Liann did not have an easy entry into motherhood.  Her first child’s birth was pretty traumatic; it was followed by a miscarriage and then very quickly by another pregnancy.   And then by COVID.   She was already overwhelmed and then everyone was isolated…and suddenly Liann had a whole lot of anger that she hadn’t seen before.  She didn’t think things could be more difficult than they were in the immediate postpartum period…and then they were.   Her toddler, Hewitt, resented the new baby: Liann would be sitting on the couch nursing the baby and Hewitt is rolling on the floor shouting “NO BABY!  NO BABY!”   Transitions weren’t a problem before, but now they couldn’t make it out the door to go anywhere.   Liann doesn’t deny that she was looking for a quick fix.  She wanted Hewitt’s difficult behavior to stop, so she could stop feeling so freaking angry.   She listened to a few of my podcast episodes and realized that she had no self-compassion.  She saw that she could be compassionate toward other people in her life, but she was unable to extend that compassion to herself (and I know she’s not alone here: this is incredibly common among the parents I work with).  Every time one of her children had a meltdown it felt like a personal attack on her worth as a person.   It wasn’t a linear path for Liann to see things differently; she initially doubted that the new tools she was learning would be useful.  She was out on a hike with them when they started whining and she realized they were tired and hungry…and so was she…but how did that help?     Then she started to believe that things could be different; that there could be another way.   She stopped taking everything so personally, which created space for her to be able to see what her children were asking for, instead of seeing their expression of needs as an attack on her for not having anticipated and met them already.   And she also started to understand her own needs, and how she could meet these in ways that might seem unconventional, and that wouldn’t work for everyone, but they worked for her.  And that’s the important thing: it doesn’t matter whether the solution they came up with would work for anyone else, just like the solutions that will work for you and your child might not work for anyone else.  What matters is that they work for the two of you.   Hear what the solution was that worked for Liann and her son after he’d been demanding that she put him to bed and nobody else - as well as how she’s learned to ask for and accept help from friends, and how she’s no longer fazed by a baby who has covered every inch of themselves and their crib with poop.   Liann experienced a number of non-cognitive shifts as she went through the Taming Your Triggers workshop, which is where you don’t just believe something different to be true in your head, but that you take it on in your entire body as well.  At that point you no longer have to constantly remind yourself about what you’re supposed to do in difficult moments, because the knowledge isn’t just in your head - it’s in your body as well.  Then it becomes part of the fabric of how you live your life with your child.   We can’t know when and how these will happen, but I will say that almost everyone I’ve seen really apply themselves in the workshop does experience a non-cognitive shift of some kind, and it isn’t always what they were expecting it to be about, but it does help them to see things in a different way, which opens up space for them to meet their child’s needs and their own needs as well.   Taming Your Triggers will be open for enrollment soon.  You’ll get:   One module of content each week for 10 weeks: all the detail you need, and none you don’t Access to a private community of parents who will process this new knowledge alongside you, and even for you, as they explain what’s going on for them and you realize that you’re experiencing the same thing The opportunity to be matched with an AccountaBuddy to hold you gently accountable to complete the workshop, and deepen your understanding of the content Optional small group coaching with me if you know you need more support (for an additional fee)   As with everything I do, sliding scale pricing is available and so is a money-back guarantee.   And if you’d like to work directly with Liann, she’s actually coming back this time around as a peer coach!  She (and our two other amazing peer coaches) will be in the workshop every few days, offering support and guidance from their perspective as parents who are a few months further along their journeys to Tame their Triggers.  We’re both excited to meet you!   Sign up for the waitlist now. Click the banner to learn more.         Jump to highlights (02:21) Getting to know Liann's family dynamic (04:08) The difficulties Liann experienced in her early journey as a parent including postpartum depression (05:32) Liann felt overwhelmed by his son's constant expression of "big feelings" (06:32) What inspired Liann to sign up for the Taming Your Triggers workshop after listening to Jen’s podcast episode entitled "Patriarchy is Perpetuated Through Parenting" (10:52) Lian's explorations into learning her family's needs and her own needs (15:12) Ways Lian started to see her needs as equally as important as her child's needs (16:10) The process that Lian and her partner used to overcome their son's difficulties with bedtime (19:49) Our child learns that we all have the right to set boundaries about what feels right to us and that they have the right to do that too (21:51) By being honest with herself, Lian was able to show self-compassion towards her sister during a difficult situation (25:33) The positive impact of the community on Lian and her family (30:03) Liann felt her need wasn’t important because of the White supremacy that showed up in her family of origin (33:03) The practices that Lian does to break the cycle of White supremacy in her family (38:42) How non-cognitive shift can help us progress in any work we do (41:15) The funny poop story of Liann’s child, and her response at that moment which she hadn’t seen in herself before (45:32) Big shift that Liann manifests when her need for rest is met

I know it can be really difficult to navigate all the events happening in the world today.  It seems like things are falling apart, with wars, climate change-caused drought and wildfires in some areas and flooding in others, with hunger not following far behind.  And things aren’t any better on the political front either.   When difficult things happen out there in the world, they spill over into our relationships with our children.  We suddenly find ourselves snapping at them far more easily than usual.  The things they do that are normally mildly irritating now push us to the limit, and we end up reacting to them in ways that we don’t like.     In this episode we discuss the reasons why you feel emotionally yanked around by things that are happening out there in the wider world, as well as by the ways these things are discussed online and in our families as well.     We look at the tools you can use to regulate your emotions when this happens…but also that regulating your emotions and then voting to express your feelings about how the world should be isn’t going to make a meaningful difference.  We learn tools you can use instead to create a sense of autonomy, which reduces stress and also change the circumstances themselves so they are less triggering in the future.   If you know you need support with your triggered feelings, whether these are related to:   Events that are going in in the wider world Seeing discussion of those events online or hearing about them from family members or friends Traumatic events that you experienced in your childhood Events in your childhood that you don’t think of as traumatic, and yet left marks on you Difficulties you’re having now   …the Taming Your Triggers workshop will help.  In the workshop you’ll learn what are the real causes of your triggered feelings (which really aren’t about your child’s behavior), and you’ll get support in taking on these ideas deeply so they aren’t just things you have to remember, but that you actually believe and live.   The difficult things that happened to us happened in relationships with other people, and so we heal most effectively through relationships with other people as well.  We’ll support you in an amazing community of parents who are all on this journey alongside you, and you’ll also get the opportunity to pair up with one of them so you can hold each other (gently!) accountable to keep going through the workshop even when things get hard, and to deepen your learning as you go.      Sign up for the waitlist now. Click the banner to learn more.       Episodes mentioned in this episode No Self, No Problem Mutual Aid     Jump to highlights (00:08) Societal factors that make us feel triggered (03:15) The Yerkes-Dodson law describes the empirical relationship between stress and performance (04:53) Broadhurst’s research has made it possible to see stress as a positive thing (07:12) A moderate amount of stress, time pressure and role conflict can all enhance your creativity (09:09) How feeling triggered is connected to our trauma in the past (11:50) Techniques to cope with stress when triggered by a trauma (12:50) What will you get out of Taming Your Triggers workshop (13:25) Our brains spend a good deal of the time telling stories about what's happening to us (16:09) Why do we create new threats in our brain (18:49) Why dealing with our child's emotions can be difficult enough when we are completely present and capable (21:34) The value of mindfulness in dealing with an oppressive society (22:27) How Mutual Aid group work for people who need help with the system (24:26) Ways we can work together with others to bring the changes we want to see (27:35) The small wins of the Gay Rights Movement (33:22) The success story of two parents in the Taming Your Triggers community who help each other on their healing journey (36:27) Invitation to join the Taming Your Triggers workshop   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"]   Jen Lumanlan  00:08 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Have you ever felt triggered by what's happening in the world? There are wars going on, elections where people get voted into power, who are elected on the promise of persecuting other people for their beliefs or their way of life or their gender or sexuality, or race. There are 1000s of people in our own communities who don't have a home to sleep in tonight, perhaps 150 million around the world who don't either, and more than a billion and a half more around the world inadequate housing. Climate change is affecting our weather systems so we're experiencing more severe weather and wildfires than in human history, which are further reducing access to housing, food, and water. There are court decisions that take away rights that lead to women getting inadequate health care because doctors are afraid that providing them with adequate care might mean that they get sued or put in jail. And they're always the people who talk about these kinds of events in inflammatory language. Sometimes we're even related to those people and we have to share our holiday table with them as they talk at length about their ideas that we see it was harmful to us, to people in our families, and to people in our society who aren't protected by our laws and practices. After each of these things happens parents in my community often come in weariness and exhaustion and say, “I'm really rattled by what's going on in the world. It's close enough to me in some way that it affects me. I'm worried about the potential for long-range bombs, or I'm angry about the persecution of people in my state or my community, or even myself, I feel powerless, that I can't do more. And I'm overwhelmed, and now I'm snapping at my kids.” And of course, they aren't alone in this and if you're having these reactions then you're not alone, either. But what should we do about it? It seems like these events come one after the other, although to some extent, I think it's a reflection of my and our privilege that things seem worse over the last few years than they have in the past, seemed like things like Mitch McConnell's blocking of the Democratic agenda, Donald Trump's election, his placement of three highly conservative Supreme Court justices and the folks who are convinced that Trump won the 2020 election and who are committing violence related to that is an indication that things are now falling apart. But things haven't been great for a lot of folks for a very long time. It's just that now things are so bad that even relatively privileged White people like me can no longer say, “Yeah, it's bad,” and then go on about our lives. In this episode, we're going to discuss what's happening when we feel triggered by current events especially when that spills over into our lives with our children and we find that we're so consumed by worrying about what's going on out in the world that we don't have any energy or patients left for them, so we'll start by taking a closer look into the research behind that curve that shows that we benefit from moderate levels of stress and see whether that's really true, and we'll look at some practical tools we can use to manage our triggered feelings more effectively as well as to actually effect the change that we want to see in the world, and this will help us not only to respond to our children from a place that is aligned with our values but other members in our family as well with our spouses and our extended families too. So what's really happening when we feel triggered by something that's going on in the world? To some extent, this is contributing to our overall level of stress. You might have seen your Yerkes-Dodson law with its inverted U shape which shows on the left side that when we face a low amount of stress our performance is low as well, our performance increases as stress increases until we reach a moderate amount of stress, and then begins to decrease back to baseline as stress continues to rise. What you may not know is the Yerkes-Dodson law isn't really a law at all. Yerkes Dodson law were animal behaviorists at Harvard University who were looking at the speed that mice could learn to tell the difference between a white and black box and to varying light levels in relation to the levels of electric shocks they received when they chose the wrong box.   Jen Lumanlan  03:50 The researchers varied the strength of the shocks and measured the speed of learning and found that learning happened faster under the threat of moderate shocks rather than mild or extreme shocks under low light, although this relationship was linear when lighting was good, the higher the shock, the faster the mouse learned. Yerkes-Dodson repeated the experiment using chicks and kittens. The chicks consistently learned faster when they save stronger shocks although the relationship collapsed when the kittens did the task in very low light and failed out. So overall, there were a bunch of different relationships between shocking animals and how fast they learned to tell the difference between black and white boxes, Yerkes-Dodson published their paper in 1908, and it was only cited 10 times in the next 50 years until behaviorism was suddenly all the rage and famed personality theorist Hans Eysenck suggested in 1955, that the relationship between stress and performance that's based on the performance of 40 mice 86 Plymouth Rock chicks and 18 Kittens would hold true for the relationship between anxiety and task performance in humans. One of Eysenck’s doctoral students named Broadhurst made three key updates to way these ideas were communicated. He was the first to draw the inverted U-shaped curve, which was significant because up to that time, the y-axis on the graph and Yerkes-Dodson’s paper usually showed the number of trials needed to learn a task which varied from 50 to 260. In this rendition, a point high on the axis means slower learning but by inverting the curve, Broadhurst has made it possible to see stress as a positive thing with more stress resulting in faster learning at the intermediate point. Secondly, the inverted U-shaped graph that Broadhurst doesn't describe the results of experiments to test how stress affects performance and it doesn't conflate all of Yerkes-Dodson’s data either but is actually the result of a preliminary study of the length of time you need to forcibly submerge a rat underwater before you release it into a flooded maze and the length of time it takes the rat to get through the flooded maze and then is extrapolated as if humans experience stress in exactly the same way. Broadhurst also described the law as a law which Yerkes-Dodson never did said that it was comparable with the experience of workers who report the same relationship between stress and performance but only cited Yerkes-Dodson’s original paper in support of that fact, which never said anything about the experience of workers. So we have this model that suddenly applies to humans but without any indication of what constitutes low stress, medium stress, and high stress, because most of the time stressors in the real world aren't administered as electric shocks or flooded mazes, and we also aren't measuring our performance at telling black and white boxes apart are making it through a maze, and now it has this beautifully simple inverse U shaped curve to describe it, which shows moderate stress as a positive thing, and which looks remarkably similar to the bell curves of intelligence questions and body weight and other things we'd like to measure about people's brains and bodies, so we can have the illusion that we understand ourselves scientifically. Just seeing something on a graph makes us think we understand it better than we really do and it makes the idea much easier to describe and replicate, which is why it's still showing up in books today. Does all this really matter? We might ask ourselves? Well, I argue that it does.   Jen Lumanlan  07:07 Firstly, because this work is cited all the time even in current media. I was recently sent a book for review that talks about the positive impacts of moderate levels of stress and actually draws out a Yerkes Dodson curve for the reader and goes on to say that, “A moderate amount of stress and time pressure and role conflict can all enhance your creativity.” I was pretty curious about that. So I went and checked out the study that was cited in support of that claim. And it was a meta-analysis of 76 experimental studies which found decidedly mixed evidence of the relationship between stressors and creativity. These authors found that yes, their preponderance of the evidence indicates there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between stress and creative performance. Low stress-inducing situations caused increasing creative performance while high stress-inducing situations cause decreases in creative performance. But, and there's a pretty big BUT here. Two kinds of threats were particularly stressful for study participants social evaluative threats meaning an aspect of the self that could be negatively judged by others including things like videotaping the participants being told you're being evaluated or being compared negatively to an individual or group and uncontrollable elements where participants couldn't affect the outcomes of the test, avoid negative consequences, stop a negative experience, or succeed despite their best effort. The more of these kinds of stresses were present the worse the participant’s creativity was and if we think about it, these are exactly the kinds of stresses we're thinking about when we're being triggered by current events. We aren't looking at time pressure or competition when we're thinking about these world events we find stressful, we're looking at threats to people's identity, and things that are happening over which we have literally no control whatsoever. When these kinds of stressors form the background of our daily lives It's no wonder we have a hard time, partly because thinking about those events takes up some of our mental capacity, which means there's less mental capacity available for us to dedicate to our children. So why do we find these events stressful? What is it about them that causes us to have this reaction of worry or panic? When we refer to feeling triggered, we're actually using a clinical description that means the panic we're feeling is connected to trauma that we felt in the past. If we're feeling worry or panic and it isn't connected to past trauma then we call that feeling flooded. The experience can be very similar but if you aren't responding in this way because of trauma you've experienced, then you aren't really being triggered. Since we're now looking at our trauma history, we'll go ahead and use the word triggered. So when we hear about people being disenfranchised so they aren't allowed to vote or their votes won't be counted, It may remind us of a time when in our childhoods someone didn't listen to us. Perhaps we had a parent who was an alcoholic or just stressed out of their minds themselves and who used to berate us and put us down, and belittle us when we were young. And nobody stood up to protect us. And now when we see someone else's views being ignored and told that they don't matter it reminds us of that hurt that we used to feel when we were little, or perhaps we see the news about a Black person being killed as they go out for a run or lie sleeping in their own beds, and perhaps even subconsciously, it reminds us of times when someone who was close to us was violent towards us when we were little and couldn't defend ourselves. The brain is a strange thing and it copes with these kinds of things in very strange ways. One thing I do want to be cautious about here is equating feelings that White people might be having about these kinds of events with White folks in the Black community experience. I'm not trying to say that White people suffer just as much as Black people do when a White person murders a Black person, quite the opposite actually, since the past and ongoing traumas that Black people have experienced as a result of White supremacy, probably make this even more triggering for them, but it's not my place to speak to that. It absolutely seems possible for a person who isn't Black to feel triggered when a Black person is killed, if it reminds them of the massive injustice they experienced in their lives especially when they were children, and even smaller injustice is feel really big. You might have blocked these memories so you no longer have a conscious recognition of what happened especially if these events happened when you were very young, you might latch on to a sight or sound, or smell that happened at the time and that caught your attention or that perhaps you use to distract yourself from the difficult events. So maybe there were sunflowers on the kitchen table which was really unusual or the tap was dripping as one of your parents was violent toward the other one or toward you. Later in life, you might see flowers on a kitchen table or hear a tap dripping and suddenly all comes rushing back to you, and you might not even realize why. You might have grown up using power over others as a way to make yourself feel more safe so that nobody could treat you the way that you were treated as a child but that most likely came at a cost as you hid the part of yourself that felt small and scared and lonely and convinced yourself that that part of you didn't exist anymore, it was still there all...

In this conversation with Dean Spade we resolve a long-running challenge in my understanding: when we talked with Dr. john powell on the topic of Othering and Belonging a couple of years ago we discussed how volunteering promotes othering, because it perpetuates the idea that the volunteer is a person with resources to give, and the recipient has little in the way of useful knowledge or resources of their own.  Dr. powell agreed, but we didn’t have time to discuss what to do instead.   In this episode we finally punch out that lingering hanging chad of knowledge and talk with Dean Spade about the concept of mutual aid, which is the topic of his book: Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis (And The Next).  In this conversation we discuss:   What is mutual aid, and how it’s more effective than volunteering How we heal in community with others from the effects that benign-seeming systems like capitalism have on us Ways to find and get involved in mutual aid projects   As Dean and I talked, I also realized how applicable these ideas are to the work I do with parents in the Taming Your Triggers workshop.     It’s not surprising that parents feel triggered by their child’s behavior when you consider the trauma that we’ve experienced.  Even if you had ‘good parents,’ they still raised you to succeed within a system that told you to hide unacceptable parts of yourself so you could be ‘successful’ - which means getting good grades, going to college, getting a good job, buying a house, and raising a family.  And we’re supposed to do all of this by ourselves, without relying on others - because then we’ll need to buy more stuff along the journey.   Our culture uses shame to enforce these rules and keep us in line - that’s why we feel a sense of wrong-ness when we do something that isn’t socially acceptable - like asking for help, for example.   Because these traumas happened in community, they’re most effectively healed in community as well - just as these two parents did when they built on each other’s knowledge in the workshop earlier this year (screenshot shared with permission):     If you want to jump-start your ability to actually apply that knowledge in your interactions with your children by learning in community with others, then Taming Your Triggers will help you.   Sign up for the waitlist now. Click the banner to learn more.         Dr. Dean Spade's Book Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) - Affiliate link     Parenting Beyond Power   The wait is over! I'm thrilled to announce that Parenting Beyond Power is now available for you to explore. Discover practical insights and fresh perspectives that can make a positive difference in your parenting journey. Click the banner to get Parenting Beyond Power today:         Jump to highlights (01:30) Introduction to the episode and guest speaker Dr. Dean Spade (03:24) Definition of Mutual Aid and how it’s different from Charity (08:26) How the history of Social Movement was organized by Mutual Aid (09:54) Montgomery bus boycott is one of the most famous social movement work in the history of the US (15:35) The impacts of having problematic systems and structures in our society on parents (17:16) The challenges that the radical social movement is facing (18:29) How mutual Aid functions during a crisis (23:22) Why it's so essential to create a system of Mutual Aid in which we actually take care of each other and that doesn't destroy people's dignity and humanity (25:53) Why is it important to talk about Mutual Aid now (30:04) How capitalism worsens the condition of our society and why mutual aid is the only way to survive it (35:44) The importance of mutual aid in our well-being and in the society (40:09) What does Mutual Aid look like (44:53) How being involved in Mutual Aid can bring a sense of healing (46:43) Factors in our society that make us feel burnout (48:51) Dr. Spade’s way of recovering from burnout and avoidance (50:35) All powerful social movements for liberation have always been done by people who were living under the worst conditions (51:48) Importance of having a sense of urgency (53:13) Ways we should prepare for each coming emergency (54:37) How to find a Mutual Aid group in your community   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen Lumanlan 00:02 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives but it can be so Jen 00:10 Do you get tired of hearing the same old interests to podcast episodes? I don't really but Jen thinks you might. I'm Jenny, a listener from Los Angeles, testing out a new way for listeners to record the introductions to podcast episodes. There's no other resource out there quite like Your Parenting Mojo, which doesn't just tell you about the latest scientific research on parenting and child development but puts it in context for you as well so you can decide whether and how to use this new information. I listen because parenting can be scary and it's reassuring to know what the experts think. If you'd like to get new episodes in your inbox, along with a free infographic on 13 reasons your child isn't listening to you and what to do about each one sign up at YourParentingMojo.com/subscribe. You can also join the free Facebook group to continue the conversation. Over time you might get sick of hearing me read this intro so come and record one yourself. You can read from a script Jen’s provided or have some real fun with it and write your own. Just go to YourParentingMojo.com/recordtheintro. I can't wait to hear yours Jen Lumanlan 01:30 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. Today we're going to close what has seemed to me to be a loose end for a very long time. It's almost like an uncomfortably hanging chad for those of you who are a certain age who remember the 2000 Bush v Gore election here in the US. So two years ago now we talked to Dr. John Powell on the topic of how to stop Othering and instead Belonging, and that was about the ways that we create separation between us, and at the very, very end of the interview, I squeezed in a question about volunteering, which seemed to me to promote othering because it encourages the person who's volunteering to see themselves as a person with resources and the recipient as a person who needs help, and who perhaps doesn't have anything useful to contribute to the relationship or more broadly. And so I came out of the interview feeling that volunteering wasn't really the answer to all of our problems but not having any idea of what to do instead. And so fast forward two years, and I actually can't remember how I discovered it but at some point, I heard the concept of mutual aid and when I looked it up online, I found the book called Mutual Aid building solidarity during this crisis, and the next, which is an incredibly short, bold, readable book by our guest today, Professor Dean Spade. And so Dean holds a JD and his professor at Seattle University School of Law and has been working to build queer and trans liberation based in racial and economic justice for the past two decades. He's also the author of normal life, administrative violence, critical trans politics, and the limits of law, as well as numerous videos, book chapters and articles. Welcome, Dean, it's great to have you here. Dr. Spade 03:00 Thanks. I'm so glad to be here. Jen Lumanlan 03:02 Diving into this, I guess it's kind of a mark of my privilege, I think as a White middle-class person somewhere north of the age of 40, and I'm just now discovering what mutual aid is for the first time. And so for those who are listening, watching this, who are in a similar boat to me, can you please help us by understanding what is Mutual Aid? Firstly, and then how is it different from volunteering and charity? Dr. Spade 03:24 Yeah, so the basic way that I define mutual aid is that we think about all the work that social movements do, like all the kinds of tactics we use, you know, we have street protests, and we block oil pipelines, and we, you know, have lawsuits, we all these different tactics. It's the part of social movement work, where we provide for each other's direct survival needs. And it's only mutual aid if we do that, based on a shared understanding that it's the systems that have created the crisis that people are in, rather than that the people are blameworthy for being in crisis. And the third element is that mutual aid always comes with an invitation to collective action, so if we're doing a mutual aid project, and we're providing like, you know, food and bottled water and tents to people living in an encampment of unhoused people in our city, we're saying like, “Oh, yeah, here grab a tent, charge your phone.” And also, like, “Would you like to get involved in the group? Would you like to, you know, be part of this group just come to this protest? We're doing about housing policy? Would you like to be part of this participating in this landlord’s house? Like, do you want to be part of our housing justice movement?” and so you don't have to get this tantras bottled water, but like, it invites people who are guaranteeing the crisis to join the collective action against the crisis, and so, you know, the reasons that that's different from charity are several. Charities/social services it's another term we might use for that, that whole model is, you know, really originates in kind of a European model from a period of when like, really significant changes were happening in terms of the economy of like clearing land so that wealthy people could like graze tons of tons of sheep and use the new looms that were being invented to make textile, that whole period of kind of the shifting from mostly subsistence agriculture to different kinds of industry was a period where tons and tons of people were displaced from their land, and they became like roving bands of like poor people who had nothing at all had lost, like, you know, the 1000s of years of way of living and those people were like, you know, storming the towns and be like, “Hey, rich people” are like no way. And so in order to stabilize that situation where rich people can dominate those poor people and kind of keep them in mind they created like a charity system that included stuff like you had to go live in the workhouse and like, be worked to death, and included like alms to the poor type idea where like rich people give some amount of money to poor people in order to get to heaven, and all that always come with strings attached like, “Oh, we only give it to like the good poor people, not the bad ones,” like, not the people who are we see as morally loose, we just give it to the mothers with children whose husband died in the war, even whatever it is, right? So charity still has that model today. It's a model that is about stabilizing a system that keeps certain people rich and other people poor. It's a model that always has strings attached and a lot of like moral blame. “Oh, yeah. Like you'd get on the on the waitlist to maybe get a housing if you can prove you're sober. If you take the psych meds we think you should take, you need to have children or not have children,” you know, be a certain kind of person that's often tied to like ideas we have about who's moral and immoral and there's a fundamental idea in charity that if you're poor, or homeless, or whatever, there's something wrong with you, you need to get sober, you need to take this budgeting class, you need to take this parenting class. It's like the charity system or social services system kind of like really controlled and judges and sorts, poor people, which in the US specifically, especially like people of color, especially Black people have been targets indigenous people, migrants. So the charity blames the poor people mutual aid, blames the system basically like diametrically opposed ways of thinking about like providing people's direct needs. Mutual Aid work is about building huge resistance movements that could stop the conditions that make anybody have to be in crisis. Charity is about like kind of putting a bandaid on the existing crisis and, you know, most people don't get what they need out of it, right, people are still like homeless and a huge number, it's like, it's very minimal, it's like the least rich people can kick down or the government can kick down, its crumbs that have like strings attached that are stigmatizing, it's humiliating the ways that people are forced to go through like homeless shelters, for example, are a lot like jails, you have no privacy or being looked at, you know, just there's needless humiliation built throughout the entire thing, people at public benefits will know the same thing like this kind of like, you just turn your whole life over to these people, they're seeing whether or not you're good enough, they're looking for mistakes this kind of thing. So, turning mutual aid are really, really different, I think in the US, most people haven't, until 2020, haven't really heard of mutual aid, partly, charity is like, the idea of volunteering that you referenced in your intro is usually a reference to charity, it's like, “Oh, on Thanksgiving, I'm gonna go to the soup kitchen.” It's like kind of like, once a year, or once every season or whatever, I plug into this thing. It's not really about the root causes of the problem. It's about kind of moral gesture in which I give a little something to the disadvantage or whatever, and like you said, that feeling you had about it like, this seems like it's not a bad power dynamic. Look at me, I've got resources and I'm one of my luxury days off this week to help, you know, got this kind of vibe that feels very, you know, the Victorian, or, you know, these early European origins I'm talking about, and mutual aid it's something different. It's like we're in the struggle together, we are trying to build mutual aid projects where people who are directly in crisis right now are part of doing them and governing them instead of upper-class people coming and giving something to poor people. So that's really different. I just want to say one other thing about this, which is, mutual aid is also like written out of the history of social movements, so we think about how we learn about social change, like, you know, you learn about the history of civil rights movement is like probably the most famous sort of social movement in the US or the farmworkers movement or whatever. When you learn about social movements we often learn about speeches that were given by men or laws that were passed, or big cases that happened, like that's kind of the vibe and what's written out of that is that social movements aren't made of those moments, those are movements are usually happening towards the end, especially if it's like a law was passed or a court case, like those are like the concessions that happen after huge organizing by large numbers of people who are actually the people in crisis and that organizing is usually mutual aid. The on ramp that most people take to get into social movement work is mutual aid. It's either I didn't have something I need it and these people were giving it out and when I got there they were like, you know we don't think this is your fault. You shouldn't be ashamed. You want to join us? Do you want to fight? poor people getting because like I was so mad that was happening to others, like maybe because it used to happen to me or because it happened to someone I love or saw in the news, and I like the first thing people want is like, “I want to be part of helping others. I'm so mad this happening because it's the beautiful instinct that people have. I want to help.” And so is the typical honor people don't usually start by laying down you know, in front of the coal train or like some other really bold action, people usually start their engagement with social movements in mutual aid, and mutual aid is kind of bold. I'm reading this book right now for my gender sexuality in law class. I'm teaching this week, I have been teaching this wonderful book that I love teaching called at The Dark End of the Street, It’s by Daniel McGuire. I cannot recommend it highly enough. It is a book about how most people think the civil rights movement was primarily about things desegregation and getting rid of Jim Crow, and what's written out of that history is that so much of what formed the civil rights movement was activism by Black women against sexual violence against Black women, by White men and against the framing of Black men for sexual violence as a way to like justify like lynching and criminalization of Black men. In the book, Daniel Maguire spends a couple of chapters talking about the Montgomery bus boycott and how what really prompted the Montgomery Bus Boycott originally was that Black women...

Claire had used respectful parenting methods since her children were babies, so child-led learning seemed like a natural fit for her.  She protected her toddler’s free play time and involved her in household chores and nature walks.   Claire attended school as a child (just like I did!); she even enjoyed elementary school. By high school she didn’t see the relevance between what she was being taught and the things she was interested in - by that time her biggest lessons came from extracurricular art classes with mostly retired classmates at an art school, and from a theater production which she and other students put on entirely by themselves - getting advice from teachers, but messing up and fixing their mistakes by themselves.   It was the art classes and theater experiences that shaped the kind of learning that Claire wanted for her child, so she got herself pretty worked up over the idea of her oldest daughter attending public school.  It was actually joining my Learning Membership that helped her see that if she did need to put her daughter in school someday, they would still be able to find ways to support her at home.  Whichever way that turned out, she and her daughter would be OK.   And in the meantime, her daughter had transitioned from the simpler questions of two to the more complex, involved questions of three.  Her new sibling was born, and her writing explorations proceeded in parallel with figuring out her place in the newly expanded family: suddenly she’s highly motivated to write a sign saying: NO BABIES ALLOWED.   Not only has Claire seen her child’s learning develop, but she’s also seeing her own growth as a person and as a parent.  Having arrived at the decision to homeschool from a place of fear and defensiveness, which she would have to justify to her extended family who are teachers, she now feels confident that homeschooling is the right fit for her family right now - even though that may change in the future.   And - more importantly - she has reimagined her role in the homeschooling relationship.  She now knows she doesn’t need to high-tail it for the library the moment her daughter expresses an interest in a new subject - she can sit back and observe and see what her daughter is really learning…and then go to the library if that’s the most appropriate thing to do.  Claire is becoming her daughter’s guide on the side who takes cues from her learner, rather than the sage on the stage who takes advantage of every Teachable Moment to impart a lesson.   Now Claire feels much more relaxed about her daughter’s learning, because she trusts her daughter - and she trusts herself.  Claire had spent a lot of her own early years feeling uncomfortable, and searching for belonging.  She figured that if she just pushed herself harder, and beat herself up when things went wrong, that eventually she would be good enough.     That she would finally stop feeling ashamed of herself, and fit in.   Now she sees that you can’t teach a child to be compassionate.  The way our children learn compassion is by seeing us being compassionate with them - and with ourselves.     So Claire is reparenting herself at the same time as she’s supporting her child’s learning.   Claire is in the Supporting Your Child’s Learning Membership, which doesn’t offer a curriculum.   It doesn’t tell you what activities to do when, or give a checklist of learning goals for you to fill out.   Instead, it helps you to: See learning where it’s already happening Provide just the right amount and type of support to help your child direct their own learning (and ALL children are capable of doing this; even the ones with diagnoses, and even the ones who can’t focus at school) Bolster skills like critical thinking, full-bodied learning, and metacognition, that they can use to learn ANY new idea or skill they like.   If you need this help so you can support your own child’s learning, I’d love to meet you in the Learning Membership. Make learning a fun adventure that not only strengthens your bond, but also nurtures your child’s intrinsic love of learning—an essential foundation for success in an AI-driven world. Get tools and strategies to support your child’s love of learning and future-proof their success in navigating whatever comes their way. No special skills needed—just a willingness to explore alongside them. Enrollment will open again soon. We have sliding scale pricing and a money back guarantee.  It’s totally risk free to try it out. Click the banner to learn more!   If you’d like a bit more of a sense for what it’s like to be in the membership before you join, I hope to see you on our FREE You Are Your Child’s Best Teacher masterclass coming up this Thursday August 15, 2024 at 11am Pacific.  You’ll get a good chunk of what we discussed in the recent five-day workshop - in just 90 minutes!   Jump to highlights: 03:07 Invitation to join the Supporting Your Child Learning Membership 03:50 What life in a homestead is like for Claire's family 05:43 How does their way of life show out in her child 07:07 Ways that Claire support her child’s learning prior joining the membership 09:17 Claire's lack of connection to what she was studying in school 10:09 How her passion for art continues to influence Claire’s life today 11:39 Getting community support for Claire help her a lot in embarking her journey in the membership 12:58 Claire's thoughts and difficulties she encountered when she began the first module 14:53 Claire’s learning explorations with her child’s interest in letters and writing 16:20 How Claire's daughter uses writing to express her feelings about their relationship 17:49 Claire’s positive and negative feelings when she first started homeschooling her child 19:10 Our education system is failing because we compel teachers to work inside a system that does not work for children. 21:42 Claire's methods for supporting her child in discovering what she is truly interested in 24:36 Listening to our child with the idea that we might be the one who comes out of experience changed 26:45 Ways we help our children explore what they already know and considering their needs and interests to be worthy 28:16 Claire's daughter shows an interest in experiments and independently determining the next steps she needs. 32:05 Claire can foresee herself in the future just being guide on the side 35:42 Claire's journey to trusting herself and her child with the help of her community 38:50 What it’s like having self-compassion with our child

At the beginning of our stay at a friend’s house in Oregon six weeks ago, my eight-year-old daughter Carys had biked a flat mile on a mountain biking trail; when we got to a very slight incline she made it 20 feet further and then it all fell apart. She whined; she cried; she refused to go on. Later in the day, after we had both calmed down, we discussed the idea of Doing Hard Things, and we ultimately both agreed that we wanted to improve our mountain biking skills this summer.   She has done both a beginner and an intermediate level bike camp since then and her skills have dramatically improved! We did the Trail of Refusal the weekend after the beginner camp and she made it all the way around the loop, and the only complaining was because our riding companions weren’t going fast enough! (I’ve also been riding a lot - selling my old bike for a good price enabled the purchase of a new, much lighter one and I’m now significantly faster than I was. I may need a skills camp myself next time we’re in town…)   Professor Angela Duckworth discusses Doing Hard Things in her work on grittiness. A few days ago Listener Jamie, who helped me to prepare to talk with Alfie Kohn several years ago and who co-interviewed Dr. Mona Delahooke with me, sent me an article from The Atlantic that had just popped up in her newsfeed called The Case Against Grit and said “You said the same thing ages ago!”.   I was pretty sure I did say that, but I decided to check it out. Looking back at something I wrote four years ago has the potential to be pretty scary - my ideas have evolved a lot since then. Does this episode still ring true? Did I miss major issues? I discuss these ideas in a preview to this re-released episode.   Learning Membership Do you want to turn your child’s interests into learning opportunities? The Learning Membership is here to help you. Make learning a fun adventure that not only strengthens your bond, but also nurtures your child’s intrinsic love of learning—an essential foundation for success in an AI-driven world. Get tools and strategies to support your child’s love of learning and future-proof their success in navigating whatever comes their way. No special skills needed—just a willingness to explore alongside them. All the usual stuff applies - sliding scale pricing, money back guarantee. Enrollment will open again soon. Click the banner to learn more!     Jump to highlights (03:29) How Grit is intimately connected to White supremacy (04:31) Characteristics of White supremacy in the concept of Grit (05:45) Teaching grittiness seems to be about passing along cultural ideas that we might not agree with (07:55) Raising children with a broad skill set and a self-identified passion are those who have encouraged rather than pushed their children in many interests rather than just one. (11:03) Invitation to join the Supporting Your Child’s Learning Membership and You Are Your Child’s Best Teacher workshop (12:20) Understanding what is Grit scale (15:30) Is grit about perseverance and passion (17:15) What it takes to be Grit (22:01) Using effort to overcome potential deficiencies in talent (25:27) Issues in measuring the Grit scale to students in schools (27:09) How could we give students from poor backgrounds a better advantage in school (28:24) Children experience at least two responses to stress (30:01) Understanding the issues of grit in famously successful people (32:21) The 7 virtues of grit (33:42) One of the major purposes of school is to pass on society’s culture and values to the next generation (35:09) The 4 key beliefs that cause a student to persevere more in the classroom (37:04) To whom exactly is grit for (40:15) Why grit might not actually be the secret to success (42:13) Is grit something we want to encourage in our child (43:51) Ways on how you can nurture your child with grit (46:26) What is The Hard Thing Rule   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen Lumanlan  00:02 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives but it can be so   Jenny  00:10 Do you get tired of hearing the same old interests two podcast episodes? I don't really But Jen thinks you might. I'm Jenny, a listener from Los Angeles, testing out a new way for listeners to record the introductions to podcast episodes. There's no other resource out there quite like Your Parenting Mojo, which doesn't just tell you about the latest scientific research on parenting and child development, but puts it in context for you as well, so you can decide whether and how to use this new information. I listen because parenting can be scary and it's reassuring to know what the experts think. If you'd like to get new episodes in your inbox along with a free infographic on 13 reasons your child isn't listening to you and what to do about each one, sign up at YourParentingMojo.com/subscribe. You can also join the free Facebook group to continue the conversation. Over time you might get sick of hearing me read this intro so come and record one yourself. You can read from a script Jen's provided or have some real fun with it and write your own. Just go to YourParentingMojo.com/recordtheintro. I can't wait to hear yours.   Jen Lumanlan  01:33 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Do you ever wonder what the future holds for your child? Do you think about what career they might have and what they'll need to know to do that and whether they'll have the persistence and grit to be able to stick with it through all the challenges they'll face? If so then today's episode has ideas to help a few days ago listener Jaime who helped me prepare to talk with Alfie Kohn several years ago and who co-interviewed Dr. Mona Delahooke, with me more recently sent me an article that the Atlantic had originally published back in 2019, that it just popped up in her newsfeed it was called the case against grit. And she said to me, you said the same thing ages ago, I had to dig back into my archives to find the episode I'd published on grit way back in 2017, and I have to say I was a bit scared to see what I'd find. I've been writing and editing the book that I've been working on for about nine months now and each time I come back to it, I find some idea that I could have expressed better or that I've learned more about and now think differently about and I'm so glad it hasn't been published yet, although I do wish we didn't still have an entire year to wait for that. So I read the article in The Atlantic by Ashley Fetters, which is a piece discussing reporter David Epstein's book Range, and I'm sorry to say that I missed that book until now because it sounds really good. So I'll read it and if it is really good, then we'll get him on the show. And then I read the transcript of my episode because here's the secret, I never actually listened to my own episodes because I so rarely listen to podcasts because reading is so much faster, and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised the transcript doesn't capitalize Black and White when referring to race, which is a policy we put into place last year so the transcript of the re-released episode will correct that, and I also often refer to nonspecific children using male or female pronouns and now I'll say “they,” but content wise, I was pretty pleased with what I saw. Before we get into that formal released episode, I wanted to put a bit of context around it so you can see where it fits with some of the ideas that we often talk about here on the show, it was actually kind of fun to look back to this episode from five years ago, and see some of my early thoughts that now form the core of my work. The thesis of the book that I'm writing is that on one hand, a lot of parents are really struggling with their child's behavior, the child is resisting and throwing tantrums and acting out and the parent needs to find a way to navigate that. On the other hand, we have some pretty big social problems out in the world, things like White supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, which I know not everyone thinks is a problem, but I'm pretty sure it is, and I should probably do an episode on that at some point to go through that, many parents see these challenges in their different hands and don't see a connection between them, and my thesis is that these ideas are intimately connected, and the way that we work with our children to solve the challenges we're having today will set the stage for how they will treat others out in the world. And the Grit episode was the start of my critical look at capitalism as I explored what are the characteristics of workers that most employers want? By and large, they want employees who do what they're told who don't ask questions and who stick with a task until it's done. From that perspective grit delivers, and almost two years before my first episode in the exploration of ideas at the intersection of race and parenting this episode looks at how embedded grittiness is in the Protestant work ethic. Now, I'm able to go beyond that and connect to the idea of grit to characteristics of WHITE supremacy, which include ideas like objectivity, the idea that there is such a thing as being objective or neutral, which is inherently superior to an emotional perspective, having one right way of doing things, perfectionism, paternalism the idea that those who hold power control decision making and define standards and perfection in the one right way, their progress always involved doing more and bigger things, the right to comfort of those in power, and either or thinking, seeing things in terms of good or bad, right or wrong. There are more of these tech characteristics but these are the ones most relevant to the concept of grit If we're aiming to teach that to somebody else. When we can see objectively there's one right way of doing things, one right way of being in the world, which happens to look a lot how middle class White folks are in the world, we can say that everybody else isn't doing it perfectly enough, when a perfect grade is the only thing that counts and our entire worth is evaluated based on it, we raise children who are afraid of making mistakes, when those in power get to define what that vision of perfection looks like and decide whether everybody else is being gritty enough to measure up and use that standard as a way of holding on to power because letting go of that power is too scary. We see how grittiness is linked with White supremacy, parents who want to raise gritty children often want their child to have an advantage in life, they want their child to be able to go to a good college, climb the corporate ladder, and make a good salary, and they see the opportunities to do these things are limited. It's not that they want other children to miss out, but if that happens to be a side effect of striving for the best then so be it, and pretty obviously in a good bad binary, being gritty is good. Not being gritty is bad. It's either or thinking at its finest because parenting is a major way that culture gets passed on, we need to think about what we're teaching our children, and we're trying to get them to be grittier. Teaching grittiness seems to be about passing along cultural ideas that we might not agree with, and might not end up helping our children much either. So, David Epstein, who wrote the book Range, that this newer Atlantic article was about actually do cite an older article in The Atlantic in the original episode, so David Epstein writes about how Roger Federer, is years spent dabbling in basketball, handball, skiing, wrestling swimming table tennis skateboarding helped him to define and develop his hand-eye coordination and his athleticism, Federer's parents encouraged him to sample all kinds of different activities, the opposite of not ever allowing them to quit. Amy Shah, who wrote the now infamous book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, was intending to mold her daughter Lulu into a violin prodigy but, Lulu quit at age 13 because she didn't want to do it anymore. When our children are young, we can more or less force them to do things we want them to do because we think they'll benefit from it, but eventually they rebel, and at that point, they're likely to just give up since nothing they ever do is good enough, or maybe find their own thing they're interested in and follow their interests. Instead, I was actually curious to see what Lulu is up to now. And so I looked her up on Twitter, and so she graduated from Harvard Law School this year, and she tweeted a few months ago, “Just got to my parents’ house after graduating from law school, and I gotta say, there's truly No Place Like Home. Got yelled twice about my work ethic and had my whole personality picked apart in a matter of minutes.” Obviously, people exaggerate things they write on Twitter but I have to say, this doesn't sound like the kind of relationship I want to have with my daughter. I also want her to be able to know when to pursue a goal because she's so incredibly passionate about it and believes in it so much, and knowing when it really is better to quit, even if she's already invested a lot. So this newer article in The Atlantic includes, funnily enough with some thoughts on the parenting styles that David Epstein encountered in his research for the book, the one that stands out, as most conducive to raising children with a broad skill set and a self-identified passion are those who have encouraged rather than pushed their children in many interests rather than just one. Epstein, mentioned Jack Andraka, the teenage inventor who invented a new test for pancreatic cancer and said that, “Jack would get interested in something to experiment on and his parents would just facilitate that where they pressed a little was for him to be engaged with stuff, whatever it was. Epstein told me they were talking about science, they were talking about issues, but they would get materials for him and encourage him to experiment.” So, Jack's parents haven't decided he's going to be a scientist, he decided that for himself that he was interested in it, and they helped to connect him with people and equipment that could help him further that interest, It was his father who used carbon nanotubes for his work as a civil engineer and who got Jack thinking about other possibilities for their use, and how he devised the cancer test. After he got in touch with a professor at Johns Hopkins, his parents would drive him there to work on the idea and the research lab often dozing outside into the night while he worked. Jack, and his dad built the plexiglass apparatus used to hold the test strips. An article for the Smithsonian Magazine relates, “About 2:30am, one December Saturday, Jane Andraka, was jolted from her parking lot, stupor by an ecstatic Jack, he opens the door she remembers, and you know how your kid has this giant smile and that shine in their eye when something went right? The test had detected mesothelin in an artificial sample. A few weeks later, it pinpointed mesothelin in the blood of mice bearing human pancreatic tumors.” Now, I'm not saying that you need to have the resources that these parents clearly have to put much of their own lives on hold to drive Jack all over the place until all hours of the night. Nobody at his school that's an island when he declines to engage in a calculus lesson because it's so trivial, and instead sits down to read a book, you can bet that a Black child doing the same thing we get a different response. And apparently things didn't all work out Rosalie, several scientists say that his test doesn't actually detect anything useful including Dr. Ira Paston, who is a world authority on pancreatic cancer. Jack didn't publish his findings in a peer reviewed journal so others couldn't examine his data. In the US, we did get a bit caught up in the Boy Wonder narrative and didn't look closely enough at whether the hype was warranted. But aside from these issues people around Jack are doing some really interesting things, they're saying that he doesn't have to bother learning what everybody else is learning, and can learn what interests him. They aren't really even trying to teach him. They're letting him make connections between ideas and see where those lead and he's excited to learn, he's engaging in real world projects, and he's doing it because he wants to do it. He's gritty to the max. He worked in the Johns Hopkins lab at nights and weekends for months, apparently subsisting on hard boiled eggs and twix, but nobody had to teach him how to be gritty, he learned it himself, because this topic is so important to him. And I believe that everyone should be learning in this way and not just people who live in suburban Maryland, where 90% of the residents are White and household income is 1.5 times the national average. And that's actually exactly what I support parents in doing with their young children today, if you want your child to be gritty, but you don't know how to make it happen, if you want your child to grab on to something that they're excited to do, and run with it, and know how to be their guide on the side even if you don't know anything about the topic yourself, then the supporting your child's learning membership that opens for enrollment between September 12th and 22nd  will help you to do all of those things and more. And if you want a free preview of what it's like to be in the membership then I'd invite you to join the You Are Your Child's Best Teacher Workshop, that's getting underway right now at YourParentingMojo.com/BestTeacher. We've already sent out the pre work for it but you can catch up on it quickly. We're doing five days of content spread over two weeks this time around so our pace is much more relaxed than it was when we did this last year. We'll leave registration open for just a few more days until Wednesday, August 31st, so you can come in and join us if you would like to, the group will be big enough that you'll get a real sense of being in community with others who are on this journey, but small enough that you'll likely hear from me directly if you answer questions, that's the thing with smaller groups, you get a much more personalized experience, just like your child gets a more personalized experience with you supporting them. I'd love to work with you so come on over and sign up at YourParentingMojo.com/BestTeacher. And now let's hear some more about the research on grit. In our rereleased episode.   Jen Lumanlan  12:14 We have a pretty interesting topic lined up for today, or at least I think so. We're going to talk about grit. If you've heard about grit over the last couple of years is probably because of one woman named Angela Duckworth, who is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and who invented what she calls the grit scale. She won a MacArthur Genius Award for her research on grit in 2013. She tells a story about how she developed this scale that goes like this: Several years ago, the US Army was having trouble figuring out which of their 1200 new cadets were going to...

Parents have been asking me for episodes on neurodivergence for a while now so I’m hoping this episode will become the start of a mini-series. In this first conversation I talk with Dr. Hanna Bertilsdotter-Rosqvist, co-author of the new book Neurodiveristy Studies: A New Critical Paradigm. We look at this topic through the lens of autism, and I share some information I found to be pretty surprising when, out of curiosity, I took the Autism Spectrum Quotient screening online.   We discuss ways that schools, workplaces, and the wider world could better accommodate neurodivergent people, both so neurodivergent people can live the fullest expression of themselves, and also so everyone can benefit from their ideas, experience, and expertise.   While this episode uses autism as a lens through which to discuss neurodiversity, the ideas in it can be applied to other types of neurodiversity including Asperger’s syndrome, dyslexia, dyscalculia, ADHD, synesthesia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and Tourette syndrome.   I also see neurodiversity as much more broad than the typical way this term is used, which tends to be used to mean “a person with a disorder that makes them not as good as a normal person.” I see us all as neurodiverse, each with our own unique combination of talents and struggles, so we should support children in learning in the way that’s uniquely suited to them.   Learning Membership Do you want to turn your child’s interests into learning opportunities? The Learning Membership is here to help you. Make learning a fun adventure that not only strengthens your bond, but also nurtures your child’s intrinsic love of learning—an essential foundation for success in an AI-driven world. Get tools and strategies to support your child’s love of learning and future-proof their success in navigating whatever comes their way. No special skills needed—just a willingness to explore alongside them. All the usual stuff applies - sliding scale pricing, money back guarantee. Enrollment will open again soon. Click the banner to learn more!     Dr. Hanna Bertilsdotter-Rosqvist's Book Neurodiversity Studies: A New Critical Paradigm (Routledge Advances in Sociology) (Affiliate link).   References: Bertilsdotter-Rosqvist, H., Chown, N., and Stenning, A. (2020). Neurodiversity studies: A new critical paradigm. London: Routledge. Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, H. (2019). Knowing what to do: Exploring meanings of development and peer support aimed at people with autism. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 23(2), 174-187. Bertilsdotter-Rosqvist, H. B., & Brownlow, C. (2015). “What’s the point of having friends?”: Reformulating Notions of the Meaning of Friends and Friendship among Autistic People. Disability Studies Quarterly, 35(4). Bertilsdotter-Rosqvist, H. (2013). Doing adulthood through parenthood: Notions of parenthood among people with cognitive disabilities. Alter 7(1), 56-68. Bertilsdotter-Rosqvist, H. (2012). Practice, practice: notions of adaptation and normality among adults with Asperger syndrome. Disability Studies Quarterly, 32(2). Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, H., Brownlow, C., & O'Dell, L. (2015). ‘An Association for All’—Notions of the Meaning of Autistic Self‐Advocacy Politics within a Parent‐Dominated Autistic Movement. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 25(3), 219-231. Brownlow, C., Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, H., & O'Dell, L. (2015). Exploring the potential for social networking among people with autism: Challenging dominant ideas of ‘friendship’. Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, 17(2), 188-193. Egner, J.E. (2019). “The disability rights community was never mine”: Neuroqueer disidentification. Gender & Society 33(1), 123-147. Lovgren, V., & Bertilsdotter-Rosqvist, H. (2014). ‘More time for what?’ Exploring intersecting notions of gender, work, age and leisure time among people with cognitive disabilities. International Journal of Social Welfare 24(3), 263-272. Metell, M. (2019). How we talk when we talk about disabled children and their families: An invitation to queer the discourse. Voices: A world forum for music therapy 19(3), 1-12. O’Dell, L., Bertilsdotter-Rosqvist, H., Ortega, F., Brownlow, C., & Orsini, M. (2016). Critical autism studies: Exploring dialogues and intersections, challenging dominant understandings of autism. Disability & Society 31(2), 166-179. Ross, H. (2021). “I’m dyslexic but what does that even mean?”: Young people’s experiences of dyslexia support interventions in mainstream classrooms. Scandanavian Journal of Disability Research 23(1), 284-294. Starke, M., Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, H., & Kuosmanen, J. (2016). Eternal children? Professionals’ construction of women with an intellectual disability who are victims of a sexual crime. Sexuality and Disability 34, 315-328. Stenning, A., & Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, H. (2021). Neurodiversity studies: Mapping out possibilities of a new critical paradigm. Disability & Society 36(9), 1532-1537. Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the neurodiversity paradigm, autistic empowerment, and postnormal possibilities. San Antonio: Autonomous.  

Every once in a while a blog post about ‘childism’ makes the rounds on social media, which is described as being a “prejudice against young people” that’s on par with sexism, racism, and homophobia. But the Director of the Childism Institute, Dr. John Wall, argues that that definition implies children are simply victims of whatever adults throw at them - when actually they are active agents who create meaning for themselves. Dr. Wall’s most recent book is called Give Children The Vote - when I picked it up, I have to admit that I rolled my eyes. I was prepared to remain skeptical…and was surprised to find that by the end of the book, the idea of children’s suffrage actually made a whole lot of sense. Changing our minds…changing the world A big part of what happened to me as I researched this episode was that I changed my ideas about two things I’d long assumed to be true: that we need to protect children from adults who look down at them, and that children shouldn’t be able to vote. As you’ll hear in the episode, my daughter was actually part of this process on the voting topic - we talked about whether she thought she should be able to vote, and she demonstrated the major capabilities that Dr. Wall said children need to be able to vote responsibly. So often we get stuck in a rut of imagining that the way we see the world is The Right Way, and if our child doesn’t see it that way then it’s because they aren’t yet mature enough to know how the world really works. But what if we could see that the ways children view the world - in fact, the ways we used to view the world before we were taught that rational arguments supersede all other kinds of knowledge - as something that actually has value? Not only does it have value, but it might create insights into the challenges we face - from the small ones in our daily lives to the really big ones like what we’ll do about climate change and how we’ll address really big social problems. Our children need us to see and value their creativity, because there are so many other places in the world that don’t value it - and that will squash it out of them pretty quickly.   Learning Membership Do you want to turn your child’s interests into learning opportunities? The Learning Membership is here to help you. Make learning a fun adventure that not only strengthens your bond, but also nurtures your child’s intrinsic love of learning—an essential foundation for success in an AI-driven world. Get tools and strategies to support your child’s love of learning and future-proof their success in navigating whatever comes their way. No special skills needed—just a willingness to explore alongside them. All the usual stuff applies - sliding scale pricing, money back guarantee. Enrollment will open again soon. Click the banner to learn more!       Dr. John Wall's Book Give Children the Vote: On Democratizing Democracy (Affiliate link).   References: Abebe, T., & Biswas, T. (2021). Rights in education: outlines for a decolonial, childist reimagination of the future – commentary to Ansell and colleagues. Fennia 199(1), 118-128. Barajas, S. (2021). Unearned advantages? Redefining privilege in light of childhood. Children’s Geographies 20(1), 24-36. Biswas, T. (2021). Who needs sensory education? Studies in Philosophy and Education 40(3), 387-302. Britta, S. (2020). The Children’s Polylogue-Doing Philosophy with Children in Intercultural Encounters. Философский полилог: Журнал Международного центра изучения русской философии 1 (7), 55-69. Retrieved from: https://www.childism.org/_files/ugd/8edd45_91282ebbaf034a3fbdfe322bb4b3156a.pdf Hart, R.A. (1992). Children’s participation: From tokenism to citizenship. UNICEF. Retrieved from: https://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/100-childrens-participation-from-tokenism-to-citizenship.html Josefsson, J., & Wall, J. (2020). Empowered inclusion: Theorizing global justice for children and youth. Globalizations 17(6), 1043-1060. Sporre, K. (2021). Young people – citizens in times of climate change? A childist approach to human responsibility. Theological Studies 77(3), a6783. Stirling, B. (2020). Childhood, ecological feminism, and the environmental justice frame. Etudes canadiennes/Canadian Studies 88, 221-238. The Childism Institute (2021). Childism: An introduction. Author. Retrieved from https://8edd4583-272f-402d-a88f-f13f889bc034.usrfiles.com/ugd/8edd45_d69ea07ff9674dd180245bd409542504.pdf Thomas, N. (2007). Towards a theory of children’s participation. International Journal of Children’s Rights 15, 199-218. Wall, J. (2022). Give children the vote: On democratizing democracy. London: Bloomsbury. Wall, J. (2019). From childhood studies to childism: Reconstructing the scholarly and social imaginations. Children’s Geographies 20(3), 257-270. Wall, J. (2018). Theorizing children’s global citizenship: reconstructionism and the politics of deep interdependence. Global Studies of Childhood 9(1), 5-17. Wall, J. (2011). Can democracy represent children? Toward a politics of difference. Childhood 19(1), 86-100. Wall, J. (2008). Human rights in light of childhood. International Journal of Children’s Rights 16, 523-543. Wall, J. (2007). Fatherhood, childism, and the creation of society. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75(1), 52-76.

This episode builds on our conversation with Dr. Atle Dyregrov on the topic of talking with children about death, where we focused mainly on death as a general concept and navigating the first few days after the death. Grief therapist Katie Lear has a new book called A Parent's Guide to Managing Childhood Grief and focuses on the much longer period of mourning that follows the death of someone close to a child. We look at: The four 'tasks' of mourning that most people (including children) move through Activities we can do in each task to help children navigate their feelings effectively long the process usually takes Signs that a child is engaged in 'complicated grief' and needs more support Where and how to find that support Resources mentioned in the show Katie's website The book A Parent's Guide to Managing Childhood Grief Selma Fraiberg's book The Magic Years: Understanding and Handling the Problems of Early Childhood The Dougy Center(resources and referrals to grief therapists) Books Katie recommends for reading with young children When Dinosaurs Die Ida Always The Endless Story The Dead Bird Goodbye Mousie   Jump to highlights (03:13) Important topics in Katie Lear’s book, A Parent's Guide to Managing Childhood Grief (04:43) Understanding what grief looks like in children and in adult (07:38) The four tasks that children need to work through during the grieving process (11:39) Useful activities in supporting children in the first stages of grief (14:03) Katie recommends picture books about death that are written in a way that children can understand and that help normalize the feelings associated with the grieving process (15:49) Should we tell our children the truth about a parent's death? (17:45) Feelings a child experiences when someone close to them dies (18:54) How does displaying a parent's grief to their child affect their behavior (21:24) Understanding our child’s commotion or acting out when they’re in the grieving process (24:11) What is Magical Thinking and how it’s connected to a child’s development (29:16) How Magical Thinking works in adults who are grieving (30:24) What is the environment like for children who are adjusting after a loved one has gone (32:01) Family bonding activities we can do to help our family process grief (33:14) How children navigate into a parentified role after the death of a parent (35:17) Which parent's death affects how a child responds to grief (37:34) Understanding the ages at which children process bereavement (40:21) Why should we consider having rituals and memorials for a loved one who passed away (43:45) How long does it take most children to recover from grief? (46:00) What is complicated grief look like in children (53:37) How to find the right resource therapist that is specialized in children’s grief   References Fogarty, J.A. (2000). The magical thoughts of grieving children: Treating children with complicated mourning and advice for parents. Amityville: Baywood Publishing. Haine, R.A., Ayers, T.S., Sandler, I.N., & Wolchik, S.A. (2008). Evidence-based practices for parentally bereaved children and their families. Professional Psychology Research & Practice 39(2), 113-121. Lear, K. (2022). A parent’s guide to managing childhood grief. New York: Adams Media. Pham, S., Porta, G., Biernesser, C., Walker Payne, M., Iyengar, S., Melhem, N., & Brent, D.A. (2018). The burden of bereavement: Early-onset depression and impairment in youths bereaved by sudden parental death in a 7-year prospective study. American Journal of Psychiatry 175(9), 887-896. Worden, J. W. (1996). Children and grief: When a parent dies. New York: Guilford Press.  

We've covered a number of episodes in the past that feed into this one, including Raising Emotionally Healthy Boys with Dr. Judy Chu (which focused on boys' understanding of masculinity in the preschool years), and Playing to Win with Dr. Hilary Levy Friedman (which looked at the lessons children learn from sports...which aren't really related to the sports themselves...).   And of course there are the two episodes on patriarchy; the interview with Dr. Carol Gilligan, as well as my conversation with listener Brian Stout about what we learned during the interview.   A few weeks ago listener Caroline and I interviewed Dr. Marnina Gonick on the topic of girls' relationships, which stemmed from the question 'why are middle/high school-aged girls so mean to each other?' but became much broader in scope as we looked at the cultural factors shaping girls' relationships. At the end of that conversation I asked Dr. Gonick if she knew anyone who was doing work similar to hers but looking at boys' relationships, and she did!   In today's conversation Caroline returns to co-interview Dr. Michael Kehler, who is Research Professor in Masculinities Studies at the Weklund School of Education at the University of Calgary. We discuss how masculinity isn't something that boys are; it's something they do, how the traditional interpretation of masculinity hurts our boys and girls, and what parents can do to support boys in engaging in alternative masculinities that allow them to feel more whole as people.   Dr. Michael Kehler's book Boys’ Bodies: Speaking the Unspoken - Affiliate link   Jump to highlights (03:31) What does it mean to be a boy (05:17) There is a type of masculinity that is perceived to be the most masculine (06:21) The problem with the phrase “Boys will be boys” (08:24) Understanding Masculine and Feminine binary (10:09) How much influence do gender stereotypes or gender norms around masculinity have on boys' relationships, particularly at school? (16:27) How mental and physical affection have shown up in boys' and men's relationships (21:37) Why do boys and men feel pressure to conform to traditional masculine norms? (23:38) Ways that girls regulated men's roles in society (27:49) How can gender diversity be supported (30:25) Boys seem to need action-based learning, rather than docile literacy-based tasks (33:54) The importance of disrupting thinking in supporting boys in their resistance to the norms of masculinity (40:07) Do boys desire close male-to-male friendships? (42:29) Power of discomfort as a learning opportunity   References: Anderson, E., Adams, A., & Rivers, I. (2012). “I kiss them because I love them”: The emergence of heterosexual men kissing in British institutes of education. Archives of Sexual Behavior 41(2), 421-430. Anderson, E. (2008). “I used to think women were weak”: Orthodox masculinity, gender segregation, and sport. Sociological Forum 23(2), 257-280. Burns, J., & Kehler, M. (2014). Boys, bodies, and negotiated school spaces: When boys fail the litmus test. Culture, Society & Masculinities 6(1), 3-18. Hayward, C., & Mac an Ghaill, M. (2013). Education and masculinities: Social, cultural, and global transformations. New York: Routledge. Kehler, M. (2010). Boys, books and homophobia: Exploring the practices and policies of masculinities in school. McGill Journal of Education 45(3), 351-370. Kehler, M.D. (2007). Hallway fears and high school friendships: the complications of young men (re)negotiating heterosexualized identities. Discourse: Studies in the cultural politics of education 28(2), 259-277. Kehler, M.D. & Martino, W. (2007). Questioning masculinities: Interrogating boys’ capacities for self-problematization in schools. Canadian Journal of Education 30(1), 90-112. Kehler, M.D., Davison, K.G., & Frank, B. (2005). Contradictions and tensions in the practice of masculinites in school: interrogating embodiment and ‘Good Buddy Talk.’ Journal of Curriculum Theorizing 21(4), 59-72. Kimmel, M. (2018). Masculinity and our common humanity: “Real” men versus “Good” men. In N. Way, A. Ali, C. Gilligan, & P. Noguera (Eds), The Crisis of Connection: Roots, Consequences, and Solutions (p.173-187). New York: New York University Press. Kimmel, M. (2004). Masculinity as homophobia: Fear, shame, and silence in the construction of gender identity. In P.F. Murphy (Ed)., Feminism & Masculinities (p.182-199). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mac an Ghaill, M., & Hayward, C. (2011). Schooling, masculinity and class analysis: Towards an aesthetic of subjectivities. British Journal of Sociology of Education 32(5), 729-744. Mac an Ghaill, M. (1994). The making of men: Masculinities, sexualities, and schooling. Buckingham: Open University Press. Martino, W., & Kehler, M. (2006). Male teachers and the “Boy Problem” An issue of recuperative masculinity politics. McGill Journal of Education 41(2), 113-131. McCann, P.D., Minichiello, V., & Plummer, D. (2009). Is homophobia inevitable? Evidence that explores the constructed nature of homophobia, and the techniques through which men unlearn it. Journal of Sociology 45(2), 201-220. Messerschmidt, J.W. (2010). The struggle for recognition: Embodied masculinity and the victim-violence cycle of bullying in secondary schools. In M. Kehler & M. Atkinson (Eds), Boys’ Bodies: Speaking the Unspoken (p.113-131). New York: Peter Lang. Plummer, C. (1999). One of the boys: Masculinity, homophobia, and modern manhood. New York: Harrington Park Press. Riechert, M.C., & Nelson, J.D. (2018). I want to learn from you: Relational strategies to engage boys in school. In N. Way, A. Ali, C. Gilligan, & P. Noguera (Eds), The Crisis of Connection: Roots, Consequences, and Solutions (p.344-360). New York: New York University Press. Robinson, S., White, A., & Anderson, E. (2019). Privileging the bromance: A critical appraisal of romantic and bromantic relationships. Men and Masculinities 22(5), 850-871. Rogers L.O. (2018). The “Black Box”: Identity development and the crisis of connection among Black adolescent boys. In N. Way, A. Ali, C. Gilligan, & P. Noguera (Eds), The Crisis of Connection: Roots, Consequences, and Solutions (p.129-148). New York: New York University Press. Rotondo, E.A. (1989). Romantic friendship: Male intimacy and middle class youth in the Northern United States, 1800-1900. Journal of Social History 23(1), 1-25. Ryan, T.A., Morrison, T.G., & O Beaglaoich, C. (2010). Adolescent males’ body image: An overview of research on the influence of mass media. In M. Kehler & M. Atkinson (Eds), Boys’ Bodies: Speaking the Unspoken (p.21-50). New York: Peter Lang. Scholes, L. (2018). Boys, masculinities and reading: Gender identity and literacy as social practice. New York: Routledge. Watson, A., & Kehler, M. (2012). Beyond the “Boy Problem”: Raising questions, growing concerns and literacy reconsidered. New England Reading Association Journal 48(1), 43-55. Watson, A., Kehler, M., & Martino, W. (2010). The problem of boys’ literacy underachievement: Raising some questions. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 53(5), 356-361. Way, N., & Nelson, J.D. (2018). The Listening Project: Fostering curiosity and connection in middle schools. In N. Way, A. Ali, C. Gilligan, & P. Noguera (Eds), The Crisis of Connection: Roots, Consequences, and Solutions (p.274-298). New York: New York University Press.    

There are lots of books available now on how to talk with children about issues related to race, but Sarah W. Jaffe noticed a gap: there weren't any books geared toward non-academic audiences talking about how the choices that predominantly well-off, predominantly White parents make impact other people. From childcare choices to school to college, at every step of the way we make decisions that reflect Wanting What's Best for our own child, but very often these decisions are rooted in the fear of our child falling behind in some way, and when we try to elevate our own child we often do it at the expense of others.   Sarah's book uncovers the ideas that underlie the seemingly innocuous decisions we make so we can ensure that our choices are really aligned with our values. It also provides a great counterpoint to the book that I'm in the process of writing, which will be on the ways we either pass on or disrupt the tools of White supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism to our own children through the daily interactions we have with them that don't seem to be about anything related to these topics. Publication date September 2023: stay tuned!   Click here to order Sarah W. Jaffe's book Wanting What's Best: Parenting, Privilege, and Building a Just World (affiliate link).    Shownotes: (02:37) How our child should engage in the world. (03:57) Learn why our fears affects how we raise our children. (05:58) The importance of racism, patriarchy and capitalism conversation in our child. (07:42) The inadequacies in the system and issues with childcare wages during the 1960s. (10:07) Why is our Social Security System being unfair and unjust to farm laborers and domestic workers. (11:45) How should we deal with the childcare systems as privileged parents. (13:20) The ideal factors in choosing a daycare arrangement between public schools and private ones. (14:19) Is it a good idea to take the funds from one school and give it to the other schools. (17:17) How racial makeup of a school does play a big part in the perception of White parents when choosing a school. (18:57) The good benefits of exposing our kids to a school with a diverse student body. (19:43) The challenges we experienced as parents while working against racism. (23:05) Anti-racist work practices that we can start now. (25:29) The real picture of how colleges and universities consider students seeking financial aid. (31:42) Should we consider it a parenting failure if our child didn't attend college. (33:21) What it means to be a good activist. (35:56) How does social change start in volunteerism. (38:26) Money talks with our child. (40:17) Every part of how we live is infused with capitalism. (42:20) How would advocating for other children's rights in the same manner that we advocate for our own children make a better future generation.