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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Denise  00:03

Denise, hi everyone. I am Denise, a longtime listener of your parenting Mojo. I love this podcast because it condenses all the scientific research on child development, compares it with anthropological studies, and puts it into context of how I can apply all of this to my daily parenting. Jen has a wealth of resources here, so if you’re new to the podcast, I suggest you scroll through all her episodes. I’m sure you’ll find one that will help you with whatever you’re going through, or one that just piques your interest 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 your parenting mojo.com forward, slash, subscribe. Enjoy the show.

 

Jen Lumanlan  00:58

Hello and welcome to the your parenting Mojo podcast. Have you seen the Wonder weeks book, or did you download the app? The book has apparently sold over 2 million copies, and the app has been downloaded over 4 million times. So, the approach has certainly struck a chord with parents. It seems to help that the book was developed by two PhDs, Dr Franz ploy and his wife, Hetty vanderai ploy, whom I will refer to together as the ploys. And I know that when I see PhD following the neighbor of an author, I perceive the author as having some credibility. They’ve now been joined by their daughter, Xavier plus ploy, as the CEO of the Wonder weeks. Apparently, Hetty actually died quite young in 2003 so when you hear me refer to Dr ploy. Later in the episode, is Dr Franz ploy. So, in this upcoming pair of episodes, I want to ask two overarching questions. In this first episode, we’ll ask is the idea of Wonder weeks backed up by scientific research. And then in the upcoming episode, we’ll ask, okay, based on what we learned here in the first episode, what if anything should we do with the ideas in the book to help us and our baby? So, if you’re expecting or you have a child under the age of one, this episode is very much for you. Let’s get started with our first question and look at the scientific research behind the Wonder. Weeks. So, Franz ploy studied biology and psychology. His wife, Hetty, studied educational psychology and anthropology, and together, they observed chimpanzees with Jane Goodall in Gombe National Park in Tanzania between 1971 and 1973.

 

Jen Lumanlan  02:30

Franz obtained his PhD in the behavioral development of chimpanzee babies, and Hetty got hers in mother baby interaction in chimpanzees. Because these dissertations were submitted in the early 1980s and fortunately, I couldn’t find any copies online, possibly as part of their dissertations or in related work. The employees noticed that baby chimpanzees seemed to go through a series of what they termed regression periods, by which they meant a return to behavior like clinging to their mother and nursing often which they hadn’t done so much only a week or so previously. The ploys hypothesized that each of these regression periods was followed by a developmental leap, and they wondered whether similar periods might exist among human babies. Several previous researchers had generally coalesced around the idea that there are four major behavioral transitions in human babies. And in the late 1980s the ploys began a research project to see if these were all of the transitions, or if they could find any more. And they decided to do this by identifying periods of regressive behavior in babies, because there was agreement in the literature that these regressive periods accompanied developmental transitions. They say that this literature finds that some sort of transitions do exist, and that these occur at two, 712, and 18 to 21 months. Unfortunately, the literature here mostly consists of books rather than peer reviewed papers. It’s not an exaggeration to say you can pretty much publish anything you want in a book. That’s why we have the peer review process in journals, so other people look at papers before they’re published and check that they are grounded in previous literature. It isn’t a perfect process by any stretch of the imagination, but at least you know someone who knows the subject has checked it out. The ploys cite 13 authors or sets of authors in support of this claim, so I tried to track each of them down. Unfortunately, seven of them were book chapters or books themselves, and of course, these are books published in the 1970s and 80s, so I wasn’t able to get a hold of them. One paper was a discussion about relationships between peer infants, which isn’t really related to what we’re talking about. One was a newsletter. One was peer reviewed and talked generally about development, but not specifically about developmental leaps. Two papers by the same author did talk about shifts in development, but didn’t specifically say At what ages they occur. One of the 13 papers by McCall and colleagues, published in 1977 did specifically discuss finding shifts at two, 813, 21 And 30 to 36 months. So, they agree with the ploys that there’s a shift at two months. But other than that, there’s complete disagreement on the timing of the shifts. They cite other research indicating hypotheses about more regression periods, and conclude quote only after the regression periods are firmly established, can one address the quest for the number and the nature of the bio behavioral transitions. So, this is what they set out to do. The ploys. Were looking for the same kinds of regressive behavior that they had seen in chimps, which was seeking proximity to a preferred individual, usually the mother. When they worked with these chimps, they would primarily use direct observation, watching the chimps each month until they had 300 total minutes of observation time. They wanted to see if they could identify regression periods using a questionnaire and interview format with human mothers. So, they developed a questionnaire that they gave to mothers who agreed to participate in their study. In their paper, they said the questionnaire asks if the child was more fussy than usual, if they were looking for more body contact, if they were sleeping less, if they feared other people had more childish behaviors, ate less in a meal, had problems in changing and dressing. Seemed to decrease their activity. Wanted more cuddles from mom, and cuddling things other than mom, obviously not all of these things happened from the earliest ages. The first ones on the list happened at the earliest ages and continued, and the later ones on the list happened as more as the babies got older, as an additional source of information, a subset of the mothers were asked to record the infant’s location and the kind of interaction they were involved in for an entire day once a week, the so called check sheet was divided into half hour periods, and the mothers were asked to record whether the baby had spent time on her lap, in contact with her, within 1.5 meters of her in its playpen, in a chair or in another room. She also noted whether the baby had been awake, asleep, crying, playing on its own, been fed, been changed, bathed, been carried around andor been played with by either her or others. A further subset of these mothers were observed directly by the ploys who would code the interactions between the mother and the baby using the following criteria. Number one, the baby’s weight is supported by mother and their fronts are touching. Number two, fronts are touching, like in the first category, and also the mother’s arms supporting the baby’s back and head. Number three, on the lap, meaning the baby’s weight is supported, but there’s no front to front contact. The baby might be facing a mother or have their back toward the mother. Number four, they’re in contact. So baby is standing or sitting on its own, but its body is touching its mothers. Number five, the infant is within arm’s reach, which is defined as 1.5 meters, but they aren’t touching each other. Number six, they’re in the same room, but outside of arm’s reach. And number seven, they aren’t in the same room and they’re out of visual contact. These categories are considered to be mutually exclusive, so a mom and baby pair can only do one of them at once. The researchers noted that whenever the pair changed from one category to another, and the percentage of time was spent in each of the six categories was used along with the questionnaire data. The main finding of this study that took place over 20 months was that most mothers found that at a certain age, their babies were more tiring, difficult and demanding, and that at other periods, this was not the case. Difficult periods were accompanied by increased crying and body contact and a decrease in the amount of sleep. Deploys called these periods regressions to validate the questionnaire data, deployers used the observational data and calculated the time that mother and baby spent in physical contact and plotted this against the baby’s age in weeks. The observational data was pretty well correlated with regressive periods that the mothers reported in the questionnaires, which isn’t massively surprising, since they’re essentially getting at the same information from very same research subjects in two different ways. Then they tried to link the regression periods with information that was already known about developmental shifts that babies make in their first 20 months. Employees didn’t do any statistical analysis with the data from the questionnaires. They simply looked for a high percentage of participants reporting similar data, which means their data are more likely to find a result where there really isn’t one. They did do some statistical analysis for the subset of mothers they observed directly looking at the relationship between the time the baby spent in body contact with the mother and whether it fell inside or outside of a regression period that the mother identified in the questionnaire. The generally accepted p value is point 05 which means if you get a P value of point 05, or less in your analysis, then your evidence is strong enough to reject your null hypothesis, that there is no link between body contact, between baby and mother and mother’s report of fussiness, then we say your results are statistically significant. The ploys never explicitly state their null hypothesis, but we have to assume is that there was no relationship between the observed data and the data from the questionnaire. The probability of the distribution of frequencies under the null hypothesis yielded a p value of point 03, which does not reach significance because that number is greater than point 05, once they combine the observations instead of looking at them in. Individually, they did get very good significance with a P value of point 004, so much less than the p value we’re looking for. Okay, so far so good, right? They got statistically significant results when they did the analysis in a certain way. Well, let’s look at the information again and just see if there might be more here than meets the eye. So, the mothers, and they were all mothers in the study were not randomly selected. They were recruited by midwives or teachers of toddler play groups, and then the mothers wrote a letter to the researchers. The researchers interviewed the mothers and quote selected healthy mothers who had no previous medical and psychological problems, who looked forward to having the baby, intended to look after it themselves were financially secure and had an extended support system, which consisted of family living in the same town and free access to a Child Guidance clinic. End Quote, and everyone in the Netherlands could access those Child Guidance clinics at the time, all of the babies were healthy, full term newborns, except one who was born four weeks early, but after four weeks in an incubator because of possible prematurity of the lungs, but apparently the baby had no postnatal problems. Quote, there was some economic diversity in their sample, but all of families were Dutch and Caucasian. Maybe you’re already seeing some red flags here, because I know I am. Well, firstly, we got that highly homogenous group of mothers, which the researchers specifically selected because they were homogenous in the paper, they said that. Quote, we followed a very strict selection procedure to find absolutely problem free and healthy families. We wanted to understand normal development before venturing into understanding pathology. End quote, the unstated assumption here is that normal development is the way that white children who don’t have any major life stressors develop, which is an idea you may recall we’ve won in run into once or twice in the past, most notably in the development of the your x year old child books. There was some economic diversity in the sample, but the effects of that are going to be muted in a country where there’s a high degree of social support, even the mothers with lower incomes had regular access to the Child Guidance clinic. People in the US have access to that same kind of support that the mothers in this study had would definitely be middle class. The mothers in the study were repeatedly asked if they were experiencing major life stressors, and none of the mothers reported experiencing any major stresses during the entire 20 months of the research, which seems kind of wild here in the US, where half of adults worry that a major health event could lead to a bankruptcy, which would likely result in losing your home and food insecurity as well.

 

Jen Lumanlan  12:38

Moving on to the mental health implications of that highly homogenous group of mothers, we have to remember that pathology means the study of disease. So, the ploys see any of the stressors that are associated with poverty and a lack of social support and major life changes as likely to cause disease, and that good middle class white families won’t experience those stressors. So if we understand how those middle class white families operate first, then we can get everyone else to act more like them, and then we won’t have any more social problems, because children who are raised like middle class white children are raised don’t cause problems, and certainly having a mother with any sort of previous medical or psychological problem, and who might have been feeling ambivalent about having a baby, and who lives in a country where there’s no legally required paid medical leave, so she might not be able to stay home with a baby, even if she wants to, who doesn’t have a husband with a stable job and a family nearby to help, is pathological. The second major issue is that while the authors stated that the mothers didn’t know the study’s purpose, meaning they were blind to its purpose. There is no mention of anyone other than the authors doing any of the work in this study, which means the study authors were not blinded, and that means the people who were doing the coding knew what they were looking for and were more likely to make observations that fit with their hypothesis that regressive behavior appears in certain periods because the researchers weren’t blind to what data they were trying to collect. We can imagine a mother answering the door with a smile, and the researcher thinking, looks like we’re not in a regression week, and codes their observations accordingly. Maybe another morning, the mother opens the door with an eye roll, a sigh and clothing covered in vomit, and the researcher thinks, oh, it looks like a regression week to me and then codes their observations accordingly. The researchers certainly knew the exact age of the baby they were visiting, so they may well have had a hypothesis about whether they were visiting during a regression week, even before they got to the door, which could have biased their data collection. The visits weren’t recorded using video or even audio only, so we have no way to have a second researcher corroborate the coding. Thirdly, the primary data source was self reported by mothers, which means the mothers were the ones filling out these logs every half hour, once a week. I don’t know if you can cast your mind back to being the parent of a young baby, or maybe you don’t need to cast your mind back at all, and you’re in a. Right now and either remember or imagine what it would be like to mark down every half hour whether your baby had spent time on your lap, in contact with you within 1.5 meters of you in its playpen, in a chair, in a push chair in another room, as well as whether baby had been awake, asleep, crying, playing on its own, been fed, been changed, been bathed, been carried about and been played with either by you or others. Is there any chance you might forget whether the baby had done each of these things and which half hour period it had done them in? Is there any chance you might have forgotten to do the log entirely and done it in five minutes at the end of the day to the best of your recollection, relying generally on your impression of whether your baby seemed more or less fussy than usual at the moment, and then back filling the data to fit that. I’d say there’s a decent chance that this did happen on more than one observation for each child, which means our data may not be very reliable. A PhD thesis by Dr Ashley woolmore that we’ll look at in more depth later said that the largest source of data loss in their separate study was written questionnaires not being returned, and when the researcher interviewed participants, they would often learn about families moving house, changes in daycare arrangements and other stresses in the household that were rarely volunteered in the questionnaire responses and which undoubtedly had an impact on the infant’s Fauci Ness. The fourth issue is that we don’t know much about what kind of conversation the ploys had with the mothers. They observed in person. We know the ploys tried to blend in with the background for most of the time and not interact with the mothers, and they asked the mothers if they changed their behavior because the observers were present. And the mothers report did using a little more modesty with nursing and using the bathroom. We don’t know which of the ploys did these home visits and whether there were differences in the observations by Hetty and Franz for the reasons that mothers might have felt more comfortable with their bodily functions and conversation being observed by another woman. Issue five is the ploys adopted almost exactly the same set of criteria for the direct observations as they’d used with chimpanzees in Tanzania, with no discussion on the appropriateness of these criteria, the most obvious issue is the definition of within arm’s reach. Since chimpanzees have really long arms, the ploys use the same 1.5 meters to define within arm’s reach in their chimpanzee studies and with their human study. But a chimpanzee’s arm span is about one and a half times its height. So, a chimpanzee of average height may have a total arm span of about eight feet, which is four feet from midline to end of fingers. By comparison, I’m about five feet eight, which is reasonably tall for a human woman, and the distance from my midline to fingertips is three feet, which is a 25% difference. So should the difference that’s considered within arm’s reach really be the same for both species. A similar issue arises in the sixth criteria in the observational study, which is within the same room but out of arms. Reach. This criteria is a bit different from the categories that use with the chimps, which were within five meters, within 15 meters and visible but over 15 meters away. Since chimps move over a larger area than human mother baby pairs do in the observational data, the researchers coded time spent in the playpen or outside the playpen, and we think about both that and the amount of time mothers spend carrying their child, we start to realize how many cultural assumptions there are in this data collection. We don’t have any information on what parenting practices these parents followed. Maybe they were following Attachment Parenting, which, by the way, is different from attachment theory. We covered that in episode 138 on most of what you know about attachment is probably wrong. If they were doing Attachment Parenting, then they were probably carrying their babies a lot more than average, potentially most of the babies waking and even sleeping hours. And perhaps the babies fussed less because of it, because there’s no need to fuss when you’re seeking proximity to a caregiver and you’re already touching them. And lest you get excited about Attachment Parenting and think that it’s going to be the mythical parenting method that saves you from all crying, it’s pretty common for former attachment parents to find my work when they get burned out from carrying their baby all the time, because carrying baby all the time is feasible when we live in a culture where we have a whole bunch of other adults around who can help carry the baby, it can be a recipe for burnout when we’re trying to do all that by ourselves in our own house, with no other support, and potentially with one or multiple other children’s needs to consider. Or maybe these parents were following the resources for infant educar is approach known as rye, where we put babies on a mat and allow them to kind of entertain themselves for a good chunk of the day without needing as much interaction from us. Our family never had a playpen, and if they are used by parents practicing rye, it’s probably to help separate an older child from a younger child, rather than as a way to contain a baby. I’m not saying that either of these methods is necessarily better for all mothers or all babies, but the parents do have different ideas about how to raise their children, and to the extent that we ignore this, the data about how much time they spend in proximity to each other has an awful lot of cultural issues that affect it that the researchers aren’t. Ring issue six. As is that this study we’re discussing was published in 1992 which was the same year as the Dutch edition of the Wonder weeks book, which was published under a title in Dutch that translates to oops, I’m growing the first English translation wasn’t published until 2003 so the ploys data on human subjects from one study hadn’t even gone through full peer review by the time their instructional manual for parents, based on their data, was published, which seems a little bit forward to me. It’s not like their work was confirming decades of research that came before it. These were pretty new ideas at the time, employees state in their paper. We’ve been looking at that quote. Of course, it goes without saying that the phenomenon of regression periods should be firmly established in follow up studies. One of the first things to be done, in our opinion, is to measure directly or more precisely the various aspects of the regression periods as reported by the mothers. For instance, the increases in crying can be measured by using a voice activated tape recorder and calculating the number of minutes crying per day, or the decreases in sleep can be kept track of by keeping a sleep log and calculating the number of awakenings per night. The increases in Mother infant contact can be directly observed and recorded with an event recorder, as we did, but the observation should be carried out at least weekly, in order not to miss any period. Now that we have a lead from the maternal reports. This has become possible. End quote, and this leads us right into issue number seven, which is the number of participants and studies this work is based upon. I’m sure you might have imagined the Wonder weeks empire, with its multiple book editions and its ubiquitous app, and you might have thought this must be based on lots of studies of 1000s of babies, right? How else could they possibly know that these 10 predictable leaps work for so many babies, since the app is available in 16 countries and the book has been translated into 20 languages, well, okay, maybe not 1000s of babies. That sounds like a lot, but it must be hundreds of babies, right? Hopefully many hundreds? Well, no, it isn’t actually hundreds either. It isn’t even 100.

 

Jen Lumanlan  22:07

This initial study, which was the only study of the phenomenon of regression periods in human infants at the time, the first book was published in Dutch, looked at 15 mother infant pairs 15, and then the researchers did the in home observations, which were so important to understanding the regression periods with two of the pairs for initial study, 15 is not a terrible number. It can tell us if there’s something there worth investigating in greater depth, 15 does not give us statistically great results. Okay, we’ve already talked about some of the statistics here, and I’m going to go into this kind of at a slightly deeper level. We need to understand two statistical concepts, right? Power and p values. We already talked about p values a little bit. Power is related to a number of things, but one is the failure to reject a null hypothesis, and we can typically consider a power of 80% or higher to mean there’s a possibility of either correctly detecting an effect or accepting the null hypothesis. A null hypothesis is the opposite from what the researchers expect to find, right? They usually expect to find some interaction between two variables, so the null hypothesis is that there’s no interaction between the two variables they’re considering. And all the ploy statistical analysis tells us is that mothers who report their babies are fussy at the moment tend to hold their babies for longer in that period. That’s it. So, coming back to our statistical significance issue, I do think we can assume the null hypothesis is there’s no link between baby’s body contact with mother and mother’s report of fussiness, which would mean the mothers see their babies are fussy and are deliberately or non deliberately, spending less time holding the babies in those periods. So, this p value, right stands for probability value, the number with describing the likelihood of finding the data that you found in your study, which you think tells you something important when there’s actually no real effect. So actually the null hypothesis is true. In other words, it’s telling you how likely it is your results happen by chance. So, recall that the generally accepted p value is point 05 if we if your P value is less than that, we say your results are statistically significant. And so, power and p values interact with sample sizes, which is why this is important here. And the main way to make sure you get enough power and a statistically significant result is to use an equation to calculate what sample size you should use. When you test more people, there’s a greater chance that the result you’re finding is actually because there’s an effect to detect, not because all the people you happen to test, all by chance, have something in common. So if we want an 80% power level, which is also widely accepted in the psychology community, and a p value of point 05, this equation tells us we need a sample of 126 which is over eight times as many mother infant pairs as the ploys actually studied with a sample of 15 that they used if they have a power level of 80% Their P value is point one, five, which no serious researcher would ever say is significant. Or if we hold that P value of point 05 we’re looking at a power level of around 18% not the 80% we wanted to be reasonably sure we’re detecting an effect that’s there, or knowing that we should accept the null hypothesis. So, we should call this a pilot study, which is a study researchers do to find out if there’s more worth investigating, but that they would never describe as offering definitive results. And we hope that the ploys or other researchers did the follow up studies using the voice activated tape recorders or the sleep logs or weekly observations, right? Well, no, now we turn our attention to the topic of replication, which is the idea that if the results on a study are real, that other researchers using the same methods will be able to find them as well in 2003 Dr Franz ploy co-edited a book called regression periods in human infancy, which contain the results of three more studies on regression. The first was done by Dr Marta Sederni and Dr Carlos Rostran at the University of Girona in Spain, and they had an explicit goal of confirming Dr ploys results that he had obtained in the Netherlands. Once again, these researchers selected mothers and babies of, quote, middle socio economic and cultural class. End Quote, with sufficient social support and quote, without any relational problems of any kind. End quote, we aren’t told whether the mothers knew what the researchers were looking for, or whether the mothers were blinded to the research, even if the researchers themselves weren’t. Soderney and Rostran found regression periods with a mean length of two weeks and a range of one to four weeks, the distribution of the regression periods was much more diffuse than Floyd’s original study. The children were not always distressed to the same level within a regression period, and mothers were not always annoyed by the regression to the same degree. Overall, the picture is of data that is pretty fuzzy. There’s something there, but it’s much more difficult to see what it is in a separate paper, Dr Sidernie Dr Ploy and another colleague of Dr ploys looked at the regression periods they found. So, I compared these with the periods in the Wonder weeks book. Both of them found regression periods at around weeks four to five and eight to nine. Soderney found one at 12 to 14 weeks and then 16 to 20 weeks, while wonder week says there’s one at exactly 12 weeks, and then a smooth period, and then another regression at 15 to 19 weeks. There’s more agreement on a regression at what wonder week says is 23 to 26 weeks, and Soderney says is 24 to 27 weeks, wonder week says there’s a regression from 29 to 30 weeks, which is a clear, calm period for Soderney. And then they agree again a bit more with wonder weeks saying that there are regressions at 34 to 37 weeks, 42 to 46 weeks, and Soderney saying 32 to 38 and 42 to 48 which are both wider Windows than wonder week says Soderney’s Last regression is weeks 48 to 53 which only slightly overlaps with the Wonder weeks regression of 51 to 54 weeks. So, when we read in the studies abstract that quote a temporal relation between the regression periods found in earlier meaning in the ploys study and the transition periods reported here. End quote is sort of true. There is some kind of relationship, but there was no statistical analysis to understand the extent to which these two studies are describing the same regression periods or not. The authors note that. Quote, some scientists could prefer the use of standardized tests or scales of development in order to observe in a more systematic and precise way the process of change, end quote, rather than simply asking mothers if their children have learnt anything new this week. And yes, we might indeed prefer that approach, but we are not going to find it in this study. Oh, and their sample size was 18 mother infant pairs. So, let’s keep track. Shall we of the number of children that the entirety of the Wonder weeks method is based on so far we have the original 15, and now this new 18 for a subtotal of 33 the next chapter that we look at in the regression periods in human infancy. Book is a very interesting one, as it was authored by Dr Franz Ploy. It references a study by doctors de veer and vanguard in the Netherlands, and it seems as though the three of them had actually worked on the study together, but there was some kind of squabble over the results. Dr ploys chapter says that De Vere and Vanguard refused to allow him to publish the data, so it directs readers over to DEAVERE and Vanguard study to see the data before then describing ploys interpretation of it. So, let’s go to the data. First. The three researchers had observed four infant mother pairs. Now we’re up to a total of 37 pairs with weekly questionnaires and interviews, weekly observations of the pairs in their homes, in which the researchers had a timer going off in an earpiece every minute and they recorded. At that instant, what the mother and baby were doing, but they didn’t produce video recordings, so there was no way to double check their coding. They measured sleeping behavior automatically using equipment placed next to the bed, although they didn’t say what that equipment was or how it measured sleeping behavior, the mothers who participated were very much not blinded to the study’s purpose. In fact, the paper says the ploys book, which had been published in 1992 had been very successful with lots of newspaper and TV coverage. So because it was impossible to avoid the mothers hearing about the book or receiving it as a present, the researchers gave a copy of the book to each of the mothers to keep the study group as homogenous as possible. Strong regression weeks were defined as those in which as much as 80 to 100% of the mothers had reported that their infants showed regressive behaviors. Although it is hard to imagine how there could be 80% of four mothers, since three of them would be 75% and four of them would be 100%.

 

Jen Lumanlan  30:56

In the final paper, De Vere and bet van Geert said that their study, quote failed to replicate the ploys original findings, both for data obtained through Holmes observations and maternal reports. They said that quote, no conclusive evidence was found. That is evidence above mere chance level for the model of 10 regressions during infancy. End quote described by the ploys, they bring up a new issue as well. They found that some behaviors that looked like regression were actually due to teething and had to be Re Coded as not regressions. Okay, that makes sense, but it brings up another issue. What if a baby is teething on the weekly survey day and then the tooth breaks out after survey day, but the mother forgets to tell the researchers, then we have a fussy day coded as a regression period, when actually it was nothing of the sort. In addition, they cite research comparing daily maternal reports with observational data on the frequency and duration of breastfeeding, and found virtually no agreement between the two types of data, given that the mothers in De Vere and Vanguard study were being asked to recall a much greater constellation of behaviors than whether or not you’re breastfeeding on a weekly basis, not a daily basis. They say that, quote, the reliability of their reports cannot be directly assumed. They go on to say that, quote, this being said, it still does not explain why, reliably or unreliably, the mothers of the ploy study reported regression behaviors in the same weeks. End. Quote, maybe we can hypothesize This is an artifact of their tiny sample size, which had such weak power that the ploys accepted the test hypothesis when they should have accepted the null hypothesis, that there is no relationship between infant contact with the mother and Mother reports of fussiness. A New York Times article reported on some of the controversy around the publication of the data in this specific study. So, after the study was published in a peer reviewed journal, Dr Ploy publicly denigrated the findings due to the two babies in the study who were often left in playpens. Apparently, he also violated privacy ethics by saying publicly that one of the mothers was under psychiatric care, and that it could have influenced her infants behavior. The University of Groinian declined to renew his contract after the incident, although Dr Floy insisted he left by choice and that he did not interfere with the publication of Dr de Villa’s work, which had been alleged. So now that we kind of have the background on the study they started together and then separated on right, we’ve looked at the data on that. Let’s come back to Dr ploys chapter in the regression periods in human infancy book, which is basically a rebuttal of De Vere and Vanguard study. So, ploy identifies a number of reasons why De Vere and Vanguard may have failed to identify the same regression periods that he did. He restates the, quote, very strict selection procedure that was used in the original study, because this was an attempted replication, the same selection criteria should have been used, but apparently, wasn’t. In addition, two of the mothers followed a very strict sleeping, contact and feeding schedule of the type advocated in the 1920s and 30s, when mothers were explicitly told to ignore their baby’s crying. The mother of the baby cone, named infant F said she let her baby cry, quote, in order not to spoil it. If the baby woke up and started crying, the mother left it crying in bed. If it was not yet the schema time to feed if the infant cried, it was less likely to be held at four weeks during the first regression period, the crying graph shows a peak, and then the body contact decreases dramatically, from 85% to 33% infant F starts smiling much earlier than the other infants, and very quickly began smiling a lot more than crying, because its mother would reward smiling with attention. Infant J and her mother were separated for 10 days at birth, and the mother did not object to this, saying that she, quote, was not up to it yet anyway, and both the mothers of infants F and J said in their entry questionnaires they were planning to use these strict schedules. So, it’s sort of a mystery why the three researchers working together at that point would accept. These mothers into the study, the mother of infant e started child minding two other children in her home 34 weeks after the birth. And remember, in the original study, the mothers were supposed to be financially secure enough that they could plan to stay home with the baby and look forward to it without needing or wanting to work themselves because their husband’s salary was sufficient. Of course, we’re assuming they’re in a cis het relationship, and they could never be single mothers, because how could you possibly work and be so available to the baby that they can be in contact with you whenever they want, if you’re working what we see here is a picture of a mother whose job it is to be available to the baby at all times. I’m not arguing that we should use the wake your child up when it’s time to feed it approach, far from it. But I also think that if seeing the regression periods happen is so reliant on subsuming all of the mother’s needs so baby can be in contact exactly when baby wants to be in contact, then something isn’t right here. Another big thing that comes up in this chapter, for the first time, is the impact of mother’s depression on parent child interaction patterns. Other researchers have found two patterns of interaction between depressed mothers and their babies, so called intrusive mothers engaged in rough handling, spoke in an angry tone of voice, poked at their babies and actively interfered with their baby’s activities. Withdrawn mothers were disengaged and responsive and emotionally flat. Infants of intrusive mothers spent most of their time looking away from the mother and didn’t look at objects either, and they didn’t cry very much. Infants of withdrawn mothers are more likely to protest and be distressed still more, researchers have found that depression lasting longer than six months has this kind of effect, and that maternal postnatal depression can affect the length and timing of regression periods. One of the mothers in DeWitt and bangurit study was depressed, which means that three of the four mothers in the study should not have been selected under replication criteria. And all of this explains why DeWitt and bangurt study failed to replicate the ploys original study. And it makes sense these authors weren’t the only ones to find that the significant findings completely disappear when the mother is depressed. The Wonder weeks book does mention depression in that it exists and that you should quote, look for the help you need, and don’t be embarrassed to ask for it, as if everyone could actually afford to go to therapy when it isn’t usually covered by insurance. There’s a comment slid in there that quote, today’s men are just as big a part of parenting as women, and go through it all too. End quote, When, sure, men listening to this podcast probably are more involved than the average man, but they’re not going through it in exactly the same way that birthing parents go through it. And the biggest point here is that the book never mentions that the data on when regression weeks show up doesn’t fit the pattern. If the mother is depressed, Dr Wilmore found a delay of the regression week by about a week in infants whose mothers were depressed, but argues that it, quote, seems improbable that this would have a detectable impact on human development. End quote, but ploy goes on to draw five main conclusions from Davia and Vanguard’s data. Firstly, the age length regression periods are reflected in direct observations of body contact. Quote, under normal circumstances, thereby the phenomenon is once again validated by direct observations. End quote, so the model works under normal, white, middle class circumstances. Secondly, under special parental conditions like rigid schedule care or depression and phobias. Direct Observation methods are not chaotic and do reflect age linked regression periods, but you have to look for the right signals. The researchers observing infant F realized the baby would smile when he was distressed because crying was so ineffective at getting his mother’s attention. So, what if this was the case with some other parents too? What if some of the parents in the original study were using a slightly less strict version of infant F’s mom’s parenting methods, and sometimes a child smiles instead of crying, and in 13 of the 15 cases where the mothers filled out questionnaires but were never observed directly, the researchers probably would not have had any idea. And also, if you’re depressed and have had a hard time responding to your baby, and your baby smiles at you instead of crying, it’s possible that this indicates a regression week. And what if there are other issues that affect relationships, like depression and what if there are other signals than crying and smiling that we know nothing about thirdly?

 

Jen Lumanlan  39:27

Quote, it has proven important to filter out large peaks in body contact that can be explained by obvious external circumstances such as chaos travel and training crawling or bipedal walking. End, quote, some parents train their babies to crawl by physically moving the baby’s limbs. So of course, mother and child are going to be in physical contact if that’s happening, and also if they’re training the child to walk by holding the child’s hands. It’s the chaos that most interests me in this statement, because chaos is a word that can describe all of the things that the. Employees don’t want to see in their study participants. Chaos could mean the uncertainty that comes with not being white and middle class and financially stable and having lots of family support and being in perfect mental and physical health. All of these could lead to the child seeking increased contact with the mom, or maybe even with the dad, if he was the only person available. But these things are called life. They happen to all of us, not all at the same time, and to some of us more than others. But what good is a model that can only be applied under so apparently, perfect circumstances. The fourth of ploys conclusions is that the context, parenting, regime and attitude and the age of the child have to be taken into account in the analysis. Well, obviously yes on the age, obviously equally obviously yes on the context parenting regime and attitude, but this was never considered in the Floyd’s original study. Finally, quote, data of individual Mother infant pairs have to be analyzed separately and cannot be lumped. End. Quote. This is interesting and sort of strange, because if the regression periods are so universal that they are applicable to all children, why do we have to analyze the data of individual pairs separately? Plus, you might remember from our description of the analysis done in the ploys very first study that they only got statistically significant results once they combined all of the mother’s results together. Ploy concludes that, quote, the discussion now needs to move on from the existence of the phenomenon of age-linked regression periods to looking at how an infant adapts to special parental conditions. End, quote, but I think we’re pretty far from there. At this point, we thought we had 37 mother infant pairs contributing data that corroborates the fact that regression periods exist, but actually we now have 34 pairs that do this and four that seem to show the opposite. There are two more studies that I want to look at fairly closely, because Dr ploy also cites these as examples of replications of the ploys original study, meaning that they tried to use all the same criteria, and they found results that corroborate the findings of the original study. The first was conducted by doctors Willmore and richer in the UK, and has the not incredibly promising title of detecting infant regression periods, weak signals in a noisy environment. This study reported data from 30 mothers involved in a larger study that turned out once I’d done some digging to be Dr Woolman’s PhD thesis. So, we’re now up to 64 children across all of our studies supporting the hypothesis. Dr Wolmer’s thesis looked at the difference in regression periods among depressed and non-depressed mothers, but in this book chapter, they only report data on the non-depressed mothers without explaining any more about the larger study or the ways that depression was shown to impact the results. So, in this chapter, we see the actual questionnaire that the researchers use in these studies for the first time, where they first ask if the baby cried or fussed more easily or had more mood swings. And then to continue with the rest of the questionnaire, if not, it’s not a regression week. The second question asks about whether the child wanted more physical closeness or was more demanding of mother’s attention. Again, continue if these are present, it’s not a regression week, if they aren’t, finally, if at least two of the following are present. It’s a regression week. The child had sleeping problems or nightmares. Had eating problems, resisted being changed, was shy with strangers, was less vocal, was less active, sucked their thumb more often, behaved more babyishly. Was jealous, wanting mother also themselves, was very naughty, was very friendly, or through more temper tantrums. The questionnaire doesn’t specify what eating problems mean. So, who knows what the mothers interpreted that as meaning. The Floyds say at various places in the Wonder weeks book that quote, both breastfed and bottle fed babies can temporarily have smaller appetites. End quote when they approach a leap, and that quote during a fussy phase. Breastfeeding babies often want to nurse more. It may seem as though they’re nursing all day long. End quote, so both feeding more and feeding less are potential signs of a leap in the book, although how they know that from a questionnaire that asks for a yes or no response to a question on whether baby has eating problems remains a mystery. Okay, so let’s look at that list of behaviors in the questionnaire, because there are some interesting items on it. I imagine sleeping problems is somewhat self-explanatory for most parents, although I’m not sure how we can tell if a child who’s less than two years old has nightmares on resisting being changed, being very naughty and throwing more temper tantrums, what I see is a child whose needs we don’t understand. Why are they resisting being changed? Why are they being naughty? We have no idea. Maybe they have a need for autonomy. Maybe they don’t want to stop playing. Maybe they don’t like being cold when they’re stripped off naked. We have no idea. All we’re being trained to see is resistance, which is apparently indicative of a regression period. So. But what if it isn’t my daughter was shy with strangers every time she met them, and she always wants me to alter herself. So, who knows how that would have been coded? Plus being very shy with strangers and being very friendly are both indicators of regression periods, which seem like they can be in opposition. Being less vocal is considered a regression item, but being fussy is a primary regression item. So how could you make it through the first question about more fussiness and then also say yes to was less vocal? We do know that not all of the babies in this particular study were first borns. We don’t know about any additional pregnancies or births that happened during the study. As you may well know, acting babyishly can be a response to sibling dynamics, and it can also happen in response to finding out that another baby is on the way. Although the researchers say that quote in signal detection theory terms these meaning their results are weak signals within a lot of noise, so there is an increased danger of making both false negative and false positive findings. They go on to say that their results provide, quote, strong support for the ploys findings for existence and timing of regression periods at weeks 1217, and 26 and they call this strong support, even though, during the peaks, regression periods are only reported by 40 to 75% of participants. They didn’t start collecting data until until 10 weeks so as to make sure to have data from children who were overdue. So, they missed the week four and the week eight leaps. They don’t say why. They stopped at week 26 they noted they had been able to identify regression periods in children of depressed mothers, but that the timing and duration was different, and when they combined all the data, then all significant findings disappeared. This is sort of getting worrying, because between 13 to 17% of mothers in the US do experience depression, with an especially high proportion of Latina mothers having it. But the Wonder weeks book doesn’t ask mothers if they’re experiencing depression and if they are that this separate set of patterns applies to you, it also begs the question, what other patterns are we missing by looking at these highly homogenous samples in the studies, what patterns would we find among children of mothers who work or single parents, or neurodivergent parents, or neurodivergent children who are obviously way too young to be diagnosed? How can we possibly know if this book is relevant to us or not? Wilmore and Richard introduce yet more reasons why this data is difficult to understand. This is the first time I’ve seen that the timing of regression periods is based on gestational age and not from age of date of birth. I was so surprised by this that I had to look closely at the book to find the single mention that the method is based on due dates. So I ran a survey in the your parenting Mojo Facebook group to see if anyone else had missed this, and I found that 70% of the people who responded said they did follow the Wonder week system with their baby. That was actually a lot more than I expected, especially since there are a lot of new apps on the market now to track every aspect of your baby’s development. Of those, 70% of the people who use the Wonder weeks, a whopping 18% of parents hadn’t realized the correct date to use is the due date rather than the birth date. Of course, in the studies, the researchers are the ones making all these calculations, but if all you have is the book and you miss the single time this is mentioned, you might be forgiven for wondering, why on earth this system doesn’t seem to apply to your child. But it turns out we weren’t the only ones to miss this in his PhD thesis, Dr woolmore says Vander Wright and ploy do not make it absolutely clear that the gestational age of the infant is used to determine the timing of the regression periods. However, their use of gestational data was later confirmed during the planning phase of this project, the issue was not considered all the timings for this project were based on infants age from date of birth. This resulted in discrepancies in the number of weeks that data were collected. For example, when prospective parents were referred slightly late, ie during the infant’s 12th week, and the infant was also two weeks overdue, the study could only start during the infant’s 15th week based on gestational age, oops.

 

Jen Lumanlan  49:16

They also say there’s a problem inherent in using a timing unit as long as one week, which meant the researchers would call the mothers on a weekly basis. The weeks were rounded, so an infant that was seven weeks and three days old is in week seven, while one that is seven weeks and four days old is in week eight. And while we’re at it, why do we consider the week an appropriate resolution to study this kind of issue at all, other than the fact that it’s convenient for the researchers, and it’s convenient to communicate to parents, the ploys have not presented any evidence whatsoever to show that a week is a duration of time that gives us an accurate picture of infants behavior. We could look at four-day cycles or six day cycles, or any other duration we like. Oh. Obviously they have to be cut off somewhere, but it seems as though if you’re looking for weak signals in noisy data, it might be a good idea to study children who actually share a due date. If you think gestational age is the primary issue, your data is organized around, but it turns out gestational age is not very accurate either. These dates are usually calculated using naglers Rule, which says we should determine the first day of the last menstrual period. Subtract three months, add one year and seven days. That produces a due date. There’s approximately 280 days from the start of the last menstrual period. Oh, and that rule was developed around the year 1850 and it has not been updated since one study found that last menstrual period based gestational age estimates didn’t agree with expert obstetric estimates. In 39% of over 600,000 live birth records in Ohio between 2006 and 2009 it also assumes a 28 day menstrual cycle and ovulation on day 14, when 1% of people who menstruate in one study of over 600,000 cycles have cycles of 15 to 20 days, 7% have cycle lengths between 36 and 50 days. Another study found that 46% of people in a smaller study of 786 cycles had differences in their cycle length of seven days or more, and 20% had differences of 14 days or more. And the differences are not randomly distributed. One study found the gestational length for white first time mothers is seven days shorter than would be expected using naglers rule. There’s also no one perfect method of determining the ovulation date, which varies from one person to the next. So, this whole idea is based on understanding the exact gestational age of your baby, which is not an exact science itself at all. Dr Woolner study introduced even more suggestions for reasons why children might exhibit regressive behavior that aren’t actually regressions, things like changes in the family routine, the arrival of a new caretaker, as well as separation from the mother, family stress we’ve been discussing. But the survey doesn’t ask about any of these things. It doesn’t say, Is your child showing any signs of regressive behavior that aren’t explained by changes in the family routine, the arrival of a new caretaker, separation from the mother, family stress, or any of the other issues we’ve been talking about in this episode. So, what if those things are happening? And we attribute it to a regression, but it isn’t really. The researchers say there were hints of these ideas in the data, but it was not possible to test them systematically. And in any event, it is unlikely that all sources of noise can ever be eliminated. Which brings up the question that underpins this episode, if we can’t eliminate the noise, what’s the point of understanding the regressions? They might have developmental interest for researchers, but if they don’t actually tell parents much, that’s useful, what is the point? And I thought of another issue related to all these family stressors. What if the baby was essentially the same from one week to the next, but the mother was feeling more tired or stressed out or even sick, and the very same behavior that seemed fine last week suddenly seems clingy and overwhelming, and Mother reports regression like behavior when it isn’t even there. Some of the mothers in this study return to work toward the end of the study period, which the researchers say did introduce more noise into the data. But they caution that, quote, studies that fail to find regression periods must be carefully scrutinized to ensure they have not simply failed to see through the noise in their data, such, they have mistaken their own failure to find the phenomenon for the phenomenon’s nonexistence. End quote. The final conclusion they draw about their data is that researchers should, quote, be careful about heterogeneity in the sample of participants, especially the existence of maternal depression. End quote. But the Wonder weeks book presents this information as if it’s relevant to everybody from every background in every country, with no mention of physical or mental challenges or any other variables we’ve discussed. The depressed mothers in these studies had behaved babies with clear, fussy periods at weeks 15 and 17, not the long peak between 14 and 18 that Dr Wilmore was expecting to find. He found a peak at week 25 instead of the expected 26 but each of these findings from a different data set, data that was corrected for gestational age and removing children with illnesses and data without these corrections, no single set of data from depressed mothers match the ploys data, and yet the ploys never mention in the book that depressed mothers can expect very different regression, period, timing. The final study that I want to look at from this book was a study in Sweden of 17 first born infants. So now we have a grand total of 82 children across these four studies, the children were divided into two groups with eight mothers responding to the usual weekly questionnaire and interview guide, translation. Into Swedish nine dyads when the observation group, which was further divided into two cohorts, one was observed from two weeks to seven or nine months and the second from seven or nine months to 15 months, no explanation given as to why of all this subdivision happened, or what if any impact it might have had on the results. During the period when the observation group children were not being observed. They were followed by questionnaires that the mothers answered. The observations consist of three-hour home visits once a week, when the researcher recorded the amount of time mother and infant had body contact, and the amount of time baby cried. Fretting and fussing were recorded once every 60 seconds due to confounding factors like illness. The number of infants included in the analysis varies from 13 to 16 per week, which we have to imagine happened in the other studies as well. But no other authors explicitly state this or told us how they accounted for it in their analysis, the relationship between the number of identified regression periods and the number of expected periods was above chance level. But only 55% of the regression periods were observed within the expected weeks. Over 60% of the children were identified as regressive during weeks 14 to 1932, to 37 and 40 to 46 weeks periods not directly supported by this data were four to five, seven to 911, to 1222, to 2649 to 52 and the 61 to 64 week periods, so two thirds of the regression periods in the Wonder weeks book. The researchers hypothesized some reasons for this finding, including less homogenous development after age nine months, cultural differences between the Netherlands and Sweden, and individual variability between infants due to factors not controlled for, like temperament. And noted that, quote, all of these factors need to be addressed in future studies. End quote, it’s also possible there were some translation issues. Dr Wilmore realized in the discussion section of his PhD thesis that a question on the ploys questionnaire in Dutch asks whether the infant is quote, tiresome, which in in Dutch means that the child is feeling out of sorts. But in Walmart’s study, the English translation meant the mother was having a hard time that week because of the child’s behavior relatedly, Dr Woolner wonders whether mothers perceive infants are more challenging during regression periods, which occur on approximately a four-week cycle due to factors unrelated to infant development, such as menstrual cycles, the missed translation of tiresome certainly could have contributed to this. In Dr Wilmer thesis, he says that he did not generate evidence to support regression at weeks 12 or 26 but this cannot be interpreted as failing to provide support for their existence because of the translation issue, but it also can’t be used as support for their existence either, which is exactly what Dr ploy goes on to do, as we will see very soon. Further, Dr Wilmer said that when he asked things like, quote, have you been able to make any time for yourself this week, and have you picked your baby up when he or she has wanted you to more often this week, mothers often asked how other participants had responded to these questions. Some mothers seemed reluctant to give responses that could be interpreted as them struggling to look after their baby, an issue which would be totally missed in the yes or no responses to written questionnaires.

 

Jen Lumanlan  58:21

So, the upshot of all of this is that we are looking at studies of a grand total of 82 children, three of which are described as replications of the original study, but which come nowhere close to finding the same outcome. And in his book chapter summarizing the findings of these so-called replications, Dr ploy states that quote the evidence presented herein provides good support for the claim that age related regression periods exist and for the conclusion that their existence should be taken into account whenever developmental processes in infancy are discussed. Admittedly, so many regression periods were not expected meaning in his original study, and the findings came as a surprise. However, the data were firm and they have been replicated. End quote, he does note some of the confounding stressors that can generate regression, like behaviors, including parental divorce, going to daycare for the first time, holidays, switching between caretakers and when the baby is ill. He also wonders whether the differences in lifestyle and culture of infant care across countries might affect the results, and describes this as a topic for further study. Yet no further studies have ever been conducted. So the ploys published their only study on the timing of regression periods in 1992 and as far as I can tell, they didn’t publish any other papers after this point that establishes the timing of the regression periods more firmly by 2003 they’re saying we should stop debating whether the periods exist or not, with only 82 infants worth of evidence, much of which is not entirely aligned with the ploys ideas to back up that claim. Yet in the Wonder weeks book, The ploys confidently state. Date, all babies go through a leap in their mental development around the same age calculated from the due date, when the evidence we’ve seen does not really support this assertion. So, this is where we leave it for this episode. So, the upshot of all of this is what’s presented as settled science in the Wonder weeks book is really anything, but it seems likely that babies cry in some periods more than others over their first couple of years. But when those periods are is very much contested, or at least it was in the early 1990s nobody else has done research on this topic since then, although other researchers who commented for the New York Times article were divided on whether they had seen anecdotal evidence for leaps or whether they thought it was a load of rubbish. In our next episode on this topic, we’ll take a closer look at the evidence for what the ploys say is happening in the developmental leaps that are supposed to follow the fussy periods, as well as the implications of the advice that they offer to parents for what they can do to support those developmental leaps. If you would like to look at any of the 46 references I looked at for this episode, 37 or 80% of which are peer reviewed, which is a much higher proportion than you will find of the references in the Wonder weeks book. You can find them at your parentingmojo.com/wonderweekspartone.

 

Denise  01:01:19

I’m a your parenting Mojo fan, and I hope you enjoy the show as much as I do. If you found this episode especially enlightening or useful, you can donate to help Jen produce more content like this. Just go to the episode page that Jen mentioned. Thanks for listening.

Jen Lumanlan  00:02

Hi, I’m Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives, but it can be so

 

Jenny  00:09

Do you get tired of hearing the same old interest in 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 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  01:26

Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. Today we are going to be talking about a topic that we have addressed a number of times recently. We’re coming back for another go at it from a different angle. We’re looking at sleep and specifically this time we’re looking at sleep training. Before we do that, I wanted to let you know that I am reopening the course that I ran with Hannah and Kelty from Upbringing in a few weeks and it’s called right from the start. And it’s really about how to get parenting right for you from the start, rather than that, there is one right way to parent. And so we cover all the essential topics that are really relevant to parenting in baby’s first year, from sleeping to feeding to supporting physical, mental and emotional development. But the parents who have taken the course tell us that the part that they really needed that they didn’t know they needed was the part that really speaks about “What is my experience as a parent? What are my needs as a parent? And how do I get those met along with meeting my baby’s needs as well?” So, the course is designed for both first-time parents as well as those who have a child already and who know that parenting cannot be the same with this child as it has been with previous children because we don’t have enough hands to go around. There isn’t enough of us to give this child the same experiences our previous children have had. So enrollment for right from the start is open between April 3rd and 13th  and we all start together as a group on Monday, April 18. So, gift certificates are also available, so if a new baby is not in your present or in your future, then you may find that it makes a great gift for somebody if you’re going to a shower or potentially an even an early Mother’s Day gift for somebody who’s important in your life. So if you would like to help somebody in your life to get the right start for them with their baby, then I invite you to go to YourParentingMojo.com/rightfromthestart to learn more. Today I’m here with Macall Gordon, who is the senior lecturer in the Department of Psychology at Antioch University Seattle. And she has been interested in the topic of baby sleep for over 20 years now. And it’s a topic that took her back to graduate school in 2001. She’s a certified gentle sleep coach at her company, Little Live Wires, as well. And Macall may actually, in addition to obviously being on the same page sartorially with me (we’re both here in our navy blue shorts) she may be the best-prepared guest I’ve ever had on the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. She actually reached out to me and said, “Could I be on the show?” And I said, “Well, I’ve done a couple of episodes on sleep already. What new angle do you think we could take on this?” and she responded with a long list of topics that really get into the weeds on the research. So if you are the parent of a child who isn’t sleeping well and particularly if that child is under a year of age, then do listen up, because today we’re going to spend quite a bit of time talking about sleep training, and we’ll learn what we know from the research as well as where that research base really lets us down, and what all of that means for struggling parents, particularly parents who have what researchers call a “Difficult Temperament,” but I imagined Macall might call a Little Livewire. So welcome, Macall. It’s great to have you here.

 

Macall  04:16

Thank you. I’m so happy to be here.

 

Jen Lumanlan  04:18

All right. And so you have been at this for a while now. This is a long time to be interested in baby’s sleep. What was it that really drew you to this topic?

 

Macall  04:28

That’s such a good question. I started on this journey back with my first child that I had right at the very start of the internet so it was so early that all the websites that were on the web could fit in a book. It was actually a telephone directory of the internet, so we relied very heavily on books and then all these parenting magazines that you’d see in the pediatricians’ offices and the magazines I was noticing that this was the era of critical periods of brain development, right? It’s a big deal about the first three years, so important for brain development. And so, they were talking about the importance of responsiveness for brain development and attachment, and everything. And then, literally on the next page, they were saying, but for sleep, you gotta let your baby cry it out. And what I noticed was that the age to start was getting younger and younger. When I first started looking at was six months, and then it was five months, and then it was four months, and I thought, “Boy, this just doesn’t totally make sense to me.” There must be research to show that this is safe and a good idea. And back then I didn’t really have a lot of resources to dig into the research but as the Internet became more and more available, I started poking around. And once I figured out, first of all, what researchers called “crying it out,” which was a whole project by itself, once I kind of unlocked the research base, honestly, the more I looked, the less I found. And I kept thinking, “Okay, I’m just not finding it.” It’s out there. I just haven’t found it yet. And even when I went to my very first conference to present my lit review, I was standing there quaking in my boots because I thought there’s going to be some massive researcher who’s going to come along and just look at me and shake their head and pity, and say, “Oh, honey, didn’t you know about the whatever study?” That I had missed some huge piece, but really, what I found is that there wasn’t a lot there, and in the ensuing 10 or 15 years, still not much more on this particular question, so many levels we’re still in the same boat as we were even 20 years ago.

 

Jen Lumanlan  06:44

Yeah, and on that issue of the age at which to start sleep training. When I looked at one of your conference posters, and it has the bars showing the age at which the resource or the book or the study recommends sleep training, and the vast majority of them, they’re doing a study on children who are aged between six months on the very young end, but usually around 12 months, and like 50 months, right? parents in the real world. Yes, there are a small fraction whose children are not sleeping through the night by then and they need help, but who are most of the parents who are searching for information on sleep training?

 

Macall  07:19

Right. They are parents of young babies. Yes, that’s perhaps one of the most startling findings to me was that the research that we often use to support the need and effectiveness of sleep training in young infants was not even done on infants, but we know very little about how any infants in those studies experienced the intervention for being, you know, so big on precision, sometimes research really misses the boat on development so I think you probably saw, there’s one study that had the sample was 4 to 52 months. If you do that math, 52 months is a four-and-a-half-year-old. You can’t possibly tell me that a four-and-a-half-year-old experienced that intervention the same way a four-month-old baby did. But the results of that study didn’t even parcel things out by age at all. They just reported it for the sample. That’s what I knew when we started poking at it and saying, “Okay, what do we really know, in a nuanced, developmentally aware way about sleep training?” It really is a bit of the emperor’s new clothes, right? I’ve consistently gone, why is no one else seeing this? No one else is seeing what I’m seeing here.

 

Jen Lumanlan  08:32

And so I think that’s super important to understand for this topic and for other topics as well. I mean, this is not uncommon in the literature, right? To study a sample that is convenient to you. Maybe those were the babies that the researcher had easy access to, for whatever reason, and they didn’t know how to go about analyzing the data, or it wasn’t convenient for them to analyze the data in multiple cohorts, maybe there was only one four-month-old and all the rest of us are much older, and they would have had to throw that one child out and then report a much older dataset, and they didn’t want to do that. These concerns exist throughout the literature and it’s a pervasive problem. What other kinds of disconnects did you find as you’re digging into this research?

 

Macall  09:08

Oh, goodness, well, what we’re really talking about is the difference between how researchers characterize effectiveness and then what happens to those findings when they’re reported in the real world and the problem is that the findings from research have been expanded to such a level that when you really start looking for nuanced, developmentally appropriate information, it’s just not there, so, for example, that study the four to 52 months, some of these don’t even say how many infants were in the sample, and then they just say “extinction,” which is really what we’re talking about here. Extinction is the main focus of, I would say, 99% of the research on sleep interventions. Extinction is basically the idea that whatever you don’t pay attention to will go away. The old behavior modification behaviorist idea that what you pay attention to persists and what you ignore goes away, so essentially, crying it out, there are at least a couple of forms of crying it out extinction. There’s pure extinction, which has been researched, which is you just close the door and you don’t go back until morning, some people call that cold turkey and there are books who recommend doing that. The second one is the graduated extinction, which we think of as Ferber, so you leave for progressively longer periods of time. There are some variations of that, were ones called like time checks, where you go in at regular intervals. Then there’s this funny one called “camping out,” which is a little bit blurry because it can mean what they call “extinction with parental presence,” meaning you do pure extinction but you stay in the room, so the parent stays there and pretends they’re asleep, while the baby or child is freaking out. It can also mean what we refer to as parental fading, which means that you start giving a lot of support at first and then you fade that out. Those two things are lumped together under the same title, which I don’t personally fully understand so that one’s a little bit unclear, but for sure, pure and graduated extinction are the big ones, and because they’re the big ones, we have to think about the business of research, right? because it’s an industry. It’s business. What happens with research is that once there’s a finding and people start building on or replicating those findings, it becomes a thing, right? That you just keep, you know, not really regurgitating, but definitely recycling, adding, reciting, and suddenly it becomes a mountain and then A it becomes evidence-based and B no one wants to question it, right? It’s really becomes like this juggernaut that no one can sail because there’s this mountain of evidence but there’s also a mountain of evidence because people keep asking that same question, right? There’s a reason there’s a mountain of evidence. It’s not because it’s the best, it’s just because most people are researching it because they want to build on an existing body of literature, so that’s definitely where we’re at right now. I continue to be surprised at the number of studies that just ask and answer, “Does extinction work? Does it work?” We need to start asking other questions like, “Who does it work for?” Who does it not work for? At what age is it maybe not recommended? How much crying is too much? At what ages? ” So more of a dose-response, rather than just this global, it works for everyone at all times, in all situations, across all amounts of crime. I really think we need to really start deconstructing it, really taking it apart and looking at each piece more carefully, which is kind of the focus of my work, I would say.

 

Jen Lumanlan  13:01

I’m 100% agree. And just on that sort of mountains of evidence point, I mean, I see that over and over and over again, where whatever study I’m looking at, it was just released, cites a study from a couple of years before, and what they’re citing is not necessarily the findings of that study, but just a comment that the person in that study who was doing that study made, which was then citing a previous study, which was about a comment that person in that study may not their actual results. And so you build on this series of comments that people have made that aren’t actually even related to their results, and then you get finally back to the beginning of the evidence chain and you’ll find that what was described in the original research is nothing like what you ended up, it’s like that game of whispers, right, where you’re whispering one to the next, and it gets changed throughout the way that it’s cited, and it’s built on as if at each stage, it still represents the truth, right?

 

Macall  13:52

There’s some new work now called I just dipped my toe into it, but it’s about what’s called citation networks. It’s very much this. It’s about how people citing and reciting certain pieces of evidence builds a kind of belief system that then gets sort of entrenched, right? And then you have review articles that summarize the things that people have already said again and again, and then meta-analyses that re-review, and then you have levels of evidence, right? We have this chambliss criteria of evidence-based practices, and you start really looking at it, and then I, of course, compare it to what the books are saying, because then this information gets funneled into more popular consumable information, then I do a comparison of like, well, the book said this, what is the research say? It is like whispers, right? It is like, I think we call it “rumors” or something, yeah, where things get altered in the translation, so, that’s very much true. I always have to do a disclaimer that this work is not about slamming extinction as an intervention. It’s not at all. It definitely works for some families and lots of babies and lots of children. It totally works without a lot of stress and drama. However, it does not work for everyone and I don’t think parents get that message really. As far as parents are concerned, this is literally the only option and that is very much not true, so it’s more a call for the idea that we need to know more about the ins and outs of using extinction and what the alternatives are because they’re out there. They just don’t get depressed. And also, it’s gotten so polarized to pro and anti-crying it out and I really think that’s leaving out a lot of struggling people in the middle, so this is also a call. And also, the people on either side of that debate, whatever they are lobbying for worked for them, then I say, there’s all these people in the middle for whom neither option worked, right? And they are really struggling and so I think that by giving parents options, we can defuse some of the sleep war piece and we can give struggling parents a little bit better information, I think.

 

Jen Lumanlan  16:11

I totally agree. Okay, so another thing that I want to be really clear about is that when we’re talking about doing a study on a method of supporting children’s sleep, the way the researchers are doing that study is very different from the way a parent at home, who is struggling and right in the thick of this and has a sleepless baby in one hand and their sleep book in the other hand, and these are two very different experiences, right? Can you talk a little bit more about what it’s like to be a parent in a sleep training study?

 

Macall  16:40

Oh, boy, that’s such a big, great question. In research, we call that transportability, right. Does what we find in the lab translate into real-world experience? In studies, they rarely just hand the parent a pamphlet or a book and say, “Let us know how that goes.” Almost all the time, someone meets with the family and then does a whole intake history. Often, they craft a plan with that family and then there is a follow-up for questions even if that follow-up is just a research assistant asking questions, we would consider that interest and a form of support. So the context of a research study almost mirrors a coaching context, so what we do as sleep coaches, and sometimes I honestly think that the active ingredient is sleep coaching, is not necessarily what we’re telling parents to do. It’s the support we’re giving them and the validation. In research, they zero that stuff out because they say, oh, no, no, no, the focus of the study is the intervention. It really doesn’t matter where or how we give parents that information. That doesn’t count. I mean, it’s some of these studies it was done in an inpatient population, so people have checked into a clinic for sleep problems and in one study, at least nurses did the sleep training, so the parent wasn’t even doing it. I know, right? I mean, it’s another little story about the infancy conference and I was just terrified because I thought I was going to be completely hauled in front of the tribunal for being a rookie. And this wonderful woman—her name is Matilda Paposek, she’s a famous developmentalist and she’s from Germany, this lovely, lovely woman and her poster was a couple of posters down from me. And we were talking and she was just like, you know, “I just don’t think extinction is as bad as you think. You know, we use it in our clinic.” And I said, “Yes.” But in your clinic, you’re meeting with parents, you’re giving them support, you’re evaluating them and assessing them. I said, “In the United States, parents are at home with a book.” And she went, “Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Like, we would never make people do that.” So, the way that we say that we characterize the use of extinction for families, it’s a whole different ballgame than the way that it’s been studied. And again, the intervention is sort of pulled out of the system that it resides in and so does the research. The research, you know, if they’re studying the intervention, they don’t really care about any other factors or influences because they’re just testing whether the intervention works. So, any other kinds of family variables or infant variables are not usually looked at.

 

Jen Lumanlan  19:32

Yes. They are irrelevant.

 

Macall  19:43

They are irrelevant because we say so.

 

Jen Lumanlan  19:38

Exactly. Yeah, that reminds me of a study when I looked at this research on sleep, it was describing the process where they were training. The researchers were training the parents on how to do the cry it out and the parents where they did not want to do it after they’d done it for a few nights and it was emotionally exhausting. And the parents are starting to drop out, and they’re getting calls by someone on the research team on a regular basis to offer “support.” And I’m wondering to what extent the parents stuck with it just because they were afraid to report to this person who was going to call them up again tonight that they were quitting. I mean, how is that transportable?

 

Macall  20:14

Yeah, some of the older studies, there’s one that the researchers were surprised at the level of problems that parents had and that there were people who dropped out of the study just on the possibility they’d get assigned to the extinction. The way that researchers interpret this again, they don’t go, “HA!” This isn’t the right intervention, they say, “Parents just need cognitive restructuring. Parents just need to be taught a different way of thinking about their child’s crying.” And often, parental instincts and parental feelings about their child’s crying are highly sort of stigmatized, and almost critiqued by researchers as being unfounded and unwarranted, and then they cite whatever research there is that we can totally talk about, about the lack of effect of crying it out on children and babies. So they’re kind of saying, “Oh, silly parents.” They’re just overreacting, right? Rather than taking it really seriously. There are a couple of researchers who are really big on this particular theme. Sarah Blunden out of Australia, Pam Douglas, Wendy Middlemiss, they really have written several papers on like, shouldn’t we be taking parents’ feelings more seriously? Why are we forcing them to do something that clearly a lot of parents don’t want to do? And I think it’s an excellent question.

 

Jen Lumanlan  21:38

Yeah, and it’s interesting. It sounds to me from the names that you mentioned that you are identifying female, identifying researchers, and so many of these researchers are male identifying, and what I’m picturing is, you know, the White middle-class man in a lab coat saying to possibly the White middle class but certainly the mother, is going to be the one who’s currently the primary parent involved in the sleep study, you know, your instinct, your intuition, everything you know about your baby is irrelevant, because it is not grounded in scientific research. And if you would just see things from my rational perspective, then you would know that this way of doing things is the better way of doing things, right?

 

Macall  22:15

Well, actually, it’s interesting and I think, to a great extent, that’s true. Some of the biggest extinction researchers, however, are women. I know It’s really interesting. Karen France is probably the seminal person and there’s another researcher named Judith Owens, and then there’s, you know, Jodie Mindell, to a certain extent, probably she’s a little more towards the middle but yeah, that’s a really interesting topic. Because really, parents get told constantly that there are no negative effects of using extinction and they really say it quite forcefully but that’s another area that when you look at the research, it’s like the researchers have been looking for something they don’t want to find, right? You know, “Oh, where is it? I have no idea. It’s not over here.” Research, to me, is quite poor in terms of a solid investigation of effects that you might actually be able to detect. Now do I think because people have asked me all the time, “Do you think crying it out will derail attachment?” And I’m like, “Attachment is a big construct. It’s a big, strong construct and I don’t think that just doing sleep training can totally derail attachment.” That said, I just think there could be other effects of certain amounts of crying for certain infants that we have not looked at that I think we should because you can’t just say it’s never harmful. Just like you can’t say it’s always harmful, neither of those are true, so let’s start asking, “Are there situations where it might not be warranted to use this intervention?” Or let’s not let a five-month-old cry for longer than X amount of time? Because everybody knows horror stories of kiddos that cry for hours and hours for days on end, and I just don’t know about that.

 

Jen Lumanlan  24:07

I totally hear you on the not looking for what you don’t want to find and it reminded me of a study where they were looking at cortisol levels in saliva. The following morning, after a crying-out night, when cortisol has a half-life of about 15 minutes, are we surprised that we didn’t find any elevated levels of cortisol in the child’s saliva and not particularly. When you say that the effects are not necessarily harmful for all children completely on board with that. How would we go about identifying the characteristics, the temperament traits of children for whom it might be harmful? What kinds of things should we be looking at?

 

Macall  24:39

Yeah, this is probably why it’s not researched because it would be difficult. What would we be looking at? Because I think you know, if that same conference had a conversation with Allan Schore, who’s the famous, you know, Guy on Affective Neuroscience, and I asked him this question about using extended crying for younger babies, and he said, these windows of brain development that happen where if something happens at a particular moment, we just don’t know what those effects could be. Now, are those even effects you could measure? Probably not. Probably not. So yeah, that’s a bit of a pickle in terms of, well, what do we think the effects might be? I’m going to leave that up to smarter people than me to figure that out but I can tell you that asking about like you said, cortisol the next morning, or attachment three years after sleep training and not having done a baseline, right, there’s one famous study that everybody cites that sleep training doesn’t affect attachment. They did sleep training at like, let’s say, nine months and then they assessed attachment at three years. They didn’t assess attachment at nine months so we don’t know if any of those kids changed status. All they said was that the kids who were sleep trained didn’t have higher rates of insecure attachment, but we also don’t know where they started from, or see this child behavior checklist. They only measure it two years later, so we don’t have any comparison, or they assess some huge, big construct that sleep training wouldn’t necessarily have an impact on, so I just think it’s because the research industry is so invested in there not being effects. We just haven’t pulled it apart and said, “Are there effects for babies under six months? Are there effects for six to nine months that have nine to 12 months?” You know, the older a child gets, the more distress they can handle capably, and the younger they are, the less they can handle, and I don’t feel like that inquiry has really been done. There are a couple of outlets currently that are recommending pure extinction, cold turkey, for eight-week-old babies. I don’t even know what to say about that, right? Pure extinction, there’s no research on babies under like nine months so I don’t know the rationale behind it. I don’t know if anybody’s researching that.

 

Jen Lumanlan  26:58

Right. What is this based on, like? Where’s this recommendation coming from? I mean, isn’t it a parenting magazine or

 

Macall  27:03

One is a pediatric practice in New York and the other one is a popular kind, like an online program. Even Weiss Blue talks about some extinction as early as six weeks.

 

Jen Lumanlan  27:17

Yeah, and for those of you who are not familiar, he’s a pretty famous author of is it healthy sleep habits, happy child, or something like that.

 

Macall  27:25

Yeah, I’m always kind of mixed up. I always say it the wrong way. Something about healthy and happy. Yeah, a very popular book. Yeah, the study on real-true extinction. I mean, I think the idea is that the younger you do it, the faster it will be, but again, self-soothing has to develop. A baby doesn’t learn self-soothing by being in a really drastic situation that’s coping or survival. Self-soothing happens gradually, with manageable amounts of distress over time. It has to be manageable for them to be able to practice, so I often say that you know, it’s like, if I picked up a 20-pound bag of sugar, I could say, “Wow, this is heavy, but I could totally hold it.” If I picked up a 100-pound bag of concrete, I either couldn’t lift it, or I dropped it immediately. It’s too much. I don’t have the capacity for that and that’s a little like this, we’re throwing younger babies into levels of distress that and having them try to manage it by themselves. That’s where I get worried because all of the work on emotional regulation on the development of the HPA system, you know, the fight or flight system, all of that is happening early on and happens, gets tuned, gets kind of primed in relationships by parents really helping babies regulate and we don’t really know what happens when babies go through this, plus we don’t really want babies eight weeks old sleeping through the night. I had thought that that was not an ideal situation. Now if they are, if you have a baby sleeping through the night, good for you. Yay, don’t worry, but I don’t know that it’s a goal.

 

Jen Lumanlan  28:59

Right. Okay, so let’s tease that apart a little bit because I think there’s a couple of things you said in there that are really important. Firstly, there’s the sleeping through the night, which to researchers tends to mean different things than what it means to parents. Can you speak to that for a minute?

 

Macall  29:10

Well, it changed actually. It used to be five hours, right? Five hours of consolidated sleep was through the night. Judith Owens, who I mentioned, suggested that she did some, you know, large population work on sleep kind of norms and she said in her sample “most,” most babies were sleeping an eight-hour chunk by three months. Now, here’s the interesting thing about the three-month mark, because a lot of them are saying, “Oh, sleep consolidates around three months,” and that’s why you can start sleep training at four months, completely ignoring the four-month regression where everything goes haywire. Everything goes haywire. So sure, babies might be sleeping eight hours at three months and then might start waking up again a lot at four months, so she found this magic moment of eight hours at three months among a certain quantity of babies, and therefore they’re now saying eight hours is kind of through the night, but then you’ll read other people who are like, “Night Waking is normative throughout the first year.” You know, I think it’s a matter of degree and in my coaching practice, I tell parents look, “You get to decide what’s the problem. If waking up for a feed is not a problem for you, There is no problem.” Yeah, there’s no problem.

 

Jen Lumanlan  30:28

You know, ding ding, ding. I think that’s where the money is, right? When we’re talking about, what are we trying to do here? We are trying to get our babies to sleep for a long time because we feel as though we need to get a long period of time for ourselves to care for our rest, for our sleep as well. And very often, because of the paucity of resources to support new parents, we’re going back to work before we’re potentially even ready. If we’re lucky, we’re getting three months of maternity leave in the US. If we’re not, we’re taking three or four days off after the birth and then we’re back to work and pumping breast milk and bathroom. It’s a funny coincidence, I was on an interview this morning, actually, with Renee Reyna, who hosts the Mom Room podcast, and she was saying she’s in Canada. She got a year of maternity leave, and she and her husband worked out this arrangement where she would go to bed at six o’clock in the evening and wake up at midnight, or not purposefully wake up, but she would get uninterrupted sleep until midnight and her husband would take that shift, and then he would go to bed and she would be on from midnight until you know the morning. She was fine in that first year because she had found this arrangement that worked for their family. And yes, it’s unconventional but from her perspective, even if her baby’s waking up three, four, or five times a night, there’s no problem here, because she is still getting the rest that she needs because she is getting 12 months of maternity leave. She doesn’t have to get up and go to work the next day. How do you see this issue of the child sleeping through the night fitting in with the context of the family and also the context of society as well. We demand women do, right after they’ve had.

 

Macall  32:06

There’s all of that, 100%. And there’s another piece where I see parents because I work on a telehealth platform so I talked to brand new parents all the time. Yes, they would like huge blocks of sleep but what I see more that actually breaks my heart is this feeling that I have control over my baby’s sleep and my baby’s waking up means I’m not doing my job. I have parents who express high levels of shame and guilt because they’re feeding their two-month-old baby to sleep, and the minute I say, “That’s exactly what you should be doing,” you can see the anxiety and how shame and guilt just lifted off of their shoulders because there’s also this pressure to say, “Your baby’s sleep is your responsibility and if they’re not sleeping, you’re doing it wrong.”

 

Jen Lumanlan  33:01

Responsible for all the brain development problems that come down the line.

 

Macall  33:05

Oh, yeah, the baby is now going to have ADHD, is going to be overweight, and you know all these horrible things. I mean, people literally are saying, “I just don’t want to start bad habits with my six-week-old,” and I’m like, “Your six-week-old has no capacity to develop a habit.” They have none. Nothing. This idea that it’s like make or break in those first few months, I think, is a huge disservice to parents because it doesn’t give them time for trial and error. It’s like every choice is fraught with like a lot of weight. And they’re so worried that they’re going to make one false move, and their child’s just going to be toast like they’re ruining their child because they’re feeding them to sleep. I really think the whole tone of advice has to change. It really does. I think we have to support parents in the process of becoming parents. We have to let them figure it out and trust themselves and know that they’re not going to make some dreadful mistake. It’s just not possible, right? I kind of joke with them. And I say, “Look, it would be like me saying don’t carry your baby, or else that baby will never learn how to walk.” No, we know that a child will learn to walk when they have the muscle strength, the visual skills, the balance, all those skills in place. Then we can start saying, “You know, I’m not going to carry you everywhere because you can totally walk.” We allow them to grow that way, and I think that sleep has to be the same way. I think we’re making parents a little nuts over it.

 

Jen Lumanlan  34:32

Yeah, there’s this sort of sense that well, if I start doing this now, then I’ll never be able to stop, and that any pattern that I write in these first few weeks even, but certainly a few months, is going to be something I have to live with for the rest of my life.

 

Macall  34:44

Right. And there’s literally no research on that. There are meta-analyses and literature reviews that basically say there is no research on the need or benefit of starting sleep training early. In fact, all the research on prevention of sleep problems is I don’t mean it’s bad research, it means they really haven’t found a lot. So any little tweak that they made often they’re pretty vague about what the sleep advice is in these. They say, “Parents were educated about the appropriate responsiveness to night waking,” but they don’t say what that is. I know you have no idea. Do a little dance? I don’t know what the advice was, but the results of those studies were that either there was no change, or the change was so tiny that it didn’t even make it really worth it, or the effect wore off in like a month. So this idea of you having to start early is just that’s definitely one that’s, you know, made up for sure. Well, I was just gonna say the other piece about, you know, even after six months about, you know, we’re told in books, at least, or advice that’s out there, on Instagram, wherever, you know, that crying it out works. And it’s true, it does work. But that’s another area where when you look at the research, we have to remember that in research, it didn’t work for everybody, right? In research between 25 and 50% of samples, it did not work at all. I did a big parent survey and asked it was basically on temperament, but it was all different parents with babies and kids of all different kinds of temperaments. You know, large percentages, maybe 40%, would say that crying it out didn’t work for them at all. So we get this image that’s like, Okay, we’re going to sleep train. We have to sleep train. And if we just grit our teeth in three or four nights, we’ll have a baby who’s sleeping through the night. While that does happen for some people, for sure. Lucky people “Yay, you.” It doesn’t work for everybody. And then when it doesn’t work for you again, parents are like, “What’s the matter with me? What am I doing? What am I doing wrong?” I wish there was more out there about that to say, “Hey, if this doesn’t work for you, here’s some other things. Here’s a plan B.”

 

Jen Lumanlan  36:57

What is the plan B? Should extinction even be Plan A? What are the kinds of progressions we should be looking at? Where does extinct right onto this? And if extinction doesn’t work? What else is available to us?

 

Macall  37:08

Right. Such a great question. Really, that’s another piece we see these shelves of sleep up and they look like all completely separate methods. All these different methods, it all boils down to one idea. And only one, which is you have to change your child’s usual go-to-sleep pattern from one where you’re doing all the work to one where they’re doing the work and you can do that really fast. And that’s basically cold turkey. You can do that really, really slow, which would I would be like the no-cry sleep solution or some of the other gentler methods, and then there’s a few that are kind of in the middle, fast or slow, you can go in big steps or little teeny tiny steps, but the idea is that you’re progressively helping your child take on a little bit more of that work of going to sleep. Leaving the room is not totally required. It works better for some kids. And I do know this to be absolutely true. For some children, you standing there and trying to help them just makes them mad. Then, of course, you should leave the room because you’re not helping. You are not helping. But parents could essentially cobble together their own approach, you know, I have parents who are full-on co-sleeping or they have a three-year-old who’s an octopus going to sleep, you know, needs full body contact. You can literally just start moving and that would be, maybe you sit up in the bed at first, and then maybe you sit on the floor, and then maybe you can just keep moving away. But there’s no magic to sleep training, unlike what it may sound like, it’s not magic. And you can do a process that makes sense for you, as long as you’re consistent and as long as you kind of keep going you don’t even have to buy books.

 

 

Jen Lumanlan  39:01

And of course, what all of this assumes is that our goal is to get our child to go to sleep by themselves in their own space, often that’s their own room, but in their own bed and in their own space. And I think what we should also keep in mind is that were those conditions are not present. Families don’t do sleep training, they don’t have sleep problems. I’m thinking back to a study. I think it was a Guatemalan mother’s, and they were talking about their children’s sleep problems and the mothers were like, “What do you mean sleep problems? We don’t have sleep problems,” because the way that they use their time is aligned with their child’s needs, right? There’s always five or six adults hanging around after dinner, and they’re chatting, there’s always somebody to carry the baby. It doesn’t always have to be the mother. And the child just falls asleep whenever they’re ready to fall asleep, and everybody transitions to bed and there’s no sleep problem. And so I think it’s really important to keep in mind that the reason we have sleep problems and we need sleep training is because we have this single idea of what good sleep means, which means going to sleep in a room by yourself. And if we had different ideas about what good sleep means, then we wouldn’t necessarily have sleep problems either. Do you concur with that?

 

Macall  40:10

Oh, yeah. I mean, it’s heavily cultural. We’ve also, I think, medicalized the problem as well, right? There’s a category of sleep disorders called limit-setting disorder, and they are not talking about the baby.

 

Jen Lumanlan  40:26

Yeah. Okay, tell me more. How does one diagnose limit-setting disorder in a mother?

 

Macall  40:32

It’s just when they would basically say it’s when parents don’t have a plan, you know, that parents just let the baby stay awake and they just respond, I mean, yeah, it’s a disorder now.

 

Jen Lumanlan  40:44

Right. Let’s just give that the weight that it deserves, right? We cannot go into something without a plan because otherwise, we have a medical disorder. There’s something wrong with that perspective, I think. Not with people who are going into sleep or being with their children in whatever way is most natural for them. Sorry, I almost don’t even know where to go with that.

 

Macall  41:06

I know, I know. It’s also the whole process of, you know, when I talked about medicalizing it, it’s going back to that behaviorism paradigm, which is that a baby is a blank slate, and the only thing it learns is based on what you do or don’t do. Therefore, then the parents’ behavior is also the source of the problem, possibly the solution, but it’s also the source of a problem, so a parent’s responsiveness is seen as weak, it’s seen as permissive, it’s seen as disordered because there’s a lack of, you know, setting some kind of limits with their kid, whatever it is, it’s that thing of saying that parents’ natural instincts to respond and support their younger babies is really seen as problematic, you know, we’re getting parents to doubt themselves right out of the gate and I think that’s just wrong. And then we are heavily reliant on experts, you know, the consumerism of our culture, right? We want babies in a separate room but to be in a separate room, you need monitors, and you need this, and you need stuff.

 

Jen Lumanlan  42:12

And a house big enough to have a separate room for each child.

 

Macall  42:16

True. And if you can’t trust your own instinct, then you need to be buying the books and buying the programs, and because goodness knows, you don’t know, as a parent, I call this a risk society right now. Parenting in a risk society means parenting has become about avoiding things like landmines. A risk. I get that some of that’s, you know, a reality, but we also set the stage by undermining parents’ instincts right from the beginning and causing parents to really worry about the consequences of whatever choices they make. And I really think it’s time to back that train up and to say, “No, we need to validate parents’ instincts, help them trust that they know that they can figure out what to do, give them options for when something doesn’t work.” The lack of options also means if something doesn’t work, you just need to do it harder, or longer, or more rather than, “Oh, that’s not working for you here. How about this? Try this?” Yeah, try this other option.

 

Jen Lumanlan  43:14

So I know the other sort of big thing that you’ve spent a good deal of time looking at is the intersection of temperament and sleep. And the idea that these “difficult children” are potentially having a harder time sleeping and different tools might be more useful for them. What do we need to know about more sensitive children and sleep?

 

Macall  43:36

Well, this is my second major soapbox, which is that if we know that extinction doesn’t work for many kids as a baseline, it really doesn’t work for kids who are more intense and sensitive. And the research on sleep training virtually never looks at temperament. There was one study that did and they basically said, and again, difficult is a research term that’s not or temperament researchers. That’s not a term I like but the more intense difficult to soothe infants did improve in the sleep training, but not nearly as much as other kids. We know very little about how children with a more sensitive, intense temperament react to sleep training, I can tell you, from just my experience working with families that often it doesn’t. It’s either a non-starter. It was for me; it was a total non-starter. I knew my persistent, intense little girl would cry for three solid hours and never give up ever, ever, ever so I just didn’t even try it, because I knew what I’d be up for. And there are a lot of parents like that. They’re like, I’m not even going to attempt that. And then there are other parents were like, “I really don’t want to do this and I’m just going to try it.” And sure enough, these kiddos are crying for hours and hours, nights upon end, like not just one or two nights, and then the promises of the sleep books really start crumbling, because the sleep books are like, look, the first night is going to be terrible but by night three, you’ll be sleeping through the night almost. And when parents have been going at it with hours and hours of crying several times a night over many nights, they’re like, “This is not worth it, I can’t keep putting my child through it because it not seem to be working.” And for these parents, they may not even really make the connection between their lack of success and temperament, so when you tell them, It’s not you, this is the way this child is wired. It’s another big aha moment for them. In this big parents survey, I looked at temperament to see if higher levels of this difficult temperament were associated with sleep problems, and also how parents experienced a variety of sleep training strategies. And for sure, shocker. The more intense the kids were, they had every conceivable sleep problems. Challenges on every front. And their parents had tried a higher number of strategies with less success. So it wasn’t for lack of trying.

 

Jen Lumanlan  46:00

These are parents who need the most help. Right? What do you tell his parents?

 

Macall  46:04

Yeah, exactly. Well, they’re getting the same message, “Oh, you just have to let them cry it out. I always just have to let them cry out,” parents are either like I did that. What else have you got? Right? Heard one parent whom I think pediatrician or nurse said, “Well, you just have to do it harder, right?” I mean, that’s just not helpful. So again, these slower, more supportive strategies really work. There’s other things that I talk about in terms of setting a different stage for these kids, they need more transition, they need an earlier bedtime, and they need a lot of support and consistency, but you really can give them a lot of help at first that you just fade out over time. And if you can be really consistent and really methodical and really supportive, those sleep problems will eventually move without them getting crazy hysterical. That’s another piece of advice. Just real quick, that is also doesn’t make any sense that I tell parents all the time, is that the advice will say whatever you do, don’t pick up your baby out of the crib. Soothe them. If you have to go check on them, soothe them, but do not pick them up. And that if I can tell everybody, I don’t understand that piece of advice. Children are not learning things when they’re hysterical. Pick your baby up, calm them down, put them back, and keep going, but once they get into that, what Daniel Siegel calls it, you know, they “flip their lid”, you know, when they’re into that hysterical zone, they’re not learning anymore. So get them back to manageable and keep going.

 

Jen Lumanlan  47:32

Yeah, when you say keep going, I think that’s super important, right? So when you’re describing this, what I’m hearing from you is that it’s almost like a ladder of interventions and we’re going to see not just where do I want to be on this ladder but where does my child need me to be on this ladder at this moment, not even overall, but at this moment, are they needing me to come in with more support right now, and if so I’m going to provide them, or if I go in and I pat their back, I’m not going to pick them up just because I always pick them up and that’s what I need to do, but because if it seems like they need picking up this time, I’m going to pick them up, if it doesn’t seem like they need it, I’m maybe not going to pick them up, I’m going to pat them on the back, that’s going to be okay. And so if I can just kind of conceptualize this, just to make sure it’s super clear for parents who are new to this, who are struggling with this, it’s all about how slow do we want to go, um, you said this, I just want to make sure that this really, really comes out that we can go fast, we can go incredibly, incredibly slowly, and it’s about matching your pace along that journey with what your needs are and what your child’s needs are. And potentially, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and you can push back if I’m not right. The closer you are to where your speed your child needs to move, the easier this is going to be overall. And if you try to rush it a little faster than they need because it meets your need, you may end up sort of creating a problem where you have to step back a little bit and you have to slow down a little bit more. Is that right?

 

Macall  48:53

Well, that’s a tricky one. It’s generally right. I would say though, that especially with very strong-willed babies, you can’t wait for them to be ready because they won’t, they will not be ready. So if what you’re doing if you know that what you’re doing is not sustainable, because the parents I work with are really going way above and beyond, or we’re talking about a kiddo that’s waking every hour. That’s a lot. So, if you know that it’s not sustainable, and things have to change that you’re going to do something that’s developmentally appropriate for your kid and you’re going to give a lot of support and you’re going to make sure that you’re not leaving your kiddo alone to figure it out. It’s okay to push them a little because again, it’s working for them, whatever you’re doing is working for them and they have no reason to change it, so sometimes as parents, it’s okay to say, “I cannot keep waking up every hour to rock him back to sleep. I have to get him to learn how to fall asleep where he’s going to wake up.” So it’s a balancing act. And I think that’s the important part as well as we have to take everybody’s needs into account. We do. We have to take the baby’s needs into account but parents who have intense kiddos are often ground down to a powder, they are so tired. And when I work with these folks, I sometimes have to sort of hold the parents before we can even really start working on the kid, it takes such a toll energetically because these kids are often, they’re not just intense, they’re like, super social, and they don’t want to play by themselves, and they’re talking all the time, and they never want a nap. So, these parents are just at their wit’s end, you can’t just say, “Oh, just put your child in a room and let them cry.” The parent can’t do that, so it’s about really finding a middle ground where we can take into account everybody’s needs for change and how fast can we go. Can we go a little faster than that? Or can we go a little slower than that? As long as you’re not trying something new every single night? I think it’ll be okay.

 

Jen Lumanlan  51:01

All right. So if parents are really appreciating what they’re hearing today and want to learn more, where can they find you?

 

Macall  51:08

That’s a good question. My information on temperament is on my website, and Facebook, and Instagram under Little Live Wires. My research work is actually more on Research Gate, if you really want the researchy stuff. I’ve got the update of the lit review that’s on there now, it’s back from 2007 but spoiler alert, it hasn’t really changed a lot since then but I will be having an update of that information, I hope really soon. But always you can contact me on my website if you have questions or want to learn more about the research.

 

Jen Lumanlan  51:37

And the website is?

 

Macall  51:38

LittleLiveWires.com

 

Jen Lumanlan  51:40

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for helping us to really break this down into something that I think is actually usable by parents. This topic seems so mystifying, right? There’s all these different books, there’s all these different studies, how can I possibly understand it all and make the decision that’s right for my child? And I think to have that framework of how fast do you want to go, how fast can your child go. It brings a lot of clarity. So thank you so much for walking us through that and helping us to see how we can apply that in our situations with our children.

 

Macall  52:08

Oh, of course, I think it’s hugely important, for sure.

 

Jen Lumanlan  52:11

And don’t forget that you can find all of the references from today’s episode, as well as Macall Gordon’s website, Little Live Wires at YourParentingMojo.com/livewires. And if you are about to have a baby or already have one under the age of one, or if you know somebody else who is expecting a baby or has one under the age of one, you can find information on our right from the start course at YourParentingMojo.com/RightFromTheStart.

 

Jenny  52:37

Hi, this is Jenny from Los Angeles. We know that you have a lot of choices about where you get information about parenting, and we’re honored that you’ve chosen us as we move toward a world in which everyone’s lives and contributions are valued. If you’d like to help keep the show ad-free, please consider making a donation on the episode page that Jen just mentioned. Thanks again for listening to this episode of The Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Don’t forget to head to YourParentingMojo.com/RecordTheIntro to record your own messages for the show.

Jen Lumanlan  00:03

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 hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research on principles of respectful parenting. If you’d like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a FREE Guide called 13 Reasons Why Your Child Won’t listen To You and What To Do About Each One, just head on over to your YourParentingMojo.com/SUBSCRIBE. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you’ll join us

 

Jen Lumanlan  00:48

Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We have a guest here today to talk with us about a tool that I actually discovered through her show and I found it to be incredibly helpful both personally and professionally. So our guest is Dr. Diana Hill, and she’s co host with three of her colleagues of the Psychologists Off The Clock podcast, and one of her co hosts is Dr. Yael Schonbrun, who we had on the show to discuss work life balance. And then Dr. Hill actually hosted me on Psychologists Off the Clock and we talked about homeschooling and social justice and parenting and stuff like that. And now she’s here with us today to discuss one of her favorite topics, which is acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which is shortened to act. So Dr. Hill has just published a book with her colleague and Psychologists Off the Clock at co-host Debbie Sorensen, called Acts Daily Journal: Get unstuck and live fully with acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which isn’t geared specifically toward parents, but there’s so much in it that’s going to help parents. So welcome Dr. Hill. It’s great to have you here.

 

Diana Hill  01:45

Thank you, Jen, it’s so good to be here with you and my interview with you is one of my favorites. So it’s time to have the table’s turned here and talk about ACT and and specifically around parenting because it turns out if you’re more psychologically flexible as a person, it rubs off on to your parenting, and then that rubs off on to your kids too. So I love to talk more about it.

 

Jen Lumanlan  02:05

Yeah, awesome. So maybe we can start there with Firstly, what is this thing psychological flexibility? And why does it matter? Why does it make a difference? How does it make a difference in our lives?

 

Diana Hill  02:14

Well, a psychological flexibility is a construct that’s been researched for decades now. And some of the research is actually starting to get into the general public. And what it is, is, it’s your ability to stay present, open up to your full life experience, not get hooked by your thoughts, and orient your actions towards your values towards what really matters to you, even when life gets difficult. So you can see how even just that term could be helpful as a parent, right? And

 

Jen Lumanlan  02:43

keep going. I’m not saying it.

 

Diana Hill  02:47

And what the research has shown is that there’s really these Six Core Processes, ways in which you engage with the world that help you become more psychologically flexible. And when you’re psychologically flexible. Not only do you have less chances of developing things like anxiety and depression, but specifically with parenting, some of the meta analyses that are showing up with parenting is that psychologically flexible parents engage in more positive parenting practices, they’re less harsh, as well as not super overly permissive, you see less spillover effects of stress onto kids. So they did some studies looking at psychological flexibility during COVID with parents and parents that were more psychologically flexible during COVID. Not only did they have less conflict in their relationship with their partners, there was less impact of the stress of COVID on their kids. This set of processes is turning out to be in the research one of the key factors in human flourishing and functioning in lots of different domains of our lives.

 

Jen Lumanlan  03:47

Okay, I’m convinced. So what are the components of psychological flexibility?

 

Diana Hill  03:52

Well, there’s six of them and you can kind of think of them Steven Hayes, who’s one of the cofounders of ACT or Acceptance  a Commitment Therapy talks about like sides of a box. So six sides of the box, that together build your psychological flexibility. And some of them are fairly familiar to folks we’ve all heard about being present. That’s one of them, being able to stay present in the moment sort of mindfulness, but it’s a little different in ACT being present has more to do with being present where it matters, because you can’t be mindful all of the time. But in that moment, when your kid is showing, like pulling out stuff from the backpack, and they’re showing you a piece of artwork and you’re on your phone, this is a time to be present because they’re bidding for attention. They’re bidding for connection, right? So being present when it matters to you as a parent. A second process is about acceptance. And in Act, acceptance isn’t sometimes that can be a term that people don’t like. It’s like I don’t want to accept that.

 

Jen Lumanlan  04:52

I don’t want to just roll over and let things happen.

 

Diana Hill  04:55

Yeah, so acceptance is not about being passive, actually acceptance is not about approval or liking something, but it’s really allowing it to be, right. So for me with my youngest child, he had colic. And for the first four months of his life, he screamed, non stop. And so I did all sorts of stuff to try and make him to stop crying I, I bounced, and I walked in, I played music, and I sing. And then I remember one day, when I was so exhausted, and burned out, and just really tired of getting him to stop crying, I decided I was going to stop trying to get him to stop crying. And instead, I was going to accept that this is how he is expressing himself. He’s working it out, neurologically, whatever was going on. And what I chose to do is to love him, and bond with him while he was crying, instead of trying to get him to stop. So that’s an example of acceptance and Act, which is really opening up and allowing for our full inner experience.

 

Jen Lumanlan  05:53

Yeah. And just a pause on that for a second, how did your experience shift after that happened? Because I think that’s the profound part, right? What was different for you, after you decided that you were just going to accept that?

 

Diana Hill  06:04

Well, I think for many of us, as parents, we’ve all had that experience of wanting to fix our kids. And when we’re engaging and fixing, there’s actually something in motivational interviewing called the fixing reflex, which is our tendency to fix things that we don’t like, what it does is it actually can derail us from engaging the very values that we care about. So for me, when I was trying to get him to stop crying, I was walking around in circles of my dinner of my dinner table, and my other child was watching, like, His head was circling back and I was not engaged with him, because I was so focused on getting my child to stop crying, right. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t sued or, you know, care for our crying babies. But when it becomes that you are trying to fix something, some kind of internal experience inside of yourself as a parent, and you’re trying to make it go away, at the cost of you engaging in the world parenting in the way that you want to be, then it’s called something called experiential avoidance, which is actually the opposite of acceptance. So for me, it was liberating my child did not he didn’t cry less by me doing that I just related to the whole experience lesson, it freed me up a little bit to be there with him be present with him, which is ultimately, what he probably really needed most from me.

 

Jen Lumanlan  07:21

Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. Okay, so what are some of the other components of it?

 

Diana Hill  07:26

Okay, so there’s six and you can see why Debbie, and I wrote a book on this? I’ll break it down. And in the act, daily journal, we take each one of these processes, and we really do break them down into little tiny nuggets that you try out in your life day by day. So the two that we’ve mentioned, are more acceptance based processes. And there’s another one that’s really kind of fun, because it’s unique to act or to these new modern approaches to psychology, so act as sort of research based approach to psychology that has taken a different approach to thoughts than what a lot of people maybe even know about, like cognitive behavioral therapy. And in Act, we do something called cognitive diffusion. And I could do a little, it’s actually I think, this is best demonstrated not necessarily described, so I’m going to have you imagine or maybe if you wouldn’t mind being fully my, my guinea pig. A thought that you struggle with as a parent. It could be a self critical thought, it could be some, so some of the ones that you know, are common are like, I’m not doing enough, or, you know, even as I’m talking people are listening to these psychological flexibility skills. And they’re like, Oh, that’s I’m not flexible. I’m not good enough.

 

Jen Lumanlan  08:47

Alright, let’s go with, there isn’t enough of me to go around that my husband and my daughter will often talk over each other at the same time asking me for things, and I feel pulled in different directions.

 

Diana Hill  09:00

Okay, so one of those is I feel pulled in different directions, which I would say isn’t a thought that’s just an experience, like that. We’ve all had that feeling of like, Oh, I feel pulled, I want to be in many places at once and that probably points, we’ll talk a little bit more about values that probably points to some of your values, things that you care about. But there isn’t enough of me to be around. What I hear in there is that that could be a sticky thought it could get in the way of you being able to be present when when your husband and child are talking over you. So I want you to imagine that thought were written across your hand, Jen, there isn’t enough of me to go around. And imagine you’re at the dinner table with your partner and your child. And that thought were just like really close up to your face. So imagine it’s waiting on your hand and put your hand right up to your face like the thought.

 

Jen Lumanlan  09:48

Covering my eyes?

 

Diana Hill  09:49

Aha, covering your eyes. Okay. Now, if that thought were written across your hand and your hand was in the spot, how well could you see the thought for what it is? So close up to your eyes.

 

Jen Lumanlan  10:02

WelI, I mean, it’s blocking my view, although it’s blurry.

 

Diana Hill  10:05

It’s blurry. Yeah. And if it’s really close up, actually, the thought itself is blurry, you wouldn’t necessarily be able to read it and how well would you be able to see your partner and your child?

 

Jen Lumanlan  10:17

Hmm, very little.

 

Diana Hill  10:18

Very little. This is what we call cognitive fusion. We’re so stuck on our thoughts. We can’t even see what’s around us. Now, what I want you to do is slowly move your hand away from your face. Imagining that that thought is still written on your hand? And can you look down and and read the thought if it were written on your hand? Okay. And then could you look around the dinner table, engage with your partner? Have a conversation with your child? Right? Okay. And notice that I didn’t cut off your hand, I didn’t ask you to write a new thought on your hand.

 

Jen Lumanlan  10:53

Yeah, you didn’t change anything about at all?

 

Diana Hill  10:57

Yeah, I didn’t tie your hand around your back. And in fact, if I tied your hand around your back, you’d have one less hand at the dinner table to work with. Right, what we did is we did something called cognitive diffusion, which is getting a little bit of space from your thoughts. And as parents, as humans, we all have thoughts all the time running through our heads. What can get in the way of us being effective parents sometimes is when we believe those thoughts to be true. And those thoughts dictate our behavior, or they cloud us so much that we can’t see what’s really happening in the present.

 

Jen Lumanlan  11:32

Yeah, I just want to pause there on what you said, we believe our thoughts to be true. And I talked about this concept with a lot of parents over the years. And the idea that we could believe that our thoughts are not true is mind boggling to a lot of people. And I’ve talked to some people who have said, You know, I was grew up in a religious commune. And I was trained to believe that my thoughts were a direct channel from God, and so they must be true, they are true. So there’s sort of that perspective coming through sometimes. But even if you don’t have that perspective, this idea that I think things and they might not be true is absolutely mind blowing to a lot of people. What do we do with our thoughts? If they are potentially not all true? Like, how could the thing we’re thinking not be true?

 

Diana Hill  12:16

Well, that’s just that the human mind does is it produces all sorts of thoughts. And actually, when you look at some of the psychological disorders out there. Some of them have more to do with trying to stop yourself from thinking or change your thoughts than they do with just allowing the thoughts to come and go. So you know, a really good example, Insomnia. Right?. One of the things about insomnia that’s really interesting is that it’s this paradoxical thing that the more you try and make yourself fall asleep, the less likely you’re going to sleep, right. And when you have thoughts, as you’re going to bed, oftentimes, I call it the, you know, the middle of the night, sort of crisis moment where everything seems so intense and real and true. And we have to figure this out now. And it’s so important that I solved this problem at 2am, which I have no way of solving, right. And then the next morning, we wake up, and we’re like, oh, yeah, that wasn’t, it’s not as big a deal. Right? So if your thoughts were true, then you would have the same feeling at 2am, as you do at two o’clock in the afternoon.

 

Jen Lumanlan  13:18

It still  be a big deal. Right?

 

Diana Hill  13:19

It would still be a big deal. Right? So the nature of our thoughts. And what’s interesting about the human mind, and sort of what neuroscience is showing is that evolutionarily, our brain is designed to create certain types of thoughts that would have protected us, right. So things like even self critical or judgmental thoughts are there, because they were a protective mechanism, right, we have an error detection, we have a warning system, that sort of like a better safe than sorry, brain. And that keeps us a little bit anxious. We are the ancestors of people that were pretty anxious, they survived because they thought it was a bear and they ran away. But what’s happened is that there’s an environmental mismatch. And what that means is, our biology hasn’t quite caught up to the current modern day environment. And so we’re not only do we have old brains that tend to be self critical, and tend to be a little anxious and tend to be negative and also tend to create in groups and out groups, right? That we also live in a culture that is bombarded by messaging. Through the media, through our early childhood experiences through we have a culture that is feeding thoughts into our brain. And if we don’t start to question them, we’re going to be in a whole lot of problems even bigger than just insomnia. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So thoughts are an act we don’t think about thoughts as to or not, we don’t actually get very entangled in them. Rather, what we do is we look at is this helpful helpful for me? Is this thought workable, like and is this thought aligned with my values? Is it pointing in the direction of the type of person that I want to be in the world? And when those things are true, then maybe those thoughts can come along for the ride, and when they’re not we let them go or we can just acknowledge like, oh, thank you mind, you know, there it is my mind talking again, it tends to do tends to do that, and it tends to, you know, have certain qualities to it.

 

Jen Lumanlan  14:37

Yeah, and just like with the insomnia, just telling it to shut up, you know, I know there’s research, researchers asked participants to not think about something for a period of time, and then all the person can do is think about that thing. So if you actively try not to think about something, or until something to shut up or go away, then it doesn’t necessarily tend to be an effective way of dealing with that unwanted thought.

 

Diana Hill  15:12

Debbie writes, in our book, we had these little vignettes, we’re both therapists, and but we also both apply these practices as moms and as partners and friends. And so we write these little vignettes of how we use these practices in our life to illustrate like, this is this is acting, the day to day living. And what Debbie wrote this story that’s so sweet about, she tried to cut back carbs. And one day, she’s cutting back carbs, and she, she sees this big potato, and she’s like, I can’t eat that big potato. And then by the end of the day, the big potato was like, you know, the size of the room, that’s all she could think about was that one big potato, right? We’ve all had that experience of trying to control our thoughts, and what how research maps on at this point in time is really demonstrating that our attempts to engage in thought control have a paradoxical effect, that you tend to have a greater rebound of thoughts. Also, the same is true for our emotions, when we try to suppress our emotions, they tend to come back stronger.

 

Jen Lumanlan  16:28

Alright, so I think we made it through three of the six. I think we covered let’s see, we cognitive diffusion, being present actually made? Do we only unacceptance. Okay, so what comes next maybe values, because you’re just talking about how it’s linked to living in alignment with your values.

 

16:44

Yeah, absolutely. And values and parenting in particular is such a good one to discuss. Because sometimes we mistake values for morals, or external expectations. And in Act values are personal and chosen, chosen by the individual. So just like your favorite color may be black, and my favorite color may be blue, black is not better than blue, and blue is not better than black. It’s just our personal chosen favorite, right? And values are also enact an adverb. So a lot of times when I’m working with clients, I’ll ask about their values. And one of the first things they’ll say is, I value my health, or I value parenting, or I value the environment. And those aren’t really values as much as they are domains, under which you live out your values. So if we were to look at parenting, in that domain of your life, how do you want to be, if I were to follow you around in a day where you feel like you were really aligned with the type of person you want to be as a parent? And you were engaging in activities and actions that demonstrate that? What would it look like? What would I see that I could be like, Oh, yeah, that person really values being playful, or that person really values compassion and being present, right. So there are these qualities that you bring, and the nature of values and the reason why values is such a powerful component of Act, and even just in guiding our behavior, is that as parents, and I’m sure your podcast because you’re super, you know, up to date educated is that values are intrinsically motivating. So, as opposed to like gold stars, and you know, good jobs, values are something that are deep within you, that you can pull upon, when you’ve got nothing left. When you’re exhausted, if you dig in deep to your values, it can help rejuvenate your parenting, it can help make you get a sense of purpose and meaning. And that is very key to not only happiness in life, but also being able to pursue actions that are important to you. So things like you know, this summer when folks were depleted and at their limit. And then you saw these incredible actions that people were taking even with nothing left. Oftentimes, that’s because they were digging deep into their values and acting from there.

 

Jen Lumanlan  19:09

Yeah, that reminds me of one of the key ideas about this approach that I took from Stephen Hayes’s book, which I read after I learned about it from your show, which is the idea of the choice point, when something difficult is happening, we have this moment where we get to make a decision about whether we go down this well worn path that is not serving us or whether we move towards something an action that’s aligned with our values. And that has been such a central concept for me to recognize, okay, I’m at this point, how do I want to respond here? Do I want to go down that path? Or do I want to go down this path and it links to cognitive diffusion as well? Right, because you have to have some distance from the situation to be able to, to see that choice point and to decide, am I going this way am I going that way? I’m not perfect at it by any stretch of the imagination, but I am finding Knowing that increasingly I can make a choice that is aligned with my values. Because I recognize that I’m at this point right now. And this is where I want to go.

 

Diana Hill  20:09

Yeah, there’s really simple skill that we teach is an act daily journal is pause, notice choose and crying babies was me whatever, nine years ago, now it’s children bickering. If I could choose any sound, the sound of my children bickering, I would be a happy person, right? Give me like a drill, give me a jackhammer, I would prefer it to my children fighting. And what that does for me in that moment, is it actually I get flooded, like I get flooded with anger, irritability, I want to control this situation, I want to get in there and get them to stop just as much as I did with my crying baby, right? And so that’s a choice point. And here’s where values come in and here’s where these components of psychological flexibility come in is that you start to get clear on Okay, here’s, here’s the moment like this, is it this is the moment that matters here? Because not only how am I responding to my kids in that moment, gonna lead me to feeling good or bad about myself as a parent, right, obviously, but it’s more about what am i modeling to my kids about? How am I handling strong emotions? How am I handling conflict resolution, these are deep values for me of teaching my kids how to engage in conflict resolution, how to engage in being present and prospective take with each other. So that’s a choice point for me and the practice of act in that moment would be pause, like, acknowledge it. This is a meaningful moment, just like the kid bringing me the picture. This is an equally meaningful, although painful moment.

 

Jen Lumanlan  21:47

Yes. People Yes. And, and it is hard for me. I’m strugling in this moment, yes.

 

Diana Hill  21:52

And struggling. So there’s a little self compassion in there, wove that in, that’s the first chapter, but also pausing, noticing what it’s like in my body opening. So that’s the acceptance part, like, here it is, this is what it feels like when I am flooded with all the neural hormones that are associated with hearing my children bickering, right, and then choosing what type of parent I want to be right here and making that move towards my values. And when we do that on a repeated basis, it frees us up, we start to feel like wow, I have choice in my life, to engage, like even when I’m flooded, I may need to pause and regulate a little bit, right? But then I can go in with intention. And it it spills over into our kids, because more than whatever you say in that moment, to your child, it’s what you’re doing with your child, how you’re interacting with them, that’s getting encoded into their bodies and

 

Jen Lumanlan  22:52

Stop fighting as you creaming.

 

Diana Hill  22:56

I’ve done that, no, I’ve done that a million times. Like I struggle with this all the time. I mean, like I said, I prefer a jackhammer. But I also can see with with practice, and that’s why these are all skills that can practice that you can just like you can learn a language at 45. It’s hard. Yeah, e2asier to learn a language 2. Same with these skills, you know, but you can do it with practice. And it takes repeated practice on a daily basis. There’s a million choice points throughout our day. And if this one doesn’t quite go exactly how we want to go. Good news.

 

Jen Lumanlan  23:27

You got 10 minutes from now. 10 minutes. Yeah, okay. And so we’ve sort of touched on the last couple of elements of perspective taking and committed action as you were talking us through that. So do you want to just get sort of rounded out with me? How does perspective taking fit into this? And then how do we get to committed action from there?

 

Diana Hill  23:45

Yeah, well, perspective taking is probably one of the most important skills we can do for ourselves, in terms of developing our own sense of self compassion. It’s also key and compassion for others. And one of the most important skills we can teach our children, right, not only because it benefits us, when we can step into a grander view of things in the book, we call it sky mind. So a lot of our daily experiences, sort of like the weather. And sometimes there’s big storms, like when my children are fighting, sometimes there’s beautiful sunny days, right? Sky mind is the ability to step back and observe those weather systems and also recognize no matter how bad it gets, those weather systems won’t harm the sky. So be able to tap into what’s more transcendent version of ourselves, the observer self, the Wise mind, someone that I studied with, they calls it sort of sitting at the back of the heart. Right? And when we can do that with our children, and I do we do a lot of in our household, not only do I do that for myself as a parent, as for perspective, like this moment, when you’re, you look at your child, and you sometimes I feel like my children get older and I just always see them as older than they are right? And then I look back at a picture of them and I’m like, Oh my gosh, I thought that they were So old when they were five, just tiny legs, how much would I give to have that five year old back, right?. And if we do that kind of perspective taking, we can also then take perspective on our child right here in this present moment, like, they’re not always going to be this way. Every day, they get older every day I get older. There’s impermanence here, right? So perspective taking can help with that of like, getting oriented around what matters. But it can also help with things like empathy, and training our kids to be more empathic, training our kids to have more flexible minds. I do that a lot. You know, everything from just the other day. So one thing about COVID is that in homeschooling during COVID, as my parent, my kids have gotten to be really good cooks. Because I’m not always cooking for them anymore, right. And the other day, I came into the kitchen, and my son was seven o’clock in the morning, and had a big bowl of pesto pasta with broccoli, seven o’clock in the morning, and he didn’t cook this, but he got his like, gotten it out of the fridge, and he was eating it for breakfast. And I was like, wow, that isn’t that’s an interesting breakfast, not when I’m expected. 7am, right. And he said, Oh, mom well, we read that book, because we’ve read books as part of our homeschool. There’s this book called This is how we do it that follows children from all over the world throughout their day. And it shows what they ate for breakfast, what they How did they get to school with their houses look like, right? And then for our homeschool, we’ve been writing our own book, this is how I do it. So that we have this perspective, taking exercise of children all over the world and all over our town, do things differently and live in different environments, right, and we live. And he said, I read that book, and they saw that people have fish for breakfast. And people have noodles for breakfast. And so why can I have pasta for breakfast? And I was like that is psychological flexibility. So perspective taking is really helpful just in those little, you know, to get our kids unhooked from shoulds. Right. But also really helpful in the way we think more about social justice and a desire for our kids not only see their worldview.

 

Jen Lumanlan  27:08

Yeah. Okay. And then that takes us to committed action. And how do we live out committed action.

 

Diana Hill  27:14

Committed action is the behavioral science of it all. So act at its core is a behavioral psychology. And what that means is, it’s really based on some core elements of what we know about behavior change. And it really breaks down to just sort of, there’s a cue, there’s a behavior that we engage in. And then there’s a reward for the behaviors that we engage in and an act what we do is we try and create contexts that support the behaviors that we want to engage in our life. So for example, one of my values is having more movement, as a family. And because we live in a sedentary culture, and also I just really believe in the mental health benefits of movement. So one of the things that I did to work on that cue, the contacts that can trigger our behavior was to remove most of the furniture from our living room. So there’s like just a big open space, where, you know, moment of the day, there’ll be a kid like running through it, throwing something tumbling, right takes a little psychological flexibility is a parent to allow some movement in your household, right? But it’s important to me, that’s one of my values, right? So creating context that support the values that you want to grow is one part of committed action. Another part of committed action is reinforcing and rewarding the values that you are engaging in when you engage in new activities, making them small, and then reinforcing them for yourself. So say you want to, as a parent, have more time as a family family conversations, right? So one of the things that you could do to reinforce that is engage in family conversations that are fun and playful, and are reinforcing to the kids and reinforcing to you. So at the dinner table, sometimes, we will play games, we’ll do math at dinner, we’ll do bedtime math, because we want to engage in these activities that we want to grow with our kids, but in a playful, fun way, as opposed to like a punishing way. So that would be an example of committed action. But really committed action is whatever value you want to pursue with your children that’s personal and chosen by you creating contexts that support it, and then reinforcing it in your daily life.

 

Jen Lumanlan  29:31

Yeah, and just going back to what you said about the taking all of your furniture, most of your furniture out of the living room and thinking about conversations I’ve had with parents about you know, how do I get the kid to stop jumping on the coffee table and the the conversation so often is focused around how do I get my child to stop doing this thing that I don’t want them to do? And this given that there needs to be a coffee table in the living room. We get ourselves locked into these visions of what a living room has to look like. And maybe they served us before we were parents. And maybe they’re not serving us so well now, but we just can’t imagine a living room without a sofa. And because every living room we’ve ever walked through or seen on TV has a sofa in it, and having the flexibility to be able to step out of this and say, you know, I would actually be more comfortable in a different kind of chair or in a beanbag, and my child would have more space to do whatever they might enjoy doing is swinging from a swing in the middle of the room or something. To get myself out of this mindset that a living room must look like this.

 

Diana Hill  30:30

Yes, the mindsets, right. So that’s when my son was three, he was hanging on the towel racks in the bathroom, and he kept pulling the towel rack off the wall. So we put a trapeze in the middle of the playroom. And now I go up, I hang from it. We spend all of our you know, child’s I was just talking to a parent the other day that said that, in her first grade son’s classroom that was on zoom, the teacher spent the most of the time trying to get the kids to keep their heads inside of the little box. Okay, so it’s not even like keep your body on the carpet square anymore, its keep your head in the box. Oh, my gosh, yeah. So yeah, so getting psychologically flexible is, is that really important? And why? What is important to me here, right? We spend a lot of our kids child, you know, keeping kids in chairs, and you know, sitting in boxes, and then as adults, we’re trying to have standing desks and going to move more with what is this about? But getting flexible with these should and you can tell this is the perspective taking part of it is that you can tell it’s a shirt when there’s things like I always, I never, I have to this is just the way it is. And being more playful with those things is important because it can help you get clear on like, what are the rules that I’m holding on to that aren’t really useful here. A lot of our inflexibility as parents has to do with trying to get our children to comply.

 

Jen Lumanlan  31:53

Yeah. Even without the word comply trying to get our children to dot dot dot,

 

Diana Hill  31:58

Right. And the reason why we’re doing that, is because there’s something uncomfortable that shows up under our skin. When our children are not complying. Yeah. And it’s everything from what do other people think when my kid is acting in this way to what my parents told me the shins in my head, the belief systems to fear if my children don’t comply, what does this mean about the Self Storage? The future tripping of like, Oh, no, they’re gonna be like, where a lot of shoes in our house or outdoors? And also, you know, there’s all sorts of conversations about that, right? And it’s freedom. When you get hooked into what really matters here, what are my values, what I really care about? And then how am I going to structure my life around that instead of structuring my life around getting my kids to comply or some rules or shoulds? About what it’s supposed to look like?

 

Jen Lumanlan  32:51

Yes. I’m just thinking, Okay, how could we actually start to do this? And it reminded me of one of the concepts of the book, beginner’s mind. And as I as I was reading through the book, and reading about what is beginner’s mind, my thoughts immediately went to somebody who’s in my parenting membership, and a couple of my other programs as well, where she posted in one of our communities recently, and she said, normally, when I go for a walk, I have an agenda. This is where we’re going, this is what we’re going to do. And today, I went out for a walk with my three kids, and we had no agenda. And we just decided to see what would happen. And she said her kids spent half an hour putting little stones on a bench and knocking them off with sticks, and saying that they were playing golf. And she said, I was absolutely in awe of them. And it seemed to be such a powerful mix of being present. And also having beginner’s mind this idea that we can go for a walk and not have to have a destination. There’s no measure of success of this walk. And and I’m guessing she’d never even noticed those stones before that they were playing with as well. And though I’m wondering that, you know, where I want to go with this is, I’m guessing our children have a thing or two to tell us to teach us about having beginner’s mind. Do you see ways that we can learn from our children on how to do that more effectively?

 

Diana Hill  34:08

Absolutely. I mean, our children are naturally beginner’s mind, because they don’t have life experiences created mental models of the world. So if you look at the neuroscience of it, basically, our brain creates categories and mental models to make things more like easy to navigate, right? So we know what this drive looks like. We know what this walk looks like. We know what a orange looks like. For children they’re approaching many, many things as if it were the first time or maybe it’s only the third time they’ve approached it. And so they’ll do things like slow down and pause and get curious and ask questions. And what parents do that interfere with that process? Is that we answer those questions. I’m not kidding. We answer those questions, and we answer them too quickly. We also have engage in a lot of scaffolding. So you know, this sort of like we set things up so that we, our kid will will kind of go that direction. With our questioning, maybe maybe we’re asking semi open ended questions, but we know where we want them to go with it. And what that does over time is two things. One is that it really limits creative thinking, problem solving, because part of problem solving and being a creative thinker is in one of the things that actually sets humans apart apart from robots, is our ability to think outside the box, right. And so we need to have that as a skill that our children are learning to be future problem solvers, you know, solving the problems of our planet. These are big tasks that we’re passing on to our children. And we don’t have the solutions as parents, so let’s keep them fresh keep their beginner’s mind. The other thing that is really problematic about answering those questions, too quickly, or too much scaffolding is that it erodes the relationship. If you come in and you answer it too quickly, they’re not able to just sit in the wonder and the curiosity and the reinforcement of thinking outside the box. If I came into my that kid eating pesto pasta for at 7am. And I said, What are you doing? That is not breakfast? Why are you eating pesto pasta for breakfast? I just eroded an out of the box thinking moment, because he was able to say I’m eating pesto pasta for breakfast. I’m realizing people all over the world don’t eat, you know, muffins and bagels for breakfast. And, and then I was able to tell me why you chose this and what was that like? And what does it taste like and get curious that I can use his curiosity to evoke curiosity in me as a parent, and then all of a sudden, we’re feeding off on each other in this place of beginner’s mind curiosity. And it’s incredibly rewarding to see our children in that way, they open our eyes to the world, in ways that we wouldn’t be able to see, as they just see more clearly.

 

Jen Lumanlan  37:03

Yeah, it’s such a beautiful idea and actually dovetails super nicely with a couple of the approaches that we take in a membership that I have to support for parents to support their children’s learning, we help them basically get comfortable with the idea of doing exactly what you just described, because so much of this is wrapped up in our fears about what learning looks like if I’m not teaching that my child isn’t learning. And when we pick a what we call a learning exploration for our parents to support the child with it’s something a child has chosen child is interested in. And we deliberately tell parents do not pick anything that you know anything about. Because if you know anything about this topic, you are going to go down this rabbit hole of teaching them and you will not be able to get your mindset out of I want them to know this, this and this. And it wasn’t successful, because we didn’t look at it in this way. And so there’s that aspect of it. And then the other aspect of it is go so deeply into listening, and not just listening to understand but listening with the idea that we might come out of this interaction being the one who has changed, we, the parents might have been changed by this interaction. And that listening does not just mean trying to understand my child’s perspective, or understand it with the perspective but then I can teach. But we may actually learn something useful in our lives by hearing truly hearing our children. So lovely to see those worlds collide.

 

Diana Hill  38:23

My husband has his PhD in education. And specifically he specializes in equity in education. And one of the things that he teaches and I sort of, I’ve gotten a chance to observe him teach this year, and it’s taught me a lot about psychology, because he’s home teaching. He teaches two things. One is two questions that I think our listeners could take away to use with their children on a regular basis. And the two questions are what do you notice? And what do you wonder? What do you notice? What do you wonder? Whether you’re approaching a math problem, whether you’re approaching a conversation of a conflict between two kids? Hey, hold on, let’s pause. What do you notice? What’s happening right here? What do you wonder, okay. The other thing that he does, and this is helpful, he uses it in classroom environments to help with perspective, taking, like perspective taking in math that other people can solve a problem differently than you can solve a problem. If you can teach that. Then you can start to see things like people have different experiences in what you’re experiencing. They have different emotions, they have different life experiences, they have different contextual things that are happening in their lives, is that he’ll do something where like, for example, with a math problem, he’ll put up a series of dots and you can imagine in your mind, like four dots and a line, and then four more dots underneath. And then he’ll ask and they’re all lined up, and he’ll ask one child, how many dots do you see? And the child will say 8 like pretty much you know, a child that can count them at the second question they will ask is, and how do you see them and one child may say something like, I see two lines of four, but then I’ll ask another child to say, how many dots do you see? I see 8. How do you see them and another child to say something like, I see four lines of two, so that we can start to teach our children, that it’s not about the answer. That there’s many ways to solve problems, that many people have different ways of solving problems, because they see the world differently. And they’ve had different life experiences. And they, and all of that is welcome here. So what do you notice what you wonder, right? Yeah. And that we’re not trying to get to some kind of outcome point. But that is much more about the process. And reinforcing that process of divergent thinking, creative thinking, problem solving, will not only benefit your household when you’re trying to like do some conflict resolution, but it’ll help our planet. That’s what we need for the future of our planet for us to work together to, for our kids to take on some of the massive challenges that they are inheriting, unfortunately,

 

Jen Lumanlan  41:00

Yeah, and this can come about through math problems. But I’m just thinking, I really learned it. It was probably 10 years ago, we were doing some big renovations work on the house. And I learned it through plumbing. There are so many ways of solving a problem in plumbing. And I got all the code books, and I read everything I was supposed to do. And I set up the plumbing in a way that met the code. And the inspector came in, and he looked at it and he kind of gave me this, he’s looking at the wall, he’s like, well, that’s one way of doing it. And so if I had been a professional plumber, I would appreciate an entirely different way. But it’s still met code, it’s still got the job done. And I probably could have come up with three other ways that it could also have met covered and got the job done. Yes, we can have these lessons as it were through math, but my daughter wasn’t alive then. But she could have helped me go through this plumbing issue, and how are we going to solve this issue? And okay, well, that doesn’t mean, it has to be more cloaked. And we could have learned that through this life experience as well.

 

Diana Hill  42:00

Absolutely, yeah. And that could have been your homeschool for the day, I mean, hearing out, right? There’s a term in psychology called the IKEA effect. And the IKEA effect is that if you give people like IKEA furniture that’s impossible to put together? Yes, well, yeah, you’re here. If you give a group of people that piece of IKEA furniture to put together and you give them the instructions, and then you give another group of people, the piece of furniture to put together and you don’t give them instructions, and you let them go at it. The folks that don’t have the instructions, it’ll take them longer to put that piece of furniture together. But then if the next day, you give them the piece of furniture, everyone gets a piece, the groups get the piece of furniture, but no one gets instructions. Guess who’s gonna build it. So what we often do in life with our kids, is we give them the instructions, because it’s faster, it’s easier, I don’t have to feel frustration, I don’t have to feel as irritable, I get a prettier product, it’s gold stars. But what we’re preventing them from doing is figuring out the plumbing project, right? Or the solving the you know, how to deal with IKEA furniture, or even just solving the problems of living, the problems of engaging in relationships. And those are the types of skills that we want our kids to have when we are not there. Because we’re not always going to be there to give them the instructions.

 

Jen Lumanlan  43:18

Yes. Yes. Okay, a bit of a non-secretary but but related to that is how do we understand the world? How do we understand ourselves. And I think a really important way of doing that, that we are not taught to do is to listen to our bodies to understand our body’s physical experience. And I did an episode fairly recently, on the physical reasons, you yell at your kids, and we talk about this body brain split, and how information that is processed in our brains is seen as superior to information that is seen in our bodies. And if we don’t sort of consciously make a decision to support our child, children in learning about information that’s coming from their bodies, they’re not going to learn this because our culture doesn’t teach this. And so I think the first step to that is understanding ourselves, how do we understand our bodies signals, does actually have some tools that we can use to sort of help to put that into practice?

 

Diana Hill  44:15

Yeah, well, what you’re sort of describing is the term that I would use as embodiment. So I’m a yoga teacher and that my lineage goes back to yoga. And then I studied a lot with study a lot of Thich Nhat Hanh and actually went to Plum Village and studied with him in my in my 20s. And mindfulness and being present in our body is, is actually it’s something that we’re born with children are born embodied. It’s not that we have to teach them how to be embodied. We have to stop teaching them not to do it.  So your children have a natural hunger fullness system of when they’re hungry, when they’re not hungry. We tell them that they’re not hungry or they shouldn’t eat. We tell them that they’re full when they are still hungry. They know their body knows when they need to use the bathroom when they feel the feeling often times with kids, um, when we’re having like a feeling like it’s just last name, my child was up and he was feeling anxious before bed and, and so instead of actually saying going straight to what are you feeling? Which parents want to put a word on it like what are you feeling? What’s the word? Is it anxious? Is it all say like, where is it in your body point to it? Is it up here? It’s up here, if we’re moving? Is it moving up? Is it moving down? Or how is it moving? It is? Is it a color? Do you have any kind of like sense Is it warm, you know, getting just sort of that awareness of the sensations that are happening in the physical body that they already know. And they can be usually just starting with point to it, they can usually point to it before they can put words to it. And as parents, as adults, we often want to put words to things. But some things are really hard to put words to and it’s not helpful to put words to them, like our body states. Another thing that’s really important, I think, with embodiment is modeling, as parents, so speaking about our experiences as sort of our full experience of like, I’m just noticing this in my in my body right now I’m noticing that I’m full, I’m noticing that I’m hungry, I’m noticing, you know, all the different parts of emotions that we can model that as we’re communicating to our children. With act, I would say processes that are involved in embodiment are things like cognitive diffusion, in the sense that you are not your thoughts, you aren’t, you know, getting a little bit of space for them, as well as acceptance being present perspective taking they all wrapped together in teaching about embody this, I don’t even want to say teaching about it, and not derailing them from their natural embodiment.

 

Jen Lumanlan  46:39

And it seems as a link to that is this idea of emotional awareness. And I really appreciated your co-author Debbie’s anecdote in the book about having this conversation that she was about to have with her co worker, and she’s thinking it’s gonna be hard, she’s putting her emotional guard up, just bracing herself she’s wanting to get it over with, and instead get finds a choice point, decides to approach this conversation with courage and, and be really open and vulnerable. And that ended up being a really meaningful conversation. And I think that this comes up a lot in our relationships with our co-parents. And as well with our children, we put our guard up, and we come at them with this message, oh, you’re doing it wrong, my way is the way to do it, we don’t have the flexibility to be able to see your perspective taking to be able to see there is another way of approaching this issue. And thing that stuck out for me from what Debbie said was, it was the fear of the conversation that was worse than the thing itself. And I’m wondering what kind of tools you recommend for people who are just starting to work with this idea of showing up differently in difficult conversations with people?

 

Diana Hill  47:46

Yeah, so I think I love that story. And when we’re thinking about a difficult conversation like that, and we’re flooded by that fear, they were fighting with our partners, right or co-parent. And in that moment, there was a lot of things that are going on, like I have the story of, I want to get my point across, I’m not even hearing my partner anymore, because I’m just like rehearsing what I’m going to say back, I have the physical feelings of this is really uncomfortable, and I’m angry, or actually maybe underneath that I feel really vulnerable and scared. All of that is happening. And one of the things that we tend to do with sort of this emotional this moment, this choice point of doing something that would actually be aligned with our values is we tend to try and avoid and get rid of going back to the beginning of a conversation, everything that’s happening, the way that we do that are things like bracing our bodies, trying to fix the other person, trying to get our point across. Because in that moment, what probably would most benefit us is get present slow down and listen, open up to the possibility that our perspectives and the only perspective and then act on our values. In that little story. Debbie’s values were clear. She talked about curiosity, courage, vulnerability, those were some of the values that she engaged in, by dropping the rope with this inner experience of avoidance. And in the book, we talk about something called experiential avoidance roundabouts. And the reason why I use that term is because we’ve all been caught in around about before, especially when it’s like they’re new to your town, all of a sudden, they plop around about in the middle of your town and you’re like, Okay, unless we have some European listeners, but here in the US,

 

Jen Lumanlan  49:28

Yeah, for the English people among us and not so intimidating. But happens on occasion, just because there are so many more of them.

 

Diana Hill  49:35

So everyone’s father’s like this roundabout and you get on the roundabout. And if you’re not a super confident driver like me, I’m just caught in it. And the way to get off the roundabout is you have to do this move like you have to like move over lane, and then feel uncomfortable while you launch yourself off the roundabout right so we get in these roundabouts whether it’s a habitual pattern of a fight with a partner, or we know we need to get off but it just means likes listening and dropping my point and you know, or round about with our, with our kids, we’re just stuck in the round about trying to fix something. So getting off the roundabout is uncomfortable. But then once you’re off, you go anywhere you want in town, like all the streets are open, you’re free now. So that’s that moment in those conversations to be aware of what’s happening inside, how am I holding on to clenching, staying stuck in this avoidance? And how can I loosen up a little bit be present, allow, and then orient myself to get off the roundabout and into my values?

 

Jen Lumanlan  50:35

Okay, and you led me beautifully to where I’d like to end up here, which is on values and connecting with ideas that are bigger than us. And I talk a lot on the show about ways that respectful parenting really intersects with broader social issues like racism, like patriarchy. And I know that those are topics that are on your mind a lot as well. I’m thinking about maybe a parent who’s listening and thinking, yeah, I have I have a value related to quality. But maybe there’s a disconnect there between how I’m living my life on a daily basis, and the ways that that’s showing up for me and this bigger value that is important to me, what would you say to a parent from an act perspective, who might be that sort of discrepancy between the value they hold true, and the way that they’re living their daily lives.

 

Diana Hill  51:18

I think the first part of it is to sit in the discrepancy and allow yourself to feel that, feel the discomfort of it. Because oftentimes, what we do is we get busy or we push through and don’t feel the discomfort. And it’s actually the discomfort that points to your values. That would motivate some of your behavior. So allow yourself to feel, feel the sadness, feel the uncertainty, feel that, like, I don’t know how to do this, or maybe I will need to change some things that are going to be uncomfortable for me to change, and open up and allow for that. And then I would say, take a look at some of the self stories, you know, some of the self stories that we think about how things need to look that, you know, social justice action needs to look a certain way, like during the summer, if I’m not protesting that I’m not engaging in social justice action, that we can engage in action that are aligned with our values right here right now You and I, Jen, having this conversation is engaging in action towards social justice, right? The conversations that we have, while we’re just chatting with a friend, the relationships that we build, the stories that we buy, from the social media that we ingest, the all sorts of ways in which we engage in the world on a day to day basis, in small ways matters. And it’s actually the accumulation of small actions over time, that make a difference. It’s important to take big actions too, I’m not saying don’t don’t do the big bold moves, but the daily small actions, the conversations with the kids, the books, that you’re buying the movies that you’re watching, just the dinner time banter, how are you bringing some of these concepts and ideas into your vernacular. And I think that that’s where over time, you’ll feel more aligned. When you take like, right now like lining up my spine sitting up a little straighter, you know, opening my chest and dropping my shoulders. If I did that all day long, my back would probably feel a little bit better. You know, I don’t have to go to a yoga class to do that. So you don’t have to exit your life to engage in social justice. You can actually do it right here right now in this moment.

 

Jen Lumanlan  53:29

What an amazing note to leave that on. Thank you so much for being here and sharing information about your book and, and about ACTs more broadly. Did you want to hold the book up? I think you have a copy right there. Right. So the book is called Acts Daily Journal: Get unstuck and live fully with acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and you can find it online and in bookstores and link also available at https://yourparentingmojo.com/act. Thanks so much, Diana. It was such fun to talk with you.

 

Diana Hill  53:52

Thank you. It’s a pleasure to speak with you. Take care.

 

Jen Lumanlan  53:55

Thanks for joining us for this episode of Your Parenting Mojo. Don’t forget to subscribe to the show at YourParentingMojo.com to receive new episode notifications, and the FREE Guide Called 13 Reasons Why Your Child Won’t Listen To You and What To Do About Each One . And also join the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. For more respectful research-based ideas to help kids thrive and make parenting easier for you. I’ll see you next time on Your Parenting Mojo.

Jen 00:03

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 hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. If you’d like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a FREE Guide to 7 Parenting Myths That We Can Safely Leave Behind, seven fewer things to worry about. Subscribe to the show at YourParentingMojo.com. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you’ll join us.

 

Jen 01:01

Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. Today we’re going to look at a topic that bubbles up fairly often in online parenting groups, and that’s related to perfectionism. The typical post goes something like this, my child starts an activity but as soon as something doesn’t go exactly the way they hope to maybe a crayon wasn’t the color they wanted, or they extended a mark too far on the paper. Or they got an answer wrong on a quiz for school. They screw up the paper in a ball and throw it away. And when this happens on a regular basis, it just seems debilitating. How can I help my child to overcome this now while they’re still young, so it doesn’t have a big impact on their life?

 

Jen 01:39

And I was actually in the library a while ago looking for books on another topic for another podcast episode and right next to the one I was there to get was an edited volume on perfectionism. And inside was an essay by our guest today Dr. Paul Hewitt. And when I read that essay, and I delved into his body of work, I knew he was exactly the right guest to speak with us.

 

Jen 01:59

Dr. Hewitt works mostly with adults. But just as we learned when we covered anxiety a few months ago, it can be really difficult to find someone to interview who doesn’t just focus on treating the symptoms of the problem, and instead goes beneath the symptoms to understand the real causes, which is what Dr. Hewitt’s work does so effectively. Dr. Hewitt is a professor of psychology, and a registered clinical psychologist who has conducted extensive research on the construct of perfectionism, which is the idea of what perfectionism actually is, and whether it’s harmful to people. He’s currently doing research on the treatment of perfectionism and trains clinicians in the treatment of perfectionistic behavior. Dr. Hewitt received his BA from the University of Manitoba, his M.A., and his PhD from the University of Saskatchewan, and he currently leads the Perfectionism and Psychopathology Lab at the University of British Columbia. In 2019, Dr. Hewitt received the Donald O. Hebb Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology as a Science for his work on perfectionism.

 

Jen 02:56

Welcome, Dr. Hewitt.

 

Dr. Hewitt 02:58

Thank you very much.

 

Jen 02:59

All right. So let’s start with definitions because it seems as though this should be kind of an easy thing to do, right to define what perfectionism is, but the more you start poking at it, the more you realize it’s a pretty nebulous concept. So, can you please tell us how you define perfectionism?

 

Dr. Hewitt 03:15

You’re right it on first blush, it feels like something that should be fairly straightforward. And indeed, a lot of people in the literature, treat it as something that’s very simple, straightforward – cognitions, or thoughts or attitudes – in reality, I’ve spent about 35 years doing research and clinical work with people with problems with perfectionism, and my definition has evolved over the decades. At this point, I couldn’t really think of perfectionism as a really complex, sort of multi-dimensional, multi layered personality style. So, it’s like a character style that people have that really serves a fundamental purpose for individuals.

 

Dr. Hewitt 04:00

So, it’s, again, it’s an ingrained, stable kind of personality style that people have. So, it’s very generally, you know, we got, we got very specific in terms of what that might entail, and maybe I can work my way through that.

 

Jen 04:16

That would be great. Thank you.

 

Dr. Hewitt 04:18

One of the ways to think about perfectionism is that people – children, adults, adolescents, seniors – will have a requirement of perfection that is, some will need themselves, they’ll require themselves to be perfect, or they will require other people to be perfect, or both. And when we talk about what we’ve talked about the need to be perfect, we talk really about perfectionism traits.

 

Dr. Hewitt 04:49

Actually, before I go any further, let me let me state this. The conceptualization that I’ve put together with my colleagues over the years has not come just from research or from reading in the literature. It’s come from working with patients and it’s come from working with people and my patients over the years have taught me what perfectionism is. So, this whole aspect of my work has really fueled everything that I do from the models we’ve created to the treatment that we’ve developed to the understandings.

 

Dr. Hewitt 05:23

So, we can go back to this need to be perfect. We talk about perfectionism traits, and traits are personality characteristics that we have that are stable, they are long standing, they’ve been there for a long time, often, most of our lives. They don’t change very easily. And we’ve talked about perfectionism traits. And these traits, these perfectionism traits, drive and energies, perfectionistic behavior.

 

Dr. Hewitt 05:55

So, it’s these traits that drive first off the need to be perfect. And there’s three ways that we’ve talked about people needing to be perfect. The first, we’ve just called self-oriented perfectionism, meaning, I need me to be perfect, I have the requirement that I have to attain perfection. And so that’s one element. It’s kind of what everybody thinks about when we talk about perfectionism. There’s another element whereby individuals don’t, I don’t necessarily need me to be perfect, I need you to be perfect, or my children, or the other drivers on the road, or my wife, or my students or the world, in general, I need everybody else to be perfect. And I will be harsh and critical of those people when they’re not perfect. In the same way, that when I have a requirement for myself to be perfect, I will be harsh and critical of myself.

 

Dr. Hewitt 06:53

There’s a third element. And this one really came from my clinical work, where it became clear that there were people who needed to be perfect, but it wasn’t arising from themselves, it wasn’t this intrinsic kind of need. It was more that other people require me to be perfect. And it’s the perception that other people require me to be perfect. Now that can be absolutely true. Or it can simply be a perception that’s not objectively accurate. But nevertheless, the person has that experience of their world where I am expected to be perfect. And that can come again, from spouses from your boss from the world in general, where a person feels like the expectation by others is that I need to be perfect. And those are the traits and they kind of drive. All of this need to be perfect.

 

Dr. Hewitt 07:51

So that’s one element of perfectionism. Another one that came out of my clinical work was not the need to be perfect. But the need to communicate to the world that I am perfect. So, you may know people that you had described, yeah, that person needs to be perfect, I can see them being really concerned with being perfect, or maybe even striving or driving to be perfect. I don’t know these other people who don’t necessarily strive and drive, or even concerned about striving, they are more concerned with communicating to everybody that I am perfect. There are certain politicians that exist in the world, for whom that rings very, very true.

 

Dr. Hewitt 08:37

So, there’s three ways that I can essentially appear perfect to you. One is I can communicate to you how perfect I am, I’ll tell you all kinds of things that I do, I might even show you something that I do incredibly well, I will promote myself as perfect in with the goal that you will then see me somehow as perfect. Another way to do that, and that’s by me kind of doing the opposite is I will conceal things from people, I will not show you any behavior that I exhibit that might be imperfect. So, I might have a concern with you’ll never see me public speak, for example, because if I speak publicly, I might falter. And you will then see an imperfection in me. And that is very aversive. So, there’s that element. There’s also and this is particularly pernicious one where I will not disclose or verbally reveal imperfections. And if you think about the establishment of intimate relationships, it’s all about this process of more and more kind of revealing truly who we are as people – perfections, imperfect and everything. You can see that there’s a whole domain of revealing of the stuff felt that this kind of perfectionism would really interfere. So, there’s that domain, you can start to see that we’re talking about a complex personalities found here. And that is in the interpersonal domain, that’s about how the perfectionism is expressed: interpersonal.

 

Dr. Hewitt 10:20

The third element that we focused on is more intrapersonal, that is within the individual. And the way I like to frame it is when we’re talking about needing to appear perfect to others, that is about the relationship one has with other people. The intrapersonal is about the relationship one has with oneself. And one of the ways best to capture that is we all have this internal dialogue that we have going on, not necessarily constantly, but a lot of the day. So, prior to this podcast, as I was getting ready, you know, I’m quiet, so my wife is there, she just sees me kind of doing whatever. But in my head, I’m doing okay, well, I’ve got 15 minutes, I got to make sure that I do this, I got to do that sort of thing and make sure my headphones are on. And it’s this simple dialogue that I have with myself. Often, it’s just something like that but sometimes it can be a dialogue that really reflects how the relationship I have with myself. So I could be us the self-statements, things I say to myself, Oh, I got a task, I’ve got to do this perfectly, I’ve got to make sure I don’t come across as silly or stupid, or flawed or defective or anywhere like that. It’s just dialogue. And if you think about that, if you had a partner that you were doing this podcast with, and you sent those words to your partner, okay, you got to do this perfectly, you got to make, it would cause real problems. And you probably wouldn’t have a partner for very long.

 

Jen 12:04

Mm hmm.

 

Dr. Hewitt 12:05

It’s very hostile and aggressive. And yet, so if we think of that the way we’re interacting with ourselves, it’s a very hostile and aggressive way of interacting with ourselves. We can also do things like after the podcast, we say, Oh how can I be so stupid, I can’t believe I said, after all these errors, I’m just horrible, I should quit this, I’ll never succeed. And these self-recriminations are self-critical element. Also, if you said that to a partner would be very abusive. And so, we can have this abusive relationship, we can also have a soothing self-congratulatory relationship with self-love for perfectionism, this relationship with self tends to be perfectionistic. As I said, I’ve got to do this perfectly, but also very harsh and critical.

 

Dr. Hewitt 12:57

So, we’ve got these three domains, three layers of perfectionism and perfectionistic behavior. And again, this is this is the truth is we’re very complex creatures. And it’s great to try to have simple models. But when the models sort of eliminate the humanness of people in all their complexity, it’s really not much help to us at all. That’s what we call a descriptive model of perfectionism. That’s how the group that I work with, that’s how we see perfection.

 

Jen 13:33

Okay. And…

 

Dr. Hewitt 13:35

So yes, it’s broad.

 

Jen 13:39

It’s big, and it’s complicated. And so, this is really driven. I mean, the vast majority of your academic career, right? I mean, why is it so important to understand so much about perfectionism?

 

Dr. Hewitt 13:51

One, because as soon as people kind of hear about it, it very often resonates with them. They say, Oh, I understand that, oh, I can relate to that. Or I don’t know how many thousands of times I’ve given a talk both professionally and to the public. And people come up afterwards, all the time. And they’re often moved simply because I’ve described something that resonates.

 

Jen 14:16

Finally, somebody understands me.

 

Dr. Hewitt 14:18

That or now I understand, my beloved aunt, or my beloved father or grandparent where they want my sibling or my child. And so, it really kind of resonates with people first off, but also it’s important because when I first started this work, I was actually an undergraduate, third year undergraduate. And I discovered that people kind of written a little bit about nobody done any research. And there were these implications that might be associated with depression, and anxiety, and eating disorders, and this, that and the other thing, and nobody checked it out. So did some initial work and developed ways to kind of do that. Some research and then began a process of finding out what not only perfectionism was, but all these different components that we’ve talked about. That, what are they related to, and we just find a gain into that it’s related to all kinds of different problems, and problems in things that we might call psychological or psychiatric diagnosis, very significant relationship problems, very significant achievement problems, and very significant physical health problems, including a study that was done by a colleague of mine here in Canada, on early death, that perfectionism is associated with knowing your control some of the other death factors is predictive of earlier death. So, it’s important because it’s really associated with all kinds of difficulties for people. Now, there’s lots of reasons theories we have as to why that, why that might be and how that works, and that sort of thing. So, a big part of my research and many others across the world has been to try to figure out what are the problems with this personality style? And then how does it work? Ultimately, how do we help people with it?

 

Jen 16:20

Mm hmm. Yeah. Okay. So, it’s associated with a lot of negative things. But one idea that I’ve seen both in the literature and that I think parents have heard of, as well as this idea of positive perfectionism. And the first reference that I was able to find on it was back in 1978, and I kind of traced it through the literature a little bit, and found a definition in a paper from 1988, where the author’s described positive perfectionism, I’m going to quote, as cognitions and behaviors that are directed toward the achievement of certain high level goals to obtain positive consequences. That is positive perfectionism is driven by positive reinforcement and desire for success. And they actually described developing a positive and negative perfectionism scale that drew heavily on a model that you would develop. So, I’m wondering, can you talk us through your ideas about whether this idea of positive perfectionism exists?

 

Dr. Hewitt 17:11

Oh, no, it doesn’t.

 

Dr. Hewitt 17:15

From my perspective, there’s nothing positive about perfectionism. And there is within the field of perfectionism research, there’s somewhat of a controversy, although it’s becoming less and less of a controversy as we actually understand it more. The truth of it is, perfectionism is about perfecting the self, don’t define it as perfecting things like to make sure everything on my desk is perfectly aligned. That’s something entirely that’s obsessionalism, or compulsive behavior. Perfection is about having a sense of being defective, flawed, not good enough, there’s something wrong with me. And I don’t fit, I don’t, I’m not accepted. People don’t care for me, I get rejected, I’m abandoned, and so forth. And so the perfectionism the need to perfect the self is in service, of trying to repair, repair a defective self, and to find a place to feel accepted to find love, love, respect, which will be whatever interpersonal means the person has, when the behavior is driven by that there’s very little that’s positive that comes from it.

 

Dr. Hewitt 18:34

When you dig into what people call adaptive perfectionism, or positive perfectionism, what you’ll discover is people will have, for example, measures of it. And the word perfection will never show up. It will be, do you have high standards? Do you expect things, expect positive things? Do you try to attain really difficult goals? And I’m, from my perspective, that’s wonderful. That’s really important, that’s really healthy. Really difficult. Can be problematic, but it’s a very healthy kind of thing. That’s what we would call… There’s been research on this domain for a hundred years. Originally, it was called level of aspiration work, that it was need for achievement. Now, it’s mastery striving, and it’s very positive, conscientious-like approach to having high standards to trying to achieve to trying to do good things. Colloquially, or just in general, some people will call that perfectionism. But when we get into the world of science, we have to be quite a bit more precise. And no, we can’t call it perfectionism. It has little to do with what we’re trying to kind of capture with perfectionism.

 

Jen 19:55

Okay? That is super helpful. So, they’re measuring something and they’re measuring something that’s useful and interesting, but that is not perfectionism is basically the way of thinking about.

 

Dr. Hewitt 20:05

That’s the way we do it. That’s why many people think about it. But there are people who would disagree with that. Okay, I’m happy to do.

 

Jen 20:15

So, as we start to think about our children because obviously that’s the focus of our show here, what are some of the ways perfectionism shows up in children?

 

Dr. Hewitt 20:25

Well, we’ve, in all the research we’ve done, we’ve focused mainly on adults, and my clinical work has all been with adults. And we’re just beginning to move into doing work with children. But it absolutely is the case that perfectionism is evident in children and adolescents. In some ways, it’s similar to the kind of perfectionism that we see in adults, although we haven’t done a whole lot of work on really trying to get what it’s like phenomenologically for these kids, it can be identified, when you do research with the measures we’ve created, and other people have created. You find same kinds of things of depression, suicide, ideation, anxiety, eating problems, relationship problems, achievement of a whole host of difficulties that are there. For children, at this point, probably as young as seven, eight, that there’s the research kind of, there’s a little bit with younger than that. And we’re starting to do stuff with three and four-year olds. So, we’re just on trying to understand what that looks like.

 

Dr. Hewitt 21:29

But parents will be able to identify the frustration that children don’t see, they’re the pain that the children are in with these things that of course, that is deeply painful to parents to see a child struggle and to know that they’re doing a good job, they’re doing everything they’re supposed to be doing. And yet they’re kind of tortured with it. So I mean, I think it can be seen in similar ways, we’ve certainly seen the traits, we’ve seen the stuff for the interpersonal elements that what we call perfectionistic, self-presentation, presenting yourself we can see that in children, we’ve seen some of the automatic thoughts, those critical or perfectionistic, thoughts that exist, as well. So those things seem to be evident, again, in children as young as eight. Okay, as I said, there’s been research that’s been done with, with some measures we’ve created and, and some other ones, but we’re really just beginning to do decent research on that issue of how it manifests in children.

 

Jen 22:35

Okay. And I know parents are also really interested in understanding where perfectionism comes from. And so, it seems as though from what you’ve told us so far, there’s probably some kind of genetic component to it that also interacts with some kind of environmental circumstances. Can you help us think through what we understand about that?

 

Dr. Hewitt 22:53

Well, at this point, with all of this, these are theories of understanding. There is no final answer at this point. So, it’s, we don’t have the truth, yet. We have ideas. And anybody who tells you Oh, this is the way it is, based on science, Well, no.

 

Jen 23:15

What are the current ideas that you’re working with?

 

Dr. Hewitt 23:18

Well, the model that we have that came from was, I have a very psychodynamic or psychoanalytic perspective that I come from. And one of the things that’s important from that perspective is trying to get underneath the behaviors that we see in front of us. We are trying to get underneath where; what purpose does the perfectionism serve? And where might that arise? And based on this perspective, the idea is, it arises early in a child’s life. Some people actually talk about infants, early in terms of learning about themselves, learning about other people and learning how to be safe.

 

Dr. Hewitt 23:59

The idea that we have is that in early relational experiences, infants and children will learn certain things, they won’t articulate it in the way that I’m going to describe it. But they’re kind of learned about, and I trust other people, are other people safe. What do I need to do to feel safe? How do I navigate the world so that I don’t have this profound anxiety or fear, or other emotions or a sense of being disconnected? And so, they learn these sorts of things, of course, usually in relation to the first experience in relation with other people.

 

Dr. Hewitt 24:40

So, a child’s job, really, is to figure out how to navigate the world, how to have a sense of navigating the world, and feel safe and secure. And a lot of this comes from what we as parents do to teach the child that. So, this is what’s called Attachment based approach. And one of the difficulties, one of the criticisms sometimes of an attachment-based approach is people very quickly dismiss it and say, Oh, you’re just blaming the mother, or you’re just, you’re just finding fault. And the truth of it is, it’s, it’s not that at all. Absolutely, there are parents who are incredibly abusive and very hurtful. And what we found is that if anything bad or negative is going on in the family, it predicts children developing protection. But there can be instances where a child will have certain needs. A need to feel like they fit, they belong, they are loved, they are lovable, which is a very different thing and that they’re safe. And so, they learn how to navigate that. So how what do I do in order to just have this sense of safety and security. And as parents, like for children, absolutely, we try our best every moment, every decision we make, has our best interests, and our children’s best interests at heart. But we are human, we miss we have demands, etc., etc. We cannot be perfect parents. So, we miss some times. Now generally, because I mean, the one thing I teach parents is one of the most important things to kind of reiterate with your children, again and again, not just saying the words, but demonstrating it is that they are cherished, and they are loved.

 

Jen 26:39

For whom they are, right? Because they exist in the world.

 

Dr. Hewitt 26:43

Absolutely. And that they matter to you, whoever they are. And you know, there’s this notion that it has parents, we just provided everything the child needs to grow, the love the carrying the support, the food, the shelter, the safety, all of that, and let them find their way, they would find their way. But too often, we all grow directing, we’re like, we have to do you know, look both ways before, we have to direct certain things that way. But if we allow them to kind of develop a sense that they can look internally, to guide their behavior, they just kind of grow. And everything else kind of sends a message to the child. So overprotective parents, for example, absolutely are trying to create a safe environment, they don’t want the children hurt. And that’s lovely. Except the message often is, you don’t know what you’re doing. You can’t trust yourself; you have to have some external entity control, you determine where you go determine what’s safe for you. That’s how the child never learns the sense of inner directedness, autonomy, or that intrinsic drive, or to trust, especially to trust that intrinsic drive. So, the child will learn to look to the external world. So, it’s those sorts of characteristics where we kind of a child can learn that they don’t have worth. And it may not be taught to them directly. But somehow they learn it they come to understand, or they come to understand the only way to feel safe and secure is by being perfect. Or convincing other people on perfect, or the only way to really it’s about safety and security, the only way to kind of navigate this world to correct what’s wrong with me.

 

Jen 28:44

Yeah, it seems as though it’s a lot about fit between the parent and the child, because a lot of parents will say, Well, my other kid doesn’t like this at all. And they live in the same house. And so what’s the deal, but it seems as though the interaction of the parents, you know, expression of love, and maybe some control and all the other things, and the way that that specifically interacts with that individual child’s needs is kind of what sets this up, right?

 

Dr. Hewitt 29:06

You’re absolutely right. It’s about fit. And that’s a really nice way to frame that. It’s also about time, because you know, you have different needs at different times. Children have different needs. Right. Let me give you an example of a patient who developed really severe perfectionism that was debilitating for her. And she came to see me when she was about 40 years of age and had a lifetime of just sort of torture. She grew up in a in a family that was an immigrant family. And when she was five, something was happening in her family. She doesn’t quite know what it was, but it was like some tragedy or some really stressful event. And the mother and father decided that the most loving thing they could do was to send their daughter with family members who love her who would look after her while they deal with whatever horrific thing was going on, but the whatever tragedy was kind of happening in the family, their daughter would be safe. She’s with loved ones and that’s a very loving thing to do. The girl did not, of course perceive that or understand that as loving, like a five-year-old, okay? No, I was sent away. My mom and dad aren’t here.

 

Jen 30:26

They don’t want me anymore.

 

Dr. Hewitt 30:27

They don’t want me anymore. I don’t matter to them. I’m not important. I’m not good enough. And, you know, it’s kind of heart-wrenching when you whenever I tell the story, and she remembers incidents, when she first told me that she never had any connection that this was an important event in her life. But it was pivotal for the development of professionalism. Anyway, she remembers incidents of, you know, crying and not knowing what she did, blah, blah, blah. An incident of when she saw her mum coming to pick her up. So, she was at the airport. And at that time, you could, you could look through the windows and see people deplaning and she remembers watching her mother deplane to come get her and how beautiful she looked. And it was after that time that she became the absolute perfect daughter, perfect student, perfect sibling. I did absolutely have never created a ripple. Importantly, the mother was a nurse, she became a nurse. The mother worked in a geriatric unit; she became a geriatric nurse. She arranged things so that she worked on the same ward as the mother, the same shift as the mother. When she got to be in high school and met a man and they decided that they weren’t going to live together before they got married, they lived in the mother’s house. When they decided they needed to move out, they moved downstairs into an apartment in the mother’s house. When they bought their own home, it was two doors down from the mother’s house. And all of this sort of illustrates that when people ask what perfectionism is, they usually say it’s a way of being in the world. And here you see how she was the perfect daughter, doing the perfect thing, ensuring in every way, she’s never going to be separated.

 

Dr. Hewitt 32:21

The problems came when the mother died of cancer. For 16 years, this woman was absolutely devastated with grief over this, and people couldn’t understand why she was so devastated until we did this kind of work. So here, you have a very long-winded story, I’m sorry. It’s my way of saying to parents, you know, we do these loving things, we do the best we can. There’s nothing wrong with us. And yet our kids can somehow it’s like, you look after your child every day. And you say the child says, I’m just going out in the backyard, and they fall, and they break their arm. Stuff happens. We do the best we can. So, it’s a way to try to say this is not about blaming the parents. It’s not about that there are bad parents, and absolutely, they create problems. But for the majority of people, No, they’re not. So that’s kind of from our perspective, where it comes from.

 

Jen 33:25

Okay, and it also leads us really nicely into the next question on how to treat perfectionism. Because I mean, the story that you walk through makes it so clear that so many of the traditional treatments that we use for this kind of disorder, focus on changing the symptoms. But if the behavior is gone, then the problem is gone. So, can you help us to understand some of the things that we know about treatments that and whether the treatments in air quotes “work or don’t work?”

 

Dr. Hewitt 33:58

Actually, I’d love to do a podcast on what you just said and how we got into this place where somehow treating symptoms is the norm, and we’re supposed to all be okay. Now, it drives me insane as well. So, the question, how do we treat?

 

Jen 34:16

Let’s just treat the symptoms.

 

Dr. Hewitt 34:19

A lot of treatments are focused on symptoms. A lot of treatments. There has been this treatment work that’s been done on protectionism, there’s been different treatments that have been developed. And a lot of them really take a symptom-based approach. And it’s not that symptoms are unimportant, but there’s a reason symptom exist. Symptoms are there to communicate to you: there’s something wrong. So when you have excruciating pain in your knee, hopefully when you go to the emergency room, they don’t just give you painkillers that somebody actually pokes around and tries to figure out what’s wrong with your knee that you’re experiencing pain. And that they actually figure out, okay, we need to. And lo and behold, if you actually treat what’s wrong with your knee, the pain goes away, the symptoms go away.

 

Dr. Hewitt 35:14

And so psychiatric psychological symptoms from psychodynamic and psychoanalytic, that’s kind of the idea, you need to get underneath and figure out what’s wrong and treat that. And from my perspective, the treatment that I’ve been doing for 35 years, we’ve been doing research on does that. It tries to get at, it tries to get at the perfectionism and what’s underneath the perfectionism. So, the anxiety goes away, the depression goes away, the eating disorders, the suicidal tendencies, the physical problems, the stress responses, blah, blah, on and on and on. And you deal with those issues underneath.

 

Dr. Hewitt 35:53

So, when I was talking about the development, that’s where we spend a great deal of time, is to try to help the person understand the relationship with others and the relationship with self. Most particularly, if I had to just narrow it right down, it would be about working on the relationship that person has with themselves, that somewhere along the line, they learned, I am defective, I am flawed. I’m not good enough. I’m not acceptable. People don’t love me. I am not lovable. And they then become perfectionistic, to try to correct that. And so, we work with that whole element of Oh, where did you learn that? How did you get there? You know, how did you deal with that. And it tends to be a very emotional type of treatment and we get to work very deeply with people. And we’ve actually found some very, very good results with our kind of treatment, as we find results with there’s quite a huge literature on the effectiveness of psychodynamic and psychoanalytic treatments that people often don’t hear about, and don’t know about. It’s absolutely there. But that’s kind of what we do with the treatment.

 

Dr. Hewitt 37:10

With kids we’re just starting that. So, I just have a really large project we’re doing, trying to figure out one, the best way to try to assess and get a sense of what the perfectionism is for each child. And then how to deal with how the child has learned this sense of themselves being flawed, defective, how they learned that that perfect, it has the promise of fixing everything, and then how do we help them kind of realign it so that they’re doing other things to try to meet those needs? It’s a vague description, unfortunately.

 

Jen 37:51

So, it seems as though a lot of it’s focused on gaining insight into the causes of the things that you’re experiencing. And where did I first learn that this was something that I needed to do? Do you ever use more experiential kinds of learning, or.?

 

Dr. Hewitt 38:09

All the time. That’s exactly what it is.

 

Jen 38:11

Oh, it is?

 

Dr. Hewitt 38:12

It’s experiential, I liken this kind of psychotherapy to learning to ride a bike. If you’ve never ridden a bicycle, you can get Lance Armstrong to come and do a workshop and give you an eight-hour lecture. And you can take notes, you can learn everything about which muscle, how to do by and z, right, a multiple-choice exam to get 100% on it and think, great, I’m ready to go. Get on the bike, and crash. So, psychotherapy is not about learning information, or learning about thinking differently. It’s not as simple as that. It’s about, we can extend the metaphor if you think how you learned how to ride a bike, you had somebody who cared about you, stick you on the two wheeler, hold on to it. And then kind of keep your bat while you tried it. And then wobbled maybe you fell. Got back up. Tried it, you were afraid, you went through, and then the person helping you slowly kind of extracted themselves from it, while you learned experientially, how to ride a bike. And then it just got really complicated, because now you can balance all I got to watch for traffic stops and blah blah blah. And then when you do all that eventually get to a place experienced the joy of riding a bike that you don’t even think about it. That’s what psychotherapy is about.

 

Jen 39:46

Okay. Well, one thing I was thinking about as I was thinking that about this and then tying it back to what kind of what we talked about earlier how this is really stable, and it’s been a part of the person’s life for a long time. It always seems as though we’re trying to change, something that’s really a core component of an individual’s personality. Is it exceptionally difficult? Or is it I mean, even something we should be doing?

 

Dr. Hewitt 40:12

Well, we don’t make do people. The way I describe it is, we would never take away who the person is. We would never take away the importance of doing things. What we’re trying to do is just give people the means to be able to go through life and not have that sharp edge. Cutting edge. When I do things, I’m not good enough, I’m never good enough, I’m not going to, you know, take that piece away. So, in some ways, yeah, it’s getting into fundamental things that are change. And indeed, we do see quite significant change in the traits and the self-presentational facets. But most especially what I’m excited about is that change in that relationship with the self, where people become more accepting of themselves, and more trusting of themselves, because they’re often not guided by anything intrinsic, that look to the external world for how to be and they’re never good enough.

 

Dr. Hewitt 41:17

So yeah, making fundamentally deep changes, you have to know what you’re doing. I’ll say that I mean, that’s what that’s one of the things that’s important about psychotherapy is it’s not an easy thing to do. It’s not a trivial thing to do. Sometimes people trivialize it and say, Oh, you’re just saying words, you’re just talking to people. So, you can’t do any harm. Oh, yeah. You can do harm. And so that’s why there’s a lot of training. So that goes into both the degrees and the professions before you start taking on treatment this time. And this treatment is difficult. For everybody both the therapist and the patient. It’s just painful.

 

Jen 42:01

I can imagine. Yeah. And so, we’ve focused then on treating people who have received a clinical diagnosis. But I think a lot of parents who are looking at this in their children are wondering, Well, firstly, how do I even know that I need a clinical diagnosis?

 

Dr. Hewitt 42:15

Of perfectionism you mean.

 

Jen 42:17

Yeah.

 

Dr. Hewitt 42:18

First off it’s not a diagnosis.

 

Jen 42:20

Okay. Thank you for that correction.

 

Jen 42:23

Don’t. Really what it is, is it’s a fundamental core personality, vulnerability factor. It’s just, it’s a personality characteristic. I’ve been asked many times, hey, you should put that in the DSM, you should make those. And I’ll say no. And it’s, the last thing I want to do is start thinking about or how people think about it as diagnosis. It’s this way of being it’s this multi layered, multi-level kind of thing. So you don’t, you know, I mean, it’s like anything for psychotherapy, you don’t need a diagnosis in order to enter a process whereby you’re going to be relieved of pain, you’re going to grow personally, you’re going to enhance relationships. And, by the way, symptoms might go away, usually do go away. But it’s always about growth. And it’s about it’s almost like a gift to yourself. I mean, that’s the way I see psychotherapy. So, for parents, when I would say when do you want to get a professional involved? When you see your child consistently experiencing pain, and torment. And the best way to measure that is how much pain and torment do you have watching your child engage in that? And then I would find somebody who can be helping. I just recommend help for people, you know, if you’re in the States, so if you can afford it, or if you have insurance that covers it, or if there’s ways that’s part of the problem part of the issue.

 

Dr. Hewitt 44:04

But, you know, I do a lot of training of clinicians, I do a lot of supervision of clinicians in different parts of the world who are working with perfectionistic patients. And we’re doing more and more training in this model. I mean, people can email me, and I can try to connect them. There’s not a lot of people out there. I’m happy to, to I’ve been doing that for years, anyway. People send me emails and ask for help.

 

Jen 44:29

That’s very generous of you. I hope your inbox doesn’t get flooded. And yeah, of course, when you said no diagnosis, my brain immediately goes to well, how then how does insurance pay for it? You’re in Canada, you don’t have that problem.

 

Dr. Hewitt 44:42

Well there is no diagnosis of protectionism, though,

 

Jen 44:44

Yeah, so maybe it has to be big diagnosis.

 

Dr. Hewitt 44:49

You can focus on the symptoms and there will be a diagnosis from if it’s not depression could be adjustment disorder, or relational problems if there’s a way to do it. The clinician will, the clinician should know how to navigate that.

 

Jen 45:06

I wonder if we can talk through a couple of specific examples that parents had sent to me. Because the parent who got me started on this whole thing in the first place said she, she looks back, and she sees how things came really easily to her daughter when her daughter was in preschool. But now when her daughter’s in elementary school, she’ll do math problems as long as she’s sailing along, there’s no problem at all. If she doesn’t have to read the instructions, she just kind of does it. And you know, I know, I know how to do this, that’s fine. The moment that she doesn’t already know how to do something, then she just refuses to be shown how she’s, but she’s also really upset by not knowing the thing. So, if she’s doing her schoolwork on the computer, and she gets an answer wrong, if she’s not too far into the test, she’ll actually scrap the whole test and start over again, rather than having a wrong answer. And so, the parent has tried to talk with her daughter about what it would mean to get one answer wrong, and how many things children do get wrong? And how many wrong answers is okay, from the teacher’s perspective, but the child just doesn’t want to hear it. And the parents wanting to know, well, do I back off completely? What does this mean for schoolwork? And kind of more generally? What should we do when our children just give up when they aren’t successful with a task?

 

Dr. Hewitt 46:18

Well, one of the ways to think about it is what is driving the giving up? Like what’s driving the upset and that anger? When does it know the instructions? Because it’s there for a reason. And it’s upset for a reason. So, this is this Nozick trying to get underneath it, to try to find out what the child’s the little girl a little boy is actually struggling with in those. And that’s not necessarily they’re not going to answer you, because they may not be able to articulate it. So, I mean, from a parent perspective, again, I always come back to the loving support and the help. And you know, in one of those studies, we have an 11 year old girl, who just starts to talk a little bit about that it’s absolutely heart wrenching, because you see how much pain she was in when she wasn’t able to do very well. So, so you can really see the pain that they’re in. So, we want to try to find out what that is.

 

Jen 47:19

So how do you do that? If they can’t tell you

 

Dr. Hewitt 47:21

Oh, yeah, that’s where you work with a professional, I think that would be something that would be helpful. And it doesn’t mean years of therapy or anything like that. It can be trying to foster a relationship, such that this young person can feel safe enough to take the risk, to talk about whatever that might be. Because there’s something there’s a reason for it, there’s something there, and it doesn’t want to talk about it, there’s a reason that she doesn’t, or he doesn’t want to talk about it. And so, it’s to try to help them articulate because it’s you’re working really blindly if you don’t know what the issue is. Now for parents that can be loving support, and, you know, comfort and soothing, as much as you can. And in that case, I would try to get a consultation, to see if there’s somebody that can form a connection. And there are some incredibly gifted child therapists who just have this ability to then get right in there. And form a connection might take a little bit of digging, but to find to find a person like that.

 

Jen 48:33

That’s super helpful. And then another parent that I work with has what she describes as a perfectionist, anxious six year old who can’t stand to lose a game, if they’re playing a game and he loses there’s this massive meltdown, he’s he always sets up the rules so that they’re modified so that he either always wins or at least there’s a tie. So, the parent is wondering, Should I continue to allow these rule modifications to avoid the meltdown in the short term? Or does the child need to learn at some point that you can’t always win in life and macro to that is, is there a connection between perfectionism and competitiveness?

 

Dr. Hewitt 49:10

Oh, yeah, absolutely. There’s like a casting perfectionism, competitive competitiveness. But again, with the little boy, I would be one I would be interested in trying to find out on a level what it means when he doesn’t win, doesn’t lose, but most particular what it means about him and who he is. So that’s the work that a therapist would do in there. I think, I mean, you said something really wise there about life is about failures. And when you when you talk to people, and most of us by far the majority of us have had some pretty horrific things happen in our lives, that we have somehow had to find a way to navigate through. And very, very often and especially when I work with people with PTSD, we get to a point and they They’ll say, I wouldn’t have wished that on my worst enemy, but am I ever glad it happened. Because there’s growth, there’s a sense of identity, there’s a sense of autonomy, there’s a sense of what I can do. It can be quite remarkable. When you are when parents are overprotective, I’m sure you’ve had a podcast on overprotective parenting, and the problems that come from that, if you think about what, what does the child learn about him or herself, Oh, I can’t do things. I can’t navigate the world myself; I need somebody else to do it for me. I’m not smart enough, smart enough, capable enough, I don’t know how to do this. I can’t trust myself to make judgments about anything. Because I will be hurt. I need somebody else there and absolutely want to keep our children safe. But we also want them to fall down. We want them to have to struggle through some things. We can support them and care for them. We don’t do their homework because it’s the struggle. That’s the important piece. It’s not getting the homework done. It’s figuring out a way to struggle through this really, really difficult task, and come out the other end and be able to say, wow, that was really hard, but I find it.

 

Jen 51:30

Yeah, it seems as though I mean, I think a lot of parents are concerned with this idea of you know, I want to set high standards, and I want my children to strive for excellence and to try and achieve things that they find difficult and balancing that with somebody who feels like well, if I can’t fail, seems as it should be, or could be difficult. But maybe the answer is that that it’s a struggle. And that that is that they’re figuring out the struggle is the work of our lives really

 

Dr. Hewitt 51:59

Yeah. And the struggle is also trying to figure out how each of us is going to do the task of living life, not trying to figure out what the formula is, or what everybody else needs me to do. It’s for me. And that’s, that’s a really difficult thing. And if you have a basis where you can’t trust yourself, you don’t you can’t trust that intrinsic drive. You’re, you’re at a loss. And probably the feeling that I hear most often initially, with people with perfectionism is that they feel lost. I’m just lost in the world.

 

Dr. Hewitt 52:39

I don’t know where to go. I don’t know who I am.

 

Dr. Hewitt 52:42

Those are the kinds of things and they did not wait for a long time, often.

 

Jen 52:49

And to conclude on a slightly more positive note, how did they then feel after support from appropriate?

 

Dr. Hewitt 52:57

Well, I mean, I continue to do this work because I love doing clinical work. Although I’m a researcher, and I probably know more from my research than anything else. It’s the clinical work, it’s working with people, I continue to do it, I get lots of people, the woman that I talk to you about at five years old, it’s been 25 years since I finished working with her. We work together for about three years, which is longer than often. I work with people with perfectionism. Every year Christmas, I get a card that talks because she was extremely suicidal and was ready to absolutely end her life. And she sends me a card every Christmas just to say, another Christmas with my family. And yes, you’re here. Now that’s anecdotal. I continue to do this work because I believe it’s helpful. people continue to come to see me, because it seems to be helpful people, students from all over the world come to be trained in this because it seems to be helpful.

 

Jen 54:00

Yeah, it doesn’t have to be a debilitating thing that controls the rest of your life.

 

Dr. Hewitt 54:04

No. And that’s such a painful prospect to think about people having to suffer with that. It’s daunting. I guess that’s not a positive note isn’t.

 

Jen 54:17

The last word was not positive. But I think the overall idea needed to go so thank you so much. That was amazingly helpful. And I think parents are going to come out of this with a lot of hope that this doesn’t have to be something that’s going to take over my child’s life and that there are places that I can go to get help. If it seems as though it is it is becoming detrimental.

 

Dr. Hewitt 54:37

I would also guess that many parents will say, Oh, that sounds familiar. And relay aspects of this too, because it’s not always happens and it’s just it’s sometimes helpful for people to hear, Okay, well, one, you’re not alone. And two, there’s often a lot of pain that’s kind of connected with these things so.

 

Jen 54:59

Yeah. And three if you wanted to explore it and potentially do something about it, there may be effective ways that you can do so.

 

Jen 55:07

Thanks for joining us for this episode of Your Parenting Mojo. Don’t forget to subscribe to the show at YourParentingMojo.com to receive new episode notifications, and the FREE Guide to 7 Parenting Myths That We Can Leave Behind and join the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group for more respectful research based ideas to help kids thrive and make parenting easier for you. I’ll see you next time on Your Parenting Mojo.

 

Jen  00:02

Hi, I’m Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast where I critically examine strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. In this series of episodes called Sharing Your Parenting Mojo, we turn the tables and hear from listeners. What have they learned from the show that’s helped their parenting? Where are they still struggling? And what tools can we find in the research that will help? If you’d like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a FREE Guide to 7 Parenting Myths We Can Safely Leave Behind, seven fewer things to worry about, subscribe to the show at YourParentingMojo.com. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you’ll join us. Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast and to today’s episode of Sharing Your Parenting Mojo. And today I’m here with Denise. And Denise, do you want to say hi and tell us a bit about you and your family?

 

Denise  01:09

Hi, hi, Jen. I’m Denise. I’m from the Philippines. But I live in Madrid. I have two kids age two and four. And I am also a parenting coach and certified how to talk so kids will listen workshop facilitator.

 

Jen  01:24

Yeah, so it always feels like we’re old friends at this point. And they’re never met we’ve been working together for it’s got to be almost two years by now. It was

 

Denise  01:32

I would say, well for you. You’ve known me for almost two years. I would say I’ve known you much longer.

 

Jen  01:41

Isn’t that weird?

 

Denise  01:44

Yeah, because I started listening to your podcast, I think my daughter must have been like four months old, and she’s four now.

 

Jen  01:57

Okay, now now this is getting really weird. There are a few listeners out there, I know of a few of them by name, who have listened to every podcast episode and I believe you’re one of those, aren’t you?

 

Denise  02:08

Yeah.

 

Jen  02:10

Awesome. So um, so you were curious about coming on to Sharing Your Parenting Mojo to talk about kind of, I guess, an interconnected issue around big feelings and cultural issues and, kinds of stuff related to that, right? I guess that probably comes up a lot for you, because you are raising children in a culture that is not the one that you were raised in yourself.

 

Denise  02:31

Yep. And all of this really started with you.

 

Jen  02:34

Oh, my goodness, I’m sorry.

 

Denise  02:38

It all started with that guide on, I didn’t even remember what the name of the guide was.

 

Jen  02:44

Holding values in the Finding Your Parenting Major Membership. Yeah.

 

Denise  02:49

Yeah. It all started from there. And there were and the questions that you asked which were just like, what are the cultures that you identify with? How do you want to raise your children in line with these cultures, in what ways are you going to be working against them? For me just really made me realise like, oh, there are really these two different cultures that are at play right now. And even though we are living in Madrid, we are living in Spain, and we have that Spanish culture, it doesn’t negate the fact that I’m from the Philippines, and that I have my own, like history and my own culture that I also want to pass on to my children in some way. Maybe not in oh, and that’s how I realised just how different it is like, you know, parenting in itself has its own difficulties, but when you kind of like, add in that like extra mix, it just makes it all the more interesting. Yeah.

 

Jen  03:49

So what kind of situations does it play out in for you them?

 

Denise  03:52

So this is actually one of the things that I wanted to talk about with you Jen was about. So one of the things that like I’m working against. And this comes from both Filipino and Spanish cultures is the denial of feelings, right? It’s the you’re not allowed to cry. And so sometimes this happens in the middle of the street and I have my daughter crying and you know, she is all out and I’m there kind of holding that space for her. When an older senior citizen comes along like a very well-meaning one comes to tell my daughter how she shouldn’t be crying because she looks ugly when she cries. And so, yeah. Very well-meaning. And so it’s kind of like how do I hide this? And, you know, for me, it’s very easy to just like, brush up what she says because…

 

Jen  04:48

You don’t know her..

 

Denise  04:49

Yeah! But these are still messages that my daughter’s receiving, right? And it’s one of those things where part of the guide, one of the things that we did was to get at what are non negotiables. And that, for me is a non-negotiable. And so it’s kind of like how do we handle these types of situations where, really what’s going on is so contrary to what we want to teach or what we want them to have or to do.

 

Jen  05:22

Yeah. So if you don’t mind, I’d love it if we could back up just a little bit through your childhood and about how that played out for you. There’s a big raised eyebrows there for those of who who are listening. Wide open eyes. So what did you learn about feelings when you were a child then and what would have happened if you had, you know, walking across the street and you have a meltdown in the middle of a street?

 

Denise  05:47

That would never have happened?

 

Jen  05:49

Yeah, yeah. So what was it like for you then?

 

Denise  05:52

It’s so funny. I was just speaking to someone else about this a few hours ago, about how in our in my childhood feelings weren’t a thing. Like, I guess like they happen behind closed doors. And not just like anger or sadness, just like, in general. I don’t remember feelings being a topic of conversation or something that we actually saw in each other. Except, you know, I have three sisters. So of course there was that anger and the jealousy but it wasn’t something that we talked about.

 

Jen  06:29

Yeah. And when you when you said it happened behind closed doors, I just got a flashback actually. Because you’ve listened to all my episodes I know you know that my mom died when I was about 10. And I remember walking down our hallway upstairs one day and going past my parent’s room and my dad was sitting on the bed. He was looking at my mom’s jewelry box, and he was crying, and I kept walking because I knew he wouldn’t want me to see him crying, or even if I didn’t know like, I felt. My impression was we don’t talk about this. It’s not okay for him to know that I’ve seen him crying. And for me to go to him and you know, could we ever have a conversation about something that’s obviously touching us both so profoundly No, no, I as a 10, or 11 year old? No, I do not know how to initiate that conversation. And I don’t know if he saw me. But he never came to me and said anything to me about it. And so yeah, I think this is this is common in so many cultures around the world, isn’t it? That we’re just, it’s not that the feeling isn’t there because it is. It’s just that we were not allowed to express it. And so, okay, let’s move one step forward, then how has that played out in your life, things that you saw happening in your childhood and that you were not allowed to express? How was that brought forward into your life as an adult?

 

Denise  07:45

By myself like without my kids?

 

Jen  07:49

Well how has it impacted your relationships, I guess, is

 

Denise  07:54

Okay, so maybe not an adult yet. We can like pass through the beautiful teenage years of how I, of course, was going through all these emotions and just didn’t even know what to do with them, you know? And I remember like, I would speak to friends about it. And I would just be like, I think, God, I have really good friends cause they would just like not say anything, and just like, be there. And so moving on to adulthood. How would that look like it would just be adulthood was fine. It was like no problems. I don’t want to talk about my feelings. It’s not something that I do. And then it’s more just like the kids come and you’re like, oh, wait, I have feelings. All these very strong feelings. And then again, because of like your work and all the other work that I’ve done, I also know that what I have or what I had growing up isn’t what I want for my kid.

 

Jen  08:50

Yeah. And that’s where I was going with it. And yeah, just to pause on your teenage years for a minute. I mean, is it possible that if our parents had cultivated that relationship with us, where our feelings were allowed that we wouldn’t have needed to go to our friends and have our friends be the sounding board that we know we so desperately need and that we can’t find a home. And so then we turn outwards to who else can we possibly get this from? I think I see in the child development research, there’s really no examination of that issue. It’s more of a well children turn to their peers in their teens. Nobody asked, Well, why do children turn to their peers in their teens? And I know you have a degree in psychology as well. You’ve probably seen the parallels there.

 

Denise  09:30

Yeah, that’s actually what like when you brought it up, that’s what I was going to ask you is like, but don’t doesn’t the research say that developmentally at that stage it’s common for you like, for you to look towards your peers and not your parents.

 

Jen  09:44

Yeah, yeah. And I’m actually exploring this for a podcast episode. And I’m having a really hard time with it, because I’m sure you’ve listened already to the episode on othering with Dr. John Powell. And so he mentioned a little nugget in there about the failure of the launching model, which is where we’re we prepare our children to launch themselves off into college, into careers, into success, into everything else. And so he had sort of seeded this idea that maybe launching is not actually that useful, but in young adults are still very much exploring who they are. What is their role in the world? And they need help with that. And the idea that, okay, we’re done, you’re off on your own now go out with a bunch of people your own age, might not actually be super helpful to them. And the reason I’m having a hard time is because in the literature.

 

Denise  10:32

There must be nothing.

 

Jen  10:34

Yeah, well, firstly, there’s nothing on that, and secondly, the phrase failure to launch means that your child has not launched themselves because the only model is the launch. And so if it’s not a failure of the model, it’s a failure of your child to live within the model. And so yes, this idea is very much swirling,

 

Denise  10:53

And it reminds me a lot of how you always mention most of the studies are like focused on the W.E.I.R.D. country’s culture, whatever the word is.

 

Jen  11:07

Yes. And if you haven’t listened to every episode that’s Western, educated, industrialized rich, democratic cultures abbreviated to our acronym is weird. Yeah.

 

Denise  11:18

And how those cultures are particularly focused on independence. Well, if you look at maybe especially more Asian cultures, their focus is really more of what’s more, just like interdependence. .

 

Jen  11:34

Exactly. Yeah and is failure to launch even a thing. And is there any research on it in English that I can find? Well, it will see, but not so far yet. So, okay, so that kind of brings us to adulthood and to the fact that parenting brings up all these big feelings in us and we were seeing in our children, we want to do things differently. And yet we have all these strong cultural messages around us about what is the right way for a child. to behave. And so your I think there’s a few layers to this. Your original question was about what to do with people that you don’t know. And then of course, there’s another layer about what to do with people you do know. With people you don’t know, if it was just some random person walking down the street, what would you say right now? What would be your…

 

Denise  12:18

I don’t mind them.

 

Jen  12:21

Do you not pay any attention? Do you even acknowledge that you’ve heard or?

 

Denise  12:23

It depends on my mood, honestly. Sometimes I just say like, thank you, because I know that again, they’re very like well intentioned for it. Other times, then, this is like after working with you, then I kind of like speak to my daughter about it afterwards, when she’s calmed down to kind of say like, oh, what do you think of that? And so I think I do kind of know what to do. It’s just the question is more, you know, if it was like a one time thing, yeah, it’s fine. It’s just, you know, if it’s something quite consistent, It’s just culture.

 

Jen  12:55

Yeah and culture is made up of people’s expectations and actions. And yeah, so I mean, I think you’re already on the right track just to sort of as gracious as you can muster. Thank you, maybe even a thank you, I’ve got this. It seems as though more advice is being offered. And then after the fact, absolutely a conversation with your daughter about what happened. And I would be super explicit about what you believe about feelings, and how feelings are expressed in your family. And of course, because you’ve been doing this work for so long, you should be able to point to times when she may be in your own apartment, she has been able to express her feelings and, you know, this is how we welcome your feelings. These are the kinds of things that you can know welcome your feelings. Is there anything else that I could be doing that I’m not doing right now, to help you feel as though when you have to express something that you have a safe space to do that in and then have that lead into a conversation about what other people believe about feelings, and we hear in the States, yes, disapproving looks are pretty uncommon. I would say it would be pretty rare for another adult to say a comment like that. So we don’t have that as much to deal with on that issue. But we’re, of course we’re having, we’re having explicit discussions with our child about race and what that means and how that intersects with all the different ways that she plays. And so I would talk with your child about what other people believe about feelings and how people in some cultures believe that you shouldn’t express your feelings, and that it’s better to not do that and that we believe something different. And so it’s possible that we’re going to encounter people we’re going to be out in the street, we’ll see a person and this is what you will hear me say when that happens like today when it happened. I said thank you to that person. That doesn’t mean that I believe that what they said is right. It means that I believe we should be polite to people that we don’t know and especially people who are older than us. And so that’s why I said thank you. But that doesn’t mean that I believe that what that person said is right, because I believe that my relationship with you is the most important thing. You know, include other family members as appropriate, and that you have the right to express the feelings you want to express and that I, I will help you to find a place for those and I will support you through those. And I think, you know, children become so adept at navigating different worlds and what rules are okay, what things are okay to do at grandma’s house, what things are not okay to do at grandma’s house. And but they are a code our house, so they can navigate these different things. And so I think that that approach really kind of helps them to know where you stand on it super explicitly, and that this is welcome in your family. And that when we’re out, it’s possible they’re going to get other messages, and this is how you relate to them. So how do you think that would play out if you have that kind of conversation?

 

Denise  15:54

Yeah, I think it’s kind of like I did the first step of having that conversation of like, okay, in our family this is what we do, and I missed the second step which is kind of like explaining how this might be what happens in our family, but it’s not necessarily what happened outside. And I guess I like it, because it’s also kind of preparing them and letting them know, like, things might be different. And it’s okay for them to be different. But still, this is this is what we do in our family.

 

Jen  16:24

Yeah. And it’s going to come up again and again. In school, in playgrounds, in everywhere they interact with other people. It’s going to come up again and again. And so you could even prepare them with something to say that if a teacher at school says stop crying, you look ugly when you cry. Maybe there’s a you know..

 

Denise  16:47

Hope none of their teachers say that.

 

Jen  16:49

Hopefully they wouldn’t, but you never know. Maybe they’re in the playground and some random person is passing by. You never know. But just you know, what is something that’s not super snarky But that also acknowledges their right to express their emotions. It’s as long as hopefully nobody’s being hit and obviously that kind of support, but if it’s an expression of emotions. So yeah, making it really explicit about what we believe and what works in our family and how we interact with each other in our family. And I mean, the extra step for how we apply that out in the world is so important. It’s so many issues related to patriarchy related to race and things like that. So as we wrap up, so anyone who’s interested in finding out more about your work and where they can interact with you.

 

Denise  17:36

Yeah, so I do most of my interaction on Facebook. So Jen is going to share the link on the description if you want to listen it’s facebook.com/DeniseSuarezConCarino. And so what I really do as a parenting coach is that I support other intercultural families because I really understand how difficult it might be when it comes to raising your children in a culture that’s different from your own.

 

Jen  18:12

So yeah, we’ll definitely post the link to that in the episode page. And thanks so much for coming on and asking that question because I’m guessing that there are a number of families who are in that position, even if you’re in a different country speaking a different language. The number of people who move away from their families now is so high and you find yourself with a different set of friends and and your family isn’t around or isn’t able to offer that guidance to you that they might be able to if they were close, and how do you navigate that So, so thanks so much for being here. And we will bet you go. We got a lot of, we got children launching themselves off. Thanks for your time today.

 

Denise  18:50

Thank you so much. Take care.

 

Jen  18:54

Thanks for joining us for this episode of Your Parenting Mojo. Don’t forget to subscribe to the show at YourParentingMojo.com to receive new episode notifications and the FREE Guide to 7 Parenting Myths That We Can Leave Behind and join the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group for more respectful research based ideas to help kids thrive and make parenting easier for you. I’ll see you next time on Your Parenting Mojo.