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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, sign up for the Taming Your Triggers masterclass. 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 Get instant access for $7. Click the banner to sign up!! Dr. Claudia Gold's Book The Silenced child: From labels, medications, and quick-fix solutions to listening, growth, and lifelong resilience - Affiliate link   Reference Gold, C.M. (2016). The silenced child: From labels, medications, and quick-fix solutions to listening, growth, and lifelong resilience. Boston, MA: Da Capo Press. Read Full Transcript Transcript Jen: [00:30] Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. In today’s episode, we’re going to learn a lot about the science of what’s going on behind a child’s difficult behavior, including the behavior that is often described as a symptom of ADHD. I’d like to extend a warm welcome to my guest, Dr. Claudia Gold MD. Dr. Gold is a pediatrician and writer with a longstanding interest in addressing children’s mental health care in a preventive model. She’s practiced general and behavioral pediatrics for 25 years and currently specializes in early childhood mental health. Dr Gold’s latest book is The Silenced Child: From Labels, Medications, and Quick Fix Solutions to Listening, Growth, and Life-Long Resilience. Welcome Dr. Gold. Thank you so much for joining us. Dr. Gold:   [01:11] Thank you for having me. Jen:  [01:12] So you spent a while running an ADHD practice earlier in your career, right? Dr. Gold: [01:17] Well, as part of a general pediatrics practice, yes. Jen: [01:20] Okay. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that experience and how it contributed to your feeling the need to write this book? Dr. Gold: [01:27] Well, um, I think it was because there were the visits allotted were generally 30 minutes long. Kids came in not with a plan to just listen to them but rather for what was termed in ADHD evaluation. So it was almost like we had decided what was the problem before we even spoke to them and it was, I found that it was really not sufficient time to understand what was going on in the family and then the kind of standard of care for treatment of ADHD is to see kids every three months and to just have them have their medication refilled. And again, it was not nearly enough time to really understand all the complexities in their lives. So then when I practiced behavioral pediatrics so that I was able to have appointments that were longer and I would sit with these families and, and listen in more depth, I would really come to appreciate all of the factors that were impacting on the child’s behavior and able to have a much broader view than the opportunities given me by the kind of standard of care in pediatrics. Jen: [02:39] And what might some of those factors be that could influence behavior that’s like ADHD? Dr. Gold: [02:44] Oh, well there are, for example, um, I had one family where, uh, there was significant amount of a substance abuse in the family that was untreated and unaddressed, one child who actually had experienced the death of a parent and was being raised by a step parent with things that had never been addressed or acknowledged stresses on kids, that people just felt didn’t really impact on kids that were young. Which of course we know is not the case. So I think so there were, you know, dramatic things like that. Other things that I began that I, in the course of my practice, I began to have a great respect for, um, challenges of sensory processing, not to say that kids have a sensory processing disorder per se because I don’t really like to think in terms of disorder, but I really have gained an appreciation of how a kid’s sensory experience of the world is very intimately intertwined with the way their emotional experience and a lot of kids who have the ADHD label based on just sort of a basic checklist have for much of their lives, had challenges in this area that have not been addressed. So those are a couple of the things that I was able to uncover. Jen: [04:12] It seems as though the traditional approach to ADHD like a lot of other childhood behavioral problems is really to just focus on the behavior and if you fix the behavior, you’ve fixed the problem. Can you tell us how you think differently from that; what do you think difficult behavior really is? Dr. Gold:  [04:28] Well, I think again, what the science shows us is that behavior is a form of communication and babies actually, even from birth have the ability to communicate with us through their behavior. So and when we look at the meaning of their behavior, again, in my first book, I talk a lot about the decades of research showing us that when, when the people who care for children are curious about the meaning of behavior, then we help them to develop the ability to think about their own feelings, to have better capacity for emotional regulation, to have better social skills, to have better thinking skills and really develop the capacity for resilience. So to kind of be concrete about it. I would have a family come in and say, well, we can’t get our child ready to go out the door. And so he’s very disorganized and loses things and all those very typical ADHD symptoms so that, uh, if we. Yeah, and you know, it’s true that the medications for ADHD are very effective at getting, eliminating me symptoms at least in the short term. but then when you dig a little deeper, you find, for example, a kid is very disorganized, is extremely anxious and so they are so focused on, let’s say, whether or not their parent is going to pick them up because a lot of kids who experienced a lot of anxiety or have separation anxiety. So let’s say that kid is worried the entire day and spending all of their energy worrying about whether or not their parent is going to pick them up so they don’t have the ability to spend the time to put the right piece of paper in the right folder so that underlying their disorganization is some significant issue in relationships. And so when we just treat the symptom, that’s just one of a gazillion examples I could give you. We just treat the symptom. We don’t get to hear what the child’s behavior is communicating and it’s when we hear that, what it’s communicating that we know what to do about it. Jen:  06:42 And it seems to me as the central thesis of the book, is that our healthcare system is really geared towards this treating of the symptoms. And if you’ll indulge me, I just want to read a paragraph from the book you say, “I recently had the opportunity to teach a seminar and infant mental health to the child psychiatry fellows at a major teaching hospital of just spending an hour giving an overview of contemporary research on infant mental health. I presented a case of a seven year old boy with a very complex family and developmental history. I then turned to the group and the how they would make sense of his behavior. A fellow responded without pause, ‘I would see if he met the DSM, the diagnostic and statistical manual I think it is, criteria for a mood disorder, and then consider prescribing an SSRI. A similarly complex case was met by this question from the head of psychiatry: ‘Do the parents need parent training or does the child have ADHD and need medication?'” And it almost seems as though the medical professionals in the system that we’ve set up for ourselves don’t have any time or energy or something to understand these underlying symptoms. And instead, the treat that behavior is, is the first thing that that happens. Dr. Gold: [07:52] Right. I mean, I think time is certainly lacking. I also think that a basic understanding is lacking because, and a language to talk about this because in child psychiatry training, there’s really minimal to no discussion of development and relationships. I know that sounds shocking. It’s very much based on diagnosis, and treatment often with medication so that there’s no language, there’s no way to think about, well, how do we make sense of what happened to this person in their infancy and how that connects with who they are today at the age of seven, and that’s what we need in order to really understand what’s going on for a kid, how kids develop the ability to regulate their attention, to regulate their emotions, to regulate their behaviors. And then once we understand that, then we know again, what kinds of things to do to help. But the psychiatrists don’t even have a way to ask about that or to think it. And that’s why they ended up with a very limited toolbox, which is just to look at the behavior and then eliminate the behavior. Jen: [09:04] Yeah, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about how we transition from childhood to adulthood and how we treat adults and how we treat child children and how those two are different than you and I tend to think we have something going on between our ears. We agree and acknowledge that we have feelings and that sometimes it’s nice to have someone listen to these feelings and acknowledge them and also that those feelings impact our behavior. But it seems as though a lot of people feel as though children don’t and that all that matters is their behavior. And I guess I’m curious as to your thoughts as to when we make that shift, to the child is a person who, who has feelings that really impact what their behavior is as they get older. And whereas in the beginning it was just the child has behavior. How does that shift occur, do you think? Dr. Gold:   [09:55] That’s a great question. I mean, it really should occur when the baby is born. Jen: [10:01] I agree. Dr. Gold: [10:03] Yeah. I mean, I, and that’s what, and in fact, the work I do is with something called a newborn behavioral observation system where we go in and work with parents and babies from birth because of baby, even a very young baby can communicate. For example, I was talking about the sensory issues. A baby who is born with a particular intense response to touch, let’s say for example, not that there’s anything wrong with them, but that baby may cry and cry and cry when they’re swaddled and then when you put them down, they stop crying. So that’s how they’re communicating through their behavior. And they have tremendous capacity to do that from very early on, but we just need to be paying attention to it and take the time to listen to what their behavior is communicating. And it takes what it means to listen to a child takes different forms at different ages. Dr. Gold: [10:58] So for example, with toddlers, a toddler with out of control behavior may may seem like he’s trying to make your life miserable, but what he actually made me communicating is that he feels out of control and he’s looking for you to help him to set limits to, to contain his big angry feelings. So depending on where the child is developmentally, the way they communicate is different. But the idea is the same that when we take the time to listen to what the behavior is communicating, then we help them to get through it in a way that’s much more effective than if we just put kids in time out, for example. Jen: [11:41] Yeah. I actually just yesterday interviewed Julie King, who is the coauthor of a new book, How to Talk so Little Kids Will Listen based on How to Talk so Kids Will Listen, and Listen so Kids Will Talk. They are producing a new edition for the two to seven crowd. Um, and so that, that interview will be on hold until the book is released in January and yours will probably go out before this. But I think that what you’re saying is very much in line with what she is saying, which is that that behavior isn’t just, what you said is it’s not just a way to annoy you or something, that children do to drive you crazy as a parent that it is designed to communicate something or maybe even not designed. It’s, it just does communicate something. Um, if we can pay attention to that, you know, may, maybe we can respond better in the moment, but even if we can’t, as a parent of a young child, I understand that sometimes it’s really hard to take that step back in the moment, but maybe after the fact, what could we do to, if we see something that’s gone wrong, what could we do to try and make it go better next time? Dr. Gold: [12:51] Right. And I think that’s an incredibly important point to highlight, which is that often we don’t know, can’t do the right thing. We don’t do the right thing. And that’s fine. In fact, kids develop in a healthy way when just that process is that things go wrong and we go back and say, wow, that didn’t work out well. So let’s say, you know, the sort of typical scenario of being in the grocery store where your kid is grabbing at, everything and you’re embarrassed and you know, and it’s just a totally impossible thing and you lose your cool because you feel kind of humiliated and you scream at your kid and finally you just leave. And then either you yourself reflect. And if it’s a child who’s old enough to have a conversation about it, you can say, well that didn’t Go well and you can reflect on the fact that maybe the child was overtired and, and you are overtired and perhaps it would have been better to recognize that ahead of time and not go to the store at that time. But you know, you got through it. It was a bad moment. You learn from it and you move on. Jen:  [13:53] Yeah. Yeah. And it seems as though I’ve heard from other sources that, that that acknowledgement process within yourself. But also with the child, if they’re old enough to understand is really a critical process, right? Dr. Gold: [14:06] Exactly. And it’s, you know, the inevitably life is full of disruptions like that, so you don’t want everything

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

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

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

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

  So, does your child ever throw tantrums?  Yes?  Well, the good news is that you’re not alone.  And this isn’t something us Western parents have brought upon ourselves with our strange parenting ways; they’re actually fairly common (although not universal) in other cultures as well.   What causes a tantrum?  And what can parents do to both prevent tantrums from occurring and cope with them more effectively once they start?  Join us today to learn more.   Taming Your Triggers If you need help with your own big feelings about your child’s behavior, sign up for the Taming Your Triggers masterclass. 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   Get instant access for $7. Click the banner to sign up!!     Jump to highlights 00:35 Introduction in today’s episode 01:00 The 1st, last and only detailed research about this subject was published in 1931 then the research went quiet until the 1980’s even since then there’s only little information about this subject because tantrums can be hard to study at home 01:56 Age bracket of children that have tantrums and this is the most common childhood behavior according to parents 02:30 Tantrums may occur in other cultures according to Robert and Sarah LeVine’s recent book Do Parents Matter? 03:12 David Lancy’s book The Anthropology of Childhood cites several studies of other cultures that mention tantrum-like behavior. 04:55 Florence Goodenough wrote a book that was published in 1939 that described tantrums implied that this is not a new phenomenon 06:30 Children who have older siblings have more frequent outbursts than first-born children 09:29 Goodenough asked parents at the beginning of the study what methods of controlling tantrums 12:15 Negotiation is considered to be a valued ability because it can bring about solutions to problems that come as close as possible to satisfying everyone 13:45 The studies found that maternal use of induction techniques was related to social competence, even across time, during the preschool period 14:58 Wrapping up the discussion   References Denham, S.A., & Burton, R. (2003). Social and emotional prevention and intervention programming for preschoolers. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers Green, J.A., Whitney, P.G., & Potegal, M. (2011). Screaming, yelling, whining, and crying: Categorical and intensity differences in vocal expressions of anger and sadness in children’s tantrums. Emotion 11(5), 1124-1133. DOI: 10.1037/a0024173 Goodenough, F. (1931). Anger in young children. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lancy, D.F. (2015). The anthropology of childhood: Cherubs, chattel, changelings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levine, L.J. (1995). Young children’s understanding of the causes of anger and sadness. Child Development 66(2), 697-709. LeVine, R., & LeVine, S. (2016). Do parents matter? Why Japanese babies sleep soundly, Mexican siblings don’t fight, and American families should just relax. New York: Public Affairs. Lieberman, M.D., Eisenberger, N.E., Crockett, M.J., Tom, S.M., Pfeifer, J.H., & Way, B.M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science 18(5), 421-428.

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

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

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

  (Believe it or not, this is Carys’ “I freaking love homemade spinach ravioli with broccoli” face!)   I was sitting in a restaurant recently with half an eye on a toddler and his parents at the next table. The parents were trying to get the toddler to eat some of his broccoli before he ate the second helping of chicken that he was asking for. All of a sudden a line from Pink Floyd’s album “The Wall” popped into my head: If you don’t eat yer meat, you can’t have any pudding. How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat yer meat? This is the way I was raised; you finish everything on your plate and you certainly don’t get dessert if you don’t finish your meal. But as is the custom with the Your Parenting Mojo podcast, I want to use this episode to question why we do this and find out what scientific research has to say about it all. We want our toddlers to eat a balanced diet, and we assume we have to teach them what a balanced diet means. But do we really? Or can we trust that our children will eat the foods that they need to be healthy? These are some of the questions we’ll set out to answer in this episode.   Jump to highlights 00:36 Introduction of episode 01:39 The first book to be published about children's eating behavior was 1939 by Clara Mae Davis 03:25 Current dietary guidelines from 2010, state that children with some specific age range should get an applicable calory supply 04:57 The children didn't have the availability of all kinds of food 07:37 What causes children to like fruits and vegetables 09:27 The more we control what our children eat, the less control we seem to have over it 12:59 How would parents deal with this discussion   References Benton, D. (2004). Role of parents in the determination of the food preferences of children and the development of obesity. International Journal of Obesity 28, 858-869. DOI: 10.1038/sj.ijo.0802532 Birch LL. (1980). Effects of peer models’ food choices and eating behaviors on preschoolers’ food preferences. Child Development 51, 489–496. Birch, LL., Marlin, D.W., & Rotter, J. (1984). Eating as the ‘means’ activity in a contingency: Effects on young children’s food preferences. Child Development 55, 432-439. Retrieved from: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1129954?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents Birch, L.L., & Fisher, J.O. (1998). Development of eating behaviors among children and adolescents. Pediatrics 101 Issue supplement 2. Retrieved from: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/101/Supplement_2/539 Birch, L.L., Fisher, J.O., Grimm-Thomas, K., Markey, C.N., Sawyer, R., & Johnson, S.L. (2001). Confirmatory factor analysis of the Child Feeding Questionnaire: A measure of parental attitudes, beliefs and practices about child feeding and obesity proneness. Appetite 36, 201-210. DOI: 10.1006/appe.2001.0398 Davis, C.M. (1939). Results of the self-selection of diets by young children. Canadian Medical Association Journal 41, 257-61. Full article available at: www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=537465&blobtype=pdf Fisher, J.O., & Birch, L.L. (1999). Restricting access to foods and children’s eating. Appetite 32(3), 405-419. DOI: 10.1006/appe.1999.0231 Hughes, S.O., Power, T.G., Orlet Fisher, J., Mueller, S., & Nicklas, T.A. (2005). Revisiting a neglected construct: Parenting styles in a child feeding context. Appetite 44(1), 83-92. DOI: 10.1016/j.appet.2004.08.007 Jansen, E., Mulkens, S., & Jansen, A. (2007). Do not eat the red food!: Prohibition of snacks leads to their relatively higher consumption in children. Appetite 49(3), 572-577. DOI: 10.1016/j.appet.2007.03.229 Jansen, E., Mulkens, S., Emond, Y., & Jansen, A. (2008). From the Garden of Eden to the land of plenty: Restriction of fruit and sweets intake leads to increased fruit and sweets consumption in children. Appetite 51(3), 570-575. DOI: 10.1016/j.appet.2008.04.012 Newman, J., & Taylor, A. (1992). Effect of a means-end contingency on young children’s food preferences. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 64, 200-216. DOI: 10.1016/0022-0965(92)90049-C Pink Floyd (1979). Another brick in the wall – Part 2. London, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Lyrics retrieved from: http://www.pink-floyd-lyrics.com/html/another-brick-2-wall.html Savage, J.S., Fisher, J.O., & Birch, L.L. (2007). Parental influence on eating behavior. Journal of Law, Medicine, & Ethics 35(1), 22-34. DOI: 10.1111/j.1748-720X.2007.00111.x U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2010). Dietary guidelines for Americans: 2010. Full report available at: https://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/dga2010/dietaryguidelines2010.pdf Ventura, A.K., Gromis, J.C., & Lohse, B. (2010). Feeding practices and styles used by a diverse set of low-income parents of preschool-age children. Journal of nutrition education and behavior 42(4), 242-249. Retrieved from: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S149940460900284X   Read Full Transcript Transcript Hello and welcome to episode 7 of the Your Parenting Mojo podcast, which is called Help!  My toddler won’t eat vegetables!  I decided on the theme for this episode when I was sitting in a restaurant with half an eye on a toddler and his parents at the next table.  The parents were trying to get the toddler to eat some of his broccoli before he ate the second helping of chicken that he was asking for.  All of a sudden a line from Pink Floyd’s album “The Wall” popped into my head: “If you don’t eat yer meat, you can’t have any pudding.  How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat yer meat?”  This is the way I was raised; you finish everything on your plate and you certainly don’t get dessert if you don’t finish your meal.  But as is the custom with the Your Parenting Mojo podcast, I want to use this episode to question why we do this and find out what scientific research has to say about it all.  We want our toddlers to eat a balanced diet, and we assume we have to teach them what a balanced diet means.  But do we really?  Or can we trust that our children will eat the foods that they need to be healthy?  These are some of the questions we’ll set out to answer today. Perhaps you might be as surprised as I was to find that the single study that grounds virtually all current research on children and eating was published in 1939 by a pediatrician named Clara Mae Davis.  She convinced unmarried and widowed mothers who couldn’t support their families to place their children into an orphanage in Chicago.  Davis then recorded every single thing 15 children ate over the first 4 ½ years of their lives after they were weaned.  In addition she recorded their height, weight, bowel movements, bone radiographs and blood tests at various intervals during those years. But the really interesting part of the study is what she offered the children to eat and how she offered it.  She created a menu of 34 different foods, all procured fresh and minimally prepared.  Some of the foods were milk, apples, turnips, lettuce, oatmeal, barley, beef, bone marrow, brains, and haddock.  The 34 foods were selected because collectively they offered the complete set of nutrients needed by a growing person although of course they weren’t all served at once – about 10 were prepared and served at once to offer a wide variety of foods at each meal. The nurses feeding the children were not allowed to directly offer or even suggest that the children try a particular food.  Only after the child reached for or pointed to a dish could the nurse put some food on a spoon and, if the child opened his mouth, put it in.  The nurse wasn’t allowed to comment on what the child ate or didn’t eat, attract his attention to food or refuse him any food.  The child could eat with his fingers if he wanted and no correction of his manners was offered.  The tray of food was taken away when the child had definitively stopped eating, usually after 20-25 minutes. As Clara Mae Davis noted, the remarkable thing about the results in this study is that nothing remarkable happened.  All of the children had hearty appetites.  Constipation was never an issue and other than mild colds, they rarely got sick. Five children were malnourished at the beginning of the study and all were healthy by the end.  The children ate, on average, roughly the caloric intake recommended by both the nutritional standards in place at the time as well as the standards we use today.  Current  dietary guidelines published in 2010 state that children aged 1-3 should get 5-20% of their calories from protein, 45-65% from carbohydrates, and 30-40% from fat; the percentages shift slightly in favor of protein and away from fat for children 4-18 years old.  In Davis’ 1939 study the average distribution of calories per kilogram of body weight was 17% protein, 35% fat, and 48% carbohydrates.  Individual children might have had protein intakes as low as 9% or as high as 20% – all still within the dietary guidelines.  So the children in Davis’ study met dietary guidelines developed sixty years afterwards, with all of the knowledge we have now and didn’t have then about how the body works, and they did this by themselves with no information or encouragement at all from anyone else, which I think is absolutely remarkable. I should also say that, as you may have observed with your own children, the children in the study were consistently inconsistent with the types and amounts of foods that they ate.  One child had a pint of orange juice and liver for breakfast; another had several eggs, bananas, and milk for dessert.  No single meal was what we would think of as “balanced” when we put a plate of meat, potatoes, and vegetables down in front of our child – but the children’s diets were on average extremely well-balanced. Now the kicker in all of this for us, of course, is that the children didn’t have unlimited availability of all kinds of food.  Vegetarians and vegans might argue with me about the health properties of animal products but the foods presented to the children in the study were selected because together they provided the complete set of nutrients the children needed.  Cereals were whole grains; no sugar or salt was added, butter, cream, and cheese weren’t used, and no canned foods were allowed.  Does that sound like the kind of food you eat at your house?  We do pretty well on the whole grains, but we certainly use all of the other foods that Davis banned from her study.  So if we accept that children can eat a healthy diet if they are presented with only healthy food, our task now is to try to understand how to apply this knowledge in the real world of our everyday lives today. I did a literature review for a paper for the Masters degree in Psychology that I’m working on and I couldn’t find any study that definitively shows what kind of behavior or actions parents can use that will have the outcome of children eating balanced diets in the short- and long-terms, largely because longitudinal studies are really rare (because they’re expensive and you don’t get to publish the results for a long time) and they generally don’t establish causation either.  But I did find a slew of other studies that can help us to understand how to support the development of healthy eating habit in our children. Leann Birch at the University of Georgia seems to be a luminary scholar in this field; if you check out the references for this episode you’ll find that around half of them have her name attached to them – and I wasn’t specifically searching for her work.  She and Jennifer Fisher at Temple University conducted a review of studies related to the development of eating behaviors in children that I’ll delve into in detail, pulling in the results from other studies as well.  Birch and Fisher start by noting the prevalence of obesity in children, some – but not all – of which can be explained by genetics; some of the rest of the explanation could be related to similarities in diet of parents and children: so if parents eat a lot of high-fat food then children are likely to have high-fat food available to them as well..  They note that very little research has been conducted that looks both at energy intake and expenditure, and it takes both sides of that equation to really understand obesity.  Children in the U.S. tend to eat too much fat and not enough complex carbohydrates, which is why public health messages now focus on increasing the amount of fruit, vegetables, and whole grains instead of just eating less fat. But other studies have found that the only significant predictor of increased fruit and vegetable consumption is a preference for fruits and vegetables – in other words, children who like fruits and vegetables eat fruits and vegetables.  So what causes children to like fruits and vegetables?  There’s evidence from several studies that these preferences are formed very early on in children (and also rats) who are breastfed, as children are exposed to the flavors of their mother’s diet through the milk, and as a result breastfed infants initially show greater acceptance of new foods than formula-fed infants. Once children start to wean they are predisposed to prefer sweet and salty tastes, and reject sour and bitter tastes.  They quickly learn to associate flavors with how they feel after eating (and they prefer foods that leave them feeling full).  I’m sure most parents realize that children are predisposed to reject new foods but one study found that 5-10 repeated opportunities to consume new foods can lead to increased acceptance.  So if your child says she doesn’t like a food the first time you offer it to her, keep trying.  Keep trying 5-10 times, and maybe one day she’ll just eat it. Another big topic is modeling of eating behavior.  Since eating tends to be a social occasion for children, the social context of meals becomes a model for the child.  One study showed that when preschoolers watched other children choosing and eating vegetables that the observing child didn’t like, the observing child began to like the vegetable more and ate more of it.  Another found that toddlers put foods in their mouths more readily when their mothers put the same food in their mouths compared to when a stranger did, which may not come as a surprise to any parent whose child wants whatever they’re eating.  When my toddler sees me come out of the kitchen with a bowl in my hands she immediately says “Want some.  What is it?” – because she wants whatever I have before she even knows what it is.  Children also look to their parents to understand what is the right amount to eat.  Studies have shown that dieting daughters are more likely to have dieting mothers, and parents who eat a lot are more likely to have children who eat a lot. I want to delve fairly deeply into the idea of parental control because I think it’s a strategy that a lot of parents try to use without knowing just how completely it can backfire.  Leann Birch has been active in this research as well and in general has found that the more we try to control children’s eating, the less control we seem to have over it.  For example, child-feeding strategies that encourage children to consume a particular food increase children’s dislike for that food, so by encouraging your child to eat more broccoli you decrease their liking for it, and we already saw that the only factor that predicts whether a child eats broccoli is whether she likes broccoli.  A survey of parents found that 40% spontaneously reported that restricting or forbidding the consumption of a certain food would decrease their child’s preference for that food, but research shows the exact opposite: when parents withhold a “bad” food children’s preference for that food increases and intake of the “bad” food can sometimes increase as well.   Esther Jansen and her colleagues at Maastrict University in The Netherlands managed to move beyond the correlations that these types of studies usually offer to demonstrating a causal link between parental control over children’s eating and children’s consumption of snack foods by testing whether prohibiting children from eating snack foods would lead to an increased desire for that food, followed by over-consumption once the restriction was removed.  The researchers provided children with two bowls of M&Ms (one containing yellow and the other red M&Ms), and two bowls of salty chips (one yellow; the other red).  Some children were instructed not to eat the red foods, were then asked how much they wanted to eat the red foods an how full they felt, and in a later test they were allowed to eat as much as they liked from any bowl.  These results were compared with those from children who were allowed to eat freely throughout the experiment.  The children who weren’t allowed to eat the red food consumed more of the red food in proportion to yellow foods, although they didn’t actually consume more food altogether.  And we should note that the authors of this study should be commended for demonstrating causation rather than just correlation, it isn’t clear to what extent the findings of this highly controlled lab study are applicable in a home setting where a wider variety of foods that may be equally unpalatable (like broccoli AND green beans) might the things children get to choose between. And what about the issue of the amount children eat?  It turns out that even infants are capable of regulating their caloric intake.  One set of researchers added more or less formula to the bottles of six week-old infants, and found that the infants drank more of the formula that was more watery so their overall caloric intake was the same as the infants who drank less of a stronger solution.  But parents who bottle feed might inadvertently pressure their child to override the child’s hunger cues by getting the child to finish the last bit of liquid in the bottle – I remember doing this with my daughter as well when she drank pumped milk from a bottle.  You don’t want to waste something that’s such a hassle to get in the first place!  Leann Birch did another study that essentially replicated this with children who were eating solid food – they adjusted the fat and carbohydrate content of the first course of a meal to make it more or less energy dense, and then tested how many calories were eaten in a second course and in subsequent meals.  She, too, found that children were able to self-regulate their caloric intake both within the same meal and also across the remainder of the 24-hour period.  But when researchers asked parents to reward children for cleaning their plates, the children stopped responding to the different energy density of the foods and began eating more in response to the rewards.  Another set of researchers noticed that parental prompts to eat were correlated with both time spent eating and the level of obesity in children, and also that these prompts to eat almost always followed food refusals by the child.  So the child says she’s not hungry; the