Emma  00:00

Emma. Hi, 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 click bait 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 yourparenting mojo.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 your parenting mojo.com/recordtheintro.

Jen Lumanlan  00:45

Hello and welcome to the second of our two part episode on the Wonder weeks on the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. In part one of this mini series, we looked at the research that underpins the concept of regression periods, which is the idea that babies go through periods where they are more fussy than usual, because they’re getting ready to make a developmental leap. In that episode, we saw that, while we might assume that given the global distribution of the Wonder weeks, book and app, that the information is based on studies of 1000s of babies from many different locations, which all came to similar conclusions, that actually they’re based on one single study and three attempted replications with a total of about 80 children, all of European parents who were specifically selected because they were homogenous, meaning they were white and in two parent families and had secure incomes, and the mother planned to stay home with the baby for two years and had lots of family support, if not all of those conditions were in place, then the whole thing kind of fell apart pretty fast. In this episode, I want to take a closer look at the developmental part of the leaps, rather than the fussiness. And the timing of the fussiness. I look back at the ploys earliest paper describing the leaps to see where they got the idea that leaps exist and what they mean. I wanted to understand whether, even though there might be disagreements about when the fussy periods are, we could still get some useful information out of knowing more about the developmental periods that the ploys say happen in between the fussy periods. So we’re going to look at the evidence for the development that the ploys say happens in each of these periods, and also consider what, if anything, we should do with that information to support our babies and ourselves. The ploys research mostly focuses on the fussy behavior that precedes the leaps, both because it’s much easier to measure than the development itself, as well as because that’s perhaps understandably what parents are worried about. They want to know that what they’re going through is normal and that they aren’t responsible for the difficult behavior they’re seeing, but in the books, they also describe the development that’s apparently happening in between the fussy periods. So let’s see what evidence we can find that supports their descriptions. The first thing that stands out to me in the LEAP section of the Wonder weeks website is how fuzzy the languages. Here’s an example, conveniently drawn from leap one. Quote from week four, your baby enters leap one, the world of sensations. The first signals of your baby’s leap will appear between weeks four to six after the due date. Learn everything about leap one in the Wonder weeks app after this leap, baby senses will undergo a sudden, rapid growth. Your baby will notice that something new and strange is happening and in their world, and they could get upset after taking leap one. Your baby will be open for new experiences, and we will notice that he or she is more sensitive. End quote, uh, what? What does this actually mean? It’s like grasping at fog. There’s no specific terms here that we can research ourselves, no indication that this sudden, rapid growth of baby senses that they’re describing is based in research. How on earth are they measuring that babies are more open for new experiences and are also more sensitive? I went through all of the language describing the leaps and tried to find evidence supporting each of them, I looked for terms that actually meant something and ran them through Google Scholar with variations of search terms related to infant development, and I didn’t find very much. After going through leap two, the ploys say that, quote, your baby stops seeing the world as one big mishmash and starts to discover patterns. End, quote, I couldn’t find any specific information on pattern recognition at this age, the one paper I did find observed that the development of pattern recognition, not just in terms of visual patterns, but also patterns in language and relationships, is ongoing throughout the early years. There’s no mention of a specific leap around week 10, moving on to leap three. Around 11 weeks, you may see signs of the next leap approaching. Leap three. The world of smooth transitions, your baby is acquiring yet another new skill. Smooth transitions are things, whether tones, the brightness of light or moving objects that smoothly change into something else. Smooth transitions are so natural to adults that we barely notice them anymore. For your baby, these are the most complex things they can handle, and are therefore peak experiences. It was hard to find any evidence related to this. The paper I did find was written by two authors who are both psychologists, and one is also an ophthalmologist, who showed that visual functions of symmetry, COVID, linearity, motion, depth, acuity, these are all beginning to develop from birth until they show more adult like signatures at seven to eight months with no specific shift in the 11 to 13 week window. Leap four involves grabbing objects which we can actually find evidence to support. This is a common enough milestone it shows up in developmental charts. Deploys also suggest that infants will start babbling in this period around four months, when developmental charts published by the Centers for Disease Control put this at closer to six months. So the ploys are right when they say in the Wonder weeks book that they mention their skills really are on the earliest possible end of when they might appear. I couldn’t find any evidence at all for leap five on putting together the relationships between all the earlier leaps. Leap six on dividing the world into categories or groups, or LEAP seven on beginning to assemble and connect things rather than only deconstruct them. Leap eight is described in such weird language that I initially couldn’t understand it. It involves the ability to observe and perform various programs. And when I put that together with the idea that the child will learn that an end goal can be achieved in different ways, I finally understood that they’re talking about planning, they also pick up this idea in the LEAP nine description. Welcome to the world of principles. If your toddler has taken the leap, you will notice they are running all kinds of programs more smoothly, more naturally and more clearly. Around 64 weeks, your toddler will be a bit used to their new world and the journey of discovery can begin. Leaf nine is the leap of principles. Your toddler is more adept at handling the world of programs. As a result, they can not only imitate programs better, but also change them and create them by themselves. As a result, your little one will learn to think ahead, to reflect, to consider the consequences of their actions, to make plans and to balance them against each other. When we put these two leaps together, we can finally find solid evidence. Dr Allison gottnick and her colleagues did some work on this topic in the 1980s which is not cited in any of the Wonder weeks books which argues that the words there no and more represent baby’s plans. Specifically, there encodes the success of a plan, no encodes the failure of a plan, and more encodes the repetition of a plan or a request for assistance. These words are also used to encode relationships between objects there encodes the location of objects, more encodes the similarity of objects, meaning this thing I just had and that thing over there, the same and I want more of it. And no is used to negate propositions around 18 months, children apply these words to their current concerns, right around the 64 weeks predicted by leap nine, although rather later than leap eight, where it’s first discussed, the description of LEAP 10 is that you will notice that your toddler is a little more enterprising. They are behaving more maturely. They become very aware of themselves, gain a better understanding of time, begin to really enjoy music, and they treat things and toys differently. They want to do everything by themselves. And I’m thinking, Well, yes, it would be sort of surprising if, all things equal, your child wasn’t behaving more maturely as time went on. A child is going to gain a better understanding of time as time goes on, as it were, from the early days in infancy, when they had no idea where you went, when you disappeared, to being able to predict when something will happen that comes on a daily basis to understanding what just a minute means, which, when we say is almost never just one minute, their understanding of time is continually evolving. I also have a video of my daughter, Karis, at about eight months, sitting on a mat and swaying in time to someone’s guitar playing, clearly enjoying music. I’m not seeing anything unique in treating things and toys differently, which can happen at a variety of ages for a variety of different reasons. Holovitz brings us to how does the Wonder weeks help? Why do so many people follow this stuff I mentioned in the last episode on this topic that I ran a definitely unscientific poll in the free Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group to understand whether parents knew that they had to base the timing of the Wonder weeks on the child’s gestational age when they responded to the survey. Some parents added comments about their experience with the program. Parent Anker said, we use the app, and it helped us tremendously. I have since learned there is much to criticize about the concept, but the perceived knowledge of what was happening for our baby made it easier for us to deal with the increased fussiness and difficult nights, and I really think that’s at the heart of it. It’s about seeing that there might be a reason why your child is being fussy and that you aren’t eat. In other words, you aren’t breaking your baby I think a big part of why we think we need apps is because we aren’t parenting in villages like we used. Do Before parenting was even a verb, and when we would have had so much help with the baby from people who had done it many times before.

Jen Lumanlan  10:08

Parent, Katie loved wonder weeks and said that they’re in parenting groups about reflux, and they’ve noticed that a surprising number of babies with reflux seem to have flares during the regression periods. Katie’s son would projectile vomit twice as often as normal, and then they would realize a new leap was underway, and every time it matched up with a wonder week. But again, we have to ask, what the Wonder week’s adds here? I totally get that we want to know that our baby is normal. I remember reading the your three year old child book when Karis was that age, and being amused and relieved that she fit about half of the descriptions in the book, but not the other half, and thinking, Oh, great, she’s doing what other kids before her have done. Then, of course, I did the deep dive into those ideas that I described in the why we shouldn’t read the your x year old child books anymore episode, because yes, she did fit half the ideas in the book. But as I pointed out in that episode, and as parent Christina pointed out in the Facebook group, these things are kind of like horoscopes, there is enough there that anyone can find something true to them in it, but also in a flex that it somehow fits millions of people. So parent Lauren found it helpful to see their baby was in a wonder week, even though their babies were so colicky that every week was a wonder week in their home. In the book The ploys note that baby lifting their head and torso with their arms while lying face down. Happens for the first time, or more often, or better than before, starting around three weeks, but maybe not until five months. They say, on average, most babies do this after making this leap, meaning leap two, which happens in weeks eight to nine. But given the wide range of ages, there are going to be a significant number of babies that lift their head and torso with their arms while lying face down after leap three and leap four as well. The book says that baby rolling from their back to their side is associated with the second leap, but that some babies won’t do this until they’re seven months old, by which they would have already gone through leap five. So what development is happening related to each leap? Well, apparently nothing that we can specifically pinned down, kind of like a horoscope deploys then liken the leaps to puberty. They say every child goes through puberty around the same age. But do they Well, not really. Firstly, puberty has a lot of different components. For kids with penises, researchers generally measure things like genital development and children the age at which their voice breaks and their first ejaculation for kids with vulvas, researchers measure things like breast development developed development of pubic hair and the age of the first period. A study of over 14 and a half 1000 children in Denmark found that boys genitals develop between the ages of eight and 17. Pubic hair between 10 and 16, and voice break and first ejaculation track very closely together between about ages 11 and 16. For kids with breasts, we’re looking at breast development between the ages of eight and 18. Pubic hair between nine and 18, and the first period between about 10 and 15. So these ranges do vary by continent. Another study found the median age at which children with vulvas develop breast buds range from 9.8 to 10.8 years in Europe, 9.7 to 10.3 years in the Middle East, 8.9 to 11.5 years in Asia, 8.8 to 10.3 years in the US, and 10.1 to 13.2 years in Africa, and yet deploys say that every child goes through puberty around the same age, even though puberty develops differs from the mental development your baby goes through, they are comparable in that all babies go through leaps at the same age, when clearly this is not the case. They go on to say that with a each age linked leap, we include a list of things that a baby could do for the first time at that earliest possible age. The key words here are could do and earliest possible, as we’ve stated before, babies don’t do all these skills at once, and hence, could do the age at which these skills appear for the first time varies greatly, sometimes by many months. To illustrate the large differences in ages when skills appear, we also state for some motor skills the average age and maximum age at which children master the skill. And we do that because we notice that parents want to know but do keep in mind that averages say nothing about your baby. End quote. So if the averages say nothing about our baby. What’s the point in providing the averages? I get that as a parent, you want to know if your child is okay, but it seems to me that it would be more helpful to provide something like the Center for Disease control’s developmental milestones, which are things like 75% or more of children can do a thing by a certain age, these are based in research, and they’re much more helpful for parents in understanding when a child might need more support, rather than knowing the earliest possible age at which a child might be able to do something, even knowing the date by which 75% of children can do a certain thing is way more difficult than you might think. So. I’m thinking back to the episode on the science of rye, where we looked at whether there’s evidence to back up the ideas in books by Magda Gerber, who developed the resources for intimate educators, or rye approach to being with young children. Gerber developed rye after her daughter was sick with a cold. One day she lived in Hungary, and physicians still made house calls then, and a physician named Dr Emmy Pickler came to her house. Gerber thought that Pickler would talk with her, Gerber as the parent, and was stunned when Dr Pickler instead talked respectfully with Gerber’s daughter. Dr Pickler published a study in English comparing the age in weeks that seven researchers had said that certain physical developmental milestones would occur, and the variation between the dates when these researchers said we would see each of the milestones appear, was incredible. One author said that babies should be able to turn from their back to their side at 18 weeks. Another said 28 weeks. One says babies should be able to turn from their back to their front by 18 weeks. Another says 32 weeks, and the rest appear in between. The lowest estimate on starting to walk is 49 weeks. The highest is 70 weeks. Most of the researchers will set a date when the child can sit by themselves, meaning the parent sits the baby up on the floor, and the baby doesn’t topple over. But parents who follow rye often don’t ever put the baby sitting up on the floor. They put the baby on their back, and baby eventually learns to get themselves into a seated position. And of course, that happens way later than parents who don’t use rye would sit their baby up so those babies would completely miss that milestone. But it doesn’t mean that anything is wrong. So why does it matter if we’re looking for a child to roll over in weeks eight to nine, when some babies can’t do this until seven months? Essentially, what we’re doing here is balancing concerns about whether we can help our child’s development if we know they’re about to be able to do something with how much we might worry if they can’t do something until later. That’s why we get the different focuses in the Wonder weeks book from the CDC. Wonder weeks is trying to appeal to a fairly well advantaged audience who wants the absolute best for their child, which probably includes people like you and me, people who could afford to buy black and white mobiles for our newborns because we’ve read the infants can’t perceive color, and the subscription toy services that send you toys supposedly geared to your child’s exact developmental stage, and cribs that function as an extra set of hands whenever you need a break, to shower, to work, to cook or sleep, and promise you’ll get your baby to sleep for an extra One to two hours each night because of its calming womb like motion and sound, a finding which has been published in a peer reviewed journal in a grand total of four paragraphs and definitely with not enough information to help us properly evaluate that claim. Now when two of the three authors on that study about the crib work for happiest baby, the manufacturer of said wellness device and the company also funded the study, and lo and behold, they have quote, unquote, peer reviewed data in support of their product. Claim, wonder weeks knows there are parents out there who want the best for their baby and will buy the Wonder weeks book and hopefully also the app and the baby monitor with its associated app and the baby’s first year diary. These parents want to know they’re proactively doing everything they can to support babies development. The CDC data, on the other hand, is looking to catch children who should have already passed a milestone but haven’t. It’s looking retroactively to see who might be having problems, rather than looking ahead to support children in reaching the milestone. And you might think, well, of course, it’s better to know what’s coming and support them in doing it. I want that. And what I want you to consider is, is it better? Is it better to know that very few babies might be able to roll over after leap two, even though most of them won’t do it for a couple more months, and some perfectly, normally developing babies won’t do it for quite a while? Because, to me, that’s a big reason why parents show up in online groups in week 10 saying wonder week says my baby should be rolling over by now, because now you know that a very small percentage of babies can do it. You worry when yours can’t do it. In my mind, there are enough real things to worry about in parenting without adding more things. Based on these incredibly early estimates of when babies might be able to do a certain skill, and with wonder weeks, you might find yourself not only worrying about what skill they should be able to do and can’t do, but also about anticipating the next stormy period, as the regressions are called in the book and the app, before it even arrives, instead of just being present with your baby and enjoying your baby today.

Jen Lumanlan  19:22

The second questionable assumption behind telling parents that babies might pass milestones very early is that parents think they both can and should do something to get or help the child to pass the milestone and maybe even to pass it early. And that’s a big fail, from my perspective, what we’re really doing when we’re doing this is comparing our child to a theoretical perfect child who passes their milestones on time and preferably early. We’re saying that the child won’t pass this milestone on time or preferably early without you doing things to make that happen. And the book encourages this approach in leave one The book tells us that quote, after eight weeks your baby. Become bored if they always see, hear, smell or taste the same old things. They crave variety. If they seem bored, keep them stimulated, carry them around in your arms or move the position of their baby chair to give them different objects to look at end. Quote, we’re told to quote, help your baby discover their hands and feet. But the only way we’re told to do that is to quote, allow your baby to study their hands as long as they want and as often as they want to. But now I’m worried they get bored by looking at their hands. How do I even know if an eight week old is bored? And if, quote, some babies will need a lot of time to complete their explorations, whereas other babies won’t. How should I support my baby if they’re done looking at their hands, or if they want to look at them endlessly, should I still move their baby chair so they can see other things? While we’re on that topic, the use of a baby chair is one of those things that’s really a cultural decision, but here it’s accepted as if it’s not a decision. There’s no place in the book where we’re encouraged to think about the benefits and drawbacks of putting your child in a baby chair. It’s just assumed we’ll have a baby chair and will put a child in it. I’m not saying that baby chairs are evil and we should never use them, but putting your child in a chair says something about what we expect a child to do, that they’re supposed to be quiet and still and contained, and that this takes preference over their ability to explore their hands and feet, which is apparently also important. We can imagine a baby who has the opportunity to just be on the floor for most of the time might reach their physical milestones earlier than a baby who spends a lot of time in a chair because they have more opportunity to move parents. In many indigenous cultures in North America used to strap their babies into a cradle board, which is a rigid board with a pillow around the back of the head and protection on the front. The practice is making a comeback among indigenous people today, who say that placing the cradleboard at eye level showed the baby the parent nurtured and respected them. Another benefit of the cradleboard was that it allowed babies to observe nature and the daily routines of the people around them in a world where close observation was a critical survival skill, the families using cradleboards Were preparing their children for success in their environment through the decisions they make that as they’re with the children. And our decisions prepare our children for our culture as well. And in this case, it’s a culture of keeping quiet and being still in the house. We used a baby rocker because I didn’t know anything differently back then, and I wrote in Karis diary when she was just a few days old that it was capable of stopping a meltdown instantly, which at the time, I thought was pretty flippin magical. I have to say, we also got one of those things that kids over about six months old, can sit in and bounce surrounded by toys. Another parent had told us it was the only way we were going to be able to take a shower. So of course, it sounded like a must have device for us, but what it was really doing was constraining Karis movement, not to a degree that harmed her, but to a degree that started teaching her that she was going to be expected to move in the ways we wanted her to move, which might not be how she wanted to move. She’s never been one of those kids who are in constant motion, although we definitely had her struggles over jumping on the couch as she got big and heavy enough that it shifted from being an activity we could permit to being an activity that broke a couchspring. But I do coach a lot of parents who want their children to stop moving so much, stop climbing on things, stop jumping on things. We all, and I include ourselves here, assume that children should adapt to the furniture we already have in our homes, even though it was designed for adults and is often inconvenient or dangerous for children to use. We rearranged our living room a few months ago so we could have hang a hammock in the middle of it. Both ends of the hammock are suspended from the same point, and that makes it perfect for swimming, swinging around in and Charis uses it many, many times throughout every day. Sometimes she says she can’t imagine what life was like before it I would love to install monkey bars down our hallway, but unfortunately, I can’t figure out a way to do it without wrecking the wood paneling another example of how a home is designed for adults rather than children. When I talked with Dr Diana Hill on the topic of how we can use Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to support ourselves and our children, she mentioned that because she believes so much in the mental and physical health benefits of movement, she removed most of the big furniture from her living room, which cues everyone in the house to use the room to get more movement. So in parenting, as it’s practiced in the US, we’re giving our kids mixed messages. We want them to meet these movement milestones early, but we want them to do it in ways that are convenient for us. And when I say us, I fully include myself here, because while we did practice a lot of elements of rye, there were also many ways that our home was not set up for children, which made it more difficult for Karis to get the movement she needed and that we needed also, but we had trained to only do when we were exercising.

Jen Lumanlan  24:35

Praise is another one of those cultural decisions that seems like it isn’t a decision. The book tells us to, quote, encourage your baby to grab toys by showing them that you are enthusiastic about the effort they’re making, and encourage each serious attempt. Praise from you will encourage them to continue. End, quote. We also see a quote from a parent eight week mental development leave baby finds their hands. Good job, buddy. I was sort of surprised. Is that the ploys didn’t cite Dr Carol Dweck work on this, because it definitely seems to be on their minds. We looked at this research in the episode on can growth mindset live up to the hype, where we concluded that yes, it seems safe to say that if you work harder at something, you’re more likely to succeed at it, but that it’s highly unlikely to be a variable that makes an important contribution to your child’s success. Our conversation with Alfie Kohn on the topic of rewards is relevant here, because praise is essentially a kind of reward. When we praise someone, we’re saying we have power to judge their behavior, and we get to determine what measures up to an appropriate standard and what doesn’t the ploys say this directly, we are to quote, encourage each serious attempt, so we’re the ones who judge whether the attempt is serious or not, and thus worth praising or not. The decision to say good job or not when our child reaches for a toy might seem pretty inconsequential, but I can’t tell you how many women I work with, especially who describe themselves as people pleasers or recovering people pleasers. People who are praised as children tend to go on to have a really hard time saying no and will say yes even when they don’t want to do what they’re being asked to do, they neglect their own needs and feel guilty if they can’t do it. All. People pleasing is driven by a variety of factors, including a desire to avoid conflict, a fear of rejection or criticism, or a need for safety, and underneath all of those is the need to belong, to have the other person accept us and love us, and we fear that they won’t if we say no to them, which we learned when our parents judged our behavior and praised us for behavior that matched their expectations and either ignored or punished behavior that didn’t measure up. We equate that praise with love and belonging, and we do whatever it takes to keep the praise coming, including abandoning ourselves when we’re trying to get our child to match up with some external idea about what they should be doing, and when we aren’t really seeing the actual child in front of us, and that is what our child needs us to do more than anything else, these cultural ideas show up throughout the book, and we presume the app as well. We learned that we should talk to our baby throughout their waking hours as a matter of course, where we see echoes of the research on the massive word gap that supposedly exists between black and white four year olds when you ignore a lot of the ways that the black kids hear words spoken between other people, rather than directly to the child. We looked at that research in our pair of episodes on the so called 30 million word gap, we learned that many babies like pull up games, which means pulling a child who’s old enough to lift their head from a half sitting position to an upright position, or pulling them from sitting to standing. We’re even told that quote, fathers are usually the first to discover that babies enjoy the early pull up games, then mothers will follow end quote. Because, of course, the mothers are the caretakers and the fathers of the fun parents. The ploys uncritically state that quote, fathers tend to be slightly more enthusiastic with baby boys than baby girls, which may well be true because we all tend to call babies dressed in pink cute and pretty, and babies dressed in blue strong our expectations of what babies can and should do, and especially what girl and boy babies shouldn’t can do, shapes them from even the younger stages. We looked at that topic in the episodes on parenting beyond pink and blue, as well as on Virginia Mendes, great book childhood Unlimited, where we found that when researchers dress a baby up in blue clothes, people call the baby big and strong, and when they dress the same baby up in pink clothes, people call it pretty and cute. We assume that mothers are supposed to take the more nurturing, caring role because that’s what women are supposed to do. Dads are supposed to take the more fun, physical role, because that’s what men are supposed to do. We’ve been socialized to think this for our whole lives. And here are the ploys, reiterating these ideas, confirming that it’s a normal and natural thing for parents genitals to be the thing that determines how they take care of and play with their babies. Later on, we learn that quote, many babies try to help their parents crawl, which I hadn’t known was possible. When I read this, I realize the Floyds have an odd writing style, where they tell us that some parents do X and many parents do Y without stating why. They’re telling us this. Are we supposed to take this as advice? The text itself doesn’t say whether we should teach our babies to crawl or not. Only. The subheading says, teach your baby to crawl. It sometimes works. It only sometimes works. Why not always? What are parents or babies for whom it doesn’t work doing that’s different from the ones for whom it does work? What does research say about whether helping babies to crawl helps them? Does it even matter? And if it doesn’t matter, why are they telling us this going back to the chimps who would physically pry their infants off them after a regression period to teach the infants how to be more independent. We see this come out at the very beginning of the Wonder weeks book, when the child of the parent reading the book is probably still an infant. And we get when a baby learns something new, we want to encourage them and make it stick so they can build on that new skill to crawl instead of being carried. Means unlearning. The habit of reaching up for their mommy or daddy. Like the earlier example of a phone update, the old way of doing things is no longer available. Once they can crawl, they can get their own toys. After each leap, a baby can do more and will also be more independent. The more they do themselves, the more their self confidence and self esteem will grow. End quote, and this is where we see how we’re being taught to train our children to be successful in a culture that prioritizes independence. I do wish I could have gotten my hands on the early Dutch version of the book and knew how to read it so I could see whether the ploys gave the same advice for their Dutch audience that got massively more social support than the average parent in the US. Because this issue is at the heart of how we parent. I’m certainly not advocating that we become our child’s servant and whatever they whatever they want, something we deliver it, but there’s a wide gulf between that and constant encouragement to do more for themselves. Always doing more for yourself leads to the parents I work with not knowing how to ask anyone for help, the statement that the more they do for themselves, the more their self confidence and self esteem will grow, is not backed by any peer reviewed research cited in the book. Do we even want their self esteem to grow? Long time listeners might remember our episode on that topic from a while ago where we saw how the state of California learned the hard way after spending millions of dollars implementing school based programs to improve children’s self esteem. The higher self esteem is not associated with better outcomes for children, and actually, self compassion is a much more useful tool. You can hear all about that in the episode called don’t bother trying to increase your child’s self esteem. Related to this, I will never forget a parent telling me that their mom used to be so kind and compassionate when the child was sick that the now parent on the call with me used to wish that they could be sick more often. That story has really guided me for a lot of years, and I try very hard to treat my daughter, Karis, every day with the same tenderness and compassion that I do when she’s sick. It doesn’t mean that I do everything for her, but it does mean that I check in with her and make more requests of her when she has more capacity and come toward her a bit more when her capacity is lower. I don’t say, well, you’re 10 now, so you should be able to unload the dishwasher when I ask you to just like I wouldn’t think, well, you’re eight months old. You should be able to get the toy by yourself, because that comparison takes us right back to the most harmful component of self esteem. It turns out that self esteem is reliant on comparing yourself to others and seeing yourself as better than them. And when you compare your child to a sibling or a theoretical child of their age who should be able to do this task, you don’t actually help them. Those comparisons create shame, which is not where we want to be. If we can help it, we may end up there accidentally, so we don’t need to end up there on purpose, because we’re trying to encourage our child to be more independent. So all of these ideas are underneath the seemingly simple advice to keep babies stimulated rather than letting them get bored by carrying them around or pointing their chair toward new things or pull them up by their hands, or get them to practice a skill once they’ve learned it, at the end of the day, your baby won’t do any better, either in the next leap or in life, because they went through these milestones faster than any other baby, we can’t even say that they will develop a particular and specific skill at a time that’s aligned with a particular and specific fussy period. Dr ploy even acknowledges this in his book chapter summarizing the results of all these so called replication studies, he says, quote, There is no simple one to one relation between new skills, task performances and behaviors on the one hand, and the age related regression periods on the other. In the past, developmental psychologists tried to establish a temporal link between brain maturation and the so called developmental milestones. They failed. The developmental milestones did not appear to be age related. Developmental Psychology has shown abundantly that children may show huge individual differences of many months in the age of first appearance of some milestones. End Quote, so once again, why do the ploys attempt to tie the developmental growth to specific periods of time, as they do in the Wonder weeks book. As well as to the fussy periods.

Jen Lumanlan  34:06

The final issue I want to work through is the idea of what we parents should do in the fussy phases. The ploys say that quote, When your baby becomes aware their world is changing, they will usually cry more easily than before. At this point, many parents might call their babies cranky, bad tempered, whiny or disconnect, discontented. End quote. They go on to list a variety of other behaviors you might notice, including being restless, impatient, troublesome, cry more often than they used to, and may want to be in physical contact with you. They might have nightmares, although the evidence they use for this is the baby tosses and turns during sleep, so it looks like they’re having a nightmare. But we have no idea if this is actually happening for infants. They say, quote, This phase is not only difficult for your baby, but also for you, and it causes worries, irritation and quarrels that puts you under strain. End, quote, the way this is presented makes it sound like there’s a direct line from the child’s clingy behavior to the parent’s worry, irritation and strain. Which is what presumably results in the quarrels. I’m not sure how you can quarrel with an infant, but I guessed it was a translation issue, and that they mean have disagreements about how much of the time you want to be in physical contact. And then on my second reading of the book, I found buried in the LEAP six section that quarrels are related to the baby’s fickle behavior, sometimes wanting to nurse, sometimes not, which irritates the mother, and that quarrels can also develop when parents and babies fail to negotiate the amount of physical contact and attention their baby wants, and their mommy and daddy are willing to give end quote, and oh my gosh, I remember those days so well. One time when Karis was a few months old, I wanted to go grocery shopping, so I got all the bags and the list ready in advance while she was napping, and then she woke I fed her. I took a few minutes to put my shoes on, go to the bathroom, head out to the car, and I was just about to get in the car when my husband came out carrying her, and she was crying, and he said, I think she needs feeling again. And I shouted pretty loudly across the street, I just want to make one decision for myself. The Wonder week’s book quotes a variety of parents saying things like, I can hardly move without my daughter crying out in fear, and my baby doesn’t like playing on his play mat for long periods. I really have to keep him occupied on my lap or walk around with him, and my son keeps on bothering me to sit on my lap, but as soon as I take him, there’s almost no controlling him. He crawls all over me and gropes around like a monkey for anything he can get his hands on. I try playing games, but it’s a waste of time, so he doesn’t feel like playing with me, okay, but at least he could stop being difficult. Another parent said, reasons why Carl was crying like this yesterday. I took the toilet paper away from him. He was playing with his favorite toy. I changed his very wet diaper. I set him down so I could use the restroom for five seconds. He hit his head on the door. I put the car I put him in the car seat. The dog walked away from him. I wouldn’t let him bite me. And lastly, for absolutely no reason at all, leap seven is really hitting this guy hard, and we still have 23 days until it’s over. And I do remember those days too. When Charis was about four months old, I would try to transition from playing with her on the floor in the living room to cooking dinner in the kitchen, and she would cry, and I remember quite clearly telling someone she won’t let me cook dinner. I didn’t know at the time how much she was impacted by being able to see me or not see me, and when I was cooking she couldn’t see me. It wasn’t that she wouldn’t let me cook dinner, it was that she may have felt disconnected from me and potentially scared at being alone. The ploys say that quote, parents are concerned when their baby is upset, they try to find a cause for their babies now, more frequent crying? Could it be teething, not enough sleep, a pesky sibling? Or perhaps it’s a leap, and I think that’s what the Wonder weeks does for us. Our child is crying more than usual, and we’re racking our brains trying to figure out what’s going on. And if we can’t think of what else it could possibly be, we conclude maybe it’s a leap. We feel better. We try to remember which are the stormy weeks, and we know weeks eight to nine are stormy ones, and it’s week 10, but week eight wasn’t that bad, was it? Maybe it’s a late regression now, but what if we didn’t have to buy the book or enter daily data into an app or worry about whether a leap is happening, given it could happen any time over a multi week period. What if we could see our baby fussing more than usual? And think I can see that you need more help today than you did yesterday? How much can I willingly come towards you, and what am I not willing to do? Yes, we want to know if there’s a physical reason why baby’s crying. If they’re wet, we change them. If they’re hungry, we feed them. If they have a tooth coming in, we offer them something cold to bite down on. If they always fuss when we put a particular item of clothing on them, we might conclude they find that particular piece of clothing to be uncomfortable. If they’re crying when we disappear to the kitchen to cook dinner, perhaps we could imagine they feel disconnected or scared, and if we put them on the floor just outside the kitchen, or maybe the end of the day is difficult. We do more meal prep earlier in the day, so there’s less work to do in the evenings, and we both have less capacity. The key is that when we do this, we’re responding to the child in front of us. We aren’t comparing our baby to some external milestone that some babies hit some time over a four week period, and trying to understand whether that’s why our baby is having a hard time we’re saying you’re having a hard time today. Let’s see how I can help. If we go back to some of those parents who were expressing dismay at their baby’s fussy behavior, we might be able to find some of the reasons why that’s happening. Maybe a baby who’s crying when they’re on their mat is feeling bored. We can test this by offering something new for them to investigate, which for a child who’s grasping things could be something as simple as a napkin, and seeing whether that engages them. If they’re not actually protesting being on the mat, but they’re protesting not being able to see us, then a napkin isn’t going to help. Putting them in a spot nearer to us will help when we perceive our child climbing on us as being difficult, when we probably want this very same child to meet milestones related to crawling and walking on time or early. Maybe the problem isn’t with our child. If they’re pulling on necklaces or earrings, maybe we could wear jewelry a bit less for a bit. If they’re grabbing at our glasses. We could take our glasses off when they climb on us and re. Great. I don’t want you to grab my glasses. We can learn to see each thing our baby is doing as exactly the right thing for them in their development, in this moment, instead of feeling unhappy when they’re too fussy and also unhappy when they aren’t fussy, as baby Nina’s parent says, The only thing my baby likes doing right now is cuddling up close to me in her sling. She’s very quiet and no trouble at all. She doesn’t do much except sleep. To be honest, though, I’d much rather see her full of life. The poor kids can’t win, can they? And what we’re hoping here is that you’re getting enough support that you don’t find babies requests for help to be difficult to hear, if you are having a hard time, that you can get help. Because according to the Wonder weeks, you should get help if things are difficult and difficult enough that you’re finding babies fussing hard to cope with. And this fact does come through clearly to readers. Parent, Catherine said in our Facebook group she got the impression the Wonder weeks book was a series of reminders not to shake your baby even if you are frustrated at a change, because that change could supposedly be expected based on their schedule. And the book is a bit repetitive on this, there isn’t much on the topic at leap one, but it starts in earnest at leap two, under a subheading, you may be on the edge of really losing it. The ploys say, only Rarely will a parent admit to having been a bit rougher than necessary when putting their baby down, because they were so driven to distraction by the baby screaming and crying that it happened without their thinking about it, even thoughts of being rough, need to be addressed immediately, because it’s an indication that you’re overwhelmed and desperate and need help right away. There is no excuse for acting on these feelings. However difficult your baby is being, accept that it can be trying at times and take action before the situation overwhelms. You talk to someone about how you’re feeling. End Quote, here’s the LEAP three reminder, if parents worry a lot about their baby and they are not given enough support from family and friends, they may become exhausted. Unwelcome advice. On top of exhaustion could make any parent feel even more irritable and snappish. They feel they have no one to turn to with their problems. They feel alone. However understandable these feelings of frustration may be, one should never act on them. Slapping or hurting a baby in any other way is not acceptable. Seek help if you feel it is all getting too much for you. End quote. Then there’s a special call out box with a drawing of a cloud and a lightning bolt at the top that says, shaking is very dangerous. In capitals, never shake your baby. Shaking a young child can easily cause internal bleeding just below the skull, which can result in brain damage that may lead to learning difficulties later on, and in some cases, even death. End quote.

Jen Lumanlan  42:29

The LEAP four reminder is many mothers and fathers can become annoyed toward the end of a fussy phase, when there seems to be no real reason a baby is upset. It may feel like their baby has no valid reason for making such a fuss, and they are inclined to let them cry a little longer than they used to. Parents may think of comments and helpful advice they’ve heard from others about spoiling their baby, baby. They really are giving into their whims too much. We hope you will remember your baby needs to be comforted. Leaving them to cry will not help them through this fussy phase when your baby won’t stop crying and you are at your wit’s end. Get help long before you lose control. Shaking in particular can be harmful. So this all, and I’m not going to repeat the same thing from all of the leaps, but it’s there for most of them. It brings us back to our quarrels with the baby. The book essentially sees our role, by which I mean the mother’s role in particular is to provide the perfect environment for your child. You have to really pay attention to their behavior and preferably record it in the Wonder weeks app and provide the right level of stimulation to ensure they’re taking advantage of their developmental leap. Which reminds me of those toy kits you can sign up for that the toys are supposedly timed for the exact developmental stage your child is at when there’s no evidence that children benefit from presenting specific toys at specific times, you as the mother don’t really exist as a person anymore. Once you become a parent, your role is to be a parent, to be a mother, to do that job perfectly, and if you get stressed out doing that, get help and don’t shake the baby. You can take an active role during a leap. We’re told, by helping and guiding your baby, you build a safe and strong bond. End quote, and even though we give you the earliest age at which the behavior appears, quote, don’t focus on the earliest possible age, as most babies exhibit these skills at the later side of the range. And anyway, you can anticipate when a leap will happen by age, but your baby’s choices make them unique. And also, don’t shake the baby as we start to zoom out a bit at the end of this pair of episodes, we have to wonder, what’s the purpose of the fussy periods? Assuming they do exist, what are we to do with this information that our child is going through one of these nebulously defined periods of development for which there’s basically no research supporting them in the book, in a book chapter celebrating the legacy of pediatrician and author, T Barry Brazelton, Dr ploy recounts the results of his early chimp studies and mapped these to the data they gathered from human parents, with a goal of understanding the four whys, where researchers try to understand the evolution, development, causation and function of behavior, regression. Periods have evolved in humans, primates and non primate mammals as well. He says the chimp mothers would tolerate increased contact that the infants were trying to get, but then, after the regression they would enter a period of conflict where the mother chimp would actually try to push the baby off them, in providing evidence for the development of regression periods. Dr ploy says that mothers of younger human babies would initially worry that something was wrong with their babies during a regression period and take them to the doctor, only to find out there was nothing wrong. Then their worry would turn to annoyance. In the first few months, they wouldn’t do anything about their annoyance, but from the second half of the first year onwards, they would the chapter is pretty light on details, and I didn’t see this information described in any peer reviewed paper, but he says the mothers sensed their babies were able to do more, and so they would demand more of them. They initially used mild strategies like diverting the baby’s attention, but over time, these would develop into what took deploy, called clashes, and by the time the babies were 18 months old, all the mothers reported these clashes, which we can assume are the same thing as the quarrels in the Wonder weeks book, Dr ploy argued that the cause of regression seems straightforward. They’re related to age linked developments in children’s brains. Their function is to trigger what he calls better caring behavior for mothers, because being able to trigger this behavior creates better outcomes for children. The evidence in support of this is a single study finding that temperamentally difficult middle class and upper class children, who we can assume are all white, had unexpectedly high IQs. He theorized that, quote, temperamentally difficult children activate special family resources, stimulating intellectual development. End quote, The ploys and a collaborator developed a program quote for a group of single mothers at risk of abusing their infants. End Quote, to help them see that their babies couldn’t help being difficult and that comforting their babies would facilitate later learning, they published their findings in a book, not in a paper, and only in Dutch, so I can’t check the outcomes, and as we might expect, they reported in this chapter that I was reading unequivocally positive outcomes, and conclude that regression periods have the function of activating family resources to promote intellectual and social development as well as physical health. If we accept this premise as true, then ultimately, what Dr ploy is saying is, hug your baby, respond to your baby, ignore all that science based advice from earlier in the century that said you would spoil your baby by hugging them too much. It is not at all clear what’s happening during the clashes, and it seems to me that that’s just as important at what happens during the regressions. But that isn’t the ploys area of expertise. Their expertise is on whether regressions exist, not on how to support children in their growth and development, which is what most of the Wonder weeks book is about. We can only speculate that there might be a connection between regression periods and attachment, between mothers and children. And if you need a refresher on how attachment theory, which we’re discussing here, is different from attachment parenting, you can find that in the episode on most of what you know about attachment is probably wrong. Dr Woolmore, who did one of the sort of replication studies in the first episode in this mini series, speculates that one interpretation of regression periods is they’re essentially periods of attachment behavior. Depression can impact attachment relationships because, as we’ve seen, depressed mothers can have a more difficult time responding flexibly and sensitively to their infant, especially when they perceive baby as crying for no reason. Perhaps the entirety of the Wonder weeks method, along with all of these reminders not to shake the baby, is that the baby is going through some sort of internal stress that it doesn’t have any control over that it’s a phase that will pass and that it doesn’t need pain medication, which some mothers and study populations did often give because they thought there was something physically wrong with baby. But this introduces a potential challenge to the ploys perspective. If we understand that something important is happening in these fussy periods, that our calm and sensitive presence is helping our baby to cope with internal struggles that we don’t know much about, then quarreling or clashing with them is not even a neutral action. It’s an action that may create more difficulties for our baby. A variety of studies have found the biggest predictor of a secure mother infant attachment relationship is adequate social support. So once again, we find ourselves considering cultural consequences of what the ploys very much see as issues that only take place within the family. It’s a lot easier to respond sensitively every time baby cries when you aren’t the only one responsible for doing this, because there are 10 other adults around you who all have experience of being with babies, but don’t have one exactly the same age as yours. So they can support you now, because they know you’ll support them with their baby when the time is right, when our culture has told us for several generations now that a family is one mother and one father and their biological children, and we can’t cope with the work that it takes to respond sensitively to those children, then clearly the answer is to spend $1,650 on a bassinet. It rocks baby back to sleep when it detects the moving, rather than to try to understand why we’re doing the work of a village of people all by ourselves. So where do we go with this information? Is there anything useful here? I think the ploys are on their safest ground when they tell us that regressions exist, because I believe they probably do, but also so what I’ve been looking at peer reviewed research on parenting and child development for about nine years now, and until I read this book and started looking for research on it. I’d heard of Wonder weeks and regressions because I’d heard of the book, but I had never seen this concept appear in any peer reviewed paper on any other topic related to parenting or child development, ever. I’ve never seen an author say we found the babies in our study did x, but we realized we tested it in a regression week. So we’re not sure if the results are valid. No other researchers are thinking about this, unless we’re talking about the three sets of researchers who were trying to prove that regressions happened back in the 1990s it seems to have basically been abandoned since of a line of work since then, I think it’s worth reiterating the weak evidence base behind the entire idea of the Wonder weeks. I’m not going to restate the contents of the first episode on this topic, where we covered this extensively. Suffice it to say the entire concept is based on essentially four studies of fewer than 100 children in total. I went through the references list to the 2019 edition of the book, and tried to get hold of every single book chapter and article that was cited. On one hand, that wasn’t very difficult. There are only 53 references in that edition. Just for comparison, this episode references 46 studies, so not that many fewer than the book. Books that describe precise developmental processes usually have much longer reference lists because readers want to know what research the assertions the authors make are based on. And to be clear, my list is shorter actually, because I couldn’t find most of the studies of the book chapters and books that the ploys are referencing. But at least 53 references is better than 28 references that the 2012 edition was published with when you look at the ploy zone research, it seems there’s a long list that is kind of explicitly relevant, but when you count up the subjects of those studies, you find a good chunk of the work is actually based on their chimpanzee studies. They have 19 papers and book chapters cited in the 2019 edition. Eight of them are studies of chimps, which is 42%.

Jen Lumanlan  52:21

One was about both chimps and people. One was in a book that I couldn’t find, so I generously interpreted that that was about both chimps and people as well. So if we distribute those studies, basically about half the work they’re published that’s cited in the 2019 book is on chimps, not on human children. Again, this is not a massive study of chimpanzees we can use to make sweeping conclusions about all chimpanzee behavior. The ploys main 80 page paper describing the pattern of Mother infant behavior among chimps was conducted on five mother infant pairs, and these are not wild chimps. These are chimps in Gombe National Park with whom Dr Jane Goodall had worked for decades. If you Google Jane Goodall chimpanzee, you can find pictures of her holding and even kissing chimpanzees on the lips. The researchers would follow the mother to be around every day to make sure she would tolerate being followed after she had the baby, and then did monthly observations until 300 minutes of good observation were obtained, which is five hours over two years. It’s nothing. And we’re looking at five chimps, two of whom became ill in the course of the study. And we know that illness affects behavior, and this one chimp study generated the data they based their subsequent papers on. So once again, we’re looking at a beyond tiny sample size here. And as we know, we can write pretty much anything we want in a book. The publisher will do some basic fact checking, but they aren’t going to dig into the weeds like we do here on the podcast, and like peer reviewers do when the study is published in a journal. 13 of the 19 studies, the ploys were involved with that are referenced in the book are book chapters rather than peer reviewed journal articles. That’s 68% of their reference work that’s never been peer reviewed, and all of this work is old. Five of the references, which is 9% of the total of 53. References cited in the 2019 book were published in the 1970s which means they’re over 40 years old. Another eight or 15% of the total was published in the 1980s 11, 21% of the total were published in the 1990s because nobody else has really looked at the existence of Wonder weeks. There’s no more recent research to support or refute the idea. I think we should be aware of the Centers for Disease Controls act early recommendations, which state the age by which 75% of children have achieved certain milestones. So if your child hasn’t met this milestone yet, then keep an eye on it. Make an appointment to see your doctor if you’re worried. There are different milestones at each age for social and emotional development, language and communication, cognitive milestones that involve learning, thinking and problem solving and movement and physical development milestones, so the social and emotional milestones at two months old that your baby calms down when spoken to or picked up, looks you in the face, seems happy to see. You when you walk up to them and smile when you talk to them or smile at them. The language and communication milestones at two months so that your baby makes sounds other than crying and reacts to loud sounds. The cognitive milestones are that your child watches you as you move and looks at a toy for several seconds. Note that they don’t say a toy that’s specifically geared toward their exact developmental stage. And the movement and physical development milestones are that they hold up their head when they’re on their tummy, they move both their arms and legs and open their hands briefly. There’s no mention of the leap of changing sensations in the CDC milestones. We could imagine that a number of the CDC milestone items could be found within the leap of changing sensations that happened back at five weeks. But then what additional information does the LEAP offer? Nothing at eight weeks, baby is supposed to be entering the world of patterns leap, and there’s nothing in the CDC guidelines about that. So the book is essentially a set of 10 reminders that babies go through periods of time when they’re fussy. Each chapter unfolds the same way with some variation of the questions deploys asked in their questionnaire to appearance. They don’t tell you all the questions at once, though, and partly that makes sense, doesn’t make sense to ask about temper tantrums for an eight week old, but the book spreads out the description of the questionnaire items, making it seem like, for example, a baby demanding more attention than before is uniquely associated with Leap two, rather than something they expect to see in every leap they’re a mixture of these questionnaire items sprinkled throughout the chapters, and when they appear in multiple chapters, they’re phrased differently to make them sound unique. There’s the reminder that you may feel overwhelmed by baby’s behavior in the fussy phase, but don’t shake the baby. They give some pointers on the kinds of things baby might be able to do at that stage, although at the very earliest end of the potential spectrum so you can look out for them. There’s a checklist of things you can go through so you can see what your baby can do. And that’s kind of it repeated 10 times. And the further you go into the book, there’s increasing focus on parenting advice as well. Just a representative sample, many parents say their sweet toddler sometimes turns into an aggressive Tiger, and this makes them uneasy, yet it is an understandable change in the world of principles. Your child tries all types of social behavior. Being aggressive is one of those your toddler studies how their parents, other adults and children react if they hit, bite, push or kick or if they deliberately break something. Show your child what you think of their behavior. This is the only way they will learn that being aggressive isn’t sweet, interesting or funny. This way they learn it’s hurtful and that adults are not amused by aggressive or destructive behavior. End Quote, and there’s a call out section on the next page which assures parents that aggression in toddlers is normal, which concludes quote, when children live in environments where aggression is not tolerated and where sweet and friendly behavior is rewarded, the child will not start hitting and kicking when they are frustrated, want something or are corrected, they will use more acceptable ways of expressing themselves. End quote, If you are a regular listener, I am sure you can imagine. I could spend an entire episode dissecting those statements, but let us go for the short version. How are we to show the child what we think of their behavior. The ploys say that, quote, a whining toddler is quicker to land in a time out than when they were younger. So are the ploys advocating this strategy. It’s hard to tell. The language is observational, but what else are we supposed to make of it? And of course, we are told, Don’t let quarrels escalate. No matter how bad the outburst of quarrels are, stay calm and consistent. Screaming is never a good example, even a small smack on their bottom or hand will work against you in the end, physical violence can never be justified. Okay, all well and good, but what are we supposed to do? Just say no. I think it’s totally fine to say no to behavior that hurts us. If your child is hitting, biting or kicking you, you should absolutely block them from doing it if you can and say, I won’t let you hit me, but only say that if you do block the hit, because if they already hit you and say, I won’t let you hit me, they learn that your I won’t let you doesn’t mean very much. If they already got a hit in you can say, I don’t want to be hit and block them from hitting you again. We’re going to get through the meltdown as safely as we all can. And then immediately after that, we want to figure out. Why did that happen? Were they overwhelmed, hungry, tired? Did you say no to 10 things beforehand, and this was the last straw, and they didn’t know how else to express their frustration? Had their sibling been poking at them all morning? Had they been keeping it together all day at preschool and they had no energy left to figure out how to tell you that they didn’t want peas for dinner today? No, we can’t always understand every single meltdown your toddler has, but you might be surprised how often you can find patterns. When you find patterns, you find needs. Your toddler probably has needs for connection and autonomy, and at some points, their need for connection may be more prevalent. At times, it might be autonomy. Some kids have additional sensory needs. They struggle with certain types of clothes or slippery foods. Some kids seek out more sensory input. Sometimes hitting can be a way of looking for more stimulation. Just imagine you came home at the end of a long day and your partner said, Hey, how are you doing? Did you get the milk we needed? And you say, No, did you get the milk? Since you clearly did remember, we can then imagine that our partner might think to. Sells. Wow. My partner’s in a crappy mood right now. How can I show them their behavior isn’t okay, but what do we want them to do in that situation? I would want my partner to think, Hmm, sounds like Jen’s had a tough day. Is there any way I might have contributed to this? And I wonder what I can do to help. And that’s usually what our kids want us to think as well. And then come towards them as much as we reasonably can, we might even find that if we can interpret our child’s behavior in this way, we might not find ourselves so frustrated by it. Psychologists call that reframing, which means seeing the same situation in a different way. What if we didn’t have to remind ourselves not to shake the baby over and over again, because we could see this is just a child doing the best they can, just like I’m a parent, doing the best I can. There’s a reason why they’re having a meltdown, just like there’s a reason why I snap at people when I’m having a hard time. The more we can look for patterns that help us understand these reasons, the less we’re reliant on horoscopes or wonder weeks. Thanks so much for being here with me as we explore these topics. If you’d like to see the extensive list of references that I consulted for this episode, you can find them at your parentingmojo.com forward slash wonder weeks part two.

Emma  01:01:13

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