headlines as often is the case misconstrued the findings and said that screens, calls add and Adhd, and that is definitely not the case. We do not have the research to substantiate that there is a link, but we’re not sure which direction that link goes from. It goes between. So is it that children with attentional issues gravitate towards the rapid fire fast paced stimulation that the online world offers? Or is it that rapid fire stimulation, that sensory bombardment that controls a two inch totally. We don’t yet know. So I go back to what do we know that the prefrontal cortex, you know, where their executive function skills are developed. One of the key parts of executive function skills, is impulse control, and we know that this part of the brain doesn’t start to peek in its development until about age is four to six. So children cannot really orient and manage their attention. And even then attention management is not fully developed. So potential risks. Jen:    [09:26] Yeah, and it seems as though the issue of correlation/causation is also there on that managing attention research, right? We don’t know if the children who have trouble managing their attention are gravitating towards screens or vice versa. And just something else that you mentioned that caught my ear. You said that children are learning to tap, swipe and pinch before they start learning to hold a pencil or tie their shoe laces. Is that a concern or could it be that those fine motor skills that children are developing using a screen time is actually helping them. Which, which way does that go? Dr. Goodwin:[09:59] Yeah, so we’ll put some mixed research there . There was actually a study by the technology company AVG two years ago that said that children literally meet their technical milestones before their physical milestones now. Um, and it’s interesting. I traveled throughout Australia and this year I’m in Australia was the first year of what they’re calling the iPad kindergarten generation and teach us throughout the country anecdotally reporting that children are entering school with poor fine motor skills so they can, you know, not holding a pencil correctly, not able to use scissors. So there is definitely, I would think some sort of displacement effect that, you know, time on screens is eroding, superseding opportunities to develop those skills. However, we have also had a study published that has suggested that actually tapping and swapping, depending on what the actual action is on the screen, that can actually facilitate the development of fine motor skills. So again, it depends on what they’re doing. If an app is specifically designed, there are a couple of apps for preschoolers that I’m aware of that do start to develop some of the pincer group and some other small fine motor skills. But again, and this is where it all comes back to balance, you know, making sure that they get the best of analog and digital experiences as well. Jen:    [11:18] Yeah. Okay. So we’ve talked a little bit about some of the potential negative effects the screen time can have on children’s development, but one of the things that I really loved about your book was the way that you address each of the seven building blocks in turn and for each of the building blocks that you’d talk about, not only the ways in which screen time can hinder children’s development in that block, but also how screen time can support it. And I was really surprised to find that there are ways that screen time can support all of the seven building blocks. So can you tell us about some of those more important ways that screen time can support child’s development? Dr. Goodwin:  [11:50] Absolutely. So screen time isn’t necessarily toxic or taboo and I think this is one of the issues facing us as modern parents. Unfortunately, if we read popular media, all of the negative attributes of technology is often reported. So we are given a very lopsided view. And as a researcher in this field, I know that there’s a lot of positive potential that screens can offer, again, if they’re used appropriately and intentionally with our kids, so as parents, I think that helps us to ditch what I call the techno guilt, we don’t need to feel bad that accuracy using a screen because there is positive potential. In particular things like language, there are wonderful apps and websites and online tools that can develop children’s oral language skills, both very expressive language and receptive language skills. So in this instance, we need to be looking for apps in particular where it’s interactive, where children can either record their voice or were they can respond to some sort of stimulus. Dr. Goodwin:

  Someone in a parenting group on Facebook suggested I do an episode on The Spiritual Child, by Dr. Lisa Miller.  My first thought was that it didn’t really sound like my cup of tea but I was willing to read it and at least see what it had to say. I was surprised by the book’s thesis that spirituality can play a critical role in a child’s and adolescent’s development.  But I was astounded that her thesis was actually backed up by scientific research. I invited Dr. Miller to be on the show and she initially agreed – but during my preparation I found that the science supporting spirituality doesn’t seem to be quite as clear-cut as the book says it is.  I invited Dr. Miller again for a respectful discussion of the issues but I didn’t hear back from her. In this episode I describe the book’s major claims, and assess where the science seems to support these and where it doesn’t.  I conclude with some practices you can use to deepen your child’s spiritual connection, if you decide that this is the right approach for your family. Note: I mainly focused on the research related to child development in this article, but as I was about to publish this episode I found an article claiming that the science behind some of Dr. Miller’s other assertions might not be so solid either.   I didn’t read all of those studies (because they’re not directly related to child development, and it took me a lot of hours to find and read just the ones that were), but the author’s conclusions very much mirror my own. References Benson, P.L., Roehlkepartain, E.C., & Scales, P.C. (2012). Spiritual development during childhood and adolescence. In L. Miller (Ed.). The Oxford handbook of psychology and spirituality. New York: Oxford. Berry, D. (2005). Methodological pitfalls in the study of religiosity and spirituality. Western Journal of Nursing Research 27(5), 628-647. DOI: 10.1177/0193945905275519 Boytas, C.J. (2012). Spiritual development during childhood and adolescence. In L. Miller (Ed.). The Oxford handbook of psychology and spirituality. New York: Oxford. Button, T.M.M., Stallings, M.C., Rhee, S.H., Corley, R.P., & Hewitt, J.K. (2011). The etiology of stability and change in religious values and religious attendance. Behavioral Genetics 41(2), 201-210. DOI: 10.1007/s10519-010-9388-3 Cloninger, C.R., Svrakic, D.M., & Przybeck, T.R. (1993). A psychobiological model of temperament and character. Archives of General Psychiatry 50(12), 975-990. DOI: 10.1001/archpsyc.1993.01820240059008 Gallup. (2016). Religion. Survey retrieved from (and updated annually at): http://www.gallup.com/poll/1690/religion.aspx Kendler, K.S., Gardner, C.O., & Prescott, C.A. (1997). Religion, psychopathology, and substance use and abuse: a multimeasure, genetic-epidemiologic study. American Journal of Psychiatry 154, 322-329. Full article available at: http://medicina.fm.usp.br/cedem/simposio/Religion,%20Psychopathology,%20and%20Substance%20Use%20and%20Abuse.pdf Kendler, K.S., Gardner, C.O., & Prescott, C.A. (1999). Clarifying the relationship between religiosity and psychiatric illness: The impact of covariates and the specificity of buffering effects. Twin Research 2, 137-144. DOI: 10.1375/twin.2.2.137 Kidwell, J.S., Dunham, R.M., Bacho, R.A., Pastorino, E., & Portes, P.R. (1995). Adolescent identity exploration: A test of Erikson’s theory of transitional crisis. Adolescence 30(120), 785-793. Koenig, L.B., McGue, M., & Iacono, W.G. (2008). Stability and change in religiousness during emerging adulthood. Developmental Psychology 44(2), 532-543. DOI: 10.1037/0012-1649.44.2.532 Mahoney, A. & Tarakeshwar, N. (2005). Religion’s role in marriage and parenting in daily life and during family crises. In R.F. Paloutzain & C.L. Park (Eds.), Handbook of the psychology of religion and spirituality (p.177-198). New York: The Guilford Press. Chapter available online at: http://psychologyofreligion99.blogspot.com/2013/07/religions-role-in-marriage-and.html Miller, L., Warner, V., Wickramaratne, P., & Weissman, M. (1997). Religiosity and depression: Ten-year follow-up of depressed mothers and offspring. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 36(10), 1416-1425. Full article available at: http://highriskdepression.org/files/1997C.pdf Miller, L., Davies, M., & Greenwald, S. (2000). Religiosity and substance use and abuse among adolescents in the National Comorbidity Survey. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 39(9), 1190-1197. DOI: 10.1097/00004583-200009000-00020 Miller, L., & Gur, M. (2002). Religiousness and sexual responsibility in adolescent girls. Journal of Adolescent Health 31, 401-406. DOI: 10.1016/S1054-139X(02)00403-2 Miller, L., Wickramarante, P., Gameroff, M.J., Sage, M., Tenke, C.E., & Weissman, M.M. (2012). Religiosity and major depression in adults at high risk: A ten-year prospective study. American Journal of Psychiatry 169(1), 89-94. DOI: 10.1176/appi.ajp.2011.10121823 Miller, L., Bansal, R., Wickramaratne, P., Hao, X, Tenke, C.E., Weissman, M.M., & Peterson, B.S. (2014). Neuroanatomical correlates of religiosity and spirituality: A study in adults at high and low familial risk for depression. Journal of the American Medical Association, Psychiatry 71(2), 128-135. DOI: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2013.3067 Miller, L. (2015). The spiritual child. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Plante, T.G., & Thoresen, C.E. (2012). Spiritual development during childhood and adolescence. In L. Miller (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of psychology and spirituality. New York: Oxford. Shoshani, A., & Aviv, I. (2012). The pillars of strength for first-grade adjustment: Parental and children’s character strengths and the transition to elementary school. The Journal of Positive Psychology 7(4), 315-326. DOI: 10.1080/17439760.2012.691981 Sloan, R.P. & Bagiella, E. (2002). Claims about religious involvement and health. Annals of Behavioral Medicine 24(1), 14-21. DOI: 10.1207/S15324796ABM2401_0 Wagener, L.M. & Maloney, H.N. (2006). Spiritual and religious pathology in childhood and adolescence. In E. Roehlkepartain, P.E. King, L. Wagener, & P. L. Benson (Eds.), The handbook of spiritual development in childhood and adolescence (p.137-149). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.   Read Full Transcript Transcript Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  We have a bit of a different episode lined up for today: we’re looking at the book Your Spiritual Child by Dr. Lisa Miller.  I was chatting with some parents in a Facebook group a while back and mentioned that I’m always looking for podcast episode topics, so one of them suggested I do an episode on this book.  My first thought was “well that doesn’t really sound like my cup of tea but I’ll read the book and see where it goes from there.” So I read the book and I was pretty surprised – Dr. Miller makes all sorts of claims about the integral role that spirituality can play in a child’s development.  Her thesis is that children are naturally spiritual and that by not allowing them to develop this quality we’re depriving them of an essential ingredient in their success.  The really surprising part to me, though, was that her claims are underpinned by actual scientific research.  So I emailed Dr. Miller and said “hey, I’m an atheist but I read your book and I’d love to interview you on the show so we can dig into this and both my listeners and I can understand it better.”  She initially responded with something along the lines of “sounds great!” but we had some scheduling difficulties and then I stopped hearing back from her.  While the scheduling attempts were going on I was doing all the background research I normally do for an interview and I started to get more and more worried.  I was finding discrepancies between the outcomes of studies Dr. Miller referenced and the way she was describing them in the book -not in all cases, but in enough that I wanted to understand the issues further.  In the end I emailed her and told her what I’d found, explained that I was really interested in a rigorous intellectual discussion and didn’t have any malicious intent, and invited her again to be on the show but she didn’t respond.  I told her it would be a bit of a bummer to have spent all this time doing research and not have an episode to show for it so I would plan to go ahead and run it without her if she decided not to participate – so here we are. So, let’s start with the book.  Dr. Miller defines spirituality as “an inner sense of living relationship to a higher power, which might be God, nature spirit, universe, the creator, or whatever your word is for the ultimate loving, guiding life-force.”  The important thing here is that spirituality is not tied to religion – it’s about an individual’s personal relationship with the transcendent, not about how organized religion might shape that experience.  We know this through the results of a study of White, Caucasian twins in Virginia by Kenneth Kendler, which asked the twins about their experience of spirituality religion as part of understanding whether these could be protective against substance abuse.  Researchers like to study twins because it’s the closest thing we have to two people who are identical but still have important differences between them, like their experience of spirituality.  Dr Miller says that “by comparing monozygotic (which are twins from the same egg and who are thus genetically identical) with dizygotic twins (which came from two different eggs fertilized at the same time and are thus genetically different), our tendencies around personal devotion are due 29% to broad heritability, 24% to family environment, and 47% to our own personal unique environment.  Now I actually couldn’t find this result in Kendler’s study.  These specific findings aren’t discussed.  It’s possible Dr. Miller worked with the statistical results provided and devised these percentages, but they are not found in the paper.  Later in the book she calls him her “senior colleage,” so I wonder if she had access to data not described in the paper.  In the paper, Dr. Kendler finds that age and number of years of education are positively associated with personal devotion (which is what Dr. Miller calls transcendental relationships) and that none of the three dimensions of religiosity differed between monozygotic and dizygotic twins, although he doesn’t mention these differences for  personal devotion. The study did that personal spirituality is a different thing from religious affiliation, which was another point that Dr Miller made, and this was corroborated by a follow-up study by Dr. Kendler.  The first study also found that both spirituality and religion are associated with lower levels of alcohol and tobacco use which is something we’ll get to again later.  Spirituality was inversely associated with depressive symptoms, indicating that people who experience spirituality are less likely to experience depression, and this actually wasn’t the case for religion.  But other than these findings, there were no significant correlations between spirituality or religiosity and any of 27 other mental illnesses. It seems as though organized religion is at a bit of a crossroads in the U.S..  A Gallup poll that’s updated annually finds that the percentage of people reporting ‘none’ as their religion is increasing, and people reporting that they have a great deal of confidence in the church or organized religion is declining, while people who say they have ‘very little’ confidence in these organizations is increasing.  Yet 89% of people asked in 2016 if they believe in God will say “yes”- and that’s down from the 96% who believed in 1944, but it’s still really high.  So what do all these people who believe in God but don’t believe that organized religion has the answers tell their children?  Dr. Miller quotes some parents she’s talked with as saying “I don’t want to share my views about spiritual things because I’m not so sure myself.  I could say something to steer my child in the wrong direction.”  Another said “I’m just not sure how to put it.  There is almost nothing at all for parents that helps us talk about spirituality, other than religion.  But I’m not religious and I don’t like the way religion was taught to me.”  Many parents they know they don’t want organized religion for their children, but they don’t know what else to replace it with. Dr. Miller goes on to quote these studies from Dr. Keller a number of other times, so in each case I tried to corroborate the evidence from an alternate source.  I did find one from Professor Ralph Piedmont of Loyola University, who wondered if spirituality could be considered a dimension making up a person that’s different from the other traits that make up a personality and found that transcendence does indeed appear to be a different component of personality than other characteristics.  So these studies point to the idea that at least a part of our spirituality is a genetic component of our makeup, and not something that is something we learn through exposure to organized religion. Dr. Miller’s second major finding is that while we might notice elements of and a curiosity about spirituality in young children it really comes into its own in adolescence.  This fits with reading I’ve been doing for my classwork on adolescent development, related to the identity exploration that adolescents go through as they ‘try on’ different identities to see which one fits them.  It turns out that teenage angst and not wanting to be around parents very much are developmentally necessary things for adolescents to go through as they figure out who they are as separate beings from their parents. My expectation would have been that the influence of biology decreases over time as the child is exposed to more experiences over the course of her life but a study by Dr. Tanya Button at the University of Colorado finds that at age 14, the largest impact on a teen’s spirituality is from her family, but by age 19 it is primarily shaped by her biology – in other words, the biological changes of puberty and adolescence.  When the researchers looked at the underlying causes of that shift they found that it was about half due to the force of genetic expression, or the “unlocking of the window” as Dr. Miller puts it, and the other half to the personal environment that the teens create as they go through the search for their identity – things like going to a youth group or to church, or trying meditation.  This shift in the influence of heritability was corroborated by Dr. Laura Koenig at the University of Minnesota using another twin study, so we can be reasonably sure about the conclusion that there is a surge in the importance of biological factors in determining an adolescent’s interest in spirituality.   So all of this brings us to the question “why should we care about spirituality?” It’s nice to believe nice things about the world and the people in it, but are there any real benefits to being spiritual?  And this gets to the heart of the issues I was having as I read through the research that Dr. Miller draws on for the book.  Because as far as she is concerned, the evidence is pretty cut and dried – but it seems to me that it’s rather less so. So let’s take a look.  We’ll start with young children: Dr. Anat Shoshani studied 479 five-year-old children in Israel to find out what kinds of characteristics are linked to a child’s adjusting well to school.  Dr. Miller reports that “the degree of the child’s transcendent strengths, based on spirituality, hope, humor, and gratitude, was more predictive of teacher’s ratings on school adjustment than the child’s other inborn capacities of intellect or temperament.”  But it turns out that that’s not what the study really said – it looked at four different types of school adjustment – cognitive, behavioral, social, and emotional.  Transcendent characteristics were indeed better related to good emotional adjustment (by a really tiny amount in some cases), but for cognitive, behavioral and social adjustment there were other factors that were more important than transcendent strengths in every case.  In fact, transcendent strengths weren’t even among the top four factors for cognitive and behavioral adjustment.  This study also brings up a methodological issue related to the study of spirituality – this Israeli study was the only one I saw that included hope and humor as definitions of a transcendent strength, and it’s entirely possible that these factors aren’t really related to spirituality at all. Dr. Miller has done a lot of work related to spirituality and depression.  She and her colleagues did a study looking at MRIs of people with a high risk for depression; some of these people reported that religion or spirituality was important in their lives, while some said it wasn’t.  They found that the outer layer of the brain, called the cortex, was thicker in some places where people reported a high degree of religiousness and spirituality, and that a thinner cortex is associated with a certain type of familial risk of depression.  They caution that they can’t say which causes which; or even if one causes another – it’s possible that people with thicker cortices like to go to church or perhaps people who go to church altered the cortical thickness. In another study, Dr. Miller found that adults who reported that religion or spirituality was highly important to them had about a quarter the risk of experiencing major depression over the next 10 years compared with other participants, and that this effect was most pronounced among those who were at higher risk for depression by having a depressed parent., who had about one tenth the risk of depression over the next 10 years than those who didn’t find religion or spirituality important.  This protective effect was found primarily against the recurrence rather than the onset of depression, which wasn’t adequately explained in the results – it’s not clear to me why spirituality wouldn’t protect you from getting depressed in the first place, but it does protect you from getting depressed again.  Yet in another of Dr. Miller’s studies, she assesses the impact of maternal religiosity as a protective factor against depression in offspring.  One of her major points in that work is that “overall the findings do not support the hypothesis that offspring religiosity is protective against offspring major depressive disorder.”  Another finding, that if mother and child has similar spiritual beliefs then the child is less likely to experience depression WAS cited in The Spiritual Child, but it’s not clear to me why she reports that finding but not the other finding that contradicts some of her other work. Dr. Miller also looked at how spirituality and religiosity is associated with substance use and abuse in adolescents – and this is one of the few studies on spirituality...

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

Have you ever wondered why your child acts up?  Is it because they really want to annoy you or because they’re trying to tell you something?   In this conversation Dr. Claudia Gold helps us to understand that what we call ADHD – an extreme example of a child’s “acting up” – is not a known biological process but rather a collection of behaviors that often go together.  We might call them “symptoms,” but they aren’t symptoms in the way that a cough is a symptom of pneumonia.   Instead, Dr. Gold argues that by medicating the symptoms (i.e. the “difficult behavior”) we ignore the underlying problems that are causing them which ultimately doesn’t help the child – or the family.   Whether your child has been diagnosed with ADHD, whether you suspect it, or whether you’re struggling with run-of-the-mill behavior problems, Dr. Gold has practical advice to help you.   Taming Your Triggers If you need help with your own big feelings about your child’s behavior, register for the Taming Your Triggers waitlist. We’ll help you to: Understand the real causes of your triggered feelings, and begin to heal the hurts that cause themUse new tools like the ones Katie describes to find ways to meet both her and her children’s needsEffectively repair with your children on the fewer instances when you are still triggered Click the banner to learn more!     Dr. Claudia Gold's Book The Silenced child: From labels, medications, and quick-fix solutions to listening, growth, and lifelong resilience - Affiliate link   Reference Gold, C.M. (2016). The silenced child: From labels, medications, and quick-fix solutions to listening, growth, and lifelong resilience. Boston, MA: Da Capo Press.

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

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

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