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

This episode kicks off a series of new episodes that I'm very excited about, which is based on listeners' questions. My goal is to produce shorter episodes that cut across the research base to help you answer the questions that are on your mind about your child's behavior and development.   Our first question comes from Dee in New Zealand, who wants to know: should she should do what her preschooler is asking and buy a pair of inflatable boxing gloves so he can hit her when he's feeling angry. Or would hitting a pillow be a better option?   If you'd like to submit your own question, you can record a video of yourself asking it in two minutes or less, upload it to a platform like Drive or Dropbox, and send a link to it at support@yourparentingmojo.com. Alternatively you can go to the homepage and click the button to record your question for an audio-only option.   Taming Your Triggers If you need help with your own big feelings about your child’s behavior, Taming Your Triggers will be open soon. We’ll help you to: Understand the real causes of your triggered feelings, and begin to heal the hurts that cause them Use new tools like the ones Katie describes to find ways to meet both her and her children’s needs Effectively repair with your children on the fewer instances when you are still triggered It’s a 10-week workshop with one module delivered every week, an amazing community of like-minded parents, a match with an AccountaBuddy to help you complete the workshop, and mini-mindfulness practices to re-ground yourself repeatedly during your days, so you’re less reactive and more able to collaborate with your children. Sign up for the waitlist and we'll let you know once enrollment re-opens. Click the image below to learn more.     Other episodes referenced in this episode: Episode 159, Supporting girls' relationships with Dr. Marnina Gonick Jump to highlights (02:18) Parent Dee’s question about her child (04:02) The six things going on in the question (06:19) The Catharsis Theory (07:18) Pointing out the difference in terminology about anger and aggression (09:38) Most of the research has studied cognitive behavioral therapy as a treatment for anger and aggression (11:22) The difference between adults and children in navigating situations (13:10) Anger in girls and boys (14:42) Addressing the difficult behavior instead of the reason for the behavior (16:00) The importance of self-regulation in managing feelings of anger (17:06) Most of us didn’t have great role models for how to cope with anger (22:23) Things to do to help a child regulate their feelings   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"]   Jen Lumanlan 00:10 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. And today I'm launching the first in a series of new episodes called Q&A. And my goal here is to take short questions from listeners and turn them into concise episodes that you can listen to for quick answers. When you have a specific question and you just want to know the answer to that question. I realize that it takes me a couple of weeks to research an average episode, and it takes you all a fairly long time to listen to it as well. And I know that while some folks really want to go in deep on learning about a specific topic, very often you just want to know what is the answer to this specific issue that I'm facing. So these episodes are really an attempt to give you that what you need in a very short, concise way. So this episode will be a little bit longer, partly because of this introduction and partly because this is actually a more in-depth question that we're going to get to today, which is on hitting and anger catharsis, so. So that's coming up in a second. Before we get to that, I just want to let you know if you have a question that you would like me to answer on one of these episodes, you can preferably record yourself on a video and send it and put it in a Google Drive folder or something like that and send it to support@yourparentingmojo.com. If you would like to record an audio only question, you can do that on yourparentingmojo.com. There's a button there that you can press and that will take you to a page where you can record the audio for your question in just a couple of minutes. So look for that if you would like to do that there. So these episodes are definitely going to be shorter, they're going to be more informal, they're not going to be as tightly scripted. I may make mistakes. So I'm trying to be OK with that and to really just get you what you need in a short period of time. OK, so the first question is actually from a parent who is in my parenting membership and she asked this question on a group coaching call recently, but I was not comfortable answering it on that call because I hadn't looked at the research at it yet. I had been on the deck for a while and I had been in the back of my mind, but I hadn't actually looked at the research. So I said could you please record that as a question and send it to me and I'll make that in the first Q&A episode. So here she is asking her question.   Dee 02:18 My question is, my three-year-old wants to hit people when dysregulated. Usually, this means angry, frustrated, excited. The hitting when excited, frustrated, seems really impulsive and is often directed at other children or sometimes us father, or me. That hitting when angry is mostly directed at me or my partner, and there's a desire to hurt us, I think; that's what our sees. We have problem solved this a few times now, and almost always asks for giant inflatable boxing gloves. I've also tried some other options like paper ripping, screaming into a pillow, but these are generally not accepted in the moment. Though I am optimistic, this will improve with age. I have been hesitant to get the boxing gloves because I don't understand the link between anger and physical aggression, and so I'm not sure if I should encourage the hitting when dysregulated even if it seems harmless and playful. My question, probably more specifically, is what's the source of the desire to hit? And my concern is that I inadvertently reinforced the link between dysregulation and aggression, and specifically anger and hitting. Okay, thank you.     Jen Lumanlan 03:50 OK, so this seems like a fairly simple question, right? Should I or should I not allow my child to hit me in a way that doesn't hurt me? Or should I let them hit a pillow as an alternative? And actually this is a really complex issue, so I've identified 6 things that are going on in this question. So firstly, we don't fully understand the link between anger and aggression, so we don't know what causes anger necessarily. We don't always know what leads from anger to aggression. We don't know why anger doesn't always lead to aggression. There's a lot of complexity that we don't fully understand. Secondly, different anger management techniques work for different people. Some people find hitting a pillow to be very useful to them. Others it doesn't help them at all. So we can't necessarily apply one solution and have that work for everybody. Thirdly, most of the research on anger and the process of navigating anger and managing that anger is done in adults, and then it's applied as if it were immediately relevant to children, when adults have a massively more developed brain and way more different kinds of tools available to them to manage their anger. So I don't think it's really necessarily right to look at research that's done on adults as if it automatically applies to children with no modification. Fourthly, anger in the expression of anger is discouraged among girls particularly so it goes underground, and boys are taught that anger is the only acceptable emotion, that is, that is OK to express. Fifthly, it's this assumes that anger is the thing to be addressed rather than the reason why the child is feeling angry. And I see this in parents’ questions that come up in the membership, in communities that I'm in where parents want to know what do I do about the anger my child is experiencing? And what do I do about the thing that the way that they're expressing that anger rather than looking at the underlying cause, what is the reason the child's angry? And then finally, most of us didn't have a reason to uh, sorry, most of us didn't have role models for how to cope with anger because the people who raised us, our parents, our caregivers saw our anger as a threat to their control over us. They wanted us to be under their thumb whether they had that was at their official goal or not. And that our anger was a threat to that control. So we, most of us didn't have a good role models for how we should actually navigate aggression in the course of normal relationships with other people.   Jen Lumanlan 06:19 And So what we're getting at here, I've mentioned this word a couple times now—Catharsis Theory. And so this is a theory that has been developed over the years. And Dr. Riccarda Karsten in the University of Innsbruck, Austria, defines it as “The concept of catharsis traces back to the ancient Greek idea and was later suggested by Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer as a treatment for hysteria, which is a very loaded word often applied to females. Note the link to hysterectomy. Um, it's sort of this, this female madness, as it were. So by experiencing and expressing repressed emotions, symptoms of psychological diseases were believed to be alleviated. A more recent definition of catharsis has been given by Geen and Quanty in 1977, who define aggression catharsis as a “hypothesized process which follows aggression and that is postulated, meaning we think it leads to a reduction in aggressiveness.” So there is aggression and there's this cathartic process in this model and then there's a reduction in aggression.   Jen Lumanlan 07:18 And so I just want to point out a bit of a difference in terminology in the way that I think about anger and aggression. So Karsten is using aggression to mean a feeling, and I see it a bit differently. I see anger as the feeling, and aggression is the thing that happens if catharsis fails, right? Like if we don't get it out in some way, then aggression towards another person follows. And that seems to fit better with how a lot of other emotion researchers think about this. Dr. Feldman says that “Anger, an emotion evoked when one’s goals are blocked or one experience is insult to the self or significant other is an intense adaptive approach in motion that requires the mastery of efficient regulatory strategies for proper functioning.” And so it's just sort of assumed that reducing anger is going to result in a reduction of aggression, so. The sort of that that correlation that's expected between those two things. So the link between anger and aggression could probably fill an entire full length episode, and maybe it will one day. A study of five-year-old children found that children who were more angry were also more aggressive, but there was not a simple anger causes aggression 1 to 1 correlation among children. The relationships between the anger and aggression were more complex than that. So I want to to look at each of the issues that I raised early in the episode and dig into them a little bit more deeply and work towards an understanding of what do we want to do about this parent’s question about should I let my child hit me, should I let my child hit a pillow.   Jen Lumanlan 08:49 So on the idea that we don't fully understand the links between anger and aggression that what that means is I can't give you a for sure answer that's true for everybody because for one thing we don't understand this very well for anybody. And secondly the vast majority of this research is done in a lab and it may not have any real-world application whatsoever. You know, these are people that the researchers are doing experiments like making somebody angry and then giving them a test on something else and seeing how well they perform on the test. And that has no relation whatsoever to how I feel in my real life when my best friend does something that I don't like. So it's possible the results that researchers are finding in the lab have no real world relevance. Going back to the second idea that that different anger management techniques work for different people, most of the research has studied cognitive behavioral therapy as a treatment for anger and aggression, actually. And that is based on the idea that if we if we change the behavior, right, if we, the clinician can get the patient to change their behavior, then the problem is gone. There is no more anger. There is no more there, there's just nothing to worry about here. And the research indicates that this may be moderately effective at changing behavior, right? We may be able to train people, adults particularly, maybe also children, to change the way they express their anger, but the cause of the behavior is still there, we're not actually necessarily making the anger go away. We may be making the aggression go away. We're not making the anger go away. We're just training the person that it's not OK to express it. So for me that's sort of a non-starter, especially when we're working with children who may not have consented to engaging in some kind of therapy to change the way that they are expressing their feelings. And, and so we're sort of moving into the idea that that it's not OK to express anger. So I'll come back to that in a second. Our third point was that most of the research is done on adults and used as if it was immediately relevant to children when adults have way more developed brains, wider set of tools. So I mean this, this is sort of intuitive, right. Adults have a much better capacity to wait. We can defer a potential reward for a much longer period of time. Unless of course we're struggling with something like ADHD, which can make the ability to wait much more difficult. But even with ADHD, an adult is probably going to have a bit more of a capacity to wait than a child does. Adults can imagine a wider array of strategies that might help them to navigate the situation, and also a wider array of tools that they can use, like making a list to help you remember the strategies, whereas children are trying to they can’t write yet, they can't read yet necessarily. They they're using a smaller array of strategies and they don't have a way of remembering them in, especially in the difficult moments when they're feeling dysregulated. So adults may have a goal to express less aggression. Very often children don't have that goal, right? And this is it. This is something that adults may see how it affects the people around them. Children may not be making that correlation yet. They may not be seeing the effect that their behavior has on somebody else necessarily so. So an adult may have a goal of reducing their aggressive behavior, whereas a child may not have set that goal, which is going to impact their ability to put these strategies to use. So we can't just say that most of, as most of the popular articles on this topic do, you know, if you Google, should I let my child hit a pillow or, you know, anger in children, something like that. Most of the popular articles that pop up are going to say they're gonna cite one study of college students who are given deliberately bad evaluations no matter what their work was like. The evaluation says your work is terrible, and then they're told to hit a punching bag while they think about the person who gave them the evaluation, and that those people report feeling more anger. Then a person who sat quietly for two minutes instead, and so most people say, well, because those students in that situation felt more angry when they hit the punching bag, then we should tell children that it's not OK to punch things. But as we have seen, that doesn't necessarily translate. Just because that finding happened in the college students doesn't mean it's applicable to a real-world situation with children. OK, the 4th point, anger is usually discouraged among girls, so it goes underground. And boys are taught that anger is the only acceptable emotion to express. So in our culture it's not OK for girls to express anger, never mind aggression, right? So we tend to praise and reward the good and the nice and the cooperative behavior in girls, and we don't give in to expressions of anger when those when those are expressed and we withdraw love and affection. And we train our girls it is not OK to express those feelings. So that doesn't mean that girls stop feeling anger. It just means that they learn to cover it up and then they get into doing things like excluding each other and talking behind each other's backs as a way of managing those angry feelings that are still there. They didn't go anywhere, they're just managing them differently. And so if you would like to learn more about that, my interview with Doctor Marina Gonick will go into much more depth on that. I'll put a link in the show notes for this episode. We don't reward emotional expression among boys. The only way that they can get big feelings across to us is through anger. And if we think, oh, well, I'm not raising a boy, this isn't an issue for me, then girls police this as well, right? Girls tell boys not to cry. Mothers, parents, you know, female relatives tell boys not to cry. Ostracize boys if they express sensitive feelings.   Jen Lumanlan 14:31 So moving into the 5th, the 5th idea of assuming that anger is the thing to be addressed rather than the reason the child is feeling

In this episode, the host shares their personal experiences and insights regarding their recent autism self-diagnosis. They discuss the results of their autism screeners and conversations with friends about difficult aspects of friendships. The host also shares listener feedback, both positive and negative, regarding their podcast episodes, and highlights the journey of a listener with an ADHD diagnosis. The goal of the episode is to help listeners gain self-understanding, meet their needs, and foster more authentic relationships. Various chapters explore personal sharing, stepfamily dynamics, social struggles, and the value of clarity and communication in relationships.

Most of the resources related to parenting and neurodiversity are geared toward helping neurodivergent children, not neurodivergent parents, so this episode aims to help close that gap.Whether you (or your partner, if you have one) have a diagnosis or you see yourself (or them) struggling but can't quite figure out why, this episode may help. Autism and ADHD are diagnosed at wildly differing rates in girls and boys (in large part because boys' symptoms often turn outward while girls' symptoms turn inward), which means that girls are very often undiagnosed and unsupported well into adulthood.Dr. A. may help you to identify neurodivergence in yourself or your partner, and then connect you to resources to support you on your journey.Find more about Dr. A's practice at SpectrumServicesNYC.comI also very much appreciated Dr. A's memoir The Rose Hotel (affiliate link) about her experiences in Iran during the revolution, and later in the U.K. and the U.S. Jump to highlights(00:03) Introduction to this episode.(03:07) What kind of patterns do you see in couples where one partner is known to be neurodivergent?(07:28) It’s often the female-identifying partner who is the one who identifies the issue.(11:46) What are some of the red flags for neurodivergent partners?(16:05) Men tend to flood four times as fast as their female partners when they are in an argument.(21:43) How do I support my partner in being a successful parent and also find more balance in terms of what they bring to the family?(25:38) What do we do with this knowledge that we have?(30:31) Dealing with conflict between the couple.(32:46) What do you think of the idea of trauma as a factor in ADHD?(36:12) Diagnosis of ADHD is multi-directional –.(41:56) Mental health is still stigmatized and getting a diagnosis could backfire on you.(42:31) What is a diagnosis and how does it help?(47:44) The different types of ADHD.(53:03) Social calendaring and extracurricular activities.(54:46) Time blocking is a better approach for ADHD.(01:01:45) Strengths of people with ADHD.ReferencesBlair, R.J.R. (2005). Responding to the emotions of others: Dissociating forms of empathy through the study of typical and psychiatric populations. Consciousness and Cognition 14(4), 698-718.Bostock-Ling, J.S. (2017, December). Life satisfaction of neurotypical women in intimate relationships with a partner who has Asperger’s Syndrome: An exploratory study. Unpublished Master’s thesis: The University of Sydney.Chronis-Tuscano, A., & Stein, M.A. (2012). Pharmapsychotherapy for parents with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): Impact on maternal ADHD and parenting. CNS Drugs 26(9), 725-732.Chronis-Tuscano, A., O’Brien, K.A., Johnston, C., Jones, H.A., Clarke, T.L., Raggi, V.L., Rooney, M.E., Diaz, Y., Pian, J., & Seymour, K.E. (2011). The relation between maternal ADHD symptoms & improvement in child behavior following brief behavioral parent training is mediated by change in negative parenting. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology 39, 1047-1057.Conway, F., Oster, M., & Szymanski, K. (2011). ADHD and complex trauma: A descriptive study of hospitalized children in an urban psychiatric hospital. Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy 10, 60-72.Dziobek, I., Rogers, K., Fleck, S., Bahnemann, M., Heekeren, H.R., Wolf, O.T., & Convit, A. (2007). Dissociation of cognitive and emotional empathy in adults with Asperger Syndrome using the mUltifaceted Empathy Test (MET). Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 38, 464-473.Ford, J.D., Thomas, J., Racusin, R., Daviss, W.B., Ellis, C.G., Rogers, K., Reiser, J., Schiffman, J., & Sengupta, A. (1999). Trauma exposure among children with Oppositional Defiant Disorder and Attention Deicit-Hyperactivity Disorder. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 67(5), 786-789.Hull, L., Petrides, K.V., & Mandy, W. (2020). The female autism phenotype and camouflaging: A narrative review. Review Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 7, 306-317.Lilley, R., Lawson, W., Hall, G., Mahony, J., Clapham, H., Heyworth, M., Arnold, S., Trollor, J., Yudell, M., & Pellicano, E. (2022). “Peas in a pod”: Oral history reflections on autistic identity in family and community by late-diagnosed adults. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 1-16.Mazursky-Horowitz, H., Thomas, S.R., Woods, K.E., Chrabaszcz, J.D., Deater-Deckard, K., & Chronis-Tuscano, A. (2018). Maternal executive functioning and scaffolding families of children with and without parent-reported ADHD. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology 46(3), 463-475.Mazursky-Horowitz, H., Felton, J.W., MacPherson, L., Ehrlich, K.B., Cassidy, J., Lejuez, C.W., & Chronis-Tuscano, A. (2014). Maternal emotion regulation mediates the association between adult Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder symptoms and parenting. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology 43(1), 121-131.McGough, J.J., Smalley, S.L., McCracken, J.T., Yang, M., Del’Homme, M., Lynn, D.E., & Loo, S. (2005). Psychiatric comorbidity in adult attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: Findings from multiplex families. American Journal of Psychiatry 162, 1621-1627.Moser, D.A., Aue, T., Suardi, F., Manini, A., Rossignol, A.S., Cordero, M.I., Merminod, G., Ansermet, F., Serpa, S.R., Fabez, N., & Schechter, D.S. (2015). The relation of general socio-emotional processing to parenting specific behavior: A study of mothers with and without posttraumatic stress disorder. Frontiers in Psychology 6:1575.National Library of Medicine (n.d.). 14. Prevalence of Autism Spectrum Disorder. Author. Retrieved from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK332896/Park, J.L., Hudec, K.L., Johnston, C. (2017). Parental ADHD symptoms and parenting behaviors: A meta-analysis. Clinical Psychology Review 56, 25-39.Pearlstein, T., & Steiner, M. (2012). Premenstral Dysphoric Disrorder: Burden of illness and treatment update. The Journal of Lifelong Learning in Psychiatry X(1), 90-101.Psychogiou, L., Daley, D., Thompson, M.J., & Sonuga-Barke, E.J.S. (2008). Do maternal attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms exacerbate or ameliorate the negative effect of child attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms on parenting? Development and Psychopathology 20, 121-137.Reinhold, J.A. (2015). Adult ADHD: A review of the clinical presentation, challenges, and treatment options. Psychiatric Times 32(10), 41.World Health Organization (2022, March 30). Autism. Author. Retrieved from: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/autism-spectrum-disorders#:~:text=It%20is%20estimated%20that%20worldwide,figures%20that%20are%20substantially%20higher

Have you ever seen recommendations for the books called Your One Year Old, Your Two Year Old, and so on, by Louise Bates Ames?  Every few weeks I see parents posting in online communities asking about some aspect of their child’s behavior that is confusing or annoying to them, and somebody responds: “You should read the Louise Bates Ames books!”This usually comes with the caveat that the reader will have to disregard all the 'outdated gender stuff,' but that the information on child development is still highly relevant.In this episode I dig deep into the research on which these books are based. While the books were mostly published in the 1980s, they're based on research done in the 1930s to 1950s.I argue that far from just 'stripping out the outdated gender stuff,' we need to look much deeper at the cultural context that the information in these books fits within - because it turns out that not only were the researchers not measuring 'normal,' 'average' child development, but that they were training children to respond to situations in a certain way, based on ideas about a person's role in society that may not fit with our views at all. And if this is the case, why should we use these books as a guide to our children's development?Other episodesRIEScience of RIEToilet learningParenting Beyond Pink and BlueNVC Jump to highlights(02:41) An open invitation to check out the new book that will be released in August 2023.(04:59) Why these child psych books from the 1980s are all over parenting Facebook groups today(06:01) The Gesell philosophy of human behavior(08:48) Who is Louise Bates(10:32) Who is Arnold Gesell(11:28) How the children were selected to participate in the experiment(14:28) How our view of childhood had undergone a massive shift in the previous 100 years(16:09) What’s it like to have a child involved in the study(19:35) Some of the significant milestones provided by researchers(20:50) Dr. Gesell is looking to study the natural development of children’s physical capabilities(22:07) What normal seems to mean in the study(23:11) Gesell fails to observe what the baby’s hands are actually doing(24:18) The purpose of the ‘performance box’(27:44) I add my own judgment of the research(28:32) Gesell wrote that what he called ‘systematic cinematography’(29:22) Another way that the situation was anything but natural was that the study took place within a dome(30:59) Dr. Gesell observed the effect of the running commentary on him in the experimenter role(31:54) Dr. Gesell makes contradictory statements about whether the behavior he observed in the lab was the same as the behavior the child displayed at home(32:58) A baby’s behavior changes based on the environment it is in(35:04) What the researchers say about children’s capabilities outside of the lab(35:56) Even the view of maturation itself is inextricably linked to Euro-centric ideas about time, on both micro and macro scales.(40:51) What are parents supposed to do with all this information(45:19) One of the Dr. Bates Ames’ key ideas is that development doesn’t proceed in a linear fashion(47:52) The similarity between reading the development book and reading a horoscope(52:33) The idea that things aren’t linear in our children’s development is super helpful(52:54) I found the most useful description of why this non-linear behavior happens in a book of essays by Dr. Myrtle McGraw(54:14) Going back to the outdated ideas about gender(57:11) The flow of authority(01:00:55) When we use our power to get children to do what we want them to do we’re still promoting the values of a patriarchal culture(01:02:58) The most common word uttered is ‘mine’(01:05:04) Each of the decisions parents make is made in a cultural context(01:07:36) An episode suggestion to listen to [accordion][accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"]Emma 00:03Hi, I'm Emma, and I'm listening from the UK. We all want our children to lead fulfilled lives, but we're surrounded by conflicting information and clickbait headlines that leave us wondering what to do as parents. The Your Parenting Mojo podcast distills scientific research on parenting and child development into tools parents can actually use every day in their real lives with their real children. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a free infographic on the 13 reasons your child isn't listening to you and what to do about each one, just head on over to yourparentingmojo.com/subscribe. And pretty soon, you're going to get tired of hearing my voice read this intro. So come and record one yourself at yourparentingmojo.com/recordtheintro.Jen Lumanlan 00:51Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Have you ever seen recommendations for the books called Your One Year Old, Your Two Year Old, and so on, by Dr. Louise Bates Ames? Every few weeks I see parents posting in online communities asking about some aspect of their child’s behavior that is confusing or annoying to them, and somebody responds: “You should read the Louise Bates Ames books!” They are really short; just about 150 pages each, and were written in the 1970s and ‘80s, and seem to describe a ‘normal’ child’s behavior at each age. The idea of the books, as Dr. Bates Ames and her co-authors state, is that the parent will be able to see their child’s behavior described in the book and be able to relax because the child really is ‘normal.’Jen Lumanlan 01:36I first heard about these books when Carys was about two, and I have to say I found them somewhat helpful and reassuring at the time, even though I would read them and think: “no, Carys doesn’t do that…or that…but she does do that – OK; I guess everything is fine.”Jen Lumanlan 01:50Whenever someone suggests reading these books, they always come with a caveat that you have to disregard the outdated information on topics like gender roles, and that didn’t quite sit right with me but for a while I couldn’t put my finger on why. Then more recently parent educator Robin Einzig posted in her group with a link to a Slate article that recommends these books, and suddenly I realized what I was struggling with. I do want to say that this is not a take-down of Robin Einzig; I GREATLY respect her work, because she’s one of the few people out there who works with parents who truly sees and treats children with respect. I almost wrote this episode without mentioning her but it would have been really hard to explain how my own understanding shifted without talking about her post, and even if I’d anonymized it I know we have enough folks who follow both of our work that it would most likely have gotten back to her. Overall it seemed more honest to just acknowledge the whole story, so that’s what I’m doing.Jen Lumanlan 02:41In a minute I’ll tell you about the whole process but before I do that, I just want to say that the reason these ideas are now much clearer for me than they were even a year ago is because I’ve spent the last year writing a book at the intersection of parenting and social justice. Many of the books on this topic that have been written recently take the perspective that to create a society where everyone belongs, we should talk with our children about the kinds of systems that make that not the case today like White supremacy and racism, patriarchy, and capitalism. I agree that yes, we absolutely MUST do those things…and that also if those are the only things we’re doing, we’re missing something really important. Our ideas aren’t just transmitted to our children through the conversations we have with them but also through the ways we interact with them about things like mealtime and bedtime and what we do when we’re feeling frustrated. If we’re using our power over our children to manage those situations then we’re still perpetuating the very same ideas that we’re telling our children are bad. The book will be released in August 2023, and I’m starting to think about ways to get the word out about it. I’ve created a new page on my website at yourparentingmojo.com/book, so you can go there to find out more information. There’s only a bit about the book there now, but there is also a form where you can let me know that you’d like to be notified when the book is released, and if you’d like to know if I come and do a reading in a town near you, and maybe even offer to help bring me to your town to do a reading or a workshop related to the ideas in the book. So, you can do that at yourparentingmojo.com/book, and we’ll also update that page when we have more information available about where I’ll be and when after the book is released.Jen Lumanlan 04:20So, the event that caused me to think about these books again was when Robin posted in her group: “I just came across this wonderful article about the persistent value of the [occasionally outdated, "old" in the world of publishing] series by Louise Bates Ames and the Gesell Institute of Child Development entitled "Your One Year Old", "Your Two Year Old" and so on.I recommend these books left and right, almost every day, both online and in personal consultations. Get them. Read them. Read excerpts of them online. Disregard the outdated stuff--you can do this, you can overlook stuff that doesn't apply anymore and focus on the information about child development, which is top-notch. There is really nothing else like them out there, and there is so much in them that is of great value.”Jen Lumanlan 04:59She then posted a link to an article in Slate from 2021 called “Why these child psych books from the 1980s are all over parenting Facebook groups today,” which mentions some of the stuff we’re going to go into in more detail in this episode – the idea that a 4 ½ year-old can be trusted to play outdoors without much supervision, which implies that the family lives in a safe neighborhood, and probably has a fenced yard as well that the parent can look into. We’ll look at the weird gender stuff more closely as well, where girls are shy, boys are exuberant, and the stay-at-home mother is always the book’s reader. The article concludes that “one things these books offer that does transcend time is a feeling of parental solidarity – and that, alone, is valuable.” And to the extent that parents see themselves and their families reflected in these books I imagine it is. But what I realized as I read Robin’s post is that you really CAN’T disregard the outdated stuff and focus on the information on child development. Dr. Bates Ames opens her 1979 book The Gesell Institute’s Child from One to Six with this paragraph: “The Gesell philosophy of human behavior maintains, and has always maintained, that behavior is a function of structure. This means that to a large extent we behave as we do because of the way we are built, and because of the stage of development we have reached.” This is the guiding principle of the Your X-Year-Old books. She goes on to say that “Age norms are not set up as standards; they are designed only for orientation and interpretive purposes. It is a gross misinterpretation of our normative work for anyone to assume that we are staying that all children do or should develop in exactly the same way or at the same rate.”Jen Lumanlan 06:38I quote that section to make it clear what I’m NOT debating. I’m not trying to argue that Dr. Bates Ames and her colleagues ARE saying that all children develop all at the same rate. But what I AM arguing is firstly, that children’s development is shaped much more by their environment than Dr. Bates Ames acknowledges. I’m not going to get into the nature-nurture debate here because I don’t think it’s helpful; I agree with them that we exist within the boundaries of what we’re physically and mentally capable of, but we are still impacted by our environment in ways they don’t seem to recognize that we’ll talk more about in a few minutes.Jen Lumanlan 07:12And secondly, I believe that what we know, or think we know is also highly shaped by our environment. That means that the way Dr. Bates Ames and also Dr. Gesell, who she worked with a lot, ask their research questions and set up their studies is NOT value-neutral, as they seem to think it is; it is very much shaped by our culture, which means their ideas about what they think children can do is also shaped by our culture.Jen Lumanlan 07:38So, to understand this better, I did what I do, and I got 20 books out of the University of California Library written by Dr. Bates Ames and her colleagues, because if there’s one thing that library does well it’s books published in the 1930s. I wanted to look more into the research that is behind the books in the Your X Year Old Child series so I could see what are the ideas about children’s development and about society that underpins them.Jen Lumanlan 08:01So in this episode we’re going to start by learning a bit about the two main players in this field. Dr. Louise Bates Ames, and Dr. Arnold Gesell. We’ll look at the ways they studied babies and young children, and how the children they chose to study and the methods they used to study them affected their views on how children develop. We’ll do this somewhat chronologically, starting with Dr. Gesell’s work in the 1920s, their work together in the 1930s-1940s, and then Dr. Bates Ames work with others at the Gesell Institute through the 1970s. By the end of the episode, we’ll have an understanding of whether the ideas in the Your X-Year-Old books fit with the kinds of relationships we want to have with children, and thus whether we should continue to rely on them.Jen Lumanlan 08:42Alright, let’s start by finding out about the two main actors in the drama that’s going to unfold in this episode. Louise Bates was born in 1908 in Portland, Maine. Her father was a lawyer and judge, and her mother a schoolteacher. She attended public school in Portland, and then Wheaton College in Massachusetts. Apparently, she disliked the elitist atmosphere of the all-female school and transferred to the University of Maine to receive her B.A. in psychology. She decided to pursue a career in psychology because it would allow more flexibility for family life, and the same year she graduated she married fellow student Smith Ames, although they would divorce in 1937. She received her M.A. from the University of Maine in 1933. She earned her Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Yale University in 1936, and her dissertation was on the sequence of creeping and crawling behavior in human infants. While working on her Ph.D., Bates joined the Yale Clinic of Child Development and worked there from 1933 until it was closed in 1948, acting as the clinic’s secretary and personal research assistant to the director, Dr. Arnold Gesell. They published a lot of books and papers together, and it was these books – as well as books that Gesell wrote alone – that I reviewed to understand the basis for the Your X-Year Old books. In a book published in 1972, Dr. Ames says that in 1950, she and others founded the Gesell Institute of Child Development Inc. That “Inc” implies that the institute is actually a company, although it is now known as Gesell at Yale. The Your X-Year-Old books leave off the “inc,” and the current website gives information on Dr. Gesell’s original research, but nothing about the early days of the institute.Jen Lumanlan 10:23We also need to know more about Arnold Gesell, since Dr. Bates Ames was intimately involved in his work and carried forward his legacy after he died. Gesell was born in Wisconsin in 1880 and received his doctorate at Clark University in Massachusetts in 1906. In 1911 he went to New Haven, Connecticut to head the Yale Psycho-Clinic, which was later called the Clinic of Child Development. He knew he would need medical training to understand child development so he obtained an M.D. from Yale in 1915. He initially studied abnormalities in childhood and then realized that he couldn’t really do that until he better understood “normal” infant growth and development. His first book appeared in 1912, but he really hit his stride between 1930 and 1960, when a multitude of books described the method he’d developed of using the new technology of video to observe young children’s behavior, many of which he co-authored with Dr. Bates Ames. Unfortunately for me, at least, these books are extraordinarily repetitive, describing the set-up of the experiments and their results over and over again.Jen Lumanlan 11:28The first thing I want to look at in the research is how the children were selected to participate. Gesell wanted to understand “normal” children’s development, and he said that to do that “the norm may be derived from a random sample or from a homogenous group.” He apparently rejected the random sampling method because he wanted to work with a small sample size, and he said that: “by carefully selecting a homogenous group rather than a random sample of the population, the normative character of the data was greatly strengthened and the central trends of development were accentuated. A relative homogeneity of environment, racial inheritance, and physical status was secured by including only those infants whose parents were of the middle socio-economic status with respect to occupation, schooling, avocational interests, and home equipment; whose parents were born in this country; whose grandparents were of northern European extraction, and whose gestation term, birth history, and physical status were within specified limits.”Jen Lumanlan 12:34To Gesell’s credit, he didn’t use the lazy sampling method that many other psychologists of his era did where they just studied the children in the nursery attached to their institution, which was mostly filled with the children of highly privileged graduate students, and then extrapolated that data to the entire population. The fathers in Gesell’s study had job titles like butcher, electrician, factory operator, mechanic, printer, and ticket seller. “Unemployed” was not an available category. There’s a large table describing the nationality of the mother’s and father’s parents; there are four...

Are you a shitty parent? Or do you ever think you might be? Parenting today is so hard, and there are so many models of 'perfect parenting' available on social media that we can compare ourselves against that provide 'evidence' that we're not doing it right. Things can get even more difficult when we believe in respectful parenting, because we have a model for what we know we want parenting to be like - and every time we fall short of that ideal, the voice is there: "You don't know what you're doing." "You'll never be able to do it right." "You're a shitty parent." My guest today, Carla Naumburg, is the author of the bestselling book How to Stop Losing Your Sh*t With Your Kids, which was conveniently released just before a global pandemic started when we suddenly all started losing our shit with our kids. Now she's back with a new book: You Are Not A Sh*tty Parent which helps us to understand: Where these stories about ourselves come from How we can stop believing these stories Ways to treat both ourselves and our children with more compassion Carla was kind enough to send an advance copy of the book to a member of my community who said that she would read a sentence in it and think: “But you don’t know me; I actually AM a shitty parent!”...and then in the next sentence it was almost like Carla had read her mind and was prepared to address the member's precise concern. So if you ever feel anxious about your ability to parent in a way that's aligned with your values and think it's all about your failures, Carla has ideas to help. Please note that some swearing is inevitable when you're talking about Carla's books but apart from that the conversation was remarkably restrained on the language front!   Carla Naumburg's Books You Are Not A Sh*tty Parent Affiliate link to How to Stop Losing Your Shit With Your Kids (Affiliate links)   References Yarnell, L.M., Stafford, R.E., Neff, K.D., Reilly, E.D., Knox, M.C., & Mullarkey, M. (2015). Meta-analysis of gender differences in self-compassion. Self and Identity 14(5), 499-520.   Jump to Highlights 01:53 Introducing today’s guest0 02:52 Exploring various types of struggles in life and parenting and the importance of distinguishing between them 08:54 Discussing self-compassion, distinguishing it from what it isn't 14:18 Exploring the difficulties of practicing self-compassion in a world of constant comparison and negative self-talk 20:07 Recognizing thoughts, acknowledging the separation between ourselves and our thoughts 29:57 Fostering compassion by first being kind to yourself, speaking compassionately to your kids, and adjusting your self-talk about them 40:06 Embracing the ever-changing seasons of life helps us release unrealistic expectations, find gratitude in the present, and accept the natural flow of experiences 44:53 Balancing compassion with power is essential for a just society 50:05 Self-compassion as a lifelong journey, not a destination 56:50 Wrapping up the discussion

Did you read Little House on the Prairie when you were a child? I didn't, but I know it's a common American rite of passage.   My guest in this new episode, Dr. Dolly Chugh, got entirely immersed in the story with her two young daughters - so much so that they took a vacation to the places depicted in the story, and her daughters danced around in prairie dresses.   Dr. Chugh didn't realized until afterward that there was something missing from both Little House on the Prairie and from her family's exploration of the Midwest: settlers didn't arrive to find unoccupied land ready for farming; the government actively removed Native Americans from the land so it could be occupied by 'settlers.'   Dr. Chugh studies issues related to race as a professor, and yet she completely missed this aspect of our country's history.   In her new book, A More Just Future, Dr. Chugh asks why so-called Good People act in ways that are counter to their beliefs because we don't have all the information we need, or we prioritize some information over others.   In our conversation we discussed this research, and what we can all do to take actions that are aligned with our values - even when we're new to working on social justice issues.   Dr. Dolly Chugh Book: A more just future: Reckoning with our past and driving social change. (Affiliate link)   Jump to highlights: (09:13) 3 ways that we tend to perceive ourselves. (12:02) People who are trying to avoid a loss are more likely to make less ethical choices than people trying to make a game. (14:35) Kahneman and Tversky's work that says how you frame something can have meaningful consequences, even if the thing you're framing is exactly the same. (15:06) So that’s all the research of Framing says, and the gain versus loss piece of it says that you can have identical situations. But what the research, Molly Curran and I have shown us that if you frame it as a loss, people are more likely to cheat. (28:51) James Loewen has done some, some deep analyses of textbooks where he's, you know, God bless him spent two years he took like the 20 most popular history textbooks used in American high schools.   References Blunt, A., & Pychyl, T.A. (2005). Project systems of procrastinators: A personal project-analytic and action control perspective. Personality and Individual Differences 38(8), 1771-1780. Fee, R.L., & Tangney, J.P. (2000). Procrastination: A means of avoiding shame or guilt? Journal of social behavior and personality 15(5), 167-184. Gilbert, D.T., Wilson, T.D., Pinel, E.C., Blumberg, S.J., & Wheatley, T.P. (1998). Immune neglect: A source of durability bias in affective forecasting. Personality and Social Psychology 75(3), 617-638. Kim, K., del Carmen Triana, M., Chung, K., & Oh, N. (2015). When do employees cyberloaf? An interactionist perspective examining personality, justice, and empowerment. Human Resource Management 55(6), 1041-1058. Sirois, F.M., Melia-Gordon, M.L., & Pychyl, T.A. (2003). “I’ll look after my health, later”: An investigation of procrastination and health. Personality and Individual Differences 35(5), 1167-1184. Sirois, F.M., & Pychyl, T. (2013). Procrastination and the priority of short-term mood regulation: Consequences for future self. Social and Personality Psychology Compass 7(2), 115-127. Wohl, M.J.A., Pychyl, T.A., & Bennett, S.H. (2010). I forgive myself, now I can study: how self-forgiveness for procrastination can reduce future procrastination. Personality and Individual Differences 48, 803-808.  

Dr. Fuschia Sirois, expert on procrastination, discusses the different types and prevalence of procrastination. They explore the link between emotional states and procrastination, as well as tools for managing procrastination as a parent. The role of forgiveness and self-compassion in addressing procrastination is also explored, along with the concept of visualizing your future self. The podcast ends with a discussion on helping children overcome procrastination and model healthy emotion regulation.

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 Workshop Taming Your Triggers is now open for enrollment.  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) Sign up for the waitlist and we'll let you know once enrollment re-opens. Click the image below to learn more.   Jump to highlights (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 and we'll let you know once enrollment re-opens. Click the image below 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...

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 and we'll let you know once enrollment re-opens. Click the image below 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...